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    An open letter to James O’Brien about trans people

    Lee Hurley -
    Dear James, Perhaps you would indulge me here a little as I try to guide you on an issue you seem to be having some problems with – the ‘transgender debate’.
    It’s easy to roll our eyes at trans issues. But what if we’re wrong? Jeremy Clarkson Jeremy Clarkson Next image › As we all know, JK Rowling recently expressed an opinion on the transgender debate, and she wasn’t just cancelled, she was erased. They put her in the delete bin, and then afterwards, all her former fans, and even the actors and actresses she’d made famous, emptied the bin into a landfill site so seagulls could feast on her eyes. Mercifully, I’ve always known I would not suffer a similar fate, because I’ve always had exactly the same views on transgenderism as I do on Victorian literature or trees. It’s not something that’s ever interested me, so why should I bother forming an opinion on it? If I want to get fed to the seagulls, I could think of a million other ways of going about it, all of which would be far more satisfying than calling Eddie Izzard a man or laughing at Sam Smith’s insistence that an interest in angling makes you a “fisherthem”. The fact is that I don’t know any transgender people. I once saw a very tall lady in Selfridges who had an Adam’s apple and hairy hands, but that’s it. That’s my only actual real-world experience of the issue and it left me completely underwhelmed. However, in recent times, the transgender issue has come to dominate the news so completely that I’ve been forced to pay a bit more attention. We are being asked whether schoolchildren should be allowed to change gender and whether a man can go to a women’s prison. This is big stuff, when you think about it. And there’s more. In the past week alone, there’s been a row about the new gender-neutral lavatories at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith and we learnt that officers in the Metropolitan Police are to be stopped from investigating crime so they can spend more time learning about “faer” and the hundred or so different pronoun options that are available to modern-day youth. And then there was Baroness Fox, who was uninvited to speak on the cancel culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, because she’d retweeted a Ricky Gervais joke about transgender people. Meanwhile, we have Piers Morgan, who’s making a good living from the debate, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, whose charity will now be supporting the Global Boyhood Initiative, which challenges traditional gender roles. Oh, and on Thursday, World Athletics, the governing body for those who like to run around and jump over things, announced that anyone who went through male puberty may not take part in female events unless they are — deep breath — DSD (differences of sex development) intersex people whose testosterone levels have been below 2.5 nanomoles per litre for a period of at least two years. It would be easy at this point to roll your eyes and think the world’s gone mad. But hang on a minute. Because what if you’re wrong? When I was at school in the Seventies, we were aware that the homosexual act was kind of technically possible, but the notion that anyone would do such a thing was of course laughable. And then a few years after Rock Hudson died of Aids, Freddie Mercury got it and died too. We were in shock. You mean he . . . you know? And then Elton John announced he had a predilection for members of the same genital grouping. And suddenly the floodgates opened. In school we’d always joked that one of the teachers was gay, then it turned out he was. And so was one of our friends. And now, just 40 years on, I feel weird for never having tried it. I went to a gay wedding last year and in January I spent a happy week cruising (on a boat) round the Caribbean with a gay couple. And it’s not a recent thing, either. It wasn’t invented by Alan Turing. Leonardo da Vinci was gay. So, probably, was Richard I, and James VI, and Florence Nightingale. Sir Ian McKellen reckons even Shakespeare swung both ways. Gayness, then, has been around since the very beginning. Well, not the very beginning obviously — we wouldn’t have got far if Eve had been a lesbian — but close to the beginning. So, what if it’s the same deal with transgenderism? Has that also been going on for years? Will we discover in the coming decades that half those brave Tommies in the First World War trenches were secretly hoping to have their old chaps shot off so they could go home and put on a frock? Think how infuriating it must be to those who really were born in the wrong body We know that in the early 20th century, a boy in California decided he was a girl. She called herself Lucy, married a man and, when that failed, opened a brothel. Where, during a routine venereal disease check, it was discovered that she had a penis. So, off she went to prison. And that, to me, has some troubling Turing overtones. I realise, of course, that the whole trans debate has been hijacked by lunatics who glue themselves to stuff and claim to be from a gender that doesn’t even exist, and I know too that there is some kind of civil war going on between fiercely women women and women who just say they’re women. This creates a noise that’s annoying to most of us, but think how infuriating it must be to those who really were born in the wrong body. I believe that this is possible and I accept that it creates several problems for society, and not just in the lavatory or in a prison or in the school high-jump competition. But how can we address these issues when every teenage halfwit is muddying the waters by claiming to identify as a bat and inventing a pronoun that wouldn’t even be allowed in a game of Scrabble? “Faer”, my arse.

    Jeremy Clarkson asks ‘What if you’re wrong about trans people?’

    Lee Hurley -
    In a recent Sunday Times column, Jeremy Clarkson discussed the prevalence of transgender issues in the news and, although he makes jokes and uses problematic language throughout the piece, he posed an important question: "What if you're wrong?"
    Edmonton Pride Parade 2011 where the "gays for gaza" spirit was alive as queers march holding signs opposing Israeli apartheid in Palestine, photo by Kurt Bauschardt, Wikimedia Commons

    Why the ‘Gays for Gaza’ position makes perfect sense

    Max Morgan -
    With the Israeli government’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank approaching a third month, and with the war crimes growing ever more flagrant, frequent and egregious, it is perhaps expected that the propaganda war would also begin to intensify. Bad faith arguments abound, nakedly dishonest justifications are wheeled out without anything even approaching the commensurate degree of shame, and attacks on those expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people are stepped up by those running interference for these atrocities.
    the trans agenda logo

    The Trans Agenda 13

    Lee Hurley -
    The Trans Agenda 13 Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday to Friday if you are subscribed. You...
    Liz Truss giving a speach at a Policy Exchange meeting. Liz Truss, as head of GEO, was tasked with reforming the GRA and trans healthcare

    Trans healthcare is fast becoming the new bogeyman in the UK

    Gemma Stone -
    With the UK's assorted plans for gender recognition act reform largely being dealt with; the media and politicians a quickly turning their attention to demonising trans healthcare instead.
    A photo of a phone being held up and showing the Twitter log on screen to represent the fact that Twitter is censoring trans people.

    Twitter is censoring trans people who speak up about on platform hate

    Gemma Stone -
    Disclaimer; Images of these tweets will be linked to but not shown in this article. The contents will be discussed sensitively. It is important to report that Twitter is censoring trans people like this, but we want to do that without adding to the harm such open calls for violence has on marginalised communities.
    Wes Streeting

    Shadow health secretary sparks outrage with separate NHS ward proposal for trans people

    Lee Hurley -
    Trans healthcare under fire: Streeting's proposal for separate NHS wards sparks outrage.

    The Trans Agenda #22 – 4 days, 3 papers, 20 anti-trans articles

    Lee Hurley -
    News you need, the perspective you won't find anywhere else. The trans community's guide to UK news, media and politics and our place in it.
    Common Sense Group

    The Common Sense Group: No sense, plenty of hate

    Lee Hurley -
    Who are the Common Sense Group and why we should be very concerned.
    A photo of Sam Smith wearing a bejewelled sailor hat and matching shiny long gloves taken from their video for "I'm Not Here To Make Friends"

    Sam Smith and the arseholes

    Phoenix Andrews -
    Billy Connolly used to talk about arsehole detectors. Flamboyant trousers. Beards dyed in primary colours. These things upset the arseholes so much, just by existing, that arseholes reveal themselves by complaining loudly. Sam Smith is a perfect arsehole detector. Their body, their music, their gender, their pronouns, their videos: arseholes can’t help but comment loudly and persistently.
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