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    The Main Court at Kingston Magistrate's Court around the time of its completion in 1935. Not where the LGB Alliance tribunal was heard. Just an illustration.

    Judges rule LGB Alliance to retain charity status

    Gemma Stone -
    Tribunal Judges Griffin and Neville have ruled on a case regarding a group widely described as an anti-trans hate group who became a charity. Ruling in their favour, LGB Alliance are to retain their charity status.
    Healthcare spelled out in scrabble tiles. To represent trans healthcare on the NHS.

    Trans healthcare on the NHS; a story of repeated failure

    Tristan Oscar Smith -
    Between striking nurses and ambulance workers, twelve or more hour waits in A&E, and patients getting passed from service to service with no actual care provided, a lot of people are seeing what a non-functioning National Health Service can look like. A sight we are all to familiar with when trying to access trans healthcare on the NHS.
    WINCHESTER, ENGLAND - JANUARY 19: UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak walks through the local streets during a visit on January 19, 2024 in Winchester, England. This week in Parliament, Rishi Sunak's government won the vote on the Safety of Rwanda Safety (Asylum and Immigration) Bill by 44 votes after a Conservative right wing rebellion failed to materialise. The Bill will now progress to the House of Lords for further scrutiny. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

    Rwanda not safe for LGBTQ+ people, warns refugee

    Ayman Eckford -
    A queer, autistic refugee from Ukraine exposes the dangers of the UK's Rwanda deportation plan, highlighting the risks for LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent individuals.
    A photo of Arthur Webber, captain of the first all trans masc football team in Europe with the ball. Photo by Lucy Copsey (@lucycopsey_98 on Twitter)

    All trans masc football team; “we made history here”

    Arthur Webber -
    "As I led the first ever all trans masc football team in Europe onto that pitch to thunderous applause, all my worries melted away. It didn’t matter what the score was; it didn’t matter if I left the field covered in mud and smelling like the Year 9 boys PE changing room. We made history here."
    daily express

    The Trans Agenda #19 Anti-trans teacher learns the law isn’t the same as GC...

    Lee Hurley -
    The Trans Agenda #19 Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday to Friday if you are subscribed. You...
    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?"
    Society of Authors logo, an interlocked capital S, lowercase o and capital A on a light blue background.

    Society of Authors mobbed by transphobes over disability support

    Gemma Stone -
    The Society of Authors posted a tweet which included the phrase "self-identified" in relation to disability. Transphobes, who have been trained to view the phrase as negative, reacted badly.
    Press photo of Penny Mordaunt MP Source: HM Government, Ally of the Year

    Penny Mordaunt isn’t our best option for Prime Minister, she’s yours Jayne

    Gemma Stone -
    Jayne Ozanne writes in Pink News that Penny Mordaunt is "by far and away the best" candidate and that Jayne believes Penny "is a true champion of all the LGBT+ community". Which is just wrong. She isn't our best candidate, she's yours Jayne. By which I mean semi-wealthy white cisgender queers. She's got your back, and judging by your endorsement of her after her tirade? Clearly you're fine with sticking the knife in ours if it means you don't have to look over your shoulder so much any more.
    Soho Square sign surrounded by Trans Pride London signs reaching things like "Trans Rights Now" from a trans rights protest in Westminster

    Trans Pride London 2022

    Steph Kyriacou -
    To me, the trans community is like a big bag of pick n’ mix – some are sweet, some are sour, some are soft, some are crunchy. We are strawberry laces and chocolate nougat and caramel buttons. Fruity gummy bears and rainbow Skittles. On days like Trans Pride London, surrounded by my family of trans candy; I felt as happy as a kid in a sweet shop.
    Press phot of Nick Fletcher MP

    Nick Fletcher MP sends transphobic rant to schools

    Gemma Stone -
    The evidence is clear, UK transphobia is ramping up its efforts in targeting trans youth in particular. I spoke with numerous children's charities month ago who told me they were "not prepared" to give comment on these issues because its a sensitive area which they need to get it right on.
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