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    Bi visibility day: a group of people carry a large banner painted in the bisexual flag colours that reads "Love knows no gender" and a large bisexual flag themed balloon wall floats above them at a parade in Stuttgart 2016. Credit Ecelan, Wikimedia Commons

    Bi Visibility Day 2023 and why it’s important to me as a non-binary trans...

    Felix F Fern -
    In 1990 ‘Bisexual Pride Day’ was declared on 23rd June at the first ‘National Bisexual Conference’ in San Francisco, US, with the Mayor "commending the bisexual rights community for its leadership in the cause of social justice.” 9 years later, the beginnings of Bi Visibility Day start to take shape.
    Census 2021 logo which reads "census 2021" in a purple font and also includes the welsh for census too which is "cyfrifiad". This is the first official UK government survey to include transgender and non-binary census data.

    A look at the transgender and non-binary census 2021 data

    Tom Pashby -
    The Office for National Statistics has released data from the 2021 census which for the first time ever includes statistics about the numbers of trans and non-binary living in England and Wales. Here Tom Pashby takes a look at the transgender and non-binary census data;
    the trans agenda logo

    The Trans Agenda #11 Ferrets, debates, murder, paper obsession & more

    Lee Hurley -
    The Trans Agenda #11 Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday to Friday if you are subscribed. You...
    A wide shot of JK Rowling reading from The Sorcerer's Stone in The White House Gardens

    JK Rowling, lesbians and The Cotton Ceiling

    Gemma Stone -
    If they believe it hard enough, perhaps they can will it into existence but I doubt it. Trans people just don't want to have sex with rancid nasty bigots. We want to have sex with people who love us and respect us, like anyone else.
    Press photo of Kemi Badenoch,, who likened trans people to a disease and is a candidate in the tory leadership race and who knew of LGB Alliance's anti-trans lobbying before meeting with them

    Kemi Badenoch likened trans people to a disease in Parliament

    Gemma Stone -
    In the middle of a Parliamentary committee Kemi Badenoch likened trans people to a disease and then immediately tried to pretend she didn't. Clips of the outbust have been circulating online with the trans community sharing their outrage - we should be angry, I just don't think Badenoch is really the right target for this one.
    Documents showing a letterhead for the House of Lords Library where its been confirmed transphobes are tampering with LGBT History Month displays

    Transphobes are tampering with LGBT History Month displays, badly

    Gemma Stone -
    An LGBT History Month display at Millbank House Library in the House of Lords has been tampered with. The book by Helen Joyce often finds its way into LGBT inclusive displays, however this is the first time we have confirmation transphobes are tampering with these displays.
    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.
    A photo of Boris Johnson with some flags behind him.

    Can a woman have a penis?

    Gemma Stone -
    Specifically, it was viewed as such because it did not require any medical intervention. It respected bodily autonomy! You could and can still obtain a new birth certificate without ever desiring hormones and surgery. Sure, you are still subject to the intrusive Gender Recognition Panel's whims, about to be set back a bunch of cash you probably couldn't afford, gatekept by a crap healthcare system to hell and have no non-binary options at all. But theoretically, its totally possible to be a woman with a penis, by law.
    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?"
    Parliament of Finland where Self ID in Finland is currently being proposed and debated

    Self ID in Finland and the awful bigger picture

    Vilja Heikkilä -
    Self ID in Finland is on the horizon so we asked a Finnish trans writer to tell us about it and the wider context it exists in. Vilja Heikkilä writes;
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