It’s your problem, not mine
When I pull up the meditation cushions and feel myself in every detail resting on the earth, hands in my lap, eyes at rest, focusing on my breathing and being present, being in the now, I find peace. I...
View ArticlePrague spring, 2011
In spring 2011, a burial was unearthed, of a male interred as a female, and was promptly billed by the press as ‘WTF? First Gay Caveman!’. In all likelihood the person was transgendered, accepted, even...
View ArticleA lurking fear … of what?
Disclaimer. I would like this post to be read as a question mark rather than just a personal statement, and certainly not as a personal challenge to anyone, because it is important to so many people...
View ArticleRachael’s Café
This is Rachael Jones (R) with Lucy Danser (L). Both are amazing. Rachael has a café in Bloomington, Indiana, where Lucy, an actress and writer, met her. The result of the meeting at the real, original...
View ArticleSemantic hegemony, if you know what I mean
Sometimes things collide and I feel a small blog coming on. This one involves the proposition that, if gender had never been defined as strictly binary, and anyone could live anywhere in the spectrum...
View ArticleAcceptably different
It’s a conversation that will never end: if society has one standard and we don’t fit, and the standard doesn’t look like changing any time soon, what should we do? The choice is varied and individual,...
View ArticleRemembrance
I’ve told a few cis friends that I shall be going to a TDOR event this month. TDOR, on the 20th November each year is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Hot on the heels of Remembrance Sunday and the...
View ArticleNot like a bone
If it were my bone – the unmistaken crack, the grinding, splintered ends, transformation by pain, and body thrown from symmetry – then I would not contaminate or as dis-ease infect the tale you’d tell...
View ArticlePride
I have only actually fully participated in one Pride event. I never knew in advance when it was. My mother always knew: ‘Pride comes before the fall’, she used to say. Maybe that’s it. Pride was a bad...
View ArticleWatch words: self hate, self harm, self destruct
Now that the gender dysphoria bit is over, I am walking over some old ground, just picking up stones, those things that hurt the feet of people following after me. You see, I remember walking down...
View ArticleRainbow dawn: love wins?
#lovewins Friday exploded in an Internet rainbow. Every mainstream media title had its report, and the world cheer that came with it drowned for a while the dissenting voices. Rainbow backgrounds...
View ArticleMinority report
2016 turned around with reviews of what a good year it had been for trans awareness. Films, soaps, celebrities, parliamentary inquiries, public debates all made it seem like a breakthrough in...
View ArticleSex and Gender; two troublesome words
I read an academic article about centring gender identity this week, that was interesting, not least because it assumed a clarity about sex and about gender that in most circles doesn’t exist. And then...
View ArticlePatriarchy
It’s the cornerstone of feminism, and a simple enough question. How comes men seem to rule and dominate the world, how comes they always seem to have done so? For what reason? It’s the one item in...
View ArticleBiological Sex
What does ‘biological’ mean? As far as I can determine, it hasn’t changed recently: it is simply ‘relating to living organisms’. I raise it again, only because it keeps rearing its head as a reason why...
View ArticleGoing Out: Eastern Germany 2017
She doesn’t quite catch my hand it falls—shatters on the ground. You never quite know. Windows down the empty way, nostalgia with suspicion — a Trabi sits on the lot, a tiny sufficient reminder that...
View ArticleThe problem with activists
In 2004 I walked into local council offices for a conversation with local officials and advisers. Somehow I had come to speak on behalf of local residents about a concerning issue. It was the first...
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