How can a human being be neither a man nor a woman? Sam Smith thinks they are, but what this means beyond grammatically inconvenient pronouns is hard to fathom.
Author: Debbie Hayton
Physics teacher and trade unionist.
Categories
In praise of the LGB Alliance
Once upon a time an organisation was established to campaign for gay and lesbian rights. They faced opposition from the outset. They were widely condemned, even called out as a hate group when they talked about same-sex attraction. When they sought charitable status, a petition was launched, urging the Charities Commission to reject the application. Tens of thousands of people signed it.
But this was not the dark days of the 1980s, when Section 28 stopped councils and schools ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. This is now.
Police and Crime Commissioners will be elected next week across much of England and Wales. These elections may struggle to excite the voters – turnout in 2016 failed to reach 30% in many areas – but those chosen have the power to hire and fire Chief Constables. They hold the police to account, and they are responsible for “the totality of policing.”
Richard Dawkins – the biologist, humanist, and author – is a well-known critic of religious faith. As he once put it, ‘Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.’
Traditional religion may have loosened its grip on society, certainly in the United Kingdom, but new quasi-religious ideologies are taking root in spaces that the churches have vacated.
Canada – “True North, strong and free,” according to its anthem – is in thrall to transgender ideology. On Friday, a father was sent to prison. His crime? Speaking out against the medical transition of his 14-year-old daughter.
Robert Webb is best known for making people laugh, but he conducted himself with poise and grace when he was ambushed by American podcast host Jesse Thorn. Thorn had invited Webb and long-time collaborator David Mitchell to talk about their latest show, and their experiences performing together as a double act over the years. But the programme ended in yet another episode of the transgender inquisition.
A year of disrupted schooling means there are plenty of issues facing our schools right now. But delegates at last week’s National Education Union conference were more interested in another subject: developing a new – and presumably beefed-up – definition of transphobia.
LGBT+ Labour might be a fringe group in the minds of traditional Labour voters but they have the power to extract a grovelling apology from Keir Starmer.
International Transgender Day of Visibility must be the most redundant day in the calendar. Since Caitlyn Jenner’s very public transition in 2015, there has been an explosion of trans visibility, and little seems to hold us back.
Is the Green party determined to make its female members feel unwelcome? After voting down women’s sex-based rights at their spring conference, the party has now suspended the co-chair of its women’s committee, Emma Bateman. The reason? According to Bateman, her decision to question whether trans women are female is to blame.
