One Easter Sunday, many years ago, some friends and I attended a showcase of performances in a network of dank subterranean vaults. The event was self-consciously avant-garde, and many of the artists were drag queens who were exploring the more …
How Allison Bailey crushed Stonewall
Ever since Stonewall, formerly known as a gay rights organisation, decided to focus on trans rights at the expense of all others, anyone articulating a reasonable objection to this change of direction has been subject to abuse, threats, and even …
Do the Tories care about women?
In Orwell’s 1984, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Last week came the discovery, surprising to many, that Tory leadership hopeful Penny Mordaunt has always been at war with self-ID. This is the policy — first promoted by …
The founding myth of Stonewall
Like most origin stories, the Stonewall uprising has been the subject of popular mythmaking. Various branches of the LGBTQ+ rainbow now take credit for the moment, 53 years ago this week, when a group of patrons at a Greenwich Village …
Boris can’t keep a story straight
These days, with Partygate refusing to go quietly, there’s increasing attention paid to Boris Johnson’s incapacity to keep a story straight, not to mention his constant prevarication about what conservatism in practice should look like: lockdowns or wild parties? Or …
How to stop children being indoctrinated
During one of the morning assemblies at my convent school, our headmistress, a fearsome nun who beat me with a shoe for accidentally breaking a window, announced that there was to be an amnesty on “Garbage Pail Kids” trading stickers. …
You can’t be born in the wrong body
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d swapped bodies with someone else: your mum, the boy next door, “a monstrous vermin”, an older version of yourself? Would you still be “you”?
There’s a reason this setup is …
Five rules for fighting transactivism
It will not have escaped the eagle-eyed that something about modern transactivism seems to make otherwise Gillick-competent adults veer towards the infantile. From the EHRC’s recent clarification about the legality of single-sex spaces under the terms of the Equality Act, …
The week the trans spell was broken
I always knew it would start with sport.
Back in 2018, when the obvious fallacies of gender ideology made me feel merely puzzled as opposed to completely enraged, a friend of mine went to the Commonwealth Games. He’s a sportswriter, …
The case that changed the gender debate
In 2019 I lost my job after tweeting about the difference between sex and gender identity.
Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender …
Inside the Tory trans civil war
During Lisa Townsend’s campaign to become Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner last year, the subject that most frequently came up on the doorstep wasn’t gang crime, burglaries, or car theft. It was Stonewall, and the lobby group’s influence on policing …
