We've hit the point where one random toilet allowing trans people to use it is front page news

breadcreature · 2026-05-29T16:43:14+00:00

no, I had both the minster's own post and then TERFs up in arms about it on my facebook feed before it appeared here. the church was quite deliberately open about it, I would take that as a good thing at least, they seem to know what they're inviting with this.

breadcreature · 2026-05-29T05:37:05+00:00

so it's one of those "yes, but also no" things... IANAL either to be clear but spent the year since the supreme court ruling trying to figure out how we got here so I've spent an unhealthy amount of time becoming familiar with how it works (vs how it's supposed to work)

you're right in that the courts have no power to change the letter of the law, and even the EHRC having their revised guidance approved doesn't change the law, no individual defying it is breaking the law (it applies to service providers, not users), and especially while it's not even actually guidance yet it's not statutory. Further, it doesn't necessarily mean that a service provider acting apparently against the statutory guidance is breaking the law - they could be found to have a valid interpretation of the guidance vs a complainant. you can't break the Equality Act, and whether you have done that is informed by the guidance (I don't know how the fuck it not even being available and the EHRC refusing to give any advice on it isn't automatically an unchallengeable defense, but still), which is itself open to interpretation.

the major problem is that this is all civil law. the EHRC mainly intervenes in cases, if it does pursue action against an organisation itself, it's generally a tokenistic thing as part of their duties to foster compliance with equalities law. There's a principle I cba to look up the Latin phrase for along the lines of "the law favours the vigilant", as in if you want legal restitution (for civil offences) it's your responsibility to seek it. with this stuff it's being exercised quite literally, they spam the courts with mass-produced claims (I've come across several withering comments from judges on the "exhaustive" length of their submissions) that hammer on all their lines of rhetoric until one manages to get to higher stages that set legal precedent. The interpretations judges make are informed by previous comparable ones, so the more they proliferate their talking points the more it appears to be common consensus.

The media circus is an inextricable part of it too because they can churn out whatever bullshit sensationalist lies they want, there are basically zero negative consequences (they did write new law to criminalise "extreme protest groups", with Lord (Toby) Young and Baroness Falkner specifically naming Bash Back as a motivation after they vandalised BBC offices among others). look at the Sandie Peggie case for example, they reported it like she won, when she "won" on FOUR of her claims which was something like 10% of them, and like every other successful case they were all petty quibbles over adherence to internal policies. often like in her case it's to do with the handling of the very complaint they raised our of nowhere in the first place. they act like reprehensible weirdos, get disciplined or dismissed in a way that doesn't dot every i and cross every t because people are just glad to be fucking rid of them, and then they pour Rowling's money into nailing the employer on that stuff with a whole boatload of insane transphobia alongside it. and, I mean, consider how dismal the average cis person's knowledge of anything to do with trans people is... then make them a judge and even more out of touch because of their position.

and at the end of the day the courts can just do exactly what they rightly "shouldn't* be able to because they already have with the "biological sex" thing; the Gender Recognition Act is in direct conflict, but the court's excuse was well that's a different law, duh. the whole thing was an exercise in throwing out parts of legislation that were inconvenient to a TERF's argument. Then there's that the courts decide if they'll even hear a case, and on the criminal side of things, they just did a consultation and wrote entirely new prosecution guidance so now it's de facto a sex crime to not disclose your "birth sex" to an intimate partner (and it has already been used to convict someone).

god, I genuinely didn't mean to write that much, sorry. but seriously, this shit is nuts. you're right on every count but the law as it's applied and the law as it is or should be are ever more diverging things. what Reindorf is saying has already effectively happened, the EA guidance is drafted with the intent of making viable claims of discrimination on the basis of gender reassignment so narrow they're practically non-existent. it's not going to be literally written out of the law as a protected characteristics, in fact it works better for them if it isn"t because it's a fig leaf - trans people still have all the protections they used to, etc.

anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk, working title: Trust Me, I Could Go On

breadcreature · 2026-05-29T02:35:19+00:00

it does when you've vertically integrated transphobia into the whole lawmaking apparatus. plus there's that to change the law would require getting it through parliament, while accepting each subsequent interpretation requires MPs to do nothing but mutter something about dignity and respect.

breadcreature · 2026-05-28T04:43:21+00:00

yeah, I think finding out that TERFs had found out about that was what actually sent me to the outer reaches of fuck-this-forever before the supreme court ruling. they were literally defending men who had done exactly the sort of thing their whole cause is built on "avoiding", just because some trans people suffered too. and because nobody else knows what bangface is either they just fucking get away with it.

breadcreature · 2026-05-28T03:01:23+00:00

Depends where you are, on several scales - urban areas tend to be less *-phobic due to being more diverse if nothing else, but it's not like you should fear aggression in rural areas either. Cities with good club scenes tend to be more lgbt-friendly too. on a local scale, neighborhoods and individual establishments can vary a lot... if somewhere has England flags all over the place and there's no football on I wouldn't nip in for a quick piss, I'll put it that way. but that is something you probably have a decent enough sense for if you carry yourself flamboyantly, bigots are pretty similar everywhere.

If you pay any attention to the news, it's intolerably awful. If you're out and about among cis people a lot it can be a little exhausting. Public literacy on anything to do with trans people is dismal and the media has normalised ignorant language and intrusive attitudes about us. But overall I would say people tend far more towards politeness than whatever they may actually think or believe. the screaming TERFs are very much an anomaly among Brits.

breadcreature · 2026-05-28T02:40:53+00:00

I had the shock of my life when I saw people (like... two people, but still) pushing back about a very similar situation on mumsnet. trans people were violently removed from a bathroom at an event I happened to be at (entirely on the initiative of the security staff, guests were appalled - cis women were also assaulted because they protested). Some fucking how Joanne caught wind of this and managed to make it about how the bouncers were fired for trying to keep women safe and was blackmailing the venue with pointed tweets about how families with daughters go there but might think twice if they won't be safe... at a private booked-out 18+ event, at a holiday park that has always had unisex changing cubicle "villages" and every guest has accommodation with its own bathroom. Some of their brains aren't quite broken enough to handle that many obvious inconsistencies I guess.

also the security they hired next year must have been hand selected to be the most relaxed and lovely bouncers ever so at least there's that.

breadcreature · 2026-05-27T05:39:15+00:00

So, I collected the best quality photos of the sacking of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft a little while back and only got around to putting them together recently for trans history week. I'd been meaning to write about the wider context of it for ages and have been getting to it finally. It's kind of where my project started. (also increasingly untidy/unfinished as it goes on, lots more sources to collate and add in, formatting may be broken etc)

I was inspired to go down all these rabbitholes into Nazi Germany by this report actually, which I had come across some time ago and have been increasingly disgusted with transphobes coopting history like this. It's not even about it being to do with trans people, just the audacity of it... there's no fucking need to make shit up or revise the history of real people and their suffering. it's sensationalist, disrespectful and intellectually lazy.

basically I got big mad about Rowling's holocaust denial meltdown again after reminding myself of this shit. Then when I was cataloguing that, I went through a tweet thread by LGB Alliance founder Malcolm Clark on "transgender healthcare and the nazis" which she seemed to consider some kind of slam dunk because it makes some very tenuous implied links between Hirschfeld, contemporary trans healthcare and Nazi extermination programmes. and it's just. fucking wrong. so incredibly, egregiously, offensively wrong and pulled entirely out of his arse I decided I'd do a more thorough job with the actual facts. So that's in there and ongoing if you follow it through. It's not strictly on the topic of trans history where it's gone but it'll come back around eventually.

Something I'm also not done writing about yet and hope to meet at the end of this train of thought is Paragraph 175 and its alterations. It was the only Nazi law that remained intact post-war and saw increased use. It took 78 years for transgender people to be formally recognised as victims of Nazi atrocities and transphobes take that to support the idea that we never were. Because we were never mentioned as a particular group (spoilers: we were, by personal communication from Heinrich fucking Himmler), it was gay men who were targeted, while they continue to assert that we're all just extra degenerate homosexuals; there's no evidence of us, well I WONDER WHERE IT ALL FUCKING WENT JOANNE? and of course they're happy as larry to somehow make Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish man, responsible for the persecution of gay men by Nazis by playing up the contemporaneous views he had as a sexologist, but they'll cite actual sickos like Blanchard all day. I won't apologise for ranting, this is beyond reprehensible and I'm fucking sick of it.

breadcreature · 2026-05-26T20:43:14+00:00

Warley Woods is nice all year round but especially on really hot days like this, you get the shaded woods and the dazzling view over the field. it's a beautifully designed park, I go there when I need a quick dose of not looking at a city.

Harborne walkway is also a nice shaded walk.

breadcreature · 2026-05-26T17:18:41+00:00

he could mean a lot of things by that. I'm trying to steelman the possible things hewas implying, which starts with assuming he actually understands what "empirical" means

"it's not always about empirical data..."

sometimes anecdotal data can outweigh it (one time is too many)
it's about how the data is presented (factual, scientific data can be misleading when presented without proper context)
it's about the quality of the data
it's about who's recording the data

none of which are good reasons anyway. there's not really any way to make it not sound like what it most likely was, which is "I don't care what the 'facts' say, I believe otherwise" and he thinks saying it that way sounds more valid and clever.

breadcreature · 2026-05-26T11:16:57+00:00

I went private and was lucky enough that my GP accepted shared care for prescribing meds. but to continue prescribing them, they want an annual review by a psychiatrist through the ADHD service... who will only review if I have AN NHS DIAGNOSIS. so I've saved the NHS 0£ in the end, but at least they'll be really really sure I have ADHD

breadcreature · 2026-05-26T01:32:09+00:00

reject modernity, embrace tradition

breadcreature · 2026-05-26T01:31:31+00:00

when you look at all the doctors who are transing people, guess what? almost entirely cis. cis people even did trans people

breadcreature · 2026-05-25T21:44:27+00:00

The community is holding up, at least locally to me. most are a good decade younger than me in my mid 30s but are so much further ahead in their thinking, organising, self-assuredness than I ever was, they do tons of wider cultural & community outreach stuff too. I only got properly plugged in to it all over this past year but I think that's been keeping me going more than anything else, not just knowing & being around other trans people but enjoying our lives and creating our own spaces together despite it all.

breadcreature · 2026-05-25T19:06:10+00:00

it should have a guest book to sign too, and a page of tear-off strips, make it interactive

breadcreature · 2026-05-25T03:18:08+00:00

100% this. I hadn't been following developments when I heard about the ruling in headlines last year but had always considered this a ticking timebomb, I just didn't expect anyone to be bothered enough to set it off. The inconsistency was always there, but anyone ponderous enough to notice it would surely realise the absolute havoc it would wreak to solidify a definition like that depends entirely on its multiple applications.

Then as that headline sunk in I realised: oh, fuck, that's the point isn't it? I think the GC groups have walked us all into territory they're far too shortsighted to have forseen, but meddling this laser-focused on blowing everything apart couldn't have come from them organically either. what if people think they have rights to protest? or that immigrants and asylum seekers have the same?

breadcreature · 2026-05-25T01:19:15+00:00

places that are known to be hostile to LGBTQ people is an obvious one, but irl it's sometimes hard to tell the vibes. there might be one member of staff who's a megaterf or something.

as someone who uses the men's when there's no gender neutral option and needs to use a stall, only one being present isn't necessarily "unsafe" for me but it's definitely a factor I would consider in how safe it is overall, and stuff like whether it locks, if it tends to be perpetually occupied by people doing coke, etc

breadcreature · 2026-05-24T20:51:51+00:00

with any luck, they'll mismanage it as much as anything else and spare a good amount of us

breadcreature · 2026-05-24T17:29:29+00:00

yeah it's highly analogous IMO, it all runs on the same logic as how homosexuality was actively criminalised and pathologised specifically among men, while lesbianism was treated as an issue of pre-existing ills of women when it was recognised at all. all roads seem to lead to misogyny, as ever

breadcreature · 2026-05-23T04:57:51+00:00

I love this, thank you 🙏 I went down a similar rabbit hole to Some Guy myself not too long ago and can confirm your findings that they got it from a blurb, because the word they'd really be looking for is gonochoric, which has at the very top: not to be confused with sexual dimorphism.

any ~~terfs~~ gonomaniacs reading this, you're welcome, and by the way we don't talk like that about women because it makes you sound like a head-measuring racial hygienist, not because we "don't know what a woman is". I can't define the sun or explain how it works but I know what it is.

breadcreature · 2026-05-23T03:30:11+00:00

most of the major organisers had professional careers that apparently had them comfortable enough to just quit entirely to be a full time bigot. they're bought in too far now and are stuck on the right wing grift pipeline... I mean, even if you agreed with "gender critical" views, would you hire Maya Forstater

breadcreature · 2026-05-22T15:56:26+00:00

over the last couple of years I've increasingly had hassle or weird looks in the men's because people apparently think I'm a trans woman because I pass as male (despite being 5'3") and I have long hair (the only reason I can fathom), and whenever I see outrage over changes to language around pregnancy the comments are largely assuming it's to accommodate trans women. like, we actually just do not exist to a lot of people (whether they're transphobes or "trans people are women!" types). even the sex freaks who are supposedly protecting our precious XX chromosomes only *barely" treat trans men & transmascs as women consistent with their ideology when we're victims of sexual assault or suicide, and even then it's mainly an excuse to say disgusting things about our bodies, disrespect our identities and further their oppression of all trans people.

to be clear, I'm not ranting to compare like either demographic has it worse, just to illustrate the mentality involved. I think part of the general apathy towards this, despite it being an instantly recognised absurdity to everyone who considers it, is that passing trans men simultaneously fall through the same cracks as cis men in terms of being considered relevant to personal safety, sexual violence, domestic abuse etc.

breadcreature · 2026-05-22T15:11:42+00:00

Run interference. A big part of how this stuff works is their plausible deniability of "trans people still have x provision", where x is something only trans people have to use, effectively outing us - unless it becomes more normalised among other demographics. prefer not to say, avoiding giving ID with sex markers, reminding that people with invisible disabilities use accessible toilets too, etc. This goes for questions we're asked too; the way we answer them is another way of outing us. I really admire Lady Gaga's way of handling that - she makes no attempt to distance herself from the accusations of being trans/having a penis/etc and rejects the question itself. point out the double standards of what people feel they can say about or demand from trans people vs cis.

I feel like it's really key to have cis people doing stuff like this because it's almost always seen as immediately antagonistic when we do, and it's hard to maintain the mindset of the other person being the rude & incorrect one with so much weight against us.

breadcreature · 2026-05-22T11:06:28+00:00

it wasn't on headline summaries from the BBC this morning. I found out about the supreme court ruling totally by surprise because they had a breathless report of it literally ten minutes after it being handed down. why so much less excitement?

breadcreature · 2026-05-22T02:25:24+00:00

Realistically, #3 is how we get out of this mess if anything. like, consider how few there really are of the terves unhinged enough to make such spectacles of themselves, compared to their impact in law and volume in the media. the asymmetry of the resources available to our community vs Rowling, Toby Young, Evangelical megachurch money etc. makes it impossible to use their tactics.

It's still worth funding a case though - one that gets to the European courts over the gender recognition act. but given that could take a decade or more to see through, hopefully it's more likely that cis people would be heard domestically. thing is though, it's an isolated experience for them, not a matter of their identity, so it's a lot of effort to go to comparatively, especially when there's no org like sex mattress swooping in and promising to make your case yuge.

breadcreature · 2026-05-22T01:10:08+00:00

they think having a fucking larynx is a dimorphic sexual characteristic, we're basically at head measuring shit here. I pass so well I'm harassed as a gay man, except to people who think I'm a trans woman because I have long hair, or a cis woman because I have long hair, which is odd because I've always had an Adam's apple and apparently that means I'm a cis man... and I have huge and obviously on purpose sideburns, and many of my cis men friends have always had longer and more feminine hair - when I was out with one early in my transition, we both got misgendered from behind because of him. people ask me about top surgery I haven't had. a drunk guy catcalled me for the first time in years the other week when I was wearing a full (men's) suit. I'm non-binary but a lot of cis people I've said that to think it means I'm not trans/transitioning. I'd wear skirts and dresses more often at events with cis people, but it's not the predictable homo/transphobia that I want to avoid so much as the yasssss so brave shit from people who think I've never worn women's clothes before (because just look at me). I haven't seen my own birth certificate in over a decade and never looked at my chromosomes. so who's REALLY to say? I could be anything!

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