Tag: history

Funny shaped dice

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Hi, Ah, the luxury of a long weekend shines forth once again. Yes, with the Jones Crew not heading in holiday this summer – what with family health, doggo worries, exam results, and that old devil COVID – the Ever Lovely Mrs J and I are using up or holiday by taking shorter weeks at work. I’m rather liking it as there’s times in booking a break that it just adds more stress to the general huff and puff of life. That aside, I’ve been enjoying the weekly podcasts from Mermaids UK and if you’re not yet listening in, there’s a list of them here. It’s a collection of different presenters from around the Trans community and they talk about […]

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Don’t tell the kids

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Hi, While reading the news this morning, I stumbled upon the story around Hungarian government’s anti LGBTQ stance. I’m not going to pick up on that because, well, either we’ll agree it’s not a good thing and get cross, or we’ll not agree and still get cross. 🙂 What piqued my interest was the reported comment from Xavier Bettel (Prime Minister of Luxembourg) and is out as a gay man, “I did not become gay because of something I saw on TV.” In my personal experience of being the T in the LGBTQ+ community – oh, and I do mean trans, and not “twit” or other insults 😉 – as a child, I knew something was up long before I […]

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Tis the season

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Hi, With it being June, it’s Pride month and there’ll be various events online and otherwise from LGBTQ+ organisations around the world. For anyone asking why do we need a month for people to be proud of who they are, I would say you only need to look at the news and at recent history. The documentary on Netflix called Hating Peter Tatchell or Amazon Prime’s Disclosure would be excellent places to start if you’re interested in recent history, IMO. The 1970s might have been an age away, yet the laws and attitudes of that time cast a long shadow. One that still, sadly, touches us. So am I moaning about the past? No, organisations – from ‘charities’, pressure groups, […]

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An academic exercise

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Hi, It was reported in the news that Richard Dawkins – author and humanist – recently posted this on his Twitter account: In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss. Richard Dawkins After receiving criticism, he added: “I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue.” […]

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Ride

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Hi, I’ve been struggling to write a post this week. Not for any momentous reason, but the usual suspects of tiredness and a somewhat busier than usual few days at work. But, perhaps, the truth of it is some posts are hard to write. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as ONE Bill Hicks Perhaps I’m taking the late Mr Hicks’s words sightly out of context, but maybe he’ll overlook it this one time 😉 The fear of gay people over won’t someone think of the children?! lead us to the nonsense Section 28 in the 80s. Decades later, […]

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UK Census 21

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Hi, In the weekend just gone it was time for the UK to fill out the census. This time around, things were a little different to the previous decade. The department had taken the option – via feedback and involving trans groups – to improve the data collection and ask about gender identity. Looking into some of the history around that and on listening to a specialist from local government, it seems there’s very much an interest on how many people in the UK consider themselves to be part of the transgender spectrum and also how they choose to identify. There’s a page about that here. Having had the conversation with said specialist a few weeks back, as I say […]

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