Who gets to be a drag queen? Gay men, trans women, cis women, all of them? When drag queens are portrayed as hyper sexual those pointing the finger assume that drag, hyper femininity, is by its very nature a sexual thing. To be a drag queen is to be performative…

Any advocacy and policy work needs to establish who its target audiences are. Trans rights, much like any minority rights, has to find a receptive audience amongst policy makers, politicians, the media, and public at large if trans folk are ever to attain normative rights. This means that there will…

One of the rubrics of trans childhoods is that young children drawn towards clothing and toys of the opposite gender to the one they were assigned at birth makes that child deviant, possibly trans. If gender, and the social construction of gendered identity, is a manifestation of the societies we…

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s lesbians stepped up to provide compassionate care to dying men as nurses and doctors were afraid to go near them. Shut away in isolated rooms, these men suffered and died without the outside world knowing of their pain. They…

There is a running argument about men wearing women’s clothing dating back to at least 600 BC that states that such a thing is an abomination. Literally there in black and white, translated into all the world’s languages that for a man to wear women’s clothing it is a grave…

It is only a minor spoiler for Everything everywhere all the time to say that compassion plays a role in the film. After watching it today, it struck me that it is not the female character who is initially the empathetic compassionate one, rather the father. The film subverts masculine…

If the right to have rights is the first right above all others, and that your rights can only be enforced by your government, the right to free speech is being fatally undermined by the current UK Conservative government. Judges have ruled that punishment for Tweeting can have a chilling…

What do we expect from knowing ourselves as people? As we grow older, often not wiser, we expect this self knowledge to become something. To become more than when we were younger. Sinatra talked of doing things his way, an inscrutable desire to shape the world to his will. Is…

One of the interesting developments of my research has been the unpacking of Theguardian.com website’s transgender based articles. On one side are mainly non-UK writers showing empathy and compassion to trans subjects, on the other are UK based staff writers who throw every dog whistle they get at any article…