Also I recommend it if you have any daughters, trans or not, or if you are a woman, or know any women, or know any men.

Dick.

Littlejohn.

Go figure, why Dick’s a prick.

It’s a shame Australia isn’t a penal colony anymore, because I’m not sure where else we should send people like this.

Lolwut. Despite fuckwit pollies determined to piss away every good thing we have, an increasing cost of living, and a large number of apathoid anti-intellectual fucktards, Oz remains a bloody paradise in comparison to the vast majority of everywhere else.

Sending folks here isn’t much of a punishment… it’s a big place with something for almost anyone.

If she hadn’t killed herself, people would have been mildly irked by the article. Just remember that when you are condemning the man who wrote it.

No, I’d still be fucking furious and disgusted by the article. But, you know, without her being dead, which is sickening and deeply sad on top of the ‘fucking furious’ bit.

I was lucky, inasmuch as the hurt of seeing that expression of loss, confusion and pain on my baby’s face is better than her girlfriend’s mum finding her child hanging from a fucking tree. It happens. Ms Meadows’ reasons for suicide were, no doubt, her own, complex and painful ones. But hers, and the other tragedy I just related share one thing in common: evil, spiteful, hate-filled pieces of shit, who just won’t leave people the fuck alone.

So, yes, you sound concern-trollish. Littlejohn, and the power to reach a wider audience through his column in Dacre’s filthy, fascist little rag didn’t do it all on their ownsome. But they fucking well helped. As did every nasty, stupid small-minded fool who caused Ms Meadows, and my daughter’s girlfriend, and all the others out there the distress and hurt their unreasoning hate brings. All equally culpable. Bloody hands on every one. To wish his demise for this would be despicable also. The desire to piss on the fuckers grave is a harder one to dismiss though.

(sorry to kick off, but like I said. This is something that not only pisses me off for its intrinsic wrongness, but because it reminds me of fresh and deep wounds)

To claim that none of us is “born male” is genetic (possibly even evolutionary) Revisionism.

Fear of the unknown is a contributory factor in labelling what is merely cultural as ‘unnatural’.

The job of responsible journalism is to try to allay people’s fears, not to deliberately manipulate  and feed their fear.

24 years later, I still don’t really get it. (I mean, I “get” that I live in a country founded by puritans and run by right-wingers, but I’ll never “get” why a woman’s chest is obscene and a man’s isn’t…)

I find the typical rhetorical division between sex and gender is the most useful for talking about this stuff. Like you say, a transgender woman’s gender is simply “woman” – not an onion or whatever. Her sex, depending on the body she was born with and whether or not she has had surgery, may be male or female, but this totally distinct from her gender identity.

(If I’m getting this wrong, trans folks and others who are more knowledgable than me, please correct me! I think I have it right, but I could easily be mistaken, and this is a topic where my ignorance could easily end up hurting someone.)