On this bumper episode of What the Trans?! Ashleigh, Flint and Alyx go over:
- The court case around last year’s hate crime in Harrow, where a young trans woman was attacked outside a roller diisco.
- More criticism of the Cass review, this time from the New England Journal of Medicine.
- Flint talks about a noise demo in support of trans prisoner Zoe Watts.
- A triple-tastic Loser’s Corner.
- Alyx’s interview with a cis ally within the NHS, shining a spotlight onto new ‘MindEd’ guidance and its many “gender critical” problems.
References
Action Alley
Trans Pride Brighton call out for volunteer fundraisers
QueerAF inviting pitches for Trans+ History Week – Deadline February 16th
TransActual – Meet Us, Hear Us
Harrow Hate Crime
UK Press and CPS defends mob who attacked and stabbed teenage trans girl
Kishwer Falkner’s Times article (archive copy)
EHRC
NEJM slams Cass review
Zoe Watts
Trans prisoner Zoe Watts is being denied ‘life-saving’ medication, activists claim
Northern Ireland
Cass review petition
An independent evaluation of the Cass review on child gender services – Petitions
Loser’s Corner
Australian TERFs lose their court case: https://bsky.app/profile/kirstimiller30.bsky.social/post/3lg64gzeqlc2i
Football Failure:
LGBA “Support” “Hotline” that is neither of those things:
Transcript
Flint: To be fair, [posh voice] to be fair, to be fair, I do– sorry, I’m trapped in the echolalia of that a little bit. [laughs] Sounds like a Fall Out Boy song.
[intro music]Flint: Hello everybody and welcome to What The Trans?!
Ashleigh & Alyx: What The Trans?!
Flint: Beautiful.
Ashleigh: Hi folks.
Flint: Hello.
Alyx: Hello.
Ashleigh: Hope you’re all doing okay out there in meat space. How are you two?
Flint: I’m doing all right. Well actually, you know what? A reminder for the folks out there in the weird cyber world. If you’ve forgotten your medication today, take your medication because I just realized as I sat down that I have missed my T-gel for the last two days. So go me, don’t be me. Go do your meds, whatever they need.
But aside from that, I’ve been playing the Stanley Parable and generally been drawing, and it’s just been a beautiful little vibe. Very much, I don’t want to say insulated from the tragedies of the world because they have been delivered to my doorstep at every single bite, but at the same time. [laughs]
Ashleigh: Yes.
Flint: It’s, I don’t know, it’s weird playing a game that’s so psychologically fucky during a time where every time I open my phone there’s somehow something more psychologically fucky. [laughs]
Ashleigh: Yeah, it’s weird when reality eclipses the Stanley Parable, isn’t it?
Alyx: Oh god, it is, isn’t it?
Flint: Yeah, yeah, that’s very much where we’re at. How have youse been?
Ashleigh: Good, yeah. I started Baldur’s Gate 3.
Flint: Oh, get in.! What character build are you got? Tell me about that.
Ashleigh: I am a wizard.
Flint: Ooh!
Ashleigh: And I went for a High Elf with a noble background because, well, because of course I did.
Flint: [laughs] I was going to say that feels very like on brand.
Ashleigh: Yeah, yeah, I’m devastatingly middle class as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before. So that’s been fun. You know, sometimes it’s been like “oh, come on!” when the dice roll hasn’t gone my way, even though I’ve got all the appropriate bonuses. And sometimes it’s like, “okay, well, I’m not going to get this without a natural 20. Oh, a natural 20. How splendid”. So that’s been nice when that’s happened.
Alyx: You always hear about High Elves and you don’t really hear about Low or Middle Elves, do you?
Ashleigh: Well there’s High Elf and Wood Elf.
Flint: Yeah, and then there’s also Drow. Who are elves of the, oh, I want to say Under Dark and I think that’s wrong. Some D&D nerd’s going to correct me [laughs]. But yeah, there’s different kinds of elves, but High Elves are the only ones that get the denotation of High. All of the other elves are just, they’re normally denoted by like a different thing. Like Sea Elves, Wood Elves, other kinds of elves.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Alyx: You haven’t got the Middle Elf, middle class elf who’s forgotten their mortgage payment earlier last week.
Flint: Yeah. Well, saying like Supremacist Elves feels a bit too on the nose. So they just go for High Elves because it’s normally what they represent. [laughs]
Ashleigh: Yeah. I like to think of them as High Elves, but as in like, “oh dude, I’m so fucking high”.
Flint: Same, same. Like when they’re like [stoner voice] like high elves, dude.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Flint: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I live for that reading in particular. It’s always my favorite one. Yeah.
Ashleigh: Baked Elves.
Flint: They’re just nepo babies that can smoke weed all the time.
[laughter]Ashleigh: And how about you, Alyx? What’s been happening down in Groovetown?
[music: Funky Town]Alyx: Down in Groovetown? I’ve sort of been grooving, you know, getting the… So basically I took a while to get home. You know, when you’re an IT professional, there’s a really important computer that mustn’t fail. And all of a sudden you go to restart the thing, four o’clock in the evening, knowing that it’s either your evening’s taken up by taking hours on a device or it’s going to breeze through nice and easily. I almost had a scare today. I rebooted this device and all of a sudden– and it was taking ages to update. And for some reason I got impatient and pulled the plug on it.
Flint: Oh!
Alyx: Which I really shouldn’t have, because the moment I turned it back on again, it said “Starting Automatic Repair” and started looping for about half an hour.
Flint: Aw!
Alyx: And you know that you dare not touch it because you’re seeing “Automatic Repair” just after you pulled the plug on it after an update.
Flint: Oh yeah.
Alyx: So I was like, you know what? I’m going to make it the higher ups’ problem, by getting one of the next line above me to go fix it. So fortunately, they pressed restart on it for me, which I didn’t have the courage to do. And I’ve somehow arrived on time for the podcast recording.
Flint: Nice.
Alyx: So I suppose the groove hasn’t been on.
Flint: Well, I mean, sympathies with your tech struggles. I recently had a friend come over around about Yule time who… we had my decks out, so we were mixing.
Alyx: Your what out?
Flint: My decks. As in mixing decks, DJ decks. And so we were mixing, we’re doing a little beaty beat. And he was like, “oh, I’ll send you some of the music that I’ve got”. I’m like,”oh, cheers for that. Sound.” So he sends over everything. There’s a moment he turns to me and he goes, “I’ve just sent you my entire library”. And I’m like, “oh my God, what did I do to deserve this?” Literally like two, two, three weeks later, when I last saw him, he was like, “dude, I’ve just had a really rough stream” because he streams on Twitch. And he was like, my computer is just completely like, shut on me, like it’s completely shut down. He had to, like restart the stream multiple times and he lost all of his music.
Alyx: Oh, no.
[sample: Captain Holt in Brooklyn 99] I just erased everything.Flint: So thankfully, because he decided to be generous around Yule time, I’m now like the only physical backup. So I said, like, “dude, come over and collect it. Like, come over, take everything. Also, please do it as quick as possible because I don’t think my laptop is that strong either. And now that it’s like the holy grail of your music collection, I’m scared for it”.
[laughter]Alyx: You’re holding it at arm’s length, trying to keep it as far away from you out of fear of destruction.
Flint: I’m like, watching the air particles, so which bits of dust are getting in the fans at this rate? [laughs]
Ashleigh: You are the backup.
Flint: [laughs] Yeah.
Ashleigh: Okay, let’s move on. Let’s go to– let’s take a stroll down Action Alley, shall we?
[Action Alley music]Flint: Yeah.
Alyx: So of course, you’ve probably seen how shit the news is and you’re thinking, “what can I do?” So we’ve got a list of some things we can do that has come up recently. So first one today is Trans Pride Brighton. They’re still looking out for volunteers to help with their fundraising activities and trying to make sure they’ve got enough funds so that the next Prides can go out with enough resources, that they can go out for their day.
Ashleigh: If you’re in Brighton or you’re somewhere in the South and you can get to Brighton? Yeah, absolutely. Do some fundraising for Trans Pride Brighton, which provides a space for some trans joy, which we’ll get to later.
Flint: There’s also a paid opportunity for some writers, if you want to write. Queer AF are doing their Trans History Month yet again and it’s for podcasting, writing and artwork. And I actually did this last year. It was very, very cool, very, very fun so I can personally vouch for it being a very, very good experience genuinely. It was just really nice.
[sound effect: tape player stops]Amber: Editing Amber here. I also did this last year. I made a documentary about the history of electronic music and synthesizers and about how old synthesizers are transgender actually. I had a really good time. I’d really recommend it. It’s a good team. It’s good people. They’re also very patient and also you get paid. So yeah, go for it.
[sound effect: tape player starts]Flint: So yeah, if you have some kind of bit of Trans History, if there’s some part of you, your history, whatever that you feel is applicable that you want to show to the world for a second, then do it, genuinely do it. Like it’s fun and it’s a good time and it’s very cool. And you get a little bit of money from it. Who doesn’t love that?
Alyx: Yeah, and with all the active effects of trying to wipe us out, this is an obvious fuck you to say, “here’s our history and here’s the creative work I’ve put towards it”. And that is also very powerful.
Ashleigh: It is.
Flint: Definitely.
Ashleigh: And obviously we can’t really rate Queer AF highly enough. They’re brilliant.
Flint: Yeah.
Ashleigh: You know. We have links professionally and kind of personally as well because Jamie works really hard and there’s some fantastic stuff on the Queer AF website and you can contribute to that. And as we’ve mentioned the last few times, Trans Actual’s See Us, Hear Us campaign where they’re encouraging as many people as possible to get some FaceTime with their MP, get in front of your MP, get them on the phone, go to the constituency surgery, be seen, be visible and make a nuisance of yourself for your local MP’s office until they agree to sit down with you and hear your concerns, of which no doubt there are many. So there’s going to be a few more actions that you can take when we get into some of our stories, but they’re specifically related to the… whatever we’re going to be talking about. So we didn’t want to just dump everything on you right at the start, devoid of the context.
Flint: Yeah. And as ever, these are all things that we encourage people to go out and support, but by all means don’t feel overwhelmed, don’t feel like if you aren’t in a position to be able to do anything immediately, that that means that you are in any way worse for it or bad for it. And also little things that we don’t even put here can be helpful. Join a union if you can see one that looks good. Like you know, there’s so many different ways. Hell, even getting to know your neighbour, that in and of itself is a really important community building thing that we need to do, because the more that we know the people on our street, if those people seem safe enough, of course, safety first, they can be a really great way of helping build community without having to maybe do all of the long travel and organisation and the kind of safety planning that goes into getting into immediate direct action. If you at least have people you can chat to and go, “fuck me, this is difficult sometimes”, that is something still.
Alyx: No, definitely. And on the note of being overwhelmed, sometimes you see large amounts of actions that you can do that you’re like, “oh I must do everything”. You don’t have to do everything. Like what I’ve noticed is like we’ve got a thousand downloads on the regular for just our website. And if one person, if every single one of those thousand people do just one of those actions, that’s still a thousand people doing actions. Even if it’s each of them doing one particular action, that is quite powerful.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Flint: So I hate to ruin this wonderful, gentle little vibe that we got going in here. But we are going to have to look out the window at the world right now. And unfortunately, a lot of it seems to be burning.
Ashleigh: It depends where you’re listening from, doesn’t it?
Flint: It depends where you’re listening from. Obviously, there is the big news that we cannot avoid, that is, you know, Trump’s reelection, that inauguration, the many executive orders, and also a lot of people are discussing the moment with Musk, including the moment where Musk did a very clear, very blatant Nazi salute, which is gross and disgusting. The more dogs that there are in the room, the less quiet the dog whistles need to be. And I feel like that’s a really good example of that.
Ashleigh: And somebody pointed out, like, just to put, just to say it’s day one, and you’re already apologising for a guy doing…
Flint: Did they apologise?
Ashleigh: Oh, no, no, no, no. As in, people were trying to justify it. Apologise was the wrong word. But as in, you know, we’re on day one, and you’re already trying to justify a guy doing a Nazi salute.
Flint: Yeah.
Ashleigh: So that, you know, that doesn’t bode well. And so as soon as he got sworn in, there was an avalanche of executive orders. So he was kind of gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and gutting any protections for trans people, any and all of them, seemingly.
Flint: And leaving the Paris climate deal.
Alyx: Yeah. Dropping price caps on vital medication.
Ashleigh: So there’s just, there’s so many things to talk about here. So we’re just going to kind of talk about it in the abstract in the sense that, the fact that there has been an avalanche of stuff literally on day one is a very deliberate strategy.
Flint: Absolutely.
Ashleigh: It is to tire out the opposition to it. It is to make the people who would stand against Trump and his fascist friends, make those people feel overwhelmed and dispirited. You know, like you immediately want to just kind of give up. But no.
Flint: Yeah. It’s a deliberate bombardment. I think Musk doing what he did was somewhat deliberate, because it helped create a lot of distraction and debate amongst the people who are willing to create apologia for anyone if they think they’re powerful enough. Passing through a lot of the actual executive orders that were signed, they’re horrifying. Some of them have already, I think, had some blockages put up.
Alyx: So there’s already been one blockage, one already immediate fuck you to Trump, which was essentially his executive order on the Birthright Law in the Constitution to say that if you’re born on US soil, you are a US citizen. Donald Trump’s executive order has been blocked temporarily just now, which is encouraging to see. And hopefully the executive order gets thrown out the window.
Flint: There’s a lot. And as Ashleigh said, this is a deliberate thing. I think it’s twofold. One, as you said, it’s to demoralise. It’s to completely overwhelm. Because if you’re having to look through the specifics of each and every single thing and all this, that and the other, you’re going to get completely tired and you’re going to miss the big picture, right? Which is organising, which is creating mutual aid, is finding ways to lessen that immediate impact in your life where you can, obviously, and also where they’re organizing to next, right? And I think that the other purpose of this is, you know, a bathroom ceiling, for want of a better word. It’s to throw as much toilet paper that’s wadded up at that fucking thing, see whatever sticks. And if they can get whatever stuff that they can, then that just, you know, creates a little bit more of the Gilead that they clearly want to fucking see, these absolute pieces of shit. I need to not get so angry. But how can you not be? Ah!
Alyx: No honestly, when I said the “fuck you” earlier, that was a bit from my own heart for a second there.
Flint: Oh, every, every so often, I keep just remembering the fucking shitscape that we’re in right now and going, “oh, for fuck’s sake!”
Alyx: Yeah, because we’ve still got a big fight in the UK against the Nazis ourselves, with Reform UK as well. So because we’ve got a large UK audience, we’ve still got a good fight ahead of us as well. But…
Ashleigh: Yep.
ALyx: Just by listening to this podcast, it’s resistance, maybe as well with the actions we said, that’s an act of resistance.
Flint: It’s, it’s fighting the system. It is fighting the system that is working as it is designed to work. And it is not a broken system. It’s not a thing that was set up with sweet and good intentions that now, oh no, has gotten corrupted. No, this is how this shit is meant to happen, according to those who set up these structural systems of power in order to maintain it within them and their own. Every time we see shit like this happening, it is not some fall from grace, because that assumes we had grace in the first place. But unfortunately, a lot of this country is built on exactly this kind of fuckery. So until we’re in some, I don’t know, different set of circumstances, this fight is perpetual. It’s longer than just our lifetimes. It is generational, and we’re going to have to keep that fire generationally.
Alyx: It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Ashleigh: That’s what I was about to say.
Flint: Absolutely. So yeah, stay hydrated and get your food packs ready and off we fucking go. [laughs]
Alyx: Let’s go fight some Nazis.
Ashleigh: Let’s get in with the news then.
[sound effect: disappointed crowd]Ashleigh: Yep, fun times. So if you’ve been listening to us for a while, firstly, well done on your impeccable taste, and secondly, you may remember this story from when we reported on it in the early part of last year. Now I’m going to have to give a content warning for a brief description of transphobic violence here, so if you’re not feeling up to this right now, then please skip to the timecode Darling Amber is about to give you.
Amber: 25 minutes and eight seconds.
Ashleigh: Thanks Amber from the future.
Flint: Woo!
Alyx: Love you.
Ashleigh: This is of course the story about a trans teenager who was attacked and stabbed numerous times outside a roller disco event in Harrow in February 2024. She was set upon by a gang of five other young adults, one 20 year old and three 18 year olds who have all been named, and one 17 year old who hasn’t. The attackers have now had their days in court where all of the details of the attack have been made known. Now we’re going to skip over the attack itself and the injuries the victim received and talk about something slightly different, which is the narrative that’s been constructed around this by the other members of the press, because it very much seems to us like a lot of other news stories are shifting the blame from the attackers to the victim.
One of the male attackers had previously invited the victim to his house, during which apparently a friend of the male had told him that the victim was trans, but when asked she denied it, having been attacked before for this in the past. After which the pair got somewhat intimate, let’s say. Unknown to the victim however, the male was filming the entire escapade and live streaming it to FaceTime without her knowledge or consent. A copy of this video was also apparently uploaded to social media. After which the attacker was again contacted to be told the victim was trans, so he pulled a knife on her and demanded that she confess saying “I’ll stab you if you lie”.
Feeling quite intimidated the victim admitted she was trans and was told to leave. Now going through the events in court, prosecutor Deanna Heer KC, said that the male attacker quote “told the group that the complainant was transgender and had lied to him about it, although she tried to deny it, the group then turned on her and backed him”. Later on in a group chat the victim apologised and believed that that apology had been accepted. In the hours leading up to the attack a week later, the victim asked what the plan was for meeting up for the roller disco and was told to “shut the fuck up” by the 20 year old attacker. She was called at least one slur but was seemingly defended by other members of the group, the other attackers. In fact this was all a ruse. In a different group chat that the victim wasn’t in, I’m going to quote from Miss Heer KC once again, quote “the telephone evidence suggests that they were setting the victim up to be attacked in Harrow that evening”.
So we have a group of people who’ve been using their phones to communicate the violence that they plan to perform on someone and in one case there’s an actual recorded phone call between an attacker and an incarcerated acquaintance, all of which points to a premeditated transphobic attack, but certain corners of the press are of course just going nuts over that initial non-disclosure of the victim being trans. For example, the Daily Mail’s headline ran “Sickening moment teenage mob stab transgender girl nine times for lying about her gender and performing sex act on boy”. GB News went with “Trans girl stabbed nine times at party in revenge for lying about her gender” and the Metro gleefully published details of the attack, like the injuries the victim sustained, but neglected to mention how the victim was broadcast online performing a sex act without her knowledge or consent.
Flint: This story is so fucking sickening. This girl was sexually assaulted on an international stage and this is how she’s fucking treated. This is how that shit is framed.
Ashleigh: On the subject of twisting then, let’s just zoom in on the Mail’s headline and how it manages to blame a gang of “feral youths” but also the victim as well. It does both of those things.
Flint: Yeah, oh it’s really going for the whole underclass thing.
Ashleigh: Oh yeah.
Alyx: I just have no words, honestly.
Ashleigh: Yeah and I think that’s a fairly normal reaction so don’t beat yourself up about it, because this is just shocking. We touched on this last year obviously when we first reported last February, which is when it happened. The date of the attack was within a couple of days of the anniversary of Brianna Ghey’s murder, so it was just like “fuck off society”, today of all days kind of thing. Fine okay, one a year, that’s still like far too fucking many.
Flint: Like one a year that’s reported. We don’t know how many situations like this are happening where people don’t go to police. Where the injuries don’t necessitate such immediate urgent healthcare or if it does that people have decided to, for their own safety, not be honest about what kind of attacks went on. So we don’t know, because when we look at the hate crime stats it seems like less of us are trusting the police to handle any kind of hate crime against transgender people with any kind of integrity, and that’s a sentiment that I also personally hold, having my own experiences.
Ashleigh: Yeah quite.
Flint: And I don’t think you need to even have your own experiences to just see the writing on the wall and go “oh, like fuck am I gonna go to you”. [laughs]
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Flint: Like at what point– you can slather our fucking flags on whatever cards you want, but like it’s not gonna make you any safer; it’s not gonna change what your actual function is. Even if tomorrow we were to suddenly get the hate crime laws that would actually protect or we were to get a change to whatever thing so that the continual injustices don’t happen against us specifically, I would argue that even then that would not make it any safer for us because if it’s not safe for all of us, it’s safe for none of us. I say this to say, abolish the police and abolish prisons, anyway.
Ashleigh: Yeah there’s only so much you can say about it, about how sickening this is. The attackers have been sentenced and they’ve all received, the ringleader the 20 year old has received I think eight years in total, like four in a young offenders institution and then on a license for another four years. But does that help? Like, you know, does a carceral system genuinely help offender rehabilitation. There’s a fair amount of evidence that suggests it doesn’t but that’s a whole other thing.
Flint: Yeah, it really is. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff on prison and police abolitionism which I would highly encourage any listeners who aren’t savvy about it, to go do so. And I say this is someone that could be a lot savvier on it myself. So I wish that I could change the topic to something that’s more lighthearted.
Alyx: We’ve got some bastards in, haven’t we?
Flint: Yeah… well the only reprieve on this one is that it is brief. Just a quick one really in a segment that we’re going to start calling Falkner Watch if it keeps happening. You may have seen that the chair of the EHRC Kishwer Falkner wrote an article for the Times published on January 19th. As you can tell it’s being argued from a place of equality and dignity for all people from the title which is quote “I’m afraid there is a Pakistani problem and we must root it out” unquote and it’s about the quote unquote “grooming gangs” that her beloved Tory government held an inquiry for and then refused to do anything about.
Buried away in the text we have this revealing little sentence, quote [music: Emperor’s Theme from Return Of The Jedi] “yes of course if you look at sexual abuse in general white British people will form the majority of abusers” unquote but you’re still going to obsess over the non-white ones aren’t you Kishwer. If you’re following along on your bingo cards at home, we’ve also got a touch of collective responsibility with [Emperor’s Theme] “For a community so concerned about honour and shame it is dismaying to note that there does not seem to have been a loud community-wide disavowal of these crimes”. Oh God, that’s evil.
Ashleigh: Isn’t It?
Flint: Fucking hell.
Alyx: She’s the head of the EHRC.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Flint: Yeah. I didn’t write this little segment here, so this is the first time I’m reading this quote. That is fucking atrocious. Anyway, we’d just like to point out that this same issue was raised this week by Kemi Badenoch, who repeated Falkner’s call for a national inquiry only to be outwitted by Keir fucking Starmer, who quite reasonably pointed out that not once in her eight years in the House of Commons did she mention it before now. But Keir did not then go on to ask Kemi why the Tories seem laser focused on delaying the implementation of any legislation based on the last report into grooming gangs, which took nearly seven years to produce and was released in 2022. Keir, that was an open goal my dude. He just needed to go one step further for the headshot and then didn’t.
[sound effect: crowd booing]Flint: Oh, also… can we just say at any moment where you’re having to make me somewhat agree with Keir I…
Ashleigh: I know. I know.
Flint: Like I understand broken clocks, but still. So anyway, we will include a link to the archive copy of the article if you want to read something that’ll make you, I guess, laugh derisively and then get really really angry. Because these views… This woman is in charge of the EHRC.
Alyx: She makes decisions regularly about how people implement equality law.
Flint: How is this relating to trans news? Not saying, you know… just…
Ashleigh: You’re quite right, it doesn’t. But it’s in here because I wanted to demonstrate, look this is the person that the Tories put in place and Labour have recently affirmed as being in charge of the EHRC and she writes shit like this.
Flint: Yes, yes. Which is horrible. And also, it just stands to reason, like as we’ve said, the way that trans people are being treated right now is not new, in terms of how minority groups are treated. If you want to find out more about that there is… all of our history. [laughs]
Ashleigh: May I refer you to any of our previous episodes.
Flint: [laughs] Yes.
Alyx: And also fuck Kishwer Falkner. Honestly.
Ashleigh: Yeah, yeah.
Alyx: It’s not the only evil shit that Falkner and her fascist ilk have been up to. And you know, with the EHRC you would expect them to be keen to keep their department as transparent as possible to wave off any signs of partisanship. Not so much here. As of time of recording, the EHRC has not published any meeting minutes since June. This is despite the fact that the board is meant to meet at least monthly. But alas we have zero meeting minutes. Absolutely nothing. And it isn’t because they haven’t met. Reactive Ashley, our lawyer of the year, has confirmed that the EHRC board has met four times. They’ve just refused to publish their meeting minutes to tell us what they’ve been up to.
Ashleigh: Oh to be a fly on the wall at those meetings.
Alyx: Well we would be if they published their meeting minutes. [laughs]
Flint: That’s what the minutes are meant to be for. But yeah, this smacks of the feigning of incompetence in order to deny the transparency that’s part of your duties. Like, you can’t tell me this isn’t somewhat deliberate.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Alyx: Yeah it’s literally after the election, they haven’t published anything.
Flint: Yeah, exactly. We can speculate all day on why. Are they ramping things up or are they just scared of looking like they’re the exact same fucking party with a different colour scheme? Oh no, I wonder where people would get that idea from? It could be anything. But either way it’s not fucking correct, my dudes.
Ashleigh: Alasdair Henderson, who we talked about last time, the extremely Christo-fascist lawyer who defended Bell V Tavistock is on the board of the EHRC. Kishwer Falkner is the chair of the board of the EHRC. There are one or two other, uh… characters, let’s say. I know I’m extremely interested to find out what they’ve been talking about in terms of equalities.
Alyx: Because if they’re trying to hide something…
Ashleigh: It very much is as if they’re trying to hide something, isn’t it?
Flint: Yeah. Like if there is the same kind of stuff being figured out, which is if you know then you know, but if you don’t know then it just looks like “well the Equalities Commission, they’re going to be looking into things about equality, so it makes sense that they’re talking about this thing or it makes sense that they’re talking about that thing”. And it’s only when you read through it you’re like “oh, this is actually a dumpster fire”.
Like once you’re, in a position of being a bit more directly affected. If it was as simple as that where it’s the kind of stuff where we would have to shake like Charlie Day and point out things on paper and poster board to get people to understand, they would just be publishing it. Which does make me feel like there’s some kind of thing up there’s maybe some kind of new… I don’t know. I get too worried about speculating because we’re in a space where speculation is, I’m wary of it a bit.
Alyx: Because they’re so key in hiding stuff, because I was– Yeah it’s speculation. I just remembered a post from Reactive Ashley, our lawyer of the year. The ICO, the Information Commissioner’s Office, was investigating the EHRC over not disclosing drafts to the guidance on trans people from a Freedom of Information Request. So tomorrow we’re going to be hearing some results from that. So that’ll be quite interesting.
Flint: Yeah.
Ashleigh: Tomorrow as in time of recording, but, like a few days ago as you listen to this.
Flint: Yes.
[sample: David Tennant as The Doctor] A big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.Alyx: So they’ve got a habit of hiding shit honestly.
Ashleigh: Hmm.
Flint: Yeah.
Ashleigh: Well, like that’s what you do when you want not many people to notice or care, is you dump it out to the public on a Friday afternoon.
Alyx: Or just as another big news story hits.
Flint: Well yeah. It’s also because everyone’s turning off for the weekend. They aren’t scrolling their phones on the commute. And they aren’t going to necessarily be wanting to do that stuff on the thing. So at the weekend people are going to be going to events, the news cycle is going to be calmed down for the meantime. And it just, it’s a common like crisis management PR tactic to dump stuff late on a Friday, because if anyone does take the time to report on it or do anything with it, the time it’s most likely to get seen is on the Monday or they’re going to be reacting to it on the fly.
Alyx: And also there’s always a seeming repetition of news coming out an hour after we finish recording our podcast episodes as well.
Flint: Well yeah, yeah. Because we record it late in the week, isn’t it? So it makes sense.
Alyx: Yeah, it’s Thursday evenings.
Flint: Yeah.
Alyx: And then they dump it out like five minutes after we finish recording.
Flint: Yeah. Or it’ll be like the next day after recording we always get some stuff come through and it’s because it’s easier to do that then. And then Monday morning it already feels like stale news so less places are going to want to pick it up anyway.
Alyx: But I suppose with the news we’ve got to ring the bell again, because we’ve got to be talking about the Cass Review again, haven’t we?
[tapping sound]Amber: Still broken.
Ashleigh: And so, this story… We were considering putting this in Losers’ Corner because this is another story of an organization that’s just kicking the shit out of the Cass Review, right?
Flint: Yeah.
Ashleigh: So in that sense this is a good news story, because it’s entirely justified, warranted and well thought out criticism of the Cass Review. Which is… well okay. I’ll start at the beginning.
[sample: Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood] To begin at the beginning.Ashleigh: We’ve talked before about how the Cass screwjob has been used to justify lots of different kinds of harm, like the outright banning of puberty blockers here in the UK of course. Now what we’ve not really talked about is the effect that this has had in other countries. Like in the US, where Cass has recently been invoked for state laws which ban gender affirming care, including the Tennessee law which is currently before the Supreme Court. On January 15 the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious and well respected medical journals in the world, has come out swinging with a short article absolutely blasting Cass’s methodology, evidence base and underlying morality.
Jo Maugham from the Good Law Project has already done a thread about this over on Bluesky and I heartily recommend checking that out if you can, although full disclosure, I am going to use some of the same talking points that he did because there’s really only so much of this article to go around. I’m not going to go through the entire article but here’s some highlights just for you. Right there in paragraph two we have an array of criticisms that have been levelled at the review which I point out because it includes a footnote reference to the work of Dr. Cal Horton, who it’s always nice to hear from, and then carries straight on with quote “our concern here is that the review transgresses medical law, policy and practice which puts it at odds with all mainstream US expert guidelines”. So it sounds like if someone wanted to try and use Cass to justify a federal ban on gender affirming care in the US, they’d meet some resistance from the medical community, which is good. Something else that’s good is when the article goes on to say quote “if it had been published in the United States, where it has been invoked frequently, it would have violated federal law because the authors fail to adhere to legal requirements protecting the integrity of the scientific process”. It then points out as we did in our special episode about it that Cass included just two of 51 puberty blocker studies and one of 53 hormone studies because the rest were not “high quality”, which in this case means Randomized Controlled Trial, which if it comes up again I’m just going to call them RCTs. But then it notes that Cass herself has said quote “they’re difficult studies to design because you can’t blind people” meaning that people receiving the actual treatment will see their body change and people receiving the placebo will notice the lack of those changes. So on it goes. It points out that Cass’s standards for evidence are actually contradictory to how most drugs are approved in the UK. Not everything that’s approved for use here has been through an RCT. Hey look at that, it came up again. And the article itself says quote “the report’s application of a heightened evidentiary standard probably stems in part from its deviation from standard medical scientific process” which is a very scientific way of saying “we see what you’re doing and we do not approve”.
It also bluntly states that quote “there is evidence of anti-transgender bias in invitations to oversee and participate in the report. At the outset, the Cass Review’s terms of reference for its assurance group/advisory body stated that it deliberately does not contain subject matter experts or people with lived experience of gender services”. In other words, gender affirming care experts and patients were generally excluded from roles in overseeing the report. We also have “in contravention of international publication standards the Cass review also does not include any listing of the authors. Observers must speculate about who else participated in the manuscript’s drafting and whether they held bias against LGBTQ+ people”, which – if you’re interested in finding out a little bit more about the perspectives and backgrounds of some of the people involved, you are welcome to check out our Cass Review deep dive episode from a few months ago. I think that’s enough of that. It’s free to sign up to the New England Journal Of Medicine if you want to read the full article, which is, for the most part, written so that a lay person can understand it. I just thought it might be nice to point out that the whole world recognises what an absolute scandal the Cass Review was. So did you get a chance to read through the full articles in the Journal of Medicine or..?
Alyx: No comment.
[laughter]Flint: Said like a true homework doer, Alyx. So I didn’t see the full actual articles themselves. I’ve seen a lot of people discussing them and talking about them. And yeah, it’s just another nail in the coffin, really. We need to keep having these happen. And I think that this scandal is– it’s always good to see it called out for what it is. I think reinvigorating this conversation is a really important and needed thing. I think it would be quite easy to, at this point, feel like it is a sort of stagnant fixed structure in the landscape of trans healthcare. And I don’t think that necessarily has to be the case. At a certain point in time, people could have said the same thing about that asshole Wakefield’s work. And look where he is now.
Ashleigh: Yep.
Flint: For reference, I’m talking about the ex doctor that is the reason why some people’s weird parents and grandparents and uncles and aunties didn’t get them vaccinated. And as an autistic person it’s a grave I can’t wait to piss on. I don’t think we necessarily have to treat it as this big stone that’s forever fixed into the foundations of our healthcare, and the more that this stuff happens the more true that becomes. Because the more acting in accordance with it being an absolute fucking botch job. I say botch, but that implies that it’s accidental. This was deliberate.
Ashleigh: Oh yes.
Flint: This was a maiming.
Ashleigh: Yeah definitely. I really appreciated the fact that it pointed out that if you’d published this review in the US, you wouldn’t have been able to publish it because it’s unconstitutional.
Flint: Which, like take note, right?
Alyx: That’s really damning for our own educational institutions.
Flint: Yeah. Considering how a lot of, sort of British institutions like to look over at the US, or at least people… a lot of the cultural sentiment in Britain is “oh, well it could be worse, we could be over the pond”. I think that that is very sweet, misguided notions of naivety to assume that it couldn’t be that bad here and isn’t already that bad here for some people. But… yeah.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Flint: Speaking of, well, America.
[snippet of The Star Spangled Banner]Flint: In a move that sounds like something happening in Florida, prisoner Zoe Watts has recently been moved to a men’s prison at HMP Peterborough. This is despite her being trans and having a Gender Recognition Certificate. And whilst in the prison Zoe has had her prescriptions and antidepressants and HRT denied. So on the 14th of January, protesters rallied outside of Lincoln Crown Court to urge officials to hold her in a female prison ward for her own safety, something that has now been denied. Zoe is now stuck in the prison facing transphobic abuse from both staff and prisoners. Currently she is unable to leave her cell for 23 hours of her day, for her own safety. She’s now being denied the medical treatment she needs, in what now amounts to state-sanctioned detransition. Which is torture, basically. We have seen this before, however. This echoes what happened with Sarah Jane Baker earlier last year. Her hormones were also blocked. She was also forced onto a male ward. And seemingly politicians seeking to make an example of both scapegoating and cruelty.
I was actually at the protest. I went down and I actually got to meet Anna from Nottingham Against Transphobia, which was great. And it’s a very strange scenario, because the courthouse is like inside Lincoln Castle. You have to go to the castle and through the castle, like through the little, I don’t want to say it’s National Trust or whatever, but that kind of vibe. And then you have, to your right a giant dragon, like dragon head and dragon wings. And every so often it roars and it growls. Which feels like, it feels like a bizarro world hyper-Britain, because it’s like the weird mixture of intense punitive measures plus dragons and old shit. And there’s something very dystopian to be honest, genuinely, about going through all of that to then stand in front of a courthouse. There are going to be people there that are in that scenario waiting to hear about their freedom, including one of the people that we were all there to support. It’s just a strange note about Lincoln Crown Court that the location is weirdly jovial, if anything. There was lots of, like, I don’t want to say high spirits, but there was a small collection of quite a few of us.
Maybe 20 to 30 max, which was decent enough. And we had to basically be outside of the castle gates, and we were waiting for Zoe’s transport to come through so that we could basically make enough noise to show her our support. One of her friends who’s very close with her was there and I spoke with her. She was lovely and was basically saying “Zoe’s aware that we’re here. They’ve told her that there’s the support and everything. And she told us that she was going to be moved back to a men’s prison.” And yeah, there was actually no real pushback necessarily. There was one person who, I don’t know who he was filming for. We tried to ask questions like that. He wasn’t causing any bother, per se, but he was just not part of the trans community or seemingly an ally or with anyone. And he had a camera and stuff. So it was a little bit like I don’t know if you’re about to go and fucking report back to Info Wars or some shit. I mean, oh my God, that’s a dated reference, but you know.
There was one moment where a homeless man came up, as we were talking and making chants and things, and he was talking about his own experiences. He was like “when I was inside we had like a trans person in with us and she, you know, went through this treatment and blah blah blah.” Which was just one of those moments. He was like “I just wanted to say, like, thank youse. And also if youse have got any change it’d be fucking wonderful”. And actually a lot of people, like, crowded around and gave some change over. I had a drink that I hadn’t drank any of yet and I’d had it for a couple of hours, I was like “well fuck, it if I’m not drinking it, someone else can”. It was actually a pretty calm supportive time. I say calm, but we were there to do a thing and I feel like that thing was carried out, and it was carried out with more support than was expected, considering how quick the turnaround on it was. How short notice there was. But yeah, that’s what I saw.
Ashleigh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, well done on going down. I know obviously the Patreon money paid for you to be able to go to there and cover it.
Flint: 100%. It is entirely down to the Patreons that I was even able to go, because I would not have been able to foot the bill for that myself on such short notice. So thank you, wonderful groovy people of the Internet.
Alyx: It’s great to see that the protest went really well and things were, it seemed like a great time.
Flint: Sarah Baker was there as well and she gave a speech. And she spoke for a bit on her experiences; how this is a thing that the government does.
Ashleigh: Yeah. It might as well be policy now.
Flint: At this point I mean, I feel like we’re in the looming shadow of it. We’ve just not realised that it’s blocking the sun yet. I feel like we’re waiting for that to come down.
Ashleigh: Yeah. So yeah, it was good to see Sarah there. It was good to see some connections being formed. And please go follow Justice For Zoe Watts. Go follow Nottingham Against Transphobia. I think it was Leeds Queers Against Fascism who were also an organiser. That’s groovy.
Alyx: But of course this is not the only action that’s happening. Unfortunately this action is going to have happened over the weekend, so we won’t be able to talk about how it went. As of time of recording on Saturday on the 25th there was a phone blockade of HMP Peterborough to demand proper care for Zoe as well. So that’s going to be going on as well. So hopefully we can see how that comes along.
Ashleigh: Yeah, hopefully that applies some pressure and lets the prison folks know “look, we see what you’re doing and y’all can fuck off with that shit”.
Flint: Yeah.
Alyx: Yeah. So speaking of action, when you take action on something, especially something you know you will need to defend pretty heavily, you will want to make sure that you are backed up with the evidence before you do that thing. And with young trans people’s lives being put in mortal danger with a puberty blocker ban, you’d want to back up, providing evidence on why you did the thing. But on the 16th of January the Northern Irish Executive have now declined to release the evidence they used to extend a puberty blocker ban indefinitely. And why do you think they can rely on telling those young people why they won’t back their decision up? “Trust me, bro”.
[sample: Metal Gear Rising] My source is that I made it the fuck up.Alyx: It’s not in the public interest to tell you why. They also stated that if they did release the evidence it would “inhibit ministers’ abilities to consider difficult policy decisions with candor, and has the potential to damage the concept of collective responsibility”. And in a response to Belfast Live they direct them to the Government’s consultation on the ban. Yes the consultation that came out overwhelmingly against a ban being put in place in the first place.
Ashleigh: So it was like “here’s our evidence” and the evidence says that you should do the opposite of the thing you’ve done. It’s not sending the message I think you think you’re sending.
[sample: The Princess Bride] I don’t think it means what you think it means.Flint: It’s not really giving competency vibes.
Ashleigh: No, no, not so much. But yes, so I read about this, obviously. I read about all of these things. That’s kind of how this show works.
[laughter]Alyx: Like, me and Flint haven’t done a single one of these articles!
Ashleigh: It does play into the next thing that we’re talking about. Because the Government have kind of done the same thing twice here. So last year on the 12th of June a petition was created which called for an independent evaluation of the Cass Review. Now it’s recently reached the 10,000 signature threshold, and with that the Government had to respond. And it was as underwhelming and shit as you might expect. It’s too long, so we’re just going to partially quote this: “the Government and NHS England are fully committed to implementing all recommendations from the independent (nah) and evidence-based (nah) Cass Review. We do not support an independent evaluation of the review”. It then went on to claim that this government remained steadfast in its dedication to protecting and listening to LGBT+ people.
[sample: canned laughter]Flint: Fuck off!
Ashleigh: Which is it? Like, you’ve just said one thing… no. It’s like being gently caressed on the cheek by your lover in one hand while they’re punching you in the face with the other. So, what? The Government that looks stony-faced at trans kids begging them not to ban puberty blockers, climbing the walls of their buildings and literally saying the same thing. A bare-faced lie! An insult to all the young trans people you claim to be listening to and protecting. Fuck off.
Flint: Fuck off, genuinely
Alyx: Yeah, literally.
Ashleigh: Come on. Did they not realise, right? Did somebody not sense check this release before it went out and said “yeah, those two things contradict each other. Cut one of them out”.
Alyx: I bet they were having drinking games: “yeah yeah you put it in. Well that’d be a laugh”. They’ll be drunk while doing it or something. I’m jesting.
Flint: You know what though? And I’m scared that this is the worst of the possibilities, but I don’t even know if it’s actually anything more than them genuinely existing in this level of cognitive dissonance. I think that they genuinely have written those things out there, put them next to each other and not twigged that they are inherently contradictory. And that’s not even a statement on intelligence or on how smart they are or anything like that. I think it’s just the power of the level of manipulation that has been put on everyone in this country as part of this moral panic, as part of this complete continual dehumanisation. I think there are some people who genuinely don’t recognise that for the fuckery that it is. And it’s not even in a way where we get to be like “lol” at people being dumb or whatever, because I don’t really think it’s as simple as that. I think this is the power of manipulation at play and I think it’s kind of a horrifying sign of the times.
Ashleigh: It’s kind of shocking and it makes you laugh in a really spiritless cynical sort of way. Like [tsk] typical.
Flint: It’s an angry laugh.
Ashleigh: It is.
Flint: Yeah it’s the laugh before you go “you need to get the fuck out of my face right now, dude”.
Ashleigh: Yes.
Flint: Yeah. Because it hits in a way where you’re like “oh, how dare you say that that’s what you’re doing”, right?
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Flint: Ooh. But there’s a lot of horrifying serious icky things happening in the world right now. And on a serious note, it may feel silly, perhaps borderline insensitive to be cavalier about the few shots taken at us that miss, especially when it feels like more are hitting bullseye by the day. But don’t start thinking that this is the quartet on the Titanic just yet. Because the point of these stories is to show that the world is not a lost cause, as much as it’s easy to feel like we’re the only rational people left.
As such, we will take a moment to reflect on those that have had their feet on the ground and on the right side of history during these ever more historical times. Because we have more than one, more than two, yes in fact three wonderful features for you on this fine frosty evening. A mini three course meal as a breather in between this absolute banquet of a show. It’s Losers Corner folks, let’s get going and see what’s behind Door Number One.
[singing: Losers Corner]Flint: So first up, we have a court case concerning Lesbian Action Group, a gathering of transphobic Victorian women. As in, Victoria, Australia. They aren’t time travellers just because their ideas are that archaic. They sought an exemption to the Sexual Discrimination Act from the Australian Human Rights Commission in order to exclude trans and bisexual women from their events. And on the 20th of January, were given the ruling of the tribunal, which was a resounding [gunshots] absolutely not.
So here is the exact wording from the decision by Dr. Stuart Fenwick. “In summary, the applicants identify as the discrete minority within a group in the community that is already identified by their sex and sexual orientation. Characteristics that afford them the protection of the SDA. They seek to actively discriminate against another group in the community, identifiable by their gender identity, a characteristic also protected under the SDA. I have determined that endorsing a vertex of discrimination cannot be the intended effect of the Section 44 exemption power in the SDA”. So good on you, Stu, you legend, because it really is that fucking simple.
Ashleigh: Yep.
Flint: And without further ado, let’s see what’s behind Door Number Two. [door opens] Our contestant is Lindsay Smith. Not familiar with the name? Understandable. She’s the “kick Stonewall out of football” campaigner that set up a whole crowdfunder for the endeavour, right? Just to showcase where in the transphobe landscape she is. Some choice quotes from the public profiles online include saying trans athletes should compete separately, quote “like the Paralympics” [retches] and the classic calling trans people nonces, groomers, etc. Right? Frequently, by the way. In fact, her comments got her investigated by the Premier League after the team she supported, Newcastle United, by the way, received complaints regarding her hostile online presence and vocal support of them, like on the same accounts. So after the League investigated her, they banned her from NUFC Games until 2026.
And she made threats of legal challenge to this and the famous anti-rainbow laces campaign, etc. But recently, out of nowhere, the fundraiser, super short of its goal, by the way, has mysteriously been closed with no explanation. But if you think we’re going to leave you with no explanation, then you are sorely mistaken, my dears. So with a big thanks to Speak Out Sister and Reactive Ashley, who both provided extra details for us, curious cat girls and boys and beans, we get to give you some extra info. So Speak Out Sister explained that the fundraiser was specifically under the notion of judicially reviewing the FA, which is the Football Association, that’s the governing body for the sport on this cursed island.
Don’t worry, I know some of us trans people are allergic to sport. However, the FA has case law that shows pretty clearly that it isn’t subject to judicial review, which means that from the off, this has a farcical “wait, how did you think this would work exactly?” tension to it, right? Now, realistically, this was likely smoke and mirrors, yeah? Create a big distraction, a mini stink bomb of a culture war, in what you would consider to be fertile ground for such thinking. As Reactive Ashley put it, this stinks of blackmail of NUFC and the League, to put pressure on them to capitulate and remove support for Stonewall to set up the precedent of judicial review. But she explained on Bluesky that judicial review is something the sports industry has actually been trying to avoid for some time now, hence why it would be seen as a point of leverage. Even if it is possibly a doomed one, you could kick up a fuss over it nonetheless.
However, this plan becomes completely moot if, say, there are plans to create a new independent regulator, which just so happens to be what Labour has set out to do, as they’ve inherited a bill from the Bastards in Blue to do just that. So, there would be no hunger to create case law as it may soon be irrelevant anyway. As Ashley put it in this quote, “with no leverage, no cash and no concessions from Newcastle, it of course fades away”. So, with all that said, howay the lads and up the bags, but remember, with all of Labour’s fuckery, this promise of a new footy regulator in these times is still very concerning because it is very likely to be a good way to slip in new anti-trans rules, and we know that they want to. Next!
[door opens]Flint: Our final contestant behind Door Number Three is none other than the three TERFs in a trench coat that keep buying tickets to our movie theatre, LGB Alliance! Yes, good old reliable. They recently set up a support hotline where you can phone in. Wait, sorry, no hang on, that’s not right. They wanted it to be a phone line, but it’s actually an online chat function, which could mean that it’s more accessible, but nope, no, no, it’s only open six hours a week. Which, like on the one hand, the how it started versus how it’s going thing of this whole little debacle makes it feel like the behind the scenes of LGB Alliance is closer to The Thick of It, but somehow everyone is more miserable, than it is to the Death Star’s operating crew.
So honestly, thank god they don’t have longer running hours because the creepy reality behind this is that the helpline is for quote, same sex attracted young people between the ages of 13 to 24, which is the exact phrasing they use. So when you know the group’s intention is to eradicate trans people’s existence, this starts to sound like an 0800 conversion therapy hotline for kids, which would be terrible if something or someone completely disrupted the ability for this chat line to harm kids, wouldn’t it?
Alyx: Yeah, I mean, if you called out of the hours in which they were open, all you’d get would be silence and crickets. I mean, not crickets because they already got a bunch of those, didn’t they?
Ashleigh: Yes, they did.
Flint: But if someone was to call during the hours and, and wish to just generally have a chat and eat up resources, then, you know.
Ashleigh: Yeah. Talk about the weather or about how the Arrows matches have been going.
Alyx: Or how you’ve been doing at feeding your pet crickets.
Flint: Yeah, like people need support with queerness in all the many sorts of ways. And maybe the weather is an important part of your queer support, and maybe you want to talk to LGB Alliance about it.
Ashleigh: Thank you for putting all three of those together. That’s some fun. We have been discussing behind the scenes about, like maybe reinterpreting the way we do Losers Corner, but, but more on that in the coming weeks.
Flint: The Nelson “ha ha, you’re dumb” kind of approach, like, is only fun for a while and in certain contexts. And I think that the framing of Losers Corner is much more about the power of the victory and how many times people take shots and they miss. So we’re not saying we’re not doing Losers Corner, but we want to make sure that we get that framing right so that we’re actually doing right by it.
Ashleigh: Yeah, legit. Thanks for putting those together. Like, I was particularly amused to read about the story where they applied for a pot of money to set up a phone line…
Alyx: Ten grand.
Ashleigh: …and it’s not a phone line. And it’s only open, what was it, six or nine hours a week?
Flint: Yeah, six hours a week. I double checked it.
Ashleigh: And that’s that’s fucking nothing. Six hours a week?
Flint: How much money again was it?
Alyx: Ten grand.
Flint: Oh God.
Alyx: Ten grand of Lottery Funding money.
Flint: That’s money that could have been used…
Alyx: Lottery money as well.
Flint: That could have been put to so many other places and areas that would have had so much actual impact.
Alyx: Imagine what we could have done with ten grand.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Flint: Oh my god.
Alyx: Or Trans Safety Network or Trans Actual.
Flint: Ten grand for that?
Alyx: Ten grand for a WhatsApp group. I could make one for free.
Flint: If only they were this bad at organising literally any other part of their movement.
Alyx: So it’s almost coming up to eight o’clock for us on recording. And I’m getting hungry for some dinner, but I suppose we need to get some meat sorted, don’t we, for that?
Flint: Yeah. If you want dinner, then it’s usually the standard to find a meat for a balanced healthy meal.
[Pink Floyd’s The Wall] How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?Alyx: You may have seen in recent Trans Safety Network articles that there has been significant amounts of transphobic infiltration into the NHS training at the new Children and Young People Gender Services or CYP, which is still ongoing. Alongside this, there’s also been other infiltration because we’ve been alerted to the news of another NHS course being rolled out, not just to gender services, but to a more extensive range of NHS staff. And its materials are even being made freely available online. Now, this course is called MindEd and in this course, it repeatedly uses transphobic dog whistles throughout. It encourages staff at the NHS to act inappropriately towards trans young people and repeatedly denies their existence. So we spoke to Robin who tipped us off to this course.
Alyx: Alright, so I’m with Robin, he/him. We were chatting a little bit over DMs over some interesting things about Nottingham, but you also mentioned some interesting things about a MindEd course.
Robin: Yeah, so this is something that I’ve been trying to get more information on, trying to get a little bit of the word out there for quite a while, and it’s taken me down a few different rabbit holes. But I’m keen to talk to people about it and maybe think of some actions we can do around a training course which the NHS has commissioned, produced, is recommending to Trusts, and is potentially developing further when there’s, unfortunately, some big problems with it.
So I’ll talk a little bit about what it is, but I’d really love to hear from other people around their views on the training, because I’m cis, obviously, I’m looking at it from my own perspective. I can notice some things, but I’m sure that other people will be able to highlight other things. But I might as well describe where I first heard about it, so unfortunately it goes back to the Cass Review, that bloody thing. Once the Cass Review came out, one of the recommendations that came from it that was swiftly put into action was for NHS referrals for young people. Trans young people could no longer go from GPs to the gender referral clinic. They instead had to go through pediatric services or mental health services.
And I realised that our local mental health service hadn’t had any sort of training around that; hadn’t been given any guidance. So I wondered what it was like for other mental health services. So I started requesting Freedom of Information requests to as many mental health trusts as I could to get information on what advice they were giving staff. In that, I started noticing that quite a few mentioned that NHS England had specifically recommended MindEd modules. It’s one word, capital M, capital E in the middle of it. It turns out the NHS has a course of e-learning modules, MindEd, accessible to anyone. If you get the link to these trainings, you just click it, whether you’re part of the NHS, whether you’re a member of the public, anyone can access them.
And they’ve produced specific MindEd courses on both trans people, although quite telling, they refer to it as “children and young people with gender related questions or distress”, as well as sexual orientation. So I saw that, I looked at the authors, one of the first questions I had was, does anyone know the authors of these modules? I tried to look into it myself. At first, some of them seemed all right, so there was a Catherine Butler, who I looked at and found a Medium account for. She’s got some really good writing, it seems like. There’s Max Davy, who I think has recently, did write something criticising the Cass Review, so this was seeming pretty good. And then I found out that those two specifically only wrote modules on sexual orientation.
Alyx: Ah.
Robin: Yeah, the modules for the topics on gender related distress, I don’t know whether to use that term. Some part of me wants to use it to just drill in how bad it is that these modules have it, but for trans people, basically. They include a Trilby Langdon, so Trilby Langdon worked on the Cass Review. She worked with the methodology of the evidence review, that methodology which was changed halfway through the Cass Review, and it said that all the evidence supporting trans healthcare was too weak.
It includes Anna Churcher Clarke, so both Anna Churcher Clarke and Trilby Langton worked with Anna Hutchinson and Anastassis Spiliadis, two names I’ll come back to in the future, in a group called Explore Consultation, which referred NHS professionals to groups which recommend conversion therapy.
Alyx: Like the one the Trans Safety Network mentioned.
Robin: Yes. Trans Safety Network, their article, it’s really the best thing to refer people to when you’re pointing people to – So for example, if you find out that your NHS Trust is recommending using the MindEd modules, you can just say two of these authors straight away, point them to the Trans Safety Network article, they’ve been involved in this group practice, this group which recommended this horrible conversion therapy group. That group, Bayswater Support Network, it’s been in the news again, because the BBC has recently mentioned it, calling it a support group for parents. But you can see on the website, it currently is recommending conversion therapy books on the website right now.
As well as that, the other two authors of it are Sophie Lander and Olivia Payne. I can’t see too much about them, apart from that they work at the Integrated Psychology Clinic, where Anna Hutchinson is a co-director, as I mentioned, I’ll bring up Anna Hutchinson in a bit as well. So lots of overlap in terms of these authors and these MindEd modules, but as they’re open to access for anyone, I thought I may as well just have a look at it myself and have a read, and unfortunately it’s just really horrible stuff.
There’s a lot of fear mongering. There’s a cartoon graphic of just a graph with a line going up saying how much there’s a rise in young people being trans, and saying that it’s specifically females who are becoming trans, or specifically autistic people who are becoming trans. It’s common lines that we’ve heard from these groups before, but we know that the evidence doesn’t stack up. One of the really annoying things is that we know that the standard of evidence that they are saying that they need for trans-affirming healthcare is completely different to the standards of evidence they seem to need for these wild claims.
Throughout the module there’s also, it consistently pathologizes being trans, as I said, it terms it this gender distress. It gives a positive idea of distress passing over time with support from friends and family. So if you just get that support from your friends and family, maybe you’ll stop being trans, wouldn’t that be good? It says that there’s no evidence that hormone interventions have consistent benefits, and says that recent research shows that there is no clarity on if medical interventions have positive impacts.
Alyx: Sounds like a real mouthpiece of Cass Review’s greatest hits.
Robin: Absolutely, absolutely. It really emphasizes people de-transitioning. It says there’s a growing recognition of the needs of young people who have medically transitioned and who have either de-transitioned or feel dissatisfied with the process. It really dismisses social transition. It says that the evidence in outcomes is low in quality, when I’ve looked over the evidence review myself and they really did not look at the evidence for social transition. They also really advocate for a watchful waiting process. They really say that you shouldn’t take any sudden action to transition.
Again, throughout there’s a focus on giving the parents’ thoughts priority over the child’s. So, for example, it says “many children and young people believe they will always feel the way they do now. They struggle to see the longer view or can’t imagine that such strong feelings can change. This means you may have to help your child understand why decisions need to be given time and may not be straightforward”. So there’s a line which says “your young person might be resistant to talking about their gender identity, or may have a very narrow view around what might help”. And throughout it’s just really emphasizing that the young person doesn’t know what’s good for them. You’ve got to tell them.
Alyx: Ah it’s just a phase.
Robin: Exactly. One of the things that was the key things in making these MindEd modules was the interim Cass Review. So a line from that, which I don’t know if you’ve heard before, which was stated a lot by people arguing against trans health care is in that interim Cass Review. It said “social transition should be thought of as an active intervention because it can have significant effects on a child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning”. That line is sort of directly cited in this MindEd module and they leave out what was the next part of the interim Cass Review, which also says “doing nothing can also have significant effects on a child or young person in terms of their functioning”. And they just leave it as implying that the review specifically says that social transition is something to be cautious of, is something to be wary of and is inherently more dangerous than not socially transitioning. And something that will come up in some other training is that they’re so vague on what social transitioning is. We’re talking about what clothes you want to wear, how you have your hair, and they’re acting as if it’s something terrible that’s going to ruin a child’s life.
Alyx: Yeah, it’s like freaking out at all the irreversible effects they always obsess over, a child realising who they really are. It was a wonderful magical time, which they just, I think it was like from Cal Horton’s Cis–supremacy, where they were like changing the trajectory and all that sort of form, which you can see from my Cass Review episode a while back.
Robin: Yeah, Cal Horton’s done a great response to some of the gender identity clinics’ training, which I’ll go on to, but it’s exactly the same stuff because it’s the same people behind it, essentially. But some of the other things to mention is that you’d think that this training is awful, but you actually get a bit of an idea of what this training could be like if it weren’t written in this way. Because as I say, they produced modules for sexual orientation by people who seem to be fairly educated on the topic, and there’s none of that in there.
So, of course, they don’t call it distress related to sexual orientation, the way they call it gender related distress, it’s just sexual orientation. They talk about models of minority stress, they talk about challenges kids face, they talk about prejudices in the world and the importance of accepting your kid as they are. So we know that they can do it in an affirming way, and it just makes it so stark that it’s gone here.
Some of the other things which I should just mention is that there’s a real demonisation of online sources of information. So for example, they say there is lots of media content related to medical transition that can give children information that may not be accurate or appropriate by groups and online connections, there can also be a rapid sharing of information that young people may struggle to understand or be developmentally ready for.
Alyx: I wonder what they could be talking about?
Robin: It reminds me of some of the response to, unfortunately, Brianna Ghey’s murder, where there’s been this complete obsession with the online social groups and should we have restrictions for social media for kids and stuff, and while I’m sure that could have positive effects, that’s not what ultimately led to what happened with Brianna Ghey. She was murdered by someone in her real life due to real life problems and lack of real life support.
There’s also just really bad stuff with assuming that being trans is something related to neurodivergence or having autism or ADHD. They seem to think there’s a repeated line of assuming that children don’t understand that you can be a masculine woman or a feminine man. So it says things like “it can be helpful to reassure your child that there’s no one way to be a boy or a girl or masculine or feminine, and that there are important and wonderful things about being different. If your child is neurodivergent, could all or nothing ways of thinking be impacting the young person’s choices and exploration?”
Alyx: Oh dear.
Robin: And then the last thing which is probably one of the most important, so I don’t even know why I’ve left it to last, is throughout it all there’s just such a tying of being trans, as being a result of traumatic experiences. So in it, there’s a whole section on adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, and it talks about how some people maybe they would have been lesbian, gay or bisexual, but then they turn trans instead.
So for example, it says “some young people have a period of identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual prior to exploring gender-related distress or before feeling that gender identity was a way to understand their experiences. Some parents worry that negative responses and in some cases extreme bullying in relation to being LGB can be internalized by young people and linked to shame, rejection and isolation”.
So you can see on the trans affirming healthcare, you have “we won’t accept anything unless it’s a double blind study where you can’t tell kids whether you’re going to block their puberty or not”. And on the other side, you get “some parents worry” and that has been held as a rigorous something to be included in this module.
Alyx: It just sounds like a shit version of a mix tape of LGB Alliance and the Bayswaters group.
Robin: It is. There’s so many little trending topics, things that we’ll be very familiar with ourselves and spaces that we see and that we read. But this is being recommended, in some cases it’s mandatory for NHS health professionals who I can tell you first-hand, some of them just don’t have a clue about anything, this will be their first time learning about anything trans related and it’s just very worrying.
Alyx: Yeah, this is the first time they’re seeing anything relating to it. Their first ideas of trans people could be formed from this kind of course. And the NHS endorsing it in this way gives it a sense of legitimacy in which to encourage things, as he said, like conversion therapy.
Robin: Absolutely, especially with some of the further developments. And I find it concerning, for example, some of the more far out there claims, one of the claims, it says, “some research also explores how homophobic name calling can impact on gender identity feelings”. A ridiculous idea that if you get bullied for being gay as a kid, then you’re going to turn trans. That’s not in the one directed to parents and a part of me wonders if they think that parents would get a sense for how ridiculous that is. That’s only in the module that’s directed to NHS professionals and education professionals. So they’ve set up two different sets, one’s for parents and one’s for professionals. And I think it’s very interesting what they decided to put in one set and what they decided to put in the other.
Alyx: I’m just shocked it’s been endorsed by the NHS. Do we know why it might have been put out and endorsed by them specifically for this?
Robin: I don’t know how these first MindEd modules will have come about, but essentially, there’s definitely some names which you’ll be hearing. So it might be helpful if I talk a little bit now about what is next going to be happening in the NHS, if that’s all right.
Alyx: Yeah, sure.
Robin: So from these MindEd modules and the interim Cass Report, the next thing that was developed was the CYP gender services training, and Trans Safety Network have recently done another really good article on that as well. And that training has been put together in part with Anna Hutchinson. So as I mentioned, she was part of that Explore Consultation, worked with Trilby Langton and Churcher Clarke and Anastassis Spiliadis.
The Trans Safety Network article is really the best thing to have a look at. It’s got a really good discussion by Cal Horton. It touches on many of the same issues that are in the MindEd module. So it misrepresents social transition, it ignores transphobia as an issue, has inappropriate literature recommendations to clinicians who are linked to conversion practices. And this is the training that all CYP gender service clinicians are going to have to take part in now. And Anna Hutchinson was part of putting that training together and also in delivering it.
Recently, Anna Hutchinson, Trilby Langton and Anastassis Spiliadis have also co-authored a paper, Cass Review aligned teaching and training in the UK. And they presented that at the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicines conference in Athens, SEGM. This is an organisation that has well known links to opposing gender affirming care, to reporting false things around trans people. It’s just a really bad organisation. And these are really key. Any people involved in the NHS who are taking part, Novara Media have done a really good article on that that I’d really recommend.
But yeah, as I say, they’ve written a paper on how to give teaching and training aligned with the Cass Review. Now, following from the Cass Review, part of the recommendations of that was to set up a CYP, that’s Children and Young People Services, Gender Education and Training Program group to say, now that we’ve got the Cass Review, how are we going to roll out all of the training? I’ve requested minutes from their meetings, which have been interesting to read through. But they don’t say who is in this group, because that would be personal information that they’ve decided to redact.
But it’s notable that the meeting minutes do indicate that one of the members of the board is an author to the Education MindEd module. So those authors were Trilby Langton, John Ivens, or Olivia Payne. So one of them. And also one of the members is a trainer and a facilitator of the induction training for the CYP Gender Services staff, which was done by Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. So it very easily to me seems like it could be that Trilby Langton and Anna Hutchinson are part of this group, which is deciding how the NHS will roll out the training going forward.
Alyx: And this is like general training infrastructure.
Robin: This is. So they’ve discussed, setting out that there needs to be a framework for all staff to be a part of these MindEd modules at the moment. The NHS is just recommending it to NHS trusts, but there’s no obligation. So our local ICB has said they won’t use it because they understand the critiques we have with it. Whereas others have chosen to because they don’t know about it, possibly because they don’t care, I don’t know. If there were some more regulated national framework, then there’s potentially going to be less of an optional opt-in. It might be more required for staff to take part in it. We don’t really know what this national framework is going to look like. That’s one of the things that this gender education training program group will be there to decide.
Alyx: And we’ve got the likes of people who are either Trilby Langton or people related to Trilby Langton on there as well for mandatory training for all staff.
Robin: Yes.
Alyx: That’s fucking scary.
Robin: It is. It is. One of the risks that that group has set out is that it says, “given the sensitive and specialist nature of the work, there is an additional risk associated with outsourcing it to an external provider, including management of conflicts of interests with stakeholders”. And it says, “as a mitigation for that, commission an external provider with experience of subject delivery or delivering programs with similar sensitivity. NHSE will actively manage conflicts of interest as part of this process”.
Really, the way I see it, the only external provider that has experience delivering a program of similar sensitivity is going to be the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which has done the gender clinics training with Anna Hutchinson. I think that that’s going to be their justification to just use these same staff members who have made the MindEd modules and made the gender clinic training to make this framework for all NHS staff.
Alyx: It’s seeming like a creeping and slow moving inevitability into basically the kind of topics – from what you’re mentioning, is there like a way we could, because originally we’ve got people voicing their concerns to ICBs, that can mean that the ICBs can ignore it, but if that’s sounding like it’s not going to be too mandatory any more – Is there a way to fight this?
Robin: I think that there are. So there’s sort of the two strands. There’s the MindEd side and then there’s the more larger spreading framework side. So I think it’s good to focus on what we can do in the moment. So the framework side, that’s going to take a long while to put together. So I’m not even sure if they’ve commissioned it yet. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing where I just need to keep sending out the Freedom of Information requests and wait until they send it back. It’s supposed to come up on a website where they go out to tender, but I’ve really struggled to find out how to notice it.
But anyway, the MindEd modules, they’re a lot easier to sort of deal with because they’re not mandatory in any way. Trusts might be more willing to use them because they’re recommended by NHS England and they’re free. So if they’re looking at “how do we give training to staff without spending any of our budget?” they might be tempted because of that. I would advise anyone who’s going to go, if you want to start having conversations with your NHS Trusts, I wouldn’t say, are you using this free trans training that NHS England is providing because you don’t want to give them the idea if they’ve never heard of them because potentially a lot of places they might not have heard of these.
I would just go to your local institutions, your NHS Trust, your ICB. So the ICB is the Integrated Care Board. They tend to have a lot of involvement in local GP practices and things like that. It might be worth doing it with your local school as well, if you’ve got someone going to a school who you’re worried about how the school might deal with it because as I say, they do have modules for educational professionals as well. But ask them what training do you offer on trans kids, trans healthcare? And if they come back and say, we use these MindEd modules, then see what you can do to get links to talk about that.
Do they have a patient participation group that you can be part of? Ask them how do they evaluate what training they supply? How do they choose the training that they do? Let them know about the links that the creators of these MindEd modules have with referring staff to conversion therapy groups, the links to the SEGM. It’s specifically an organisation that opposes gender affirmation care. So it’s really inappropriate that someone who has put together these MindEd training modules is submitting papers to the SEGM.
See if you can get some input that way and then think about what alternative training they could do. So Trans Actual has amazing resources available just to anyone on their website if it’s something that they’re not going to be paying for. One of the things you can do, so in one of our local trusts, there’s a staff network for LGBT staff members and that staff network gets a budget and one of the things they decided to do with their budget was to pay for trans education training for staff from a source which isn’t going to be…
Alyx: Evil.
Robin: Yeah, basically. Something else that I do really need to mention is that Gender Education Training Program Group. The other thing that they’ve said, apart from that large framework, is they are looking at further proposed MindEd modules. This would include under-12s, children’s social care, care planning in primary and secondary health care specifically focused at GPs and neurodivergent kids. And the one which I find most worrying, specifically psychosocial approaches such as CBT for children experiencing gender distress. Now to me, there’s no difference with helping someone with their mental health with CBT if they are trans or not, in terms of helping with their mental health, the only time you would specifically talk about CBT specifically for trans people is if you’re going to try and use CBT to stop them being trans. I see that as a really worrying sign of something moving more towards a movement for conversion therapy.
But the board did say that before they looked at proposing more MindEd modules, because they have had no formal evaluation of the existing modules, they need a process to collect feedback from the target audience. I think that we need to be ready for however they decide to get that feedback, we need to see how we can impact that. How we can look at these MindEd modules and give the feedback of what the trans community, and parents, parents are explicitly the target audience for some of these modules. What do they think of this training so that that informs this board of how the NHS England should commission these materials, because ideally they shouldn’t commission any of these materials. They’re all objectively harmful to trans people.
So I don’t know what that would look like. I’ll know more once again, it’s a case of just having to submit Freedom of Information requests until I find out what they’re planning in terms of collecting that feedback. But for a starter, if people would be interested, I would happily set up a Microsoft Forms where people could anonymously submit their thoughts on it and we could have that ready to go as criticisms of the MindEd training.
And the other thing that might be helpful is, I know that Katy Montgomerie has just started making videos again and I really like her videos and one of the things she mentioned in one was the idea of an online resource dedicated to these repeated arguments you see. That trans people are just converting LGB children, trans people have fixed ideas of gender and what gender means and having a really easily accessible space that gives rebuttals to those arguments, so that when we criticize elements of the MindEd module, we’ve got a dedicated resource that we can look and say the MindEd module says that calling kids gay turns them trans. We have this, say it’s a wiki, where you can look up converting LGB to trans myths and it gives you all of those arguments, the research, the science behind it and I think that could be a really good idea as well.
Alyx: Definitely, I think I saw that in the recommendations of my YouTube earlier. But I suppose if that sounds like some really good calls of action for our audience there, we’ll make sure to link all the relevant documentation and such in the description as well, so if you want to research more about it. I suppose with that, thank you for letting us all know about this, please do keep us informed as things happen. I’m sure when you share them with those FOIs, we’ll make sure to forward on what we see as well.
Robin: Great, thank you very much.
Flint: It’s really hard to listen to that and then not go “oh that’s conversion therapy”. There’s all of the elements to it.
Alyx: Yeah literally. There’s… Because you see the CYP training, that’s insidious. The MindEd training, there’s some insidious elements which I’m working on in a more investigative journalism sense that I can’t even say right now.
Flint: No I mean, like MindEd alone sounds like some kind of dystopian, like a Doctor Who big bad evil corporation stand-in.
Alyx: It’s being rolled out to multiple different regions in the UK for general staff to be able to access. It’s a lot wider than just “oh it’s just in the new gender services” when they’re put out, with a small limited amount of people in which it only affects the culture of one particular part of the NHS. This one involves changing more of the culture in the wider NHS for general clinicians and nurses, and it seems that they’re going to be doing more work to foster this environment of exclusion from what Robin mentioned.
Flint: I don’t know if this is directly related to the recommendations of the Cass scandal. However, even if it isn’t directly, it’s opening the door. Like this is what’s walking through that door that got opened by Cass.
Ashleigh: So I didn’t actually listen to the interview. I didn’t have time in the end.
Flint: [gasps] My goodness.
Ashleigh: I know, I’m terrible.
Alyx: Well we didn’t read the article from the NUJ, from the New England Journal.
Ashleigh: Oh New England Journal of Medicine. Yep fair enough. I signed up now, I’m on their mailing list.
Flint: Ooh!
Ashleigh: I get two free articles a month.
Alyx: That’s nice.
Ashleigh: Shame I’m not a doctor really.
Alyx: Yeah it’s very informative I hope.
Flint: He laid out the stuff really well and really informatively. And it was easy to, well I say easy to follow; I feel like I’m very much not the person to be able to say something is easy to follow when I’m in this news all the time. So at a certain point the muscles for reading statutory bodies and things like that… you develop them.
Ashleigh: Yes
Flint: But it was a joy to be able to speak to Robin and hear from Robin. And speaking of joy, we’ve got trans joy.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Alyx: Trans joy.
Flint: Oh yeah.
Alyx: Thank God.
Flint: So first up we’ve got one of the stars from I Saw the TV Glow who played Maddie has changed their name to Jack Haven, which is cool. They’re non-binary and it’s just good to see. Well done, congratulations. Proud. Yay.
Alyx: Well done Jack.
Ashleigh: Carla Sophia Gascon has made history in the Baftas by becoming the first openly trans actress to be nominated for a film award.
Flint: Yes, which is very cool. I have feelings about the Emilia Perez film.
Alyx: I think when you said that, I was like, my thoughts are it’s interesting.
Ashleigh: Yeah so unfortunately this is for Emilia Perez, which…
Flint: Yeah.
Alyx: I’ve not really watched any of it or seen a full breakdown of it, but I think Flint you were able to provide some thoughts on it.
Flint: I watched it with the thoughts of maybe doing a little article or review of it. And at this point I don’t know. So this is the thing, right? No shade to this actress. She’s great in the role, and from what I understand she was a really good force for the artistic direction and the trans handling of Emilia Perez’s character, which is great. And I’m glad that she’s nominated for an award. We need trans people in awards. Brilliant.
Ashleigh: Yes.
Flint: I still have disagreements with the film. I have disagreements with the way that the film’s coding and framing often places transness next to a certain level of subterfuge, deception and also places a lot of Emilia Perez’s actions that are controlling or more of her like cartel boss life. It seems to tie it to this thing of like… they never say it but it feels like underneath they’re secretly saying somewhere “oh yeah, that’s the gang lord that’s still in her”, as if, like that’s a masculine thing, and it feels weird. Like I remember watching the film and feeling like this film feels like it’s set up for you to at some point realise that the transition was actually just a fake ruse for subterfuge.
Ashleigh: Yeah.
Flint: And this is the thing . Because also this is asides from– like I’m genuinely confused on how it got nominated so much. Even if you go, the music is up to taste and it’s clearly done with the big budget blah blah blah. Sure. But as I said, it feels like you are at some point meant to find out it was all a ruse. And when I tell you that I read an article that was actually them talking about what the original script was because the title of the article was that Carla Sophia had spoken with the director and changed the trajectory of Emilia Perez’s character.
Lo and behold, the original script had Emilia Perez as a male drug lord who was cis, who transitioned as a way to get away from the life that he’d built for himself. That was the initial– it was initially a fucking ruse, it was initially a ruse. And she basically pleaded to the director and the writers and went “no, please make it genuine. Please make this character actually a trans woman. Just make it sincere, make it authentic. Let this be a choice that she is living for her life” and they went along with that, which is a good shout. I’m glad that they did that. But I think it perfectly encapsulates all of these issues that you feel in the film as you’re watching it, because oh! That piece that I felt was missing, it was there. It was there and then they took it out and they replaced it with a different one. But the rest of the pattern still follows it, you know?
Alyx: The problem is if the foundation is on shaky ground, you’re just paving over bumpy ground anyway.
Flint: Yeah, so I’m very glad that she was there and involved, because I think if she hadn’t have been, if it had been someone who didn’t feel as comfortable bringing up that kind of consideration, what the fuck might we have seen instead?
Ashleigh: I just noticed on the article that talks about the BAFTA awards, there’s a little sidebar where the Oscar nominations are there and Emilia Perez has got the highest number of Oscar nominations. It’s got 13. So I kind of hope it doesn’t win any of them and I apologise for bringing this up, because this was supposed to be about trans joy. So…
Flint: Meanwhile I Saw The TV Glow has not gotten as much.
Ashleigh: Yeah. That’s not gotten much love at all.
Flint: Again, I honestly feel like it’s like a perspective thing. I think seeing things through our eyes is just a little bit too much for people. I don’t know, that’s useless. I’m not sure if that’s a helpful critique but…
Alyx: But forget the BAFTAs, because I Saw The TV Glow won the best film of the year at What The Trans Awards, and that’s what matters.
Flint: [laughs] Yeah.
Ashleigh: That’s the big one, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s the one everyone’s fighting for.
Alyx: There’s some really good music that’s come out for trans people that isn’t spotty and actually really good.
Ashleigh: Mmm.
[tape click]Amber: Me again. I promise this isn’t becoming a regular thing. I will go back to shutting up and making sound effects after this. But the team asked me to talk a little bit about trans singer-songwriter Jasmine 4T, who is based in Manchester and has just released her debut album “You Are The Morning”. And I just want to talk a little bit about how great it is. It’s a beautiful piece of music. It’s a collection of beautiful songs. She’s the first British artist to be signed to Satisfactory Records, which is Phoebe Bridges’ label. And she’s about to go on tour around the UK. I’m going to go see her when she’s in Glasgow and I am super excited. Just.. oh just listen to it, it’s just great.
Flint: I actually, just before recording this, was listening to an early release of an EP that I got sent by a band that I came across at Bishop Auckland Pride. Trans punk band Dinky Basetti, based in the northeast, is releasing their new EP on January 31st. So I listened to some of it today, because they very kindly sent it over to me. I think Jade, she’d sent an email being like “hey we’re releasing this”, because I mentioned Jade in the article. Because it was a very lovely chilled out family-friendly vibe at Bishop Auckland Pride, as you would want for the inaugural one. And then at one point I heard this punk sort of acoustic guitar. And I could hear a woman screaming “trans exclusionary reactionary fascist”, and I was like “Ooh? Ooh?” I literally said to my friends, I was like “I’m so sorry, I need to get up and just find out where that’s coming from”. [laughs] It’s very stripped down, it feels quite like garage. Not garage in terms of, like UK garage. Garage in that it’s got that garage punk vibe of like, you can feel a little bit of that reverb and that echo.
Ashleigh: Mmm.
Flint: Speaking of teasing…
Ashleigh: Mmm.
Flint: We may have soon coming up an interview with Vera Drew, who is the director and star of The People’s Joker, which… Gotta tell you, I freaked out when I found out about that, I was like “oh! oh that’s very cool. I’ve definitely not been casually waiting for updates about this film since last year”.
[laughter]Alyx: I could see your excitement when I forwarded you the email on the group chat.
Flint: Yeah. I saw, like, some stuff about it last year and was like “oh that’s sick, I really want it to come over here. And I saw stuff about the copyright thing. And then I, genuinely, I just kind of forgot about it for a while until suddenly that email came through, and I went “do we want to interview Vera Drew? I don’t know, do dogs shit in the woods? Absolutely.
Alyx: [laughs] Yeah, because I posted this on the chat going “hey, is anyone up for interviewing this person? I’m not free to go to this but I’d be happy for someone else to jump on it” thinking in a non-committal, yeah maybe people will ignore the message. But no, you just jumped straight at it and I love the energy.
Ashleigh: Let’s bring this enterprise to a close. Thank you very much for listening.
Alyx: Thank you for watching– listening.
Ashleigh: Watching, darling? It’s not really how this works.
Flint: Watching with your ears.
Ashleigh: What? Yes, that. Anyway, so you can check out all of our stuff, all of the reviews that we’ve mentioned for I Saw The TV Glow and various other things, you can find all of that on our website. We have decided to not use Twitter anymore, we’re just… We’re out. We’re done. We’re done with Twitter. We are considering what we’ll do with Meta products as well, like Instagram, Facebook. Not sure about that. Maybe. Or…
Alyx: We’ll follow the direction of people.
Ashleigh: Yep. More on that as we decide. You can of course find us on Bluesky. So yeah, we’d recommend that. And if you feel like this ragged chorus of nonsense is something that you would like to share and/or support you can find us on Patreon: patreon.com/whatthetrans.
Flint: [whispers] What The Trans?!
Ashleigh: Thank you all very much for listening and we will be back to you in another two weeks.
Flint: [Muppet-style] Bye!
Alyx: [also Muppet-style] Bye!
Ashleigh: [non-muppet] Goodbye.
[outro music]Ashleigh: This episode of What The Trans was written and presented by Ashleigh Talbot, Alyx Bedwel and Flint, was edited by Amber Roberts and Amber Devereux, with our opening theme music composed by Waritsara Yui Karlberg, and our thumbnail by Uppoa Piers, with transcription performed by Sam Wyman, Rowan B, Rachel Aldred and Georgia Griffiths and Becky. And we would especially like to thank our 99 producer-level Patreons. So if somebody really wants to make our day and make it an even hundred, that would be wonderful. Go on, treat yourself.
Flint: Treat yourself.
Ashleigh, Alyx & Flint: Our producer level Patreons are: Jordan Star, Lee Downs, Lindsay Cannon, George Simmons, Carly Silvers, B2, Smiley, friend of Candy from across the pond, The Socialist Party of Great Britain (1904), Sarah, Erris, Tim Rufo, Maestrum, Lex Phoenix, Sebastian Sings Soprano, Joe the enby is working on their self depreciation (We’re delighted to see that, well done), Andrea Brooks, Jack Edwards, Stefan Blakemore, [unclear], [mega reverb] Crazzee Richard, needles and threads, Flaming Dathne, Dr McGee, Gen, Janeway, Katie Reynolds, Georgia Holden Burnett, Grabilicious, Mx Aphen, Rootminusone, Grey, Elisabeth Anderson, Bernice Roust, Ellen Mellor, Jay Hoskins, Trowan, Ashley, Setcab, Jane, Roberto de Prunk, Rose Absolute, Sarah, Sinna, Kiki T, Dee, Skye Kilaen, Eric Widman, Bee, Jude, [French accordion] monsieur squirrel, Fergus Evans, anubisajackal, Camina, Brandon Craig, braykthasistim, Sian Phillips, Heidi Rearden, Ezra, Lentil, clara vulliamy, Amelia, Samantha Raven, [bring the thunder] Ravenheart bringer of the heavy metal, Tabitha Jo Cox aka Candy, Fiona Macdonell, Murgatroid, ontologicallyunjust, Stella, Cyndergosa, Rebecca Prentice, danoblivion, Florence Stanley, Helen_, Elle Hollingsworth, Melody Nix, Fiona Punchard, John, a mysterious, anonymous patron (ooooh! [X-Flies theme] [Mulder] Spooky), CB Bailey, Gordon Cameron, Ted Delphos, Kai Luren, Vic Parsons, Patreon User, Vic Kelly, Katherine, Sabrina McVeigh, Cassius Adair, Melissa Brooks, Karaken12, April Heller, Sofie Lewis, Alexandra Lilly, Claire Scott, Ariadne Pena, Lauren O’Nions, Bernard’s Pink Jellybean. And Lenos.
Flint: Thank you so much.
Alyx: Thank you so much for watching.
Flint: Who’s gonna be the centurion? Who’s gonna be the centurion?
Alyx: Find out next episode, hopefully.
Ashleigh: Goodbye.
Alyx: Bye.
Flint: Byeee.
