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The National
22-04-2025
- Politics
- The National
Steph Paton: Trans people won't retreat after Supreme Court ruling
I'd kept it because I had somehow ended up on the front page. The headline read 'Scotland to Recognise Third Gender' and was illustrated by a photograph from a recent Pride march that just happened to be of me. The world is a very different place now, eight years on. Rather than discussing the future of legal recognition of trans people in Scotland, we're instead fighting to keep what rights we have. In the last year alone, more than 1000 articles were published about transgender people in the UK, in just a handful of right-wing newspapers – from a carousel of supposedly 'cancelled' voices that have never struggled to gain a front-page story wherever the mood strikes. READ MORE: Kevin Bridges rips into UK response to Donald Trump tariffs in hilarious skit From a place of hope for legal recognition to the bonfire of equalities we see today, it has been a bitter road – and all the hallmarks of those past years are present in the Supreme Court's ruling on the definition of 'woman' in law. While anti-trans organisations and Tufton Street lobby groups were welcomed to give evidence, trans voices were explicitly excluded from doing so, a trend that we've witnessed over the years of being talked about but never to. Listening to Lord Hodge deliver the verdict last week, it was remarkable how clearly this influence was felt. Instantly recognisable transphobic talking points nestled in all the legalese made clear exactly who had been listened to in this case. The culmination of eight years of dehumanisation has brought us to this questionable ruling, cheered on by Britain's right-wing press, funded by the wealthiest as they share victory photos from a private yacht, and seemingly meekly accepted without challenge by most of Scotland's political parties. It took two hours for the First Minister to tweet that the Scottish Government would be accepting the Supreme Court's ruling. That could barely be thought of as enough time to read and consider it. No challenge. No agitation for an appeal at the European Court. Just … acceptance. And the reason, I suspect, is simple. The SNP, and Labour, have long played both sides on human rights issues. Every victory for LGBTQ+ rights that has come under Westminster and Holyrood governments has been accompanied by far more internal turmoil and intentional delays than either party would care to admit. But it didn't stop them from using those victories to market themselves as 'progressive champions' – a phrase that seems positively vintage at this point – when it was a boon to do so. Now here comes a Supreme Court ruling that lets both parties' leadership claim their hands are tied as they officially abandon the pretence of wanting to advance LGBTQ+ rights forward. The sigh of relief that must have come from various government departments that they can drop this pretence must have been something to behold. But unfortunately for them, this is not the end. Rather than retreat, the movement for trans liberation has had a fire lit beneath it. We know that this ruling will, like the Cass Review, be used to justify institutional change that it never ruled on nor supported. As much as the widely-maligned Cass Review is cited as the justification for withdrawing access to puberty blockers, this was never recommended in the publication. Likewise, it seems the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is preparing to take the inch given by the Supreme Court and make a grab for the mile. Already it seems to be preparing to release guidance that attempts to misapply the ruling. Baroness Falkner, Liz Truss's appointee to lead the EHRC, who Labour chose to keep, is already preparing to test how far she can push statutory guidance on the back of the ruling, whether justified or not. In response to the ruling, Falkner claimed trans people should just use their powers of advocacy to have third spaces provided for them. When we can't even be heard by the Supreme Court while it is ruling on our lives, I'm not sure what advocacy Falkner thinks we are capable of. But more than that, advocating for minority interests is the LITERAL POINT of the EHRC. Instead, Falkner openly says that trans people should effectively fend for themselves while she leads a campaign against us. We may have been abandoned by press and politicians alike, but it is a different story on the streets of Scotland's cities. While anti-trans demos can, at best, cobble together a few Scottish Family Party activists alongside their 'feminist' compatriots, the rallies in support of trans liberation bring thousands to the streets. And as much as this ruling was about supposedly bringing 'clarity', things seem less clear than ever. Like so much facing us today, the 'trans debate' is part of a fight for our independence and autonomy against the vested interests of the wealthy and their friends in politics. But they will not win. Not just because we have the numbers, but for the simple reason that you cannot legislate a people out of existence. The Supreme Court's poor ruling is limited to the definition of women in law only. It could no more legislate the Earth to spin in the opposite direction than they could make trans people cease to exist.
The National
22-04-2025
- Politics
- The National
Trans people won't retreat – a new fire has been lit
I'd kept it because I had somehow ended up on the front page. The headline read 'Scotland to Recognise Third Gender' and was illustrated by a photograph from a recent Pride march that just happened to be of me. The world is a very different place now, eight years on. Rather than discussing the future of legal recognition of trans people in Scotland, we're instead fighting to keep what rights we have. In the last year alone, more than 1000 articles were published about transgender people in the UK, in just a handful of right-wing newspapers – from a carousel of supposedly 'cancelled' voices that have never struggled to gain a front-page story wherever the mood strikes. READ MORE: Kevin Bridges rips into UK response to Donald Trump tariffs in hilarious skit From a place of hope for legal recognition to the bonfire of equalities we see today, it has been a bitter road – and all the hallmarks of those past years are present in the Supreme Court's ruling on the definition of 'woman' in law. While anti-trans organisations and Tufton Street lobby groups were welcomed to give evidence, trans voices were explicitly excluded from doing so, a trend that we've witnessed over the years of being talked about but never to. Listening to Lord Hodge deliver the verdict last week, it was remarkable how clearly this influence was felt. Instantly recognisable transphobic talking points nestled in all the legalese made clear exactly who had been listened to in this case. The culmination of eight years of dehumanisation has brought us to this questionable ruling, cheered on by Britain's right-wing press, funded by the wealthiest as they share victory photos from a private yacht, and seemingly meekly accepted without challenge by most of Scotland's political parties. It took two hours for the First Minister to tweet that the Scottish Government would be accepting the Supreme Court's ruling. That could barely be thought of as enough time to read and consider it. No challenge. No agitation for an appeal at the European Court. Just … acceptance. And the reason, I suspect, is simple. The SNP, and Labour, have long played both sides on human rights issues. Every victory for LGBTQ+ rights that has come under Westminster and Holyrood governments has been accompanied by far more internal turmoil and intentional delays than either party would care to admit. But it didn't stop them from using those victories to market themselves as 'progressive champions' – a phrase that seems positively vintage at this point – when it was a boon to do so. Now here comes a Supreme Court ruling that lets both parties' leadership claim their hands are tied as they officially abandon the pretence of wanting to advance LGBTQ+ rights forward. The sigh of relief that must have come from various government departments that they can drop this pretence must have been something to behold. But unfortunately for them, this is not the end. Rather than retreat, the movement for trans liberation has had a fire lit beneath it. We know that this ruling will, like the Cass Review, be used to justify institutional change that it never ruled on nor supported. As much as the widely-maligned Cass Review is cited as the justification for withdrawing access to puberty blockers, this was never recommended in the publication. Likewise, it seems the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is preparing to take the inch given by the Supreme Court and make a grab for the mile. Already it seems to be preparing to release guidance that attempts to misapply the ruling. Baroness Falkner, Liz Truss's appointee to lead the EHRC, who Labour chose to keep, is already preparing to test how far she can push statutory guidance on the back of the ruling, whether justified or not. In response to the ruling, Falkner claimed trans people should just use their powers of advocacy to have third spaces provided for them. When we can't even be heard by the Supreme Court while it is ruling on our lives, I'm not sure what advocacy Falkner thinks we are capable of. But more than that, advocating for minority interests is the LITERAL POINT of the EHRC. Instead, Falkner openly says that trans people should effectively fend for themselves while she leads a campaign against us. We may have been abandoned by press and politicians alike, but it is a different story on the streets of Scotland's cities. While anti-trans demos can, at best, cobble together a few Scottish Family Party activists alongside their 'feminist' compatriots, the rallies in support of trans liberation bring thousands to the streets. And as much as this ruling was about supposedly bringing 'clarity', things seem less clear than ever. Like so much facing us today, the 'trans debate' is part of a fight for our independence and autonomy against the vested interests of the wealthy and their friends in politics. But they will not win. Not just because we have the numbers, but for the simple reason that you cannot legislate a people out of existence. The Supreme Court's poor ruling is limited to the definition of women in law only. It could no more legislate the Earth to spin in the opposite direction than they could make trans people cease to exist.
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
I've got the message: security leaks are no laughing matter
During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s MTV Europe presenters' accents and Russia Today op-eds. I began to bait the bots by inserting deliberately incomprehensible, but also somehow provocative, sentences into my pieces, culminating in the following paragraph, from the summer of 2016, after which point the Russian provocateurs left me alone: 'One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines' cephalothoraxes. Let's see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenic Russian wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.' But nature abhors a vacuum, and soon the comment space the Russians vacated was filled by Tories and Brexiters, like rats entering a vacant building, or unseated Tory MPs getting their own reality TV shows. Between 2020 and the fall of the last government these columns were the subject of complaints and criticisms on the right, many with their own newspaper columns in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, and their own House of Commons notepaper and/or links to opaquely-funded Tufton Street outlets. But although Kemi Badenoch just took a £14,000 freebie from Neil Record – whose tentacular connections include Tufton Street's climate change denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, its Truss-grooming charity the Institute of Economic Affairs, and its monomaniacal astro-turfed anti-National Trust outfit Restore Trust – the background noise has lessened since the election. Perhaps because the US government are now doing Tufton Street's job of normalising rightwing talking points more effectively than just getting the former IEA staffer Kate Andrews on to the BBC's Question Time for the 14th time. That's what I call a special relationship! But, as I enter my 15th year of satirising the news for money here at the Observer, the quality of complaint has changed again. These past few weeks it has been helpful readers that have been writing in to correct my factual errors and my 'jokes', although admittedly last week's column on the Trump government's attitude to its Navajo citizens was a hot mess for which I, like Trump's national securty adviser Mike Waltz, take full responsibility. I accept the point that Trump did acknowledge the Navajo veterans by inviting them to the White House in 2017, but at the same event he did then make a joke about Pocahontas while standing in front of a portrait of president Andrew Jackson, author of the Indian Removal Act, which relocated Indigenous peoples and saw their lands seized, which probably soured the celebration for the Indigenous wartime heroes. As usual with Trump, it's difficult to know if the crass behaviour was calculated to play to his base, or whether it was just evidence of the ongoing tone deaf stupidity and systemic incompetence of his team. As a rule, one should hesitate before ascribing motive to a landslide, for example, or to a prolapse. Like Trump perhaps, they just happen. Which is where the worst western military security failure of the century so far comes in. On 15 March the Trump team used the Signal messaging service to discuss their forthcoming attack on the Houthi pirates, and accidentally invited a Democrat-supporting magazine editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to join their discussion. If it was a sitcom plot you'd reject it as being too on-the-nose. Goldberg could have revealed the bombing plans and a CIA operative's identity. And now everyone knows the depth of the current American administration's ideologically-driven contempt for European democracy, and the fact that Mike Waltz, a 51-year-old man in a position of some responsibility, uses emojis to celebrate airstrikes. Like a baby with its own bombs. Does Keir Starmer still think he can salvage the special relationship, an abused husband watching his furious wife throw all of his jazz vinyl out of the bedroom window? The whole world saw America's Uncle Sam mask slip. But when Trump was questioned about the incident by a journalist on Tuesday, he claimed to know nothing about it, as if he had just been roused from a 24-hour KFC coma and thrust before the cameras without being briefed on a story that was global front page news. Maybe, like in the classic Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads episode where Bob and Terry don't want to know the football result, Trump was trying to savour the moment of discovery. Clearly, we can no longer share intelligence with Trump's US, and no future defence or foreign policy plans can rely on the cooperation of a country that wishes Europe material harm. But more importantly, is it worth me writing jokes about Trump's US? A paranoid reading of recent events makes it look as if they are targeting even their mildest visa-carrying critics, recently denying entry to a French scientist and three-quarters of punk veterans UK Subs. Although to be fair, five years ago the drummer from the offensively apolitical stoner metal band Orange Goblin was also denied entry, like some kind of innocent shrimp-like bycatch. First they came for a French scientist. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a French scientist. Then they came for UK Subs. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a member of UK Subs. And then they came for the drummer from Orange Goblin. And I did not speak out. Because I prefer Electric Wizard. And then they came for me. Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf until spring 2026 with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
