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Imagine feeling like your country's newsmedia could at any time turn its back and begin this level of hate campaign against you, to the point that they harass you and everyone you love to the literal ends of the earth, mining you for content until your death and even after. How would you live life?

I present this exercise for the cis people who've recently told me they're surprised by how bad things are. This is the torture we all live under, a torture we risk simply by using the bathrooms we feel most safe in, and doing the jobs we've always done. Many of us are planning to leave the country.

Please, I beg of you. Understand this environment trans people are living in when you interact with us online. You need to have way more than just basic empathy right now.

Oh, and by the way, given I know a lot of my followers haven't been watching this story? That trans doctor the Daily Mail article is fixated on? Did absolutely nothing wrong. Cleared of every charge. Was just living her life, forced to flee the country by NHS bigots and the British media. Yeah.

I said in this interview that life as a trans person in 2026 Britain is "terrifying", but I honestly don't really feel "terrified" so much as I feel "terrorised". And the industry I work in carries much of the blame.

Do you think there's any truth to The Guilty Feminist's suggestion (in the book Six Conversations) that a foundation circa 2014 decided that fighting gay rights in the UK was a lost cause so the way to divide the left, and feminists more broadly, was to start a campaign against the trans community?

I've said for years that Mumsnet was GamerGate for wine moms. From this side of the pond, the transphobia felt like it came from its own genesis, but who the fuck knows at this point.

What TheGuiltyFeminist specifically mentions is that Evangelists looked at Britain and said "we've lost the whole gay marriage debate, what else can we do?" but mentions the DAILY MAIL was, in 2013, applauding out tolerant society for not caring about a trans actor in OrangeIsTheNewBlack. So IDK.

There's certainly precedent, with the Religious Right in the US pivoting from segregation to abortion after the Civil Rights Amendment.