On 5 August 2022, trans female Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti, also known as Keffals, was swatted and arrested after an email containing death threats purporting to be signed by her was sent to members of the city council of London, Ontario. The email was clearly fake, riddled with grammatical errors and including Sorrenti’s deadname, which she had not been using […]

Coined by Julia Serano in her book Whipping Girl, ‘transmisogyny’ describes how trans women experience a heightened and more aggressive version of misogyny. This leads to trans women facing extreme levels of sexualisation, much heavier policing of our femininity and presentation, and greater silencing of our voices.

We need to talk about trans sex and trans identities in schools. We need to not be punished for that demand with the warmed-up homophobic accusation that it means we’re predatory. We used to be trans kids, too. We need more trans voices in the media, and more trans characters in fiction. We need them played by trans actors, and written by trans people. We need to understand the unique benefits the trans experience can offer us on subjects that are unrelated to our genders or our bodies. We need cis people to make space for us.

If the ABC is truly interested in accurately representing our lives, then it must let us talk without cisgender interference. For us to be able to achieve equality, there must be aspect of our existence deemed too unpalatable for a cisgender audience.

The death of Mhelody Bruno and the court’s acceptance of Mr Toyer’s evidence regarding the manner of her death are further evidence of the racism and transphobia at the heart of Australia’s justice system.

If you had told teenage me that I would one day be writing this, I would never have believed you. I grew up reading Rowling’s books, and they are a large part of why I write mine for trans and gender diverse children and teenagers. I consider this an honour. I’m proud of my work, and whenever I meet my audience at events, they make me proud too. They are tired of transphobia, racism, misogyny and ableism. They want and deserve better.

It is the symbolism – not the content – of the transgender policy that is truly radical. Cricket Australia has wielded its significant cultural power to normalise transgender inclusion in national life – a commendable act of leadership.

Australasia’s largest philosophy conference was wrong to give transgender discrimination a free pass last week: not even academics should have a right to discriminate.

At first blush, the phrase ‘gender critical feminist’ is essentially meaningless: all feminism is ‘gender critical’ by definition. What makes TERF ideology reactionary rather than radical is its dedication to binary gender essentialism.

I was struck not only by the stories that were presented on the night, but also by those that weren’t – so often our community is considered to be a monolith of identity and of opinion, when in fact even this small slice of life showed our deep and beautiful diversity.

Back in October 2014, there was public outcry when Queensland tabloid the Courier-Mail ran the lurid headlines ‘Monster chef and the she male’ and ‘Ladybody and the butcher’ when covering the case of Mayang Prasetyo, a transgender woman who was murdered by her partner.

It is in this textual tradition that Transparent unfortunately falls, with its lead character Maura, a trans woman played by a man, Jeffrey Tambor, an actor best known for playing the patriarch on Arrested Development. Queer theorist Judith Butler has recently cogently pointed out that Transparent, while very good on representing Judaism, harks back to The Birdcage in its level of cliched representation of transness.

One might be under the impression that transgender people have never been so visible nor been so accepted, from the Time Magazine cover declaring the ‘trans tipping point’ to the coming out of reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner, to more meaningful progress in access to medical treatment and human rights across much of the world. But visibility has always been a double-edged sword for transgender people, and while there have always been transphobic responses to trans gains (Germaine Greer, for instance, has been predictably awful for forty years), it was inevitable at some point that a substantial political backlash would emerge.

Of course it’s true that transgender women don’t experience menstruation. I don’t think that’s very interesting, of itself: plenty of cis women don’t either. Nor, for that matter, do all women experience the following: childbirth, lactation, penetrative vaginal intercourse, bikini waxing, swooning over Colin Firth in a wet white shirt, wearing lipstick, and so on. And yet all of these are variously held up as universal – or definitive – experiences of womanhood in popular discourse. The shorthand we use for formative girlhood experiences privileges the white, middle class, heterosexual stories of cis girls in the Anglosphere.

Most of the responses to the Cardiff petition follow a familiar liberal template for discussion on bans and boycotts. Whether the topic is Germaine Greer’s misogyny towards trans women, Chris Brown’s history of partner violence, Geert Wilders’ denial of the Holocaust, the Sydney Biennale’s links with the detention industry or Israeli universities’ role in the occupation of Palestine, it’s a template that pits vilification against free speech, asking: what is bad enough to justify a ban or boycott? What do you have to say or do to deserve silencing?

But simply stating an event is inclusive does not automatically make it so. The phrase ‘pussy power’ promotes the idea that having a vagina is synonymous with being a woman. This is problematic on two levels: it excludes those women who do not have a vagina from the category of women; it also erases the gender identity of trans men and non-binary people who have vaginas by insisting that they are women. This is cis-sexism. Apart from the important reality that associating vaginas with womanhood can trigger dysphoria for some trans people, trans women, like other trans people, face the constant negation of their gender identities.