I would like to thank Sarah Brown, Jae Kay, and Zoe O’Connell for their analyses of the bill so far; I’ve had some time to read the bill over the past 36 hours and I’ve got my own comments.
Were I to grade the legislation, I’d give it 6/10, could do better. In the abstract, it’s a good bill, in so much as two people of the same gender will be able to marry. However, there are some seams in which the concept of equal marriage start to fray.
I’m fucking angry. And if you were in my position, you would be too.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, it’s been filled with an onslaught of articles from the nominally liberal paper The Guardian against the transgender community. And finally, thank god, it looks like it’s reached a point where cis people are saying it’s gone too far.
Leeds University Union’s No Platform policy was renewed two weeks ago at one of their Better Union forums but a motion to extend it to the student newspaper was sent to referendum. The reason for the second motion was an interview that was published with Griffin in Leeds Student a month ago, which caused a massive controversy on campus because it didn’t technically break the No Platform policy. The whole controversy, though, I think exposes exactly why the policy is broken as it currently stands.
Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance. While I personally have my issues with participating in it, due to the intersectional nature of trans murders, I feel it would be remiss not to acknowledge it.
Natalie Reed has a blog post of a similar nature. It contains links to voices of trans women of colour instead of her own voice. Instead of copying from there, I’m going to link instead.
My only comment is one I made on Twitter this afternoon which appears to be quite popular on tumblr:
Just because it’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, doesn’t mean you should forget about trans people for the other 364 days of the year.
People who know me know that I really don’t like Tom Harris, the current MP for Glasgow South. Hell, my second blog post was basically about him being totally awful on the issue of tuition fees (a lie he continues to this day), and he relishes in being the tribal kind of Labour MP, especially on Twitter. So savvy he is on Twitter, that he became Labour’s internet adviser.
Until he posted a Downfall parody of Alex Salmond, effectively comparing the Scottish National Party leader to Adolf Hitler. Yep. After he lost the Scottish Labour leadership election, he might’ve been a bit angry. Who knows? But he did end up having to resign the post.