Tuesday 9 April 2013

Thatcher is dead .....

.....  So what?

Has Britain's manufacturing industry been rebuilt?
Have the privatised utilities been renationalised?
Have the shipyards reopened?
Have the coal mines reopened, and the rifts within the mining communities been healed?
Do schoolkids get free milk again now?

A frail old lady has passed away.  Well, wake me up when something interesting happens.  (And I don't mean rioting, looting, damaging property and arson.  I fully expect all that.)

Monday 1 April 2013

The Sun almost get it right!

After a whole bunch of transphobic screeds in the media, this article is actually pretty benign by the standards of The Sun:  (Yes, The Sun. You have been warned.)

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/lifestyle/4867253/pre-op-transgender-woman-takes-revenge-on-childhood-bully.html

They at least refer to Nicole as a woman throughout the article.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Nicole is conventionally beautiful and very "passable".

This being The Sun, of course, they manage to turn her into an object, using gratuitous underwear shots to "prove" how feminine she is.  But at least they are objectifying her fully as a woman, rather than presenting her as some kind of freak.  And some would say points should be docked for the gratuitous inclusion of boypix and boyname; but some people are more comfortable than others with mention of their previous lives, and for all I know, maybe Nicole is cool with this.

So, yes, the article is misogynistic -- but it's not particularly transphobic, compared to how it could have been written.  She is only being beaten with one stick, instead of two.  I would love to think this is a sign, however dim, that we should hope for better.