CN Lester 🏳️‍⚧️

God, I just want trans people to be fulfilled as people - not as totemic figures of left wing victory, not placeholders for liberal tolerance.

Just as whatever we are. Whatever our vocations, our loves, our ambitions.

We're political footballs for the right, but also for the left.

I want more.

Railroad tracks and the entrance gate of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. COntemporary photo of the Memorial site.

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I think the best and easiest way to fight people without principles is to have principles. Scumbags and liars wither in the face of moral clarity, the only way they have a chance is if their opponents are insincere weasels themselves

A whole school of style the written equivalent of a red faced man spraying your face with his spittle as he shouts across the dinner table, slamming his hand down in the gravy.

And people pay for it?

I note as well that it's the same bombastic outraged 'look at this sick filth' language as today - does Fleet Street ever change?

Urgh...I was reading an article today from 1925 saying that the Home Office needed to treat gender non-conforming queerness like cholera! Same old, same old contagion/plague/disgust vibes, and lamenting the degradation of gender roles

Another entry in 'this world could be a paradise, if we choose to make it so'

I do think my own prose will benefit from Nuzzi's influence, if only because I am starting to ask myself "would Olivia type this" and it really helps me kill my own darlings with prejudice

In terms of search terms, it's a lot of things like 'vice' 'perversion' 'dressed as women' etc.

Vicky Iglikowski-Broad Vicky’s research interests include the history of British society and culture, gender and sexuality, and 20th-century social change and protest.

Vicky Iglikowski-Broad's work at National Archives gives lots of ways into the newspaper records as well as criminal records www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/people/vicky... and Matt Houlbrook's work often quotes from papers, which you can then trace back and follow

For people AMAB, the coverage is part of the pansies raids of the 1920s and 30s - so the evidence will be someone with a picture of themselves as a woman in their pocket, or followed home by police for arousing suspicion for being gender non-conforming, and then surveilled and arrested

Of the 'she's a man' now stories, there's a lot more on the intersex nature of those cases and how nearly all in the UK were patients of Lennox Broster (who hated trans people with a passion) - Oram's 'Farewell to Frocks' (2011) is great, and David Andrew Griffiths' work - 'Diagnosing Sex' (2018)

Let me just grab the bibliography!

Right, I'll stop spamming you now, but thank you for talking about research obsessions! Good luck with you writing!

Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889-1939 | National Humanities Center Edited by Daphne Patai (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) and Angela Ingram

Have you given this one of a read? nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellows-book... I found it really enjoyable

It's very much an Atlantis story, mixing Clyde's theosophy and the 'evolution' Atlantean classification ideas of Blavatsky, with Utopian social divisions in the line of Plato and Moore, plus lesbian marriage and lots of romance and adventure. And Clyde was an awful snob who didn't like democracy.

Getting into the weeds: slaves who are socially evolved enough can ask to be free, but for the main slave in the story Nîa, even though she hates being enslaved and listens to stories of how Britain doesn't have slavery with rapt attention, she remains in slavery because she's not ready for freedom

Not sure why my side doesn't seize more of the openings provided by the fascists to impose our own values and ideas.

Sorry, in full writing up mode, so it's all Clyde, all the time!

Highly recommend it, particularly for the awful mix of liberatory things and...not such liberatory things you get in Clyde's philosophy and full writings. So full on lesbian utopia, but with slavery that gets handwaved away by 'well, the good slaves will be freed, but not the less evolved ones'

Ah! I'm writing up a chapter on Irene Clyde at the moment - what a fascinating, aggravating person she was

All solidarity to the incredible workers at the British Library! They deserve so so much better

There's a limited number of stories that do the popular rounds (Mark Weston, most of the time) - Alison Oram covers a lot of this in her early work. But the treatment of people assigned male at birth living as women/presenting as feminine is absolutely horrific.

...gender transgression, calling for people to be harmed, publishing names and identifying details of people arrested for 'cross-dressing' so that they could lose their jobs and their homes etc.

I'm afraid it really wasn't - this is one of my academic specialism, and I'm currently writing a book including these archival resources. There would be some positive 'change of sex' stories (not positive to gender diversity, but to certain ideas of medical advancement), but far more lambasting...

Nothing like going through the British newspaper archives looking at anti-trans/anti-queer reporting from the 1920s/30s to make you aware of just how deep the rot goes.

Thinking a lot about Dr Beth Upton and the brief glimmer of hope that was the Leveson Inquiry.

What will it take?

As they say, this is the moderate position.

bring back shame, combat vice signaling

It's just really frustrating that "Transphobe nurse ruled not to have been discriminated against, all claims against trans doctor thrown out, but NHS Fife liable on some harassment claims due to procedural flubs" will likely be reported in the press as "The courts say trans doctors aren't allowed!"

BBC News of course quick to quote Peggie’s response to her great “victory,” but thus far at least zero interest in securing any quote from
Dr Beth Upton, who has been cleared of any wrongdoing, which one might think would be relevant after dragging her name through the mud for months.