Happy Pride Month 🌈

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This continues to be the case.

A #poem for all the dehumanising bullies who crush others while crying that they are the victim #poetry #farage

here's what i wrote

Or the British media every day

It’s not a genuine Farage Riot unless the frog-eyed demagogue incites it and a fakenamed felon gives it a secondary fermentation; otherwise it’s just sparkling right-wing thuggery.

Only bollards can deliver this much happiness. #WorldBollardAssociation

And now to the day. Coffee with @matthewhodson.bsky.social, lunch with @malrog.bsky.social and an afternoon in the Churchill Room. The world is in a shitty place at the moment, so I seek out joy in people and places I like. Oh, and I take Will for a walk.

I’ve haunted Senate House since 1982, via a History degree, an attempted PhD, an English degree, a PGCE and sheer love of the place. From the start, I’ve been fascinated by its role in the production of information. I’m going.

So if I kidnap, incarcerate and drug someone, their numb silence constitutes consent to their captivity.

totally worth the wait

These are your terrorists, Labour, not elderly pensioners holding pieces of cardboard.

Today is International Whores’ Day. It is not “Sex Worker Day”; that's March 3rd. Today is a day to shamelessly celebrate our shameless history; it is a day to celebrate the triumphs of criminalized human beings against a society that would rather we didn’t exist: maggiemcneill.com/2026/06/02/w...

It appears the government won't be satisfied until it has hounded trans people out of society altogether. The Government are choosing every moment and mechanism they can to demonstrate they don't care about their lives. We have to draw the line. Reject the framework.

Here’s the Trans Agenda. When James Barrett, head of the Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital, asked me what I ultimately wanted from him, I said, “Peace.” That’s it. That’s the agenda. Instead, the relentless fucks keeping coming for us.

Our pavements, once, where lovers walked, souls side by side, and thinkers talked with arms spread wide, where mothers strolled and pushchairs rolled — are sadly blocked by parking cunts. Pavements #poetrychallenge

And we love them both #pride #transgender

Here.

My daughter has one foreign-born parent. Me.

Repost the Leather Dachshund from Seattle Pride 1991 to be blessed this Pride Month!

June

Boys will be boys.

My Boden purple starry shirt that I bought in the early noughties and wore every Friday when I was teaching, to celebrate the school’s stars of the week. I recently found and bought another one on eBay, of a similar vintage. (also worn by my favourite children’s illustrator, Nick Sharratt)

While we are being warned of a possible night attack, I want to turn to Ukrainian poetry. Poems by Ukrainian poet and servicewoman Yaryna Chornohuz will be published in the US by Arrowsmith Press this autumn.

«J'ai honte de ma langue maladroite.» Something I said more than once to my French colleagues as I stumbled awkwardly through their language. I learnt it at school, can read and write it and spoke it (falteringly) when I lived in France as a teenager. But I’m crippled by embarrassment when I speak.

😍

‼️ Amnesty's new research exposes the anti-trans movement. They have a plan - first they're coming for trans rights and then for women's rights. We'll only defeat them by coming together.

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. —— Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. -Philip Larkin, The Trees #everynightapoem As always, for the end of May.

Happy Pride Month. If you're a gay man, please remember your power. People often think that gay men are innately fashionable, which means if you wear some stupid shit for long enough, straight people, including homophobes, will copy you and then you can laugh at them.

Desert Island Discus: celebrities chat with Lauren Laverne and hurl their least favourite records into the sea

I will become a supermodel because I am insane

Discrimination based on gender identity or expression is illegal in New York City. Trans New Yorkers are protected by law. Our City will protect your rights, defend your humanity and stand beside you without hesitation.

I’ve worked in a few organisations where there have been wholesale redundancies. I helped keep projects going at Aviva while they laid off half of their delivery workforce. Our central principle was to treat those who were going with decency and humanity, or we’d lose the people we wanted to keep.

This ⬇️

"The Code will lead to cruel and inhumane assessments and outcomes not only for trans people who may be outed without their consent but also for all gender non-conforming people, including gender non-conforming women."

Malcolm said they had thought "in quite some detail" about use of language when it was put to them that they had in the past stated that “James Murray has integrity." Asked if they had changed their mind, they replied: “Yeah, I have changed what I would say. I would say he’s a backsliding cunt.”

‘My 15-year-old relative was killed for refusing to marry her cousin. My family celebrated by dancing in the street’

On this: I’m a tall Brown woman with a strong jawline. A whole white woman accused me of being a man in a public toilet the other day. I didn’t correct her because my being trans or cis was not the point. The point was she felt entirely comfortable and confident doing that to someone in a TOILET.

This is joyous.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #books #booksky

Francesca Albanese bearing witness even When the World Sleeps Albanese steps beyond the formal language of UN reports & into something far more personal & more dangerous ... she tells the real stories of real people affected by this crisis #booksky 1earthmedia.com/francesca-al...

A cartoon about book festivals for @theguardian.com

It was the middle of June and the sun all day had kept right on shining with sweet mightiness. - Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say #sundaysentence #firstsentence #books #booksky

Spotted in Listowel.

ralph miliband and marion kozak-miliband

Please read this and remember. Utterly devastating reporting by @andrewkersley.bsky.social. How many others are in the same, or similar, situations due to a litany of errors and failures to protect them?

I noticed her prominent wristwatch and fell into the easy patriarchal cliché of wristwatches being first used by soldiers at the turn of the twentieth century. And then I discover that women have been wearing them for 200 years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...

Born in Częstochowa, to Bronislawa and Dawid Kozak. The Germans took their factory away. Polish nuns hid the Kozaks from the Germans. It's close to miraculous she survived. In the 1970s, she did a PhD on women munition workers in WW1 at Hull. May her memory be a blessing.

Famous for a singularly horrible book, this author should just be ignored.