The Chronic Youth Film Festival is curated by the Barbican Young Film Programmers, whose intake apparently changes on a yearly basis. I suppose that avoids anyone getting -gasp- old. The two young women who presented the screening looked as if they were early-twenties, so not that young. Not proper Village of the Damned anyway. A young man with a camera crouched nearby, snapping away, as they gave their introductory speech, stood stiffly together, no doubt having flashbacks to prefecture and assemblies.
Executive Briefing: Allies Coming out for Trans+
The day before it started there was a faux pas; a demand for proof of identity on entry because ‘duty of care is paramount in this toxic environment’, with a lame assurance that if the name we booked in didn’t match our legal record, we would be treated discreetly, without clarifying what this actually meant. ‘Not really trans allyship, is it?,’ I thought, and it seems an assortment of pink- and blue-hairs concurred, as 24-hours later, we had another email, more or less saying ‘we didn’t really mean it’. Of course, the fear was that some angry terfs were going to gate crash and liven things up but alas this happens only once in a blue moon. It’s really only our events which get disrupted.
Who’s afraid of gender?
On the issue of ‘lexical capture’, they need to steal the language back that gender crits had stolen, the word ‘harmful’ for example, as in ‘puberty blockers are harmful’. Interestingly Judy had a little Freudian slip when she described them as ‘gay affirmative healthcare’, before quickly correcting herself.
Review of memoir: README.txt by Chelsea Manning
Chelsea Manning claims that ‘copying data is the most natural thing in the world’, so he won’t mind then, the abridged version of his memoir
Glen or Glenda? and the History of Trans Healthcare
I would have said it had Virginia Prince’s fingerprints all over of it, except the film predates Prince’s Transvestia magazine by several years. Nevertheless, Wood clearly spent time speaking to such men (probably Prince) and the psychiatrists who treated the same, as the description and depiction of transvestism is all too familiar to those who know it. A reminder also that gender identity ideology was already fully formed before most of us were even born.
Review of film: Desire Lines
Before we watched the film, Rosskam wanted to contextualise where things were right now for trans people, in the US there were ‘522 anti-trans bills’ and the UK had just banned puberty blockers for children. These were dangerous times. There was also ‘genocide’ in Gaza and we were watching governments ‘essentially decide who gets to be human and who gets to live’. Although the two issues may not seem related, they were, it was to do with the way governments ‘restricted bodies’.
The Lies They Tell 
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