The first of the month is usually an admin day for me. I get to spend it doing backups, accounting and so on. I haven’t done the Wizard’s Tower accounts yet because it is Canada Day across the Atlantic and consequently no one is at work at Kobo to run their June accounts reports.

I have put in a request to run a party at Worldcon. I wonder what that might be for?

I have also booked up for Virtual World Fantasy. After all, I can. (It is in Utah this year so I would not have been able to attend physically.)

The big news in the outside world today is of a major piece of dishonesty by the UK government. Their reporting of COVID-19 cases has been divided into two groups, the so-called “pillar 1” and “pillar 2”. Pillar 1 consists of the results of tests performed by government agencies. Pillar 2 consists of the results of tests performed by private contractors. A week or so ago there were very few pillar 2 tests. Now there are a lot, but they are not included in the official government statistics.

The official statistics say that new cases of COVID-19 have been steady at around 1000 per day for a while, and have been dropping slowly. But when you include the pillar 2 tests you see that infections are rising rapidly and the current rate is around 5000 per day.

This is not yet being relfected in the death tallies, but we know that the virus takes a while to incubate and people don’t die immediately. It seems like a spike in deaths is just around the corner.

Interestingly the rise in new cases seems to be quite localised. As you may have heard, Leicester has been very hard hit. So have a few locations in Wales. Mostly this seems to be a result of people being rushed back to work and employers not putting proper precautions in place. I’ve seen reports that at least one employer in Leicester ordered staff into work even though they were sick.

The government will doubtless blame it all on Black Lives Matter protests, even though the locations of the outbreaks are not strongly correlated with major demonstrations.

Right now there doesn’t seem to be any serious rise in cases in the South West, but I will keep my eye on the situation.

What have I done today? Hmmm…

I did a bunch of trans stuff on social media.

I answered a lot of emails, mainly Diversty Trust work. It is good to see that ramping up again.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do online training effectively. My thanks to a bunch of academic friends on Twitter for sharing the learning that is being sent their way.

I finished writing a thing for next year’s LGBTHM, which involved reading a PhD thesis about “sex changes” in 1930s Britain.

I gave a talk on trans history to a trans youth group.

And I finished the June issue of Salon Futura.

There were a few more things as well, but that will do, I think.

Meanwhile in the so-called real world, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, suggested on Radio 4 that cis women need to be protected from the likes of me. Apparently he has also challenged Bozo to 50 press-ups at the next Prime Minister’s Question Time. I think I can join every other woman in Britain in echoing Nicola Sturgeon’s, “Oh for goodness sake…”. There is not enough facepalm in the world. Who let men be in charge of anything?

The most significant event of today is that I have discovered that Duolingo has finally added a Finnish pack to their list of languages. I am so there. I doubt that I will ever be able to speak Finnish well because I will have trouble pronouncing the various vowel sounds correctly, but at least I should be able to learn to read it, and to understand something of what people are saying.

I have a huge collection of back issues of Thätivaeltaja to practice my reading on.

One of the Sunday papers apparently featured a picture of Bozo doing press-ups to prove how fit he is. He was wearing a suit (minus jacket) and tie. And of course it was a still picture so there’s no proof he actually did any. Goodness only knows how patriotic British people manage to avoid dying of embarassment. Queen Victoria is doubtless spinning in her grave. How on Earth is anyone supposed to write satire about this nonsense?

It has been rather warm in the UK over the past few days, and having no air conditioning I have resorted to siesta. I’ve been working in the morning and evening, and sleeping in the afternoon. It seems to work.

The inevitable result of the combination of good weather and people being furloughed is that huge numbers of people are heading to the beaches. That seems unlikely to help with virus containment, but Bozo lost all moral authority on that subject when he refused to sack Cummings. And in any case he doesn’t care. As usual he will assume that if people die that will prove that they were unfit to live.

The 7-day rolling average of UK deaths ticked up again today. And we are back over 1000 new cases per day.

Odd as it may seem, I spent part of today doing convention planning. While most of the forthcoming events have had their face-to-face component cancelled, several are continuing online and I need to work out how best to represent Wizard’s Tower at them. There will be announcements in due course.

For some time now I have been tracking the state of the C-19 pandemic in the UK via the official government data portal. I’ve been a little suspicious of it, but not greatly so. Yesterday, however, I saw people citing this site which claims a death toll from yesterday of 280, as compared to 171 on the government site. As the total number of deaths are the same on both sites, I presume this is another case of the government sneakily allocating some of the new cases to previous days so that the “today” figure doesn’t look so bad.

Today, however, people were sharing a leaked report from Public Health England which claims that the actual numbers are much higher. In particular for June 18th, when the government claims there were only 1346 new cases of infection, the actual number was 7000. That’s terrifying, especially with Lockdown restrictions being lifted.

The trouble is that this government lies so often, and so transparently, that no one believes anything they say any more.

Thankfully I have no need to go anywhere except to Tesco once a week.

Wow. 100 days of not seeing any of my friends in person, and not leaving the small town where I live. I’d like to say something profound, but really it hasn’t been that hard. I’ve been constantly in touch with friends around the world by email, social media and Zoom meetings. I’ve continued to have work. I have probably gained weight and saved money. I’m upset not to have got to Sweden, Canada and Finland as planned, and not to be going to Croatia, but right now it seems that international travel will come back eventually so I’m OK about it.

As I have said elsewhere, I am far more afraid of the government than of the virus.

I have got to the end of She-Ra, season 5. If Noelle Stevenson doesn’t get a Hugo for that there is no justice in the world.

I have done some work today, honest. I have also watched 8 episodes of She-Ra season 5. I’m going shopping tomorrow. I need more tissues.

Today was the first day I can remember since Lockdown started that I didn’t have urgent things to do. Obviously I have a huge backlog of things I should do, but nothing urgent. I am so very tired.

Fortunately New Zealand is out of Lockdown by now so there is live rugby on TV. Also I read about half of a novel. And I have started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yes, I know, I’m very late to that. But it is now on Netflix so I can watch it and I’m doing so.

I haven’t seen anything much about the outside world today, but I assume that the government will have been lying about something.

Today’s big excitement was taking my car in for an MOT. I’m delighted to report that she passed with flying colours yet again. Not bad for a car that cost me precisely £0.

Also today I was phoned out of the blue by my hair salon. They are opening in July and wanted to let regulars book up. Obviously I can survive longer without a haircut, but I’ll be very pleased to get one if it is still safe to do so by then.

Taking of which, the infection and death rates in the UK continue to fall very slowly.

Elsehere our Foreign Secretary has demonstrated conclusively that he has no idea what is going on in the USA at the moment. I mean, it is only a country that we are supposed to be negotiating a major trade agreement with. Fortunately there is good news. He is well up on events in Westeros. Perhaps we’ll be able to tuck into some juicy White Walker steaks alongside our chlorinated chicken and Vegemite. It will make a change from having to eat each other, which is looking increasingly plausible as each day goes by.

I did a webinar. I’m told it has been recorded and will be online soon. I will let you know when it is. My thanks to everyone at Benefex, and to Trish Driver, for a fun time.

I’ve also done some politics, which is badly needed right now.

I keep watching the virus data, and the numbers for the UK keep dropping ever so slowly. Given the mess we are in, I take this as very good news. We could easily be in the middle of another big spike right now.

Today has mostly been spent putting together this week’s radio show. I have a great interview with Rebecca Manson Jones, the Health Spokesperson for the Women’s Equality Party, that I’m eager to share with you. We talked about the care industry, how it is now more vital than ever to the economy, and how government still doesn’t value it, or the people who work in it.

In the news the anti-trans lobby is busily reconfiguring its arguments to explain how rights, that only last week they were still insisting trans people didn’t have, are now an urgent and present danger that must be removed.

But there is good news. The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS to its friends) has ruled that discrimination in employment against LGBT+ people is against the law. That in itself is remarkable. Everyone I know was expecting us to lose that fight. But the way in which the judgement was framed is truly astonishing.

It has long been an argument of the anti-trans lobby that the existence of trans people infringes on the sex-based rights of cisgender women. That is, they claim that there are only two sexes: male and female, and that allowing people to cross from one to the other, or exist outside them, is a direct danger to cisgender women and an infringement of their civil rights.

The SCOTUS judgement, in contrast, accepts that sex/gender is a social construct, and that people may express sex/gender in a variety of ways. (It doesn’t actual use the word “gender”, probably because the more conservative judges would have had a heart attack if forced to utter it, but the word is clearly meant by what they say.) The judgement argues that discrimination against LGBT+ folks happens because we fail to perform sex/gender in narrowly defined ways, but that Title VII, the US law which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex, must protect all forms of sex/gender, not just cis straight male and cis straight female.

And this judgement was carried 6-3, despite the *Unpresident stacking the court with his personal appointees.

I am gobsmacked and delighted. Now I am going to bed, and hoping that I don’t wake up and find it was all a dream.

Well, as you’ll see from the post below, today wasn’t great. On the other hand, it has been great to have it out in the open at last. We in the trans community have known for a long time that the true objective of the anti-trans movement was to take away our civil rights. Now they have been given what they wanted — the GRA reforms have been scrapped — and yet the government is already saying that they are planning a massive curtailment of trans rights. Even though there is no evidence that the rights that we have enjoyed for the past 10 years have caused any problems.

I note also that this is very selective protection of women. In 2017 and 2018 147 women in the UK were killed by violent men. We don’t have the final count for 2019 yet, but the total is at least 115. We also know that violence against women has increased substanially during Lockdown. Conviction for rape is now so difficult in this county that many people are saying it is no longer a crime. The government is doing nothing to tackle this massive problem, and yet it is putting significant effort into “protecting” women from people like me. Hopefully most people can see how crazy this is.

Anyway, there will have to be major changes in my life in the near future. I will need to devote much more time to protecting my community, and indeed focusing on my own safety. I am very aware of the possibility that I may have to leave the UK in order to avoid being forced to detransition.

Watch this space.

Dear Goddess, that was a long day. I spent 6.5 hours on Zoom in a virtual academic conference during the day, and a further 2.5 hours on Zoom in Virtual Ã…con in the evening. I am all Zoomed out.

It was a lot of fun, though. My thanks to both sets of organisers.

I gather from Twitter that today has been a day of nation-wide activity by the All Lives Matter movement (who don’t actually care about your life unless you are white, cis and straight). They claim to have been responding to planned attacks on war memorials by “BLM thugs”, but no such attacks appear to have taken place, and the BLM people are entirely bemused as to where the idea came from. These brave defenders of Britain’s legacy in WW2 have been keen to demonstrate their admiration for Winston Churchill by, er, giving Nazi salutes.

From what I’ve seen on Twitter, these protesters are all of a certain type. They are all white, they all appear to drink copious quantities of lager while on duty, and their bodies indicate that this has been a life-long habit. I have only seen one woman amongst them, and she was wearing an anti-trans t-shirt.

I am fully expecting tomorrow’s papers to be full of stories of how these brave warriors fought off violent mobs of dark-skinned “antifa” rioters, with no help from the traitorous police.

I should note, by the way, that one of the people I was talking to today is Polish. He tells me that in Poland government ministers are openly declaring that LGBT+ people are “not human”. I guess that makes a change from “tank-topped bumboys”.

Today has been pretty horrible for a variety of reasons that I won’t bore you with. Suffice it to say that I think we have passed a tipping point of sorts in that public opinion in the UK has swung so far against trans people that many people who used to be allies will no longer be prepared to stand up for us because it is too politically risky to do so.

On the other hand, I get to spend tomorrow at an academic conference on queer history, which should be a lot of fun.

Elsewhere, people continue to die in large numbers. However, I’ve seen some interesting research that suggests that wearing face masks is more effective than social distancing at preventing the spread of COVID-19. If that’s true it would be very helpful in getting the world back to normal again.