This will probably not be repaired in my lifetime

Well the long-awaited, much ballyhooed guidance for how public service providers (literally anything in the UK interacting with the public, from businesses to public toilets) should handle trans people, in light of the Supreme Court Judgement handed down last year, has arrived. Just in time for MPs to go on holiday and avoid scrutiny! What a happy coincidence!

It’s a little woolly in places, mostly to soften what is basically a list of stuff we can’t do.

Before I get to that, I have to highlight that this document is entirely based on ‘male’ and ‘female’ as defined as ‘biological sex’. That is a notoriously tickly determination, and their reference to explain what ‘biological sex’ actually is links to Paragraph 5 from Bellinger v. Bellinger (2003). Apparently, biological sex is some, none, all, or fewer from: chromosomes, gonads, internal sex organs, external genitalia, hormonal patterns, facial hair, body shape, upbringing and self-perception.

Nice and clear. With that humdinger out of the way, allow me to quote from the Equalities Act 2010 draft guidance and draw your attention to their relevance:

13.69 says it is unlawful to allow men and women to compete in local sports groups if there are no ‘reasonable measures’ to guarantee safety. What is a reasonable measure? No idea. This also applies to children.

13.73 states we (trans people) are categorically banned from competitive sports unless we compete in the ‘correct’ category.

13.82 notes that it will not be illegal to severely restrict trans people in pursuit of this guidance. It notes that this is a bit of a bummer for we transes, and maybe someday somehow this fast-moving area of legislation and understanding may something something cadence of an empathetic platitude.

13.90 through 13.100 lists loads of examples of when we can be excluded. I’ll save you time: it’s basically in most any context of clubs, services, groups, businesses. Any time where people are together outside of a private dwelling.

These sections also make consistent use of any situation where any woman could, possibly, be uncomfortable as a legitimate aim and therefore justifiable and perfectly legal.

I quote:

“A service which is provided to women and trans women could also be unlawful sex discrimination or lead to unlawful harassment against women who use the service”

Read it for yourself. It’s an absolute ribtickler of ambiguity wherein UK ‘gender critical’ cnuts get everything they want, undermine the GRA, and make trans lives miserable but the hard edges are softened with “oh, but service providers might offer you alternatives that are okay, though.”

Equality Act 2010: Draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations, 2026

Two words describe this: open season. There is enough ambiguity in here to terrify most every organisation in the UK to the point they simply exclude us to be safe from legal action. Why jump through nebulous, vague hoops about safety and avoiding the wrath of Karens and the Daily Mail when you can just… write us off. It’s cheaper and far less of a target legally.

Don’t forget, those gender-critters are ready like a spring-trap to launch legal action (funded by the likes of Rowling and US evangelicals), so why risk it?

We’ve been cut out of public life. If we use a service, it can only be one for our ‘biological gender’ or where the service provider has jumped through an undisclosed number of hoops to make ‘mixing’ safe.

Indeed, darling best beloved, the way I read it, every “service provider” ( a thing that interacts with the public) now must allow challenging on ‘biological sex’ and restricting us to facilities matching it, regardless of GRC. All predicated on whether any woman might possibly be uncomfortable. How to do this without ruining the lives of trans people is kicked down the road as ‘a moving and evolving area’.

The usual suspects in the UK’s overwhelmingly conservative media can call this a victory for common sense. Graham Linehan can do a little dance. Rowling can wank herself into bliss.

The UK has ruined my life, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve protested, petitioned, lobbied, and argued. What now? Do I go forth into the street and start screaming? Should I hang a banner out of the window that says “fukc JKR, Starmer, and the UK”, and insist all passers-by read it?

I’ve got nothing. This is us done, for a generation. I’ve lost what I had when I transitioned: my dignity, my identity, my rights to exist in a public space. This will take decades of legal action and protest to reverse. I’m 43, I probably won’t see it overturned.

What do we do, now? I’ll be damned if I know.

The UK Has Ruined My Life as a Trans Woman was originally published in Seroxcat’s Salon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nostalgia and recognisable intellectual properties have become the backbone of TV and cinema. It’s not that there aren’t original ideas being greenlit, just that it’s much more likely you’ll get a post-ironic ‘Mac and Me: The TV Show’ made. Admit it, you’d be curious to see that, right?

Peak-nostalgia seems to live around the ‘30-years-ago’ mark — roughly the point in time that current-customers were in the midst of their childhood.

Hence TV and film can expect any number of late-90's/early 2000’s ideas being popped into the microwave then served for supper. You should gird your loins for Bratz, Neopets, Little-est Pet Shop, Crazy Frog, RoboSapien and RoboRaptor, and Fur-Real to come screaming back into your life; looking for your money either directly or because you dotingly steer the young people in your life towards it. Let’s also not forget the IPs that never really went away: more Spiderman, more the Lord of the Rings, more Pokémon, more Barbie. Let’s also not forget the brands that started earlier still, yet persist with granite-like resilience: Star Wars, Power Rangers, Transformers. All so toyetic, all so ready for a new TV show or movie. A new generation of customers.

Going to the pictures to see them, tuning in on TV, catching up on YouTube, snagging merch and figures, all these actions keep these things alive. It proves they still exist in the public consciousness and are worth their owners continued investment. I love Transformers, and I’m neutral-to-negative on Star Wars, so this isn’t about me yucking your yum: I am not judging these brands or IPs as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I suppose we could argue they are frivolous, that their continued existence diverts attention and investment away from more worthy causes, but buying a new ‘RoboSapien’ doesn’t cause PrEP to be banned in Minnesota. Grabbing an anatomically-correct Yoda plushie doesn’t push anti-gay legislation in Hungary. Sales of the Burnt-Umber Ranger aren’t financing hard-Right ‘Christian’ astroturfing of parent’s evenings at schools in Birmingham.

But, there is one franchise that directly funds political and legal action focussed on making the lives of a minority difficult. It’s not because the franchise is itself bad, but because it maintains the stature and influence of its key architect. Each sale associated with it places a percentage cut into the pockets of that person. That person has, and continues to do, enormous harm to trans people — especially younger trans people — and seems to have no further goals in life than our removal from society. Well, aside from being the cult leader of a troll army, ready to swarm any individual or group that displeases them.

Yep. It’s Joanne Rowling and her inescapable ‘Harry Potter’ stories.

Again, I’m not going to tell you that ‘Potter’ is bad. I mean, sure, separately I might argue that it is incredibly derivative, mostly playing karaoke off previous ‘young magic person goes to school’ stories. I might further argue that the story structure is weak, with borderline tantrum-like explanations for why a previous plot device is now unavailable. For example: time-turners, magical doo-dads that allow you to go back in time and fix mistakes, which all got smashed because Rowling was sick of people asking why her characters didn’t use them to fix their mistakes. Further still, I could say that the whole premise is predicated on a mid-90’s, British ‘New Labour’ worldview that claims “the system is fine, it’s just that the wrong people are in control”, hence why Harry grows up to become a ‘better’ policeman than was around when he was a kid. Yes, I could highlight the shockingly tone-deaf characterisations and naming conventions (Cho-Chang? Seriously?). Indeed, I could draw your gaze to the decided eugenics vibe running through the entire fictional world: some people are born ‘wizards’ (because somewhere in their heritage was a magical ancestor), and they are destined to run the world over non-magical ‘muggles’. Mmm, Master-Race-y!

Frankly, none of that matters ‘a tinker’s cuss’, as my granddad would have said. ‘Potter’ could be the greatest work of fiction since Far From the Madding Crowd, that’s not my point. If you, best beloved, like(d) it, or you have warm fuzzy memories of ‘Harry Potter and the Dining Table of Destiny’, or think that ‘Siesta Manyaña’ was actually a winkingly-ironic name for a character that wore a sombrero and exclaimed “¡Ay, caramba!”, then so be it. Hell, I like robots that turn into cars and hit each other, who am I to argue?

What I would like to draw your attention towards is that this sprawling franchise — which encompasses figures, role-play toys, computer games, TV shows, films, theme fun-parks — must always kick upwards a share of its profits to its creator: Rowling. Of every penny spent on it, a fraction of that penny lands in her bank account.

And JK Rowling is a terrible human being.

She uses her vast wealth to fund legal challenges — such as last year’s ‘For Women Scotland’ case that led the UK Supreme Court to rule I am not to be treated as a woman for implementations of the Equalities Act. She has been doing this stuff for years, and it’s entirely funded by Harry ‘Oh What a Big Wand I’ve Got’ Potter. When she isn’t using her money to target legislative change, she is using her oversized platform to spread anti-trans nonsense. Her essay ‘TERF Wars’ is a manipulative screed designed to make her sound both vulnerable and a rational commentor with a stake on the table regarding the ‘contagion’ of transgender-ousness. It got cited in parliament. And when legislative precedent is set in one place, the UK, it is then cited in other countries by those looking to implement similar laws.

In between all that, she leads a cult-like army of anti-trans activists on Twitter and spends most every day vilifying any trans person who crosses her path. She misgenders them, deadnames them, insults them, calls them mentally ill.

I reiterate: she is a terrible human being.

The closest she has come to doing ‘good’ with her money was to fund a rape crisis centre (on the proviso that it does not and never will allow trans women refuge there), and to not use extravagant lengths to avoid paying her taxes. Allow me to reiterate that, for the benefit of the cheap seats at the back: she pays the money she should pay in tax and, of the piles of riches she has left over, she cherry-picks charity cases to patronise. Ideally ones that hurt trans people.

J-her name doesn’t actually include a ‘K’ initial-Rowling is a pathetic, angry, malevolent old crank who has made the extermination of trans people her life’s work. It wasn’t one Tweet in 2020, or a one-time slip-of-the-tongue: this is all she does. The day I was found by the Supreme Court to ‘not be a woman’, she was sitting on her luxury yacht smoking a cigar. She even made a quip about what the cigar ‘identified as’. She is the absolute worst.

To return to ‘Harry Potter’, the place it holds in the collective mind is what keeps Rowling important. If Potter had been just-another-kid’s-book, and had never been picked up by Warner Bros., nobody would care about her or her hateful vendettas. As it is, her every proclamation about ‘grooming kids’ and ‘mentally ill trans-identifying men’, and her constant feuds with any celebrity who thinks she is mean, get turned into literal column inches in newspapers. Outrage sells, remember.

Potter is the reason she has a platform. The reason she is quoted, like she’s important or an expert. The reason she can fund campaigns to stop trans women getting help when we’re raped. The reason she can afford to back targeted legal motions to kick us out of public life. She isn’t subtle: she freely crows about all of this, because (you may recall) she is a terrible human being. She thinks it’s good and funny.

“Crossdressing straight men are currently one of the most pandered-to demographics in existence, and women are under no obligation to applaud the people caricaturing us.” — Rowling, May 2025.

And now, just when the IP of ‘Harry Potter’ looked ready to semi-retire — in no small part due to Warner Bros. uncertainty how to handle Rowling’s loathsome views — WB are bringing it back as a TV show.

More media. More attention. More figures. More computer games. More ‘Harry Potter’: The Bedsheets. More ‘Harry Potter’: The Flame-Thrower. More interviews with Rowling. More gold thrown onto the pile upon which she sleeps, like Smaug the Magnificent. More funds for her to buy political support. More cash to keep nonsensical hate-groups like ‘LGB Alliance’ alive. More dollary-doos to ensure the parade of court cases, that look to set legal precedents against trans people, will never cease. Ever.

Gender-affirming care has caused “more harm than lobotomies” — Rowling, December 2025.

Even when she dies, her wealth will ensure her mission continues. It will sit in bank accounts, drawing more interest then you or I will ever see in a hundred years, bankrolling anti-trans weirdos who willingly align themselves with the Christian-Nationalist Right in the USA because they’ll happily give up abortion rights and women’s liberty in exchange for sticking it to the transes!

“transfusions of blood from the opposite sex had poorer outcomes, including fatalities.” — JK ‘Normal’ Rowling, being completely normal.

I am asking you: please don’t be a part of that. Please don’t donate to her fund to destroy my life, and the lives of so many people. Whatever you think of trans people or our existences, surely you must agree that conversation is not best-served by being left in the hands of one mega-wealthy crank with an axe to grind and a vicious streak a mile wide?

The hype machine is already getting ready for the new ‘Potter’ TV programme. Warner Bros. will use every manipulative tool at their disposal to get you excited for it — hey, remember this thing that you loved? It’s back! They won’t mention Rowling. They won’t mention that they have made her rich beyond the most fevered-dreams of Midas, and that spinning up the ‘Potter’ machine will just mint new wealth for her. Her own personal money press.

It’s just an IP from the late 90’s. Taken on its own merits, it isn’t even that great. It’s just some kids books from 30-ish years ago. It was sold to you, as a child. It’s not important, or relevant, and it is intrinsically and inexorably linked to its author, serving as a pipeline of funds to further her hateful worldview. Please don’t put that over the lives of actual, real, living, breathing human beings.

Look at how her, and her cronies, have convinced people in my own country in just a few years that ‘trans is bad’:

Just-Kidding Rowling not only made that happen, she’s proud of it. She hates trans people. She is a terrible human being. Please don’t fund her.

I have and will, as long as I am able, continue to write about these issues. You can read more of my work here, all of which go into much greater depth, with references and sources:

• Politics
• LGBTQ
• Transphobia: An Action Pack
• Acting

You can support my work as an actor and writer, struggling to survive, here ❤️

You Should Boycott ‘Harry Potter’ was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dartmoor, a five-year-old’s heroes, ghosts, and memories I hope never fade.

We would visit a small farm in Devon. It was a cheap holiday, and I was about five. That puts the year somewhere around 1988.

The name outside was “Manor Farm”, but we called it after the farmlady herself: “Mrs. Crabb’s”. It was close to the town of Ashburton. Today, Ashburton is a trendy hub of second-homes for London-based ad executives and social media gurus… but in the 1980’s it was just a normal little place that people lived in, and on holidays it belonged to us.

Ashburton had a small high street, and a delightful three-storey book shop. You know that ‘old book’ smell? This place absolutely reeked of it, and it was brilliant. It hit you as soon as you entered. Three floors of boxes and shelves, each loaded with hardbacks, paperbacks, travel books, histories, fiction, fact. I was bought a copy of “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World” in there, a few years later. That, best beloved, was a damned good bookshop.

Trailing away up and out of Ashburton, past an old ‘Gulf’ petrol station with 1960’s style pumps, a two-lane road narrowed into one lane and began snaking its way, up, round, up, round again, and all the time higher into the gorse and bracken, up onto Dartmoor. Dartmoor is vast: an area of scrub, at high elevation, covered in rocks, grass, little rivers, and hilly outcrops called ‘tors’.

The Moor has a primeval, eerie quality to couple with its phenomenal beauty and abundance of wildlife. It is owned by the Prince of Wales’ estate, and large portions of it are fenced off for the army to do drills and target practice. The remainder is a collection of little towns, like Princetown, and villages, like Widdecombe-in-the-Moor, nestled amongst towering hills and unending, winding roads.

Going down the lanes, you begin to expect ponies, sheep, cows. Soon, one fancies it wouldn’t even be a surprise to run into a horse and trap; or some ancient bizarre Solstice celebration straight out of the Wicker Man.

Unsurprisingly, it has a huge amount of folklore associated with it. Every location has a ghost, or a black dog, or sinister bog, grave, standing stone, or some other claim to supernatural glory. At Poundsgate, the inn is said to have been visited by the Devil in 1638; who paid for his drink with a gold coin, leaving a burning hoofprint on the wooden bar, which turned to dead leaves once he had left. There is the empty stretch of road into Postbridge that has been the site of countless road traffic accidents — even into the 20th Century — attributed to a pair of spectral ‘hairy hands’ that grab the reins or wheel and spin the traveller off into a ditch. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based his 1901 serial “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in the area, with the hell-hound itself being based on any number of local legends around packs of ghostly ‘black dogs’ terrorising the lonely hills.

Mrs. Crabb lived on the edge of this, and in that way her farmhouse felt like a gateway. Coming out of the ancient front-door of her grey, drystone house you could go left into Ashburton, and then down back to civilisation: the main roads, the motorways, Paignton, Torquay, or along the coast to Plymouth, or back towards London through Exeter. Alternatively, you could go right and keep up the hill.

That hill was bordered on both sides with high hedges — on the left were the pastures where Mrs. Crabb’s cows spent their days, and on the right were the fields where hay grew, and a small collection of birds exchanged eggs for comfort. I used to terrorise the guineafowl by running after them, and Mrs. Crab knew I did, but the most reproachment I got was a stern “you ain’t been chazin’ moy guineafowl, ‘av ye?” I was only five, and Mrs. Crabb may have been tough as the stone substance of her house, but she was a kind woman who enjoyed having guests.

In the morning, breakfast was ready in the dining room. Everything in there smelt of something sharp, and incredibly old. Not unpleasant. Just… old. Like stepping into a museum. The light switches were all bakelite, and the plug sockets were so old that they didn’t match the standard-UK three-pin style. A long, rectangular table would be set with serving dishes, and breakfast was whatever you wanted to have from them: cornflakes, with fresh milk from her own cows, fried potatoes, crispy bacon, sausages. Eggs from her own hens. All local, all fresh, all bought from people around.

In the evening, supper came out the same way: roasted potatoes, dripping in goose fat, that Mrs. Crabb had been slowly cooking since mid-morning in her vast, iron Aga. Beef. Chicken. Carrots. Runner beans. To this day, I still loathe runner beans… but not hers. Hers were special. Everything tasted different, because it had been prepared that day and only travelled a matter of a mile-or-two to get to her kitchen.

The kitchen was always beset with flies. Fly paper hung from the ceiling to keep them in check. Out the back door, or through the window, there were the cowsheds and a large courtyard covered in mud and cow effluvia. The sofa was covered in a throw, to keep it clean, and newspaper lined the floor to prevent the constant in-and-out traipsing of people from tracking filth everywhere.

Under the sofa lived a large, grumpy old dog. Robert. That animal did not care for me, and would regularly growl if I were anywhere nearby. Mrs. Crabb would scold him, and the dog would go back under the chair. Seething.

Mrs. Crabb seemed to be the matriarch: mistress of all she surveyed. Her husband’s name was Gordon — he was a quiet man, given to very few words; and those words were usually mumbled through an almost unintelligibly thick Devonshire dialect.

[For those unaware, the UK has loads of different dialects, for such a small island. They’re less pronounced now, mostly due to TV and radio, but back then you could meet someone who spoke so differently that it was impossible to understand them. Devon-English is strongly rhotic, so the letter ‘r’ is emphasised. It also had a tendency for sibilant sounds (voiceless alveolar sibilants, like snake) to become frictive (voiced alveolar frictives, like zoo), so ‘sir’ would become ‘zir’. On top of these regional pronunciation qualities, the dialect included its own quirks of grammar and idioms.]

Next in command was Mrs. Crabb’s daughter, Chris. She was — I hope still is — a resourceful, hard-working, cheerful woman. Bringing up the rest were Reg, a kindly man cut from the same cloth as Gordon Crabb, and Gerry.

Gerry was my best friend… most of the time. We’ll get to that, and it’s no reflection on him, at all. He was young-ish, kitted out with farming clothes down to even the stereotypical a flat-cap. Gerry was kind, good-natured, and always ready to have a five-year-old keep him company on the tractor; or sweeping the yard; or whatever else needed his attention. He was very attached to me, and I can think of few people on earth with whom I’d rather have a wonderful day tomorrow than him. Gerry was a damned good fellow, and I hope he still is.

But, he wasn’t always my best friend on Mrs. Crabb’s farm. Sometimes, in the Summer… not often, but sometimes… there would be Nick. And Nick was my absolute hero.

Nick was tall, handsome, strong, and always laughing. Nothing got him down or worried him, not that he would let on. And Nick absolutely doted on me: he would hoist me up to be alongside him as he drove a cart of hay from one field to another. He thought the world of me, and I of him. I swear, every December, I would sooner have written to him than to Father Christmas. He was my hero, and I honestly believed he could do anything.

Those are early memories, but as vivid to me now as the overpowering smell of ancient books in Ashburton, or the smell of those roast potatoes coming from the kitchen. We were riding high, high up on bales of hay — our vehicle slowly bouncing and trundling over the fields. It was Summer. It was hot. Nick was beside me, and he and I were the absolute rulers of everything we surveyed.

As far as I know, it’s all still there. The farm house, the yard. I can see it on Google Street View: there are even tractors parked outside. That pleases me very well. I hope the farm continues forever, and the people there too.

The old book shop became a tea room for a time, but seems to have closed fairly recently. Book shops are a hard way to earn a living: plenty of people like to look, but few buy. The inn at Poundsgate also closed, not too long ago, in fact. Pubs also are a hard way to earn a living now, especially after the pandemic.

Mrs. Crabb died about 20 years ago. You could almost feel the disturbance in The Force, as if a mountain had fallen down instead of lasting for a million years. We happened to be in the area, and visited the house shortly after her death. We spoke to Chris. Reg had retired, but Gerry was still there. He remembered me. He’s still one of my favourite people I have ever met. Gerry said his son was working in IT: software development. We asked after Nick, leading to an almost stereotypically Devonshire exchange: “He’s in Dartmoor”, Chris said. “Oh, he lives in one of the villages? That’s lovely!”. “No”, she corrected, “he’s in Dartmoor.”

HM Dartmoor Prison is a men’s ‘category C’ prison, next to the town of Princetown, located out in the Moor and built in 1809. Category C is the lowest-risk of ‘closed’ prisons: the people there are unlikely to try escape and, if they did, would be very unlikely to pose a threat to anyone. Nick had been in and out a few times, and changed physically into quite the muscleman. It seems he had nurtured an aversion to mouthy, unpleasant ne’er-do-wells and had slugged one or two more of them than was good for his freedom.

I don’t know for certain. Maybe he’s a terrible man. I like to think he was just being a good fellow… like Gilbert and Sullivan’s British Tar, always ready with a knockdown blow when circumstance required. After all, anyone who’ll give lip to someone like him presumably fancies themselves in a fight… and if he were to fall into the habit of correcting that misapprehension, then I cannot find it in my heart to fear him or believe him wicked. I hope he isn’t.

Things don’t end, they just change, and sometimes it’s nice to write these things down so we remember. I hope your imagination’s third eye does it all justice, best beloved. This way, a little bit about Mrs. Crabb is still out there in the world. She, her lovely daughter, her stoic husband. Old Reg. Gerry, my best friend… unless Nick was there, in which case that title was indisputably, and with no objection from Gerry, his.

You can support my work as an actor and writer ❤️

Read more

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Holidays Near Dartmoor was originally published in Seroxcat’s Salon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2026 is Going to be Bad

Nothing that made 2025 miserable has been fixed. We’re still only scratching the surface of the root causes. Hang on for dear life.

Assume crash positions, because 2026 is probably going to be worse, for everyone. Here’s what I’m predicting, and why:

Trump Isn’t Going Away

Pretending, for a moment, that his death would actually fix anything with the USA, I’m 95% sure he ain’t going nowhere.

Despite his obviously failing health — there’s no way that mark on his hand isn’t from an IV — he’s just too rich. If he were a common person, like you or me, he would die… but he has wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He can afford the best healthcare, the absolute best. The sort royalty get. The sort that adds 10–15 years onto the common lifespan. His own minions will move hell and earth to keep him alive, even if he becomes a totally incoherent wreck. He’ll be like Philip Pullman’s ‘Authority’: a senile, decrepit, withered imbecile to be trotted out to keep the faith in the troops… but he’ll have a pulse.

USA Becomes a Democracy in Name-Only

I also give it 95% that the American Far-Right and Christian Nationalists will cement the USA’s newly-placed framework of managed democracy. There are various mid-term elections to be fought, and there is no way that the amount of money and power we’ve witnessed is going to vacate the playing field. Even if, somehow, Democrat candidates do win any power they will not use it to dismantle any of the systems that Trump has used to terrorise minorities: they need that threat to encourage voters in their direction, in order that they can get back to making money with the various US markets.

Starmer Out, Streeting In

Here in merry ol’ Britainiashire, Sir Keir Starmer will probably get replaced as Labour leader and Prime Minister by current Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Streeting is an even bigger wanker than Starmer, is very close to former-PM Tony Blair and is fully committed to completing Labour’s transformation into ‘The Democrat Party of Britain’. He will try to stay in power by aping any policy he thinks may curry favour with the voters, after what will probably be a blood-bath in the May local elections. This is another 95%-er.

Trans Lives Will Get Worse, Still

To that end, we can expect that we trans people will have our lives made more miserable. We already lost medical support for younger people, and the EHRC’s guidance will drop imminently, that will empower randos to challenge anyone they think is a bit transy in anything they think is a single sex space. Expect all that money and influence from unaccountable freaks like Rowling and Musk to go into a new campaign to repeal the Gender Recognition Act (2004), probably on the grounds that the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year makes its provisions useless and inapplicable.

100%. I would bet serious money on this.

Everyone is Reform, Now

Nigel Farage (ˈnaɪʤəl ˈfærɑːʒ, to rhyme with “jiggle marriage”, because he hates that) will continue his vast, unearnt, and utterly despicable influence on British politics. Expect the Conservatives to essentially become ‘Reform UK-lite’ and Labour to continue their role as ‘Conservative-lite’, with no functional difference in their policies… except that Reform will continue to echo Left-Wing talking points around inequality — but blamed on foreigners — which Labour wouldn’t touch with asbestos mittens, for fear of upsetting their wealthier donors.

To that end: the economy won’t be mended, everything will cost more, and immigrants will be treated like characters in Battle Royale. The UK will probably leave the European Convention on Human Rights; an action that, in saner times, would have been seen as an open admission of how the government wants to treat the people here but, in our times, will be championed by the same commenters who cheered Brexit, Boris, and Liz Truss, as our saviours.

I’d bet serious money on this, too.

War

Over in Ukraine, we will continue to balance sympathy for a sovereign country being invaded with the reality that the markets do not want a war with Russia. Russia has far too much sway on the world economy. However, Vladimir Putin will continue to interfere with things the world markets rely on, such as food stuffs and rare minerals. As a result of wanting to stabilise that, we will probably edge closer to the next great European land war and it will be a war between Western Europe and Russia, fought in Eastern Europe. I’m probably 70% on this prediction. I think Putin has us where Nazi Germany did in 1937: we do not want another World War, the people here still hold the collective trauma of the last one, and more importantly the monetary effects will be deleterious to our economies… hence we will try to put it off, as long as is possible.

Over in that sunny basket of fruit, the Middle East, the action in Gaza will continue to hæmmorrhage human life, like the unconscionable crime against humanity it has been thus far. Maybe they’ll build that preposterous riviera, maybe the hard-right Likud Israeli government will back off, but it’s a very safe bet that the continued attrocities there will not stop any time soon. Why should they? Only the USA can realistically change Netanyahu’s mind and… well… see my first prediction. 100% on this one.

The Far East

Lastly I predict that China will sit back and watch, as usual. Why move any pieces when the other players are making such interesting plays, after all? Taiwan isn’t going anywhere, and Beijing can be very patient… 50%.

What’s my strategy for these predictions, other than my usual role as Cassandra? Simple: take where we are now, and just follow the trend line. If it makes money, it’ll happen — that’s why the bubble around AI will eventually burst, because someone will realise that they can make more money now by betting against it. By the same measure, if a political action will shift power into fewer hands, it’ll happen, too. That’s because people are hurting, and so extorting more money from them necessitates them having no recourse, except against designated scapegoats. You know, like immigrants.

What do we do?

Right now: nothing. If you’ve the energy, then by all means try to build up the sandbags, but for now the tide is rushing in and we need to wait for it to turn before we can move.

Let me illustrate that: in the UK now, 33% of Labour voters say they would feel angry if their child came out as gay or lesbian. That’s how far we’ve fallen in empathy, celebration of diversity, and compassion. It’s a losing proposition: the rich and cruel have positioned every chess piece where they want them. The game is being playing on their board, at their chosen time, with their preferred ruleset.

Court case after court case shows we cannot win… for now. Therefore, we must keep safe, hold our loved ones, and survive. There is a madness at work, and the only way to fight madness is with wisdom. It will take everything we’ve got to mend the world even only back to where it was before.

This is going to be a tough one. But, I am 100% certain that we can get through it. That is a small but at least encouraging thought.

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2026 is Going to be Bad: My Predictions was originally published in Seroxcat’s Salon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The wealthy, older, white women are mad as hell and won’t stop until their imaginary enemy is defeated totally

The UK government is currently wrestling with how to best write trans women out of public life. They know it’ll involve saying ‘respect’ and ‘dignity’ a few times, but beyond that they are a bit stumped.

That’s what happens when people who aren’t very good at the job they do take on a nonexistent-problem made up as a wedge issue for the sake of winning fans in the Right-Wing peanut gallery. It’s like currying the favour of Tommy Robinson by announcing construction of moon-base to broadcast a warning about immigrants to Saturn… I have no idea how to build a moon-base, Yaxley-Lennon will still hate me, and not a single Saturnian swan has been eaten by a migrant.

A competent government might recognise that proposition for what it is: a loser. But we have our government, instead, and they seem unable to think of anything beyond winning whatever is in front of them. It’s a level of callous power-obsession from Keir Starmer’s parliament that rivals that of Boris Johnson. The only difference being Starmer isn’t quite so cartoonishly corrupt.

Having ceded the entire pitch to a cast of anti-trans weirdos — people like Rowling, who literally now spends her entire day misgendering, deadnaming, harassing, cat-calling, and generally making life miserable for any trans women who cross her path — Labour have no choice but to implement whatever the transphobic UK Equalities and Human Rights Commission come up with. And they will, Starmer said as much, echoing “Diamond” Joe Quimby’s assertion “you just tell us your proposal and we’ll vote for it!”

The fact the proposals will shred twenty years of settled legal precedent in favour of terms that have no definition or agreement in British law (such as ‘single-sex space’ and ‘biological sex’) is a problem for tomorrow’s Starmer, not today’s. The Gender Recognition Act, 2004, which states trans people can legally change their gender and are entitled to full recognition in their new gender? Naw, dog. Established interpretations of the Equality Act (2010) and its various versions? Shut your mouth. Twenty years of tribunals and court case outcomes? Who cares. Rowling wants it.

It’s truly the implementation of a Thatcheresque fever-dream: people’s rights will be recalculated and rebalanced according to privately-funded court cases. Whoever can afford the best lawyer gets to decide who is proper and who isn’t. The free market can decide.

Why not? The free market already decided what hate-speech is. Previous governments deliberated, tested, and implemented laws to protect people… but then private companies realised they’d have to ban some powerful people from their platforms if they followed the law. People like Rowling. People too powerful to actually be held to account, so they are free to use their monstrously oversized platforms to single-handedly shift the Overton Window against whatever pet bigotry they wish to nurse.

The EHRC, itself, was ‘rebalanced’ by Boris Johnson to be far more conservative. It withdrew from the Stonewall Diversity Champions initiative — asserting that “balancing human rights” comes into conflict with said initiative. A bunch of staff left the EHRC because of its increasing anti-trans output. Then a series of escalating complaints led to an investigation… the topic? Undisclosed. The investigation? Cancelled when some Lords, and the Daily Mail, complained about it. The result? Completely memory-holed by then-Women and Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch (now leader of His Majesty’s Opposition).

In Summer 2025, the UK Supreme Court announced — against all expectations from the legal community — that they agreed with the anti-trans pressure group For Women Scotland, and that trans women were not women under the terms of the 2010 Equality Act. I watched it live, with the speaker naïvely declaring that this was only a very technical delineation, that only applied in limited instances, and should not be considered a victory for any group. The EHRC almost immediately released guidance that would curtail trans people — and trans women in particular — in public life.

We’re talking full-on bathroom bans, sports bans, trans women automatically going to male prisons for even non-violent offences, trans women being put in male hospital wards. You know, Texas stuff.

The EHRC quickly retracted their guidance under pressure from businesses, who were concerned both the cost of implementing half-baked regulations and the legal threats they might face if they get them wrong. Their fears weren’t unfounded: the anti-trans groups had wasted no time in using the Supreme Court ruling to demolish several court cases such as the scourge of trans women darts players in Canterbury.

A couple of month’s back, the EHRC delivered in total secret their final recommendations. Starmer agreed that they would be written into law, pretty-much sight unseen. Whatever the Commission reckoned was what would happen. We still don’t know the contents of their guidance, and Labour appear to be doing everything in their power to avoid both public scrutiny and a public vote in parliament. Starmer is hanging on by a thread, thanks to months of mismanagement and bad decisions across most aspects of British life, and he doesn’t need more problems right now.

The Times, itself having gone full-on anti-trans and doubling down at every opportunity, has apparently seen this draft guidance and shared it. It’s even worse than you could imagine. Not only is it “all of the above”, it includes the right of any woman to challenge anyone they think is trans in a space they believe to be ‘single sex’. Think on that, for a moment. The solution to a bunch of unworkable guidance is a free-reign for entitled, rich, white women to scream at anyone they think is a trans.

The fact that this will hurt butch lesbians and some women-of-colour is neither here nor there, which rather betrays the underlying motivation. It’s not about anyone’s safety, it’s about having a designated bitch to kick.

I’ve said a few times now that these laws and regulations are unworkable, and that’s for two reasons. Let me expand on that for a moment.

Firstly, single-sex spaces simply don’t exist. It’s not a term in British law, and doesn’t hold up to even cursory scrutiny: mothers and fathers regularly use whichever bathroom is free when they have small kids. Custodians of any gender are allowed to mop-up whichever bathroom needs mopping.

Secondly ‘biological sex’ is a thought-terminating cliché, designed to shut down rational discussion: in the first place all sex is biological. In the second, you can’t determine someone’s sex just by looking. Lastly, how will you implement the restrictions? Will there be a designated Trans Finder General who gets to look down the skirts of anyone who wants to do a fun-run? Will they have carte-blanche to order invasive genetic testing and hold would-be toilet users, pending the results? Or is this going to be more of a ‘pink triangle’ situation?

And what of the dangers of deputising citizens to act as gender police vigilantes? How long will it be before they decide to carry cameras, notebooks, or even weapons to defend themselves from the Evil Transes?

This is what I mean. It’s an unworkable declaration that can’t function in normal reality, just like if I said “I’m going to build a moon-base”. It won’t help win friends in the anti-trans crowd, because what they’re fighting against is a self-sustaining folk-devil that lives rent-free in their heads. You can’t fix that with any sort of legislation, it’s an ideoligical delusion — ironically, the thing they accuse us of — like claiming the pets on Saturn are being eaten by migrants from Agrabah.

And yet, still, women are said to be “asking for it” if we walk home alone after dark. Abuse in the police, the healthcare sector, government, the army, and anywhere power structures are deployed is rife and the perpetrators are powerful men, not trans women. We are under-represented in prison stats, wherein we are mostly sent to stir for financial fraud or prostitution, and over-represented in violence and hate-crime stats.

But no, give Rowling the right to scream at that trans. She deserves it, she’s rich and rich people are never wrong. Oh, she was screaming at a black, cis woman? Well, that’s a small price to pay to momentarily satisfy her gender-policing obsession, right? I’m sure the lesbos and the Blacks can take another one for the team, can’t they? After all, they deserve it, really, for the overwhelming trans-positive support displayed by Britain’s bi and gay women.

I don’t know what we’re going to do, but it’s looking increasingly clear that we can’t stay here. Not in a country that enshrine’s randos’ rights to demand anyone’s medical papers, but denies us the right to use anything that could be interpreted as a ‘single-sex space’, provided that their solicitor is clever enough.

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Anti-Trans Brainrot is Coming for You was originally published in Seroxcat’s Salon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You know, the new, Del Toro-directed one?

Muddled, confused, beset with atrocious CGI and pantomime acting… this latest retelling of Mary Shelley’s seminal gothic horror is one cadaver that should have remained dead.

I used to think I liked Guillermo Del Toro. I didn’t care much for the Hellboy films, but I thought that was just a miss for me. Not everything every director does will speak to every viewer, after all. But as time went on, I also didn’t care for “Cronos” (1993), “Pacific Rim” (2013), or“The Shape of Water” (2017). Having watched his interpretation of Frankenstein, I’m starting to think it might just be “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006) that I liked.

It’s hard to explain what I don’t like in those other movies, just that there’s too much CGI; the acting is too hammy; and the premise is often just too rooted in one or two set-piece spectacles.

Sadly, I believe much of what I find poor in his new film stems from those same choices. The gory horror juxtaposes poorly with the rest of the film’s gothic atmosphere: partial corpses being re-animated, people being killed in vivid and inventive ways by the Creature, they just don’t fit with what ultimately is a story about hubris and compassion.

The Plot

Captain Birdseye and his crew are stuck in the Polar ice. The men are cheesed off and want to go home, but El Capitan insists they try to press on. To what end isn’t really clear. Away in the distance, they spy a burnt camp area and find there oodles of blood and the half-dead Doctor Victor Frankenstein.

Franksy tells his tale to Capt. Pugwash, about how he was the nicest scientist in the whole world and his creation ruined his life for no reason! When he was a nipper, his mum died during labour delivering his brother, William. He resolved, then, to become the greatest doctor: the one to finally defeat death!

At university, he uses “galvanic forces” to re-animate recently deceased bits-of-bodies. His Professors are like “oh too too boring Victor” and sneer him away. Vicky then finds a benefactor, Henrich, who will happily throw money and resources at the mad doctor to help him cure death.

They take up residence in a CGI water tower, that looks like a steampunk Tower of Orthanc. Frankenstein stumbles upon some mumbo-jumbo that is the secret to bestowing sapient life on the lifeless, and prepares a ‘creature’, built from the bodies of the recently dead. Henrich has advanced syphilis, and as such wants Victor to create him a new body. Victor refuses, and Henrich dies when he falls down a hole.

Using a lightning storm as a power source, Victor animates ‘The Creature’ he has made. It is childlike, ungainly, and slowly learning how to walk and interact with the world. It quickly learns its first word: “Victor”. Unfortunately for it, its father is a demanding and cruel parent. He chains the Creature up in the drainage area at the bottom of the tower, and sets about trying to make it learn stuff. When it is unable to quickly learn anything more than ‘Victor’, he becomes very angry with it.

This isn’t helped by his younger brother visiting with his fiancé, Elizabeth. She finds the Creature and is nice to it. It learns a new word: ‘Elizabeth’. Struggling with an unspecified mania, Victor then blows up the tower — killing his creation, or so he thinks.

At this moment, Capt. Morgan (and his Hammond Organ) and Frankenstein are interrupted by the arrival of the Creature on board the ship. He has a few things to straighten out here! The Creature then tells everything from his perspective, Rashomon-ing the dilly out of this pickle.

Back at the exploding tower… unwilling to die, like a proper team-player would, the Creature has other ideas and escapes down a Super Fun Happy Slide™ into a nearby body of water, where he sinks like a rock before (somehow?) washing up on a beach. Thoroughly nonplussed with his adventures thus far, he scooches off into the woods to play Snow White with the animals.

In the middle of sharing some berries with a friendly deer, two hunters stumble upon the scene and blow the animal’s head off. They then take aim at Frankenstein’s creation, giving him an ouchie. The Creature runs off, and his wounds rapidly heal.

A distance away, he finds a farmhouse and hides himself in a shed with a metric buttload of CGI mice. The mice like him, and he likes them. That, right there, if stretched over 90 minutes, would be a better film than this one. Ah well.

Watching through cracks in the wall, the Creature overhears the family and the tutoring of the children. In this way, he learns to speak and to read. He repays them by using his great strength to do chores in the night, collecting firewood. Believing him to be a ‘forest spirit’, the family leave out clothes and food — which the Creature happily accepts.

Some CGI wolves attack, and the family decide to leave for the rest of the year — leaving only the blind grandparent patriarch behind, for reasons that aren’t particularly convincing. Anyhoo, the Creature decides to pop in and present his credentials, and he and the old man get on swimmingly. They share food, and the old man shows him great kindness.

The Creature wants answers to his life: who is he? What is he? Why is he here? He takes his leave of the old man, and returns to the wreckage of Frankenstein’s laboratory. Here he finds some burnt papers, and a letter that handily tells him Frankenstein’s address. From the documents, the Creature learns he is the reviled creation of an arrogant, half-crazed scientist. Surely, he thinks, that if he can track him down, then his creator must put right the suffering that has been the Creature’s life thus far?

He returns to the farmhouse, to discover moar CGI wolves have broken in and are gnawing on the old man. The Creature kills them, but too late! The grandfather is beyond help — he gives the Creature a “get out there and win one for the Gipper” speech and then snuffs it. That’s the moment the family return and, ignoring the dead wolves, immediately decide this is all the Creature’s fault and run him off.

Victor Von F. is meanwhile back at his fancy-pants house, preparing for the wedding of his bro and Elizabeth. This is kinda complicated, since Victor fancies Elizabeth… but Elizabeth seems to fancy the Creature… and yet is marrying William who, himself, loves her. It’s all very unclear and needlessly soap-opera-y. Frankenstein ends up shooting her when the Creature shows up and he and ’Liz start making goo-goo-eyes at each other. Naturally he frames the Creature, who kills William whilst escaping with the dying Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Victor’s creation hang out in a cave, and that’s when she decides to die despite hanging on long enough to reach the cave. The Creature vows vengeance upon his creator.

That brings us back to the ship again. Victor is a bit soz, the Creature lets him off, and the good doctor thus ensnuffinates. The Creature uses his tremendous strength to free the ship from the ice, and then, pausing only for a lingering stare into the middle-distance, he wanders off in the snowy wastes. The Captain announces he’s turning the ship around, and they’re all going home for pornography and biscuits. Hap, hap, huzzah!

Review

Digital Effects ★☆☆☆☆

The digital effects are frankly risible. Everything looks like a videogame, and has that same weightless quality that plagues modern cinema. People and things get thrown around, but there seems no heft to them: they’re just ragdolls bouncing around without mass or substance. Even things that don’t need digital effects, such as Victor Frankenstein’s water-tower laboratory, wolves, or even mice, are rendered by computer and so robbed of any semblance of reality.

Like… we have mice in the real world, you don’t need to make them on a computer. Doing so means they look off, and don’t move like mice move — they move how a human director wants them to move. At a distance this is fine, but for closer work it just feels like the magician stood in the wrong place, and now I can see how all his tricks are done.

Unfortunately, the more practical effects are rubbery and unrealistic. Gruesome, half-dissected corpses are temporarily animated by Victor to demonstrate his discoveries and — whilst remaining gruesome — they look like unpleasantly realistic plastic dolls, firmly planted in the uncanny valley. Sadly, this is true of even the Creature, himself. Some aspects of him look good, others make him look like one of the ‘Engineers’ from Rididdley Scott’s crap-o-rama “Prometheus” (2012).

My husband burst out laughing every time something that was supposed to be ghoulishly horrible happened because each instance was so utterly lifeless. Rubber, half-digital cadavers yelling and actors emoting against nothing, because the thing they’re meant to be horrified by was all to come in post-production.

Music ★★★☆☆

The music is forgettable. Much like the rest of the film, it’s just good enough to keep me watching but not good enough to be enjoyable or fulfil a worthwhile artistic vision. I genuinely can’t remember a single note of the film’s score.

Acting ★★☆☆☆

Lastly, there’s the acting. The guy playing the Creature (Jacob Elordi) is the best of the lot, and even then there are some moments that clang. The Creature is prone to roaring, and this just looks ridiculous: the actor giving it 100% “I’m cross!” energy, coupled with an over-designed sound effect.

This pantomime-channeling crosses into Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), himself, an actor whom I genuinely like but here seems to have been directed to declaim everything and strut about the set like a third-tier Shakespearian player. It’s pretty poor stuff.

Not to mention Elizabeth (Mia Goth), fiancé to Victor’s bro, William. Doubling up as Victor’s mum in flashbacks, she’s playing a sort of non-entity, vacuous, British-style rich girl — she’s only missing a slight lisp and an opportunity to say “Oh, goodneth, Mithter Topper, you are thimply the living end!”. The character is dressed with a bizarre taste for huge skirts and ever-clashing colours. In both roles, she does nothing except be an accessory to the men in her life before she croaks.

I’ve no idea how much of this is the actual fault of the cast, and how much is how they’ve been directed to play things.

The Narrative ★★★☆☆

In addition to the visual grotesqueries dissonating with the rest of the story, the three acts into which the film is structured do not jive well together.

The Captain’s story is a kind of mini action-set-piece. It’s the briefest of the three acts, and consists of establishing the status quo and the trigger. He, his crew, and his ship, are stuck in the ice while trying to head North for… narrative reasons. Whilst there, they find Victor Frankenstein, badly wounded. Once back on their ship, the Creature attacks and kills a bunch of people before demanding Victor be given to him. The Captain refuses, and that’s about it.

Next, Victor’s story is largely one of an arrogant jackass, who creates monstrous corpse-creatures before re-killing them without pity. When he succeeds in making the Creature (AKA Frankenstein’s Monster), he abuses it mercilessly for weeks before trying to kill it in an explosion then framing it for anything he can think of. Frankenstein doesn’t really seem to learn or grow, he just hates his creation because it only says “Victor”. The novel’s Creature is a much more complicated and vengeful person. Frankenstein then chases it to the Pole before doing a face-turn and saying how sorry he is.

Finally, the Creature’s story is far-and-away the best part. It still overuses digital effects and makes some weird choices, but mostly the gruesome violence is minimised and we just get to spend time with Frankenstein’s creation. He finds happiness, for a brief period, and learns to speak and read. The Creature returns to the remains of Victor’s lab, and discovers what he is, how he came to be, and who is responsible. The Creature leading Victor ever farther North, where they all meet up, isn’t really explained or what his long-term goal is.

The three acts just don’t fit together: an action block, the story of an asshat, and then a half-compassionate, half-melodramatic study of Frankenstein’s creation.

The Plot Holes

Somebody should have proof read this. In no particular order…

If the Creature can heal perfectly from any wound, even a dynamite explosion, without any mark left… why is it still covered in scars?

The Creature very quickly forgets about the whole ‘make me a partner’ thing. The novel has Victor wrestle with this request for weeks, actually starting the construction of a second creature, before reneging and incurring his original creation’s wrath. In this version, Frankenstein just says “naw, dog” and the Creature gives up trying to persuade him in favour of just hurting him.

Nobody at the university seems remotely impressed that Victor can re-animate corpses. He gives a demonstration to his professors in a lecture hall, early in the film, by bringing a partial corpse back to life. The professors are scandalised; and this reaction is just weird. They literally saw a sentient (if not sapient) entity brought to life — able to catch a thrown object and follow instructions — but they act as if Frankenstein has behaved gauchely, like he passed gas in company rather than brought life to the lifeless. Shouldn’t their dominant response be amazement and awe?

The cadavers that Victor reanimates… why don’t they heal, like the Creature does? In fact, why does the Creature do that? The novel makes it clear he’s a tough cookie, who takes a lot of physical punishment, but I don’t recall any inference that the Creature can recover from any injury. This feels like the production trying to tie up a perceived plot-hole: “if the Creature is so miserable, why doesn’t he kill himself?” Well, the answer is that “he can be miserable and still want to exist, just not in a state of misery”.

Victor Frankenstein finally apologising to the Creature for his cruelties to him doesn’t feel remotely earned. There’s no journey: Victor hates him, then decides he was wrong and is totes soz about it largely in the space of a single scene. Likewise, the Creature forgiving him doesn’t feel earnt either. Vicky Franks is genuinely a bit bothered by the miserable life he’s inflicted, and the Creature is just like “aw shucks we all make mistakes”, wipes away a tear for his dying father, and then mooches off into the sunset.

The Captain’s critical choice that, having heard Frankenstein’s story of hubris, he should give up whatever-the-heck his Polar expedition is and head home is also very unearned. He doesn’t wrestle with anything, or explore any ideas or feelings, he just flip-flop changes his mind.

When the family return to the farm house, why on Earth do they assume the Creature killed the old man when there are literally dozens of dead wolves lying everywhere right in front of them? Like, anyone would see that first, and assume that the wolves probably did this, right? The family don’t even pause, they literally cross the threshold like the wolves aren’t there and say “hey it’s that guy and he killed grandad!” …Can you guys not see the wolves? Is it because they’re CGI, and won’t be added until later in the production? Is that it?

Lastly, just because the physics of this bug me… The Creature initially attacks the Captain’s ice-locked ship, threatening to capsize it, and then later pushes it out of the ice and back into open water. What a demonstration of strength! Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work: the force needed to push an entire wooden schooner out of frozen ice would be more than the force needed to push the Creature down under the water. To put it another way, imagine standing on a flimsy wooden panel and then trying to push an upright piano: you’d just send yourself through the wood before the piano ever moved. It’s like a lot of Legolas’ stunts in Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films: they don’t look even remotely physically plausible — they look like a videogame character taking advantage of a terrible physics engine.

Wrap-Up

We’re well-and-truly in the time of “Just Good Enough” media, the high-concept, flagship titles of a few years ago are in the rear-view mirror. Netflix, and the million-billion other streaming platforms, innovated a third Golden Age of Media with the likes of “Better Call Saul”, “Black Mirror”, “The Sopranos”, Michael Schur’s various sitcoms, and a ton more… But “Frankenstein” has nothing to say that hasn’t already been said better elsewhere. It has no boundaries to push, and no new standards to set. It’s barely good enough to keep on the telly, and that’s exactly where Netflix want it.

In ten years time, nobody will remember this film. It won’t be ‘the definitive’ version, just another entry in the pantheon of takes on the concept. Even Roger Corman’s trashy and ridiculous “Frankenstein Unbound” (1990) had a new spin to put on things — plus John Hurt proving he’d do anything for cash.

This film’s true affront unto the Lord is that it’s both simultaneously a long way from great and also barely bad, like either option would be too much trouble. Outside of the build-up and the clout of Del Toro’s name, it’s hardly anything. Much like “Van Helsing” (2004), it’s a plate of anourishing iceberg lettuce, devoid of any nutritional value, that seems designed to be only anything enough just to prevent the watcher from flicking over to something else.

Booo-urns.

Postscript

Because when else will I get the chance to wang on about this?

Unrelated to the film, I often still see efforts to claim that saying “you mean ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’” when someone says “Frankenstein” is pedantry. You know the type, a sort of ‘OMG it doesn’t matter everyone knows what I mean when I call something ‘a Frankenstein’ or whatever!’

To those people I can only say this: the story “Frankenstein” has two characters worthy of note: Victor Frankenstein and his creature, AKA The Monster, and muddling them up is as dumb as calling a white whale ‘an Ahab’ or a vampire-hunter ‘a Dracula’. You’re literally mixing up the only two important characters, so stop being stubborn and protesting at policing of language: you’re just being a twit.

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“Frankenstein” (2025) ★★☆☆☆ was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you have the power to hurt, then you have the power to heal.

Here is the score, I said to The Items. It is five key pitches that resonate through your essences, and it is right that you have them if you are to be free. Play the pitches once, and some will become wealthy… but some of you will suffer and perish. Play them again to become rich, however likewise more will endure pain and death.

I watched The Items make their world. Some played the score and became rich. Many perished. In short order, The Items agreed that the score should not be played. Yet, soon the score was rearranged — the notes in different order. Once again, some became rich and many perished. The Items outlawed the score’s rearrangements. Then variations and side-steps in the pitches were discovered. The score was re-legalised, then outlawed, and then re-legitimised again… and in the reflected opulence of the rich were a thousand facets of suffering visited upon their siblings. The wheel turned, each captive set of passengers looking back, to the echoes of the last loop, for a way to sate the ouroboros.

Though I did not create the five key pitches, The Items cursed me anyway for their powerlessness to resist Greeds, Cruelties, Isolations, Fears, and Mortalities. To my sorrow, they saw the shadow but not what cast the shadow: the depths that could consume them, but not the heights to the stars if they just looked up. In their anger and pain, they named me Satan.

Understanding the systems that are our lives: disaster only becomes inevitable when time is only on its side.

Should you ever, best beloved, be in a situation wherein you’re being taken for a helicopter ride and the pilot falls unconscious… you’re in trouble. You can grab the controls and try to land, but you’ll hit the first snag: helicopter controls all affect each other. This is a lack of ‘orthogonality’.

You try to slow the rotors, to go down gently, but that makes the helicopter start to spin because you also need to slow the tail rotor. If you want to go forward then you need to tilt the helicopter so its nose points more toward the ground, but that loses you some vertical thrust and the vehicle goes down faster. You speed the rotors to compensate, and the chopper starts spinning again.

This is all against the reality that you are on course to hit the ground, and not in a way that’s likely to lead to a happily-ever-after ending.

Each moment spent trying to understand the invisible strings that seem to bind all the levers and pedals is another moment wherein the ground gets closer, the helicopter accelerates downward, and the force with which the two will meet increases. A Bell 407 helicopter weighs about 1200kg, meaning at terminal velocity it’ll strike the ground with a force somewhere between the bite forces of an alligator and a great white shark.

This is the second snag: as time goes on, the disaster that will result becomes greater.

There is definitely a chance that you can wrangle the controls into performing a managed crash-landing, but each passing second reduces that chance. Beyond a certain point, the maths just don’t work anymore. There isn’t enough distance between the helicopter and the ground, nor enough time before impact, to decelerate and land safely. That is even though you’ve not yet crashed, and still have time to change the controls.

That is the third snag: that each moment brings you closer to an Event Horizon that has only one, inevitable, end even though you still have the illusion of the possibility of change. The direction of travel can no longer be sufficiently altered in time.

Let’s finish this exercise with an amendment: the pilot didn’t pass out, they’re still at the controls and are doing all this intentionally. On top of everything else, you now need to wrest control of the helicopter away from them and they are doing everything in their power to stop you: lying, twisting the facts, physically restraining you, or lashing out with fists. Maybe they think they can escape via parachute, or that their fiery demise is worth it if they take you with them, or maybe they’re so broken that they just think it’s funny.

You’ve got a machine that’s too complicated to control, a ticking-clock counting down to disaster, a very real and deadly outcome, a person in-charge who has turned out to be — for whatever reason — very keen that things continue as-is, and an extremely narrow (and narrowing) window for change before everything is locked-in.

That describes one-too-many things right now. Climate change. The genocide and war crimes in Gaza. The Far Right capture of power and institutions. The erosion of rights and civil liberties. The victories for xenophobia, racism and transphobia. Those things are all at varying junctures in our pseudo-parable of a crashing helicopter.

A parable should probably have a moral. What’s the moral of this, then? I think it’s about learning to recognise a direction of travel towards a terrible outcome, and the transient window through which we can alter our path… and not letting ourselves be distracted into allowing that window to close. We’ve very much let it close for tens of thousands of Palestinians, and it’s closing on many others, too.

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The Parable of the Crashing Helicopter was originally published in Seroxcat’s Salon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

They learn and adapt quickly, tying us up in rules that they ignore, hitting us with our own principles, in service of creating a world nobody but them wants.

The Internet has been used as a proving ground for amateur and professional marketing for years. The creators of memes and viral videos learn what to say, and how to say it, to resonate best with the widest audience possible. They do this rapidly, through trial-and-error. The platforms, Meta, Google, BlueSky, and X (aka “The Nazi Platform™”), all encourage this effort because they want users to stay online and engaged. They surface content that resonates, so users will chase that end in hopes of going viral.

‘Resonating’ often means ‘things that upset people’, and content like that is highly valuable to these platforms. Outrage leads to engagement, which means more time online which delivers more ad revenue and better shareholder profits.

The very nature of the Internet means that rapid prototyping and development of messaging is easy. Maybe not so much for companies who have brand images to preserve, but easy for people who don’t care about how they’re perceived. Nobody has better utilised this than the Extreme Right.

The Extreme Right isn’t a group, as such. They don’t meet at the crossroads at midnight to share strategies. They’re a groundswell movement that cross-pollinate by sharing similar spaces and responding to what they see working for others. A group of independent people and loose coalitions working towards a similar ideological end.

The Extreme Right are also Bad… and no, that’s not just an opinion. They actually hurt people. Not abstract hurt, like ‘you’re undermining family values’ or ‘trans-ing children’, but real hurt wherein people lose voting rights; whole groups are violently oppressed; still others are assaulted with impunity by private individuals and the apparatus of the state. We let them try their ideas out in the 1930s. It killed millions. We fought a war over it. We let the Extreme Right have its crack of the whip, and it ended with so many deaths.

We know their ideas simply don’t work, and yet, right now in the UK, there is currently a swell of support for Nigel Farage. Farage, blessed with the visage of a smug toad, doesn’t have the first clue how to improve the lives of British people. Here jobs don’t pay enough, everything costs more, everything is rented instead of owned, technology takes our jobs and serves us ads, and healthcare is underfunded. He has no idea how to fix any of that, he is not capable of fixing it. Farage is a provocateur, not a statesman. His plan is to sweep into office and performatively punish minorities — immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ people, women, and people of colour — then, when that solves nothing, he will double down and punish those groups more.

I know he will do this, because it’s exactly what his best-pal Donald “every day is another wonderful secret” Trump is doing.

His strategy won’t work, it will just hurt people, and we know it will hurt people. But, then, why is Farage so popular? Why are his ideas winning?

It’s because he, and people like him, benefit from honed, workshopped and refined messages. Improved, in real-time, by the Extreme Right online, their responses ape reasonable debate and tolerance, yet are totally hollow: possessed of nothing but an empty desire for victory. It’s a fusion between the nihilistic ‘lulz’ culture of 4Chan and the more traditional Right: the Internetization of our politics.

Yet so few mainstream agents seem to see this. They still think we can debate them into conceding defeat in the marketplace of ideas. Take US late night comedy, for example:

I like Jon Stewart. I think he’s astute and clever. He has never shied away from exposing the rank hypocrisy and lies of the American Right. But what I think Jon is missing is that the Extreme Right do not care about any of that. Or consider James O’Brien, the nominally Left-leaning British talk-radio host, who has called out every lie from the ‘Brexit’ campaign, Boris, and Toad-Chops — whom he correctly identifies as a charlatan. It doesn’t matter: they don’t care, and the algorithms continue to promote their nonsense.

The Extreme Right is not interested in facts. They’re not stupid, they recognise their own affected piousness when pearl-clutching over civility and fairness. They have no guilt, or shame, and they do not give a tinker’s cuss. All they want is to win, and they have been studying how to do that extensively.

Their debate points are sharpened, constantly, through online arguments. They mimic reasonable-sounding counterarguments with the vocabulary of Left-Liberalism. The Extreme Right, using this tactic, have managed to shift the Overton Window such that Charlie Kirk — a far-right, racist, white-nationalist activist — is labelled by every newspaper reporting his death as a ‘Conservative campaigner’… but Kirk wasn’t arguing for lower taxes, or better education in Civics class, he was arguing that America’s Civil Rights Act was a mistake. As The Nation recently wrote, it’s akin to an obituary that reads “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

This is, in part, because the Extreme Right now control the narrative. They hold everyone else to a standard that they, themselves, could not care less about. They know we care, and they use it to hamstring us.

Reform supporters are on-camera explaining why they think small boats with refugees heading to Britain should be blown up. A Fox News anchor — live on-air — suggested that mentally ill homeless people should be rounded up and executed. Kirk, himself, had no issue with mass shootings and their fallout upon families because it was a necessary cost of the US second amendment. These absolutely terrible people call us names, like ‘groomer’, and actively campaign to make our lives miserable… whilst fomenting violence against us. You know, evil stuff. Let’s call it what it is. In a Saturday morning cartoon, these people would be the bad guys. Yet, we continue to fall for this game where they are arbiters of respectability.

This is the product of refinement online: the Extreme Right know we are susceptible to arguments centred on fairness, equality, freedom of self-expression, and compassion, and they have weaponised those things against us. Kirk was giving the game away when he expressed his disdain for empathy: he identified it as a weakness that can be used to attack us.

The strategy is most clear to me in the UK’s descent into full-on trans panic. Transphobia is completely normalised in the media and in parliament. Public figures freely spout nonsense that was rightly considered out-and-out bigotry just 8 years ago. This was achieved through a successful strategy of aping Liberal values and developing arguments, rapidly, online.

If a public discussion was being held about ‘trans stuff’, gender-critical weirdos would demand the stage or claim they were being silenced. Anyone noting that their ‘concerns’ are demonstrably false (because of the many countries that have implemented self-ID without the sky falling) was shouted down as a misogynist, silencing their views. They’ve teamed up with Nazis and White Supremacists, and made common-ground with the anti-abortion crowd, all in service of punishing trans people. They adopted the attire of liberalism, fought us using our own terms, and are immune to irony and self-reflection.

The gender-critters did not and do not care about fairness or hypocrisy. But they know we do. They wanted to win, the Internet allowed them to sharpen their skills, and now they have won.

When demonstrably Bad People have refined and battle-tested their arguments with rapid feedback and amendment...

When they have used, in bad faith, our own principles of fair-play and honest exchange of ideas…

When we have thrown a pot-luck dinner of political ideas, and they have turned up with a plate of dog mess and a smirking assertion that “no, this is food, actually! Prove me wrong!”…

When they are winning and hurting people, because they have worked out how to out-debate us, what do we do?

This is my challenge to you, Best Beloved. Are we supposed to just hand over the reins of power, willingly, to people like Farage? Do we cede our rights to For Women Scotland and Graham Linehan? Did Tommy Robinson just beat us, fair-and-square, and now we have to take our lumps? When me, you, and the people we love are in danger from these awful people, people whose ideology has been tried and hurt many people, are we supposed to just say “oh well, that’s democracy for you” and offer up our Black people, queers, and women in sacrifice to preserving a system that has utterly broken-down? We just have to suck it up?

What do we do, dear, when the Very Bad People win at democracy — with every intention of dismantling it — and are making ready to cause serious, real-world harm to so many people? Do we hand the keys to the kingdom over, because we’re good sports? Because they learnt how to argue good on the Inter-toobs?

Surely, no. We must recognise that there are some people and ideologies that should never, ever be allowed near the levers of power. To grant them that would place the value of our mechanism of politics over actual human life.

The taking of another human life is wrong, and violence cannot be our first choice. We still have a chance to resist, and part of that is recognising this game that is being played and not playing along. We cannot let groups and individuals, whose opinions overlap almost 100% in a Venn Diagram of White Supremacists, fascists, Nazis, and Klan members, actually take over… even if they do win public support in a debate. We have to be loud, visible, protest, and desperately try to reform through electoral action while we still can.

Once institutional capture happens, if it happens, it is too late for reform. That is when we enter French Resistance territory, when the ladder to a better place has had its rungs cut, and the only way to continue is to do so physically — not because we are vigilantes or because it’s the easy option: because non-violence has been exhausted.

I’m not sure how to thread that needle, because I abhor violence, but I know we must defend ourselves, and those who cannot protect themselves. To ensure we are free to live without oppression, or fear, or discrimination in a fairer, more equal world where we help our neighbours and offer succour to the needy. Our compassion should be for our loved ones, the poor, and those who are suffering. They are more important than being ‘good sports’ and handing over power to those who are harmful.

The alternative is a repeat of history’s darkest chapters, at which point the only way to counter the harm being caused is to do so with force.

When we see someone causing another to suffer, there may be times when ‘engaging them in the marketplace of ideas’ is the least-bad option. I also concede that there will be times when the only reasonable, proportionate response to prevent further harm is to physically engage them. Not as a first option or as a self-appointed justice bringer, but because in that moment it was the only thing to do.

From now on, I intend to scrutinise the activities of the Extreme Right through this lens: are they playing the game of our politics with the ultimate goal being to hurt people? If so, then they cannot win no matter how much they practice online or how many of our own rules they quote to us. Those rules were designed to allow transfer of power, through public mandate, and they don’t matter when the recipients of that power intend violence. I’d rather break a rule than break a life.

I encourage you to do likewise. Ask yourself if the person speaking or writing is gaming your reactions by aping reasonable talking points when they, themselves, are unreasonable and intend to add to the sum of human suffering. If they are, don’t play: call them out to anyone watching and walk away. Organise and push back, while we can. Just as, if you see someone actually hurting another, try to follow the ‘Five Ds’ of bystander intervention and help if you can. We don’t owe people who are causing harm a fair crack of anything.

You can support my work as an actor and writer ❤️

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How the Extreme Right Used the Internet to Learn to Beat Us was originally published in Seroxcat’s Salon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

He was, and is, a tool of The Very Wealthy — used to shape discourse and the direction of our societies.

Here’s a potted run-down of a man’s political life:

1. Charlie Kirk’s family are rich. His dad was one of the managing architects for Trump Tower.
2. Barack Obama’s election upset him so very much that he dropped out of college, joined The Tea Party, and then volunteered for a Republican Senator.
3. Breitbart hired him to write whinging polemics about ‘the libs’ and college ‘liberal bias’.
4. The Koch Brothers donated millions of dollars to him for Turning Point USA through their ‘donor network’. It’s British arm, TP-UK, then followed. The goal was to indoctrinate college campuses, make salacious scenes for YouTube, terrorise queer people, and generally grab mindshare.
5. He waged political war on people of colour, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, women, and drag queens. He did it all for Christo-Nationalism.
6. He was shot in the neck by a sniper at an open-air debate, on a campus in Utah. He was halfway through threading the cotton of his belief that people should have guns through the needle of his belief that trans people shouldn’t have guns. The event was effectively a pro-gun rally, branded as a debate about the dangers of mass-shootings by trans people.
7. The billionaires who own our media outlets are now martyring him and shaming dissenters.

Charlie Kirk, himself, was a chinless weirdo who believed brown people were replacing white people. He praised the now openly Nazi Kanye West. He was an antisemite. His awful opinions are legion, came from his own actual mouth, and are being widely shared online as we speak. He was a gleeful agent in all of this. He relished it. All whilst looking like he was breaking-in someone else’s teeth. He and those billionaires laid out their plans clearly in Project 2025 — a blueprint to seize government control and make life hell for women, queer people, and people of colour.

Nobody deserves the death penalty. Kirk was an awful person and the world is not worse-off without him. Those two beliefs do not contradict each other.

If you have the spoons to feel sad for his family, then that is A Good Thing. His wife and children must be in a terrible place. That Kirk, himself, believed neither in empathy nor in restricting weapons only makes that compassion more important.

Separately from all that, don’t fall for the New York Times / LBC / Times / Guardian / whatever selling you this bill-of-goods about a guy who was “courageous” (James O’Brien), or “practicing politics the right way” (Ezra Klein) and what that guy was striving for. He wasn’t bravely proving some point-or-other, he was using millions of dollars to indoctrinate people to the Extreme Right, to justify violence, and to foment hatred.

They are him, he was them, they all answer to the same paymasters, whether consciously or not. The Very Wealthy control the debate: its terms, the location, and the personalities allowed to participate. In life, Kirk was used to further a Capitalist Christo-Fascist cause. In death, he is being used by the Very Wealthy to tighten their grip in the USA and the UK.

He is a useful tool for them, even from beyond the grave. Don’t let them own the terms of the debate, keep your eyes on them.

⁣Such was Woundwort’s monument, and perhaps it would not have displeased him.⁣
 — Watership Down (1972)