(Repost) Gillette, Piers Morgan, and Steve from Hull.

AN: This is a repost of a piece I uploaded to other social media platforms, but realised I never posted here. It is from early January.

Gillette have just released an advert calling for people to stop dismissing toxic masculinity and abusive, bullying or harassing behaviours as 'boys being boys'. The advert shows children being bullied, women being touched inappropriately and without consent, cyberbullying occurring through texts, and men stopping themselves from crying or showing emotion when looking in the mirror.
Piers Morgan, embarking on one of his regular tirades, has taken to national television and the medium of Twitter to slate the advert and threaten to boycott the entire company of Gillette. (I'm sure they're shaking in their boots, Piers. Just absolutely quaking.)
Piers Morgan is well known for taking issue with companies attempting to promote basic human decency and equality, as his most recent issue with the Greggs vegan sausage roll provides a good example - a large food chain creates a product for the vegans among us, the dairy-allergic vegetarians, those with egg allergies, or consumers who simply wish to try something new. Morgan took it upon himself to slate the company, accuse Greggs supporters of bullying him (a really poor joke aimed at bullying sufferers and survivors), and even bite into one of the new products and 'vomit' on national television to show how disgusting he thinks the idea of food without carcasses in is. I mean, who would ever eat a vegetable?
Having scanned through Piers' tweets briefly and the replies to them, it's come as an absolute shock to me that there are a number of people actually supporting his latest tirade and boycotting Gillette for their advert. Whilst I'm sure Gillette aren't going to cry themselves to sleep at night over Steven, 47 from Hull refusing to buy their razorblades anymore, it just baffled me enough to make me want to write a post addressing those supporters and Morgan himself.

By boycotting a company as a result of such an advert, I hope you realise that you are taking a direct issue with that company calling for an end to abuse, bullying, sexual assault and rape, and the method of brushing it under the rug that is referring to the actions as 'boys being boys'. I personally saw nothing in the advert that struck me as 'PC gone mad', 'man hating' or any of the other phrases you are all throwing at the campaign. The images shown include a young boy being chased down by other children, made to cry in his mother's arms, a group of men with tears pricking their eyes forcing themselves to hold them back when looking in the mirror, and an audience of men watching and laughing at an actor pretending to 'grope' a woman's body when her back is turned for the sake of  entertainment. I had hoped that anybody with an ounce of humanity in their body would be opposed to such things and would support any attempts to stop them and reduce the excuses made for them on the grounds of them being 'kids being kids', 'natural' and 'masculine traits', yet Piers Morgan and the Twitter Brigade have surprised me once again. I can only pose this question to you, as you are clearly incapable of assessing issues unless they are directly related to you; what if it was your mother? Your sister? Your daughter? Your grandmother? Or your father? Your son? Your brother? Your grandfather?

If we start showing our children, our friends, our parents and siblings that it is okay to cry, it is never okay to touch somebody without their consent, and that bullying destroys lives then perhaps in the future we will actually live in the civilised world we should realistically be in by now, in this day and age. However, as long as blindly following media 'stars' because of their lack of a filter and the edge they apply to debates continues, we are never going to get anywhere and men are going to continuously think that campaigning for basic human rights to be adhered to is absurd and the result of a 'generation of snowflakes'; Morgan's evident favourite term.

Bravo, Gillette. Thank you for creating such a poignant advertising campaign and for addressing very serious issues in an understanding, respectful way.

And for everybody who takes an issue with the campaign, shame on you.
Shame on you for opposing to a male-targeted company campaigning for an end to the same toxic masculinity and abuse-excusing behaviour that kills people.

The rampant transphobia of Emile Ratelband

I recently had an argument with an oh-so-entitled stranger on the internet, who claimed that because she knows a couple trans people, she can decide what is transphobic and what isn't.
Emile Ratelband, if you haven't heard of this absolute imbecile, is a transphobe. He is the man who achieved internet fame by proposing to his country's courts that he should be able to change his age, as, and I quote, "people can change their gender". His reasoning behind this? He "would be able to get more women on tinder".
Perhaps, Emile Ratelband, at the age of 69 and a single father, you should focus on raising your nine children (two of whom you originally wanted to name after such materialistic goods as cars, which just says it all,) rather than how many romps you can attain on a dating site.

Ratelband's new-found fame has rightly offended and disgusted many LGBTQ+ people and their friends and families over the world, and has further enabled transphobes by giving them yet another bigot to agree with and quote in their narrative of how the world should work. By comparing a ridiculous choice such as changing your age so you can 'attract more women' to the absolute battle trans people face every day, you are belittling trans people and making a joke out of us. It further fuels the fire of hatred towards us, and that is one hundred percent Ratelband's sole intention. It only takes one look into Ratelband's personal beliefs and history to realise that he is a bigot and a transphobe. For one, he is a trump supporter - and a vote for trump is a vote for transphobia. He also claimed in one BBC interview that age is the biggest cause of discrimination, which is closed-minded and frankly laughable; try telling the black trans teen that he is privileged just because he is young. He reduces being transgender to a choice, and claims that in the Netherlands, there is absolutely no transphobia at all.

In addition to being transphobic, Emile stated that homosexuality is "not human and not healthy". The fact that people can still support this man after his rampant discrimination of the LGBTQ+ community is absolutely beyond me - and how people such as the individual I had a debate with can say that he is not transphobic purely because they know a trans person and thus can apparently make that decision, is mind-boggling.

The attitudes of people such as Ratelband directly contribute to the oppression of transgender people, and are one of the many reasons why 89 percent of trans people have thought about suicide. Bigoted viewpoints shouldn't be tolerated in a society that claims to be so progressive, yet they still are, and people such as Ratelband are given screen time and fame simply for being discriminatory. This has to end.

72 percent of trans people have self harmed at least once.
27 percent of trans people have attempted suicide.
89 percent of trans people have had thoughts of suicide.
55 percent of trans people have experienced workplace discrimination related to their gender identity.


48 percent of trans people in the UK have attempted suicide.

Why, as a disabled person, I shouldn't apologise for living life.

As a chronically ill disabled person, I spend a lot of my life at specialist appointments, with doctors and in the hospital. I've been chronically ill since the age of 16, when contracting infectious mononucleosis left me with myalgic encephalomyelitis. From then, my health spiralled, and I am currently diagnosed with more than five chronic physical conditions, along with multiple mental health conditions. I'm under the care of two physiotherapists, a neurologist, a cardiologist, a mental health specialist, an eating disorder specialist, an ehlers danlos specialist, a respiratory clinic, and a surgeon. So needless to say, trips to and from doctors' offices and hospitals can get tedious very quickly. This tends to impact my mental health quite severely, as whilst I am very aware that a lot of people have conditions that take up more time and are more life-limiting than mine, I feel like I'm spending my entire life in medical environments. Constantly wondering when my next flare will be. Wondering when my next admission will be.

This is why, when I am able to take a spontaneous day out, trip away, or just do something fun that doesn't fit with a healthy person's idea of how I should behave as a sick person - I refuse to apologise.

On a Tuesday morning in November of last year, I woke up unable to walk. I had partial paralysis, and my nervous system was sending signals entirely to my left leg as opposed to my left and right in equal measures, so my right leg was suffering hemiparesis. I'm incredibly lucky that I regained the ability to walk mostly unaided by March of this year, though my wheelchair and crutches are in the living room within easy reach as my neurologist informed me it's inevitably going to happen again with my condition.

This is why I will not apologise for having fun. For dancing in public. For spending a little extra money to go further afield so I can explore a new town. For walking when I can. For proving that disabled people don't have to fit your narrative and that sometimes we have fluctuations in symptoms, we have pain free days, or we choose to push through them to carry on living. I have been given the gift of movement in both legs again and I refuse to let it go to waste.