What this actually is.

Personal manifesto

A memory was juggled loose in my brain: how, in the 90s and 00s, we used to mock organisations in a simple and effective way — with a mirror.

A mirror of the website itself. A live, one-to-one copy, with a few basic phrase and word replacements applied on top, just enough to ridicule the key ideas the organisation was trying to present with a straight face.

Inspired by a glass of rosé — I refuse to divulge the size of it — I figured we could probably do a little better in the modern era. So the idea was born, discussed with a few close friends, and implemented before the wine ran out.

And now you are reading it. I’m sorry.

On a more serious note, the story I want this satire to tell is bigger.

It is about how people with money, spare time, and absolutely no hobbies use and abuse the pretence of institutional legitimacy to enforce their hate onto others. And when this is your operating scope, merely going along with the hate, merely accepting that it can exist, is never enough.

Many such organisations have long since stopped pretending otherwise. Their politics are not about debate, balance, or safeguarding. They are about making the lives of the people they target smaller, colder, more frightened, and less possible. They will not stop at disagreement. They will not stop at exclusion. They will not stop until the hate is complete, total, and ordinary.

This is not hyperbole. If you scoffed, or inhaled sharply through your nose, I urge you to actually read some of the documents, letters, and manifestos they send and publish.

For added hilarity, often enough those people are not even expert in their proclaimed domain of hate, as shown repeatedly in courts.

Sadly, they are not as amusing as what I have written here. It is deeply depressing to watch someone’s mind fall into such depths of all-consuming hate.

I have been fighting hate, in whatever form it presents itself, for all my life. For most of that life, I did so from a position of privilege. Now I am doing so from the trenches, and shockingly, now people seem most surprised that I keep fighting like my life depends on it.

Even though it does.

What it is

This site is a parody of advocacy organisations that campaign against the rights of transgender people in the United Kingdom.

The fictional charity "Hate Matters", its trustees, its campaigns, its briefings, its working groups, its donors, and its legal strategy are inventions. The archetype they parody is not. Every structural detail — the unqualified founders, the parliamentary submissions, the opposition tracker, the missing quorum, the aspirational American funding, the signature line repeated until it loses meaning, the letters that are firm in spirit — is drawn from the documented public behaviour of real organisations, none of which are named on this site.

Every named person, institution, publication, court case, and policy position on the rest of this site is fictional. Any resemblance to real organisations, persons, or campaigns is parody and commentary on matters of public interest.

Why it exists

The parody is unkind. It is meant to be. These are organisations that have caused, and continue to cause, real harm to trans people in the UK and internationally. They have done so with the language of reasonableness, evidence, and ordinary common sense. The purpose of this site is to make that language visible.

It is a personal project. It has no affiliation with any organisation, political party, or campaign. It is not funded. A solicitor's letter will not make it funnier, though it may make it more interesting.

A note

Everything on this site that is not on this page is in character.

We mean none of it.

We mean every line of criticism it implies of those it parodies.