#TransOnTrains 🏳️⚧️😊
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Anna Nicholson
@transponderings@eldritch.cafe
mastodon 4.7.2+glitchAutistic+ADHD queer nonbinary woman
she/her (en)
I’ll sometimes talk about mathematics and linguistics, those being fields I attempted PhDs in (but burned out)
I’ll sometimes talk about activism
And sometimes I’ll talk about railway signalling
And cats 😽
1375 Followers
1164 Following
25 Posts
Joined April 27, 2022
Words:
Centralised social media:
Congratulations to Hannah Spencer in the Green Party of England and Wales’s first by-election victory! 💚
Extremely pleased to see my vote counting in Edinburgh Central, as @ScottishGreens@mastodon.scot elect their first ever constituency MSP.
Huge congratulations to @lornaslater@mastodon.scot! 👏💚💚
Great speech for Pride Month by Sarah Owen, chair of the UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee.
She puts most of her own parliamentary Labour colleagues to shame.
#PrideMonth #LGBTQ #TransRightsAreHumanRights #EHRC #UKTransphobia #UKPolitics
This year, Pride is more protest than party | Sarah Owen MP | Pride Month | FULL SPEECH
@SharonCrockett@toot.community The Trump one reminds me of those street performers who pretend to be statues.
That’s a lot of gold-coloured spray paint.
A practical way to support at least some of the trans kids whose healthcare has been withdrawn by NHS England: https://goodlawproject.org/help-fund-healthcare-for-trans-kids/
Interesting plot.
More useful for the vehicles, though, would be a measure of how efficient they are in terms of transporting people or goods rather than themselves, given that they’re not actually animals.
Tom Nicholas is very good here on the current piss-poor (pun intended) state of affairs for trans people in the UK:
Britain's New Transphobic Laws, Explained
A good analysis of where we stand in the UK in terms of trans rights and rights more generally:
‘The United Kingdom continues to serve as the launchpad for anti-trans pseudoscience worldwide.’
Erin Reed on a new salami-sliced NHS review used to justify reduction in healthcare for young trans people:
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/new-nhs-england-review-excluded-97
The BBC really are obsessed with Reform UK (Reform 2025 Ltd), aren’t they? Here are the Scottish Parliament election results so far, according to them.
No seats for Reform UK yet, and none ever elected previously. So why list them here?
No seats declared for the Scottish Greens yet either, but eight MSPs elected in 2021, two of whom were junior ministers in Sturgeon’s cabinet. Yet the Greens don’t get a mention here. Strange that.
Joanne ***King Rowling just can’t stop being evil.
It seems she’s managed to get the MHRA’s completely unnecessary trans-only puberty-blocker trial paused.
She really disgusts me. I feel so sorry for the trans kids who are being treated with such cruelty.
‘Reading worked so well for so long not because text is magic, but because books came with built-in boundaries. They end. Pages stay still. Libraries provide quiet. These weren’t features of literacy itself but of the habitats where literacy lived. We need to rebuild those habitats for a world where meaning travels through many channels at once.’
Carlo Iacono’s essay on ‘Books and screens’: https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem
(Available as a 23-minute listen for those who prefer that modality.)
Also, though not mentioned in the alt text, each toilet door also shows a tiny ♿︎ beside the toilet-symbol person.
Does this mean:
• there’s only room for children (or dolls) in wheelchairs?
• people using wheelchairs are much less important to them?
Actually, it’s probably both. 😞
#accessibility #disabled #disability #equity @distorted@transfem.social https://transfem.social/notes/aeqzsqtnhcux0ikd
A new unpost with some thoughts on the revised draft EHRC guidance, ‘laid’ before the UK Parliament on 21 May 2026
#EHRC #EqualityAct #trans #TransRightsAreHumanRights #women #equality
https://transponderings.blog/2026/05/28/not-feeling-great-but-not-giving-up/
Nice new statue of Elvis
Going outside is hard (an unpost)
I was going to meet Kitty this morning at EdinBrick, the annual Edinburgh LEGO show. Despite spending hours together every day, it’s actually been months since we’ve seen each other in person, and I was *really* looking forward to spending time with her.
But she’s been very stressed lately, not least because she’s preparing to move house, and she has a few other things to deal with this week. So it was always a possibility that she wouldn’t feel up to it, and yesterday she was erring on the side of not going.
I woke up at about 6, which I’ve been doing quite a bit in the brief time that I’ve been taking melatonin to help with my sleep. But I hadn’t had more than five hours’ sleep at that point, and I was feeling extremely anxious about going out later.
Read more:
https://transponderings.blog/2026/05/09/going-outside-is-hard/
New ‘unpost’ on my (now statically-generated, EU-hosted) blog:
https://transponderings.blog/2026/05/03/static-unpost/
(Social media cards not yet implemented fully, so please excuse any ugliness!)
Comment here or at https://ko-fi.com/annanicholson
Replying to
@jamdoodles@mastodon.art @squish@neurodifferent.me I have questions:
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Have you ever been charged for damaging hotel property?
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On the flip side, has a hotel ever offered to pay you for your work?
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Most importantly, do you turn the table over to paint it, or do you lie beneath it, like Michelangelo?
This is a really lovely episode of Rail Natter! 🥰
Gareth Dennis talks to Ashlynn Hudson-Welburn of the National Railway Museum’s ‘People, Pride and Progress’ project, about queer histories within the rail industry.
The recorded personal stories from around 46:50 are very moving and worth hearing if that’s all you have time for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdZVaCGtXs8
Info on People, Pride and Progress: https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/research-and-archive/people-pride-and-progress
#railways #history #RailwayHistory #QueerStories #LGBTQIA #Pride
The trans woman who gave us miniature trains | #Railnatter 293
Replying to
@JesseSkinner@toot.cafe @Bdellar@mastodon.social Actually, no
I am planning on sticking around (and will be deleting my birdsite account very soon)
But saying ‘boost if you X’ just feels like a holdover of birdsite-like behaviour, and an attempt to ‘go viral’ for the sake of it
(I have to admit that I boosted at first before realising I was being sucked into old patterns of behaviour. I don’t want to do that any more)
Replying to
@ingridphoenix@mastodon.online @jamdoodles@mastodon.art @squish@neurodifferent.me Not talking about the teenage mutant ninja turtle btw 😉
Replying to
@appassionato@mastodon.social Just the right amount of gibbous *chef’s kiss*
(A fuller moon would be inside the rainbow’s circle, and a less full one outside – I think.)
Replying to
@jalefkowit@vmst.io For anyone relying exclusively on the alt text, you’d be mistaken to think this is a highly detailed picture of three historical cars with some incidental human drama. 🙄
(I imagine those people could write very different stories using this photo as a writing prompt!)