The word cisgender describes a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth, i.e., someone who is not transgender. The prefix cis- is Latin and means on this side of. The term cisgender was coined in 1994 as an antonym to transgender, and entered into dictionaries starting in 2015 as a result of changes in social discourse about gender. The term has been and continues to be controversial and subject to critique.
Alan Arthur Johnson is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for Education and Skills from 2006 to 2007, Secretary of State for Health from 2007 to 2009, Home Secretary from 2009 to 2010, and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2011. A member of the Labour Party, he was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle from 1997 to 2017.
David John Taylor is a British critic, novelist and biographer, who was born and raised in Norfolk.
The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" ; between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
Edward Docx is a British writer.
Johann Eduard Hari is a Scottish writer and journalist who wrote for The Independent and The Huffington Post. In 2011, Hari was suspended from The Independent and later resigned, after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001 and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct. He has since written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, the effect of technology on attention span, and anti-obesity medication, which have attracted criticism for inaccuracies and misrepresentation.
Wesley Paul William Streeting is a British politician who has served as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care since July 2024. A member of the Labour Party, he has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Ilford North since 2015.
Christine Burns is a British political activist best known for her work with Press for Change and, more recently, as an internationally recognised health adviser. Burns was awarded an MBE in 2005 in recognition of her work representing transgender people. In 2011, she ranked 35th on The Independent on Sunday's annual Pink List of influential lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the United Kingdom.
Alex Massie is a British journalist based in Edinburgh. He has served as the Scotland editor for The Spectator, and writes political columns for The Times and The Sunday Times. Massie is also a regular contributor to ITV Border, BBC Television and BBC Radio.
Laurie Penny is a British journalist and writer. Penny has written articles for publications including The Guardian,The New York Times and Salon. Penny is a contributing editor at the New Statesman and the author of several books on feminism, and they have also written for American television shows including The Haunting of Bly Manor and The Nevers.
Helen Alexandra Lewis is a British journalist and a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is a former deputy editor of the New Statesman, and has also written for The Guardian and The Sunday Times.
Paris Lees is an English author, journalist, presenter and campaigner. She topped The Independent on Sunday's 2013 Pink List, came second in the 2014 Rainbow List, and was awarded the Positive Role Model Award for LGBT in the 2012 National Diversity Awards. Lees is the first trans columnist at Vogue and was the first trans woman to present shows on BBC Radio 1 and Channel 4. Her first book, What It Feels Like For a Girl, was published by Penguin in 2021.
Casey Plett is a Canadian writer, best known for her novel Little Fish, her Lambda Literary Award winning short story collection, A Safe Girl to Love, and her Giller Prize-nominated short story collection, A Dream of a Woman. Plett is a transgender woman, and she often centers this experience in her writing.
Dawn Hayley Foster was an Irish-British journalist, broadcaster, and author writing predominantly on social affairs, politics, economics and women's rights. Foster held staff writer positions at Inside Housing, The Guardian, and Jacobin magazine, and contributed to other journals such as The Independent, The New York Times, Tribune, and Dissent. She regularly appeared as a political commentator on television and was known for her coverage of the Grenfell Tower fire.
Transgender rights in the United Kingdom have varied significantly over time, with transgender Britons facing many issues not experienced by non-trans individuals. These include various laws and public attitudes in regards to identity documents, as well as anti-discrimination measures used by or pertaining to transgender people, in the areas of employment, education, housing and social services, amongst others.
Mermaids is a British charity and advocacy organisation that supports gender variant and transgender youth. It also provides inclusion and diversity training. Mermaids was founded in 1995 by a group of parents of gender nonconforming children and became a charitable incorporated organisation in 2015.
Transgender literature is a collective term used to designate the literary production that addresses, has been written by or portrays people of diverse gender identity. Transgender literature has grown so rapidly in recent years that it is now the subject of a scholarly work published by a major academic press: The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature.
The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice is a 2021 non-fiction book by Shon Faye on the subject of transgender liberation in the United Kingdom. Faye explores how issues of social class, employment and housing insecurity, police violence and prisons, and sex work affect transgender people. She aims to make a left-wing argument for how transgender liberation would improve society more widely. Faye, a professional journalist, wrote the book largely in the first English COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. She drew from Revolting Prostitutes and Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race in her writing, while reviews frequently contrasted it with Helen Joyce's Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which was published in the same year. It became a bestseller in The Sunday Times.
Isabel Waidner is a German-British writer and cultural theorist based in London, England. They have written four novels: Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Sterling Karat Gold, We are Made of Diamond Stuff, and Gaudy Bauble. We are Made of Diamond Stuff was nominated for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and Sterling Karat Gold won the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize. They are also the editor of the anthology Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature and have written for numerous publications including Granta, Frieze, the Cambridge Literary Review, and AQNB.
