I know I can be naïve. Western-centred too. I write and campaign on a range of issues loosely described as "womens' issues" and "lgbt issues": but my focus, mostly, is on those things that go on in the UK, then Europe and, because of family ties, Eastern Europe.

There are...

Now listen very carefully - lawyers especially - I shall say this just the once: this is not incitement. Oh no. Definitely not. If, in any way, you should happen to read it as that, stop: go back and put on your post-modern super-ironic goggles and, I'm sure, you'll see...

To regulate or not to regulate: that... well, that really is NOT the question. Though if you'd listened to the news over the last 24 hours and heard the squeals of media mouthpieces in defence of self-serving privilege, you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Leveson, and the debate that...

Look out London: the students are coming. Again. And if police and press reports of the last major student demonstration, back in 2010, are to be believed, a torrid time is on its way.

But should we? Believe, that is, the sensationalist one-sided version we have been fed in the...

What? Did Twitter just pull the account relating to one of the UK's most exciting happenings for professional women this week because some whiny guy didn't like the idea of women getting equal air time? Or even worse, has the Twitter account for TheWomensRoomUK been pulled because...

When is an expert (not) an expert? That's a question somewhat in the news this week, following a fairly furious reaction from women not at all impressed by Radio 4's apparent inability to find female "experts" to discuss breast cancer on the Today programme.

Quite. It...

Sometimes, I hate being a journalist. No. Not the hours, the risks or the public kicking I take every other week from people who reckon that journalists sit somewhere between bankers and politicians on the scale of human infamy. But the fact that by taking on that title, I also...

Paedophiles are escaping justice as political interference with the forensics service means some police forces are pursuing only the worst and most serious of cases. Yet according to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) a failure to pursue low-level cases could mean that individuals committing actual...

Red faces over at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) as they became the latest in a long list of government departments to publish confidential information to the general public.

In this case, bungling officials appear to have given away the ATOS tender document for the new Personal...

At last! Depathologization day is here again - well, tomorrow, actually - and for once the world is looking in, listening, starting to take note.

Not before time!

Because while being trans in whatever form that takes is burden enough, it is made many times worse by the...

Time to wake up and smell the coffee! I have, it would appear, been paying far too much tax. Over the years, according to how well the scribbling business has done, an average of between 25% and 35% on my hard-earned dosh.

But no more. For thanks to

Ah, serendipity! No sooner do I tackle a subject as theoretical essay, than a real live example ups and bites me. In this case, it is a story i've covered, of a panto - trAnnie - planned for this December by the Sydney Opera House and...

I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but...as one Facebook poster receives a short sharp prison sentence for a series of vile posts about April Jones and Madeline McCann, and another receives a community service sentence for Facebook offense, I find myself not entirely in...

So the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have blundered and let loose into the wild some highly personal data on almost 300 individuals - both the convicted and, far more alarmingly, the acquitted. Am I surprised? Not in the least, though it saddens me to have to say so....

What a difference a day makes. Saturday in London and walking the mile or so from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square, I am buoyed up by the goodwill, the solidarity and the sheer bravery of the women - and men - who have turned out for Slutwalk....

As the British legal and political establishment indulges in one of its perennial bouts of breast-beating and public self-flagellation - this time over the wholly needless death of football fans at Hillsborough in 1989 - I hope you'll forgive me a slightly hollow laugh.

Why so? I mean, they're all...

At around 2:30 p.m. GMT theTtwittersphere -- or at least that bit of it that had been following the #porntrial topic in the UK -- erupted. Simon Walsh, who for the last 16 months has been waiting the chance to clear his name in court on charges of...

Two for the price of one! That might be highly desirable when it comes to grocery shopping, but slightly less so when it comes to offending minorities, as Peter Martindale appears to have done in a blog on HuffPost U.K. I am impressed, but not in a good way.