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Metro
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Hundreds of thousands celebrate London Pride with focus on trans rights
A Pride party brightened up a drizzly central London today — although many of those thronging the streets had a serious message to deliver. Tens of thousands took part in the rainbow march taking place in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman. More than a million people overall were expected to attend the event, which includes the procession and stage areas, according to TfL Commissioner of Transport Andy Lord. Singer and actor Olly Alexander was among the LGBTQ+ artists who decried the court ruling and expressed fears trans people are being 'villainised more than ever'. The judgement was also criticised by writer Shon Faye and actor Ellis Howard, who stars in the BBC drama What It Feels Like For A Girl. Crowds danced on floats and walked in solidarity around city landmarks after the Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan shouted 'happy Pride' and more than a dozen motorcyclists from LGBTQ+ groups led the way. The procession of more than 500 organisations filed from Hyde Park Corner, through Piccadilly Circus, and on to the end at Whitehall Place. Ahead of the day, Pride in London said 35,000 participants would be 'marching in solidarity' in the main procession. With thousands of members from all over the world, our vibrant LGBTQ+ WhatsApp channel is a hub for all the latest news and important issues that face the LGBTQ+ community. Simply click on this link, select 'Join Chat' and you're in! Don't forget to turn on notifications! Bearskins of the Foot Guard Regiments were part of the scene as more than 400 members of the UK armed forces and related charities took part. There were shouts for 'trans rights now' as the engines roared and rain started to fall on Saturday afternoon. American pop singer Chaka Khan is due to appear on the Trafalgar Square stage as the headliner of the event, now in its 53rd year. Former Years And Years singer Alexander said: 'Trans people right now, they need our support and love more than ever, they're being villainised, demonised in the press, by a lot of the media, and trans people they're just like us… they're you, they're me. 'They deserve the same respect, the same rights, the same privileges, same opportunities, and that's why Pride is so important this year.' The event took place four months after the Supreme Court ruled that the words 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex. Shon Faye, author of Love in Exile and The Transgender Issue, said before the event: 'For the trans community in particular here in the UK, we've seen an onslaught of misinformation, attacks in the media, and unfortunately the roll back of human rights in the courts. 'I think (Pride) is more important than ever – I think a lot of trans people have been made to feel afraid in public space and pride this year is about taking back public space, and showing what we're not going to be silenced, and we're not going to be intimidated.' Howard played Paris Lees in the BBC dramatisation of her memoir and, like Alexander and Faye, was supporting trans rights charity Not A Phase at the parade. He told PA that 'we're in an incredibly precarious political time' and said Pride this year is 'more important than ever'. The actor added: 'I think it's so, so important that we show up as queers, as allies, and we celebrate. 'Joy is an act of resistance. 'I hope it shows queers of all ages that we stand with you, we are for you, and we love you'. Sir Sadiq said 'it was an honour and a privilege' to walk at the front of the procession. The city's mayor described the event as a 'defiant reminder that we must keep fighting for equality and take a stand against those seeking to roll back hard-won rights.' Ella Morgan, who was part of the Pride in London live commentary team, also reflected on the difficulties faced by the trans community in the past few years after the 'joy' of expressing her true self on holiday. Ella, who came out as a trans woman 15 years ago and spoke at the Metro's Pride Awards, said: 'Now I do feel ironically less happy. 'I'm more scared and I'm conscious of the places I think to visit. 'So I wanted to do things in America, work in America, and obviously that now is something I'm slightly worried about doing. 'I've been to America years ago and I felt really safe. 'Now because of the Trump administration and also I guess because of what's going on here as well, I was afraid my passport was going to be changed from female back to male. 'But I don't think it will stop me, I just think I'm conscious and I'll be worrying in my head a lot, not only about visiting another country but about what people will say and think.' Some headed on to after-parties, including at the Clapham Grand, which has become a focal point for LGBTQ+ events and parties. More Trending A spokesperson said: 'The Clapham Grand celebrates Pride with its biggest ever day of parties, headlined by Nadine Coyle, Bimini, Booty Luv, Tete Bang and many more, welcoming over 1,500 party people through their doors while also raising funds for trans+ charity, Not A Phase.' London Trans Pride is being celebrated on Saturday, July 26. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Full list of LGBTQ+ icons who won Metro Pride Awards revealed MORE: Trans woman 'covered in blood and bruises' after transphobic attack in street MORE: I moved to London dreaming of LGBTQ+ paradise — the reality is bleak
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The Independent
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Love in Exile: New book explains why we're still struggling to find love and romance
Finding love is a notoriously difficult task. With burnout from dating apps, healing from broken hearts, and the mind games and power plays of situationships, more people are struggling to find a partner than ever before. It's an issue that bestselling author Shon Faye tackles in her new book, Love in Exile. 'We ache for love, but love eludes us,' she opens in the preface to the text, which has become a sensation on social media. 'Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human.' Comparing romance to addiction, the writer says euphoric feelings of lust and attraction can cloud judgment and lead to confusion. 'At a cultural level there is a widespread mistaking of codependence for love in our culture,' she told an audience at the South Bank Centre in London on Wednesday (26 February). 'For example, if we take sentences that we often consider a sign of great passion and romance like, 'I think about all the time', 'I can't live without', 'I need', 'I don't know what I'm going to do without', and say that about heroin addiction. But if we say that about our ex...' However, she insists that true love is an act of will, and not a fleeting feeling, referring to the work of bell hooks. 'Love is an act of will, love is a verb, it's something we essentially get up to every day to choose to do for ourselves in the world,' she says. 'The idea of love [we have] is very similar to addiction.' An obsessive and euphoric kind of love can be a sign that it isn't real, says Faye. 'It's about the gratification of the obsessed, the object of the obsession is actually kind of irrelevant. It's mostly selfish. We're staring at the projection of a person.' She also adds that desire can complicate matters, with women being discouraged from owning their passion and being judged for expressing it. Rather, they are encouraged to emulate the object of desire. 'For women in a patriarchal society to even know what your own desire is and to be able to say it,' is a challenge. Childhood trauma, family dysfunctions and substance abuse, gender, all pose obstacles, for which the political system does not offer any support. Faye refers to her own experience as a transgender woman and believes that one of the biggest reasons love is difficult to find is because we live in a 'techno-capitalist dystopia'. In such a system we are encouraged to commodify ourselves in a transactional manner, making real love difficult to find. Friendships, family, and community all offer avenues for love and connection, which are undervalued in comparison to romantic relationships, she adds. 'Friendship provides us a model for moving forward,' she says. 'I talk a lot about friendship as a form of love that's very meaningful in my life. However, friendship serves no aims to capitalism whatsoever.' Ultimately, she says, we can only find love through courage and risk. 'The only thing I can do is try,' she writes. 'Love is, after all, something you only get better at giving and a little better at losing every time you actually try to do it. Learning this way, in practice not theory, humiliates and hurts sometimes. 'There's no way to feel love without also experiencing loss, which is terrifying. For me, acknowledging this terror is far better than trying to ameliorate it or wish it away. Love is a risky business, and it hurts. I want to bear witness to that and to still try anyway. Now, more than ever.'


The Guardian
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
On my radar: Shon Faye's cultural highlights
Born in Bristol in 1988, Shon Faye studied English literature at Oxford University and trained as a lawyer before turning to writing. She worked as editor-at-large at Dazed, and has contributed to publications including the Guardian, Vice, Novara and Vogue, where she writes the Dear Shon advice column. She hosts the Call Me Mother podcast, for which she interviews LGBTQ+ trailblazers. Faye's bestselling first book, The Transgender Issue, was published in 2021; her second book, Love in Exile, about the politics of romantic love and relationships, is out now on Allen Lane. She lives in London. Peggy by Ceechynaa This song came out last year, and my jaw dropped at the obscenity of it. Ceechynaa is a young UK drill rapper, and the narrator of this rap is a dominant, aggressive sex worker who humiliates men – Peggy is a word play on pegging – in a way that I feel would make a lot of men genuinely quite terrified. A lot of the music I've been listening to has been about female vulnerability, so it was refreshing to hear something that is the antithesis of that, and absolutely not for the male gaze. Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad Hammad originally delivered this essay as the Edward Said memorial lecture, days before 7 October. It looks at the idea of recognition scenes in fiction – what Aristotle called anagnorisis – when a character recognises something they already knew at some level, but they fully recognise the truth and it confronts them with the limitations of their own knowledge. She takes this idea and expands it to people coming to recognise the personhood of Palestinians. I listened to the audiobook recently and was astonished at the ferocity of Hammad's intellect. Procida, Italy This is an island off the coast of Naples where I wrote a lot of my book. I twice went there to work on my own – when I'm doing a first draft I tend to struggle in London because there are so many distractions. Procida is captivating for the imagination. I was watching The Talented Mr Ripley – since it's the older, better version of Saltburn – and I recognised that it was all filmed there. I took a lot of walks, and you become intimately aware of this small island and its landmarks. Brutto, London When I'm at a party and someone tells me to put on a song, I immediately become fearful that my music taste is terrible and everyone's gonna laugh at me – I feel like that about restaurant recommendations because I have so many friends who are foodies. But what I love about Brutto is that it's all Florentine, simple, Italian dishes. It's charming, it's unpretentious, and it's in Clerkenwell, so it's perfectly located. My friend Monica Heisey, the novelist, suggested it once for dinner in September, and I've become totally obsessed with it. Now it's my go-to spot. Pedro Almodóvar I'm a huge Almodóvar fan – I enjoyed his new film The Room Next Door, but I've been thinking recently about 2004's Bad Education. I first saw it when I was a teenager, and there's a section where Gael García Bernal plays a transgender woman called Zahara. Now it's quite problematic, because he's a cis man, but he looked so beautiful, and I wasn't used to seeing representations of trans women in that way. I love that Almodóvar integrated trans characters in quite a humanised way, especially for the time. Anglophone cinema still has a way to go to catch up with Spanish-language cinema on this. Dilara Findikoglu I don't impulsively spend as a rule, but the last time I felt a little bit heartbroken over a man, I went to a Dilara sample sale in east London. They had this Fire dress – Julia Fox wore one – which is heavily corseted, and I ended up walking out with one that, to be honest, I've only really worn on one occasion. It was pure: 'I want to make myself feel better using a bit of consumerism.' I love that Dilara's designs espouse a kind of gothic femininity: high cinching but also hard and strong, like a warrior.


The Guardian
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shon Faye on love and dating as a trans woman
Shon Faye, author of Love in Exile, shares her experiences of trying to find love: from a trans teen who thought themselves unworthy of love, to a party girl in her 20s – and now, a woman with a deeper understanding of what real love is. She tells Hannah Moore how recovering from alcohol addiction helped to reframe her understanding of love. 'I started to think about this idea of love and romantic love being an antidote to this deeper feeling of being unlovable, and how much of that had probably been the wrong basis to seek out romantic love to begin with, although I think so many of us do.' Shon tells Hannah what she learned in her first serious relationship, her time on dating apps, and her time writing her advice column, Dear Shon, for US Vogue. Support the Guardian today:


The Guardian
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love in Exile by Shon Faye review
Sometimes, if you are a straight woman, it can be tempting to see your sexuality as a curse. It is a cliche to talk about the uselessness of men, but I do it anyway: it is a neat way of avoiding the fact that I too can be selfish and cruel to the men who go out with me. Writing in the New Inquiry in 2019, Asa Seresin used the term 'heteropessimism' to refer to this tendency among straight women. As Seresin points out, this way of thinking is not terribly helpful, because it is really an abdication of responsibility. If men are irredeemable, and loving men is always going to make women unhappy, then we don't have to attempt the difficult work of trying to make our relationships more equitable. What makes Shon Faye's memoir about love so refreshing is that it resists heteropessimism, and tries to do something more hopeful. Faye is a trans woman who spent years convinced that she would always be an 'exile' from the closed world of heterosexual romance, but the idea she puts forward in this book is that this sense of exclusion is not unique to her. Faye argues that, collectively, we ask too much of romantic love: we expect it to solve all of our problems and when, inevitably, it doesn't live up to the hype, we feel excluded from the 'happy kingdom' of successful partnership. Instead of blaming men for love's disappointments, Faye analyses her breakups to try to imagine better ways of approaching relationships. This is a memoir but it is also a kind of self-help book. Faye is trying to teach herself – and her reader – how to love in a different way. Much of Faye's writing is deeply personal, but a political thesis underpins Love in Exile. Drawing on the work of the academic Mark Fisher, Faye argues that, under capitalism, love has been privatised. The erosion of the welfare state has put intolerable stress on couples by making romantic love the exclusive source of affection that should properly be found outside the home, in labour unions and within communities. Faye's analysis is not vague here – she references specific cuts to local authority budgets that have chipped away at the social care infrastructure – but still, I found these parts of the book unconvincing. Faye argues that we idealise romantic love as the source of all meaning and happiness because capitalism has failed us, stating that we began to conceive of love as 'transcendent' and 'quasi-spiritual' during the industrial revolution, when community bonds started to dissolve. I don't doubt that better social care provision would alleviate strain on couples, but blaming your failure to find love on capitalism, as Faye does here, feels a bit of a reach to me. Haven't human beings throughout history always turned to their lovers for a specific form of intimacy and affection that cannot be replaced by community support networks, even if they were fully funded? Also, if we have to end capitalism before we can attempt to have successful romantic relationships, then my future – as a single, 33-year-old woman – looks bleak. Love in Exile is more enlightening when Faye suggests specific changes we can effect – on an individual level – to make our relationships more enriching. Throughout the book, she pushes herself to acknowledge her own role in creating dysfunctional relationship dynamics. Writing about sex, Faye suggests that she actually presents herself as less desirous than she really is in order to shore up her gender identity: 'The more I present myself as a passive actor in sex, the more I satisfy the cultural demand placed on trans women to be non-threatening. The more I – frankly – seem like a woman to others.' The best writing in this bookacknowledges that we fall in love in a capitalist patriarchy, but doesn't pretend that women are only ever passive victims of those systems. Heteropessimism is fun because it is easy. To be reminded that you have agency is uncomfortable, but it is also freeing. In a chapter towards the end Faye writes about how to cultivate kindness and compassion towards herself. This is the closest Love in Exile gets to straight self-help, as Faye shares strategies like learning to 'say no' more, and trying to silence her own internal critical voice. (Faye is so funny and self-deprecating that her advice is never preachy, but she writes that one thing that has brought her some measure of peace is regular prayer.) Love in Exile is sincere in a way that reminds me of bell hooks' 1999 book All About Love, which Faye cites as an influence. Like hooks, Faye is prepared to mine every experience, and share every hard-won lesson to try to get her reader to love in better ways – even if those lessons are, in their very earnestness, exposing. I find her vulnerability generous. There is no redemption arc here. Faye writes in her postscript that she hasn't found romantic love, or even total self-love. She suffered a new heartbreak in the middle of writing the book, and was shocked to discover that she had 'acquired no new mastery over my own emotions'. It hurt just as much. But the end of this book is, crucially, optimistic. Faye refuses cynicism and commits to trying again. Her writing will shake your illusions about love, but remind you of the value of even attempting it. By the time I put down this book I felt hopeful about men, and heterosexuality in general – which, considering I read it in the aftermath of a breakup, is no small thing. Love in Exile by Shon Faye is published by Allen Lane (£18). 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