Hello and welcome again to Red Hacks, your favorite show on journalism,

socialism and being a journalist in a neoliberal world.

My name is John Romero, and I have the pleasure of hosting these conversations,

which have so far included New Statesman assistant editor, George Eaton,

renowned photojournalist Jess Heard, and veteran journalist and prominent author Paul Mason.

If you'd like to give those episodes a listen, please visit soundcloud.com slash forward

Paul Theory Other. You can find them all neatly filed under a playlist named Red Hacks.

And if you want to make sure you don't miss a single episode of this show or the regular

Politics Theory Other podcast, don't forget to follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook,

and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Podbean, or A-Cast.

First, the disclaimer, we are recording in our guest's living room,

so if you hear any background noise,

that's just the comings and goings of life in London.

I must say I am a little terrified of today's guest because while she's utterly,

utterly lovely, she has a reputation for making exhaustive notes for her own podcast, so I'm feeling

extremely vulnerable looking at my dodgy scribbles on my notebook and iPad. I'm speaking, of course,

of writer and filmmaker Julia Jakes, formerly a columnist for The Guardian and

the New Statesman, which were experiences that will surely feature heavily in this conversation,

and for which she got nominated for the Oral Prize in 2011 for her transgender journey,

Guardian blog. She's also published in a series of other renowned titles, such as the London

Review of Books, The Washington Post, the New York Times,

Granta and Freeze, as well as the author of the much-loved 2015 Verso book, Trans, a Memoir.

...