Staircase House

Staircase House was our destination this week. It’s a Grade II* listed medieval building dating from around 1460 situated in Stockport. The house is famous for its rare Jacobean cage newel staircase.

After a lovely meal sitting outside in The Courtyard at the Arden Arms – an old marketplace pub in Stockport – we walked up the hill to Staircase House. This is a real hidden gem. You can walk past it and not know it was there.

Very little is known of the property’s early history, though it is thought that it may have been the home of William Dodge who, in 1483, was the Mayor of Stockport.

The first residents of whom there is certainty were the Shallcross family who owned the House from 1605 to 1730. Members of the landed gentry, with their seat just across the county boundary, in Derbyshire, it was they who in 1618 installed the distinctive Jacobean cage newel staircase, from which the house takes its modern name.

The House, including the staircase, was painstaking restored using traditional materials, tools and techniques, following a major fire in 1995, the second of two arson attacks on the semi-derelict building.

There are lots of amazing photos to be seen here.

Elon Musk’s Twitter No Longer Shields LGBT+ People from Abuse

In October 2022 Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter. He emphasised that he will allow for looser rules over what people can say on the platform. Immediately, far-right users started to celebrate the ability to freely use homophobic and transphobic rhetoric and make threats on the social media platform.

One person posted a photo of a drag queen smiling at a young drag performer with the caption, “This is a groomer.” The word “grooming” has long been associated with mischaracterising LGBT+ people, particularly gay men and transgender women, as child sex abusers.

LGBT+ people already face disproportionate rates of online harassment. Roughly 1.5 million, or 15 percent, of 10 million online posts analyzed between 2016 to 2019 were transphobic, according to a 2019 report by anti-bullying organisation Ditch the Label.

Researchers from the Anti-Defamation League found that throughout 2020 and 2021, 64 percent of LGBT+ respondents said they experienced online hate and harassment, compared to 46 percent of Muslims, 36 percent of Jews and about a third of Black and Asian respondents.

Earlier this month, Elon Musk got rid of Twitter’s protections for transgender people.

It’s now totally okay for people online to bully and abuse trans folks by deadnaming and misgendering them without consequence.

As part of its policy, Twitter quietly altered a section dealing with transgender people. The section considers a policy violation if a user repeatedly uses slurs, tropes, or other content that reinforces negative stereotypes about a protected category.

In particular on 8 April 2023, Twitter removed a phrase that described “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

Targeted misgendering and deadnaming are explicitly prohibited in TikTok and Pinterest’s hate and harassment policies, while Meta has stated the same for Facebook and Instagram.