Author: Cheryl

Coronavirus – Day #92

~ Cheryl

Well, as you’ll see from the post below, today wasn’t great. On the other hand, it has been great to have it out in the open at last. We in the trans community have known for a long time that the true objective of the anti-trans movement was to take away our civil rights. Now they have been given what they wanted — the GRA reforms have been scrapped — and yet the government is already saying that they are planning a massive curtailment of trans rights. Even though there is no evidence that the rights that we have enjoyed for the past 10 years have caused any problems.

I note also that this is very selective protection of women. In 2017 and 2018 147 women in the UK were killed by violent men. We don’t have the final count for 2019 yet, but the total is at least 115. We also know that violence against women has increased substanially during Lockdown. Conviction for rape is now so difficult in this county that many people are saying it is no longer a crime. The government is doing nothing to tackle this massive problem, and yet it is putting significant effort into “protecting” women from people like me. Hopefully most people can see how crazy this is.

Anyway, there will have to be major changes in my life in the near future. I will need to devote much more time to protecting my community, and indeed focusing on my own safety. I am very aware of the possibility that I may have to leave the UK in order to avoid being forced to detransition.

Watch this space.

The Government War on Trans People Begins

~ Cheryl

Today’s papers have the news that the UK government is ready to move forward on reform of trans rights. The government has leaked to the Sunday Times that it will not be implementing the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), and will instead be introducing proposals to protect the British people from dangerous trans folks.

By far the most remarkable part of this is the revelation that 70% of respondents to the government survey on GRA reform were in favour of the proposals put forward by those notorious radicals, Theresa May and Amber Rudd. However, the proposals are still being rejected because the government believes that the Wrong Sort of People responded to the consultation.

If only they had been so sensible about the 52% of people who voted for Brexit, eh?

Also, given that trans people make up around 1% of the population, I find it hard to understand how we could have swamped responses to a public consultation, especially because almost every national media outlet, including the Guardian and the BBC, were encouraging people to reject the reform proposals.

But we are where we are. The government is determined to move forward as it sees fit, and it has made clear that even a supermajority of public opinion will not be allowed to stand in its way. So what does it all mean? Like most things pertaining to trans people, the announcement in the Sunday Times is full of coded language that can seem harmless but may hide all sorts of nastiness.

I should note, by the way, that I have no reason to believe that the Sunday Times has got this wrong. One of their reporters who led their campaign against trans people until recently was rewarded, after the General Election, with a post as a senior advisor to the Prime Minister.

One way in which we can try to decode what the announcement means is to look at what is already being done. Some time ago the government announced a legal inquiry into the operation of the Tavistock and Portman clinic in London, which provides the vast majority of health care for trans youth in the UK. The Tavi is well known to be deeply conservative in its practices. When asked to recommend international best practices for trans youth I normally point people to the official guidelines in the USA and Australia. However, a week and a half ago NHS England issued new guidelines for the treatment of trans youth that characterised the services that the Tavi provides as experimental and dangerous. This gives the inquiry no choice but to find that the Tavi is operating improperly, and to either order them to change their practices or close them down.

Those new guidelines also cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of treatment for trans adults.

One of the proposals listed by the Sunday Times is as follows:

There will be a crackdown on “quack” doctors to ensure that only reputable medics can give approvals.

This is obviously a direct attack on Dr. Helen Webberley and her Gender GP service, but the UK has a long and inglorious history of attacking anyone who sets up in private practice to help trans people. All of these people have been reputable medics with appropriate qualifications, but they have all been attacked (with the connivance of senior NHS doctors). Every single private gender expert that I have seen has been forced out of business. As I understand it, Dr. Webberley has moved her operations overseas.

The reason that private operations such as these exist is that waiting times for a first appointment at UK Gender Identity Clinics (GICs) were around 3 years as of before the pandemic. All services are currently on hold. Once services start up again that will have increased signifcantly. That’s 3 years before you see anyone at all, and probably at least another 6 months before a second appointment and approval for you to start treatment.

One of the ways in which trans people have navigated this problem is to initiate transition themselves. They transition socially. They may obtain medication from someone like Dr. Webberley. And until recently NHS guidelines suggested to GPs that they could provide a “bridging prescription” to tide people over until they could get officially taken on by a GIC. That guidance was withdrawn fairly recently. (Sometime last year, as I recall.) So one of the questions I am asking is, what if “quack doctors” include GPs who have provided treatment to trans patients who are not yet with a gender clinic? Will they soon be banned from doing so, under pain of being struck off?

It is rather ironic that a government that is hell-bent on privatising as much of the NHS as possible is also trying to prevent any private practice in the case of trans health.

The Sunday Times also talks about new national guidelines on access to toilets. They talk about how the general public does “not support transgender women with male anatomy accessing female-only facilities”. This is deeply disingenous of them. The current treatment protocols for trans people require that you show you can live full time in your correct gender for a period of time. The GRA states 2 years, though most GICs currently require less than that. This so-called “real life test” includes navigating public life. If trans women are not able to use public toilets, changing rooms and so on, they will fail the test and not be allowed surgery or a legal gender change.

The Sunday Times report also talks about a crackdown on the provision of gender neutral toilets. This does not protect cisgender people in any way. When asked to give advice on toilet provision I always note that gender neutral facilities should either be an addition for those who need them, or that they should be entirely separate cubicles such as you find on trains and aircraft. Gender-specific toilets can still exist alongside them. That way anyone who is unconfortable accessing a “male” or “female” toilet will have somewhere safe to go. That will include non-binary people, and butch lesbians, as well as pre-surgery trans women. It looks like this option will be banned.

Then there are the waiting lists. There are currently thousands of trans women in the UK who have transitioned successfully but have either yet to be accepted by a GIC, or are still waiting for a date for surgery. All of these women will be left in limbo by such regulations. Even going to work will be difficult for many of them. Thank goodness for Lockdown, because currently no one is surprised that we are afraid to leave home.

What about people like me? I successfully completed all of the required tests years ago when treatment protocols were much more stringent. I’ve had genital surgery and I am legally recognised as female. Will I be safe under these new proposals? Possibly not.

To start with, in the 20+ years since surgery I have had continual problems with GPs who have been unwilling to provide me with the hormones I need to stay healthy. There has been an ongoing spat between the GICs and the Royal College of GPs, with the latter pushing for a position that all health care for trans people should be conducted by GICs because it is “too complicated” for ordinary GPs. The GICs, being massively overloaded, have pushed back against this. They discharge people into GP care as soon as they have had all of the surgery they want.

Remember that I suggested that GPs might be banned from providing hormones to trans people before they access a GIC? What happens if they are banned from providing hormones after surgery as well? The government will say that there is no problem because people like me will be able to go to a GIC for prescriptions. But there will be at least a 4-year waiting list, and having thousands of people like me apply to be taken on will only make matters worse.

None of this will even require any legislation. All that is required is for the NHS to change official guidelines and threaten GPs with being struck off if they disobey. As we have seen with the changed guidelines for trans youth, they are already willing to do this.

Another point raise by the Sunday Times is as follows:

Safeguards will be put in place to protect “safe spaces” for women, reaffirming provisions in the Equality Act.

What does this mean?

UK readers will remember that the Tories have long been opponents of equalities legislation. David Cameron’s government spent a long time trying to find a way to repeal the Human Rights Act. The fact that they were unable to do so while still part of the EU was a significant driving force behind Brexit. The government does not want to do anything to equalities legislation except dismantle it.

A key feature of anti-trans arguments (for example Rowling’s recent screed) is that trans rights somehow take away rights from cis women. They want equalities legislation changed so that “sex-based rights” always trump the rights of trans people. This sort of thing appeals to the government because it can be endlessly extended. If they get this done, then they can argue that the rights of religious people trump the rights of LGBT+ people, that the rights of Christians trump those of non-Christians, that the rights of white people trump the rights of non-white people, and that the rights of men trump those of women.

The government knows that it is impractical to pass a law banning trans women from “women-only” spaces. It doesn’t want to be seen to be responsible for putting police guards on toilets and changing rooms. What they will do instead is to amend the guidance for the Equality Act to note that any person or organisation that allows a trans woman (whether she is legally female or not) access to a “woman-only” space is committing an act of discrimination against cis women. They will then sit back and wait for the rash of law suits that will force organisations to rescind their trans-inclusive policies.

In the USA a couple of days ago the *Unpresident changed legal guidance so that it is no longer an offence to refuse medical treatment to trans people. What I think the UK government is proposing is far worse. They will make it a crime for an orgnisation to be trans inclusive, even if it wants to be.

Finally there is the point about outlawing gay conversion therapy. This is generally being seen as a sop to the LGB community, and an effort to further divide them from their trans allies. “Don’t make a fuss over the trans thing,” the government is saying, “and we will give you this other thing you have always wanted.” But it could be much more than that, because the anti-trans movement has long claimed that gender reassignment is, de facto, gay conversion therapy.

Back when I transitioned, it was absolutely essential that I claimed to be sexually attracted to men, otherwise I would be deemed not feminine enough to be allowed to transition. Thankfully that wasn’t a problem for me, but others had to lie to get through. Suppose, however, that claiming to be sexually attracted to men was also taken as proof that I was “really gay”, because I was “really a man”. Anti-trans LG people firmly believe this is the case, and that “their people” are being stolen by gender clinics.

If the government listens to the anti-trans lobby, and they have shown every sign of doing so enthusiastically, then they could quite easily define gender transition as “gay conversion therapy” as an excuse to ban it.

Now of course none of this has happened yet. It is possible that the government is not in fact as devious and cruel as I think it is. But I’m not going to bet on that. We need to be prepared for the possibility that such changes will be introduced, and that they will be disguised by weasel words to make them seem harmless. The misinformation campaign over GRA reform has shown just how dishonest the opposition can be when it comes to trans rights.

The question is, will anyone care? Obviously vastly more people who do care are on our side than are not. The results of the consultation proved that. But the vast majority of the UK population did not respond. Nevertheless, they should care about what is being done to trans people right now, because we are the canary in the coal mine. Also we are running out of time.

Last week the government confirmed that they would not be seeking an extension to the Brexit negotiations because of the pandemic, and that they will be continuing their intransigent negotiating stance. This means that a very hard Brexit currently looks inevitable, and as a consequence the UK will suffer a massive economic disaster in January. We need to stop this. We need causes to rally around. The Black Lives Matter campaign appears to be one of them. I am hoping that the sheer cruelty of the government’s treatment of trans people might be another one.

The other interesting political wild card is Scotland. The Scottish government has published a Bill implementing the proposed GRA changes, and has promised to progress it once the pandemic is over. I have long wondered why Nicola Sturgeon has insisted on this, given that one of her main allies, Joanna Cherry, is violently transphobic. My assumption is that for the SNP independence always comes first, and that Ms. Cherry is privately prepared to accept a temporary increase in trans rights in Scotland if that provokes a massive row with Westminister.

We surely live in interesting times.

As usual with such things, comments are closed on this. You know how to find me if you need to talk.

Coronavirus – Day #91

~ Cheryl

Dear Goddess, that was a long day. I spent 6.5 hours on Zoom in a virtual academic conference during the day, and a further 2.5 hours on Zoom in Virtual Ã…con in the evening. I am all Zoomed out.

It was a lot of fun, though. My thanks to both sets of organisers.

I gather from Twitter that today has been a day of nation-wide activity by the All Lives Matter movement (who don’t actually care about your life unless you are white, cis and straight). They claim to have been responding to planned attacks on war memorials by “BLM thugs”, but no such attacks appear to have taken place, and the BLM people are entirely bemused as to where the idea came from. These brave defenders of Britain’s legacy in WW2 have been keen to demonstrate their admiration for Winston Churchill by, er, giving Nazi salutes.

From what I’ve seen on Twitter, these protesters are all of a certain type. They are all white, they all appear to drink copious quantities of lager while on duty, and their bodies indicate that this has been a life-long habit. I have only seen one woman amongst them, and she was wearing an anti-trans t-shirt.

I am fully expecting tomorrow’s papers to be full of stories of how these brave warriors fought off violent mobs of dark-skinned “antifa” rioters, with no help from the traitorous police.

I should note, by the way, that one of the people I was talking to today is Polish. He tells me that in Poland government ministers are openly declaring that LGBT+ people are “not human”. I guess that makes a change from “tank-topped bumboys”.

Coronavirus – Day #90

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today has been pretty horrible for a variety of reasons that I won’t bore you with. Suffice it to say that I think we have passed a tipping point of sorts in that public opinion in the UK has swung so far against trans people that many people who used to be allies will no longer be prepared to stand up for us because it is too politically risky to do so.

On the other hand, I get to spend tomorrow at an academic conference on queer history, which should be a lot of fun.

Elsewhere, people continue to die in large numbers. However, I’ve seen some interesting research that suggests that wearing face masks is more effective than social distancing at preventing the spread of COVID-19. If that’s true it would be very helpful in getting the world back to normal again.

Free Webinar on LGBT+ in the Workplace

~ Cheryl

On Tuesday next week (12:30 UK time) I will be a guest on a webinar run by Benefex, a company that helps employers make better use of their employees by treating them better. Given the current atmosphere in the UK, I have no doubt that it will be highly contentious. It might even get me on the front page of The Times again. We shall see.

Anyway, if you are interested, you can sign up for free.

This Week on Ujima – C-19, Genetics and #BLM

~ Cheryl

As I mentioned yesterday, my Ujima show for this week got postponed until yesterday morning thanks to technical issues. It is now available on the Listen Again service, and you can find it here. That page might not say it is Women’s Outlook, but that’s because it is an automated system.

I only had one interview this week. It is with Professor Julian Gough who used to be at Bristol University and is at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge (MRC). He’s involved in a project to look at possible genetic links to COVID-19 susceptibility. This is obviously of interest at Ujima because of the much higher death rates in people from non-white ethnic backgrounds.

There’s a potentially contentious issue here because of the focus of people like Cummings on eugenics, but that’s medical nonsense. All human DNA is very similar. The difference between individual humans is around 0.1%, and we are only 1.2% different from chimps. So the racist nonsense that somehow white people are completely different and massively superior to all other humans is just that, nonsense. However, as Professor Gough explains, some genes are linked to specific diseases (breast cancer, for example), and sometimes those genes are more prevalent in some ethnic groups than others. Furthermore, if there is a C-19 gene, it might not be ethnically linked, but instead be widespread throughout the population, because we already know that systemic racism is a major cause of health inequalities.

A key part of Professor Gough’s work is that he needs data, and you can help. Or at least you can if you have had your DNA sequenced. It doesn’t matter whether you know whether you have had C-19 or not, or even if you’ve had no symptoms. And it doesn’t matter where in the world you live, because the pandemic is global. So if you have DNA data, Professor Gough would love to hear from you. You can join the project here.

By the way, I did ask about data security. UK universities are very strict about such things. Your data is far more at risk from the private companies that do the seqencing than from the MRC.

The rest of the show was taken up with me pontificating about statues taking dip in Bristol harbour, and playing lots of civil rights songs by Black artists. Here’s the playlist:

  • Tracy Chapman – Taking about a Revolution
  • Tom Robinson Band – Long Hot Summer
  • David Byrne – Hell You Talmbout
  • Bob Marley – Slave Driver
  • Black Roots – Bristol Rock
  • Amaal Nuux – Last Ones Down
  • The Specials – Racist Friend
  • Eddy Grant – Boys in the Street
  • Beyoncé – Freedom
  • Jimmy Cliff – Peace Officer
  • Prince – Baltimore
  • Alicia Keys – We Gotta Pray
  • Stevie Wonder – Living for the City
  • James Brown – Black and I’m Proud
  • Otis Redding – Change is Gonna Come
  • Janelle Monáe – Hell You Talmbout

Silence is the Enemy, and Sound is the Weapon.

Coronavirus – Day #89

~ Cheryl

Bleargh. Aside from a half hour break to cook dinner, I have been in Zoom meetings from 13:00 to 19:30 solid. That’s a lot of staring at people’s faces.

The radio show did run in the 10:00-12:00 slot today. I’ll do a proper post about it tomorrow.

If anything exciting happened in the outside world, aside from various transphobes venting bile, I was too busy to notice.

I can haz sleep nao?

Coronavirus – Day #88

~ Cheryl

Apparently Bozo has made some complicated announcements about “social bubbles” or some such. I do live alone, but I have no one I could form a bubble with. In any case, given the insane levels of transphobia in the UK these days, I feel much safer self-isolating. That way no one can feel threatened by my “violent” presence.

Wizard’s Tower and BLM

~ Cheryl

Lots of organisations have been posting statements about how they intend to be better at supporting people of colour, and in particular Black people, in the future. Many of those, I suspect, will prove to be PR exercises, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that I haven’t yet said anything about Wizard’s Tower, so here we go.

None of the novels we publish are by people of colour. Nor, to my knowledge, are there any stories by people of colour in any of the anthologies that we publish. There are people of colour in the non-fiction parts of Adventure Rocketship, for which we have the ebook rights. I’m very pleased about that because the book is about the intersection between science fiction and music.

I would very much like to publish more work by people of colour, but when someone, anyone, comes to me and inquires about getting published my first reaction is always to ask them if they are sure, and can they not get a better deal with someone else. There are plenty of very talented people of colour out there, and they should be getting published by mainstream publishers, not having to resort to a tiny outfit like mine.

I will note that I have one anthology of translated fiction in publication, and have another two hopefully forthcoming this year. That’s something else that is a hard sell with bigger publishers, but I’m always happy to look at.

I try to do the LGBT+ stuff too. Lyda, of course, is a lesbian. Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II has three stories by trans people in it. If you have books that bigger publishers won’t touch because of queer content, do come to me. Ditto any other marginalised theme.

It is embarassing not to have any writers of colour on our books. All I can say is that it is not by design. Given the way that publishing works, a whole bunch of the writers of colour who are being taken on by the big companies right now will get dropped after a couple of books. If that happens to you, do come to me for future projects, because rescuing mid-list writers who have been dumped is what Wizard’s Tower was set up to do. If you are not published yet, keep an eye on any anthology projects we might announce, but have ambition. You can crack professional markets. Go for it!

No Show

~ Cheryl

Today’s radio show did not air as planned. I don’t know exactly why, but getting the show scheduled does involve a bunch of computer stuff. Also Ujima staff have been run ragged over the past few days because of the whole Colston issue. I think the show will air at 10:00am tomorrow, but regardless of when it does it will be available on the Listen Again system. I will let you know when that happens.

Coronavirus – Day #87

~ Cheryl

I did my weekly trip to Tesco today. The stocks appear to be fairly normal now. There are plenty of types of flour in stock. I didn’t see any yeast, but I didn’t look very hard. A few more people were wearing masks, but its still a very small proportion of the total.

The after effects of Sunday’s events in Bristol continue to ripple around the world. Kevin tells me that we were on CBS radio news yesterday. Meanwhile in Europe statues are falling.

In the Belgian city of Ekeren, a statue of King Leopold II, the man responsible for the atrocities in the Congo, has been taken down and is being sent to a museum. It looks like it was sprayed with paint during protests over the weekend.

In London a statue of a slave trader called Robert Milligan has been removed from West India Quay. I got that info from a tweet by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, so again this was an official removal.

It sounds like civil authorities are trying to head off any further statue dunking by pre-emptively removing potentially controversial figures. Result!

Coronavirus – Day #86

~ Cheryl

Social media is still buzzing away talking about dumping statues in the sea. I’m pleased to see that Avon & Somerset police are defending their wise decision not to attack the protesters in an attempt to save a statue of a slave trader. I’m sure they prevented a lot of violence, injury and damage to property by doing so. I’m also pleased to see Mayor Marvin and city notables such as Thangam Debbonaire MP and Cleo Lake standing up for them. I believe that Kerry McCarthy MP was trying to do so in a Law & Order debate in Parliament today, but the Tories have so thoroughly manipulated the parliamentary process that she probably didn’t get a chance to speak.

In stark contrast the government has been spitting furious. There’s no doubt that the likes of Bozo and his Home Secretary, Priti Patel, wanted the police to attack the protestors so as to precipitate a violent confrontation. Sadly the Police Federation has not behaved any better. And Bozo had the cheek to say today that Britain is “not a racist country”. In a YouGov poll released this evening 33% of respondents said that they thought we should have statues honouring slave traders.

In the midst of all this I have been putting together a radio show. There might be rather a lot of civil rights protest songs in it.

Coronavirus – Day #85

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Well, what a day!

Things began overnight with a certain very rich writer of dubious children’s books spouting transphobia over her Twitter feed. I had to unfollow and block one person, but in general I was very proud of the way my own personal social media bubble rallied round. Good show, people!

Just about when that was starting to die down, the Black Lives Matter demo began in Bristol. I wasn’t able to attend, and indeed many of the Black people I know stayed away because of health fears. Cleo Lake and some other community leaders organised an online protest with the hashtag #BristolTakeTheKnee, which I participated in. And then I got on with some work.

The next thing I knew, people had toppled the statue of Edward Colston and dumped it in the harbour.

For those of you who don’t know, Colston made an huge fortune from slave trading. He did pay some of it back by donating money that helped the city, but that’s no excuse for all the lives he destroyed. However, because of that philanthropy he had various things in the city named after him, and a statue erected in his honour. Much, if not all, of this was done in late Victorian times long after the slave trade had been abolished and when the white population of the city had managed to forget its horrors.

The Black people of Bristol did not forget. For decades now they have been campaigning to have Colston’s name removed from the city. Many of my friends from Ujima have been involved in that. Members of the white establishment have fought them every inch of the way. Last year the concert hall agreed to change its name, but attempts to even acknowledge Colston’s unsavoury habits on the plaque on his statue were ferociously resisted. We all know what happens when attempts at calm and reasonable protest are blocked.

A couple of things are worth noting. Firstly the actual act of toppling the stautue seems, from the video I have seen, to have been done by young white men. When Tim Maughan wrote about the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft in Infinite Detail he wasn’t joking, and didn’t make it up. Secondly, while Avon & Somerset Police maintained a presence at the demonstration, they did not attempt to intervene or attack the crowd. Those responsible for actually toppling the statue will be investigated, but public safety was maintained and there was no violence. This sounds very different from what police in London and Manchester have been up to.

The government is, of course, livid. I would not fancy being Marvin Rees (the Mayor) or Sue Mountstevens (the Police Commissioner) tomorrow morning.

I understand that the BBC has given air time to both David Olusoga and to my friend Olivette Otele, both of whom are more than capable of explaining just why so many people in Bristol want Colston gone.

And now I have to make a radio show. It will air on Wednesday, but I should deliver it by the end of tomorrow. And I won’t have time to do any interviews. I have been collecting civil rights songs to play.

Coronavirus – Day #84

~ Cheryl

It rained quite heavily today. Clearly the English summer has arrived. Are we back to “normal”? Somehow I doubt it.

Anyway, I spent the day reading, writing a paper about Roman philsophers, cooking, and attending an online event. I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not leaving home.

This weekend people seem more angry with the Unpresident than with Bozo, which I’m sure will be a great relief in Westminster.

Coronavirus – Day #83

~ Cheryl

Who would think that radio and TV could be so tiring? Today I recorded an interview for next week’s radio show, and did the broadcast with Dan mentioned in the previous post. Then I collapsed and slept for a couple of hours. Part of me suspects that if I was back having to travel to meetings I would not be coping at all well.

Anyway, stuff got done. Hopefully people will be entertained by it.

The news from the outside world is that the R number in the south west has crept above 1. R is a measure of the nuber of people infected by each infectious person, so an R above 1 means that the number of cases is accelerating. This is not good.

I know that there is a major Black Lives Matter demonstration planned for Bristol on Sunday. Folks, if you are at all at risk, please don’t go. The City Council (which of course means Marvin Rees and Asher Craig, both of whom are Black) has this suggestion for showing solidarity on social media instead.

The Dan & Cheryl Show

~ Cheryl

Today I did my thing with Dan Vo for the Queer Britain Lockdown Hunt. It was a lot of fun. I covered a range of queer history books ranging from the 20th Century back to the 2nd. I also mentioned four science fiction and fantasy books. They were:

  • Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
  • Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
  • Friday by Robert A. Heinlein
  • Triton by Samuel R Delany

Obviously there’s a huge amount of queer SF&F that I could have mentioned, and I tweeted about several others, but those four had interesting stories. To find out why I chose them, you’ll need to watch the show.

Coronavirus – Day #83

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

I’m sure I accomplished some things today, but almost none of them were things I had planned to do. There was unexpected Diversity Trust email, unexpected death of a friend, and two good TV documentaries that I had expected to be an hour long and were both two hours. Oh well, I have at least finished the Wizard’s Tower accounts for the month. Now I need to get to bed so that I’m awake to record an interview and to do the thing with Dan tomorrow.

The biggest news in the outside world is that the NHS has updated its guidelines on the provision of cross-sex hormones to trans adolescents. Current regulations say that these can be prescribed at age sixteen, generally after a long period of assessment by the youth gender clinic. The new guidelines are almost laughably unscientific.

They talk about how this treatment might have irreversible effects such as breast growth (in trans girls) or the voice breaking (in trans boys). You don’t say? That’s kind of like saying that cataract surgery can have the irreversible effect of better eyesight.

They note that such treatment might lead to infertility but should not be used as a form of contraception. Really? Who on earth would use it for that? I know that oestrogen is an active ingredient in the birth control pill, but would anyone seriously think of using testosterone?

And finally they talk darkly about the lack of knowledge of the long term effects of such treatment. Well hello! 26 years and counting. And I’m not the only one. There are plenty of us about, many of whom have been on hormones for far longer. But of course no amount of actual evidence will stop these people from scaremongering.

There are two things that we can take from this. The first is that the outcome of the the judicial review into the operation of youth gender clinic has already be decided at a political level. The clinic will be found to be operating unsafely, and it will be shut down, regardless of how much evidence to the contrary is presented, and how many young lives it has improved.

The second is that it won’t stop with kids. The idea that giving trans people hormones is “unsafe” clearly doesn’t only apply to teenagers. GPs now have a carte blanche to refuse to supply them to adults as well. It won’t be long before the adult gender clinics are threatened with closure as well.

On #QBLockdownHunt Tomorrow

~ Cheryl

Those of you who have been following the Queer Britain Lockdown Hunt on Twitter will know that each Friday Dan Vo has been getting people to search out particular items of significance in queer history. We’ve done badges, we’ve done postcards, we’ve done t-shirts and fliers. But tomorrow the object will be books.

As you can imagine, that’s right up my street. Dan has kindly invited me to join him at 3:00pm to chat about books. I’ll be showcasing some science fiction novels of significance, and also some books from much further back in time that are important to queer history.

Dan also has several other guests through the day, including the fabulous Diana Souhami who has written several books on the lives of famous lesbians. The full details are in the tweet below.

Farewell Milena

~ Cheryl

In the midst of all of the pandemic crisis, normal threats to health haven’t gone away. I got word this afteroon that my Croatian friend, Milena Benini, died today of lung cancer. It was apparently very quick — only a couple of weeks from diagnosis to death — and having had two parents die of cancer I am convinced that quick is good. Milena had two daughters aged, I believe, 17 and 23. They were a lot smaller when I visited her on one of my trips to Croatia a few years back.

Milena was a fine writer of science fiction. She has a story in Kontakt, the anthology of Croatian SF&F that I published through Wizard’s Tower. I understand that she had her first published story when she was aged just 14. She was also a staunch feminist, and fond of whisky. Needless to say, we got on very well.

That’s about as much information as I have right now. If you knew Milena, or admired her work, I’m sure that more information will be coming from Croatian fandom in due course.

Coronavirus – Day #82

~ Cheryl

Back to staying at home and working for me today: day job, Wizard’s Tower accounts, and some stuff with Mike Carey which will all come to fruition in due course.

It was Prime Minister’s Question Time again today, and once again Bozo lost badly. That’s despite the fact that he was caught cheating with an earpiece in so that aides could whisper appropriate responses to him. It won’t be long before he turns up roaring drunk and refuses to answer any questions ever again.

Meanwhile the plan to re-convene Parliament in-person has gone very badly wrong. The Business Secretary, Alok Sharma, has been taken ill and is being tested for COVID-19. If he tests positive that’s presumably a whole bunch of MPs needing to self-isolate, including all of the Cabinet. Jacob Rees-Smaug was apparently heard to say that there was nothing wrong with being undead, and the sooner the whole of Westminster followed his example the better.