Current Affairs

Comments Closed

~ Cheryl

Thanks to discussions elsewhere I have become aware of problems with the UK’s new Online Safety Act. In theory this legislation is designed to protect children from unsafe material on the internet. It does things like require social media companies to actually enforce their age limits, and to have active moderation policies. In practice it is a poorly-thought-out piece of legislation that will catch a lot of innocent people in its net.

People who run various fora and bulletin boards for volunteer and hobbyist groups have already started taking their sites offline because they cannot afford to comply with the legislation, and can’t afford to ignore it. (You can be fined up to £18m if found in breach of the act.)

My guess is that, much like HMRC puts a lot of effort into prosecuting individuals who might have made a mistake in their tax return, while letting the wealthy and corporations get away with massive tax evasion, the force of this law will fall mainly on private individuals and small companies. There have been suggestions that SWATing-like tactics will be used by internet trolls whereby they seek to place dubious content on sites they have taken against, and then report those sites to the authorities.

In theory, blogs like this are exempt from the law on the grounds that they are not bulletin boards, but rather simply people commenting on things the blog owner has said. However, when the Act was drafted, it did not occur to anyone that it is possible for people to reply to other people’s comments on a blog. And that makes it functionally more like a bulletin board. There is no means in WordPress to prevent that from happening without closing comments altogether. As people hardly ever comment here these days anyway, I have taken the decision to close them entirely. Should things change in the future I can always open them up again. In the meantime, you can always reply to posts via social media.

Of course it would not surprise me if, sometime soon, the UK government decides that all discussion of trans issues is “pornographic” and therefore must be behind an 18+ screen. The Online Safety Act will be the vehicle through which they attack online discussion of trans rights. But I’ll deal with that as and when we get there.

Community Action in Practice

~ Cheryl


There has been a lot of talk on social media of late about how communities need to work together to fight the onrushing tide of austerity policies and Fascism, but there has been little idea of how that might be achieved in practice. Well, here in West Wales we have something that is rather special.

My friend Deri Reed runs a top quality restaurant in Carmarthen called The Warren. (I took Kevin there after Worldcon if you need a less biased recommendation.) More recently Deri has founded an initiative called Cegin Hedyn (that’s Seed Kitchen for you English-speakers). This provides a “pay what you can afford” service which aims to ensure that the people of Carmarthen and the surrounding area have “access to nutritious, delicious meals, regardless of financial means.” The service is run by volunteers and relies on donations of money and food from the local community.

Recently Cegin Hedyn has been named as one of the finalists for the Community Food Champion award in this year’s BBC Food and Farming Awards. Consequently it was featured on Saturday’s edition of BBC Morning Live. If you have access to the BBC iPlayer you can watch the segment here (fast forward to 44 minutes). The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Glasgow on December 2nd.

While it would be lovely for them to win, the point I want to make here is that this is very much a grass roots initiative that was set up to benefit the local community in a sustainable way. It is something that we could all learn from. If you would like to help out you can do so via the LocalGiving website.

By the way, Cegin Hedyn serves all of the local community. The BBC video features a couple of people I know from the local queer community. And if you check out the organisation’s website you will see that one of the Directors is my long-time friend, Frank Duffy. Frank provides all of the graphic design for The Warren and Cegin Hedyn. They have also done quite a bit of work for Wizard’s Tower over the years.

It’s That Day Again

~ Cheryl

Yes, today is the annual Trans Day of Remembrance. Indeed, it is the 25th anniversary of the founding of the event by Gwendolyn Ann Smith. It became a global phenomenon, and now it seems it is dying. I’m certainly seeing a lot less interest in it his year, and especially a lot less support from outside the trans community.

From my point of view it is a bit of a relief to not have to spend this evening reading the names of people who have been murdered, often brutally, simply because they were trans. But they are still dying. Indeed, the official figures suggest that there has been an increase of around 10% in the total in the past year. I expect next year to be much worse, especially in the USA where a small segment of society believes that the election result has given them the freedom to harrass and kill anyone they don’t like.

Here in the UK the violence is less obvious but no less cruel. The government has launched an inquiry into health care for trans adults along the lines of the infamous Cass Report. Everyone knows what the result will be. In defiance of international medical best practice, the inquiry will report that transition care for adults is experimental and dangerous, and must be stopped. I’m hearing reports of GPs in England stopping providing hormones to trans patients in anticipation of the inquiry’s findings.

Whether this will extend to Wales or not is unclear, but I have other things to worry about in the coming year. One of the things that the incoming government in the USA has threatened to do is define all discussion of trans issues as ‘pornography’. They will then use that to pressure media companies to stop producing films, TV, books, comics and so on that have trans themes. Discussion of trans issues on the internet is also likely to be defined as pornography. One of the things I have on my to do list for December is to find alternative hosting for my websites in case my US hosting service is forced to shut them down.

Anyway, I intend to keep publishing work by trans writers until such time as the UK government decides to lock me up over it. Tomorrow is release day for Fight Like A Girl 2, which includes three stories by trans women. Two of those, plus one story by a cis writer, are overtly trans positive. It is a small act of resistance, but every little helps.

Hustings

~ Cheryl

We have an election happening in the UK. In the past such things have often been of little interest to me. The town where I grew up, and the town where I lived until recently, were both in constituencies where the the Tories could have put up a corpse and still got over 50% of the vote. Ah well, at least I wasn’t in the Bath & North East Somerset constituency, where they did put up a corpse who kept getting elected. However, Rees-Mogg is one of many Tories too chicken the contest the election this time because he knows he’ll lose. That’s not the case for Trowbridge, where the incumbent Tory is still confident of winning.

These days, things are very different. To start with, my local constituency is known to be a hot bed of Plaid Cymru supporters. Secondly, it is one of the constituencies that the Tories gerrymandered. They have stuck us in with Carmarthen which has traditionally been solidly Tory. And with Labour on the rise across the country, people were initially predicting a three-way fight.

Earlier this week some friends and I headed into Carmarthen to see a hustings. It was being held at SERO, a community environment centre, and was therefore likely to attract a more progressive audience. Of the 8 candidates, only 4 turned up. The far-right (Reform) and far-left (Workers Party) candidates did not respond to the invitation to participate. The Green, very sadly, was sick and unable to attend. There was a place set for the Tory, but he didn’t show. It looks like he has given up. So maybe it is only a two-way race.

Ours is one of the few seats in the country to have a Women’s Equality Party candidate. I suspect that is because the incumbent for my town’s old seat was kicked out of Plaid when he was arrested for beating his wife, though he kept his seat in Parliament. However, he decided not to run, which left my new pal, Nancy Cole, with much less to do. It was her first time as a candidate, and with the election having been called in a rush she had no time to get any training. In view of that, she did very well, but I don’t expect her to retain her deposit. On the plus side, both the Labour and Plaid candidates supported most of her positions. Getting other parties to support their policies is one of main purposes of WEP.

The LibDem candidate, Nick Beckett, was the only man among the four candidates. He’s a local councillor, clearly an experienced politician, and he spoke very well. Sadly he has no chance.

The Labour candidate, Martha O’Neil, is very personable. She was born here, speaks good Welsh, and clearly knows the area despite now being part of the Westminster set. She’s young, very smart (won a scholarship to Cambridge), has worked for an animal rights charity, and knows a lot about IT (a skill sadly lacking in Westminster). She could win.

That leaves Plaid Cymru. Their candidate, Ann Davies, is also an experienced local councillor. She owns a small farm near Carmarthen. What I’d seen of her campaign before the hustings was all about being anti building new transmission links to connect renewable generation to the grid. Farmers have a reputation of being very conservative around here, so I was a bit worried.

Thankfully Ann was very different in person. She, along with Nick and Martha, had clearly researched options for getting more renewables online without building pylons through local beauty spots. She was well aware of the culpability of farmers in polluting rivers, and knew something had to be done. Despite being quite a bit older than Martha, she was equally vociferous in supporting the women’s rights issues raised by Nancy. Being a Plaid candidate, she was able to talk about advocating for Wales, whereas Martha, if elected, would be subject to the whims of the very English Labour establishment. And she was the only candidate to mention LGBTQ+ rights, unprompted at that.

To date no one has come to my door canvassing. I’ve had one leaflet from Labour and two from Plaid. The Tories sent a questionnaire asking about my political views, which seemed to be aimed at getting a list of people to be sent to internment camps should they actually win.

Given that it seems that kicking out the Tory is not going to be an issue here, we are more free to vote our conscience. Some of my friends will vote Green regardless. Personally I’d like to vote for Nancy, but I’m also very invested in the Plaid Cymru v Labour contest, because the thought of a government led by Kier Starmer with a massive majority fills me with terror.

Most people in the UK will be better off under Labour. There’s little doubt about that. A few groups of people will not be. That includes trans people. Starmer has been very clear that he supports all of the anti-trans policies put forward by the Tories. In his view, trans women are not women, even if they have a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), and he has promised to ensure that people like me are kept out of “women only spaces”. That means hospital wards, changing rooms, toilets, rape crisis centres and so on.

The hospital thing is interesting because NHS Wales is a separate organisation from NHS England. But this is probably one of the points where we will discover that Starmer does not believe in devolution. I’ll just have to hope that I don’t need a hospital stay any time soon.

Toilets and changing rooms are a different matter. There’s a case before the UK Supreme Court at the moment that will probably end up with a ruling that it is legal to exclude trans women from “women only spaces”, even if they have a GRC. That won’t be enough for the transphobes. What they want, and what Starmer seems prepared to give them, is to change the law so that it is a crime to allow a trans woman to use a “woman only space”.

This will put the onus on service providers–hotels, pubs, gyms, shops and so on–to enforce the law. They will end up getting lots of false positives, causing endless trouble for cis women who are not sufficiently feminine-looking. But they will, very reasonably, claim that the Gender Recognition Act is an obstacle to their upholding the law. I have government ID (passport and driving licence) that say very clearly that I am female. The government would have to demand that I surrender those so that I can’t use them to pee illegally. As I have no desire to have government ID that outs me as trans to anyone I have to show it to, that would be a major inconvenience.

As far as other constituencies go, I would still advocate voting Labour if the only alternative is the Tories. I’d probably be voting Labour if I was still in Trowbridge. But if, like me, you have the option to get rid of a Tory without giving the seat to Labour (or Reform), I hope you will do so. The country needs an opposition.

Friends in Bristol, please vote for Carla, she’s great.

Legal Shenanagins

~ Cheryl

One of the things that has protected trans rights in the UK over the past couple of years is that the Tories are too busy, and too cowardly, to actually repeal the Gender Recognition Act, even though many of their MPs very much want to get that done. The anti-trans lobby is unhappy about this, and is therefore taking matters into its own hands by taking legal action. Very soon, their case will reach the Supreme Court. Should they win, the consequences for trans people in the UK (and equality law more generally) will be catastrophic.

The Gender Recognition Act says, unambiguously:

Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).

However, as I understand it, the argument that will be put before the Supreme Court is that allowing a trans woman to be treated as a woman is, de facto, discrimination against cisgender women, and therefore illegal under the Equality Act. As the Equality Act is a more recent piece of legislation, its provisions should supercede those of the GRA.

Hopefully it is obvious that, should this claim succeed, it will open the doors to equivalent claims such as, “letting Black people into my whites-only pub is discrimination against white people,” and “building a wheelchair ramp is discrimination against able-bodied people.” Thankfully such claims are less likely to pass the Supreme Court.

But the chances of this getting through are very high. And if it does, not only will the GRA be rendered useless, it will create a climate of fear in businesses all around the country. Because it will be possible for a business (or school, local authority, etc.) to be sued for discrimination if they inadvertently allow a trans woman to be treated as a woman. This will lead to a lot of proactive bans being issued at places like public toilets, gyms, clothing stores and so on. Most of the people caught by this will be gender-nonconforming cisgender women, because despite what the anti-trans lobby claims, they can’t always tell, and neither can anyone else.

I say the chances of it getting through are high, because at the moment no trans people or allies will be allowed to give evidence. The anti-trans lobby is being bankrolled by She Who Must Not Be Named (to the tune of £70,000). In contrast, a crowdfunder by The Good Law Project to allow them to intervene in the case stands at just over £10,000. Britain’s only senior trans judge has asked for leave to intervene on the case, but that request may be denied.

My guess is that both Sunak and Starmer will be having messages sent to the Supreme Court judges encouraging them to find in favour of the case, because both main political parties would be delighted if the GRA could be made to vanish without them having to do anything. And of course the judges know that they will be pilloried in the media if they don’t find in favour of the case.

It would not surprise me if, by the end of this year, the UK had become one of the most transphobic countries in the world (rather than just one with the most transphobic media in the world).

Government by Ideology

~ Cheryl

Social media this week is full of discussion of a letter written by the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to the Minister for Women & Equalities, Kemi Badenoch. For those of you unfamiliar with UK politics, one of the things that the current Tory government has done is fill “equalities” posts with people directly opposed to equality. Badenoch is an Evangelical Christian and Climate Change Sceptic. The Board of the EHRC has been filled with people who are openly transphobic. Nonsense is to be expected.

The first thing worth noting is that this letter has no legal force. Neither has there (yet) been any move to act on it. However, both Sunak and Starmer have muttered openly about “safeguarding woman’s rights”, which is a code pharse for removing the rights of trans people. If you feel minded to do so, and are a UK citizen, there is an old petition here that is suddenly getting a lot of traction and is worth signing. Sending a warning shot across the bows of Westminster is often quite effective.

Should they decide to move forward with this, the government will spin it as not removing any trans rights, but rather protecting the rights of women. The effect will be very different. The letter proposes amending the Equality Act to make it “clear” that “sex” means “biological sex” (whatever that means). The stated purpose of this will be to make it possible for any “single-sex” service to exclude anyone not of the correct “biological sex”. However, it has long been a claim of the anti-trans movement that allowing a trans woman into a supposed woman-only space is discrimination on the grounds of sex. If this change is made, we can expect to see a wave of prosecutions under the Equality Act where services have treated a trans woman as a woman, and are being sued for discrimination as a result. This will affect spaces such as toilets, changing rooms and sports clubs as well as rape crisis and domestic violence centres. Bizarrely the letter also references book clubs as an example of the sort of place that needs to be sex segregated.

Note that these new regulations are intended to apply to all trans people, regardless of their medical and current legal status. Somone like myself, who has been through a full surgical gender reassignment process and has a Gender Recognition Certificate, would still be regarded as “biologically male” under these proposals.

To government will claim that trans people can still change their gender using the Gender Recognition Act. However, because sex will have been defined as meaning biological sex, that change of gender will have no effect in law. The government will also claim that trans people are still protected by the Equality Act. They will be correct in saying that a company can still not fire someone for being trans, but that company will be legally obliged to treat trans employees as persons of their “biological sex”. It would not surprise me to see law suits complaining that allowing a trans woman to use female pronouns at work amounted to discrimination against cis women.

The letter talks airily about checks and balances, and about how these changes will be better for some and worse for others. Significantly it talks about trans women losing rights, and trans men gaining rights. But the rights that trans men would gain would be rights to be treated as women, which is the last thing that most trans men I know want. This is entirely in keeping with the anti-trans belief that trans men do not exist, and anyone claiming to be one is an innocent lesbian who has been duped by the Evil Trans Lobby.

Let’s now think about how this would work in practice. The anti-trans movement likes to claim that they can “always tell” who is trans, but they definitely cannot. Neither can anyone who runs a service that includes toilets or changing rooms. The only way that companies will be able to protect themselves is by requiring ID. There will be even more harassment of women whose appearance is not gender-conforming. And the government will have to revoke the existing passports and driving licences of trans people, issuing new ones with the sex marker being that they were assigned at birth. Goodness only knows how they will deal with foreign visitors who are trans.

There’s also this question of “biological sex”. What does it mean? The government probably thinks that’s just the sex you were assigned at birth. But the anti-trans lobby has been insistent that biological checks are necessary. For example, they insist that Caster Semenya is a “man”, despite her having been assigned female at birth and having lived all her life as a woman. Apparently she has higher than average levels of testosterone and that’s sufficient to disqualify her from womanhood.

The trouble is that we don’t routinely test for chromosomes or testosterone levels. No one has any idea how many women out there have a Y chromosome and androgen insensitivity. Given that there has been at least one well-documented case of a woman with a Y chromosome who gave birth to a healthy child, there’s no way we can know without testing. So what happens in the future if a woman has some routine checks by a doctor and it turns out she has a Y chromosome? Will she be legally required to live as a man from then on?

Given that the anti-trans lobby is very keen on genital surgery for intersex children who have ambiguous genitalia, this would not surprise me.

So that’s the world that these proposed changes would usher in. And all on the basis that a small number of fanatics have decided that they don’t want to live in a world that also contains trans people.

War With Scotland

~ Cheryl

Back when I was in school we learned all sorts of strange stuff in history. One of the things that caused much mirth in the class was the fact that there was a major war between Britain and Spain called The War of Jenkins’ Ear. It was a dispute over the American colonies. In 1731 a British ship called the Rebecca, captained by one Robert Jenkins, was boarded by Spanish coastguards off the coast of Florida (then Spanish territory). Captain Jenkins was accused of smuggling, and his left ear was cut off as a warning to other British sailors. Eight years later, Parliament used this incident as a pretext to declare a war that was fought mainly in the Caribbean.

Now we have something even sillier. The Westminster government has precipitated a major constiutional crisis over the issue of Scottish devolution, and their pretext for doing so is access to women’s toilets. Perhaps it will be called the War of Ladies’ Loos.

As you are probably aware, the Scottish parliament has passed a law simplifying the process of legal gender recognition in Scotland. What they have done is by no means unusual. Many countries around the world have already passed similar legislation. Ireland did it in 2015, and none of the terrible things that anti-trans camapigners have predicted for Scotland have come to pass there. But Westminster has chosen to make this issue one over which they will activate their nuclear option of a Section 35 Order. This is a part of the Scottish Devolution Act which allows Westminster to strike down any law passed by Holyrood if that law is deemed a signifcant danger to the Union (i.e., the political union of the component countries of the UK).

Yes, you read that right. The question as to where I am allowed to pee is so important as to pose a significant danger to the Union.

Westminister had earlier threated to simply refuse to recognise any Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs) issued by Scotland under the new law. It was pointed out to them that they already recognise certificates issued by many foreign countries under similar legislation. Their reaction to this was to say that they would withdraw recognition of GRCs issued by any country whose procedures they deemed to be insufficiently rigorous. This would include Ireland, Belgium, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Practically speaking it would also include Australia, Canada, Mexico and the USA, where such legislation is devolved to state legislatures and it may be difficult to discern from someone’s ID where their GRC was issued.

The fact that Australia, Canada, the USA and Mexico all have different regulations for legal gender recognition in different parts of their country, without any apparent difficulty, has apparently not yet penetrated the thick skulls in Westminster.

The justification for triggering Section 35 is also so flimsy as to be practically transparent. Westminster claims that the Scottish law will negatively impact the UK’s Equality Act by making it too easy for someone to obtain a GRC. However, the protections afforded to trans people under the Equality Act are independent of whether we have a GRC or not. You acquire the Protected Characteristic of Gender Transition simply by declaring publicly that you are undergoing such a process. That is, you aquire it by self-identification, in a manner much less robust than the Scottish law which requires a Statutory Declaration, with heavy penalties should you make such a declaration fraudulently.

It is also worth noting that the entire process of medical gender transition is predicated on self-identification. Once you have been accepted as a patient at a gender clinic you are required to begin living full-time in your desired gender. To facilitiate this the doctors will give you letters allowing you to change ID such as your driving licence and passport to match your new gender. A Gender Recognition Certificate only affects your birth certificate, which is explicitly not acceptable as a form of ID.

In other words, the whole thing is a storm in a teacup into which Westminster has been backed by the combined efforts of the right wing media, the religious right elements within the Conservative Party, and probably substantial donations from a certain wealthy author.

Interestingly, the Scottish law was backed by the Scottish Labour Party. The Welsh Government, which is a Labour government, has expressed support for the Scottish law. But the English Labour Party, or at least its leader, has expressed support for the Westminster line.

Goodness knows where this will end, but it appears that we are in for another year of Interesting Times in UK politics.

Coronavirus – Day #642

~ Cheryl

Hello again from Plague Island. This is your latest report on the campaign of the Tory Party kill off all of the poor, unfit, brown, queer, old and otherwise undesirable elements of the population. How are they doing?

Well, the infection rate has taken a sharp tumble from the dizzy heights of early January, but it appears to have stabilised at around 1% of the population being infected at any one time, which would have been a record at any time prior to the arrival of Omicron.

Meanwhile the government has been busy. Yesterday four of Bozo’s senior aides resigned. One more followed this morning. Also yesterday the First Minister for Northern Ireland announced his resignation in despair at the mess Brexit has made of his country. Bozo announced that he had actually fired all of these people and that he was “taking back control”.

Also today there was a report that staff are leaving the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission in significant numbers. “It was as if Baroness Falkner and the Board wanted people who actually cared about human rights to leave,” said one ex-staff member. Falkner was appointed to head the organisation by Liz Truss, apparently with a specific mission to take away trans people’s civil rights, and to rubbish the idea that things such as racism and Islamophobia could exist.

Truss, when she is not busy campaigning to take over Bozo’s job while professing total loyalty to him, is planning to host a major LGBT+ Rights conference in London this summer. Business leaders believe that she is hoping to close some major trade deals for exporting the majority of the UK’s LGBT+ population to other countries.

Fear not, though, dear readers, all is not lost. Bozo has come up with a brilliant plan for defeating the Coronavirus. He is going to stop publishing data on cases. That way no one will ever contract the disease in the UK again, let alone die of it. He is understandably proud of his genius.

Coronavirus – Day #623

~ Cheryl

Omicron has arrived in the UK. How do I know that? Well the peak number of daily new cases last winter was over 70,000. The last three days have all exceeded that, with today being a whopping 88,000. And this time there is pretty much nothing being done to stop it, save for the government exhorting us all to get vaccinated.

The good news is that I had my booster on Monday. It was a Pfizer, whereas the previous two had been AstraZenica. Other than a sore arm and feeling a bit tired I’ve had no side effects. The theory is that if I catch the Rona then I’ll survive it. In practice, given my medical history and the likelihood of my being discriminated against in a hospital, my chances are not good. I’ll be isolating as much as I can.

I do need to do one more food shop before the holidays, but that will be tomorrow and hopefully it will be good for three weeks.

The other good news is that hospitalisations are around a quarter of what they were last winter. That’s because vaccines work. Most of the new cases are less serious. How things will pan out when the number of new cases is well over 100,000 a day and climbing remains to be seen.

There is a parliamentary by election tomorrow. Despite the utterly awful record of the current government, the expectation is that the Tories will win, because the other two major parties are far too busy fighting each other. We may get rid of Bozo soon, but only because Tory MPs are bleating about loosing their Freedumb by being asked to wear a mask, or show evidence of vaccination before going to a football match. Whoever replaces him is likely to be worse, because there isn’t anyone better in the running for the job.

Happy Holidays from Plague Island.

Coronavirus – Day #567

~ Cheryl

This is about the time when I’d be telling you about my programming assignments for BristolCon and World Fantasy. However, I have no idea whether I will be at either of them.

Here’s the problem. COVID infections have been rising rapidly in the UK over the last couple of weeks. We are now over 50,000 new cases every day. For comparison, that’s roughly where we were at Christmas last year.

The government says that it is not worried, because the death rate is very low. It is just over 100 a day, which compares very well to the over 600 a day we were seeing last Christmas. Vaccines work. Of course 100 deaths a day is still horrific, but the government is very happy with it. Their ideology states that anyone who dies was obviously weak and not worth saving.

So a death rate of 100 a day isn’t going to result in any change in government policy. Probably 200 a day won’t either. But that’s not the number I’m watching. The key indicator is the number of people admitted to hospital, because that tells you whether the NHS is likely to be overloaded. That number has been rising steeply through October, and is roughly tracking the level we had last winter. That’s not good.

It doesn’t help that the situation here in the South West is far worse than the national average. This is in large part because one of the testing labs that serves the region had been discovered to be returning a large number of false negatives. This is apparrently what happens when you hand out government contracts on the basis of who you know and how much they donate to Tory Party funds, rather than their ability to do the job. Anyway, lots of people around here who had COVID were told they didn’t, and as a result infections have skyrocketed.

Right now the government is trying to bluster its way through the situation. They insist that there is nothing to worry about. This is rather like when a football club says that it has total confidence in the manager. You know that a dramatic u-turn is coming soon.

There’s also the attitude of other countries to consider. Morocco closed its borders to the UK last night. Other countries are likely to follow suit in the coming weeks. Canada might be one of them.

I’m still planning to go to both conventions, but anything could happen between now and the end of the month.

Life on Transphobia Island

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

It is fairly well known now that the UK has become one of the most transphobic countries in the world. We aren’t as bad as places like Russia or Hungary yet, but the situation is not good. Most of you will probably think that the bulk of the problem is lack of reform of the Gender Recognition Act, and the constant flow of anti-trans propaganda in the mainstream media. Some of you may be aware that there is now around a 5 year waiting list to get a first appointment at a UK gender clinic, and that in five years time that delay will be much longer. These are the things that hit the headlines, but they are not all that is going on. Behind the scenes, much worse is happening.

I’m writing this post today because today is the first time that I have resorted to ordering medication over the internet. I’m hoping that I won’t have to use it, and there are some helpful people within the NHS who are trying to get me a new hormone prescription. But without the cooperation of a GP local to me they will probably fail.

The GP services in the UK are currently organised through things called Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). There are lots of these around the country. While patients have a free choice of GPs within their local CCG, it is difficult to get care from anywhere else. A recent survey by Gender GP has discovered that 83% of CCGs in England do not have any policy in place regarding healthcare for trans people. That doesn’t necessarily mean no treatment. If you have a friendly GP whom you have know for years they will probably still prescribe. But increasingly GP services are run through large, multi-doctor surgeries where you never see the same doctor twice, and without an official trans healthcare policy from their CCG they will probably refuse treatment.

Note that I’m not asking for anything highly specialist here. The gender transition process is still handled by Gender Identity Clinics. But if, like me, you have had your gonads removed, you need an alternative source of hormones to stay healthy. In theory I should be getting a regular prescription of oestrogen. In practice GPs refuse to prescribe, even though they know I will get quite ill without it.

There are parts of the country that are not so bad. There’s that 17% of CCGs that do have a trans policy. Plus, if you happen to live in London, Manchester, Brighton or Liverpool there are specialist GP services you can go to. But for much of England there is a huge problem.

You might think that, in such a situation, someone in private practice would leap in to take advantage, but that doesn’t happen. I’ve tried three private GP services, including BUPA. All three said that they would not accept a trans person as a patient. Anyone who sets up in private practice specifically to help trans people is quickly hounded out of business by the medical authorities.

So healthcare is a problem, but a potentially far worse one is the removal of trans people’s civil rights through changes in police policy. The UK now has elected Police & Crime Commissioners (PCCs) for each local force. In England, inevitably, the majority of these are Conservatives. Recently there has been a coordinated push by these people to redefine the law as it applies to trans women. In a recent post on the right-wing website, Conservative Home, several PCCs stated their opposition to trans rights, and to the LGBT+ charity, Stonewall.

The reason for the complaints against Stonewall is that their training on the Equality Act correctly explains that trans women can only be excluded from “women-only” spaces if there is a good reason for doing so. This is in line with the official guidance regarding the Act produced by the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Earlier this year an anti-trans lobby group spent a large amount of money to bring a court case demanding a judicial review of the EHRC guidance. The claimed that, under the Act, trans women should always be excluded from women-only spaces. The judge described their argument as “absurd” and “wrong in law”. Nevertheless, the media continues to put forward this anti-trans position as if it is fact, and now several PCCs have done so too.

The most extreme example is Philip Wilkinson, the PCC for Wiltshire, which happens to be where I live. He stated that he does not believe that “biological men” should be allowed into women-only spaces. The term, “biological men” is a favourite of anti-trans campaigners. Its meaning varies quite a bit. Some people say it means people with a Y chromosome, others that it means people who do not have ovaries, and others also want to exclude anyone with above average levels of testosterone in their body. But all of them agree that the term absoutely excludes all trans women.

Currently in the UK the Gender Recognition Act allows trans people to change their legal gender. That should allow them to be treated as an ordinary person of that gender in almost all circumstances. Equally, the Equality Act says that it is illegal to discrimiate against a person on the grounds that they have undergone, are undergoing or plan to undergo gender reassignment. By saying that he will bar trans women from women-only spaces, Mr Wilkinson is saying that he wants the police under his command to ignore the Gender Recognition Act and Equality Act, and to act with prejudice against any trans women they encounter.

Of course this is illegal, but if there is one thing that the current government in the UK has shown it is that they have no respect for the law, and believe that they can break it with impunity whenever they wish. The same is apparently true of Conservative PCCs. And while a trans woman who is arrested for using a toilet, or trying to buy clothes, might eventually have her day in court and win, that won’t make up for the trauma of the experience.

It is probably no accident that Mr Wilkinson’s statement was quickly followed up by the launch of a campaign by Wiltshire Police to target “sex offenders”. How they are likley to be able to spot potential rapists before they commit any rapes is a bit of a mystery. But it is axiomatic amongst the anti-trans movement that they “can always tell” if someone is trans, and Mr Wilkinson clearly believes that all trans women are, by definition, sex offenders. It is pretty obvious who the Wiltshire police will be on the lookout for.

Sadly the “we can always tell” manta is nonsense. The vast majority of people who get harrassed in public toilets and other women-only spaces on suspicion of being trans are cisgender women. They might have short hair and a fairly masculine style of dress; they might be wearing a wig for some innocent reason; or their might have lost their breasts to cancer. Many trans women are quite safe in comparison, but it doesn’t feel that way when you know that you are being hunted by the police.

So yeah, life here on Transphobia Island is not much fun right now. My advice to young trans people is to get out if you possibly can. It will get worse before it gets better.

Coronavirus – Day #503

~ Cheryl

Gosh, I went over 500 days and didn’t even notice. The pandemic has become a way of life.

Of course I would have been more likely to notice if I’d be posting about other things more often. Its not that nothing is happening in my life. It is partly that I’m very busy, and partly because most of what is happening in my life is stuff I can’t talk about.

Some of that, however, is Wizard’s Tower stuff. Look out for some exciting announcements soon. Including, of course, the new Green Man book.

Meanwhile we all try to get used to living with the virus. Last Friday I had dinner with friends in Bath. I traveled by train, and I took one of those home tests the day before, just in case. The tests are horrible to do, but much better than infecting your friends.

In theory, life should ramp up more in September. I have a couple of work things in London I should go to, and there’s FantasyCon at the end of the month. Then I look at the virus stats and worry. There was a huge spike in the UK due to the football, and a drop again once the tournament was over. But now cases are rising steadily again. Over 100 people are dying every day. Its only likely to get worse over the winter. Is it wise to go anywhere? I really don’t know.

Coronavirus – Day #466

~ Cheryl

It is a time for experiment here on Plague Island. For the few weeks we have been running an experiment involving huge crowds at sporting events, and large numbers of people getting very drunk and running around the streets. That is set to continue throughout the summer, though probably with not quite the same level of drunkeness and violence now that the football is over.

As of this time next week, pretty much all COVID restrictions in England will be removed. We are apparently still encouraged to wear masks in high risk locations such as on public transport, but it won’t be mandatory and the government is crowing about it being “Freedom Day” so lots of people will doubtless stop doing it.

In view of this you will doubtless expect that the pandemic is well under control here and all of the danger indicators are at very low levels. You would be exactly wrong.

Today we had almost 34,500 new cases of COVID and are now over 300 cases per 100,000 people. The rate is rising fast. Hospitalisations are now shooting up, with over 550 today. Deaths are still quite low — only 6 today — but everything will ramp up as the restrictions come off. The good news is that last time we had this many infections the death rate was over 600/day. Clearly the vaccines are having a major effect on the lethality of the disease. But government scientists are apparently predicting we could get up to as many as 200 deaths per day in the near future.

Bozo is telling us that this is a risk we must take for the good of the economy. It is very much a case of, “You people must die so that my share prices can remain high.”

Technically I still have in-person conventions planned for September and October, and I’d still love to get to Canada for World Fantasy in November. I have no idea what will happen with any of them, though I suspect that the Canada trip will be the least likely because other countries will not want people from the UK visiting them.

For comparison, the UK had the second highest number of COVID cases of any country in the world today. Only Indonesia had more. I believe that we have more cases per day than the rest of Europe combined. I would love to be heading to Rome this week to enjoy Eurocon and to congratulate my Italian friends on their victory in the football, but that isn’t going to be possible.

Coronavirus – Day #455

~ Cheryl

Now that the third wave is well underway here we have some interesting data. The daily infection rate is now over 27,000, which is where we were in mid-December last year. However, at that time we were seeing a death rate of over 400 per day. Yesterday’s death count was 22. Equally in mid-December the hospitalisation rate was just short of 2000/day. Currently it is under 300.

Obviously I’m not an epidemiologist, so my analysis of this data should probably be taken with a very big pinch of salt. But what I think I am seeing is that the pandemic is once again raging out of control, but amongst a population that is far more resistant to its effects. Vaccines work.

Is that a good thing? I guess that depends. It should mean that more people can feel safe going to work, going to entertainment venues and so on. But it will also mean that there will be less concern about biosecurity, and therefore those at risk will be more likely to get sick when they are less able to fight it off.

Anyway, it doesn’t make much difference to me. I’m old. My lungs are distinctly dodgy. And I’m highly likely to be discriminated against in a healthcare setting. I’m taking no risks.

Coronavirus – Day #439

~ Cheryl

Well, here we go again. To very few people’s surprise, the current levels of Lockdown restrictions in the UK are being extended, rather than being eased next Monday as was originally planned. Why? Because infection rates are soaring, as they have been for around 3 weeks now. The current restrictions haven’t slowed that, so there is no reason to think that simply extending them will have any effect. Things will have to get substantially worse before the government will admit that there is a problem.

I must admit that I was a little nervous about going to Clevedon on Saturday, but I also knew that it was likely to be my only chance of any sort of break. Also I am fully vaccinated which ought to count for something. But from now on it is back into security mode.

That means definitely no Eurocon for me. Probably no Bristol Pride, which is currently scheduled for July 10th. Further out on the planning horizon I have FantasyCon in September, BristolCon in October, and World Fantasy in November. I’m much less hopeful for all of those now, but at least come August we’ll have a better idea of what this current wave looks like.

In the meantime, if you haven’t booked up for my trans Romans talk on Thursday, there is still time to do so. Remember that you don’t have to listen live, you have a whole week to watch it on replay. Tickets available here.

Coronavirus – Day #426

~ Cheryl

It has been a while since I did one of these, but I had my second vaccination today and I figured that was worth marking. For the record, I’m fine, other than being very tired, which may be a result of it being warm and muggy today rather than the virus.

Other than that, life on Plague Island is pretty much as usual. Not content with trying to be responsible for more deaths than Winston Churchill, Bozo is also trying to have more wives than Henry VIII. Here in the South West we are currently in a mostly COVID free phase, but elsewhere the new Delta Variant is running amok with the result that national infection rates have been rising for several days now. Those with long memories will remember that Bozo delayed imposing travel restrictions from India for many days because he was planning a visit to that country, and that’s the main reason why we are heading into a new wave of infections.

The big difference this time is that our vaccination rate is pretty good. As of today, almost 75% of the country has had one dose, and almost 50% has had both. It will be interesting to see what difference that makes to the spread of infection.

Anyway, we have sunshine, which is good. Also I still have plenty of work and don’t need to go anywhere. And if I have got through 400+ days of this I’m sure I can do a few hundred more if need be.

Coronavirus – Day #398

~ Cheryl

Slowly but surely, infection and death rates continue to fall, at least they do in this country. Are we getting back to normal? How would we tell?

Well, one of the potential signs is people feeling confident enough to hold coventions. Not here, just now, I hasten to add, but this year’s Eurocon, to be held in Fiuggi, Italy, has announced that they have permssion to go ahead. Their dates are July 15-18.

Data point: infection rates in Italy are currently four times what they are in the UK. That’s not huge. The USA and France are much higher, and India is off the scale, but it is still an interesting level of confidence from their government.

Currently us Brits are forbidden from going on foreign holidays (unless we are very rich or related to a Cabinet minister). We are due an announcement on the 17th about possible loosening of those restrictions. Whether Italy will be on the list of permitted destinations is another matter.

Am I going? I don’t have a clue. It would be lovely, but I haven’t had my second vaccination yet and I would not put it past our disaster of a government to suddenly stop second injections for anyone they deem expendable so that can save a bit of money. Ordinarily wild horses couldn’t stop me from taking a trip to Rome, but these days going anywhere still seems potentially unwise. FantasyCon in Birmingham in September seems like a more realstic goal.

Coronavirus – Day #376

~ Cheryl

Today there has been great celebration in England, because non-essential shops, restaurants and pubs have re-opened, sort of. Pubs and restaurants can only serve people sitting outside, and it snowed in many parts of the country today, but at least they are open. My hairdresser sent me a text this morning saying that they could take bookings again. I phoned after lunch and the earliest appointment they had was in early May.

So has Bozo “saved summer”? Well maybe. There were over 3,500 new cases of COVID-19 registered today. Thirteen people died from it in the last 24 hours. That is by no means zero COVID. The government is banking on the fact that a sigificant proportion of the population has now had at least a first vaccine jab. The assumption is that this will slow the rate of infection, and reduce the serverity of cases for people who do catch the virus. If that doesn’t work, we could be back in full Lockdown fairly quickly.

Thankfully I don’t need to go out much. Once a week to Tesco is still mostly all that I need. It does, however, make me more confident about just popping out for a walk. I’ve signed up to do the sponsored walk for One25 again in May, which means that for a month I will have to average 4 miles a day. Right now I am so unfit from a year of hardly leaving home that I’m struggling to manage two, so it is just as well that I have a few weeks to get in training.

Coronavirus – Day #370

~ Cheryl

Oh look, a year has gone by. Are we still deep in the shit? Why yes, so we are.

The good news is that all of the major COVID in the UK are still falling. Trowbridge is officially “suppressed”, but this does no mean zero COVID. There could be at least 10 cases in town.

More worryingly, the UK is still registering over 2000 new cases a day, and the media is talking about how the virus has been beaten and everything is going “back to normal”. Bozo is talking breezily about people being able to go on summer holidays abroad. We don’t really know how the vaccine will change things, but some sort of third wave seems inevitable.

Of course the likelihood of anyone from the UK being able to travel internationally in the near future is not very high. Bozo will doubtless blame this on the EU. The people who voted for Brexit still don’t understand that “taking back control” of our borders does not mean taking control of everyone else’s borders as well, and the freedom of movement whose ending they cheered so loudly included their freedom of movement as well.

Coronavirus – Day #337

~ Cheryl

Wow, it is a long time since I did one of these. Of course I was crazy busy during February, but to a large extent nothing much has changed. We are still in Lockdown and will be until April. Infection rates have been falling steadily for a couple of months, but are still scarily high. And locally they are not going down. Having had rates well below the national average over the winter, we are now well above the national average. If nothing else that shows that the Track & Trace system is not worth a dime, let alone the £22bn that the government spaffed away on it.

Meanwhile Bozo has ordered schools to re-open, and I’m already seeing claims that the infection rate is surging amongst young children.

We had a budget, apparently. It seems like no one is happy about it. And yet the supposed opposition party is doing such a bad job that the Tories now have a much bigger lead in the polls than they did when they won an 80 seat majority back in late 2019. It is almost as if refusing to challenge the government on any of its policies isn’t a vote winner. Who would have thought it?

In much less good news today I learned that the Loyalist Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland have denounced the Good Friday Agreement. That is, they are blaming the Catholics, and the South, for Bozo’s complete disaster of a Brexit agreement which saw a border created in the Irish Sea, something he had promised would never happen. It seems entirely in keeping with modern Britain that someone else is getting blamed for a government screw-up. But the outcome is likely to be renewed sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which will please no one except a few die-hard survivors of The Troubles, and the Tory right wing who have always hated the fact that peace was declared.

Ah well, at least I still have work, which is getting me to talk to people, even if it is seriously interfering with my book-reading habit.