Hugo-winning artist, John Picacio, is making some of his work available in a sale to benefit disaster relief for those affected by the earthquake in Oaxaca, Mexico on September 7th, and victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. There are five original works of art available for sale. A portion of the sale price of each one will go to the disaster relief effort of the purchaser’s choice. For details of the items available, see John’s blog.
Current Affairs
Last Week on Ujima – Crime, Cricket, Umbrellas & Protest
With profuse apologies for the day, here are the Listen Again links for last week’s show.
We started off with my friend Lucienne Boyce talking about her latest historical novel, Butcher’s Block. This is a new Dan Foster mystery novel, Dan being a Bow Street Runner and amateur pugilist. We got onto the subject of bodysnatchers, and thence onto the horrors of 18th century medicine. Inevitably, when Lucienne and I get together, we start talking about suffragettes as well. Not in the 18th century, of course, but next year is the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, which gave some British women the vote.
Next up was my report on the Kia Super League Finals Day, including interviews with Raf Nicholson of The Cricketer, and Stafanie Taylor, hero of the hour and captain of the West Indies women’s team.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
The second hour began with a pre-recorded, trans-Atlantic interview with Nancy 3 Hoffman, owner and curator of the world’s only umbrella cover museum. Nancy is packing the museum into suitcases and bringing on it’s holidays to Bristol for a couple of weeks.
Finally I welcomed Amirah and Cat from the Bristol People’s Assembly into the studio. They told me all about the big anti-austerity demonstration that was to take place in Bristol at the weekend. I see from the news reports that it drew some pretty big crowds. It is also the first time I can recall the mayor of a city calling a demonstration against his own policies. Marvin says he has no choice but to make cuts because of reductions in the money he gets from central government, and he wanted people in Westminster to know how angry the people of Bristol are about it all.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
The playlist for the show was:
- Thin Lizzy – Fight or Fall
- Sade – Is it a Crime
- Eurythmics – Sisters are Doing It for Themselves
- Queen – We Are the Champions
- DJ Bravo – Champion
- Billy Holiday – Stormy Weather
- Weather Girls – It’s Raining Men
- UB40 – One in Ten
- Bob Marley – Get Up, Stand Up
Me v Trump
This afternoon Bristol 24/7 asked me if I would write something about the current fuss over trans people serving in the military. So I did.
Somehow I doubt that I’ll have any impact on US politics, but it is useful to point out that trans people are being used here. We make up only a very small percentage of the population. We cost the countries in which we live very little, and we try very hard to be law abiding because we know we’ll be punished far worse than non-trans people would be if we get caught breaking the law. And yet we keep having these media panics about how powerful, dangerous and expensive we are. The reason for this is that we are one of the current most popular media bogey groups. Some day it will be better, but doubtless only because some other luckless minority group finds itself in the spotlight. We need to become better human beings and stop falling for this nonsense.
Bristol Together For Grenfell
By August 4th I am going to be in Finland, but the good people of Bristol have chosen that day to show their support for, and raise money for, the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. It should be a great night. Ujima is busy promoting the event and our Station Manager, DJ Style, is one of the acts giving their time for free to help the appeal. Tickets are available here.
If you can’t make it to the event, you can still support the main Grenfell appeal.
Trans Kids in School – The Good and the Bad
On Tuesday (just in time of the course that Berkeley and I were giving at Plymouth University) Stonewall published the latest in the 5-yearly surveys of British schools. For the first time trans issues were included in the report, and the results were pretty shocking.
On the good side, homophobic bullying has decreased significantly, at least in part to the greater number of teachers who are comfortable being out. Transphobic bullying, however, is still commonplace. This comment from a student from Yorkshire really hit home for me:
No one I’ve spoken to at school has ever knowingly met a trans person before or been taught anything about trans people and what we might need.
This is why I did that Stonewall role model course.
The headline statistic that appeared in many newspapers is that 45% of trans school children have tried to take their own lives. That’s horrifying, but journalists rarely try to understand that statistic.
When trans kids do take their own lives, newspapers and other media often run articles by professional concern trolls who go on about how this is all the fault of the horrible “trans agenda”, and if only the parents had been more supported in their attempts to “cure” the child this would not have happened.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Studies in the USA show not only similar suicide rates to the UK, but also that those rates drop like a stone if the parents are supportive of the young person. A 2012 survey of trans youth quoted here has a 57% suicide attempt rate for kids without supportive parents, but only 4% if the parents are supportive.
Fortunately many parents, and many schools, do understand and do their best to support trans kids. Yesterday Stonewall announced the results of their annual Education Equality Index. The winning local authority was Bath & North-East Somerset. They have always done well in the past (and indeed narrowly lost out to Brighton last year), but I’m pretty sure that their triumph this time is a result of their leading the way on trans issues.
Obviously I’m not involved in the day-to-day running of schools and youth services, but I have done a fair amount with the folks who do that work over the last year. I’m very proud of them, and grateful that they listened to me banging on about trans rights.
Bristol Council, in contrast, doesn’t bother to submit an entry for the Stonewall Index, and has recently dismantled its Equalities team.
Pride on the Radio
Today on BBC Radio Bristol John Darvall has been discussing whether or not we still need Pride. Many of my friends were on, including Daryn Carter of Bristol Pride. I was on too. I may have had a bit of a rant about the DUP getting into government.
John and I had a discussion about Theresa May’s voting record without having the info to hand. I have since looked it up. She is actually in favor of gays and lesbians getting married, but she’s against allowing them to adopt. She also avoided voting on allowing LGBT issues to be discussed in schools, and on both the Gender Recognition Act and Equality Act. Details here.
One thing that I didn’t get a chance to address was the idiot who phoned in to say that if being trans wasn’t an illness then why is it treated on the NHS. Well firstly many trans people don’t want or need any medical treatment. And for those that do, that treatment is to help them transition, not to stop them being trans. The treatment is very successful with the vast majority of trans people being happier as a result. Saying that trans is an illness because trans people get NHS treatment is rather like saying that if having lungs wasn’t an illness why does the NHS treat pneumonia.
The broadcast will be available through the BBC’s Listen Again service once the show has finished. I’m on just before the end of the first hour.
WEP Trans Policy
Yesterday there was a bit of a kerfuffle about a particularly nasty trans-hating blog post. I’m not going to dignify it with additional traffic, but here are some choice examples:
They rapidly take on the prettiness of femininity – the shoes, the makeup, the clothes, and the hair – yet leave aside other traits commonly associated with the gender: empathy, compassion, nurturance, receptivity. Those aspects of the gentler sex are discarded because they don’t fit in with the behaviour of men
There is more embedded in gender than a change of outfit.
A frightened child in a rape crisis centre isn’t going to look at a transwoman and see trans-inclusive ideology. She’s going to see a man in a dress
They attempt to both devalue and claim for themselves all that is female
None of this is particularly new or unusual. What got social media excited is that the author claimed to be a member of the Women’s Equality Party. Inevitably people were asking whether this post represented official WEP policy. No, it doesn’t. The official party policy is on page 5 of the recent manifesto, which includes this:
WE also recognise that the binary words “woman†and “man†do not reflect the gender experience of everyone, and support the right of all to define their sex or gender or to reject gendered divisions as they choose.
And here is a tweet confirming that policy.
See 'Who WE are' on p5: https://t.co/X60sixYqUa That is the party's position
— Women's Equality Party (@WEP_UK) June 25, 2017
As WE have, to date, only had one party conference, WE haven’t had a chance to have a public debate on trans issues as yet. There is an awful lot of areas that WE need to over. But I am hoping that a trans motion will be put before conference sooner rather than later. In the meantime I’m grateful to the party management for continuing to stand behind people of all genders.
Equality is better for everyone
Election Tomorrow
I’m doing training in Bristol tomorrow morning and traveling to London in the afternoon for a couple of events on Thursday and Friday. That means I’ll be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to get to the polling station to vote.
My constituency is about as dark blue as it gets. The results last time around were:
- 1st – UKIP wannabe
- 2nd – Official UKIP
- 3rd – Labour
- 4th – LibDems
- 5th – Greens
Ordinarily in such circumstances I’d be voting Green to get their share of the national vote up. This time, however, I’ll be voting Labour for the first time in my life. Not only is Laura Pictor the only woman on the ballot (and therefore the candidate of choice for WEP members), she’s also the candidate with the best chance of depriving the Tories of a seat. I’m not a Socialist, and there are Conservative MPs that I have a lot of time for, but their current leader not only doesn’t believe in human rights, she has staked her entire campaign on a promise to repeal human rights legislation. Not to mention the whole disaster of her relations with Europe, her sucking up to Trump, the selling off of the NHS… Need I go on?
Elsewhere I’d like to wish the very best of luck to Helen Belcher (LibDem), Sophie Cook (Labour) and Aimee Challenor (Green) who are trying hard to get a trans person into Parliament. Good luck also to Molly Scott Cato, Thangam Debbonaire and Stephen Williams in Bristol West. I’m so sorry that two of you have to lose.
And finally a huge cheer and masses of luck to Sophie Walker, Nimco Ali, Harini Iyengar, Sharon Lovell, Sally Carr, Celine Thomas and Kirstein Rummery who are the first ever parliamentary candidates for the Women’s Equality Party. You are making history, ladies.
Festival of Ideas Does Feminism
On Thursday evening I attended two feminist-themed events at the Watershed in Bristol. Both of them were organized by the Bristol Festival of Ideas.
First up was science journalist, Angela Saini, promoting her new book. Inferior, expansively subtitled, How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, is all about how gender bias, sometimes unconscious and sometimes not, has been a feature of science over the years. Mostly the book is about biology, because this is an area in which men have used dubious science to claim superiority over women. This has been going on for a very long time. Aristotle has a lot to answer for, and Darwin was no better.
The biggest problem area is evolutionary psychology, where people make the most bizarre claims. Saini focused on the question as to why human women (uniquely among primates, but not the entire animal kingdom) live for a long time after they have ceased to be fertile. Many people on Twitter and Facebook reacting to my posts mentioned the sensible idea that older women are useful to society and it is good to keep them alive. There is an alternative theory (developed by men) that old women are ugly so there is no need for them to be fertile, and consequently they have lost the ability to breed.
Those of you who are on social media may have seen this week’s joke evolutionary psychology theory: that women have evolved to become bisexual because men love watching lesbian sex.
It doesn’t take much to poke fun at this stuff, but it is useful to have someone like Saini around to work on the more serious bad science. Fans of Cordelia Fine will doubtless love her book. I’m looking forward to it too, but I can’t read it just yet because the event only had a limited number of pre-publication copies and they sold out.
The reason why I was late getting in the queue is that I’d made a couple of new friends. One is a psychologist from Boston who understands the need to consider trans issues in her work. I’m hoping to learn a lot more about what she’s doing next week. In the meantime I’m going to check out the work of Charlotte Tate, who is also doing good work in this area.
My other new pal is Virginia Bergin, a Bristol-based writer of YA science fiction. Her latest book, Who Runs the World, is a pretty obvious candidate for the Tiptree. My chagrin at not having heard of Virginia before was mollified slightly by the fact that Virginia had no idea that Bristol had an SF&F community. We plan to rectify both of these issues.
The second event featured anti-FGM campaigner and Women’s Equality Party parliamentary candidate, Nimco Ali. She’s an amazing person who has done a huge amount to get the UK authorities to take FGM seriously. I recorded a brief interview with her after the talk which I’ll air on my June 7th Women’s Outlook show.
My thanks are due to Nimco for helping me understand what was going on in Rome as successive emperors attempted to ban child castration. It all makes much more sense now.
Now if only we could get the UK to ban surgery on intersex children.
Stonewall Visits Bath
Yesterday I attended a workshop in Bath given by Stonewall. This was the first event in a new initiative aimed at helping build activism capacity outside of major cities. Given that it was a first event, some of the course probably needs a little tweaking, but nevertheless I was very pleased with the day.
The main thing we learned is how to actually construct a campaign that has focus, stands a chance of succeeding, and will result in beneficial change. This is important. Too many of the things that LGBT activists spend their time on, and I include myself in this, is poorly focused and ill-thought out. Given how tiring activism can be, good use of your time is important.
Of course this does mean that you need a willingness to build alliances and accept when you have made a mistake. The Stonewall team chose to illustrate the process using the Rainbow Laces campaign which challenges homophobia in soccer. Because they needed money and good contacts within the UK soccer establishment, Stonewall initially chose to partner with the betting company, Paddy Power. While this did get them off to a good start, it caused a number of problems. It meant that they were unable to work with schools on the campaign. And it got them a lot of bad press in certain quarters because of Paddy Power’s horribly transphobic advertising. The partnership with Paddy Power no longer exists, but the campaign has continued to go from strength to strength.
Interestingly, the Paddy Power advert that caused all of the trouble had been developed in partnership with the Beaumont Society. This was a classic example of a group of cross-dressers not understanding that what they were doing would be very damaging to trans women. Issues of community cohesion got quite a bit of airing in the workshop. Kudos here to the lad who raised the issue. It is good to see a gay man taking the lead on such things.
Of course the issue is very much in the spotlight right now thanks to the frankly appalling behavior of celebrity trans woman, India Willoughby, in attacking non-binary people. Thankfully Stonewall is very much on point these days and is solidly behind the non-binary community. Unfortunately, given Willoughby’s high media profile, many organizations that claim to work for the LGBT community will continue to pay her to represent trans people.
For me the biggest benefits of the day were the number of people who attended and the new contacts that I made. I think I counted 28 people at the workshop. They came from Cheltenham, and from small towns in Somerset and Wiltshire, as well as from Bath. They came from universities, local councils and the private sector as well as activist organizations such as the Diversity Trust and Bath Gender Equality Network. I have a long list of things to follow up. If Stonewall offers to do one of these workshops in your region I recommend that you go along.
Got Manifesto? WE Have
It is general election time in the UK. That’s means that parties have to produce manifestos. The Labour one was leaked in draft form yesterday, because Labour MPs can’t resist any opportunity to fight each other in public. The Conservatives haven’t issued one yet, presumably for the same reason that Theresa May is hiding from the public: they don’t want anyone to know what they plan to do. The only thing that the Tories think is important enough to want to announce in advance is that they want to scrap the ban on fox hunting. I think that tells you all you need to know about their priorities.
Today the Women’s Equality Party issued their manifesto. HQ came up with a great PR wheeze too. One of the core principles of the party is that WE want to put ourselves out of business. If the other parties were to care as much about women voters as they do about men there would be no need for a Women’s Equality Party. So our policy director, Halla, took copies of our manifesto around to the other major parties and invited them to steal the contents for their own manifestos. The LibDems and the Greens said thank you very much. Even UKIP, sorry, I mean the Conservatives who just happen to have policies to the right of UKIP these days, said thank you very much. Labour refused to accept their copy, because they can’t resist an opportunity for a PR disaster when one comes calling.
You can find our manifesto, and a brief summary of key points, on the WEP website. I just want to quote one small part of it. This is from page 3, where WE define who WE are:
Our policies aim to recognise and address the fact that many women experience additional inequalities due to the intersections of socio-economic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, disability, immigration status and gender identity. WE also recognise that the binary words “woman†and “man†do not reflect the gender experience of everyone, and support the right of all to define their sex or gender or to reject gendered divisions as they choose.
I note that I had nothing to do with crafting that, other than giving workshops at Conference last year and chatting to part leaders while I was there.
There are, inevitably, a few bits of the manifesto that I would like to be slightly different. That’s inevitable. One of the things that many online activists don’t seem to understand is that if you want a political party to agree 100% with your views on all subjects then you will end up in a party with just one member. People refusing to vote for left-ish candidates because they are not ideologically pure enough is one of the things that has got us into the current mess we are in. (Lack of proportional representation is another major issue, but that’s a whole different blog post.)
On the other hand, by stating that WE are trans-inclusive from the start, WE don’t need to hedge about statements later on. All statements about gender equality automatically accept trans women as women, and include more than two genders. So well done whoever wrote the manifesto on that score.
The manifesto doesn’t make any explicit promises with regard to trans-related legislation. However, Labour, the LibDems and the Greens are all on board with that, and with only 7 candidates WE are not going to be forming a government. I’m sure our MPs will support such initiatives when they are brought forward, because the core philosophy of WEP is that equality is better for everyone. That means WE are beholden to support new equality legislation.
China in Bristol
On Friday evening China Miéville was in Bristol to promote his newly published history of the Russian revolution, October. Naturally I, and many of the Bristol SF crowd, where there to see him, even though he barely mentioned SF.
Despite his background in academia (he has a PhD in Marxist theory of international law from LSE), China has written this book using his novelist brain. There are, he says, no footnotes. This sounds like a smart move. Popular history, that is history made accessible to the general public, sells very well. Also, by focusing on people and events, China will hopefully dispel the fear that his book might be full of Marxist theology, debating which comrades have the right to dance on the head of a pin and which should be executed as traitors. While some description of the disputes and demarcation lines between the various factions that created the revolution is inevitable, I trust China not to make this a work of hagiography or demonology.
One of the reasons that China gave for taking this approach is that he has a truly remarkable story to tell. Indeed, he joked that if it he had presented the plot as a novel he might have been told by his editors that it was too fantastic, even for him. Personally I am not surprised that the revolution was kickstarted by a women’s strike. After all, the French revolution was kickstarted by the women’s march on Versailles, and the Stonewall riot was begun by trans women. When it comes down to actual revolution, as opposed to just talking about it, it is always those who have nothing to lose who throw the first stone. However, some of the stories that China has found in the letters from revolutionary soldiers to the party leadership sound really interesting. I wish I had time to read the book, but of course I have a huge pile of Tiptree reading to get through.
Despite our politics often being seemingly poles apart, China and I tend to find ourselves agreeing on quite a lot. He made a point during the talk of distinguishing between those liberals who actually adhere to the principles of Liberalism (“a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality” according to Wikipedia) and those who simply support the instruments of the so-called Liberal state. He also thinks a lot about his politics. One of the questions he was asked was whether he thought it was inevitable that the revolutionaries resorted to terror tactics. His lengthy answer covered the fact that the Whites used terror tactics too, that in such situations terror may well have been inevitable, and that this doesn’t mean we should glorify it. I might have added that the original suffragettes did a lot of things that would be counted as terrorism today.
China’s view of the success and failure of the revolution appears to be (on a very simplistic level which I am sure is addressed much more deeply in the book) one of Lenin v Stalin, and in particular Stalin’s disavowal of the project of internationalism in favor of building a Communist state in Russia. You can read more about his views, both on that and on why the story of the Russian revolution is still relevant today, in this Guardian article.
On Friday he also talked about the tension between those who feel that revolution is necessary, and those who prefer to work within the establishment for what they presumably hope will be a more peaceful transfer of power. That reminded me a lot of Ruth Hunt’s comments on Wednesday about how the previous regime at Stonewall adopted an assimilationist approach to LGBT rights, emphasizing that gays were people “just like anyone else” and eschewing anything deemed too outré (such as trans people). China, of course, is a revolutionary by inclination, and these days who is to say that he is wrong? I certainly accept his point that “revolutions always eat their children” is a trite and simplistic slogan, not a natural law. On the other hand, the more chaos a revolution generates, the easier it may be for someone to sell the need for Strong and Stable Leadership.
I note in passing that internationalism is a core belief of the pro-EU movement in Britain today, and that some of the Labour support for Brexit appears to be based on the idea that revolution will be much easier to achieve in a small and isolated country than in the EU.
Politics can be really complicated.
It occurs to me, however, that most of you didn’t want me to talk about politics, you wanted to know if China has any fiction in the pipeline.
Before I get to that, there was brief discussion of his fiction during the evening. His interviewer asked whether there was any connection between his interest in fantastic fiction and his politics. China very wisely pointed that while he might be in the part of a Venn diagram that overlaps those two obsessions, the two circles are by no means congruent. Beyond that he would not commit, so allow me to propose a thesis.
Science fiction is often, though by no means always, about future history. The philosophical project of SF is to examine technological change (and other factors such as alien contact) and examine how that might change the world. Fantasy is often used to examine social issues through a framework of an alternate world (Juliet McKenna being a good example of this). Both of these things are of obvious interest to historians. And politics is, at least in part, the art of applying historical knowledge about how human societies work to try to create a better future.
As to new books, China told me that he does have a novel he is working on. However, October has eaten up two years of his life, and now he is on a book tour. He needs all of that to be over before he can get back to being a fiction writer again.
There wasn’t a lot of time to chat after the event because China had to catch a train back to London. He was, of all things, appearing at Blackwells in Oxford the following night. (That would be the bookstore with the famously pro-UKIP owners.) However, we did manage a brief catch-up. China, if you are reading this, I have checked out your pal and have read this. It seems pretty good despite the potentially incendiary headline, but he does need to think about trans identities outside of the modern Western cultural bubble.
Politics, Again
So, we have another general election, eh? Nothing like keeping the political journalists in business.
For those of you outside of the UK who are totally confused about the whole thing, the short version is something like this: a party with a very small majority is calling an election in which it hopes to gain a massive majority, even though its policies are hugely unpopular. It will achieve this partly because there is no effective opposition, and partly because it has almost all of the media on its side.
I’m sympathetic to the view that Mrs. May has called the election primarily because with a much bigger majority she won’t be beholden to the lunatic fringe of her own party, and can therefore negotiate with the EU in a sensible manner rather than by trying to pretend that she has a worldwide empire at her command. This may result in a somewhat softer Brexit than we might otherwise have got, but it may also result in the privatization of everything that’s left to be sold and a bonfire of civil rights legislation. In other words, the results will be disastrous for the majority of the population, rather than for everyone.
It so happened that my membership of the Women’s Equality Party was due for renewal, so I have renewed it. I don’t expect us to have many candidates because we can’t afford it. Also it would be irresponsible of us to further split the vote in some key marginals, so WE won’t do it. But I very much hope that WE’ll field a candidate against the obnoxious Philip Davies. That could end up being very entertaining.
More broadly I expect us to support the candidates who will do the most for equality. That probably means whoever has the best chance of beating the Tories in each particular constituency. There are some good Tory MPs around. I very much hope that Maria Miller keeps her seat because she’s been a far better opposition to the government than the Labour leadership for the past few years. Ben Howlett has done some good work for trans people as well, but his Bath constituency is very vulnerable to a swing towards the LibDems, and Bath is fairly strongly anti-Brexit, so I think he may go. But at least he’ll last longer than Thangam Debbonaire whom I expect to be purged by Labour in advance of the election. Last time around Bristol West was a very tight race between Thangam, the incumbent Stephen Williams (LibDem), and the Greens. I’ve seen a suggestion that Molly Scott-Cato, our local MEP, might be the Green candidate this time around, and I think she has a very good chance if she does go for it.
Elsewhere around the region I’ll be keeping a close eye on Chippenham where Helen Belcher is the LibDem candidate. It is a seat that the Tories took from the LibDems last time, so Helen has a real chance of getting it back. If she does she’ll be the first trans person to be elected to the UK Parliament. (There may well be other trans candidates, but I don’t think any of them stand as good a chance as Helen.)
It is hard not be utterly depressed by the whole thing. Thus far the most interesting contests appear to be Labour v LibDems, Labour v itself, and the Greens v the BBC. None of this will do any good for the country. WE might be a very small and very new party, but at least WE are trying to do our best for the country. Here’s hoping WE can have some effect. If nothing else WE intend to get women’s issues talked about during the election, and that will be a major change to how politics is done here.
Stonewall Has a Vision for Change
This morning Stonewall released their long-anticipated trans rights campaign strategy. It is called A Vision for Change, and you can find the press release and document here.
The first thing to be noted is that this marks a sea change in British LGBT+ politics. The old Stonewall, before Ruth Hunt took over, was very much LG(b)-focused. If trans people were mentioned, it was more likely to be as targets for lesbian or gay transphobes as it was for positive reasons. The new Stonewall is very much trans inclusive. Indeed, it recognizes trans rights as one of the major issues facing the LGBT+ community at the moment. Ruth can take a lot of the credit for this turnaround, but she could not have done it without the backing of the Stonewall staff, or without the help of the group of trans people they recruited to develop their policy (some of whom I am honored to call friends).
It is also worth noting that this support is unconditional. The subtitle of the report is, “Acceptance without exception for trans people”. There is no, “we’ll help you as long as you conform to certain stereotypes,” as there has been in the past.
So what is Stonewall actually going to campaign for? The document lists six specific policy goals:
- A reformed Gender Recognition Act (it needs a thorough overhaul)
- A reformed Equality Act (to ensure all trans people are protected)
- Removal of the infamous “Spousal Veto” from marriage legislation*
- Action on the so-called “sex by deception” prosecutions which have led to trans people being sent to prison for having sex without disclosing they are trans
- Legal recognition of non-binary people including, but by no means limited to, an X option on passports
- Reform of the Asylum system (which is also a priority for LGB people)
Interestingly coverage in the national media has focused solely on the passport issue. This has been so uniform that I suspect it must be the result of a specific briefing from Stonewall (journalists are notoriously busy and will always prefer to be spoon-fed a story). There are potential banana skins here. No one wants this to be made mandatory for all trans people and for it to become a sort of trans id card. However, this is something that many other countries have done (including Australia, New Zealand, India and Pakistan) so it is easy to shame the government on this point. The government argument that it would upset the Americans is no longer valid because everything upsets the American border control people these days, and hardly anyone wants to go to the USA anyway.
There is, of course, a long way to go. However, Stonewall is a well-respected and highly effective campaigning organization that does have the ear of government and of the media. The trans community has badly needed someone like them to step forward and help for a long time. This is a real opportunity to make progress.
And yes, I am really looking forward to all of the articles in the Guardian and New Statesman complaining about what a dangerous, radical organization Stonewall has become.
* The Spousal Veto is a system that allows an existing spouse to block a change of legal gender, even if the person wishing to change gender has undergone full medical gender reassignment.
Yesterday on Ujima – Radio Comedy, Allyship & Conferences
Yesterday’s show on Ujima seemed to go OK, despite much of it being thrown together at the last minute as a couple of people I’d wanted were not available. We did have some technical issues at the start, but Ben was able to sort that out and I think we were OK for most of the show.
First up was Olly Rose talking about their fabulous science fiction radio play series, Ray Gunn and Starburst. Season 2 should be dropping very soon now. If you haven’t listed to Season 1 yet, you can do so for free here.
At 12:30 I welcomed Camille Barton, whom I have been fortunate to be on programme with a couple of times recently. She was talking about her Collective Liberation Project, which is a really interesting attempt to do intersectionality in practice.
Along the way I got to plug tomorrow’s event at Ground & Burst where I will be talking about gender identity around the world, and Monday’s BristolCon Fringe event which will feature Paul Cornell and Steph Minns. And I gave a shout-out to the amazing Sound Industry conference that will be happening in Bristol at the end of the month.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
Regular guest Charlotte Gage of Bristol Women’s Voice and Bristol Zero Tolerance joined me at 13:00 to discuss a really interesting conference on male gender roles that is taking place on Friday of next week. I took the opportunity to mention a private member’s bill about giving people the right to ask for their taxes to be spent on peace initiatives rather than wars. The Taxes for Peace bill is sponsored by Ruth Cadbury MP, who also happens to be a good ally of the trans community. If you think your MP is likely to support it, please nag them before the 24th. Charlotte also talked about a new initiative to monitor street harassment that is going to be launching in April.
Finally on the show I welcomed Liz Andrews of WellBeans to talk about the Emotional Wellbeing in the Workplace conference which is being held in City Hall on Monday 27th. Thinking back to my time as an employee, it really is about time that businesses took this sort of thing seriously.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
The music for the show began with a tribute to Joni Sledge of Sister Sledge who sadly died this past weekend. After that all of the music was chosen to fit in with the Month of Revolution theme on Ujima. Here’s the playlist:
- Sister Sledge – Thinking of You
- Sister Sledge – Lost in Music
- Tracy Chapman – Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution
- Chic – Rebels We Are
- Bob Marley – Revolution
- Pretenders – Revolution
- T. Rex – Children of the Revolution
- Jamiroquai – Revolution 1993
I will definitely be back in the studio on April 12th. I may end up doing April 5th as well, though I have two other things I should be doing that morning.
Introducing Rainbow Pilgrims
Last night I was in Exeter helping my good friend Surat-Shaan Knan do an event about his amazing trans people of faith project, Twilight People. In the process of that I discovered that he has a new project just starting. It is called Rainbow Pilgrims, and it is all about LGBT+ migrants. The primary focus will doubtless be on refugees and asylum seekers, but I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear from LGBT+ people who have migrated without being in fear of their lives.
You can find out more about this exciting new project at the website. Please note that, while it does talk about oral history, there is no requirement to give one to be involved. Fleeing your home and traveling to a foreign country because you are afraid of being killed is a deeply traumatic experience and no one should be pushed into reliving that. There will be other ways of participating.
Given the current desperate situation in the UK for LGBT+ refugees and asylum seekers, this is a very timely project.
Hola World
This is a very quick update from Barcelona. The weather is much better than in England. The food and the wine are great. The University of Barcelona is as beautiful as ever. I am spending much of my time apologizing to young European academics about the awfulness of Brexit. Even the Americans are less embarrassed than me because Trump is a vague and nebulous threat whereas for some of these people, or their friends and colleagues, Brexit means losing your home and possibly being separated from your spouse.
Anyway, the conference is great. I haven’t learned a huge amount, but I have confirmed a few things I was unsure about which thankfully means I don’t have to do any massive re-writes of my talks for LGBT History Month. I’m delighted at the number of people who want to learn about trans theory to help them with their work.
The State of British Politics
Here’s where we are. Our mother, Theresa, wants us to welcome rich Uncle Donald with open arms, despite the fact that he’s a vulgar lout with a reputation for roving hands and rumors that he’s a serial rapist. Mother says we must do this because he’s a good family man, even though his kids keep telling us what an awful bully he is. What Mother doesn’t say is that we are becoming increasingly poorer, especially since she had that huge falling out with Aunt Angela and most of the more distant members of the family aren’t speaking to us any more. Mother thinks Uncle Donald will lend her money. She seems to be unaware that he has a reputation for reneging on all of his promises.
If this was a Victorian novel it is pretty clear what the ending would be. But it isn’t, so we can’t rely on the moral compass of the universe to save us. There’s not a lot we can do to prevent Uncle Donald coming to visit, but he is a dreadful narcissist. If we fail to smile winsomely enough at him, or poke a tongue out at him when Mother isn’t looking, he’s likely to go off in a huff. We can make a start today.
And we can keep signing this, even if Mother says she’s going to ignore it.
A Note on Exclusion
One of the things I have noticed over the weekend in the responses to the Women’s March is a bunch of women people complaining that they felt excluded by all of the signs talking about vaginas, uteruses and so on. I’d like to talk about that for a while.
First up, trans women were welcome at the marches. (Sex workers less so, but that’s a different conversation.) Janet Mock, Raquel Willis and Julia Serano were all on platform. I don’t know of any trans women who were invited to speak at UK marches, and would like to hear if any were, but at least there were some in the USA. Also there were many trans women marching, and many trans-supportive banners.
Obviously I understand that a huge crowd of women being very positive about body parts that you desperately wish you had, but don’t have, can be very triggering. On the other hand, there are plenty of cis women who can’t conceive for one reason or another, and I didn’t see any of them complaining about the reproductive rights signs.
The reason why there were so many signs talking about vaginas and uteruses is because Trump brags about his sexual assaults, and that he can get away with them, and because he and his cronies are planning an all-out-assault on women’s reproductive rights. That’s what those people were marching about, and they have every right to do so.
OK, I understand that trans rights are under assault as well. People were marching about that too. But that march wasn’t all about us. To put it another way, would you complain about all the people with Black Lives Matter signs because you are not black?
It’s all too easy these days to condemn any popular political movement because it is not aligned 100% with your concerns and beliefs, but where that gets us is all of the angry left wing people who refused to vote for Hilary because, “she’s as bad as Trump”.
Of course there is also the point that anyone claiming that “trans women” are excluded by signs about vaginas is saying that you can’t be a trans woman if you have a vagina. In which case, who’s being exclusionary now? Mostly I suspect people didn’t think of this, but some of us remember the 1990s.
Finally, a little bit of inclusion. Here’s Raquel getting all of the points across on MSNBC. Great job, sis. And thanks for reminding me that I’m not the only one who can’t force herself to smile all of the time while on TV. Doing TV interviews is really hard.
Update: I’m getting reports of some marches that were hostile to trans folks. Obviously where that was the case people have every right to protest exclusion. Austin, I am deeply disappointed in you.
Big March, Small Step
Yesterday was fun, right? We had the Orange Puppet crying into his golden champagne flute. But it was only a start. A march like that won’t get rid of Trump, it won’t even slow down the political change that he is planning to bring in, because right now he has the votes he needs in Congress to force that through.
My feeling is, and I accept I’m a long way away from the US these days, that what US politics needs is people calling their CongressCritters, incessantly. They need to know that people are behind them, because right now they are terrified of Trump’s supporters. All those people that the Republicans have been spending 8 years encouraging to buy guns? They are Trump people now.
As for the UK, one very positive thing you can do is join WEP and get involved. WE only have around 65,000 members right now. Almost twice that went on the London march alone. We need your help, and we need you to vote whenever you get a chance. Not necessarily for us because WE won’t have candidates everywhere, but for people who are prepared to stand up against Putin, Trump and May.
The other thing that you all need to do is foreground people from marginalized groups. It is true that the majority of marchers yesterday were middle class, middle aged and white. For now that meant that the police were afraid to brutalize the marchers. Had that march been predominantly people of color, or even white students, there would have been tear gas and baton charges, and the media would have been full of stories about how angry and violent the march was.
So we were allowed to march in peace (for now). What we do, when given that opportunity, is foreground those people who would not have been allowed to march in peace. Like this.