On the one hand, there is still real worry for Tara. We understand that she is in Horfield Prison. She’s probably being held in solitary confinement for her own safety. It must be awful.
On the other hand, the petition in her support is closing in on 65,000 signatures as I type. In the meantime all of this has happened.
Ben Howlett, the MP for Bath, has been busy pigeonholing his colleagues in the Ministry of Justice and putting pressure on them to do something.
Rather briefly I was down to appear on the BBC’s local news program, Points West. Thankfully for the people of South-West England, they managed to get Ben instead.
I had this article about the flaws in Britain’s gender recognition laws published in Bristol 24/7.
That earned me a phone call with a journalist from the Telegraph, which resulted in this article where CN Lester and I give the existing laws (and the Gender Recognition Panel) a good kicking. Thanks Radhika, great job!
Meanwhile Ben was raising Tara’s case in the latest session of the Transgender Equality Inquiry. I suspect that Caroline Dinenage was very relieved to be able to hide behind an excuse of sub judice. There may be stern words passed down to the Bath magistrates court.
We have no idea how much information is getting into Horfield. Probably not a lot, but hopefully Tara’s lawyers have been in to tell her what is going on. It would not surprise me to see her on national news on Friday. Yesterday I was hoping she’d get moved to a women’s prison. Such is the outpouring of support for her in the country that I’m now hoping that her sentence will be commuted to something non-custodial.
If you want to send a message of support to Tara you can do so here. She can’t get email, obvious, but Ceri and her friends are collecting all of the messages and will deliver them as soon as possible.
When I was a kid my father used to read the Telegraph every day. He gave up on it during Margaret Thatcher’s government because he found it too right wing. And now here I am watching a Tory MP and the Telegraph helping lead a campaign for trans rights. You could knock me down with a feather.
Today’s Women’s Outlook show had a lot of science fiction content. For the first half hour I was joined by Joanne Hall, the Chair of BristolCon. We discussed the various things that people will be able to see and do at the convention, and then we went on discuss Jo’s new book, Spark & Carousel, which is launching at the convention. We may have noted that Jim Burns like a beer or two.
One of the many fine authors who will be attending this year’s BristolCon is Stephanie Saulter. Last week I did a phone interview with her about her latest novel, Regeneration, which I broadcast today. The whole thing is about half an hour long, so I had to cut it down quite a bit for the show because of ads, music and news. I will post the extended version on Salon Futura in due course.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
The second half began with the studio full of artists. They were all people involved with the Art on the Hill art trail, which is one of many such trails in Bristol. Nicolette de Sausmarez provided all of the admin details, Jane Lee & Sue Jones talked about their art, and Alan Gibson represented Nota Bene, a local a cappella group.
Finally we got serious and discussed the refugee crisis. Paulette, who is back from Jamaica at last, announced a new initiative from Ujima to help people in Calais. I talked to Dr. Naomi Millner from Bristol University who wrote this fine article about what we can do to provide practical help.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
The playlist for today’s show was as follows:
Earth, Wind & Fire – Fantasy
Janelle Monáe – Tightrope
Pointer Sisters – We are family
Bob Marley – Could you be loved?
Prince – Art Official Cage
Nota Bene – Let’s do it
Jamiroquai – Emergency on Planet Earth
Jama – No Borders
And finally, here is a news report about Ujima’s recent win at the National Diversity Awards.
Yeah, I have been back on the radio again. Paulette is still in Jamaica so I was allowed to put the whole show together myself. What I wasn’t expecting was that I’d end up learning to be an engineer on the job. I’ve had a bit of training on the desk before, but this is the first time I have actually done it live myself. There were a few very minor gaps in the flow where I had a panic as to which button to push, but mostly it was very smooth. Huge thanks are due to my colleague, Jack, who was keeping an eye on me and pointing out when I had forgotten something.
Anyway, the show began with discussion of the current furor in the UK over the election of Jeremy Corbyn to be leader of the Labour Party. As I said on the show, I’m not a Socialist, but the behavior of the mainstream media, the right wing of the Labour Party, and even the Prime Minister has been so childish that you can’t help but have sympathy and respect for Corbyn. I’m not surprised that there has been a flood of people joining Labour since he was elected. My colleagues, Judeline and Jack, offered their opinions.
Next up I talked a bit about the Ascent of Woman documentary series that is airing on BBC 2 at the moment. I’ve talked a lot about it here already, so I won’t go into that again.
After the news we were joined by Tom Parker and Jasmine Atkins-Smart of the Tobacco Tea Theatre Company. You may remember Tom from his appearance at BristolCon Fringe. The they have been up in Edinburgh performing in a play called The Accidental Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in which Tom played Doctor Watson and Jasmine played Sherlock. We chatted a bit about what it was like being at Fringe as performers, about the theatre scene in Bristol, and about Sherlock as a cultural phenomenon.
Next up we were supposed to have Cezara Nanu of Bristol Women’s Voice talking about modern slavery. Sadly she had caught a chill, probably from running the Bristol Half Marathon on Sunday (where she was raising money for refugees) so we gave the actors a little longer and then covered the slavery issue as well as we could by ourselves. Judeline and Jack had done some great research.
Finally we touched on an issue that arose out of the media panic over Mr Corbyn, the idea of women-only railway carriages. That naturally broadened out into the topic of safe spaces in general. I chipped in with the issue as to whether trans women were allowed in women’s spaces, and put poor Jack on the spot as our representative of men.
If you want to listen to the show you can find the first hour here and the second hour here.
Michael Gove is apparently not a wholly bad man. Oh, I know that the teaching profession is overjoyed to be rid of him, but the legal profession is leaping up and down with glee to have a nice, reasonable chap like Gove in charge of them rather than a grasping, amoral monster like Chris Grayling. That’s because Gove is rolling back some of the worst excesses of the Grayling regime at the Ministry of Justice. You know, things like the UK government setting up in business to advise repressive regimes around the world on how best to control their citizens. (Though apparently we will be fulfilling our contract with the Saudis because it would cost too much money to walk away.)
On the other hand, Gove is still Gove. That much is fairly obvious from the UK Government’s response to the recent petition on trans rights.
Just to be clear on this, the petition is not exactly asking for the moon. It is asking for UK trans people to have the same right of self-determination that has just been granted to Irish citizens. It is also asking for legal recognition for non-binary people, something that has already been granted by governments in places such as India, Pakistan and Australia. Sadly the response from the MoJ is not exactly encouraging.
Actually it is interesting that the response comes from the MoJ and not the Equalities Department within the Home Office, because they are the people responsible for trans rights. It is possibly also significant that the response comes a few days after the public evidence hearings for the current Transgender Equality Inquiry, because if any of the witnesses at that event had wanted to point out the desperate state of trans equality in the UK all they would have had to do was quote from the MoJ’s statement.
But wait, there’s another public evidence hearing this coming Tuesday. Get out the popcorn, folks, this could be a cracker.
So what did the MoJ actually say? Well you can read the whole thing here, but as you might have guessed I’m going to comment on the salient points. Let’s start with the outright lie. The MoJ says:
The gender recognition process in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 was developed as a result of the Government’s commitment to allowing trans people to gain legal recognition in their acquired gender.
Well, no. The UK government fought tooth and nail to prevent trans people getting any legal rights at all. The GRA was only introduced following a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (Christine Goodwin v The United Kingdom, Case No 28957/1995 for any legal wonks out there) which found the UK government guilty of discrimination.
Now let’s move on to the willfully naive. As I noted above, part of the petition calls for legal recognition for non-binary people. The MoJ’s argument against providing this is:
Non-binary gender is not recognised in UK law. Under the law of the United Kingdom, individuals are considered by the state to be of the gender that is registered on their birth certificate, either male or female.
It goes on to note specifically that the Equality Act provides no protection for non-binary people, but only for people who are male or female. I’d like to see that tested in court.
Actually, thinking about it, what the MoJ is saying here is that it is OK under the Equality Act to discriminate against someone if they look neither male nor female. That clearly affects trans people, because you can claim that you are perfectly OK about them being trans, but not about them not looking like a member of their preferred gender. In addition it affects LGB people, because you can claim that you are not prejudiced on the grounds of sexuality, but rather on the grounds of gender performance. So the MoJ thinks it is OK to discriminate against a gay man if he looks effeminate, or against a lesbian if she looks butch. This is an issue that affects the whole LGBT community.
Finally they note:
We recognise that a very small number of people consider themselves to be of neither gender. We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment
If ever I saw a call for a social media campaign, that was it. CN Lester noted:
4. …I've been denied schooling, work and adequate healthcare because of being neither male nor female. @MoJGovUK
Having read a number of government responses to online petitions, it does seem that it is a standard tactic to quote existing law as an argument for not changing it. The MoJ statement has taken this to heart and goes into great detail about all of the hoops that trans people are forced to jump through in order to achieve legal recognition of their gender. As Maria Miller perceptively noted at the Transgender Equality Inquiry on Tuesday, those requirements are now far more stringent than those recommended by the medical profession when approving patients for surgery.
The key sentence in the MoJ response is this one:
A person’s gender has important legal and social consequences.
Basically what that is saying is that differences between men and women are enshrined in UK law, and if we allow trans people to unilaterally switch between genders then the whole fabric of Patriarchy will crumble.
Remind me again how it is that trans people are agents of the Patriarchy who reinforce the gender binary.
By the way, the petition currently has just over 30,000 signatures. If it gets over 100,000 that will force a debate in Parliament. You can sign it here.
A big meeting of EU finance ministers is taking place next week in Dublin. Some politicians do appear to have got the message that the current system is a complete disaster. However, many are still holding out and insisting that small businesses sign up to an administrative system whose costs, both to them and to government, far outweigh the amount of tax likely to be paid under the scheme.
As Juliet McKenna explains here, we have a chance at that meeting to persuade the EU to act. We may get some sort of emergency provision that will introduce a turnover threshold below which businesses don’t need to register. It doesn’t have to be that big. Wizard’s Tower would do way less than €1000 worth of cross-border business each year, were I able to trade. Hundreds, possibly thousands of other businesses are in the same position. But if nothing happens in Dublin it will be 2017 or 2018 before we are likely to get another chance.
So yeah, another thing I need to do this weekend is write letters to European politicians. If some of you can find the time to do the same, Juliet and I, and many, many small businesses all over Europe, would be very grateful. Details here.
Yesterday’s show on Ujima was devoted entirely to the plight of the Palestinian people. Paulette is away on the far side of the Atlantic again, and she had left me with a prepared show full of guests for me to host.
What she didn’t leave me with was music. Given that the Palestinian situation is very much about state violence, I figured I could start with “Hell You Talmbout”, the protest song written by Janelle Monáe for the Black Lives Matter campaign. The song features Janelle, Jindenna and the whole of the Wondaland crew chanting the names of people of color killed by police in the USA this year.
Naturally, having done that, I had to read the names of the trans women of color killed in the USA this year. To get some idea of why people are so worried, here’s an historical comparison:
2010 – 14
2011 – 9
2012 – 15
2013 – 16
2014 – 10
2015 – 20 to date
Here are their names: Papi Edwards, Lamia Beard, Ty Underwood, Yazmin Vash Payne, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, Penny Proud, Kristina Grant Infiniti, London Chanel, Mercedes Williamson, Ashton O’Hara, Amber Monroe, India Clarke, K.C. Haggard, Shade Schuler, Kandis Capri, Elisha Walker, Tamara Dominguez, Jasmine Collins, Bri Golec, Mya Hall.
I also wanted to find music by Palestinians. This led me to discover Doc Jazz, who I was very impressed with. Then I found a page of songs about the Palestinian issue, most of which were hip hop. Scanning through I noticed one artist described with gender neutral pronouns, which is how I discovered the wonderful Invincible. That’s another brilliant trans musician I can add to my playlists.
The first hour of the show began with an interview with Ed Hill, a Bristol-based activist who has made several trips to Palestine and knows the situation there well. He did most of the work putting the show together, and his main interest is the forthcoming European Championship soccer match between Wales and Israel which is taking place in Cardiff at the weekend.
Next up I had a chat with Eddy, one of the founders of the Palestinian Museum in Bristol. Thanks to Eddy and Rita, we are fortunate enough to have the first museum in the world dedicated to the Palestinian people. Washington DC has since followed suit, and Amsterdam is now building one.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
Ed Hill came back to talk to me at the start of the second hour. Our main topic of conversation was the arms trade, and how British companies profit from the Israeli military operations again Palestine.
Finally I was joined by the Rev. Sue Parfitt and Eddy Knasel. We wanted to make a point that the campaign in support of the Palestinians is not simply a case of Muslim against Jew, as it is often portrayed in the Western media. Many Palestinians are Christians, and many Jews support the Palestinian cause. Sue is an Anglican minister who has just returned from a visit to Palestine where she helped a local Jewish-run peace organization build houses for Palestinians made homeless by the Israeli army. Eddy is a Quaker, and part of an international, multi-denominational Christian organization called Kairos which is dedicated to helping the Palestinians.
Of course I had to end the show with a shout out to Nalo Hopkinson for becoming the first Jamaican writer to be a Guest of Honor at a Worldcon. Well done, Finnish friends.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
The full playlist for the show was as follows:
Hell You Talmbout – Janelle Monáe and the Wondaland Jam Authority
Rising Tide – Doc Jazz
No Compromises – Invincible
Gimme Hope, Joanna – Eddy Grant
The Lebanon – The Human League
Lei Lei – Maryam Mursal
Our House – Madness
Change is Gonna Come – Otis Redding
My apologies once again to Isaac, my engineer, for screwing up the order of play. Apologies also for the pneumatic drilling that you may be able to hear in the background during the show. There was nothing we could do about that. Hopefully the building work will be done by the time I am back on the air in two weeks time, because I am expecting to interview Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.
Regular readers will be familiar with the utter disaster of the new EU VAT rules on digital products, which have forced vast numbers of small businesses to stop trading and forced similar numbers (including Wizard’s Tower) to sell only through big corporations such as Amazon. You are probably also aware that Juliet McKenna is part of a small team of people who have taken it upon themselves to lobby the EU and try to get something done.
As Juliet reports on her blog, the EU has now started to listen, and to accept that it has a problem. Unfortunately EU decision making takes place on geological timescales, so getting them to actually do anything is a major problem. There is a major EU Finance Ministers meeting taking place in Dublin next month, and if we want anything done we need to lobby them, hard.
Of course most lobbying of such meetings is done by professional lobbyists with multi-million Euro budgets backing them up. Up until now, Juliet and her colleagues have been paying all of their expenses out of their own pockets. And they are just about out of money. So they have launched a crowdfunding appeal.
The initial goal was to send one person (Clare Josa) to Dublin. I’m delighted to see that goal has been reached in less than a day. That’s thanks in no small part to Rebellion (publishers of, amongst other things, 2000 AD and Solaris books). Sadly they can’t send Judge Dredd to Dublin to help Clare out, but it would be good to send someone else to give Clare some support. Also there are meetings in London that the team need to attend (which are often held early in the morning when rail fares are crazily high). Juliet is already out of pocket to the tune of around £500, and the other members of the team will have had similar expenses. It would be good to be able to reimburse them.
The objective in Dublin is to get the EU to agree to the immediate imposition of a threshold for VAT registration under the new system. This would allow small companies like Wizard’s Tower to get back to selling direct, and it would stop taxation departments around Europe hassling small businesses for amounts as small as 5p.
As I have said before on this subject, it makes no economic sense whatsoever to have taxation services spend more money to collect tax revenue than they will receive in revenue. And yet they are doing it. It is your money they are wasting (if you are a tax-playing EU citizen).
Also it is really important for the fight against DRM to allow small businesses to sell direct. I have been told, though I haven’t had time to check this, that since the new VAT rules came in both Nook and Kobo have stopped allowing customers to download a book, they will only send books to registered reading devices. It is not in your interests to be locked into buying only from big corporations.
Obviously publishers such as Rebellion and Wizard’s Tower are ponying up what we can afford here. It is in our interests to do so. I don’t expect readers to get anywhere near matching that. However, every little helps. Also, the more people donate, the more evidence we have to show the EU that people want this mess fixed. Send them the price of a coffee. I’m sure most of you can afford that. And think of it as a small finger in the face of Amazon and their Eurocrat friends.
The team has promised to only use the money for campaign expenses. Any excess will be donated to the microfunding charity, Kiva.
Today’s show was a Diversity Special put together for me by my friend Berkeley Wilde of Diversity Trust. With Berkeley in the studio were Sarah-Louise Minter of LGBT Bristol, Lesley Mansell of North Bristol NHS Trust, Mitch McMorrow of Bristol City Council (and Shout Out Radio), and John, a young, black gay man from Bristol.
We covered a lot of territory: legislation, hate crime, services for young people, the 20th birthday of Freedom Youth, services for old people, LGBT celebrities, the need for monitoring, Ireland finally getting legal recognition for trans people (today, well done, TENI!), the plight of LGBT asylum seekers and probably a whole lot more that I have forgotten.
You can find the first hour of the show here, and the second hour here. And by the way if you want to listen to my Pride coverage it is here — sorry about the Dr. Flex billing, the Listen Again system is automated and doesn’t cope well with unusual scheduling, and thanks to the good Doctor for the use of his slot.)
The playlist for today’s show was as follows:
Secret Love – The Vinyl Closet
Doubt – Kele Okereke
It Must Be Love – Labi Siffre
Feels Good – Rahsaan Patterson
Bleed Like Me – Garbage
Q.U.E.E.N. – Janelle Monáe (feat. Erykah Badu)
Talking ‘Bout A Revolution – Tracy Chapman
I Will Survive – Gloria Gaynor
On next week’s show I’ll be having a chat with a teenage fashion designer, Kieran Mceleny; catching up with friend of the show, Christina Zaba; finding out from Sian Webb why Bristol lags behind in the gender pay gap stakes; and talking to Assistant Mayor Daniella Radice about the 50:50 campaign for female representation in the City Council that was launched today. There may be a bit of feminist ranting.
As I predicted, I spent most of the morning in my hotel room doing panel prep of various sorts. I think my academic paper is now more or less done. I have one panel still to prepare for, which I’ll get done tonight.
Today I saw a couple of panels about fandom. Firstly George, Parris and Gary talked about their life in fandom. Also Parris was joined by Edward James, Crystal Huff and Michael Lee to talk about Anglo-American fandom. Much apologizing for Puppies was done. Personally I feel that a bit of apologizing for other people might have been appropriate as well. I have spent a great deal of time being told that I’m “not part of our community”. Because I have a stubborn streak, and Kevin’s support, I stuck it out and finally won a Hugo or two. Torgersen and Correia claim to have suffered a small amount of rudeness, as a result of which they are now making like professional soccer players rolling around on the ground clutching various tender parts of their anatomy and screaming for an ambulance. Them I have no sympathy for, but while few people are as thin-skinned as them I don’t think that everyone is as thick-skinned as me either.
The bottom line is that we have won the Culture War. Everyone is a fan now, and we have to accept that, or get left behind.
Today also saw Johanna Sinisalo’s Guest of Honour speech. She certainly seems to have been a precocious child. She could read well at 2.5 years old, and at five, having discovered that books were written by people, resolved to become an author. One of the first SF-related books she read was Comet in Moominland. Being a smart kid, she worried that comets might actually strike the Earth, and asked her father if this was possible. As she tells it, “Then he made a very serious mistake”. Her father, perhaps hoping to reassure her, told her that this Tove Jansson person was a woman, and that women knew nothing about such things. Little Johanna immediately resolved to prove him wrong, and to see to it that women were never again told that there were things they could not do.
Johanna also read us a short passage from the novel she currently has in translation. It is set in a near future Finland where an authoritarian government has banned all “dangerous” drugs except chilis. Naturally everyone turns to the burn to get their endorphin rush. Apparently she and her husband had a lot of fun researching this book.
Today’s first piece of really good news is that the Finnish government has awarded Johanna a five-year arts grant to allow her to write more books. She now earns more than I do just for being an author, quite independent of any money she might get from publishers. I am absolutely delighted for her.
The other piece of really good news was, of course, the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. We celebrated by having a Diversity in YA presentation from Suzanne von Rooyen, and an LGBT panel featuring Suzanne, Dirk Weger and myself. More on those shortly.
I spent much of today in Bristol where Cory Doctorow was promoting his new non-fiction book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free. He was there at the behest of the Festival of Ideas and the local branch of the Open Rights Group. I tweeted quite a few quotes from his talk so I’m going to be lazy and reproduce those tweets here.
Cory’s main question in all this is to determine how creative people such as himself can make a living in the digital world. He admitted upfront that being a creative person is not a great money-making proposition. Nevertheless, there are ways in which the world can be arranged which allow creative people to make a living, and there are ways that prevent them from doing so.
His central thesis is that the big media and technology companies are leaching all of the value out of the work of creative people, thanks to a combination of:
Technological curbs on consumer behavior (e.g. DRM, which locks you into the supplier you rented, rather than purchased, content from);
Market regulation designed to raise barriers to entry against potential competitors;
Legal bullying of consumers (e.g. punishing an entire household if one member of it downloads pirated content).
This is all fairly basic economics. The big media and technology companies have found ways to establish market dominance, and are now proceeding to “extract rents”, as economists say, on the back of that dominance. Often they will use “regulatory capture”, that is using their contacts in government to have laws passed that favor them and disadvantage their competitors and customers. As we have seen with the TTIP fiasco, governments on both sides of the Atlantic are firmly in the pockets of big business. The scary thing is that it is hard to see what anyone can do about it. With TTIP ordinary people, and even most politicians, have been prevented from having any say in what goes on.
It is worth noting that all of this makes very little difference to actual piracy. Illegal copying goes on regardless. What it does is put a stop to legal challenges to the dominant companies, sometimes by simply making competing with them illegal.
Kudos to Cory for adopting a policy of taking alternate questions from men, and from women/non-binary people. He says that if he doesn’t do this then his questioners tend to be almost exclusively male.
Naturally I ended up providing one of those questions, but I was pleased to see a young woman in the audience ask something too. She turned out to be one of the people from Hydra Books, our local anarchist bookstore (hi Anna!). Cory and I popped in for a coffee on our way back to Temple Meads, and I was pleased to find that they had several trans-related books in stock.
All-in-all, it was a splendid day. Thanks to Cory for being such an engaging and enthusiastic speaker, and for being so approachable.
There has been action on the VAT issue in Brussels this week. As per this post on the EU VAT Action blog, Commissioner Ansip has finally admitted that there is a very serious problem here, and that something needs to be done.
Unfortunately, this being the EU, doing something is likely to take many months. Indeed, they might not even start the process until next year. (And let’s not forget that next January all cross-border trading will come within the new VAT rules, so all of you folks out there selling jewelry, soap, art objects and so on will be caught by them.)
So they agree that we need a threshold of at least €100,000, which would be more than sufficient to get all of Wizard’s Tower up and running again, but nothing is likely to happen until next year. I think you can guess how frustrating this is.
Another frustrating aspect of the whole affair is that it is becoming clear that much of the problem in the UK is our government’s over-zealous implementation of the new regulations. This is not a new phenomenon. Successive UK governments have had a habit of picking on particularly poor pieces of EU legislation and then going overboard on implementation so as to make the EU look bad. My guess is that their attitude now will be that there’s no need to do anything because by this time next year the UK will have left the EU and will no longer have to comply with EU laws. However, as I have discussed before, the regulations do, in theory, apply to the entire world.
What we would like the UK government to do is unilaterally opt out immediately. I have heard rumors that some EU countries have quietly advised micro-businesses that they don’t need to register. I can’t see us doing that, if only because it would be a tacit admission that there are lots of other EU regulations that we could have implemented less enthusiastically. What the UK government can to is implement what is called an Extra Statutory Concession. This would be an actual piece of legislation. It is something that may be worth writing to MPs, or to Treasury, about. The EU VAT Action post has suggestions as to how to go about that.
Sadly my expectation is that nothing will be done, because the current government doesn’t want people being self-employed.
Yesterday’s radio show was another one part-planned for me in advance, which I presented because Paulette is still in Jamaica. I’m very glad I did, because I got to meet an amazing woman.
Lisa Newman works with the Golden Key Project and the IF Group, both of which work with people who have the sort of complex and multiple needs that I was talking about on Monday. IF Group is particularly interesting because it is staff by what I have learned to call Citizens of Experience. That is, the people who have themselves experienced the same life problems that their clients are struggling with. Lisa talked bravely to me about her own struggles with addiction and homelessness.
With my trans activist hat on, I am all in favor of empowering people to help themselves. I’m sick and tired of being told that trans people need help, and that this can only be done by… bunch of weasel words meaning “respectable people”. If you allow yourself to be treated as a victim, you’ll always be a victim. So best of luck to Lisa and her colleagues. Here’s hoping that they achieve great things.
Lisa was with me for the whole of the first hour. You can listen to that here.
We had fewer people around for the second hour than expected, so I ran an interview with Juliet McKenna that I had recorded while I was in Oxford. The full interview is a lot longer and I’ll try to get it on Salon Futura soon. Chopping it down to two 7-minute chunks made it a bit messy, but hopefully it was coherent.
Juliet has an update on what has happened in Brussels this week on her blog. I’ll do a separate post about this.
By the way, I do 7 minute chunks because I have to play music and you can’t always predict what other material you’ll have to include in each 15 minute block.
In the final half hour I chatted to a couple of young people who are volunteering at the station at the moment. Emily is doing A Levels and hoping to study journalism, while Richard is on a journalism course at UWE.
Thanks also to my friend Jackie for popping in and helping out, and to my engineers, Ben and Eric.
The music for the show included Janelle Monae, Amanda Palmer, the great B.B. King, and a whole lot of funk, all produced by Nile Rodgers.
Next week Judeline will be in charge of the show because I’ll be at the Watershed listening to Cory Doctorow explain how information doesn’t want to be free. Tickets are still available. I hope to see some of you there. I’ll be back in the studio on June 3rd, when my guests will include Lucienne Boyce and Kevlin Henney.
Visiting Juliet has reminded me of the dreadful ongoing mess caused by the EU’s new VAT laws for digital services. Despite sterling work by Juliet and her colleagues, and many lobbyists and politicians, we still don’t have a workable solution.
Meanwhile I have email from Podbean encouraging me to add a patronage feature to my account. Whoever set this up for them appears to be totally unaware of the need for any sales into the EU (and possibly now Australia) to charge VAT (or GST) on the transaction, and pay the appropriate tax authorities in the country where the customer resides. So a whole lot more people are being gently encouraged to break EU law by a third party platform that is based safely outside of the EU and so will doubtless escape any legal action.
Today Juliet posted an excellent blog entry on the EU VAT Action website explaining how the new laws disproportionately affect the poor, the disabled, those from less developed countries and so on. The government is simultaneously trying to prevent people from claiming benefits, and preventing them from starting businesses that might help them no longer need benefits. It’s ridiculous.
This morning’s news includes items about the Australian government adopting new rules on taxing digital downloads. Ostensibly this is to crack down on tax avoidance by companies such as Netflix, but as with the new EU laws it appears that the regulations will be applied to ebooks, and there will be a zero threshold. If this is correct (and I am by no means confident in the ability of online news sources to get this right) then the end result is likely to be blocking of sales to Australia by large numbers of small businesses who simply can’t afford to comply with the regulations.
Australian friends, I suggest that you check this out. Feedback would be appreciated.
Transgender Europe has just issued this map showing the state of trans rights across Europe. The color key is brown for no legal recognition, red for sterilization required for legal recognition, and blue for it not being required.
A full copy of the map, and detailed index of various rights which gives a much clearer picture of where each country is, can be found here.
Ireland’s Gender Recognition Bill has passed through the Seanad but is not yet law. Hopefully some of my Irish readers can update me on what the remaining steps are. If they are not too busy campaigning for a Yes vote in the same-sex marriage referendum. Good luck, folks!
The Council of Europe’s position on trans rights is very clear. This resolution is in advance of just about every country in the EU, except possibly Malta. Which is doubtless one of many reasons that the Conservatives want to leave the EU.
Well, that was weird. Prior to the election the polls were predicting that Labour and the Conservatives were neck and neck — if anything with a slight lead for Labour, though that wouldn’t necessarily translate into more seats. I wasn’t surprised, as David Cameron had presided over the least competent government I can remember. When I went to bed the exit polls had just come out, and they were predicting that the Conservatives would have a healthy lead with 316 seats to Labour’s 239. Now, with all results in, the Conservatives have an actual majority with 331 seats to Labour’s 232. The leaders of Labour, the LibDems and UKIP have all resigned.
What the heck happened?
Understanding elections these days isn’t easy. If it was, the pollsters would get it right. Take a look at my constituency, for example. It is a Tory Rotten Borough, so the incumbent MP was re-elected with over 52% of the vote. UKIP came second with their vote shooting up from 5.5% to 17.5%. The Greens, running for the first time, got 5.8%. The LibDems slumped from 30.5% to 10.6%. Conservatives and Labour had small gains. So did a whole lot of former LibDem voters defect to UKIP? I think it unlikely. I think that UKIP drew votes from both Conservatives and Labour, but those parties also gained LibDem votes. Of course there’s no way I can prove that. Explanations as to what happened have to be conjecture.
From my point of view, the main issue with UK politics prior to the election was that all three major parties — Conservatives, Labour and LibDems — have been drawing their candidates mostly from an upper middle class, English, Oxbridge educated elite that has little connection to ordinary people and no experience of having a job outside of politics. I understand that this was more marked in Labour and the LibDems than in the Conservatives, who are happy with taking on rich businessmen as candidates.
Many of the British people are more than a little pissed off with this, and are looking for an alternative. In Scotland they found one. The SNP, as Jane Carnall explains, took a lot more of their candidates from local communities. And while Scotland voted against independence the Scots were very happy to vote in national elections for a party that didn’t appear to only represent London. The result was an utter massacre of both Labour and LibDems in Scotland (a country that was already almost Tory-free).
The situation in Wales was a little different. Plaid Cymru failed to establish itself as a viable alternative and trailed in fourth behind UKIP. That may be because Welsh independence has never looked viable economically, but it could also be due to local issues I’m not aware of as I don’t keep a close eye on goings on in the Welsh Assembly.
As for England, what choice did the disenchanted voter have? The LibDems had proved themselves useless over five years of propping up the Tories. Voting Green is still seen as an eccentric middle class fad. And Labour were busily promising to be just like the Tories if they won, with more austerity measures and even more persecution of those on benefits. So people voted UKIP instead.
Labour is busy blaming the SNP for their poor showing, which seems a bit off because even if they had won every SNP seat they could still not have formed a government. What may have tipped LibDem voters into going blue rather than red was the prospect of a Labour-SNP coalition, or failing that a need for a second election. That, of course, is partly Labour’s own fault. They campaigned heavily against electoral reform and therefore helped make voters afraid of anything other than a single-party majority government. Unfortunately for Labour, without Scotland, which they appear to have treated with utter contempt, they have no chance of ever getting a majority in Westminster.
Given the level of anti-Scottish rhetoric in the English press over the past few weeks, I suspect that if they held another Scottish Independence referendum now then the Nationalists would win easily. Then the Scots could get back to being a country again rather than begin just anti-English. How long that sentiment will last I don’t know.
As for the rest of the UK, what it desperately needs right now is a viable opposition to the Tories: a party that is neither made of up careerist politicians nor racist cranks. I have no idea where such a party can be found, though if the Greens can manage a bit more populism they might fill the void.
One small ray of hope is that the Tories will probably soon be tearing each other apart over exit from the EU. Promising a referendum helped Cameron stave off the UKIP threat, but now he has to deliver and the business community is firmly on the side of staying in the EU. Similar issues with the Eurosceptic wing of the party bedevilled John Major’s government too. It had a similar wafer-thin majority, and when it collapsed that ushered in Tony Blair.
On a personal level, the election has been a disaster. I quite understand the public anger with the LibDems, but losing Julian Huppert and Lynne Featherstone from Parliament is a major setback for trans rights. Thankfully we still have Kerry McCarthy and Caroline Lucas, but I don’t know of anyone with a voice in government that we can rely on.
Bristol, on the other hand, has done quite well. All four city MPs are now women, three of them Labour. One of the new ones is Thangam Debbonaire who is a former professional cellist, and an internationally renowned campaigner against domestic violence. We don’t have a gay MP any more, but you can’t have everything. I note also that Bristol Greens gained 7 seats in the City Council elections, including both Clifton seats.
Finally a word of commiseration to my friend Talis Kimberley who stood as a Green candidate in Swindon South. While she didn’t manage to save her deposit, she did come within a whisker of beating the LibDem. In any case, standing for Parliament is a hugely stressful thing to do, Here’s hoping her political career only goes upwards from here.
1. As usual, Laverne Cox says things better than I can.
2. If UK people want to do something to help, one thing that would be very useful is to promote the Trans Manifesto. You can find out more about that here, but the basic idea is to ask parliamentary candidates if they will sign up to three core principles as follows:
Regard trans individuals as equal citizens with equal rights
Empower trans individuals to be authorities on all aspects of their own lives
Encourage diverse, representative, realistic and positive portrayals of trans individuals
You don’t have to be a trans person to ask candidates about this. In fact it is probably a more powerful message if you are not. You can also find out what your local candidates have said on the subject by looking them up here.
I note that as of the time of writing only 28 of 184 candidates contacted were willing to sign up to those principles. That’s just 15%. Still, that’s only a tiny fraction of the total number of candidates, so maybe things will be get better.
3. If you’d like to see a wonderfully diverse collection of visible trans people, this set of My Genderation videos by Fox & Lewis are an ideal introduction.
In my Twitter feed this morning was a link to a piece in Buzzfeed in which David Cameron is on film saying we need to do more on trans rights (and sort of agreeing with my comments about education being the key).
I’m not entirely sure from that clip that the Prime Minister knows what trans means, but at least he has been briefed to say positive things.
So we now live in a world in which the leader of the Conservatives is in favor of trans rights, but the New Statesman is allied to hard-line Republicans in opposing them. Bizarre.
Elsewhere I am still seeing people concern-trolling about how unfairly the poor TERFS are being treated by the horrid trans people. Why, people keep asking, are trans folk not prepared to debate important issues? Well, here are a few things to think about, based on stuff I have read elsewhere.
First up, the acronym TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. All of those words are important. The suggestion that its use attacks all feminists, or even all radical feminists, is clearly incorrect. Indeed, most trans activists identify as feminists, and many as radicals.
I am well aware of the claim that “TERF” is a term of abuse. However, it is a simple and factual statement of their political position. If there was a better word, I’d be happy to use it. However, the TERFs themselves prefer to be referred to as “feminists” or even just “women”, this being an attempt to infer that their position has far greater support than it has, and to encourage the sort of confusion I referred to above. Claiming that any word we come up with to describe them is a term of abuse is a tactic used to prevent us from addressing their claims.
I have a Gender Recognition Certificate. Under the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 this means that I have the right, in law, to be treated as a woman. My driving license, passport, and even birth certificate say that I am female. The central thesis of this law — that I and people like me are women — was described as the “extreme form” of trans ideology by the New Statesman last week. Hopefully you can understand why I get a little irritated by constant demands that I “debate” the idea that I am not “really” a woman, should be barred from female-only spaces, and should be forced to use male-only toilets if I need to pee when out in public.
By the way, props to Roz Kaveney for pointing out that these attempts to prevent trans women from using public toilets are very similar to the Victorian idea that by not providing public toilets for women they could be forced to stay at home and not participate in public life.
If your position is that an exception can be made for trans women like me, but not for others, then you need to define how this exception will work. Note, however, that the TERF position is that I am, and always will be, a man, and can never be allowed in women-only spaces. Germaine Greer’s position is that anyone with a Y chromosome is a man, no matter how weird their biology. This include people with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome who are female-bodied, assigned female at birth, raised as girls, identify as women, and in a few cases have even given birth.*
If your idea for how to control exceptions is “PENIS!!!”, what will you do about a 17-year-old who has been living as a girl since she was 5, has not and never will go through male puberty, but cannot legally have gender surgery until she turns 18?
Note also that in order to qualify for gender transition patients at Gender Identity Clinics generally have to spend at least 2 years living full time in their preferred gender role. That includes the use of gender-appropriate toilets.
Currently some 13,000 people have undergone transition under the care of British gender clinics (not all of whom will have had surgery). It is reasonable to assume that getting on for half of them identify as trans women. To date not one of them has been charged with sexual assault of a woman in a public bathroom. (It would have been all over the papers if one had.) Why would anyone say that all of them should be punished by being denied access to toilets, just in case one of them might commit an assault?
If your position is that heterosexual men might disguise themselves as trans women in order to sneak into women’s toilets and commit sexual assaults, why is your solution to that to ban actual trans women from toilets? If you were worried that rapists might disguise themselves as postmen in order to attack housewives, would your solution be to ban mail deliveries?
Why is it that trans men are never seen as a sexual threat (even when TERFS demand that they use women’s toilets)? Why are lesbians not a danger in women’s toilets, or gay men in men’s toilets? Why is it only ever trans women who are seen as potential sexual predators?
And finally, over 200 trans women are killed worldwide every year, just because they are trans. Almost always the killers are men. TERFs know this when they demand that trans women be forced to out themselves to strangers and enter a male-only space if they want to have a pee.
I don’t suppose any of that will put a stop to it. People will go on and on complaining, “why can’t you be reasonable, why can’t you just debate this point?” After all, people keep saying that we should debate the reality of evolution, and climate change, and the moon landings. But there comes a point when you have to say enough. The reality of gender identity issues, and the appropriateness of gender transition as a treatment, is recognized by the UN, by most democratic governments, and by the bulk of medical and scientific opinion. As this post on Skeptoid states, it is time for TERFism to be recognized as a form of denialism so that most of us can stop having these endless “debates”. Mostly they are just excuses for terrorizing trans women, and we need to stop enabling them.
By the way, on the subject of medical evidence, I note from Canadian news that Kenneth Zucker, the primary proponent of the sort of trans “cures” that Julie Bindel advocates, and which led to the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, has been put under a six-month independent review by his bosses.
Also the current evidence used by Zucker and his pals to claim that trans women are mentally ill is the condition of “autogynephlia”, a form of sexual fetish in which we are supposed to be in lust with our images of ourselves as women. I saw recently on the GIRES website that someone has done some proper science to test this condition by introducing a control. The research showed that, using the diagnostic criteria recommended by the inventor or autogynephlia, Ray Blanchard, 93% of cis women tested should be classified as suffering from this “mental illness”. Yet autogynephilia is still included in the current US directory of mental illnesses, and many countries still require that trans people be officially diagnosed as mentally ill before they can even change their names.
* There is a science fiction story to be written in which external incubation of babies becomes fashionable because Greer-like feminists have a horror of being “contaminated” by male cells should they male children. Every woman who has born a son has a bunch of Y-chromosome cells floating around in her body.
