Current Affairs

VATMOSS Twitter Storms Tomorrow

~ Cheryl

As you may have seen, Juliet McKenna got to go to Downing Street last week as part of a delegation taking the VAT campaign directly to the Prime Minster’s advisers. That’s serious progress.

The next step in the campaign happens on Monday, and will take the form of a couple of Twitter storms aimed at EU officials. Details can be found here. Your support, as always, is much appreciated.

Of course it does occur to me that if this was something being done on behalf of trans women then it would get spun as a violent attack on vulnerable politicians…

Free Speech Becomes Newspeak

~ Cheryl

Issues of freedom of speech are all the rage in traditional and social media these days. As this is a political question, there is invariably a lot of subtext surrounding what is actually said. People say loudly that they are in favour of “free speech”, but what they mean by that can vary considerably, and it is wise to understand the issues before offering immediate support to such a call.

This particular post was prompted by a letter in The Observer on Saturday (it is dated Sunday, but it went online on Saturday morning) in which a posse of the great and good decried what they view as a creeping atmosphere of censorship in British universities. This in turn led to lots of people getting very angry on social media, and people getting very upset as a result.

Much of this involves the issue of “no-platforming”, by which student unions say that certain people whom they view as purveyors of hate speech and other objectionable views are not allowed to speak on union premises. This sort of thing has been common in student unions for decades — certainly since I was at university, which is so long ago that we called the study of dinosaurs agricultural economics. I am pretty sure that some of the people who signed that letter will have happily marched around their campuses chanting “no platform for racists and fascists”. The difference these days is that the people potentially being no-platformed are people with a track record of spreading hatred against trans people and sex workers.

It is worth noting that no-platforming is not censorship. It does not say that the people concerned have no right to their opinions, or to express those opinions, it simply says that they should not have the right to express those views on university premises. There are plenty of places where one can spread vile views about trans people and sex workers, the Guardian/Observer being one of them.

Also, of course, one’s access to platforms increases dramatically if one is white, middle-class, cisgendered, Oxbridge educated and so on. If you want to see how British society effectively no-platforms people of color I recommend that you follow @WritersOfColour on Twitter. They publish some really good articles.

Let’s now deal with the substance of the complaints. Sarah Brown has a comprehensive take-down of the various issues it raises here, but I’ll go through them briefly here.

The comedian, Kate Smurthwhaite, was not no-platformed. Her gig was cancelled because only 8 tickets had been sold.

Germaine Greer was not no-platformed at Cambridge. There was discussion between the Cambridge Union (which is a debating society, not the Student’s Union) and student feminists about whether she should be invited to speak. In the event she was. The students organized a rival event, which they have a perfect right to do. Greer used her platform to abuse trans people, which rather proves the point as to why the students didn’t want her to be invited in the first place.

Then there is Rupert Read, the Green Party candidate for Cambridge. He hasn’t been no-platformed either. What did happen is that a bunch of trans activists protested against his views, and some demanded that he be de-selected by the Greens. This happened because of views about trans people that he expressed publicly. I got told on Saturday night that these views were “not transphobic”, and yet what Read was effectively doing was calling for the repeal of the Gender Recognition Act.

The key point about the GRA is that it gives (some) trans people the right to be legally recognized in our preferred gender. Read’s position was that we should not have that right, and that “women” (a group he clearly felt not to include me) should have the right to exclude trans women from female-only spaces if they so wished, specifically bathrooms. How that can be construed as not transphobic is beyond me.

Support for trans people has long been a prominent feature of Green politics, and to see one of their candidates expressing firmly anti-trans views was very worrying. What happened with Read is that the leadership of the Greens took him aside and explained that what he was saying was against party policy. He has since apologized and retracted his remarks. If that is censorship, then so is all party politics. Suggesting, as the Observer letter does, that trans people should not be allowed to challenge political parties on their support for issues directly pertaining to us is very worrying and deeply undemocratic.

Of course there has long been a view amongst prominent left-wing activists that they have fulfilled their moral obligation to trans people by allowing us to dress as we please and have medical assistance to look the way we want. They will then insist that this doesn’t mean that trans women are “really” women, or that trans men exist, and that holding such views does not make them in any way transphobic. My opinion of such sophistry is not printable. We have not forgotten that the one piece of UK legislation that makes discrimination against trans people legal was authored by the Labour Party.

The only actual case of no-platforming I know of involving the people mentioned by the letter is a single incident in which Julie Bindel was banned from speaking at Sheffield University. This is hardly a tidal wave of totalitarianism, deserving of a mass letter to the national media.

Of course the Sheffield students are perfectly within their rights to deny Bindel a platform if they wish. Student politics is not a dictatorship, and if the actual student body disagrees they can vote the current leadership out. Nor has Bindel been prevented from holding a meeting elsewhere in Sheffield, or writing about the situation in national newspapers, who seem only to keen to pay her for her opinions, no matter how vile they are.

I don’t know why Sheffield decided to deny Bindel a platform, but I suspect that it is something to do with her support for “reparative therapy” for trans people — the sort of psychological bullying that caused Leelah Alcorn to take her own life. The letter, very disingenuously, says that none of the people no-platformed have ever advocated violence against trans people. The only one of those people that was actually no-platformed is someone who has indeed advocated grossly inhuman treatment of trans people. I understand that some of those mentioned advocate things that are deeply dangerous to sex workers as well.

To understand why the letter unleashed a Twitter storm you also have to understand the subtext that it contains, and why trans people will have seen it as saying much more than it actually did.

The point here is that trans activists are for the most part fed up of being asked to debate our right to exist, our right to be considered sane, our right not to be labelled “rapists” simply because we are trans women, and our right not to have to respond to accusations that we are can never be “real” women because our vaginas are too smelly (the Jeffreys position) or not smelly enough (the Greer position). Frankly we have better things to do with our lives.

Nevertheless, people do love a good bust-up. We don’t throw people to the lions any more, but we do what are known as “ambush debates”. What happens here is that you invite someone from a minority group along to talk about their experiences, and when they get there they discover that they will be expected to “debate” against someone who hates people like them, and that they will have to spend the entire “debate” responding to lies and insults from the professional hater.

Of course if you decline to be part of such a “debate” then the people organizing it will probably cancel, because they will be deprived of their entertainment. Trans people have discovered that if you use this tactic, and the event is indeed cancelled, then we will be accused of having “no-platformed” or “censored” the person lined up to insult us. This happened to Sarah Brown when she declined to be on a panel with Julie Bindel (something which turned into an appalling example of real world as well as online bullying of Sarah); and it happened to Paris Lees when she declined to be on a Newsnight “debate”.

So when someone says that they are against “no-platforming”, what trans people tend to hear is that they are in favor of having us put in metaphorical stocks while someone like Bindel or Greer throws insults at us. To the trans community, saying that you are against “no-platforming” comes across in the same way as saying that you are concerned about ethics in games journalism.

Next up there is the way that Twitter storms work. Soon after the whole thing blew up I was starting to hear stories that trans activists had unleashed a storm of hate messages against those who had signed the letter, and that this somehow proved what awful creatures trans people are.

It doesn’t work like that.

Twitter is an ideal vehicle for spontaneous mass protest by people normally denied a voice. You don’t have to organize a Twitter storm, and unless you have vastly more followers than any trans activist you probably can’t. They happen quite naturally, because lots of people have access. I have no idea who was the first person to tweet about that letter, but it is entirely likely that it was just the first trans person to look at the Guardian website that day. I heard about it from some young trans people I follow. They are not particularly activists, but they do get angry. One of them, I know, has been thrown out of her family home by her parents because she is trans. People like that get angry easily.

Once a storm gets going, of course, everyone joins in. I’m sure that a few trans activists will have said some fairly vile things. But our cause will have been adopted by people with a grudge against some of the people who signed the letter, by people doing it “for the lols”, and by sock-puppet accounts set up by the TERFS for the purpose of discrediting us. That’s the way that Twitter works.

In addition, prominent trans activists will have been targeted with abusive tweets. That too is part of the way Twitter works. But apparently that doesn’t matter, because it is only the feelings of white, middle-class media celebrities that are important.

The solution to all of this is not to blame the minority group that is seen to be sending abusive tweets, but to demand that Twitter become better at dealing with abuse. And in the meantime to use the “block” button.

Social media has made modern politics rather complicated to navigate. I can quite understand how some older people have difficulty with it. However, it is part of the way we live these days. If you want to carry on having a political voice, you have to understand it. And if you are going to sign up to a high profile statement that is deeply critical of a minority group, you have to understand what that statement is saying.

I don’t expect that everyone who signed that letter in the Observer will be aware of this subtlety, and indeed there has been some suggestion that what they were asked to sign is very different from what finally appeared in the paper. So hopefully some of them will be thinking, not just about how they have been abused online, but how they have been used, and why.

Bleargh

~ Cheryl

I am back from Manchester. I also have a cold. Given how badly I was sneezing on the train on the way south (deeply embarrassing, I can assure you) I elected to steer clear of the two Bristol events I was supposed to attend last night, and instead go straight home. I need to get myself fit again for the launch of Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship on Thursday night.

The one piece of good news from yesterday was the launch of Stonewall UK’s new trans inclusion policy. This looks to have been really well done, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it.

In the meantime, of course, the “feminist” lobby in the mainstream media has been busily stirring up hated against trans people. I may have a few things to say later today.

Patreon and VATMOSS

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been contacted by Heather Burns, one of the people campaigning against the new EU VAT rules on digital services, about the response to the new laws from Patreon. As you may recall, crowdfunding and patronage were two of the relatively new funding sources that the EU and Treasury mandarins completely failed to consider when bringing in the new legislation. As Heather reports, Patreon has decided to ignore the whole thing.

Of course Patreon has no obligation here. They are a US-based organization and they don’t have to collect taxes on behalf of the EU if they don’t want to. Their legal justification for not complying appears to be utter hogwash, but that isn’t really important. What is important is that anyone resident in the EU that wishes to use Patreon is now obliged to register for VAT and do all of the admin themselves. This is very different from, for example, Amazon, who do all of the work for you.

My guess is that many other non-EU platforms will follow Patreon’s lead, which rather makes a mockery of HMRC telling people that it is the platform’s duty to provide the necessary accounting services.

Thanks For Nothing, Florida

~ Cheryl

Given that I can’t enter the USA these days, I can’t go to ICFA anyway, but if I could a new law being put before the Florida State Legislature would give me pause for thought about going. Why? Because if the bill passes and I were to use a women’s restroom in Florida then I would be liable for up to a year in prison. Also anyone else in the restroom at the time would be able to bring a civil suit for damages against both me and the company on whose premises the restroom is located. Full details at Slate.

Somehow I doubt that this is likely to become law, and even if it did I’m pretty sure that it would get ruled unconstitutional in due course. But you never know. A very bad part of me rather hopes that it does become law, and that a whole lot of hairy, muscular trans guys descend upon Florida and start using the women’s restrooms.

The Wheels of Government Turn

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

This afternoon I headed into Bristol for this event, billed at “Government’s Women’s Engagement Event for Lesbian, Bisexual & Trans* Women In the South West”.

It was part of a government initiative to gauge the views of the nation’s women on a variety of subjects. In other words, it was a sort of focus group. This, dear readers, is how the UK government consults with citizens these days.

I guess I should start by noting that Bristol was somewhat honored. You see, we were the only place in the country asked for our opinions on LGBT issues. Obviously the South West must be an exceptionally queer place. As we were the only such meeting, people came from a long way away. I met a couple from South Wales, and one woman who had come all of the way from Leeds.

There were around 30 of us I think, to represent all LB & T women in the UK. (And yes, similar groups must have represented other groups — the disabled, ethnic minorities and so on — elsewhere in the country.) Gee, I hope we were representative.

Well actually we weren’t, because around a third of the attendees were trans. That has to be more you would expect. Part of it, I am sure, is because so many of us are self-employed or unemployed, so have the time to attend such things. Part of it is that we have so much more to be worried about as far as public policy goes. And part of it is that most of the lesbian and bi- women will have jobs and won’t have the time to attend a Friday afternoon event.

There was only one obvious person of color, though I think two attendees identified as such. That’s a massive under-representation.

I can think of so many better ways to sample the views of the nation, starting with SurveyMonkey, but maybe that wasn’t the point.

We had just two hours, one hour of which was spent on speeches by the invited panel, and half an hour was given over to a refreshment break. Only half an hour was allowed for us to give opinions.

Baroness Jolly (LibDem, Health, House of Lords) chaired the session. For her speech she mostly read from something prepared by her staff. There was a lot of spin in it. In particular it glossed over the Spousal Veto, and the fact that the Governments trans equalities program ground to a shuddering halt when Lynne Featherstone was removed from responsibility for it. I may have had a few things to say. Baroness Jolly gracefully accepted that it is a politician’s duty to take the hit when her staff write fluff for her.

There were four other speeches. My colleague, Sarah-Louise Minter, from LGBT Bristol did a kickass job, making an impassioned plea for a proper diversity policy in schools. I was also impressed by Deborah Reed of Exeter College, who told an anecdote about a vacation to the USA and discovering that Coca Cola World really gets diversity, whereas UK institutions (including hers) are still very much white, cis and heteronormative. The other two speakers, including Carol Steel from Transfigurations, a Torbay-based trans support group, were clearly much less experienced at public speaking and lacked confidence as a result.

For out input we were divided into four groups focusing on Health, Safety, Access to Services and Education. I joined the latter. In theory we had five questions we were supposed to answer. In practice we managed two. When it came time for the groups to give feedback, what our moderator said seemed to me to bear little relation to what we had actually discussed. So here, for the record, are the two points that I made.

Firstly, I am sick to death of cis people doing training on behalf of trans people. We have got a little better over the past few years, in that “LGBT” training does now sometimes actually include T. However, the chances of it actually involving a trans person are low, particularly where education is concerned. That has two effects. Firstly it reinforces the view that trans people are unfortunates who are incapable of speaking for themselves; and second it means that what gets taught may well be ill-informed. Deborah Reed said that they had asked trans people to talk at Exeter College but it proved too expensive. Cue sound of a door being firmly shut in my face yet again.

Second, the only way we will solve any of this — sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, etc. — is if we teach kids about gender, and how gender stereotypes screw up society. I may write something about this for next month’s Bristol 24/7 column.

There were a few other good points raised. Briefly:

– Yes, we need more women governors in schools, and in particular more LBT women.

– Yes, teachers are only human, and can’t be expected to be experts on everything (which is one of many reasons why I love the folks at TIGER).

– And yes, sometimes the trans community it is own worst enemy, with the insistence of young activists on adherence to an ever-shifting set of language rules and terminology.

That was my experience of being asked my opinion by the government. If I sound a little cynical, well I guess I am. I have run focus groups before. I remember well one I did for a government organization in California at the end of which the civil servants complained about how the invited members of the public said all of the wrong things, and they had to find some way to make sure that the next focus group gave the answers they wanted.

The net result of this one will, I suspect, be that the Government ticks a box to say that it has consulted the LBT women of Britain, and that a report will be written that reflects what the civil servants in charge of the program want said.

Dealing With A TERF Infestation

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

As some of you may know, Bristol University recently suffered an attack of TERFs. Some of those terribly persistent Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists decided to try to make trans students at the University feel unwelcome and unsafe there. This all blew up earlier in the week and I’ve been a bit busy, so I didn’t manage to do much other than tweet while it was happening. However, there were some great articles in various papers:

Nothing in The Guardian, you will notice, but equally nothing from the New Statesman about how important it is to keep The Menz, meaning trans women, out of female spaces.

Anyway, today I got caught up, and have done an article for Bristol 24/7 on the subject. You can find it here.

Thanks are due to Jamie Cross of LGBT+ Bristol, the student group responsible for the original poster campaign that the TERFs were attempting to parody. He’s dealt with the whole thing really well. Also thanks to Alice Phillips, the Students’ Union Equalities Officer, who has been right on the ball sorting this out.

Of course the TERFs are only concerned with trans women using the women’s toilets. They think we are going there with a view to raping them, rather than with a view to having a pee, which is a rather more likely explanation. The possibility of trans men using men’s toilets doesn’t occur to them, because they don’t think that such people exist. It is rather a shame that bathroom panic concentrates so much on trans women, because trans guys have a real issue with bathrooms. They are much more likely to get beaten up, or worse, if read because they are going into a very male space. If people were really worried about bathroom safety, that’s the first thing I would look at.

Too Crazy To Drive

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Just in case anyone is wondering why I am not going to the Eurocon in St. Petersburg this year, here’s a clue as to one reason. According to that BBC report, trans people are now banned from driving in Russia on the ground that, as sexual deviants, we are too mentally unstable to be allowed to drive.

I eagerly await the New Statesman article praising the Russian government’s modern and enlightened approach to mental health and public safety.

By the way, the Russian fans running the convention are lovely people, and I have bought a membership. I still hope that one day in the future it will be safe for me to visit their country.

Leelah – A Shared Grief

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well that was interesting. Normally this blog averages around 200 visits per day. For the first five days of 2015 it averaged over 1500 visits.

It is obvious why this happened. The story of Leelah Alcorn has struck a nerve with the general public. I very much wish that it wasn’t necessary to write about a tragedy like this before people will pay attention to trans issues, but at the same time I need to take advantage of the opportunity while it lasts, because Leelah is the tip of a very big iceberg and we need to stop tragedies like hers from happening again. While I do talk a bit about trans issues here, I’m much more likely to be talking about books, so many of the people who have discovered me over the past few days will soon get bored and stop reading. I’m going to do what I hope is one last post while there is still interest in the subject.

Today I received email from the organization promoting the petition to outlaw conversion therapies in the USA. It asked me to imagine myself in Leelah’s place: alone, cold and seeking solace in death. That wasn’t hard. I’ve been there. Most trans people I know have.

Also today I saw this NPR interview with Greta Martela, the founder of a national (US) suicide helpline for trans people. She says she started it because she could have done with one herself. When she tried calling one of the big suicide prevention hotlines it was less than helpful.

“the operator didn’t know what ‘transgender’ meant, and so I had to explain that to him,” she says. “And once he did understand what I was talking about he got really uncomfortable.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Greta says about Leelah, “I think every trans person I know was crying about it the day that it came out.” I’m pretty sure that was the same for me.

Why? I refer you to this 2012 survey (PDF) of British trans people conducted by Scottish Trans. It reported that 84% of the respondents had considered suicide at one point during their lives. Eighty-four percent.

And yes, those numbers do include me, as I participated in the survey. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, suicide isn’t just something I considered in the past, it is something I know I need to plan for in the future as I get older.

When people say that Leelah’s suicide note struck a chord, we mean it. We have pretty much all been there. We know how she felt, because most of us have had those feelings, and nearly all of us know someone who has. Many of us have lost friends to suicide.

Why? How does this happen?

Well to start with it was the timing. Leelah died just after Christmas. That’s a time of year when many people are talking happily about shared family experiences, about spending time with their loved ones. By no means all trans people are openly rejected and abused by their families, as Leelah was, though many are.

I was talking last year about a charity trying to raise money to buy a house where homeless trans kids in Jamaica can shelter, because right now they are living in a sewer, having been kicked out of their homes by their parents. For some it really does get that bad. And I see from their Facebook page that over Christmas the police raided the place where the kids were sheltering and beat them up.

For many trans people Christmas is a time for gritting teeth as elderly relatives constantly mis-gender us and call us by the wrong name. Others are simply not welcome at family gatherings because of the friction it would cause, or get asked when they are going to “get over” the “phase they are going through”. It’s no fun. It is often easier to stay away. So Leelah died at exactly the right time of year to trigger memories of family issues.

You might think that your family is the one group that ought to support you. Again, not everyone is like Leelah’s parents. The trouble is, however, that the better someone knows you, the harder they find it to come to terms with a gender change. The way we humans interact with each other is so heavily influenced by gender that we find it very difficult to change how we see someone if their gender changes. Also parents tend to imagine futures for their children the minute that the midwife has pronounced the gender of the baby. If they are not sufficiently clued up to look for signs of gender discomfort, they will have nurtured those hopes for years before they find out there is a problem. Truly, families are a minefield for trans folk.

Something else that will have struck a chord with almost all trans people is the part where Leelah talks in her note about feeling that she is running out of time. Puberty is a shit time for an awful lot of people, but for trans folk the problems are multiplied many times over, because we find ourselves turning into monsters.

When you are a kid it is possible to hold on to crazy dreams about how the whole gender thing is a dreadful mistake, and when puberty hits it will all come right. Maybe you have some intersex condition that no one knows about, but will manifest itself when you need it. When puberty hits, these dreams come crashing down in ruins. Trans teenagers find their bodies changing in ways that horrify them; ways that they know can only be fixed by painful and expensive surgery. No wonder they think that their lives are over.

In some ways it was easier for me, because I didn’t know that anything could be done. Sure people like April Ashley had got hormones and surgery when they were older, but teenagers had no access to that. Modern teens like Leelah know that isn’t true. Treatments do exist, and you can get them if only your parents and doctors will let you. There must be a very real sense of seeing an opportunity pass you by.

I’ve seen some very passionate posts about how it is wrong that trans women should feel it so important to conform to classic standards of beauty, and I can see the point. The trouble is that from a very early age we are bombarded with messages telling is that being pretty is the most important attribute a girl can have. It takes considerable strength of will to resist that sort of conditioning.

There is also the matter of personal safety. Trans people — trans women in particular — do suffer from a much higher level of violence than non-trans people. If, as a trans woman, your looks are somewhere in the average range for non-trans women, then you will be much safer from such attacks than if they are not. That might be a dreadful state of affairs, but it is a simple fact of life.

So the process of going through puberty, the process of acquiring an adult body of the wrong type, is a deeply traumatic thing for trans teenagers. Every trans person who has known about their condition from childhood (and not all of us do) will have gone through that. Most of us have also wrestled with the knowledge that our families don’t fully support us, or the fear that they won’t if we tell them. The feelings that drove Leelah to take her own life are common to the vast majority of trans people.

Eighty-four percent.

Truly, there but for the grace of the Goddess, go I.

And one final thing. One more reason why, despite the awfulness of Leelah’s story, people are so keen to share it. The media has finally taken notice. With a few dishonourable exceptions, it is covering the story sympathetically. This is rare and unusual. We’ve got lucky, and we need to exploit the moment for all it is worth while that luck lasts.

We know, for example, that around the world a couple of hundred trans girls like Leelah are murdered each year. Mostly these killings are not reported outside of local media, or at all. If Leelah had not been white, her story would probably have got much less media attention, and would have been spun very differently.

If you are sensing an air of desperation, of a feeling that this too is an opportunity that could easily slip away, and we have to make the most of it while we can, well you’d be spot on.

Fix society. Please.

Leelah – The Establishment Closes Ranks

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

As many of you will know, Leelah Alcorn’s online presence has been erased. Not just her suicide note, everything: her blog, her art, her music. I’d rather expected this because Leelah was only 17 and was probably a minor under US law. However, Jane Fae has been investigating the situation and her report suggests that even this excuse wasn’t necessary. The mere fact that Leelah’s parents were “direct family” was enough for Tumblr to give them control over her legacy. (And yes, it was the Daily Mail that dug that up. It is a strange world in which the Daily Mail is more trans-friendly than the New Statesman.)

This is quite worrying. As Jane notes, the law in Europe may be different, but all of my online presence is hosted by US-base companies. I already knew that I needed to get my will re-written this year. It looks like I also need to make sure that Kevin has some ownership over my online presence so that no one can take it down if I die.

Something else that Jane has been investigating (content warning – Jane reports on some extreme transphobia) is a hate page on Facebook which was looking to bully other trans kids into killing themselves. Unlike most of the newspaper and social media coverage, this site was explicit about the method of Leelah’s suicide. It also directly encouraged copying it. Despite frequent complaints from trans activists over a period of 24 hours, Facebook moderators insisted that the page did not breach any of their community standards. Only when Jane took an interest, and mentioned that she wrote for major newspapers, did Facebook decide to take action. My guess is that the page will be back up again in a few days, probably after the New Statesman has published an article by Sarah Ditum defending Facebook’s right to freedom of speech in the face of bullying by trans thugs.

This is the sort of thing that drives trans people to take their own lives. No matter how much support we have, no matter what laws are passed to protect us, when it comes down to it there always seems to be this closing of ranks whereby those in power cite endless regulations justifying their mistreatment of us. Sure, we might have rights these days, but enforcing them is another matter entirely.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

Some Quick Leelah Links

~ Cheryl

While media feminists in the UK were busy trying to bury the story of Leelah Alcorn, media feminists in the USA have been offering support to the trans community. On today’s episode of the Melissa Harris Perry Show there was a segment featuring Leelah’s story, followed by a feature on Angelica Ross whose organization TransTechSocial, gets trans kids off the street and teaches them technology skills.

There was a vigil for Leelah in London today. I couldn’t get there, but I understand that it was very well attended. Sarah Brown gave a speech, which she posted to her blog. It is concise, to the point, and most importantly is aimed at the real villains here, the therapists who claim to be able to cure people of being trans.

Sarah says she’ll be doing what she can to ban such therapies in the UK. I wish her every success. These methods are banned in California for treatment of gays and lesbians, but not for treatment of trans people. In the UK, although the Health Minister described their use on gays and lesbians as “utterly abhorrent”, he refuses to ban it, and such treatments are apparently being paid for on the NHS. If is happening with respect to sexuality, I am sure it will be happening with trans kids too.

If you’d like to see conversation therapy for trans people banned in the USA, please consider signing this petition.

More #EUVAT Irritation

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Over the past couple of days I have been working on adjusting the prices of Wizard’s Tower books in various stores to take account of the new VAT laws. It isn’t as easy as it sounds.

A major issue is that the stores don’t all work the same way. Amazon and Kobo expect you to enter a VAT-inclusive price, while Nook wants a VAT-exclusive price and Google allows you to do either.

On the face of it, VAT-exclusive is the right thing to do, because VAT rates are different in each country, but there’s a problem with that because you can’t know where a customer is located until they supply a physical address and that may not happen until checkout. EU law requires stores to quote a tax-inclusive price, which may be why Amazon has chosen the method it has.

In any case, one can’t argue with what Amazon does, because they account for the vast majority of sales, so I have to go along with them.

Then there’s the question of individual country prices. Amazon has stores in many different countries, and as it requires VAT-inclusive pricing in theory I should know the rate for each country, and keep track of changes, so that I can price books correctly. It is actually much easier to set a single price for the whole Euro zone and accept that you’ll get more money for sales in low-VAT countries than in high-VAT countries.

All of the stores have some means of calculating prices in other countries based on a core price and current exchange rates. That’s fine if you can enter the price in US$ — you only have to add different prices for countries in the EU. But Kobo wants me to enter the core price in GBP, and because that price is VAT-inclusive I can’t use it for the basis of any other country prices. I have to do each one by hand.

And then there’s Nook, with their seemingly sensible VAT-exclusive pricing. I was happy with that, until I read this blog post. Apparently some EU countries have fixed pricing laws than mean you can’t offer the same book for different prices in different stores. So I’d have to make sure that whatever VAT-exclusive price I entered for the Nook exactly matched the VAT-inclusive price entered for Amazon and Kobo, and again I’d need to keep track of rates. I’ve ended up restricting Nook sales to the USA (because the only options are USA and USA + EU).

I suspect that a lot of people will just give up and sell exclusively through Amazon. Which, you know, might just be what Amazon’s lobbyists wanted.

Cis People Know Best, They Tell Us

~ Cheryl ~ 19 Comments

Surely as night follows day, support for a cause leads to a backlash. The huge outpouring of sympathy and support for trans people that came from the sad death of Leelah Alcorn was inevitably going to lead to attacks on trans people. Unsurprisingly to any trans activist in the UK, the first salvo has come from the New Statesman.

On the face of it, Sarah Ditum’s article is supportive and caring, but it is actually a very clever piece of concern trolling. What Ditum wants to happen, is for people to stop writing about Leelah. Her excuse for this is that it is against Samaritans guidelines to publicise suicides, least this encourage copycat attempts. Technically, of course, this is correct, in that yes, the Samaritans do advise this. Practically it is quite another matter.

To start with, Leelah did a darn good job of publicising her suicide herself. She posted her suicide note on Tumblr, and by the time I woke up on Tuesday morning my Twitter feed was full of the story. Many young trans people have few friends outside of the Internet because they dare not tell anyone who might gossip about them to their parents, their teachers or other kids at their school. The bush telegraph of Tumblr and similar sites is very effective. Any additional publicity was mostly going to reach cis people, who are not the people at risk.

Secondly, many of the trans activists who covered the story (myself included) deliberately pointed to Leelah’s own words because we know how badly our stories can be mis-represented in the media. If a community is used to having news sources tell lies about it, then it will want the right to speak for itself.

Then again, there’s the question of least harm. If a teenage girl had killed herself because her parents were sexually abusing her, would people want this made known so that the parents could be brought to justice? I’m pretty sure that most of you would say yes. Well Leelah wanted the world to know that she was being abused too. Her parents had forced her to undergo “therapy” to “cure” her feelings. I don’t think they use electric shocks like they did when I was a kid, but this sort of thing is still very much psychological torture. The aim is to make the kid associate having the “undesirable” feelings with pain and unhappiness. In many parts of the world, using these methods on gay and lesbian people is banned by law. It is still commonly advocated for trans people.

By the way, while Leelah’s parents certainly bear some responsibility for what happened, personally I would prefer to see the blame land squarely on the preachers and quack psychiatrists who peddle these supposed cures. They prey on worried parents for profit.

But couldn’t the publicity that Leelah’s death has got encourage other trans kids to kill themselves so they could become famous too? If you believe that trans people are all attention-hungry and mentally ill — and many radical feminists do appear to believe that — then maybe yes. However, trans kids are killing themselves in ridiculous numbers anyway. As recent surveys have shown, the number of suicide attempts per head of population for trans people is over 40%. Roughly speaking, a trans person is 10 times more likely to attempt suicide than a straight cis person, and twice as likely as a gay or lesbian cis person.

As this Salon article notes, “Trans people don’t commit suicide because they’re trans; they commit suicide because the rest of us don’t treat them like people.” Leelah knew this, and said so. Her eloquently written note ended with a plea for trans people to be treated like human beings. It led to exactly the sort of outpouring of support from the mainstream media that she must have hoped for. No wonder some people want her silenced.

Given that the trans community was all getting the story on social media anyway, a deafening silence in mainstream media would have confirmed everyone’s worst fears. Publishing supportive articles was a far better way of preventing copycats than silence.

Like all good pieces of concern trolling, Ditum’s article contains some good points. She certainly sounds like she cares. But what she doesn’t say is also very telling. For example, she makes use of the #TransLivesMatter hashtag, but says absolutely nothing about the #RealLiveTransAdult hashtag that was very popular in the wake of Leelah’s death. Why did she fail to mention it? Could it be that it was because it was solid proof of the trans community doing something positive to try to prevent further tragedies? That would hardly fit with the narrative of people needing to be protected from themselves now, would it?

The real viciousness of the column, however, will be invisible to most readers, because it lies in the choice of author. You see, Sarah Ditum has a reputation amongst trans people in the UK as a leading TERF. In fact it would be hard to find any journalist more hated by the UK trans community. I guess they could have asked Julie Burchill to write that piece, but she’s incapable of the sly subtlety that Ditum has mastered. If the New Statesman’s editorial team (and yes, I do mean you, Helen Lewis) wanted to commission something guaranteed to cause hurt and anger amongst the UK trans community, they could not have done better than to ask Ditum to write it. This looks like Fox News level viciousness.

So why does this happen? On the face of it, the New Statesman is a very liberal, progressive newspaper. It publishes some great articles by Laurie Penny, who is a good friend to the trans community. Why do they have this hate on for trans people?

It would be simplistic to say that they are all radical feminists stuck fighting a battle that they lost back in the 1970s. It is certainly true that Ditum believes that trans women are “really” men. I’m sure she’ll take any criticism by trans folk of what she writes as “male bullying”. But that’s not the whole story. If it was she wouldn’t be able to do the concern troll thing so well, and Lewis wouldn’t think she was doing right by publishing it.

No one thinks of themselves as a villain. Conservatives tell themselves that they are following the world of God, or that the oppression of the poor is simply the Law of the Jungle in operation. When liberals want to oppress someone, they tell themselves that they are doing it for that person’s own good.

What I see here is a deep-seated belief that trans people are mentally ill; that they are not capable of speaking for themselves, because they are so clearly deluded. They need protecting from themselves, and curing of their sickness. When I see Ditum say that she cares about trans people, what I hear is that she wants us in asylums, where she hopes that we can be made to be not trans. I hear exactly the sort of dehumanising behaviour that drove Leelah Alcorn to take her own life.

So yeah, if there is anything at all written about this case that is likely to cause more trans suicides, it is that piece in the New Statesman. And they will tell themselves that it is for our own good.

VAT Price Rise Reminder

~ Cheryl

Those of you based in the EU, don’t forget that most ebooks will be rising significantly in price after today. That’s because many small presses that were previously VAT-exempt now have to charge VAT, and because Amazon et al will be required to charge your local VAT rate rather than the 3% they have been charging on VATable books.

The Wizard’s Tower store will be closing some time this evening. If you want to get anything, please do so now.

South African Sunshine

~ Cheryl

One of the things I do to keep positive through the winter is watch the cricket from the southern hemisphere, particularly South Africa as they are almost in the same time zone as I am. They are currently playing a test series against West Indies, and new match started today. The game is being played at St. Georges Park in Port Elizabeth, and a group of local fans have a really good brass band that often strikes up tune during a match. This morning I was surprised and delighted to hear them playing this:

I see from the Twitter feed of South African sports writer, Firdose Moonda, that they’ve had that number in their repertoire for some time, so it is not a sign of anything new in South Africa, but it is very welcome to hear all the same.

And you know, we could do with some more songs like that right now. #BlackLivesMatter

A Very Un-Merry VATmess #EUVAT

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

I know that people are getting fed up with folk who write open letters to celebrities. However, I contend that senior official in the European Commission are not exactly celebrities as such. Besides, I have just spent quite a bit of time composing a letter to M. Pierre Moscovici, one of the people with the most power to do something about the awful disaster that the EU has unleashed upon digital microbusinesses. I’d like to share it with you.

Dear M. Moscovici,

I hope you are having a good Christmas. I’m not sure what you will be doing over the holidays, but I am busy dismantling a business that I have spent the past few years building up. That business is no longer economic, thanks to the new regulations for VAT on digital sales that you and your colleagues are bringing in as of January 1st.

This may come as a surprise to you, but I suspect that there are many people in a similar position to me. Europe-wide, there may be millions of us. That’s because the start-up costs for selling digital products online are extremely low. Once you have a product, you can set up an online store to sell it in a few hours, and for little or no cost. No technical knowledge is required.

I say “business”, but these are probably not businesses as you would understand the term. They don’t employ people; they don’t even make enough money to support their owners. Almost all of them are run by people in their spare time. The profits, such as they are, are often measured in hundreds of Euros a year rather than thousands. And yet all of them are classified as businesses under your new regulations.

Who runs these businesses? All sorts of people. They might be elderly folk looking to supplement their pensions so that they can afford a holiday, or some nice Christmas presents for the grandkids. They might be disabled people who have difficulty getting out to a job but can operate a computer at home well enough. They might be single mothers looking to supplement the meagre income they get from their jobs in supermarkets.

In my case I suppose you could say that my business is a hobby. I run a small publishing company, and thanks to Amazon there’s precious little profit to be made in such an enterprise. I do it because I love books, and because there are many fine authors out there who need a hand extending their careers, or starting them.

I, of course, am one of the lucky ones. I don’t have to shut the entire business immediately. I can still sell books through Amazon and similar stores. What I can’t do is sell direct to customers, because that would involve way too much time and expense complying with your fantastically complicated regulations. This isn’t a viable long-term situation. Amazon and their ilk are not my friends. Their terms are non-negotiable, and they are always looking to squeeze more profit out of the people who use their services.

In any case, by no means all third party websites are compliant with your regulations. Indeed, outside of the book trade, it seems that very few are. Many of them are based in the USA and see no need to jump through the various hoops you are putting in their way. You may think that we can simply swap to other, EU-based services, but the digital market doesn’t work like that. In the same way that most people buy books from Amazon because they are the biggest name, other segments of the digital market have their own brand leader sites. If we move away from them because they don’t support your new VAT laws, our sales will plummet.

For my own part, my main concern is crowdfunding. Over the past few years this has become the dominant method of raising funds for new books. I had big plans for new projects for 2015. However, the crowdfunding services I wanted to use do not levy VAT for me, and I don’t have the time or money to do it myself.

Your publicity for the new VAT regulations talks about levelling the playing field, and certainly forcing Amazon to sell on the same terms as a book chain based in Ireland, or Portugal, or Latvia is a good thing. However, there is no way I can compete on level terms with Amazon, or with the major multi-national publishers. Their economies of scale and negotiating power are things I can only dream of. The one small thing I had in my favour was not having to charge VAT on my books. You have taken that away from me.

Fortunately there are solutions of a sort. Because it is so easy to set up a new digital business, I have been able to find someone in the USA willing to take on my business and ensure that it will continue. I’ll doubtless still be involved, and will happily pay income tax on any money I make. But it won’t be my business any more, and it won’t be a European business. Other than via Amazon et al, it may not sell into Europe at all.

The sad thing is that all of this could have been avoided. The principle of Proportionality is well established in tax law. There is no point in trying to levy taxes when it costs more to collect them than you will gain in revenue. If it were not for people closing their business, HRMC here in the UK would be utterly swamped by the number of new registrations they would be getting. And yet, for some reason that no one can explain, you have chosen to do away with thresholds for VAT on digital sales. You have chosen to force people out of business if their operations are not large enough to comply with your regulations. That’s a very strange way to encourage economic growth.

Merry Christmas, M. Moscovici. I hope you are having a happier one than I am.

Cheryl Morgan

Meanwhile, In Bristol – Enviroment & Race

~ Cheryl

My latest column for Bristol 24/7 is all about women in the environmental movement. In 2015 Bristol will be the European Green Capital, so you can expect to hear lots more green stuff from me through the year. This week’s article focuses on the fact that there are very many women doing important work in green organizations, but when it comes to public recognition, and especially to handing out money, it is suddenly white men to the fore.

One of the questions I asked in the piece, and I wish I’d had more space to go into detail (but hey, 500 word limit) was whether women are more predisposed to the message of the green movement. I based that solely on social conditioning: girls are raised to be cooperative and nurturing, boys to be competitive and self-reliant. However, I was interested to hear Stuart Lorimer say on the Radio 4 program about trans women that hormones do have a significant effect on how people interact with society.

Checking the Bristol 24/7 site today, I was delighted to see that David McLeod has won a victory of sorts in that the City Council’s education department has formally apologized for its insensitivity of hiring Gill Kelly and will be terminating her contract with them as soon as is feasible. I imagine that there is celebration all round at the Ujima studios today. Here’s hoping that the City Council takes race issues a little more seriously in future.

Voter Supression Update

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This is a follow-up to my post from Monday about the new UK voter registration system that will force trans people to out themselves is they want to vote.

Various people have taken an interest in this (thanks Talis), and I brought it to the attention of Bristol City Council who promised to take action on it. One of the things that has come up is that legally the government has no right to ask about name changes that happened more than a year ago. So what are they doing? Well the existing website has been fixed, but the government says they are planning to change the law so that they can demand information about name changes more than a year old.

So in addition to all of the VAT nonsense, I also have to write a letter to Nick Clegg. As if I didn’t have anything better to do than respond to constant government attacks on my personal safety and livelihood.

A Quick #VATMOSS Update (#EUVAT)

~ Cheryl

While I have been busy rushing back and fore across the Atlantic, Juliet McKenna and the other women involved in the VATMOSS campaign have been very busy.

On Tuesday there was another Twitter storm, which is where the #EUVAT hashtag comes from. There is a report on that here. The short version is that it was a big success, and that it very much got the attention of people in Brussels.

If this was a normal time of year, we might actually get some action before the new law is implemented. However, it is a time of year when many people won’t be in the office for a couple of weeks. Therefore the chances of anything happening in time are pretty much zero. However, the chances of getting something done early in the New Year are starting to look better. What we need now is to keep up the pressure on Brussels. To find out how to do that, go here.

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So Much For Voting, Then…

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

With a General Election due up in May of next year it seemed likely that the current UK government would follow the example of parts of the USA and try to prevent people who might disapprove of it from voting. They are starting small, on a group of people unlikely to get much sympathy from the media: trans folk.

As this Gay Star News article explains, registering to vote in the UK now involves either sending off a huge amount of paperwork, or using an online form that demands you reveal if you have ever changed your name. This is in direct contravention of the Gender Recognition Act, and is probably a violation of EU Human Rights legislation as well. I think I’m OK, in that I am already registered, so I shouldn’t be asked to go through the process again unless I move home. Other people won’t be so lucky.

I changed my name 20 years ago, and have had passports and a driving license issued in the new name. I even have a birth certificate in my new name. But apparently there is still doubt about my identity that can only be resolved by outing myself to whichever people happen to be responsible for the register of voters. Oh well, at least the form doesn’t ask for my “real name”.