Feminism

A Few Words on Versailles

~ Cheryl

No, I am not watching the drama series. Enough of you have expressed utter horror on social media to warn me off that. However, I did take in the accompanying documentary about Louis IV and his court presented by Lucy Worsley and Helen Castor.

Mostly this was good stuff, at least as far as I know because 17th Century France really isn’t my period. However, there was one brief comment that caused me to pause.

Normally BBC history documentaries erase all evidence of LGBT folks from the past. After all, children might be watching, and we wouldn’t want to get a nasty letter from Mary Whitehouse, would we? (Yes, I know she’s dead, but the BBC and Ofcom don’t appear to have twigged that yet.) However, you can’t really talk about Louis XIV without talking about his brother, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans.

Philippe was very gay, and an enthusiastic cross-dresser. So far so good. It is nice to see teh gay actually acknowledged (though the chap playing Phillipe in the documentary isn’t like any gay man I know, and looks positively embarrassed when cross-dressed). However, during the documentary Lucy Worsley blamed Philippe’s gayness on his being treated as a girl by his mother, Anne of Austria.

Lucy, we need to have a word.

To start with, suggesting that a kid can be “made gay” by his upbringing suggests that being gay is something that can be induced, and therefore also “cured”. That’s not a good point to be making.

In any case, we know that many gay men exhibit gender-variant behavior in childhood. When you see people claiming that 80% of trans kids “grow out” of being trans, and have thus been cured of their transness, what they actually mean is that 80% or so of kids exhibiting gender-variant behavior are not trans, and mostly grow up to be happily lesbian, gay or bisexual. Or to be happily non-binary but not want any medical intervention. Or can’t make up their minds as kids but discover their trans identity later in life. Philippe fits right into this pattern.

Which brings me to my second point, Lucy. Blaming a child’s gayness on his mother is anti-feminist. Kids are what they are. My guess is that all Queen Anne was doing was accepting her son’s gender-variant behavior. That’s not bad parenting, it is loving your kid. Mothers have quite enough to do without having people going round blaming them for their kids being gay.

Suspension Bridges – Invented by a Woman

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Suspension bridges are one of the iconic features of Victorian England. Thomas Telford’s bridge over the Menai Straits to Anglesey, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s bridge over the Clifton Gorge in Bristol, are world famous. But neither of these great bridges was designed by the engineer credited with their construction. Both were based on a patent filed by another great Bristol inventor, Mrs. Sarah Guppy.

Well, actually Mrs. Guppy didn’t file the patents herself. That would have been illegal in Victorian England. She had to get her husband, Samuel, to file them for her. Mr. Guppy owned a sugar refining company in Bristol. He’s not listed among the residents of Bristol who were awarded compensation under the Abolition of Slavery Act, so we can assume that he didn’t own plantations, though his fortune must have been based in part on cheap slave labor in the Caribbean.

Mrs. Guppy ended up making a fortune in the arms trade. That probably wasn’t her intention, but her invention of a system for keeping barnacles off ships netted her some £40,000 (£3.5 million in today’s money) from the Royal Navy. Of course all of the money went to her husband, because that patent was in his name too.

To give him his due, Samuel Guppy did actually register the patents in the name of “The Guppy Family”. Nor was Sarah unknown to her peers. Telford and Brunel both appear to have been her friends and she advised them both on the design of their bridges. As a good Victorian housewife she asked not to be credited for her work so as not to appear boastful.

The Oxford Dictionary has recently added Mrs. Guppy to its list of notable British biographies, which has given the Bristol Post the opportunity to celebrate her work.

Sarah’s son, Thomas, clearly took after his mother as he became an engineer when he grew up. He’s a character in my story in Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion, where I have him recruited to be the chief engineer on the Severn Barrage (which the Victorians did seriously consider building).

The family is probably best known for Sarah’s grandson, Robert, who became a naturalist and had a fish named after him.

Girls Can’t Code

~ Cheryl

Many thanks to the Girls Who Code movement for this hilarious video parodying the excuses given for not employing women as programmers.

In my case it is even harder. I suffer from autogynephilia, so not only do my boobs get in the way of my seeing the screen and keyboard, but the mere sight of them keeps me in a constant state of sexual arousal. It is very distracting.

Sophie Walker in Bath

~ Cheryl

The other event in Bath this evening was a visit from Sophie Walker, the leader of the Women’s Equality Party (and recent candidate for Mayor of London). I may have more to say about this tomorrow when I have a bit more time and can talk in detail about how WEP works as a party. For now all I want to say is that Olly and I were impressed. (We had sent Ceri home because she’s sick.)

The bottom line is that WEP knows it has to appeal to a broad audience to succeed. It can’t be a major force in UK politics if it only appeals to cis straight white able-bodied middle class women. Olly and I talked to Sophie and Halla, her chief policy advisor, about trans issues, and it is clear that they are on board. What they need to do, and presumably need help with, is to reassure the many rank and file members, and prospective members, who have been taken in by the appalling lies spread by Sarah Ditum and her ilk. That, I am sure, can be done.

In the meantime there is lots of important work to be done, particularly with respect to the e-Quality campaign. I spent part of the evening plotting with Jess from the Bristol branch. Expect a special radio show later this year.

I should note that no political party is perfect. WEP’s policy on sex work is, IMHO, absolutely wrong. But Sophie knows this is a contentious issue. As with the trans thing, there is education to be done. Unlike the trans thing, I’m not best placed to do it. (Looking at you, Brooke.)

Oh, and there was talk of a WEP football team. Not involving me, I hasten to add.

Come Into My Parlour, Said the Mayor

~ Cheryl

This evening I was in Bath for two events. The first was in the Guildhall. There were no fairies, but there was a mayor.

Will Sandry is the 788th Mayor of Bath, and as far as I know the first openly gay one. He has been an excellent friend to the Bath Gender Equality Network over his year in office, and today he invited Ceri and the gang for drinks in the Mayoral Parlour, a room full of bling and history used by mayors for entertaining visiting dignitaries. Thus it was that a bunch of mouthy feminists (many of them trans people), and one young unicorn got to tread in the footsteps of various kings and queens, Baden Powell, Winston Churchill, Emperor Haile Selasie and most recently the Chinese Ambassador. We all behaved ourselves, more or less. There are some pictures on the BGEN Facebook page, but I’m not sure if all of them are public.

The room is a Victorian extension to the Guildhall, so Jane Austen would not have been there.

Huge thanks to Will for inviting us. When I get a chance I’ll process my photos of the bling and history. They have charters signed by Richard I and Elizabeth I, over £1million worth of gold bling, and a nice big sword. It is quite impressive.

WEP’s e-Quality Campaign

~ Cheryl

I have email from the Women’s Equality Party. Tomorrow they are launching a new campaign called e-Quality. It is aimed at tackling the issue of harassment and bullying of women online which, unless you have been living in a cave for the past few years, you will know has become a major issue.

It’s not just fanboy tantrums over girl gamers or the all-women Ghostbusters movie we are talking about here. As this Telegraph article points out, girls as young as 11 are becoming victims of revenge porn attacks. Any woman who pokes her nose above the parapet is deemed fair game. I have no idea how people like Brianna Wu and Laurie Penny cope with the level of shit directed at them on a daily basis.

Wisely, in my view (and I’ve been saying this on the radio show for some time), WEP is making a core part of its platform a demand for compulsory sex and relationship education in schools. This is something that was proposed earlier this year, with the backing of both the Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, but was vetoed by the Prime Minister. The work that groups like TIGER do in Bristol is invaluable, but right now schools can just ignore such issues and let me media do all of that side of kids’ education.

Personally I think that the campaign should also target social media companies, particularly Facebook. It is becoming increasingly obvious that their “community standards” are being enforced by people who are misogynistic and transphobic. That may not be company policy, but it happens and you have to create a huge stink to get anything done about it.

While this is a specifically UK campaign, it isn’t a UK-only issue. This morning I saw an article from another SF-writing journalist, Kate Heartfield from Canada. She too was wrestling with the issue of the need to tackle certain issues as women, not as members of a political party, a position that WEP has to spend a lot of time defending.

There will be an online thing happening tomorrow morning with the hashtag #CtrlAltDelete. I shall be interested to see how that goes, and how much trolling it attracts. As Sophie Walker, the WEP party leader, will be in Bath on Wednesday evening, I should be able to get an up-to-date report on how things went.

Today On Ujima: Judy Darley, No More Taboo, Predatory Peacekeepers and Mike Carey

~ Cheryl

Well that’s a fair old mix of a show.

I started off with local writer, Judy Darley, who is running a literary fundraiser for St. Mungo’s, a charity that works with homeless people. The event is going to be in St. John on the Wall, a fabulous 13th Century church built into the old city walls. Pete Sutton is having his book launch there later in June, though I’ll miss that due to Finncon.

The second half hour saw a welcome return for Chloe Tingle who runs No More Taboo, a non-profit which promotes the use of cheap and recyclable sanitary products. The main project they are raising money for is in Nepal where, unbelievably, women who are having their periods are still shunned socially and required to stay out of the family home until they are “clean” again. You can find the crowdfunding campaign here.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

My planned 3rd quarter guest had to cancel, so I took the opportunity of spending a few minutes talking about the Predatory Peacekeepers campaign. This is attempting to hold the UN, and the French government, to account for sex abuse carried out by “peacekeepers” in the Central African Republic. The petition I mention on the show can be found here.

Rant over, I went straight into my final guest interview of the day, which was with Mike Carey. He’s in town promoting his latest (and very good) novel, Fellside. Mike and I will be discussing the book at the Bristol Waterstones tonight. We managed to find the time to discuss the state of the Girl with All the Gifts movie (which will be out in September) and our love for the X-Men as well.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

The playlist for today’s show was:

  • Papa Wemba – Show me the way
  • Billy Paul – Me & Mrs Jones
  • The Specials – A Message to you, Rudy
  • The Selecter & Prince Buster – Madness
  • Madness – Night Boat to Cairo
  • The Beat – Mirror in the Bathroom
  • The Bodysnatchers – Lets Do Rock Steady
  • The Specials – Ghost Town

The IDAHOBIT Post

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Given that I post about LGBT rights rather a lot, it is probably a bit over the top to do a special post just because it is the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. However, I did have something I wanted to talk about.

Last week the UK Parliament published the first reports from the All Party Parliamentary Group for Global LGBT Rights. The Secretary of the group is Ben Howlett, the MP for Bath, and it is this work that Ben principally wanted to talk about when I arranged for him to meet Stuart Milk in February.

You can find a copy of the full report here (PDF). As we have a Conservative government, they have the some of the most senior posts. The Chair is Nick Herbert, and of course Ben is a Tory too. However, the group is genuinely cross-party, with representatives from Labour, the SNP, the LibDems and the Greens.

One of the more notable things about the report is that it doesn’t just bash foreign governments. It is openly critical of both the Foreign Office and the Home Office. The former, under Philip Hammond, has significantly backtracked on its support for LGBT rights around the world. The latter has a major problem with how LGBT asylum seekers are treated.

The report quotes a number of academic studies and will this be very useful to Berkeley and I when we are putting together evidence in Diversity Trust work. It will probably seem all very dry and impersonal to many of you, but this sort of thing is necessary to convince governments.

In addition the report majors on the economic benefits of equality. Persecuting some 10% of your population just because they are LGBT is not a recipe for good government. It isn’t even a recipe for good corporate governance. The chart below shows how the share prices of companies with strong equality policies are well above the average. There are, of course, many possible explanations for that, but a happy and diverse workforce is certainly one of them. Public confidence in the company many be another.

Chart from APPG report

Some of you are doubtless shaking your heads and saying that people shouldn’t need an economic incentive to treat others with fairness and respect, but again this sort of thing works. One of the biggest problems we have with selling diversity training is that far too many companies see no benefit in doing it. The big stick of compliance with the Equality Act can only take you so far. You need a carrot too.

Marketing Evil

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’ve just been to Tesco for various things, including picking up my copy of The Force Awakens. They have this special offer going on where you can select a Dark Side or Light Side limited edition cover. From a style point of view, the black cover actually looks nicer, but who would want to side with Evil?

The answer of course, is obvious. You just have to look at all of the marketing surrounding the film. If you are a woman, a person of color, or old, then you are with the Resistance. If you are a young white man the the Evil Fascist Dictatorship is the side that you should support.

Does anyone else find that a teensy bit disturbing…

Fight Like A Girl On Film

~ Cheryl

The fabulous Roz Clarke has made a movie of the Fight Like A Girl launch event. You can watch it below. It does of course include the notorious pirate, Captain Morgan. I took the hat off for the panel so that everyone could see the other panelists.

I have been working on editing the audio. The full versions of all three readings are ready to be posted. Hopefully I’ll get the panel discussion done soon. I won’t be posting audio of the fighting demonstrations, partly because the presenters were not mic’ed so the audio quality is poor, and partly because what they say makes no sense without the pictures.

Bath Does Feminism

~ Cheryl

Alice Denny
Last night saw the first in what will hopefully be a series of Lightning Talks on feminist issues, organized by the Bath Gender Equality Network. For those of you not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks are conference presentations that are just 5 minutes long. Some people (me included) can carry an hour-long presentation, but a lot of people can’t, and in any case you don’t want to learn by being put in front of an audience for that long. Lightning Talks give the audience an opportunity to sample a lot of different ideas in one evening, and they give the presenters a shot at getting before an audience in a fairly low stakes way.

There was a wide variety of talks in the program, including sexism in anarchist communities, women in movies, and dating while trans. It wasn’t all women either. Daryn Carter of Bristol Pride explained why such events are still needed; my boss, Berkeley Wilde, talked about the work of The Diversity Trust; and there was a presentation on the problem of male suicide. Some of the presenters were obviously nervous, and the tech set-up didn’t allow for presenters to see their slides except by turning round to look at the big screen, which didn’t help. But most of the presentations were pretty good. A couple tried to address issues that were too complex for five minutes, and one or two clearly hadn’t timed their material in advance, but mostly it was a good evening.

The star of the show was undoubtedly Alice Denny, who is a superb poet. I have been lucky enough to see her on several occasions over the years now, and her performances are getting much more assured and sophisticated. She had the Bath audience spellbound and in tears.

While I was there I got to meet some of the women from the Bath branch of the Women’s Equality Party. We are talking. This is promising.

Well done Ceri et all for organizing a great show. Thank you Alice for being wonderful. And thanks also to Sophie for revealing some of her experiences of online dating. I am so using some of those in my talk for the PopSex conference in September.

Diversity Trust Spring Newsletter

~ Cheryl

I have spent the past couple of days doing trans awareness training in Bristol and Plymouth. It’s a very rewarding experience for me, and I’m particularly struck with how many of the people in the classes say they volunteered for them because they know someone who is transitioning and they want to understand the issues better.

However, The Diversity Trust doesn’t only deal with trans issues. We do LGB, obviously, and our spring newsletter, just published, focuses on our disability work with bios of the various trainers we use. If you need that sort of service, or are just interested in what we do, you can find the newsletter here (PDF).

This Week on Ujima: Cavan Scott, Suffragettes & Art

~ Cheryl

My first guest on this week’s Women’s Outlook was Cavan Scott. Cav is a very busy boy. We first talked about his Star Wars tie-in novels, one of which was chosen for World Book Day and went on to become the best selling book in the UK for a while. We talked about his forthcoming Sherlock Holmes novel, The Patchwork Devil. We talked about his comics and radio play work on Doctor Who. And of course we talked about The Beano, for which he writes Mini the Minx and several other strips.

For Bristol people, Cav’s book launch for The Patchwork Devil is on April 30th at Forbidden Planet. It is a lunchtime event.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

Next up on the show was our expert on suffragettes, Lucienne Boyce. She was in to tell us all about a local screening of Make More Noise, a compilation of silent film coverage of actual suffragettes from the first two decades of the 20th Century.

Finally I welcomed Ruth Kapadia from the local office of The Arts Council. We talked about the sort of work that The Arts Council does, and how people can apply for grants.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

Of course I also talked quite a bit about the cricket. West Indies are currently world champions for the Twenty20 format at under 19 level, in the women’s game, and in the men’s game. The entire Caribbean is celebrating, and we celebrated with them. All of the music was related to the cricket in some way. Here’s the playlist:

  • We are the Champions – Queen
  • Dreadlock Holiday – Boney M
  • Champion – DJ Bravo
  • Da Cricket Loba Gatama – Latif Nangarhari
  • Cloth – Bullets
  • Come Rise with Me – Machal Montano & Claudette Peters
  • Gavaskar – Andy Narell & Lord Relator
  • David Rudder – Rally Round the West Indies

The 2015 VIDA Count

~ Cheryl

VIDA’s survey of gender bias in literary reviewing was published last week. You can find piles of infographics and some analysis here.

The basic message is “more of the same”. A few magazines — notably Harper’s and The New Republic — have made significant improvements. Granta continues to score well. But magazines such as the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books continue to be bastions of the Patriarchy.

This year for the first time VIDA choose to look at a range of other identities that intersect with that of woman. They surveyed ethnicity, sexuality, ability and gender identity (although the report in The Guardian carefully omitted any mention of gender identity because we wouldn’t want to think that VIDA was no-platforming anyone, would we?). Inevitably the numbers were fairly depressing, but beyond that there’s not much we can say until we have new data next year to make comparisons. My congratulations to Poetry and Tin House, both of which managed more than 0.5% of bylines by trans women.

Tiptree Winners

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

The winners of this year’s James Tiptree, Jr. Award (“An award encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender”) have been announced. They are as follows:

  • Eugene Fischer, “The New Mother” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2015)
  • Pat Schmatz, Lizard Radio (Candlewick, 2015)

Both are totally new to me and sound very interesting. I shall be checking them out.

Descriptions of the winners and honor list works, plus the long list, can be found at the Tiptree Award website. My congratulations to Ian Sales for making the honor list with his novel, All That Outer Space Allows. I am delighted, if a little surprised, to see Radiance on the honor list. It is a fabulous book but perhaps not my first choice for the Tiptree. And I am absolutely flabbergasted to see no mention whatsoever of Luna: New Moon. Still, juried awards are notoriously unpredictable.

Controversially, I shall not be setting up a “Sad Kittens” organisation to protest that the Tiptree is worse than Hitler for no platforming a book I happen to like. Nor will I be screaming FREEZE PEACH!!! all over social media.

The 2016 jury is already hard at work. If you want to recommend a work for their attention you can do so here. I’m pleased to see that someone has just recommended Fight Like A Girl. Good luck, fighty friends!

Nobody Knew She Was There…

~ Cheryl

Local fantasy writer, Sarah Ash, is starting a new blog series highlighting women fantasy and science fiction writers. It is titled, for obvious reasons, “Nobody Knew She Was There…”. The series will start on April 28th with Jessica Rydill and will also include Jan Edwards, Freda Warrington, Stephanie Burgis and Liz Williams. As it is going to be weekly, there’s plenty of time for many more. For more information about the series, see here.

Women, History, Comics

~ Cheryl

Last night Neil Gaiman tweeted about a Kickstarter project called She Changed Comics. Run by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, it is essentially a history of women in comics. This morning, of course, the thing has blown through its funding goal in a single day and is almost 50% over budget. It has all gone so quickly that they haven’t announced stretch goals yet. Doubtless there will be some in due course.

Anyway, I am very much looking forward to the book. I suspect some of you will too. If you want to drop them some cash, the campaign page is here.

Time to Fight Like a Girl

~ Cheryl

My good friends Jo Hall and Roz Clarke have a new book due out soon. It is called Fight Like a Girl, and it features women SF&F authors writing about woman warriors. Here’s the blub:

What do you get when some of the best women writers of genre fiction come together to tell tales of female strength? A powerful collection of science fiction and fantasy ranging from space operas and near-future factional conflict to medieval warfare and urban fantasy. These are not pinup girls fighting in heels; these warriors mean business. Whether keen combatants or reluctant fighters, each and every one of these characters was born and bred to Fight Like A Girl.

Featuring stories by Roz Clarke, Kelda Crich, K T Davies, Dolly Garland, K R Green, Joanne Hall, Julia Knight, Kim Lakin-Smith, Juliet McKenna, Lou Morgan, Gaie Sebold, Sophie E Tallis, Fran Terminiello Danie Ware, Nadine West

The launch event is in Bristol on Saturday. It promises to be even more spectacular that the event we put on for the Spark & Carousel launch at BristolCon. It will, after all, have a live swordplay demonstration. It will also have a discussion panel chaired by moi.

If you are in the area and would like to attend, tickets are available here (and include food).

And if you can’t, the book will be available from the usual places very soon.

My Bath Ruby Talk about Trans*Code

~ Cheryl

Is now available on video. Many thanks to the lovely people at Confreaks TV. The video covers the entire third lightning talk session, but if you are not interested in IT stuff you can fast forward to around 8:50 to find me.

I also wholeheartedly recommend Janet Crawford’s talk about the neuroscience of gender inequality.

My thanks again to Bath Ruby for providing such interesting programming.

Aurealis Awards

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

It being Easter weekend, conventions are going on all around the world. The Australians, as is their wont, are getting in first. At Swancon this year’s Aurealis Awards have been announced.

I mention this because I am absolutely delighted to see that Glenda Larke has won the Sara Douglass Book Series Award for her Watergivers trilogy (my review here). Epic fantasy is one of those things that tends to miss out on awards because it comes in such long forms, and epic fantasy by women suffers the usual issues of cultural erasure. Glenda is one of the best in the field, and it is very pleasing to see her work recognized at last.

By the way, if you are having trouble with one of those daft people who say that it is “unrealistic” to have women having active roles in epic fantasy novels, you might want to point them at this excellent essay by Kate Elliott.

Back with the Aurealis Awards, I also note that the Convernors’ Award for Excellence has been won by Letters to Tiptree, edited by Alex Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein. I am somewhat biased in this case, because I have an essay in the book.

A full list of this year’s Aurealis Award winners can be found here.