Feminism

Want To Write A Letter To Tiptree?

~ Cheryl

The fine folks at Twelfth Planet Press are currently working on a non-fiction piece in which contributors share their thoughts about the life and work of James Tiptree Jr.. They have commissioned a number of pieces, but they are also having a period of open submission. The guidelines are given below. It is possible that I’ll have a piece in this myself, though there is still plenty of time for Alex & Alisa to come to their senses.

The great James Tiptree Jr was born sometime in 1967, a little over forty-eight years ago. Fifty-two years earlier Tiptree’s alter-ego, the talented, resourceful and fascinating Alice B. Sheldon was born. And somewhere in there, about forty years ago, poet Racoona Sheldon showed up.

In celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Sheldon’s birth, and in recognition of the enormous influence of both Tiptree and Sheldon on the field, Twelfth Planet Press is publishing a selection of letters written by science fiction and fantasy’s writers, editors, critics and fans to celebrate her, to recognise her work, and maybe in some cases to finish conversations set aside nearly thirty years ago.

Letters to Tiptree will be a collection of letters written to Alice Sheldon, James Tiptree or Racoon Sheldon; a set of thoughtful pieces on the ways her contribution to the genre has affected (or not) its current writers, readers, editors and critics.

Edited by Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein, we are looking for two types of submissions.

Firstly, letters that are between 1000 and 2000 words, exploring personal and/or literary reflections on Tiptree/Sheldon.

Secondly, briefer responses addressing questions such as:

  • Does it make a difference, reading James Tiptree Jr’s work, knowing that Tiptree was Alice Sheldon?
  • Who is James Tiptree Jr to you?
  • Why do you care about James Tiptree Jr?
  • What impact has reading James Tiptree Jr’s fiction had on you?

We are paying 5cpw up to $USD100 to be paid on publication. We are looking for World First Publication in all languages, and exclusivity for twelve months. Letters to Tiptree will be published in August 2015.

Submissions are open between May 18 and June 8.

Please send your essay to contact@twelfthplanetpress.com.

The Motherhood Thing

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

In my Age of Ultron review I had a few things to say about Natasha Romanov, motherhood, and how society treats childless women. Today is Mother’s Day in the USA, and inevitably the Internet is full of posts about motherhood. I’d like to draw your attention to this one from Helen Boyd about the difficulties that childless women, and non-traditional mothers, face on days like this. There’s no one right way to be a mother, or to have a mother, and not conforming to some narrow definition of motherhood does not make you any less of a woman.

It is probably also a good time to point you at this brilliant satirical piece from Beulah Maud Devaney on the things people say to childless women.

Of course the “wide continuum of mothering” that Helen’s piece quotes does leave people out. I don’t know what views Amy Young has on LGBT folks, but her post is centered on religion so sadly I suspect that their omission is deliberate. This post, therefore, is for lesbian and bi women who get told that having children without a man is wrong and selfish; it is for young trans women who know that no matter how good their bodies might look on the outside they’ll always be missing a womb; it is for trans guys who are biological mothers and may or may not see themselves as mothers; and it is for older trans women who have biological children, yet are told that they can never be “mothers” to them.

Motherhood. It is no more simple than anything else in the world.

Yesterday on Ujima

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s show seemed to go OK, despite the long layoff. I don’t think I have lost my touch, which is a relief. And I managed to cope OK with the new (temporary) studio. Thanks are due as ever to Valentin for making things happen when I need them to.

The first hour was all about books. I started out with Sarah Hilary talking about her Marnie Rome novels. Someone Else’s Skin has just been long-listed for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Most of the discussion, however, was about the new book, No Other Darkness. We talked about killing children, pointing fingers, preppers, the role of crime fiction in the world, and the amazing talent of Lauren Beukes.

Sarah was followed in the hot seat by Pete Newman. We talked about being a two-writer household, sexism in the book business, babies, goats, demons, singing swords and the genius of Akira Kurosawa. We also talked briefly about Tea and Jeopardy, and there was a brief appearance by Latimer.

You can listen to the first hour here.

The second hour followed on from my article on sanitary products for Bristol 24/7. I had a pre-record interview with Chloe Tingle, and then two of her colleagues, Frances Lucraft and Michelle Graabek, joined Judeline and I in the studio to discuss the issues raised. The Talk Period is now live, so if you are in or around Bristol please do get involved. Frances and Michelle assure me that male-identified persons are welcome.

You can listen to the second hour here.

Back On Ujima

~ Cheryl

For a whole variety of reasons I have not been doing any radio for the past few months. However, I’ll be back on Women’s Outlook tomorrow. The original plan was for me to do a whole show once a month, which would be much more manageable from my point of view. However, Paulette has had to head out to Jamaica for a few weeks on family business so I’ll actually be doing the next three week’s shows.

My first guest tomorrow will be crime writer, Sarah Hilary. We’ll be discussing her new novel, No Other Darkness, and also the fact that her debut, Someone Else’s Skin, has just been long-listed for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award.

Next up will be Pete Newman, husband of the fabulous Emma and half of the Hugo-nominated Tea and Jeopardy podcast team. I’ll be asking Pete about his novel, The Vagrant, which launched last week. I may also get him to allow Latimer to say a few words.

The second hour will be given over to the issues raised in my Bristol 24/7 article from last week. It includes an interview with Chloe Tingle of No More Taboo — recorded because she’s in Uganda right now. Also a couple of her colleagues will be joining the team and myself for further discussion.

As usual you can catch the show live via the Ujima website. It should also be available via the Listen Again service for a few weeks.

Talking About Tampons

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I have a new article up for my feminism column at Bristol 24/7. This one is all about menstruation, and the enormous cost of sanitary products. If you are saying “eeewwww” right now then you are part of the problem. Go have a read. I’ll be discussing the article on Ujima next Wednesday, so if you have any feedback I’d be very grateful.

Sex On Sunday

~ Cheryl

I spent part of Sunday morning catching up on the final episode of Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s three-part BBC2 documentary series, Sex and the Church. It is a history of the increasingly fraught relationship between Christianity and sex. Part I is all about Jesus and the early church; Part II about the Medieval church and the Reformation, and Part III about how in the last few hundred years the church has lost control of sexuality in Western society.

As you might guess, the early programs were of more interest to me. Here are a few highlights of things most people probably don’t know (and which fly in the face of what modern Christian conservatives want us to believe have “always” been true).

Aristotle taught that the entire human seed was present in male semen. The female body was simply fertile ground in which this seed could be planted and grown.

On the back of this (and other, similar, more ancient beliefs), the early theologian, Clement of Alexandria taught that all sex that could not result in a legitimate child was sinful. Adultery, concubinage and sex with prostitutes were all sinful because any child resulting would not be legitimate, and sex with your wife was sinful if she was already pregnant as she clearly could not get pregnant again.

Saint Augustine, of course, was a raging misogynist loon who taught that all sex was sinful, even within marriage.

Marriage was an important civil contract in the Roman Empire (hence Clement obsessing over legitimacy), but for more than half of its history the Christian church wanted nothing to do with anything so salacious. Marriage did not become an official sacrament until the Council of Verona in 1184. Even then marriages had to take place in the church porch, because a couple who were planning to have sex were deemed too sinful to be allowed into a church until their lust had been safely contained by marriage.

The third program is relatively free of such gems, but it does have some interesting correspondences with Amanda Vickery’s series on the history of feminism. It also has some rare footage of Sir John Wolfenden being interviewed on the BBC about his new (in 1957) report on the decriminalization of male homosexuality. And there’s a great section on missionaries trying to explain to Africans why it was OK for Abraham and Solomon to be polygamous but not OK for them.

MacCulloch talks a lot about the role of women in the church, but doesn’t talk much about gender. He glosses over Origen’s supposed self-castration as merely an extreme form of celibacy, doesn’t mention the prevalence of eunuchs in the Byzantine church, and ignores the idea of celibacy as symbolic castration. On the other hand, what he does say is often a lot of fun. He has mastered an almost Kenneth Williams-like salacious pout that he uses to discuss particular naughtiness, and he clearly has no truck with the pomposity of conservative Christian moralists. Overall, the series is a lot of fun, and has some good (for a TV documentary) history too.

Trans Kids Wrap-Up

~ Cheryl

The media onslaught on the trans kids issue continued for a few days after my last post on the subject. I had intended to say more about it at the time, but other things got in the way. I’m coming back to it now because there are a couple of important points I wanted to make.

First up, when you are reading any of these “debate” articles in which a journalist presents what appears to be two sides of the argument, always look for who gets the last word, because that is almost certainly the side that the journalist wants you to think “won” the “debate”. The article will probably be structured to lead you to that conclusion.

As an example, check out this piece from the Telegraph which purports to give advice to parents whose kids exhibit gender-variant behavior. The articles talks to Mermaids and a gender specialist, but gives a lot of space, and the last word, to one Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist, who encourages parents not to “overreact” — the journalist’s word, not hers.

As I noted in my post on the Victoria Derbyshire program, around 75% of the kids who see doctors for gender variance issues do indeed “grow out of it”. However, that leaves 25% who do not. Slowly but surely, the gender specialists are learning to tell who needs more help and who doesn’t, but the kids’ own testimony is found to be a strong indicator of behavior. The more insistent a child is that they are the “wrong” gender, the more likely they are to need to transition later in life.

The article states (without quote marks so I am assuming these are the words of the journalist, Radhika Sanghani):

However, the most important thing for parents to remember is that there are no real ‘warning signs’ their child will become transgender or transsexual.

This is flat out wrong.

Furthermore, consider this scenario: suppose your child exhibited possible signs of a dangerous disease. There’s a 75% chance that it is a false alarm, but a 25% chance that there is something seriously wrong which, if it is not treated in time, could lead to death, and at best lifelong disfigurement. What would you think of someone who advised you not to overreact, and to wait and see if the child recovered on their own?

The other piece of coverage I wanted to point you at is an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. It is probably gone from iPlayer by now, but there is a transcript available here.

Before reading that, however, you might want to check out this blog post by CN Lester which explains how the Woman’s Hour staff tried to recruit CN to be the anti-trans person in a debate on the validity of treating trans kids. There’s little doubt that Woman’s Hour intended to run a “debate” show, and that they wanted the anti-trans side to win.

And if you need further evidence, go and read the transcript and pay close attention to the questions that Jenni Murray poses.

The eventual show had the anti side taken by Finn MacKay, who happens to have just written a book on radical feminism. Because there’s nothing quite like arguing against someone’s right to exist when you have a book to promote, right? Finn is a lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Doubtless our paths will cross at some point.

Actually, almost everything that Finn says on the program is stuff I agree with. Jenni Murray is much more obviously anti-trans. However, the program is presented in such a way as to suggest that parents who take their kids to a gender clinic are obsessed with a need for those kids to conform to the gender binary. Michelle Bridgman of Gendered Intelligence does her best to counter this idea, but she isn’t allowed much space to explain.

The truth of the matter is that trans people have waged a long and exhausting campaign against the medical establishment to try to prevent them from forcing gender-normative behavior upon us. Being trans isn’t about sexuality, and it isn’t about gender performance either. If all someone wants to do is wear pretty dresses, that person will be happy to go through life as a cross-dresser. They don’t need medical transition, and they should not be encouraged to seek it. Nor is someone who does transition medically required to be gender-stereotypical in their behavior afterwards. Presenting trans people as being obsessed with being gender conformant is just one of the lies that radical feminists tell about us.

As for kids, it can be hard to tell which way they will go, but gender specialists are getting better at recognizing who needs help. In the meantime treatment is carefully staged so as to give the kids every opportunity to back out. For those that don’t, there is increasing clinical evidence that the use of hormone blockers provides significant benefits.

The medical evidence is very clear. And yet journalists persist in scare-mongering and arguing that trans people should be denied treatment. What’s worse is that they do this for “entertainment”.

Puppygate – Winners and Losers

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

What a big HugoThat image is from issue #70 of Doom Patrol, published by Vertigo in 1993 and written by Rachel Pollack. The woman in the frog mask is Kate Godwin, a.k.a. Coagula, a trans woman superhero. The words are, of course, mine. If you’d like to know more about the villain, Codpiece, or indeed Coagula, that issue is available on Comixology.

I’m using that as an illustration to remind people that angry, entitled white men are by no means new. Indeed, if you want an even better illustration of the type, go and read Chip Delany’s Triton. Bron is possibly the ur-MRA character, though he does come up with a far more inventive solution to his inability to get laid.

As to this Puppygate thing, let’s see if I have understood it properly.

Postulate: for the past two decades the Hugo Awards have been controlled by an evil cabal of commie, pinko, faggot feminists led by Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden. They use their power over the SF&F industry to ensure that the commie, pinko, faggot feminist writers they publish via Tor Books dominate the Hugos.

Fact: John C. Wright is published by Tor Books.

Fact: This year John C. Wright has five works as Hugo finalists.

Q.E.D..

Or maybe not. I don’t want to go through the whole Puppy 101 here. If you want details, Mike Glyer has them (and he deserves to be a finalist for the Fan Writer Hugo again next year for the sterling work he is doing keeping up with the torrent of comment).

Actually the whole thing is a bit of a mystery to me, because for the past five years or so I’ve heard little save how the Hugos are a conspiracy run by an evil right wing cabal headed by Old White Men such as Kevin and myself. It is actually a bit of a relief to be told that we are commie, pinko, faggot feminists after all.

By the way, please do remember those accusations. Lots of people are weighing in on the Puppygate issue. They all seem to have advice as to what you, the voters, should do about it. Before taking their advice, do bear in mind what they have said about the Hugos in the past. If they are the sort of person who has dissed the Hugos at every possible opportunity, and they are now telling you that the only thing to do is adopt a scorched earth policy and kill off the awards completely, you might want to be a bit suspicious about their advice.

For most of us, however, the Hugos are a thing that we have some affection for, and Puppygate has clearly got people riled up. I must admit that from my point of view the constant carping, not to mention outright greed, of some people claiming to push a diversity agenda had totally put me off. I simply couldn’t be bothered with all of that nonsense anymore. Puppygate, however, has awoken something interesting in fandom. Right now I am more optimistic about the Hugos than I have been for a long time. Let me explain.

The title of this post was inspired by a podcast that Kevin guested on. One of the hosts of the show was complaining that, no matter what fandom did in response to Puppygate, VD was bound to win. I thought that was wrong, so I started thinking about who the winners and losers were in all of this.

The most obvious losers are, of course, Correia and Torgersen. Firstly they have been portrayed in large numbers of articles all over the mainstream media as a couple of bad losers who, when they didn’t get the share of the Hugo cake they felt they were entitled to, invited a bunch of thugs (VD and GamerGate) to come and piss all over the cake so that no one could have it. Secondly, as has been pointed out by many people, they have been totally pwned by VD. And they daren’t try to dissociate themselves from him too strongly because if they do he’ll come after them next.

Some other authors are losers, of course. There are some fine works that could have been finalists for this year’s Hugos had not the Puppies intervened. But then again every year there are far more fine works that are not finalists than fine works that are. The Hugos are a very tough contest, especially in the fiction categories. Doing good work is not a guarantee of a rocket. That, of course, is a point that appears to have escaped the Puppies. It must be so sad when someone takes the silver spoon of patriarchy out of your mouth and forces you to compete with everyone else, no matter how brown, female or queer they might be.

Has fandom lost? Well obviously if VD and his pals win a bunch of Hugos then we will have done this year. But the final ballot hasn’t happened yet. I understand that Sasquan took an additional 1350 supporting memberships in the two days after the Hugo finalists were announced. I suspect that more memberships are still being bought. Sasquan is on course to be the first Worldcon ever to have more supporting memberships than attending, and probably the third largest Worldcon ever. Some people, I know, are convinced that all of those new members are VD loyalists who will vote as he directs. Personally I’m not so sure.

It’s not just those 1350 or so new members (presumably all voters) that we need to think about either. Given the way that nominating eligibility works (members of last year, this year and next year’s Worldcon), there must have been at least 12,000 people eligible to nominate. Only 2,122 people actually did so. And in the Puppy-dominated short fiction categories the largest number of nominating ballots was 1,174.

What would have happened if all 12,000 eligible WSFS members had cast nominating ballots? Well in Novel, where there were 1,827 ballots cast, three non-Puppy works became finalists.

It is certainly true that a small number of people voting for a slate has far more influence on the nominating ballot than a larger number of people voting independently. But there is a limit. With enough people voting, even a slate becomes less effective.

So my first point is this: VD didn’t win the Hugos, we (collectively) gave them to him by failing to use our votes. Obviously there are good reasons why people don’t participate even though they have the right to do so, but if we want to fix the Puppy problem one of our main priorities ought to be to increase the level of participation in Hugo voting. I do, as you might expect, have ideas about how to do that, which I’ll address in a later post. For now, however, fannish outrage at Puppygate is doing a fine job of encouraging people to vote.

My second point, of course, is that if enough of us vote in the final ballot then he won’t win that either.

I understand that VD has threatened that if he doesn’t win the Hugos this year he’ll come back harder next year. Well, let him try. How many loyal followers does he have? A few hundred, at most, I suspect. There are lots more people who enjoy conservative-themed fiction, but I’m pretty sure that most of them have discerning taste.

There is, I understand, a great deal of debate about how to vote in the final ballot. Do we vote as normal? Do we put known Puppies below No Award? Do we put everyone on the Puppy slates below No Award? Or do we vote No Award for everything?

Well, your vote belongs to you. How you use it is up to you, not to anyone claiming to be an arbiter of fannish morality. All I can say is what I’m intending to do.

I’ll start by noting that there is one category (Fan Artist) for which the puppies didn’t put up a single candidate. There is the possibility of the first ever Finnish winner of a Hugo Award. There are other deserving candidates too (hi Spring!). I’m certainly voting in this one.

There are some really good works in Novel and Graphic Novel too, and anyone who thinks I am forgoing the opportunity to vote for Groot and Rocket has got another think coming (though actually I’ll probably put Winter Soldier first because it is a seriously good film). In Fancast I’m torn between my Aussie pals, Alex, Alisa & Tansy, and Bristol’s local heroes, Emma & Pete.

I’m not going to go through all of the categories in detail, but I do want to note that just because something was on a Puppy slate it doesn’t mean that it didn’t deserve a nomination in its own right. Guardians of the Galaxy was a Puppy nominee, despite the fact that the principal villain, Ronan the Accuser, is a right-wing religious fanatic who wants to kill off everyone he deems morally inferior. I have been constantly surprised that Jim Butcher hasn’t appeared on Hugo ballots, given how many books he sells, and he was a Guest of Honour at this year’s Eastercon.

Ronan judges the Hugos

Then again, No Award is available as an option if you think that a work is genuinely not Hugo material, or doesn’t deserve to be on the Hugo ballot for some other reason. I may well be using it. John C. Wright, sadly, has not got better through his career. Some of you might remember what I thought of him in the days when he was the Great White Hope of Libertarian SF.

I understand that VD claims he will have won if he is beaten by No Award because that will “prove” that the results are fixed. The believability of such a claim will depend a lot on how many people vote.

By the way, Puppies, when I first started getting nominated for Hugos, a whole bunch of angry people from Fanzine Fandom started going on about how I had cheated by using immoral campaigning tactics, how I should have been ruled ineligible anyway, and that there should be a campaign to place me below No Award. I was even officially blacklisted from programming at the 2004 Worldcon. I won Fanzine that year, and a rant denouncing my win was put on the Worldcon’s official website1. Some of them, I think, are still demanding that the “Hugo Committee” correct the results and remove my wins from the record. Frankly, you Puppies are amateurs when it comes to being hated by people who think they own fandom.

I like to think that I won because the voters liked what I was doing. However, I have learned from the latest Galactic Suburbia that, according to Puppy supporters, an Evil Feminist can only win a Hugo if she has a “glittery hoo ha”. A little Googling revealed this means that the poor male members of Worldcon were so desperate to have sex with me that they voted me four Hugos even though I didn’t deserve them. I must admit that I hadn’t noticed this level of general lust, but my ego has benefitted significantly from the discovery.

Given the number of people voting, I am fairly confident that there will be some very fine winners of Hugo Awards this year. There will also be some results I disagree with, but then again the works I nominate rarely become finalists so I am used to that. People need to remember that if some Hugos are won by very popular works that they don’t particularly like, that does not mean that the awards are “broken”.

The real winners of Puppygate, however, are science fiction, and the Hugo Awards themselves.

Why? Well to start with look at all of the press coverage we have got. It is still going on now, more than two weeks after the finalists were announced. No amount of money could have bought that level of attention.

What’s more, most of the coverage is broadly sympathetic. The message has been that there are awards for science fiction that are deeply loved by fans and authors alike, and that those awards have been hijacked by a group of right wing fanatics. A lot of the coverage has explained that diversity has been increasing in the SF&F community, and that this is why a bunch of bigots are so angry.

If that wasn’t enough, we have a whole bunch of top authors writing about their support for the Hugos, and we have hundreds, possibly thousands, of fans signing up to vote.

Thanks Puppies, there’s no way we could have managed all of this without you.

Finally, lots of people have been talking about the need for major change in how the Hugos are run. Normally the WSFS Business Meeting is viewed as a massive snore-fest. This year the eyes of the world will be upon it. Obviously Kevin has a huge responsibility as Chair of the meeting, but I have every confidence in his ability to do a brilliant job. The end result could be a number of really valuable changes that will make the awards much more relevant.

What those changes should be will be the subject of a later post.

I’m closing comments on this, mainly because I don’t have the time to deal with the war that is likely to erupt in the comments if I don’t. There are plenty of other places where partisans can throw insults at each other. If you have genuine questions for me, I’m not that hard to find.

(1) Thanks again to con chair, Deb Geisler, for ordering the web team to take it down, though the matter should never have got that far up the chain of command.

Reclaiming Words at Bath Uni

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Last night I was an invited panelist at a meeting of the Bath University LGBT+ Group. It was an intersectional event, and the panel includes representatives from the university’s race and gender equality groups (though not a disability activist, which was a shame). The panel was part of a campaign the LGBT+ group is running called “That’s So Straight”, which aims to raise awareness of the use of “gay” to mean “bad”.

The theme of the panel was reclaiming words. Should we, the panelists were asked, use words such as C*nt, N*gger, F*ggot, Tr*nny and so on when they are still viewed as offensive by many members of our respective communities? It was a wide-ranging and interesting discussion, and we ended up mostly agreeing that reclaiming words was a good thing, but with significant reservations.

Chloe for the gender equality group made the good point that the offensiveness of words is very much dependent on power structures. Calling a man a pussy is offensive in a way that calling a woman a dick will never be.

Miada for the race equality group noted that word reclamation is generally led by young people, and the elders may not always be happy about what they are doing. I noted that a lot of older LGBT folk, especially gay men, are very upset about the reclamation of queer.

For my own part I described how tr*nny is generally viewed as offensive by much of the trans community, but is a beloved nickname for many cross-dressers.

I also opined that, due to the games played on social media, the whole idea of offensive words has pretty much jumped the shark. When you have a group who refuse to accept any term for people who are not trans other than “normal people”, and reject anything else as a slur, it becomes very difficult to talk about trans issues. Also I see quite a lot of people on Twitter who proudly have SJW as part of their handles, while another sizeable group is running around wailing, “SJW is a slur, how dare you call me that!”.

It is a difficult issue. On the one hand I profoundly distrust the policing of language. On the other hand, hate speech exists, and so does carelessness. I noted, that the list of words people had suggested to use to mean “bad” instead of “gay” included “lame”. Some of the gay guys actually defended that, which is why I wish there had been a disability activist there.

At the end of the panel we talked about words we would like to reclaim. My own suggestion was “Radical Feminist”, which I would like to mean something other than an angry bigot who spends all her time policing other women’s behavior, allies with the likes of GamerGate, and thinks that the need for the extermination of trans women is the most important issue facing feminists today. My thanks to people on Twitter who sent in their suggestions. Special thanks to Lee Wind who suggested reclaiming the term “family values”, and to Gili Bar-Hillel who wants to reclaim the word “puppy”.

My thanks to Ellen Edenbrow for inviting me and chairing the panel so well, and to all of my fellow panelists.

Last Day for GlitterShip Kickstarter

~ Cheryl

We are fast approaching the final day for Keffy Kehrli’s Kickstarter campaign for GlitterShip, the LGBT SF&F fiction podcast. Keffy has easily smashed his initial funding targets, and as a consequence episodes will be 4 per month rather than 2 per month. There was a stretch goal to allow for 2 episodes a month of original fiction rather than reprints, but as that looked quite far off Keffy has added an easier goal for just one episode of original fiction per month. That looks achievable. Go pledge now!

Holdfast Anthology Launch

~ Cheryl

Tomorrow night in London the lovely people from Holdfast Magazine will be launching their first print anthology. The event will be at the College Arms in Store Street, not far from the British Museum. Details here.

According to Facebook some 76 people will be going, most of whom I don’t know which will be very interesting from an SF point of view. Part of the entertainment will be some short readings, and topping the bill (at least from my point of view) is the fabulous Stephanie Saulter.

As I have to be in London for Trans*Code I’m popping over a day early to attend this. Rather foolishly, Laurel & Lucy have asked me to read something too. So there will be a new piece of flash fiction, which I think classes as mythpunk. It will only last a few minutes. You can bring ear plugs.

Suffragettes Forever!

~ Cheryl

That’s not just a rallying cry, it is the title of a three-part documentary series on BBC2 fronted by Amanda Vickery. It is a great piece of history, because it reminds us that while the nature of liberation struggles might change, the tactics used by those in power, and by those fighting for their rights, don’t change much. I’ve just watched the final program, and as Vickery points out there’s no question that what the suffragettes did in Edwardian times would count as terrorism today. The heavy-handed and violent police suppression of demonstrations is also very familiar (though at least they don’t come at us on horses and armed with sabres as was the case with the Peterloo Massacre — and no, that wasn’t specifically a feminist protest, but scroll down that link and you’ll see that the soldiers deliberately targeted female protestors).

The final program featured a short clip from a 1959 interview with Nancy Astor, the first woman to win a seat in Parliament. The interviewer did the classic thing of asking her if it wasn’t true that women were temperamentally unsuited to a role in government. Her response was pure Joanna Russ. No, she noted, it is men who are temperamentally unsuited, because they are so weak-willed. With just a little flattery you can get them to do anything. All you have to do, she said, is smile sweetly and say, “tell me more about yourself.”

I may have punched the air at that point.

Something else I discovered from the program is that the feminist hatred of sex workers may date back to a book written by Christabel Pankhurst. In The Great Scourge and How to End It she argues that wives should avoid having sex with their husbands because men are forever going off with disease-ridden prostitutes and bringing their infections back home. I note that Christabel was also opposed to including working class women in the movement.

Of particular interest to me was he way in which the government tended to dismiss the suffragettes as mentally ill (“hysteria” being the usual diagnosis). It is so like the way that trans people’s concerns are dismissed these days.

Vickery makes it clear that while feminism has won many victories, the struggle for equality still has a long way to go. There are more men currently sitting in Parliament than the total number of women MPs who have ever got there. Vickery also makes mention of the online abuse directed at women. There is indeed much to be done.

Had I not had duties at Sofacon I might have been in Bristol for the Women’s Literature Festival. Then again, it is probably better that I wasn’t, because I would probably been thrown out as a dangerous rapist. They had a panel on women and journalism that was stuffed with TERF sympathizers. Obviously I’m only going by other people’s tweets, but the hypocrisy on display appears to have been jaw-dropping.

This from a woman who spends much of her time paying white, middle-class women to persecute trans women and deny them access to, well, everything, starting with bathrooms.

The only reason that most trans women get to tell their stories, you arrogant, self-righteous prig, is that they are stuck at home being unemployed, and because they are willing to write for no pay just to get the message out there.

To quote Amanda Vickery’s final line from the series, “It isn’t over”.

Too damn right it isn’t.

Inspiring Women

~ Cheryl

Inspiring Women

Amelia Maltepe, Andreja Pejic, April Ashley, Bethany Black, Caitlín R Kiernan, Carmen Carrera, Caroline Cosset, Charlese Saballe, Charlie Jane Anders, Christine Jorgensen, Christine Burns, Claire Parker, Dana International, Fallon Fox, Geena Rocero, Isis King, Jackie Green, Jaime Clayton, Janet Mock, Jan Morris, Jenna Talackova, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Joan Roughgarden, Juliet Jacques, Kim Petras, Lana Wachowkski, Laura Jane Grace, Laverne Cox, Lynn Conway, Parinya Charoenphol, Paris Lees, Roberta Cowell, Roz Kaveney, Ryka Aoki, Sarah Brown, Sarah Savage.

Did you see what I did there?

There were, of course, lots more fabulous women that I could have added (and a few fabulous people whom I wasn’t sure if they identified as female).

Justina on Women and SF

~ Cheryl

Justina Robson’s new novel, The Glorious Angels, is due out on the 19th (and if you live in the UK you can pre-order the Kindle edition for just £1.99). As part of the PR campaign, Justina has an article in The Independent today talking about women and science fiction. This comment leaped out at me:

A friend tells me: “I was told by someone who has been in publishing a lot of years that the content of my books really didn’t matter. They put a woman [author] on the cover and that would determine sales. A man on the cover, any man, and sales would be higher.”

Head * Desk * Repeat

Bristol Takes The Pledge

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I spent much of today in Bristol at an International Women’s Day event in the M-Shed. It was organized by Bristol Women’s Voice and seemed to have been a great success. My congratulations to Sian Webb and her team.

From my point of view, the most encouraging thing about the day was how multi-cultural it was. There were lot of non-white women around, many of them playing important roles in the event. The amazing young women of Integrate Bristol, who campaign against FGM, were amongst the stars of the show. I was also very impressed with rugby player, Deborah Fleming (even if she is English). A special shout out to Refugee Women of Bristol who do amazing work.

There were lots of stalls, including my friends from TIGER. There was a really fun theatre company called Lady Strong’s Bonfire (check out Tomasin’s art). And I was fascinated by a new group called No More Taboo. They campaign on issues to do with menstruation. Did you know that in the average British woman life she generates 150 kg of waste from sanitary products, spending between £1400 and £3500 in the process? That’s can’t be good, either for the finances or the environment, but nothing is done about it because no one wants to talk about menstruation. There will be an article about this coming up soon.

The big news from today, however, is the launch of a city-wide campaign to pledge zero tolerance for gender-based violence. This is an initiative that has come out of the Bristol Women’s Commission that was set up by Mayor George Ferguson when he signed the European Charter for equality of women and men in local life back in 2013 (Bristol was the first UK city to sign up). Today Penny Gane, the Chair of the Commission, launched this pledge, and wheeled in a bunch of the great and good from around the city, George included, to support it.

There are two things I particularly like about the pledge. Firstly, any organization that signs it commits not only to having zero tolerance, but also to doing something about it. Secondly, it really is about gender-based violence. The pledge says:

Gender based violence includes domestic and sexual violence and abuse of women and children, domestic and sexual violence against men, sexual exploitation, FGM, forced marriage, honour based violence and sexual harassment.

So there is no room for the Men’s Rights Activists to complain, “What about us men!”. Nor is there much room for the TERFs and their claim that the mere existence of trans women is an act of violence against women. I might have worded it a little differently, but the principle of ending all gender-based violence is there.

Thoughts For International Woman’s Day

~ Cheryl

Technically IWD is not until tomorrow, but just about everyone is doing their thing today instead, if only because of the transport problems on Sundays. I’m grateful for that, because getting to Bristol on a Sunday is not easy.

Of course I have this sinking feeling that IWD is going to be mainly another occasion for cis white women to do amazing things for other cis white women. I’ve seen some buzz on social media about a new “let’s promote women” thing that Lauren Laverne is launching called The Pool. It is all very coy right now, but I’m not signing up to it to find out more because I’m pretty sure one of the first things I will find is a Trans Women Not Welcome sign, like has happened with just about every other feminist initiative in the UK over the past few years.

However, we have to keep plugging away the best we can. And in that vein here is something of mine that went up at Bristol 24/7 last week when I was drowning in LGBT History Month stuff and thereby slipped my notice. It is all about putting an end to sexism.

Brief UBU Follow-Up

~ Cheryl

There’s a point I made at the debate at UBU last night that I’d like to spread a bit wider. When I was talking about lack of inclusion of PoC in LGBT activism, I tried this little test on the audience.

First I asked them if, present company excepted, they could name any prominent trans activist in the UK who was not white. I would have named Sabah, who is one of the leading figures behind Brighton Trans Pride, but no one in the audience had a suggestion.

Then I asked if anyone could name a prominent trans activist in the USA who was white. That was a little easier. They could have had Kate Bornstein, Jenny Boylan, Mara Keisling or Masen Davis, for example. However, these days most of the big name activists are black: Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Geena Rocero, Angelica Ross, Lourdes Hunter, Monica Roberts and so on.

When we complain about trans people getting murdered, it is overwhelmingly trans women of color that we are actually talking about. That makes the lack of TWOC in UK activism even more stark.

This is not their problem, it is ours.

On the Future of the LGBT+ Movement

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Last night I was honored to be asked to be part of a panel at Bristol University Students’ Union (UBU) that was discussing the question: “What Next for the LGBT+ Movement Following the Passing of the Same Sex Marriage Act?”. This was part of a series of events under the general title of a “Festival of Liberation”. Ruth Pearce reported on last week’s intersectionality panel here.

My fellow panelists were as follows:

  • Daryn Carter, the Director of Bristol Pride;
  • Noorulann Shahid, the Black Rep on the NUS LGBT Committee and also the Campaigns & Activism Intern at UBU; and
  • Sorana Vieru, Postgraduate Education Officer at UBU.

The panel was chaired by Alice Phillips, the UBU Equality, Liberation and Access Officer. Fran Cowling, the LGBT Officer (Women’s Place), was unable to attend.

I may have introduced myself as, “an abusive and violent online mob that mercilessly persecutes New Statesman columnists”.

Alice started by asking us what we thought of the Same-Sex Marriage Act. The general opinion of the panel was that it was good that same-sex marriages could now happen, but the problem with the Act is that it is a Same-Sex Marriage Act, not a Marriage Equality Act. Specific issues that were raised included the complete lack of provisions for non-binary people, the Spousal Veto, and the lack of a civil partnership option for straight people.

We were then asked where we thought the LGBT+ movement should go next.

Daryn and I both mentioned the need for the movement to be fully inclusive of people of color. This is a difficult issue to address. I was delighted to have Noorulann on the panel, and the audience was far more diverse than I am used to seeing at LGBT events in Bristol. However, I totally understand that PoC will feel intimidated by all-white gatherings and may not want to attend them. Having things like UK Black Pride is good, but at some point we all need to start working together.

I’m particularly sensitive to the pressure that people like Noorulann will be under to somehow represent “their people” and drag their fellow PoC along to events. The category “non white” includes a vast array of different cultures, and one person can’t possibly be expected to speak for, or to, them all. Noorulann is a very impressive young activist, and I hope that they succeed in their campaign to get to head up the NUS LGBT team next year, but equally there is only so much that one person can do.

Anyway, the door is open. Daryn and I are happy to listen. Hopefully people will come forward and tell us what they need from us.

Related to this are issues of immigration and international policy. The way in which LGBT asylum seekers are treated by UK immigration officers is an absolute disgrace. I suspect we’ll need a change of government to do anything about that (and given the way that Labour are jumping on the anti-immigration bandwagon, a fairly major change of government). Also, while there are clear concerns about the way LGBT people are treated in other countries, we need to be very careful to not allow our concerns to become a cover for wars over resources, or to lead to a repeat of the colonialist nonsense that exported our (white European) phobias to other countries in the first place.

Lastly (I think) on general issues, we noted that austerity policies are particularly hard on LGBT youth, many of whom are made homeless by their families.

I’ve put the general issues first, because I don’t want people to think that the panel was totally about trans issues, but there was certainly a lot of it, and not just because there were two trans people on the panel. Daryn mentioned that he got into LGBT activism in Bristol in part because he found the local scene too trans-exclusionary at the time. And it was an absolute delight to hear Sorana, as a cis woman, talking about the need to oppose TERF ideology in academia (where apparently it is rife in some subject areas).

Noorulann mentioned that the NUS now has a policy to “smash” the Gender Recognition Act, which is fine by me as long as they don’t take away my birth certificate. Here’s the sort of things I want to see:

  • Official recognition of an Other category for gender, as is done to varying degrees in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Australia and Germany;
  • Official promotion of a gender-neutral pronoun (as has just happened in Sweden);
  • Revision of the Gender Recognition Act to allow for this third category (and doubtless a whole bunch of additional fixes);
  • The creation of proper Marriage Equality Act that is entirely gender-neutral; and
  • An end to surgical modification of intersex infants.

As far as I could see, the panel and the audience were OK with that.

We also briefly touched on the ongoing attempts to limit or ban treatment for trans people through the NHS. There may be more news on this next month. For now I simply note that the NHS is under very heavy pressure to cut costs, and one of the ways it is looking to do that is prioritize what services it provides. This will mean that there is no explicit “ban” on unpopular treatments, but there will never be sufficient budget for them to be provided.

I note in passing that after several years of investigations the General Medical Council has just decided that Dr. Richard Curtis has no case to answer and may continue to practice. I don’t suppose that this news will be deemed important enough to appear in The Guardian, though it was all over the trumped up charges when they were brought. Sadly I also expect that new trumped up charges will be laid against Dr. Curtis fairly soon, because that’s the way life is for anyone who dares to provide private medical services to trans people.

I also touched on the case of Chris Wilson, the Scottish trans man who was convicted for fraud for failing to disclose his trans status to sex partners. (Someone in the audience mentioned a similar case in Staines. It isn’t clear that Gemma Barker identified as trans in any way, though that may not have been any protection.) Both of these cases also involve sex with minors, which complicates matters considerably, but the idea that failure to disclose one’s trans status to a sexual partner is an act of criminal fraud is deeply disturbing, especially as it appears to negate the central principle of the Gender Recognition Act.

There were some interesting follow-on questions from Alice and the audience and I’d like to touch on a couple.

Firstly we were asked how we could get more young LGBT people involved in politics. It isn’t easy, unless they are directly affected by something. However, I think that the new vlog series that Fox & Lewis have been running on the My Genderation YouTube Channel is a wonderful thing. The young people making the vlogs don’t talk much about politics, but the fact that they are there, talking about their lives, and giving encouragement to others, is enormously powerful politically.

In discussions afterwards we were told that YouTube is a very important venue for reaching out to young people. I have an awful feeling that I need to overcome my horror of seeing myself on film.

Finally there was an interesting question about inclusivity and alphabet soup. There is no right answer here. I’ve used LGBT rather than QUILTBAG here because of the title of the panel. UBU uses LGBT+ rather than the widely misunderstood LGBT*, but as Noorulann noted those who get letters in QUILTBAG but not in LGBT can feel erased by the +. Even when you try, things can go wrong. Some people now use LGB & T as a means of trying to make it clear that T is not about sexuality, but Noorulann was under the impression it was an attempt to jettison the T. In some cases it depends who you are talking to. Daryn mentioned meeting a lot of people who didn’t know what LGBT meant. Some we need both and. We have to be as inclusive as possible, and recognize people’s identities, but equally we need to represent ourselves to the rest of the world, and avoid damaging internal squabbles. We’ll never get it right, but we can keep trying.

I’d like to end by thanking Alice and UBU for a fantastic event. Special thanks are due to Noorulann, Sorana and Daryn for being fabulous fellow panelists, and to the audience for listening to my ranting. Like Ruth, I have come away greatly encouraged about the future of feminism.

Safe Spaces

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

As a general rule I think that comparing the oppression that one minority group gets to that another minority group gets is a bad idea. I get very irritated by people who, when on the receiving end of prejudice, go on social media and complain, “that wouldn’t have happened if I was xxx”, because of course quite likely it would. However, in this particular case I think a comparison will help illuminate the issue. My apologies if anyone is offended by it.

Anyway, today’s fracas du jour on social media has been all about the vital importance of keeping those horrible trans women out of rape crisis centers, so that “real” women can feel safe in them. Here’s a little thought experiment for you.

Suppose you are running a rape crisis center. Two women have come in. Both have been raped, and both are deeply traumatized. One is white, and the other is black. The white woman says to you, “I don’t feel safe with that black woman here, black people scare me, please throw her out.” What do you do?

I don’t for a minute suggest that would not happen. Sadly there are parts of the world where I suspect it is all too plausible. However, hopefully you lot will all be as horrified by it as I am.

I’ve never been trained to run a rape crisis center, but this is the sort of thing I hope would happen. Firstly I have a deeply traumatized black woman whose day has just been made much worse by the behavior of the other woman, so I need to get her somewhere where she can be looked after without this unwanted drama. Hopefully I have more than one room I can use, and colleagues I can call on for help. Then there’s the white woman, who is behaving very badly, but is also deeply traumatized. She might be better when she’s calmed down a bit, and in any case it is our job to help women who have been raped, no matter how badly they behave. So we look after her as well. We try to make both women feel as safe, comfortable and supported as possible.

Now try this scenario. You are running a rape crisis center. Two women have come in. Both have been raped, and both are deeply traumatized. One is cis, and the other is trans. The cis woman says, “I don’t feel safe with that trans person here, he’s really a man and might attack me, please throw him out.” What do you do?

If your answer to that is, “throw the bastard out, how dare he come into a women-only space!” then I would be deeply worried about you. Nevertheless, you would have some support, both from prominent media feminists, and from the British Government.

Of course they never put the argument like that. It is always presented as the cis woman who has been raped, and the trans woman who might cause trouble by invading the women-only space. One woman is portrayed as the victim, the other is demonized. But really, why would the trans woman be coming to the rape crisis center if she hadn’t been raped too, and be equally in need of help and support?

As far as I can see, these “debates” have two main purposes. The first is to scare trans women by making it clear that if they were unlucky enough to be raped then there would be no help or support for them, they’d be on their own. The second is to reinforce the idea that trans women are dangerous sexual predators who are not safe to have around “real” women. I find both of these things despicable.