Feminism

A Brush With Celebrity

~ Cheryl

The Bath event was for a biography with Gareth Thomas, who is one of the UK’s most famous gay men. Obviously he’s not in the same league as Elton John and Ian McKellen, but for reasons that should become obvious he has a huge impact.

Gareth’s story is pretty much the same as any other LGBT person’s. It involves being lonely and desperate as a kid, being afraid to tell your friends and family the truth, and being afraid of what will happen if they find out. It involves suicide attempts. And eventually there is a coming out tale. What make’s Gareth’s story unique is that he had been captain of the Welsh national rugby team, and was still playing professionally when he came out to the public.

Well so what? Probably only my Kiwi friends an understand what this meant in Wales. For the rest of you, imagine if it has been Brett Farve (USA), Wayne Gretsky (Canada) or Adam Gilchrist (Australia). Thomas isn’t an actor or a pop star — the sort of career that gay men are supposed to have. He’s not an ice dancer, or even into something fairly non-contact like baseball. Yes, he was a top sportsman, but he was also an acknowledged leader, a national icon, and a player in a sport that is well known for the physical contact and bravery required of its players.

I could see the effect of that at work last night. We often talk about how out LGBT folks should stand up and be counted so as to be an example to others. I try to do that myself, but I’m not convinced that it makes much difference to the world. I rather suspect that a lot of people think it is just more shameless self-promotion on my part. It is also true that I’m too old, too ugly and too weird (science fiction, ewwww!) to be of any use in the mainstream media. For Gareth Thomas it is a very different matter. There wasn’t a huge crowd (though this was apparently his second event in Bath that day), but afterwards just about everyone who came to get his book signed wanted to talk to him about how much he had meant to them. I imagine that he gets that everywhere he goes. That’s amazing.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading the book. Also, having heard Gareth tell his story, I am even more proud of those teammate such as Stephen Jones and Martyn Williams who stood by him so loyally through a very difficult time. Welsh rugby: it is awesome.

Destruction Goes Rainbow

~ Cheryl

Yes folks, it is time to Destroy Science Fiction again. This time the fine folks at Lightspeed want Queers to do the job. Goodness only knows what the Dudebros are going to make of that.

I guess I’d better try to think of a story idea, though actually I need to finish the story for Accessing the Future first.

Anyway, if you are interested in submitting to Queers Destroy Science Fiction, the guidelines are here. And keep a lookout for the crowdfunding campaign, because if they get enough money they are going to queer fantasy and horror too.

This Week’s Radio – Food, Feminism, Lady Mayoress

~ Cheryl

First up on Wednesday’s show I interviewed Daphne Lambert who is crowdfunding a book called Living Food: A Feast For Soil & Soul on Unbound. There was some general chat about seasonal food, healthy food, environmental awareness and so on. Possibly the most interesting thing that came up, however, was the enormous amount of pumpkin flesh that gets wasted every year in the UK at Halloween. 18,000 tons of the stuff, according to The Independent. I shudder to think how much goes wasted in the USA.

Daphne was accompanied by her friend, Elizabeth Winkler, who provided that little titbit. For the second half hour Paulette took over and we had a bit of a feminist rant, in particular about how the UK has fallen down the international league table, as explained here by The Guardian. The fact that we rate 26th is bad enough, but to drop from 18th to 26th in just the past year is very worrying.

You can listen to the first hour here.

Next up, Judeline took over the microphone to interview our friend Sabitha (sorry love, don’t have your last name written down and don’t want to mangle it). This turned out to be mainly about the growth of racism in the UK in recent years.

And finally, we were delighted to welcome Shilpi Choudhury, the wife of Bristol’s last Lord Mayor, Faruk Choudhury. Her story of how a young couple of Bangladesh came to the UK to study and ended up as Bristol’s first citizens was tremendously encouraging after the somewhat negative tone of the past two segments. Also the deli that Shilpi has opened, Chai Shai, sounds very interesting. (And I note that the finding for the deli came via Outset, the organization that I talked to Amy Morse about a few weeks back. Paulette ran this one.

You can listen to the second hour here.

Feminism is for Everyone

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

bell hooksI have another article up on the Bristol 24/7 website. Last week we ran a comment piece that was what people on the Internet tend to refer to as “white woman’s tears”. So I got a bit annoyed, and this is the result. As usual, help with the traffic is much appreciated. I suspect that I may get a bit of a kicking, because that always tends to happen when you talk about being trans in a very public space. But you never know, Bristol might surprise me.

Anyway, the point remains: feminism is for everyone, whether they are white, black, lesbian, Muslim, disabled, or even male. I’m pleased to have an article of mine that is headed by a photo of bell hooks. And yes, I do know that she doesn’t capitalize her name. My editor has kindly “corrected” it for me.

Today on Ujima: BristolCon, Maya Angelou & Thomas Glave

~ Cheryl

First up on today’s show I had the fabulous Roz Clarke in to do a quick preview of BristolCon. We may have mentioned several people that you know. It gave me a warm and cosy feeling to note that almost all of the authors we mentioned had been on the show themselves at some point in the past.

At the half hour point I handed over to Paulette who had Rachel de Garang in from Breathing Fire, a black women’s theatre company, who are putting on a show in honor of Maya Angelou. I didn’t catch all of the content, but it sounded fun. With Rachel in the studio was performance artist, Joanne Tremarco, from the Nomadic Academy for Fools. They are in Bristol at the moment and Joanne’s contribution is something called Women Who Wank.

Of course we are not allowed to say wank on the radio. Tommy Popcorn and I were highly amused at the gymnastics Paulette went through to get the point over.

I provided all of the music for the show. Two of the songs Paulette played are from Maya Angelou’s 1957 album, Miss Calypso. She has a great voice, and was clearly thinking along feminist lines even back then.

I got the studio back for the final half hour and played a pre-record of an interview I did with the Jamaican LGBT activist, Thomas Glave, when he was in Bristol the other week. Amongst other things, we discussed anal penetration, which apparently you are allowed to say on the radio. I also played a couple of songs that have Kenneth Williams levels of innuendo in them, both about gay sex. I may also have had a thing or two to say about Mike Read’s pro-UKIP single, which I am delighted to note he withdrew from sale shortly after the show was broadcast.

If you want to listen to the show, you can find the first hour here, and the second hour here.

I Talk Women in IT at Bristol 24/7

~ Cheryl

In what I expect to be the first in a series of monthly columns on women’s issues, I have done this year’s Ada Lovelace Day post (slightly late), at Bristol 24/7, a brand new magazine dedicated to life in Bristol. You can read it here.

Eyeballs are, naturally, appreciated. It is a new magazine that needs to establish credibility in the eyes of advertisers. Also I’m sure that my editor will be keeping a keen eye on whose columns draw the most traffic. I want to be able to do well without resorting to writing click bait.

I ♥ @JanetMock

~ Cheryl

Today the Tangled Roots writing workshop that I featured on my radio show is happening in Bristol. I won’t be there, partly because I am way too busy, and partly because my experience of mixed cultures is insignificant compared to what people of color face. However, I have just seen a great interview on the Larry King show with Tracee Ellis Ross (that’s Diana’s daughter) about her new comedy series, Black-ish. It is good to see US TV exploring these issues in such a positive and high-profile way.

What really impressed me, however, was that Larry didn’t do the interview. He handed the job over to Janet Mock.

So this is what we have: a trans woman of color, standing in for Larry King, doing an interview with a top actress, on a subject that is nothing to do with being trans, and doing a superb job of it.

Possibility model, Janet. Possibility model.

The interview is online, but doesn’t appear to be embeddable. You can watch it via Tracee’s website.

Ada Lovelace Day, 2014

~ Cheryl

There won’t be a post from me today. That’s not because I haven’t written anything. It is because the thing that I wrote is in another venue that won’t be published until Monday. What venue is that? I hear you ask. Why, it is this thing, which has just launched. I note that it has an absolutely kick-ass books section, because my pal Joanna Papageorgiou edits it, and the first edition contains an interview with the fabulous Emma Newman. The article mentions BristolCon and the Hugos. Can’t ask for much more, can I?

While I am here, however, I’d like to make a quick mention of Ada’s mum, Annabella Milbanke. The story goes that Baroness Byron had her daughter educated in mathematics because it was the most un-poetic subject that she could think of. However, Annabella’s interest in educating girls was not limited to irritating her notorious ex-husband. In 1854 she purchased a building called the Red Lodge in Bristol, which she gave over to one Mary Carpenter to use as a school for girls. The Red Lodge is one of the oldest buildings in Bristol, dating back to 1580. I’m told it is well worth a visit, and it certainly looks so from the photos I have seen. Must drop in one day.

The Abominable Crime

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I spent most of Saturday in Bristol. In the afternoon I was at the Arnolfini for a screening of a film called The Abominable Crime. This follows the lives of two gay Jamaicans. Simone is a young lesbian and single mother. When the film opens she has just survived an attempt on her life by homophobic gunmen. Maurice is a lawyer and gay rights activist. When he is outed in the Jamaican press he is determined to return to the island to carry on the fight, even though his husband in Toronto fears for his life.

Simone and Maurice are real people. In Jamaica, being gay can be deadly.

The film was followed by a panel discussion chaired by Roger Griffith, one of the directors of Ujima Radio. Also on the panel was a Jamaican writer, Prof. Thomas Glave, who has won two Lammy Awards. Thomas and Maurice are two of the founders of J-FLAG, the current LGBT rights organization for Jamaica. Thomas and I did a brief slot on the radio last week, and on Saturday I bagged a slightly longer interview that I’ll air on Women’s Outlook when I get a free slot.

From my point of view, the most interesting part of the discussion was the discovery of the Dwayne’s House charity project. Dwayne Jones was a young trans girl from Jamaica. When she was 14 she was thrown out of the family home by her parents. Two years later she was chased through the streets by a mob and beaten to death. The Dwayne’s House project seeks to purchase a building where homeless LGBT kids like Dwayne can have a safe place to sleep. The project also hopes to provide medical care, counseling and education. Details of how to donate can be found here.

By the way, the panel was keen to make clear that while the situation for LGBT Jamaicans is not good, it is not always as bad as you might think from the film and news reports. Just like anywhere else, class makes a huge difference. Also things have got a lot worse over the past few decades. As with Africa, much of that is due to heavy lobbying by rich American religious fundamentalists. Of course the people behind Dwayne’s House are also Christians. Nothing in life is simple.

Black Pride on Ujima

~ Cheryl

As part of the Black History Month celebrations in Bristol we have a number of interesting Jamaican visitors in the city. That includes the Jamaican Poet Laureate, Mervyn Morris, who is doing a public event tonight at Bristol University.

Also in town in Thomas Glave, who is a well known gay writer with several Lammy nominations to his name. Thomas is also one of the founders of J-FLAG, the Jamaican LGBT rights group. I met up with Thomas yesterday at the Ujima studios where he was appearing on the Kizzy Morrell show. I’d been invited along as the LGBT expert.

As it turned out, Thomas was a bit late arriving, and Kizzy had a very packed show, all of which conspired to give us less time than we had hoped. However, the first hour of the show is well worth listening to because of the fascinating interview with a chap from Little Rock, Arkansas, who is in Bristol to explain how his city is helping is poorest citizens. You can find that first hour here.

Thomas and I are on towards the end of the second hour of the show. We start about 49 minutes in. We managed to cover a bit of what is happening in Jamaica these days, including the excellent news that J-FLAG is raising money to provide a safe house for trans teens who are homeless because they have been thrown out by their parents. You can find the second hour of the show here.

Juliet on Equality in SF&F

~ Cheryl

While I was in Cheltenham on Saturday I once again had cause to chide Waterstones for their lack of attention to women writers when they do table displays for science fiction. In this case they had managed just one book by a woman out of 22, though at least it was Ann Leckie and not Ursula Le Guin again. Anyway, my tweet came to the attention of Elizabeth Moon, who had not heard about this issue before. I directed her to Juliet McKenna, who has been leading the charge on this particular issue. This prompted Juliet to do a post on her website rounding up all of her writing on the issue of gender equality. You can find it here. It should prove a very useful resource.

Ridding the World of Girl Cooties #BalanceTheBooks

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I have said many times that the only way to put an end to the under-appreciation of female writers is to start in school. If children are brought up to believe that only male writers are important, and in particular that boys do not need to read books by women, they will take those attitudes into adulthood where they are much harder to shake off.

My friends at For Books Sake have been taking a look at gender representation in English Literature examinations in the UK. They found to their horror that the syllabus is becoming more male dominated (and more white) rather than less. As the politicians are fond of saying, something must be done.

To read more about the issue, go here. And for information about how you can help the #BalanceTheBooks go here.

Janet Mock on Feminism

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’d like to draw your attention to this essay by Janet Mock on the subject of claiming her place in feminism. As a androphilic trans woman of color and former sex worker, Janet is four times excluded from the sort of feminism the RadFems would like to enforce. I’m only doubly excluded, but still just about every day I find myself and my life under attack from people who assume the right to tell everyone else how to be a feminist. It would be so easy for me, for Janet, for #GirlsLikeUs as the hashtag goes, to turn our backs on a feminism that loudly brays about how we are not wanted.

And yet, where are we to go? We are still women. If we can’t be feminists, we’d only have to invent a new word for the same thing. (Many women of color have — you may have seen the term Womanism bandied about, and that’s just a different name for feminism adopted by women of color who feel they have been excluded by white feminists.)

For me the key statement in Janet’s essay is this one:

I believe we waste much of our efforts policing one another — one of the many workings of patriarchy is to busy us with policing each other’s choices rather than protecting them.

So yeah, enough with the policing. I call myself a feminist because I refuse to be excluded from a worthwhile and necessary cause simply because some rich, white, cis women have decided that I’m not acceptable for admission to sisterhood.

Rainbow Jews Crowdfunder

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

My friend Surat Knan is running a crowdfunding campaign to help support their Rainbow Jews project. If you have any interest in LGBT history, and in particular if you do so and are Jewish, you may want to support this project.

One of the uses of the money will be to allow the Rainbow Jews history exhibit to tour around the UK. Surat and I have briefly discussed bringing it to Bristol at some point. We’ve also been taking an interest recently in the work of the Jewish Pre-Raphaelite painter, Simeon Solomon. More of that in due course.

To learn more about Rainbow Jews, and support the crowdfunder, go here.

Eurocon – Invisible Women

~ Cheryl

My first panel today (at 10:00am! — huge thanks to Laura Ann Gilman for fetching me coffee) was on invisible women. We covered most of the usual topics that regular readers have doubtless seen here many times before. I was very pleased to make the acquaintance of Susan Connolly who did an awesome series of articles for Clarkesworld on the subject of women in the industry. You can find the final one here.

We didn’t recommend many people, but here are a few I remember:

Trans Pride Podcasts

~ Cheryl

The last of the broadcast material from my Trans Pride coverage aired last Thursday so I am free to podcast the full, unedited version. This has the full interviews with Fox & Lewis, with Nicole Gibson, and with Bethany Black. It also has several more interviews, the whole of the opening address by Caroline Lucas, MP, and lots of vox pops. The magazine article mentioned by Sam towards the end of the show can be found at WHM Magazine.

Alice Denny’s poem, “Normal/Questions”, deserves a podcast all of its own. Alice only got one take, as is a little emotional towards the end. Also we got heckled by seagulls. However, there’s no mistaking the raw power of the words.

The Trans Stuff at Worldcon

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today there was an academic program section that included a paper on trans characters in science fiction. It was given by Paul Ballard, and I went along to see what he had to say. I was completely floored when he opened up by recommending that people read this. It is a bit outdated now. I need to do a new version.

Paul works with a trans youth group in Kent so he knows his stuff. Like me, Paul is concerned that trans people are being misrepresented in fiction because of a desire by cis writers to use them for entertainment, or to make political points. He made an interesting point that for a character in a novel to count as trans that character should have a specific will to change in some way; it was not enough to have forced change, or change that is entirely natural of the character. I need to think a bit about this, in particular with reference to people who see themselves more as gender-fluid, but it could be a useful distinction.

Mention of characters that shift genders naturally brings us naturally to The Left Hand of Darkness. Paul noted that the Gethenians really aren’t trans people in a Terran sense. I noted, as I often do in such discussions, that it can be read as a book about Trans Panic; that is the discomfort (and sometimes murderous rage) that cis people can develop when confronted by a trans person whom they thoughts was cis. Also giving a paper in the session was Jason Bourget, whom I had previously met when we were on a trans issues panel together in Montréal. Jason is a Le Guin scholar (and presented a good paper on gender in The Dispossessed). He noted the debate over the fact that Le Guin had used male pronouns for the Gethenians, and said that the Trans Panic reading only works when male pronouns are used. If female pronouns had been used, Genly would need to be gender-swapped to female (and probably made a Radical Feminist) for the same reading to work.

By the way, trying to read a paper which talks about trans people and transhumanism, which are two very different things, is very difficult. We need new terminology.

Worldcon – Day 0

~ Cheryl

I headed to London straight from the studio to be in time to catch up with Rina & Jacob from Tachyon Publications, and Rani Graff from Israel, for dinner. There was a party at Rina & Jacob’s apartment last night, at which I managed to catch up with a bunch of people, including Pat Murphy whom I have not seen in ages. Her work in progress sounds very interesting. Also John Kessel told me he has a novel that he’s almost ready to shop around, which is excellent news.

Oh, and Tachyon are bringing out collections by Kate Elliott and Hannu Rajaniemi next year. SQUEE!

I chatted a bit to Gary Wolfe about various things and he happened to mention seeing the infamous Michelle Goldberg article in The New Yorker, which Julia Serano eviscerates here. Goldberg clearly intended the piece to be a vehicle for TERF propaganda, but I’m starting to hear that for many people it had the opposite effect. Certainly Gary said that he found the TERF line that Goldberg was describing so vile that he automatically took against it. Yay! 🙂

Today the madness begins. I am booked solid from 10:30 to 18:00, save for an hour and a half to check into my hotel and get lunch. That starts at 3:00pm so I’d better eat something now.

On Depression and Suicide

~ Cheryl

The desperately sad news about Robin Williams today has resulted in a flood of comment on social media. Much of it, inevitably, is foul. Much more, however, is well intentioned but simplistic. Depression, like so many things in life, is complicated. Neat maxims that fit into 140 characters cannot and will not be suitable for all cases.

One thing I’d like to note is that sometimes talking isn’t enough. Heck, I went through several days of being unable to talk. Drugs helped. It may well be that I would have got better without the drugs. I haven’t done a control experiment to find out, and I have no intention of doing so. But I was very grateful for the drugs at the time, and I did get better.

The other important point is that people are not always just depressed. They may well be depressed for a reason. A September 2012 study found that 48% of British trans people had attempted suicide (sample size, 889). A similar study from January this year found that the number for the USA was 41% (sample size, 6,456). Those people were probably depressed (though maybe not clinically so), but that wasn’t all that was wrong.

When trans people attempt suicide it is often because they are facing being homeless and unemployed. It may be because they have been disowned by their family and abandoned by their friends. It may be because they have been bullied and humiliated by social services staff when they asked for help. It may be because they are afraid to leave home because of the harassment they get from their neighbors. And, for example in the case of Lucy Meadows, it may be because of vile things that have been said about them in the national media.

This is why what the BBC is up to at the moment is utterly reprehensible. Last week on Woman’s Hour they gave a lot of air time to a notorious “radical feminist”. Sure they had a trans women on as well for “balance”, but it is hard to get your point across when what your opponent says is full of lies and distortions; and doubly hard when what you say is constantly called into question by suggestions that you are dishonest, dangerously violent and mentally ill.

Last night Newsnight tried to pull a similar ambush. The trans people involved (including Paris Lees) declined to participate once they realized that they were being set up for the modern equivalent of bear baiting. This is now apparently being spun by media “feminists” as “intolerant”, censorship and even “aggression” on behalf of Paris and her fellow intended victim.

So yeah, sometimes people do commit suicide because they are clinically depressed, and they can be helped by drugs and psychiatry. Sometimes, though, they commit suicide because their simple right to exist is constantly under question in the national media, which quickly leads to harassment in daily life. There is no point telling such people that they are wasting their lives, and that things will get better, unless you actually do something to ensure that their lives are likely to get better.

The good news is that things actually have got better. My life, since transition, has been far happier and more successful than I ever expected. Social change has been rapid. Change, however, inevitably brings backlash. If we don’t want trans people to kill themselves, we need the media to stop using them as punch bags for entertainment.