Feminism

Perceptions of Sub-Genre

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been seeing a few comments lately about how books by women don’t get seen as belonging to certain sub-genres even though they appear to fit the criteria. N.K. Jemisin was asking yesterday why her latest series is not seen as Grimdark, given the amount of slaughter that goes on. And here Vandana Singh (who teaches theoretical physics) talks about her relationship with Hard SF.

Obviously that’s her personal take on the issue, and I pretty much agree with all of it, but I’d like to add a couple of my personal observations.

Firstly I suspect that many people have come to identify Hard SF with the “written with wooden dialog, cardboard characters, stereotypes of gender, race and sexuality, and ‘as you know, Bob’ infodumps” stereotype that Vandana mentions. Women tend not to write stories like that. They are far too interested in people. And consequently, when they do write Hard SF, it doesn’t get recognized as such because it doesn’t conform to the stereotype, even though the science itself might be brilliant.

In addition I suspect that women writers of Hard SF are held to a much higher standard than male writers in the same sub-genre. Let me explain by means of a personal anecdote. Before I transitioned, if I came across a programming problem I could not solve I was quite happy using support services, online forums and so on. After transition I quickly realized that using such things was a waste of time, because nothing I said would be believed or taken seriously. That wasn’t because I had suddenly become a bad programmer, it was because I now had a female name. As a result of that, my ability to do technology would always be called into question by most males that I encountered.

I suspect that the same is true of women trying to write Hard SF. Historically, boys have been brought up to believe that they are much better at science and technology than girls, and that’s an easy story to maintain if you segregate them in all-boy schools. (Don’t try to pretend to me that this doesn’t happen. I was raised a boy, remember?) If someone brought up in that environment encounters a woman who is good at science or tech, he’ll feel that his masculinity is threatened if he can’t somehow prove her wrong. And that means questioning the “hardness” of SF by women.

By the way, this can work the other way around to some extent. I spent a lot of time studying fashion as a kid because I knew I was missing out on girlhood and wanted to plug the gap. These days I occasionally meet women who seem threatened by the possibility that I might do femme better than them. Or at least regard me as some sort of performing animal that can do things that should not come naturally to it. Gender expectations are a total pain.

Kathryn Allan – Accessing the Future

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I recorded an interview with Kathryn Allan, who is co-editing the Accessing the Future anthology with Djibril al-Ayad of The Future Fire. The anthology will focus on themes of disability in science fiction. We also talk about how Kathryn came to be the current recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship (and a quick shout out here to Margaret McBride who is indeed awesome as Kathryn says).

The sound quality is slightly ropey at my end, which is probably because I forget to cover up the big, flat screens around here with something soft. I really do need a home studio. However, we seem to have avoided picking up the person using a powered trimmer next door throughout much of the recording, which is a big relief.

Disability activism is an area that I’m not very familiar with, so if I have inadvertently used inappropriate language please accept my apologies in advance (and do suggest how I could do better). Apologies also for keeping bringing the discussion back to trans issues, but that’s what I know and hopefully it does make it clear how intersectional all this stuff is.

When you have had a listen, please go and back the anthology project.

Update: Who forgot the embed link. *headsmack*

Trans History Is Not White

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday Juliet Jacques had an article in the New Statesman about the supposed “debate” between radical feminists and trans women. (It is an interesting form of debate — the TERFs want us dead, and we just want them to leave us alone.) The article is, in most ways, fine writing which makes clear the dishonesty, spite and bigotry at the heart of the TERF cause. However, in tracing the history of trans people, Juliet focuses solely on events in Western Europe and the USA, dating from the late 19th Century. This gives a very distorted view of trans history.

The first firmly documented evidence of a trans person is the Roman emperor, Elagabalus. According to the historian, Cassius Dio, Elagabalus enjoyed dressing as a woman, referred to his handsome charioteer as his “husband”, and offered a fortune to any doctor who could provide him with female genitalia.

The date that the Kama Sutra was written is a matter for scholarly debate. It may be older than the Roman Empire, or it may not. Either way it makes reference to gender identity. In the section on fellatio it notes that some eunuchs adopt a male gender performance while others adopt a female gender performance.

The existence of trans women in India — Hijra, Aravani and other terms depending on the language — dates back at least to the time of the Kama Sutra, and probably much longer. Other Asian civilizations have their own traditions of gender variance. The Kathoey of Thailand are probably the best known. Kabuki theatre in Japan may also have provided an outlet for gender-variant people.

In her autobiography, Redefining Realness, Janet Mock notes that Hawaii had a tradition of gender variance before the arrival of Europeans.

To be mahu was to occupy a space between the poles of male and female in precolonial Hawaii, where it translated to “hermaphrodite,” used to refer to feminine boys or masculine girls. But as puritanical missionaries from the West influenced Hawaiian culture in the nineteenth century, their Christian, homophobic, and gender binary systems pushed mahu from the center of culture to the margins.

Other Polynesian cultures have their own versions of gender variance. In Samoa the term used is Fa’afafine.

Across the Pacific, many Native American cultures also had traditions of gender variance. Once again many different terms are used. One of the most commonly seen today is Two Spirit. I am fairly confident that research would turn up gender variant traditions in the pre-colonization cultures of Africa and South America as well.

Traditions of trans men are much less common, presumably for the same reason that trans men attract relatively little attention in our culture. Trans women are almost always seen as being far more socially transgressive, and therefore more notable. However, the Sworn Virgins of Albania form an example of a tradition that makes space for trans men in society.

The way in which gender identities are constructed in other cultures can be quite different from the accepted medical model of transsexualism that we are used to in the West. This is hardly surprising, because the form that gender variance takes will be necessarily dependent on the way in which gender is perceived by the host culture, and on the level of medical technology available.

Many Hijra identify as Third Gender rather than male or female. Pakistan (yes, Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country) has had a law allowing citizens to register as Third Gender since 2009. Nepal and India have since followed suit.

One thing that the West might regard as unique is the use of advanced medical technology, in particular the use of hormone therapy and plastic surgery. However, Hijra have been undergoing castration for centuries, so medical intervention is hardly new.

There are many reasons to acknowledge the existence of gender variance in non-white cultures. To start with white people ought to stop claiming to have invented things when they clearly have not done so. Much more importantly, the vast majority of trans women murdered each year because of their identities are non-white, and we should not erase them by appearing to present being trans as largely a white phenomenon.

In this particular instance, however, it is also important to present the long history of gender variance outside of white cultures because a fundamental axiom of the TERF cause is that being trans is a modern creation of a medical industry at the service of Patriarchy. They see this as a direct response to the rise of feminism, which is generally taken to be an invention of white women from the 20th Century. (Go back and read The Female Man to see some of these ideas spelled out fairly clearly.) Once you are aware of the long history of gender variance in other cultures, the fatuousness of their claims is apparent. Trans people have always been with us, even in cultures far more misogynist in many ways than our own, and even when no medical industry existed to create them.

The Leaky Trans Umbrella

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

It is hardly surprising that the outpouring of joy that was Trans Pride last weekend has been followed by a barrage of attacks on trans people by white feminists. What I have found interesting is the form that those attacks have taken.

For a long time these people have complained bitterly about how badly they are oppressed by trans folk because we call them rude names. (They call for us to undergo aversion therapy and be denied human rights, we call them names; they are clearly far more oppressed by us than we are by them.) They don’t like being called TERFs because, well, the whole thing is a nonsense. Of course they are radical feminists but, they hold, trans women are “really” men, so excluding them from feminism is like excluding tarantulas from the group, kittens.

Most of all, however, they don’t like being called “cis”. Now “cis” is a piece of standard Latin that is the opposite of “trans”. It will be familiar to anyone who has studied chemistry, or the history of Gaul. It has been used to describe people who are not trans at least as far back as 1914. But according to the TERFS (oops, sorry, did it again) “cis” is a hate word recently coined by trans activists for the express purpose of oppressing them. It is, apparently, a slur.

As Roz Kaveney pointed out on Twitter yesterday, if we called them “squidges” they would claim that was a slur. If we called them fluffy bunny-wunnies they’d call that a slur too.

Last week, however, the TERFs (Bad Cheryl! No biscuit, Cheryl!) have started to claim that they can’t be cis because they too are victims of gender-identity-based oppression.

To understand how this can happen you need to know a bit about what we call the Trans Umbrella. It is a catch-all term for people who identify in some way outside of social gender norms. You see, we can’t just have “trans” mean people who have undergone full gender re-assignment surgery. There are people who, for a variety of good reasons, are unable or unwilling to do so. There are also people who identify as third gender, or non-gendered, or intersex, for whom no surgical options (and in most cases no legal protections exist). All of these people deserve the support and siblingship of those of us who do happen to conform closely to the medical profession’s standard trans narrative, and one of the triumphs of both Trans Pride and the My Genderation films is their acceptance of this broad spectrum of transness.

Also included under this umbrella are some people who still identify with the gender that they are assigned at birth. Typically they are male cross-dressers — either drag queens, who do so openly and flamboyantly, or those who do so privately at home, or in cross-dressing clubs.

There are many reasons for accepting such people under the umbrella. It is always difficult to know where to draw the line. Drag queens often identify as female when in their female persona. In years past being a “female impersonator” was one of the few jobs open to trans women (April Ashley and Amanda Lear both did this). And many men who are trying to come to terms with their complex feelings about gender start out by cross-dressing and come to realize that there is more to it than that.

What about female cross-dressers? Well, there are drag kings, who are absolutely welcome under the umbrella. There is less need, however, at least in Western society, for women who wish to express a masculine side through clothing choices to do so in secret. If a woman cuts her hair short, wears trousers (pants) instead of skirts, or goes without make-up, it is unlikely to affect her employability or social status that much. Certainly not in the same way as would affect a man who wanted to go to work in a dress, high heels and make-up. There is an imbalance of prejudice; and one that is rooted in the sexist notion that a woman who wants to be more like a man is expressing admirable ambition, whereas a man who wants to be more like a woman is insane.

There are, of course, female-bodied, female-assigned-at-birth people who identify as “genderqueer”. I know a few, and am perfectly happy with that. I have a suspicion that these days there are some young women who are politically genderqueer in the same way that some radical feminists are politically lesbian — that is they embrace the term because it makes them sound more oppressed, but they reject the practice. However, what the TERFs are now proposing goes way beyond even that.

(OK, you are busted, girl. One hundred lines for you. Write out, “I must not call the TERFs “TERFs”.)

The current proposal is to make the umbrella so leaky that it lets in everything and keeps out nothing. It states that every woman who is opposed to gender-policing in society — every woman who hates pink, or who doesn’t want to be a princess, or who prefers short hair, or doesn’t like being addressed as “dear”, or has bridled at sexism in any way, at all, ever, is in fact not “cis”, because she allegedly has a non-binary gender identity.

It is a bit difficult to understand what they are trying to achieve by this. Although they claim to be not cis, they certainly don’t want to be called trans. Indeed, I get the impression that the only terms they would find acceptable are things like “normal women” or “real women”, because in their eyes any term that does not implicitly state their superiority to trans women is a slur.

What I suspect they are doing, besides mess with trans people’s heads, which for them is as much a favorite pastime as trolling is for the mens’ rights gang, is trying to get the vast mass of women angry about the term “cis”. The message they are trying to get across is, “if anyone calls you ‘cis’ they mean that you do not suffer from sexism”. That, of course, targets every woman on the planet (yes, even that Mrs. Windsor doubtless has a tale or two). And by doing so they hope to a) make the term “cis” useless and b) get lots more people to hate trans women and their allies.

In addition they may be trying to indicate that this is all there is to being not cis. That is, the only negative consequences of having a female gender identity are those consequences faced by all women. As a result of which, trans women cannot be any more oppressed than anyone else. Because, as we all know, there is no one in the universe more oppressed than the rich, middle-class, white feminist forced to subsist on a constant diet of lobster and Bolly lunches.

My heart bleeds for them.

On a more positive note, I found this post about Trans Pride very interesting. I suspect that Andie is being a bit unfair to Sparkle. I’ve never been to it. While I understand that it did start out as more of a party for male-identified cross-dressers than anything else, it appears to have evolved into something much more. Besides, I am inclusionary by nature. However, I think Andie’s point about Trans Pride being a place where we don’t have to feel ashamed of who we are is spot on. That’s still where trans rights are in this country.

Remembering Susan Wood

~ Cheryl

Before Claire Brialey and Tansy Rayner Roberts won the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 2011 and 2013 respectively; before I won in 2009 (if you accept that win as fair and accept me as a woman); before the long, dark years of the Langfordian Ascendancy; there was Susan Wood. Susan won three times — in 1974, 1977 (tied with Richard E. Geis) and 1981. I never met her. She died late in 1980, aged just 32. However, her legacy remains in the form of many fanzines that she wrote and edited.

While the prevailing view on social media appears to be that the 1970s were an awful time in which women were barred from participating in fandom, Susan was an ardent feminist. This was, after all, the time of Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree Jr.. Of course progress has been made since that time. Worldcon masquerades are no longer an excuse for male writers and fans to ogle female fans in various states of undress. But it is also worthwhile to remember what was being done in those days.

Over at Amazing Stories, R. Graeme Cameron has written a retrospective of Susan’s career. You can find it here. I certainly found it interesting, not in the least for the fact that the Feminist SF program stream that Susan helped curate at Westercon 30 was trans-inclusive — in 1977!

Feminism shouldn’t just mean making sure that present-day women writers are remembered. It should mean rescuing women writers from the obscurity to which his-story has consigned them. Susan is very much someone who deserves remembering.

SDCC Does Trans, Badly

~ Cheryl

San Diego ComicCon is taking place this weekend and Tor.com has lots of reports from the event. Yesterday I was alerted to a post about a panel on trans themes in comics. This is, of course, something I know a bit about. I had a read of the article. Head, meet desk, repeatedly.

It is hard to tell where the fault lies, because I wasn’t at the panel so I don’t know whether it was badly done, or badly reported, but the overall effect was not good. The starting point appears to be that there were no trans people on the panel, and the article was not written by a trans person. Did any of them have a clue what they were talking about? I know it is really bad to make comparisons with race, but so often articles by cis people about trans issues remind me of a white person trying to write about race by talking about Al Jolson.

Obviously Michelle Nolan is a comics historian and I’m just an amateur who has been diagnosed insane, and it could be the article writer at fault, but anyone who is researching trans characters in comics and manages to miss Madam Fatal, Wanda in Sandman, and Rachel Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol isn’t really trying.

There’s also quite a bit to say about how you interrogate cis people’s portrayals of gender switching. I have a lot to say about that Superboy Becomes A Girl story in my LGBT Superheoes talk. Nolan, and again this may be the fault of the article, appears to have missed all of the nuances.

I suspect that quite a lot of people in the audience will have challenged what was said by the panel. The article certainly suggests that robust discussion took place (even if some of it did come from Ashley Love — *sigh*). But can we just let trans people talk about themselves for once?

Oops, sorry, I forgot. I’m a Dupe of the Patriarchy who is causing division within the trans community with my out-moded views of what being trans is all about. I shall put on a fake beard and go and read some Judith Butler as penance.

Just Human

~ Cheryl

Over Pride weekend in Bristol some of the young journalists from Rife Magazine work with a youth LGBT group to make a film about what people want from a relationship. There’s a rather lovely twist at the end that I don’t want to spoil, but the main message of the film is that we are, all of us, just human.

The thing I love about this film is the way it explodes boxes. The more I see about how we monkeys use labels such as “lesbian” or “trans”; how those labels get redefined by each new generation; how labels are defined with a view to exclusion; and in particular how people in non-oppressed groups seek to re-define labels to make it seem like they are more oppressed than anyone else; the less useful I think labels are.

Of course we’ll still need labels, because how else can we identify groups that are oppressed. But the more that we can define variations in human characteristics as all “normal” the fewer excuses we have for creating division.

The Kids Are Revolting, In a Good Way

~ Cheryl

Last night’s BristolCon Fringe meeting was very interesting in two ways. Firstly, Ken Shinn had us agog with a tale about a demonic version of Benny Hill who has a drunken otter for a familiar. In addition our other guest, Andy Goodman, had some very interesting things to say in the Q&A.

Andy writes fiction primarily aimed at teenage boys. I asked him about that market, and was delighted to hear him say that there is now pressure from publishers for authors to move away from the “books for boys / books for girls” marketing philosophy, and instead to produce books that can be enjoyed by young people regardless of their gender.

It is not entirely clear why, and it may well be in part due to the pressure that parents have been putting on them. However, Andy’s anecdotal evidence suggests that practical experience has played a part. I’ve been saying for years that if you pinkify a book then boys are not going to read it. It appears that the message has got through to publishers that by packaging books by women as “for girls” they are cutting off half of their potential audience. Here’s hoping that this message spreads throughout the publishing industry.

The audio from the readings should be online early in August.

Leah Moore Interview

~ Cheryl

I have just uploaded the full version of the interview with Leah Moore than I made while I was in Liverpool. In addition to the material that we broadcast on Ujima Radio, this version contains a discussion of the Electricomics venture that she has started with (amongst others) her father and her husband, John Reppion, with the support of the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.

For more information about Electricomics see their website, or follow them on Twitter and Facebook.

The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts is a £7 million fund from Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Nesta to support collaboration between arts projects, technology providers and researchers to explore the potential of increasing audience engagement or find new business models. Separate Digital R&D Fund for the Arts are being run in Wales and in Scotland.

DRD logo

Juliet & the Waterstones Count

~ Cheryl

Yesterday Juliet McKenna put up a long post looking at the issue of how SF&F books are promoted by Waterstones. She has had some friends doing a survey of stores around the country. It looks like there is some pretty good evidence that the feature tables for SF&F are biased in favor of male authors. This is one of the issues we discussed at the Women & Publishing panel at Finncon, where I noted that the last time I was in the Bristol store the counts were 5/35 for fantasy, and 0/35 for SF. If you assumed that the store staff thought Robin Hobb was a man, the fantasy count would change to 3/35.

Juliet makes some excellent points about how Waterstones are hurting their own sales by this behavior. There are plenty of women who read SF&F. Indeed, as another data point, the majority of members of The Emporium Strikes Back, the SF&F book club at Mr. B’s, are women. But why is the effect Juliet notes happening, and what can be done?

Obviously lack of knowledge by buyers and store staff is a contributing issue. Heck, the SF&F table at my local store has disappeared completely since we’ve had a change in management. But even when there is knowledge it doesn’t always filter through. Last year, when Juliet first started making a fuss about this issue, my local manager wrote to head office asking why she was given so few women SF&F books to stock. The buyer wrote back enthusing about something called Ancillary Justice that they expected to be a big seller. And yet, when it came out, my local store wasn’t sent any copies, and the book still isn’t getting pushed much in any store I have seen despite the heap of award wins.

Then of course there is the whole issue of publishers, the editorial staff of whom appear to be mostly female. Yet they too appear to mostly push SF&F by male writers at the expense of women. At Finncon Elizabeth Bear noted that she found UK publishers much more hostile to women SF writers than in the USA.

With all this in mind, I found this article on Mashable very interesting. It reports on an academic study of middle managers in large US corporations, and looked at how those managers’ performance was rated on the basis of their hiring choices. As a back-up, the study was replicated as an experiment using college students role-playing the senior management, and this produced similar results.

What the study found is that, although the corporations has policies advocating diversity, and although white male managers were praised for making diverse hires, female managers and PoC managers were given negative performance evaluations if they recruited people like them.

This appears to be telling us two things. Firstly prejudice is probably much more ingrained and subconscious than we like to think. And secondly women and PoC who are in a position to improve diversity within in their organizations are likely to damage their careers if they do so. No wonder this stuff is so hard to shift.

The Finncon LGBT Reading Lists

~ Cheryl

As promised, I have posted the LGBT Reading Lists that Suzanne Van Rooyen and I produced for the panel at Finncon. You can find them here.

My apologies to everyone I have left out. I’m sure that there are lots of other fine books and authors we could have recommended.

National Diversity Awards

~ Cheryl

So, yeah, popular vote stuff. Probably mainly an excuse for big corporations to advertise their support for diversity without actually having to practice it, and for celebrities to charge for their endorsement. And of course the awards will go to those people and organizations that work hardest on social media to get the vote out. But that’s a game anyone can play and as I have stupidly large numbers of “friends” and “followers” I should do my bit for organizations that are important to me.

In particular I’d like you to endorse the nominations of Ujima Radio and Bristol Pride. Ujima absolutely deserves it. I mean, how many other minority-ethnic community radio stations are going to let a trans woman talk to science fiction writers on their main women’s interest programme? And Bristol Pride needs your help. It is a great show, it is genuinely trans-inclusive, it got voted the second-best Pride in the UK last year, and yet the City Council has voted to withdraw all funding for next year. Here are the links:

All you have to do is given them an email address they can verify. There doesn’t seem to be any requirement for voters to be UK-based.

Becca Lloyd, M.P. Wright, Outset & Bristol Pride

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s radio all went very smoothly, thanks in no small part to Seth, my engineer, being available again. It is so much easier presenting the show if you don’t have to be constantly thinking about running the desk as well.

We began with an interview with Becca Lloyd, a local writer of strange and macabre tales. Becca and I talked about obsessive people with odd ways of seeing the world, and a penchant for killing people. We also discussed how the peculiar reticence of the English might contribute to such behaviors. Becca’s latest books: Mercy (from my good friends at Tartarus Press) and The View from Endless Street are newly available and are having a little party at Foyles tomorrow night.

Next up was the interview with Mark Wright about Heartman, which I have been trailing for the past few days. It is well worth a listen. Mark talks intelligently and respectfully about the difficulties of a white Englishman writing a book featuring mainly black characters. It would be great if someone like Tobias Buckell could get the same sort of deal that Mark did, but the world doesn’t (yet) work that way. Indeed, as Mark noted, the publishing industry wasn’t that keen on him to begin with (which is why his book is being published by a small press from Edinburgh). It wasn’t until the TV people started sniffing around the rights that the book started getting noticed. Right now, of course, all Mark has is payment for an option. But if that does turn into a J.T. Ellington TV show I see no way it can be whitewashed, given that almost all of the major characters in the book are black. I’m less sanguine about it getting filmed in Bristol, but we can hope.

One thing I forgot to mention on the show is that the book does include quite a few murders of women. That generally requires a content warning. However, I was discussing this with another woman who has read the book at the launch party, and we agreed that this isn’t a misogynist book. Guys, we can tell when you are salivating over the deaths of pretty women.

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

The third half hour was given over to Outset, a Bristol organization that helps people from disadvantaged groups set up their own businesses. This is a fine thing to be doing, and I note that it is jointly financed by Bristol City Council (George, unsurprisingly, is a fan) and the EU. Yes folks, the European Union is subsidizing business creation in Bristol. Take that, UKIP.

Finally Jayne Graham-Cummings from Bristol Pride came in to preview next week’s events. On air we mainly talked about what people could go and see, because that’s what most people would be interested in. Off air Jayne and I were chatting about how we could keep Bristol Pride fully trans-inclusive and methods of keeping a political edge to the event.

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

Liverpool Coverage Elsewhere

~ Cheryl

This isn’t new material. All of the interviews I have from the Unstraight Conference in Liverpool are on the podcast. However, a few people have kindly asked to use parts of that material elsewhere.

First up, Mary Milton took an edit of material to create a report focused on the April Ashley exhibition for Shout Out last Thursday. That show is available as a podcast here.

In addition the folks at the Tom of Finland Foundation have posted my interview with Durk Dehner on their blog.

Many thanks to both of them for the additional signal boost.

I note also that Durk and Homotopia were at Helsinki Pride yesterday. It looks like it was a great event, and it was lovely to see my LGBT contacts and science fiction contacts both reporting from the same event on Twitter.

Man Trouble

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

While I was out and about in Bristol yesterday, my Twitter feed was buzzing with comment from outraged women. There were two main issues.

The first one is that Dave Truesdale has gone and put his foot in his mouth again. The regularity with which he does this is such that a generous interpretation would assume that he understands outrage marketing and was deliberately trolling female writers and fans in search of traffic for his website. Sadly I’m not convinced that Truesdale is that bright. When he says that he’s not seen even a smidgeon of racism or sexism in science fiction, what he probably means is that he views the supposed intellectual and moral superiority of the white male as a scientific fact, and that therefore stating it cannot be seen as discrimination.

Of course this is the sort of attitude that leads to Men’s Rights Activism and claims of “reverse racism” when it comes up against how the rest of the world sees things.

Anyway, the day did produce one superb blog post: this one in which Amal El-Mohtar recruits famous female SF writers from the past to make her case for her.

While women readers and writers of science fiction around the world were dealing with an actual case of sexism, the white feminist media cabal in the UK (otherwise known as the Lobster & Bolly Set) were up in arms over what they believe to be a far more dangerous threat to feminism: trans women.

Yes, it has been penis panic time again. Our TERF friends appear convinced that all trans women have secret penises with which they will mercilessly abuse any non-trans women that they can find. Now it is certainly true that not all trans women have surgery. Some can’t afford it, some have good medical reasons for not risking it, many are simply on their way through transition, and some have their own reasons for not opting for it. But for the TERFs it is a case of once-a-penis-always-a-penis. So I guess I have a political penis: it might not exist in reality, but for TERF political purposes it is just as real as any man’s pride & joy, if not more so.

Pressed on this, the TERFs are likely to claim that anyone raised as male (even if only for the few brief years needed for them to learn to talk) will have been culturally conditioned for masculinity, and will forever more exhibit behavior that is ineluctably masculine (yes, I did choose that word deliberately). However, even if they were to find a trans woman who looked and behaved in a way they deemed entirely female, they would simply claim that this person had successfully “deceived” them by hiding their “true” nature.

So there you have it. As far as your typical British media feminist is concerned, my supposed political penis is far more threatening to them than anything that Dave Truesdale, or even Elliot Rodger, could come up with. It is good to know that they are keeping their eye on the really important issues while the rest of us are busy with trivial stuff like campaigning on behalf of women writers.

I’d like to see some of them come to Finncon and demand that I be forced to use the men’s sauna.

Meanwhile, because at least one of them is undoubtedly screaming BUT SCIENCE! at this point, here’s an actual science article titled, “What your science teacher told you about sex chromosomes is wrong”. Odd that the same bad-science excuses used by men to justify sexism are used by TERFs to justify their hatred of trans women, isn’t it.

Update: via CN Lester on Twitter here is an excellent overview of how different types of animals decide what sex they are. Hint: it is hardly ever anything to do with chromosomes.

Women, Art & Invisibility

~ Cheryl

Over the last few days I have watched a 3-part series on BBC4 called The Story of Women and Art. Structurally it follows a pattern dating all the way back to Kenneth Clark’s classic Civilisation: an academic with a mildly eccentric presentation style takes us on a tour of great Works of Art and enthuses over them. It is a while since I watched Lord Clark’s magnum opus, but I’d be prepared to bet that most, if not all, episodes go by without mentioning a single woman artist. Amanda Vickery has set out to put the record straight, by rescuing great art by women from obscurity (frequently back-room storage areas in museums and galleries) and putting it back on display, at least on our TV screens.

Unlike novel-writing, which has always been seen as a domestic activity, the creation of Art — by which I mean primarily painting and sculpture — has, for most of history, been the domain of men. Indeed, in much the same way as certain types of writing — most obviously romance — have been deemed “women’s work” and therefore of lesser value, so certain types of artistic activity — paper-cutting, embroidery, etc. — have been deliberately excluded from The Academy because they are the preserve of women.

I suspect that there is a correlation with fantasy literature here. According to Vickery, the highest form of Art is deemed to be History Painting; that is scenes from history, classical mythology or the Bible. Of this, War Painting is a particularly valued sub-genre. Interestingly, women artists flourished in The Netherlands in the 17th Century specifically because the fashion for art moved from dramatic scenes of human passion to the still life. Women were deemed incapable of producing war painting due to their lack of participation in war (cue Kameron Hurley rant). More damningly, however, History Painting, and associated sculptures, tended to emphasize the use of nudes, after the style of Greece & Rome. It would have been improper for a woman artist to study the male body in such a way as to be able to render realistic nudes, and if she did manage to do so that would be taken of proof of her sluttish nature. Women artists were therefore doomed either way.

Nevertheless, many bold women did manage to make their way in the arts, despite all of the barriers placed in their way. I’d like to highlight just a few.

Artemisia Gentileschi lived in Italy in the 17th Century and was adept at mythological paintings. She produced this (Susanna and the Elders) when she was just seventeen.

Susanna and the Elders - Artemesia Gentileschi

Later in life she joined her father at the court of Charles I in London where she helped him produce this ceiling at Malborough House in Greenwich. It is titled “An Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown”. No wonder Charles got his head chopped off if he gave out pompous commissions like that.

An Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown - Artemesia Gentileschi

Moving into the 18th Century, I was surprised to discover that Marie Antoinette was a great patron of women artists. This portrait is by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The dress is probably one of many designed for her by the founding mother of the French fashion industry, Rose Bertin.

Marie Antoinette - xxx

Sadly the killjoys of the Revolution did not approve of women taking up artistic pursuits, except perhaps knitting.

Finally, here’s the finest war artist of the British Empire. Every British schoolboy knows this picture. I suspect that very few know that it was painted by Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler; or that she actually stood in front of a Scots Greys cavalry charge to get a proper sense of what it should look like.

Scotland Forever - Elizabeth Thompson

All in all it was a fascinating little series, if a little depressing in that it showed that the problems women writers have in getting recognized are if anything less than those faced by women artists.

Destruction Completed

~ Cheryl

Lightspeed #49


I have a small part in the splendid publication. Please don’t let that put you off. If you didn’t support the Kickstarter campaign, you can now purchase Women Destroy Science Fiction here.

Contributors include: Seanan McGuire, N. K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, Pat Murphy, Maureen McHugh, Charlie Jane Anders, Maria Dahvana Headley , Amal El-Mohtar, Stina Leicht, Nisi Shawl and many others.

Yeah, THIS!

~ Cheryl

Laverne Cox on Time cover

You go, girl!

Mind you, that is America. In the UK prominent white feminists are busy crowing over how driving a trans woman to a nervous breakdown was a moral duty, and complaining that her writing about what happened is bullying and abusing them. Is it any wonder that I want nothing to do with the feminist establishment over here?

Yesterday on Ujima – Friends, Radio & Museums

~ Cheryl

The studio was a bit busy yesterday because we were hosting the first ever live show by @FemFMFutures, a group of young girls who had been through a training course aimed at boosting the number of women in radio. They did a great job. You can listen to their show here.

We’d planned to follow that up with an hour-long discussion of the role of women in radio, but Harriet Robinson, who was one of our guests for that, had been involved in the training and needed a bit of debrief time with her crew. To give her time, Judeline and I filled in for half an hour.

I did actually have quite a few things to mention, including Gareth L. Powell’s BSFA win, and meeting Karen Lord in Finland. The main thing I want to draw to your attention, however, is this petition aimed at saving two young people being threatened with deportation by the UK Immigration authorities. Their parents have been given leave to stay, but because they are over 18 Ahad and Anum Rizvi have been assessed separately and told to go. They have no family back in Pakistan as their entire extended family has fled the country due to religious persecution. The fight to keep them here is being led by Easton Cowboys, the local cricket club that Ahad plays for.

We filled in the rest of the half hour with a discussion of friendship and what it means in these days of social media. I wish I had been to the Pelican Books event (of which more in a later post) before we did this, because some of the discussion there was very relevant. Humans do badly on their own, and it is an open question as to whether online “friends” can fill the gap left by evaporating local communities.

The second half hour was the planned Women & Radio discussion, for which I was delighted to welcome Harriet Robinson & Mary Milton into the studio. They both have a lot of experience with BCFM (Bristol’s other community station) and the BBC.

You can listen to the first hour here.

The second hour was devoted to a new, community-led exhibition in the M-Shed. I think the best way to describe it to you folks (an idea I came up with during the show) is that it is Long Hidden for the current Bristol community. That is, the museum is looking to highlight the work of amazing people from marginalized groups in the local community. Unusually, it has reached out to those communities for the material. Many thanks to Karen, Ric, Alex & Remi for a great discussion.

You can listen to the second hour here.

The playlist for the show featured mainly songs to do with radio in the first hour, and songs by people with a connection to Bristol in the second hour. I also played a song especially for our young trainees. Here’s the full list:

  • Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves – The Eurythmics
  • On My Radio – Selecter
  • Radio Silence – Thomas Dolby
  • Bristol Rock – Black Roots
  • Stranger on the Shore – Acker Bilk
  • The Riddle – Nik Kershaw
  • Overcome – Tricky

The Invisible Women of Pop Art

~ Cheryl

While you lot were all watching Eurovision, I was watching a very different sort of pop. BBC2’s Culture Show was running a special about the women who were prominent in the Pop Art movement back in the 1960s. It is now available on iPlayer for those who can access such things. The link is here. And here’s an extract from the program blurb:

However back in the day, pop art was not just a boys’ club. The scene was full of female artists, tussling with sexuality, violence and consumer culture every bit as much as their male counterparts. Strangely, their work has been consigned to the margins of history — they started out together, shared the same art dealers and were shown in the same exhibitions, but as the boys’ prices skyrocketed, the girls’ stayed put. By the end of the sixties they had pretty much been erased from the pop narrative.

Sound familiar? Yes, it is exactly the sort of thing that people have been complaining happens to women science fiction writers.

Of course, while I am familiar with most of the SF writers, I knew very little about Pop Art beyond the few men who have become legendary: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Blake. I was therefore delighted to discover a whole bunch of women artists who were famous at the time, even if their achievements have been subsequently erased.

My favorite work from the show was Pauline Boty’s portrait of Lewis Morley, which sadly I can’t find online. Overall, however, I really liked Jann Haworth‘s soft sculpture. I was instantly reminded of the famous Trebor Softmints commercial that used Cockney Rebel’s “Mr Soft” for the soundtrack. The author of that commercial claims it was inspired by the work of another soft sculpture pioneer, Claes Oldenberg, but the figures look very like Haworth’s and in any case I had learned from the program that many of Oldenberg’s work was sewn by his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Much as Haworth’s contribution to the Sgt. Pepper album cover has been erased from much of art history, so van Bruggen’s role in creating work with Oldenburg tends to be forgotten.

Along the way we learned a little bit about cultural prejudice against Pop Art. I was amused to see Huw Wheldon fulminating about pernicious, low-brow influences such as movies, pop music and science fiction.

Anyway, it was a fascinating program which I am glad I got to see. And Alastair Sooke did a fine job of presenting it. Because yes, no one would have paid any attention to what the show had to say about women artists, had a man not been out front to say it, eh BBC?

Bah! Here’s Mr Soft.

And here’s the original with actual Steve Harley vocals.