Feminism

Books for Trans Girls

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Last Thursday my friends at Shout Out did a great segment with author B.J. Epstein about her new book, Are the Kids All Right? Representations of LGBTQ Characters in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (which is sadly not available as an ebook so I don’t have it yet). The show is available as a podcast here (28th Nov. 2013 show — we need direct links for individual shows, Mary — Update: here is it, thanks!).

That’s recommended, but what I want to talk about here comes from a conversation I had with B.J. on Twitter yesterday about the representation of trans kids in literature. Here’s the important bit.

Like B.J. says, trans boys are getting much better coverage in YA novels than trans girls. It is useful to have books like Luna available, but it gives a really unflattering impression of what a young trans girl might be like (my brief review here). So why are there so few good books about trans girls, as compared to books about trans boys (I recommend f2m: the boy within; B.J. recommends I Am J), or YA books with trans women in them (such as Eon)?

Well, I’m reading the new Julia Serano book, Excluded, right now, so I know the answer. It is all about different social attitudes towards gender transition.

Any YA book containing trans characters is going to need support to get it to market. You won’t get that from conservative people who regard all trans people with horror. So you need to get left wing people on your side. If you write a book about a trans boy, what you’ll be seen as doing (by people who don’t understand trans issues) is writing about a girl who does boy things and ignores girl things. So the kid might have an interest in cars, or science, or being a rock guitarist, but will have no interest in clothes and make-up. This will be seen as feminist, because it is showing a girl doing things that are traditionally “boy things”. Your left wing friends will approve.

Suppose, however, you are writing a book about a trans girl. What might her interests be? Well if she is anything like me when I was a teenager she’ll be interested in pretty clothes, make-up, boys and babies. She may well be interested in traditional “boy stuff” too, but what she will really want are the things she can’t have because her family are raising her as a boy.

Of course there are plenty of books for young women that deal with those things, but they tend to get published by conservatives types who won’t want to touch trans issues. If you take a book like that to left wing types you’ll probably get told that you are “reinforcing the binary”; that you are damaging young women by encouraging them to focus on “trivial” things like clothes and appearance.

Now of course as trans women grow up they will come to their own accommodation with femininity. Some of them will end up presenting very boyish, because that turns out to suit them. Others will still want to present feminine, but will have a better understanding of the social implications of that choice. However, if you are writing a book for teenagers, about a teenager who is struggling to claim her femininity in the face of social opposition, you need to allow her to be traditionally girly. That will incur the wrath of many cis feminists, which will in turn make it hard to get the book to readers.

Doubtless we’ll get there in the end, but there is a long, hard struggle to be fought first against feminism’s traditional distaste for things feminine. We need more Julia Seranos.

Violence – It Affects All Women

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

A couple of things irritated me greatly during the Trans Day of Remembrance. Firstly we had supposed feminists telling trans women to quit all the depressing stuff about people being murdered. Like, who cares, right? And even if they did it was hardly as important as trans people being mean to celebrities on Twitter. On the other hand we had LGBT people in the UK saying that TDOR wasn’t important here because all the people who get killed live in other countries.

The points I kept making are that there is a reason that around 99% of the trans people who get murdered identify as female, and there is a reason why the vast majority of the victims are people of color. There is misogyny involved, and racism. Being a trans woman of color puts you very near the bottom of the tree, but it is a tree whose branches reach out and touch us all.

Now it so happens that today in the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. That means we get to look at cis women who get killed. There are a lot more of them than trans women, so the numbers are much higher. I understand that in the past year 88 women in the UK have been killed by their male partners.

Violence against women. It happens. And violence against trans women is part of that.

Talking of which, Pink News reports that a trans woman was found dead in her home in Worthing just three days after TDOR. The police are treating it as murder.

Bonus #TDOR2013 Content

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

BCFM ran a one-hour trans-themed special this evening. There are little bits of interview with me spread about the broadcast, but don’t let that put you off. There’s plenty other content from Nathan, co-presenter Steffi, studio guest Tara and so on. Part of me wants to quibble that it is trans awareness broadcast rather than a TDOR thing, and I tend to get very angry with people who say that TDOR is too gloomy and we should focus on positives instead. Focusing on positives doesn’t stop trans people getting killed, it just allows those who are not getting killed to feel less guilty about it, which in turn stops them doing something about it.

Then again, education is badly needed, and this show has gone out to a mainstream audience. I’m sure that it will have done some good.

You can listen to the show here.

My #TDOR2013 Events Today

~ Cheryl

As it turned out, some of what Paulette had planned for today’s Women’s Outlook show didn’t come off, so we ended up with a whole hour discussing the Trans Day of Remembrance. It was a little disjointed, but the young folks we had in the studio asked some great questions, and I’ve had some positive feedback. You can listen to the show here.

The event at UWE was really good. Huge thanks to Sebastian for putting it on and getting a good audience. Sadly Nathan and I had to rush off and get a cab part way through because Bristol traffic is awful and we needed to be sure we’d be at City Hall by 6:00pm.

The memorial ceremony itself went very well. Huge thanks again to Annabelle and the City Council for providing the space. It was also great to have people attending from the Bristol Hate Crimes Service, and Avon & Somerset Police. We are very fortunate to have such good civic support.

Of course there are people who need support far more than we do. In particular it was heartbreaking to again have to read out the names of so many people from Latin America, so many of them very young. It is trans women of color who bear by far the greatest burden of violence. Most of them may be far away, but the whole point of today is that we should never, ever forget them.

The other 364 days of the year we can be looking for ways to help them stay safe.

In Memoriam

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

TDOR - LA Pride image

I will be out all day I’m doing a Trans Day of Remembrance segment on Ujima at Noon. I’ll be at the University of the West of England in the afternoon for their Trans Awareness event. And in the evening I’m reading this year’s In Memoriam list at a ceremony in City Hall. There are 238 names on the list, and as always it is incomplete, in particular omitting those who were driven to take their own lives.

My thanks to Pride LA who produced the wonderful image above.

Happy Deathday, Section 28

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Pink Against Prejudice

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the end of Section 28, the infamous Thatcher-era government rule about not “promoting” homosexuality in schools. We are being encouraged to wear something pink today to celebrate. I am doing so.

Of course the fact that the rule no longer exists doesn’t stop schools from acting as if it did, or stop people continuing to try to re-introduce it by various back doors. And in the intervening 10 years the idea seems to have been successfully exported to many other countries, just like we managed to export the idea of homophobia during the days of the Empire. The UK has a really bad track record in this respect, and we should do something to make up for it.

I also note that S’onewall is likely to make a huge fuss about this anniversary all week so as to try to drown out any publicity for the Trans Day of Remembrance on Wednesday. I am giving it a day in the sun today, and will be doing TDOR things from tomorrow.

And finally I have been told on Twitter that the nice phoenix image is widely pirated and should be credited to this person. I don’t know whether the people who produced the poster above asked permission to use the image.

Grimpink in the Wild

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Nerf Rebelle

When I did my post on Grimpink last month Gaie Sebold left a comment saying, “It’s funny ‘cos it (could be) true.” Well, scratch the “could be”. The picture above is of the Nerf Rebelle crossbow from a new Hasbro range designed to appeal to female fans of The Hunger Games. They already have a range of bows, of course, but someone in marketing decided that girls would not want one unless they could get one in pink. Jane Martinson has had a rant at The Guardian so that I don’t have to.

By the way, I did talk to Kameron Hurley at World Fantasy. She said she’d rather contribute a story than co-edit. One or two other people expressed interest too. But I have some other WTP projects to get out of the way first.

Ujima Part II: Hate Crime and White Ribbon

~ Cheryl

For the first 15 minutes of the second hour I handed over the Judeline and the rest of the crew for the Lighter Look at Life segment. I gather that they discussed movies, including Gravity. I have no idea whether Paulette mentioned my drooling over Thor prior to the show. After that I was back in the studio for a 15 minute chat with Sam from the White Ribbon Campaign, which is basically men doing something to help stop violence against women. Well done Bristol on getting special recognition from the Campaign.

The final half hour was spent talking to Alex, Sarah and Daryn from the Bristol Hate Crimes Service, a wonderfully intersectional multi-pronged approach to tacking the problem. The cases they have to deal with are often heart-rending, but it is an absolutely amazing service and I was proud to be able to talk to them on the show.

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

Well Worth Watching

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

While I was catching up with SHIELD last night (which I can rarely watch live because Rugby) my Twitter feed was going crazy over a live webcast of a conversation between author bell hooks and TV presenter Melissa Harris-Perry. I finally caught up with it this morning. It is an hour and a half long, which gave me cause to ponder whether to watch it, but I’m glad I did. You might enjoy it too.

While both ladies are very smart, and very much aware of their place in the world, the thing that struck me most about this show was how impossible it would have been in the UK. I mean, two respected, intellectual black women having a lengthy discussion, at a university, on TV, without a white person obviously in charge? Not going to happen.

What’s more, they managed to use the word “cis” twice, without the seemingly obligatory preface of, “How dare those disgusting, bigoted tranny perverts in their bad wigs oppress me by calling me…”. Had such a thing happened here, Respected White Feminists would be queuing up to write articles for The Guardian explaining how these poor, deluded Dupes of the Patriarchy need educating on the Important Issues Facing Feminism Today; namely saving the lobster and Bolly set from the awful, unwashed hordes online.

Hello Croatia

~ Cheryl

You folks probably know all about this — indeed I remember a couple of you expressing concern on the subject when I was last in Zagreb — but I have been asked by Transgender Europe to spread word of this petition, so I am doing so.

For the rest of you, it is the same old story of a right-wing religious group attempting to introduce a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Please do not sign the petition if you are not a Croatian citizen. That would only give the other side an excuse to claim that the petition is foreign interference in local politics.

More Delusions of Gender

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I added the “more” on the front as I’m not talking about Cordelia Fine’s excellent book, I’m talking about silly people.

I have doubtless had a little rant or two before now about how some self-styled radical feminists like to classify all trans people as men. Trans women are men because they are assigned male at birth and raised, albeit these days just for a very few years, as boys. Trans men are men because they look like men and identify as men. They get you one way or another.

I tend to think that the more a social group becomes obsessed with defining who is not allowed to be a member of it, the more daft and potentially dangerous it becomes.

But other people who are desperate to insult trans people in some way rely on science! I saw an article the other day which used this photo

AIS women

and basically argued that because those people are all men then trans women are all men too.

Who are those people? They are all examples of folk with what is known as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). Let me explain. The default state of the human being is female. However, if you have XY chromosomes then, in general, you will turn into a male and your body develops in the womb. The people pictured above are all incapable of processing a chemical called Androgen, and therefore don’t develop as male, despite having XY chromosomes. In general, such people are identified as girls at birth, are raised as girls, and are perfectly happy with their assigned gender. Often they only find out about their chromosomes when they go to a clinic to find out why they can’t get pregnant. In most cases they don’t have wombs. I can’t imagine how it must feel to find out that you have such a condition.

And yet, for some people, science is all that matters, and science, they hold, makes these people men.

Now, what about this person.

Caroline Cossey

That’s Caroline Cossey, one of the heroines of my youth. She’s a former model and actress (she was a Bond Girl) and she has a condition called Klinefelter’s syndrome. People with that condition usually have XXY chromosomes, though Caroline actually has XXXY. Because of that one Y, she developed a male body and ended up going through gender reassignment surgery to get a body she was comfortable with.

However, science, we are told, means that she too is a man.

Now, remember when I said that in most cases people with AIS don’t have wombs, and only find out when they can’t get pregnant? Did you spot the use of the phrase “in most cases” there? Is is possible that someone with AIS could give birth? Yes it is. See this paper, and the comment below it, for examples.

The paper describes a person with XY chromosomes who has had two children, perfectly naturally, one of whom was assigned female at birth but who also turned out to have XY chromosomes.

And according to “science” these people are men too.

Why yes, I did introduce scare quotes there. That’s because when I did my science degree doing science was all about having hypotheses and testing them, by which process you either disproved a theory, or let it stand until new evidence came along that disproved it. Science is not about sticking with an idea that is clearly daft, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. If it was we’d still believe that the Earth was flat, and the center of the universe.

I submit to you that the idea that someone who has a Y chromosome is automatically and unarguably male is something that is well past its sell-by date.

The lengths to which some people will go in order to insist that trans women are “really men” can be quite staggering. I think it is about time we added a new section to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I’m going to call it Obsessive Androidentification Fetishism, and it will denote someone who has a compulsive desire to identify people as male, despite all visual and social clues to the contrary. I’ve used the term “fetishism” because I think we should go the whole hog and suggest that such people derive sexual pleasure from mis-gendering others. That would be entirely in keeping with the way the DSM treats anything gender-related. Also it gives a nice set of initials.

While I’m at it, I think we could also add Archaeoscientism, which is the compulsion to cling to ancient, long-disproved scientific ideas.

And talking of the DSM, via Laurie Penny I found this wonderful article which reviews it as if it were a dystopian novel. In the sad world described by the DSM, no one can ever be happy, as any display of enthusiasm is immediately seized upon as evidence of a psychiatric disorder. Of course no one is oppressed, they are just medicated for their own good. As dystopias go, that’s pretty terrible.

More On Bookstores: Numbers Matter

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Via Glenda Larke on Twitter I found this sad tale from author Mindy Klasky. Basically it is reporting on the same sad cycle of negative feedback that I wrote about last week. Barnes & Noble would not stock Mindy’s first book in a series in all but the biggest stores, then got into a dispute with her publisher, and when book two came out they refused to stock it at all because sales of book one had been so poor.

Mindy is, of course, asking people to go out any buy her book, ordering it if necessary. That’s pretty much what I said we had to do to get Waterstones to take notice. I see that I’ve come in for some criticism on that score for letting people in publishers and bookstores off the hook, and putting all of the onus on consumers. I can see the point, and certainly with a small press or independent bookstore you can ask people to do better, though of course they have businesses to run. With the big publishers and chain stores it is more difficult. Policy tends to get mired in bureaucracy, and anyone who is seen to be “difficult” (that is challenging the prevailing orthodoxy) risks ruining their career, or even losing their job. So making change on your own can be hard.

Just as importantly, however, it is a matter for consumers. When I say that “you” need to go out and buy books, I don’t mean You, Ms. Social Justice Warrior. I know You are doing your part. What I mean is y’all, the great book-reading public out there. Because a few concerned people doing the right thing isn’t going to make a difference. Big companies are run by accountants, and they normally only pay attention to numbers.

I see numbers too. When I make a post about diversity issues in publishing it doesn’t get a lot of hits. If it is about white women, rather than brown people or queer people, it will get more hits. Posts about books by white men do even better. But none of those come close to the popularity of amusing rants pointing out someone else’s failings.

Which I think probably says something rather sad about us as a species.

So diversity, yes, it is good. How about buying some books? These books:

Today on Ujima: Literary Festivals & Kadija Sesay

~ Cheryl

Well, that was a busy day. I knew I was going to be on air for at least an hour, but when I arrived at the Ujima studios Paulette informed me that her planned guest had cancelled, but we had two new people, and could I talk to them please. Well, this is live radio, folks, you just roll with the punches. And I think it went very well.

I started off the show with a shout out to my friend Bea Hitchman whose lovely book, Petit Mort, has been picked up for serialization on Radio 4. It will be broadcast in 10 episodes, the first of which will air on Monday 28th October. What’s more they have got Honor Blackman to play the role of the older incarnation of Bea’s heroine. Honor Blackman. Bea is having a fangasm about this, and I can’t say I blame her. I would too.

My first guest on the show was Matthew Austin from an organization called In The City Series, a Lottery-funded project which is doing some very interesting things in Bristol. In particular in November they will be running a Human Library. What’s that? Well, they get a whole load of people to be books, put them in a venue, and then other people can come along, check a person out for 15 minutes, and talk to them. The idea is to generate awareness of the vast array of different cultures and lifestyles in the city by allowing people to interact with other sorts of folk that they may not have encountered before. I may volunteer, but I’m way too busy and I’m going to offer it around the Bristol trans community first.

Talking of varied backgrounds, my second guest was Baljinder Bhopal who lives in Bristol, is fairly obviously of Indian ancestry, but was born in Glasgow and has a wonderful Scottish accent. This sort of thing gives me hope for multiculturalism. She’s a great poet (here’s the book she read from), and she’s also an immigration lawyer who helps local people through the Avon & Bristol Law Centre.

Later on in the show we had a bit of a rant about the Racist Van, and the new outrage of Racist Texts. The UK Border Agency is very clearly not fit for purpose. If we had even a vaguely competent government then heads would roll. As it is, I suspect our leaders are quite happy with what the UKBA is doing.

With me throughout the show was my main guest for the day, Kadija Sesay. She had traveled up from London for the day, so we shamefully made full use of her. If you are Googling her you should also look up Kadija George, which is her legal name. Sesay is her mother’s maiden name, which she has adopted for use as a writer. Kadija describes herself as a Literary Activist, and as soon as I started researching her online I knew I had found a kindred spirit. She is the founder of Sable, a literary magazine for writers of color, and a co-director of Inscribe, an imprint of Peepal Tree Press. One of the projects she’s currently involved in is organizing a literary festival in The Gambia. I think she works harder than I do.

There’s more about Kadija in the second half of the show, but in the meantime you can listen to the first hour here.

For London folks (this means YOU, Stephanie), on October 24th Kadija will be taking part is a discussion at the C.L.R. James Library in Dalston Square, London, on the state of Black British Publishing. Like most other artistic endeavors these days, things are not good for people trying to publish writers of color. Kadija and I spent a bit of time talking about ways of financing diversity in publishing, and I introduced her to the Clarkesworld model of fiction magazines.

The second hour begins with the Lighter Look at Life segment, which I ended up having to present. We chatted a bit about entertainment, about how hard comedy is, about how British comedy is so often based on cruelty towards people who are seen as “other” in some way, and about how comedians from within immigrant communities can tell jokes about those communities without it becoming racist. Along the way I said a bad word, we all praised Eddie Izzard, and I recommended Nikesh Shukla who is a very funny writer and whose first book takes a wry look at Indian communities in West London.

After that I had 15 minutes off while Paulette did a stint on the microphone. I’m afraid I missed the feature she did entirely because I was doing preparation for the final half hour in which we had Mike Manson from the Bristol Festival of Literature in to preview some of the sessions. Being Ujima, we focused initially on those events featuring writers of color, but we also found time to bring in many other items including the use of the wonderful Redcliffe Caves and, of course, the science fiction event, The Kraken Rises. So I got to plug that, and BristolCon. I name checked so many people I can’t remember them all.

There is also an SF-themed event on Saturday evening in which Nikesh talks to Toby Litt about post-apocalyptic literature. I’ve got other stuff on during the day (see last week’s show for details) but I’m booked in to see Nikesh and Toby and am looking forward to it. If you are in town for The Kraken Rises then you should come along.

Mention of science fiction reminds me that Kadija is working on a speculative fiction issue of Sable, which she will co-edit with Nnedi Okorafor. I am very much looking forward to seeing that. We also talked a lot about Afrofururism, and in November I’ll be doing a whole hour on that. That is going to be fun. They’ve promised me I can play music.

Oh, and I was delighted to discover that one of Sable‘s most popular issues to date was the LGBTQ one (shout out here to Adam Lowe), Kadija says they are going to do another one. So if you are a writer of color, and identify somewhere in the QUILTBAG, you should check them out.

I think that’s most of what we covered, but I spent so much time chatting enthusiastically to Kadija, some of it off-air, that I am bound to have forgotten something. You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

Whoops, yeah, I forgot Kadija’s book. This one. And the discussion of the sorry state of the Nubian nation. And Pan-Africanism. It was a busy two hours.

Ada Lovelace Day 2013

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Yes, I know, today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I don’t have a post for you. It kind of snuck up on me, and doing a proper ALD post requires research. I just don’t have the time for that right now. So instead I’m going to dedicate this post to my mum, who worked as a chemist for the Central Electricity Generating Board (doing environmental testing, no less) back in the 1950s. That was a tough gig.

The Bisexual Book Awards

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Yes, there are such things. They have an SF/F/H category too, and a separate one for YA. You don’t have to identify as bisexual, just have suitable content in your book. Entry is free, so if you happen to have a book out this year with bisexual content then you should get on and submit it. Because you never know. Also I want to see plenty of support for the awards from our little corner of the world (in fact they only do the SF/F/H category if there are sufficient entries, otherwise we get lumped into mainstream). Further details here.

Coming Out Day

~ Cheryl

It is apparently International Coming Out Day, which is probably a good opportunity to point you once again to this post that I did for DiversifYA on growing up trans.

However, I’d also like to point you are this post by Kat Gupta. Coming out can be a wonderful thing, and there’s no question that having more people able to be out helps the campaign for equal rights. On the other hand there are still people in the world for whom coming out is not safe. Kat’s post refers to gay people in Egypt, but there are trans people in the UK who can’t come out safely, and even those who have come out may still have to keep parts of their lives very private. Coming out is a gift to the community, but it is a gift that not everyone can afford to give.

Women in SF&F: The Cycle of Negative Feedback

~ Cheryl ~ 23 Comments

A few weeks ago some of my lady writer friends were having a grumble on social media about how, when Waterstones does a promotion for SF&F, the books they pick are almost exclusively by men. Now it so happens that the manager of my local Waterstones is a good friend, and a big SF&F reader, so I went in and had a chat. She asked me to provide a list of good SF&F by women that I recommend she stock, and also promised to pass the question up the command chain.

Somewhat to my surprise, we got a reply from the SF&F buyer at Waterstones HQ. Mainly it was the usual corporate platitudes about how they only consider “how good it is and whether I think it will sell”, carefully leaving aside the possibility that “it is by a woman” and “I think it will sell” might have very little overlap. However, the note did add that some really great SF by women was coming in October, including Ancilary Justice by Ann Leckie which, at least in my corner of the Internet, is by far the most talked about SF book of the year.

Well, that book has now been out for a week or so, and I have been into the shop twice since then. Can I find it on the shelves? No, I cannot. Of course it may be selling like hot cakes, but I rather suspect that Waterstones corporate figured it would not sell well enough to send copies to a small store in a country town. For comparison I checked the Bristol branch today. They had two copies. They had a big display table, which did contain some books by women (I was pleased to see Freda Warrington and Mary Gentle there), but Ancillary Justice was not included. Clearly the idea that it might be a big seller is not getting through to the stores.

For further comparison, I poked my nose into Foyles. They had no copies at all. I know the manager so I asked him about it. He’d never heard of the book. I showed him some of the chat about it on Twitter and he ordered a couple of copies. Sadly you can’t expect every bookstore manager to be an SF&F expert, but whoever does fulfill that role at Foyles obviously doesn’t think that Ancillary Justice will sell.

So here’s what I think happens. The editors at the big publishers are probably nervous about buying SF&F by women (unless they can pass it off as YA or “Dark Fantasy”) because they know how hard they’ll have to fight for such books within the company. If the books do get bought, the publicity department will be reluctant to allocate funds to them, because they think that SF&F by women doesn’t sell. When the sales staff visit the bookstore buyers, they don’t waste time pushing the SF&F books by women, because they think that they won’t sell. The note we got back from Waterstones said that in September only 6 of the 81 new SF&F titles offered to them were by women, which was fairly typical.

If the publishers do push SF&F books by women, the store buyers will be reluctant to take them, because they have sales figures that prove that SF&F by women doesn’t sell, and if they do take them then they are reluctant to send those books to any except the biggest stores. Consequently it is really hard to find SF&F by women on the shelves, and because of that such books don’t sell. Well gee, I wonder what that might be?

As far as I can see, there’s only one way out of that mess. That is that we, as consumers, need to go into branches of Waterstones and order SF&F books by women. Because there’s no way that they’ll be offered to us, no matter how much we big them up online. Unless we actively change those sales figures, the same cycle of negative feedback will perpetuate itself.

You might start by ordering a copy of Ancillary Justice. I’ve not read I yet, but it is on the pile and in the meantime smart folks like N.K. Jemisin, Genevieve Valentine and John Scalzi have been enthusing over it.

Today on Ujima: Historical Novels, Equality Act, Women of Color

~ Cheryl

It was another busy day for me in the Ujima studio. Paulette is still on vacation and I had to host 1.5 hours of the show. Many thanks to my colleagues who ran the other half hour to give me a break.

From the bookish point of view, the most interesting session is the first half hour in which I talk to Lucienne Boyce about two panels on historical fiction that she has organized for the Bristol Festival of Literature. These feature Romans and maritime history (including pirates!). You can learn more about them here. We also talked more generally about historical fiction, and I managed to get in mentions for Nalo Hopkinson, Mary Robinette Kowal and David Anthony Durham.

That was followed by a session on the UK’s Equality Act, which managed to be quite topical as an attempt by a Christian couple to claim that they have a right to discriminate against gay people was all over the news today. The last 10 minutes or so of that was given over to discussion of how badly the Act works for trans people. I was not in the least surprised the the current government is busily conspiring with business leaders to remove all of the provisions in the Act that are useful in court, so as to make it seem like the legislation is still in place, but render it toothless.

The whole of that first hour is available on Listen Again here.

I took a break for the third half hour, at least in part because I needed to talk to my final two guests because I didn’t have much idea of what we were going to say. Thankfully Lynn and Sandra proved really good interviewees, having lots of interesting material and a very positive attitude. Basically they were talking about an event later this month that will showcase the craft, entertainment and business talents of women of color in Bristol, and provide training and inspiration for young girls. It sounds awesome. I’m going, and I’m hoping to meet some people who will be good guests on future shows. Also I managed to sneak in a name check for the awesome Laverne Cox and her idea of being a Possibility Model.

The second half of the show is available on Listen Again here.

Routes to Diversity – Ask Questions

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

As I said yesterday, diversity in fiction can take many different forms, and happen in many different ways. I want to see more people from a wide variety of backgrounds producing books, but equally I want the people who are currently producing books to include a wide variety of characters, and do so in an informed and respectful way. How are they to do this? Well, a group of YA writers has set up a site called DiversifYA. It is aimed at all YA writers, not just the SF&F community, and it seeks to provide information on a variety of different life experiences. They use the “five questions” format to get structured feedback from people with a range of backgrounds, and that will hopefully help authors better understand the types of characters they want to put into their books. Today they ran an interview with me about growing up trans. You can read it here.

Routes to Diversity – Back This

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

So, you want more diverse SF&F; in particular YA SF&F? Well then, go here and back the latest project out of Twelfth Planet Press. Kaleidoscope will be an anthology of diverse YA fantasy, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios. They already have promises of stories from Sofia Samatar, Ken Liu, Vylar Kaftan, and Jim Hines, and they will be paying 5c/word. It should be good. Backing is via an Australian crowdfunding site called Pozible. Like Kickstarter, they don’t charge you unless the project fully funds. Not that I’m expecting any difficulty here. Indeed, I’m looking forward to them announcing stretch goals. Because you are all going to back it, right?