Feminism

Trans History Follow-Up

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

So today is National Coming Out Day. I was going to write something about trans people and “stealth”, but with BristolCon less than 2 weeks away I’m rather busy so I’ll leave that for TDOR next month. In the meantime, here’s a bit of history.

My recent post about the Jess Nevins article on io9 revolved around the fact that ideas abut trans people have changed significantly since 1906. Indeed, the Western world had no such concept then (though many other cultures did). However, it turns out that there is a concept that fits the book that Jess reviewed quite well.

This morning I listened to an interesting podcast of a talk that Juliet Jacques gave to the Westminster Skeptics. It is called “Thinking critically about transgender issues”, which I think only works if you don’t know much about such things. Then again, that probably fits most of Juliet’s audience, and it will have done them some good. What the talk does provide, however, is a fascinating review of Western attitudes towards trans people from the 19th Century onwards.

The key piece of history, as far as Jess and the book The Anglo-American Alliance is concerned is the concept of “sexual inversion”. This was popularized by Henry Havelock Ellis, an early sexologist, via his book, Sexual Inversion, and later through Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which uses similar terminology.

Havelock Ellis’s ideas conflate what we now consider to be separate phenomena: sexual preference, and gender identity. The character of Margaret in Gregory Casparian’s novel closely follows the character of the “invert” that Havelock Ellis describes.

Of course the interesting question here, and one which Juliet touches on, is whether our (still developing) ideas of trans people are just as much a product of our culture as the invert was of early 20th century society. However, even if they are, going round telling people that they are “doing trans wrong” is not terribly helpful.

On a related note, BBC1 is screening a documentary this evening called “Me, My Sex and I”. It is a look at what are unhelpfully called “Disorders of Sexual Development” and might more usefully be understood as natural variation in the development of sex organs. The blurb for the program estimates that almost 1 in 50 people are born with some sort of intersex condition.

(Oh, and the programme is not available in Wales or Scotland. *sigh* But it will be on the iPlayer.)

Ada Lovelace Day: Rachel Armstrong #ALD11

~ Cheryl

Today, as many of you will know, is Ada Lovelace Day: the day on which we are all encouraged to write about women working in science and technology. I have been rather busy of late, and haven’t managed to compose anything lengthy, so I’m going to be lazy. Here is Rachel Armstrong doing what she does best — talking about living architecture.

That was recorded in 2009. I first met Rachel when she talked about the Venice project at the Architectural Association last year. When I met her at the British Library last month she told me that the project is currently mired in Italian politics. Given the popular suspicion of “gray goo”, this is hardly surprising, but it is still a very cool SFnal idea.

You can see my previous ALD posts here and here.

Therapy, It’s Political

~ Cheryl

Occasionally when I do posts mocking the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) I get people questioning my right to do so. After all, the APA are qualified professionals and I’m just a crazy person potential patient. Well today on Twitter Christine Burns pointed me to this online course that focuses on the role of the DSM as a political tool. There are plenty of academic references and links for further reading.

Elsewhere there have been a few other items of news that point to the political nature of definitions of “mental illness”. After all, if it wasn’t political, why would the European Parliament feel it was necessary to call for an end to classifying trans people as mentally ill?

That’s by no means a popular stand to take. The comments on that Pink News article contain many comments from gays insisting that the horrible trannies are indeed crazy. The EP’s views would also not go down well with the Institute for Canadian Values, a “Christian” organization that wants to prevent Canadian children from being taught that trans people exist. They want their government to take action to enforce their preferred standards of normal social behavior.

Given this serious disagreement over what it means to be crazy, what is an LGBT person who feels in need of therapy to do? Well, one option is Pink Therapy, a new website that lists LBGT-friendly therapists. Most of the listed professionals are based in London, but I’m pleased to see how many there are around the rest of the country. At least if you approach one of these people you can be fairly sure that their politics won’t get in the way of their treating you.

Meeting Josephine Saxton

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

One of the highlights of the Gollancz party was the presence of Josephine Saxton. She’s over 80 now, and still very sprightly and intelligent. She had a number of books published in the 70s and 80s, and was a leading light of feminist science fiction at the time. Six of those books are available via the SF Gateway project (see Amazon), including Queen of the States which was a Clarke Award nominee in 1987.

I don’t know much about Saxton’s work myself, though I now have 6 books I can buy and read. However, I discovered last night that Roz Kaveney was her editor for some of the books. Roz dear, if you are reading this, could you please add some detail so as to encourage people to sample some of Josephine’s work? I shall have a word with Mr. Clute about the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

Avoiding the Silent T

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This morning on Twitter Christine Burns pointed at an excellent new resource written by GALOP (London’s LGBT community safety charity, not the pollsters). It is a guide for LGBT organizations on how to be T-friendly. Given the amount of difficulty trans people have with such groups, this is a really important document. I don’t suppose it will have any effect on groups like S’onewall that are actively transphobic, but for an LGBT organization that is trying to get things right it is invaluable. Lambda Literary please note. You can download the document here.

Little Boxes on Passports

~ Cheryl

Many of you will have seen a story earlier this week about how the Australian government has changed the law to make it easier for various gender-variant persons to obtain passports that match their lifestyles. I’ve seen a few people ask whether Australian trans activists are actually happy with what has been done, and it seems that at least some of them are.

One of the changes is certainly overdue. That allows people who are living in their preferred gender, but have not yet had any gender reassignment surgery, to have their passports changed. The British Consulate in Melbourne changed my passport to say “female” without question when I told them I would be living full time as female. That was in 1997. Had I been an Australian citizen I could not have had that done. I would have had to have waited at least 2 years until I had had surgery. It has taken Australia until now to give their citizens similar rights.

The other change allows people to leave their gender unspecified — X rather than F or M. That has caused some confusion, and this morning I was pointed at this article on Global Comment that complains about how the story is being reported in the world’s media.

Well, yes and no. It all depends on who you talk to.

The problem that the article has is that it assumes there is a right way to use terminology about trans people, and sadly that’s far from the case. To start with there’s the question of what is an acceptable umbrella term for gender-variant people. Umbrella terms are hugely contentious. In many ways they are very useful, because they bring together many minority groups with different interests who all face discrimination from the same sources, for much the same reasons. Inevitably, however, there are those who say that they don’t want to be associated with certain others. You see that in the tensions between LGB and T people within the queer community, and you see it within the trans community.

The Global Comment article specifically complains about confusion between “transgender” people and “intersex” people, but these terms are not simple and clear-cut. In some communities “transgender” is used to mean all gender-variant people, including those the article describes as “intersex”. In others it is used only for people who reject the gender binary, have no wish to have surgery, and have no medically recognized intersex condition. It is also used in the way the article suggests. There are, inevitably, people who regard themselves as intersex who want nothing to do with trans people: “we have a recognized medical condition, whereas they are crazy and give us a bad name.” Equally there are transsexuals who want nothing to do with the transgender label: “we are genuinely trapped in the wrong body, whereas they are dilettantes and perverts who give us a bad name.” It is a mess, and wastes an awful lot of energy on internecine warfare.

Even if you accept the labels, however, the distinction doesn’t work. I have friends who don’t wish to be identified as male or female, but have no recognized intersex condition. I have friends who do have intersex conditions, but who are very happy with the place they have chosen within the gender binary (which may or may not be the place they were assigned at birth). I have even met transgender activists who insist that all trans people should identify as outside the binary (and should therefore adopt the X designation). On two separate occasions I have been informed that it is morally wrong for me to claim to be a woman, and that I should modify my appearance to make my trans nature clear. Personally I disagree with this, but the fact that such views exist show what a wide variety of opinions we need to take into account.

If you interpret the Australian law to mean that everyone who does not have a medically recognized intersex condition must register as M or F, while everyone who does have such a condition must register as X, then you will end up with a lot of unhappy people getting a designation forced upon them by (potentially hostile) medical people. Sadly I suspect that may happen, because people like tidy little boxes, and medical people like being in charge. But, if you allow people to choose M, F or X depending on how they identify, and how they live their lives, then they’ll be happy.

Alternatively, as Jane Fae suggested today in The Guardian, you could do away with gender markers altogether.

Simples (as those annoying ads encourage us to say).

Lambda Makes Progress

~ Cheryl

Last week I blogged about the new awards that Lambda Literary was taking on, and how the eligibility criteria were LG inclusive, but not really LGBT. The original wording was as follows:

LGBT authors will be recognized with three awards marking stages of a writer’s career: the Betty Berzon Debut Fiction Award (to one gay man and one lesbian), the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize (to one male-identified and one female-identified author), and the Pioneer Award (to one male-identified and one female-identified individual or group).

That wording has now been revised as follows:

LGBT authors will be recognized with three awards given annually during the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony (each to a male-identified and female-identified individual) marking stages of a writer’s career: the Debut Fiction Award (to one queer man and one queer woman), the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize (to one male-identified and one female-identified author), and the Pioneer Award (to one male-identified and one female-identified individual or group).

This is much more inclusive. Of course it is by no means perfect, as it sticks rigidly to the idea of the gender binary and thus excludes anyone who does not identify as male or female. There may also be some people who have issues with the word “queer”. But it is progress, and to be honest it is a lot more than I thought we would get. I suspect that we have Nicola Griffith to thank for applying pressure on the Lambda board, and possibly other supportive folks as well.

So, thank you Lambda for listening and acting. Now we need to have a conversation about this gender binary thing. Would you like to talk some more?

Cat Women: Part II

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

The second part of Sarah Hall’s Cat Women of the Moon series was broadcast on Radio 4 this morning and is available for listening here. Once again various well known people made a lot of good comments. My overall reaction, however, is a bit mixed.

The good news is that there was no obvious poking fun at SF, and no insulting trans people either. Indeed, in today’s episode Iain Banks made a point that I always make when talking about gender swapping in SF: if we are to believe in a society in which people swap genders easily and regularly, we have to assume that society has achieved gender equality. (If anyone knows which Culture novel the quote they used was taken from, please let me know. I want to quote it myself and all of my Culture books except Surface Detail are in California.)

On the downside, there wasn’t a lot of depth, and that’s entirely understandable. The programmes were clearly aimed at people who didn’t reach much, if any, science fiction, and consequently there was a 101 feeling to a lot of the discussion. Also, as anyone who has edited podcasts will know, it is really hard to patch together a bunch of separate audio clips to form a coherent narrative. You can’t just change the words as you might in print.

Given the obvious constraints, I was really quite happy with the series until the last few seconds. I’m not sure what Hall was trying to say at the end, but it didn’t come over well. The message that I got was that we could somehow avoid the potential problems that scientific progress has in store for us if we just stopped reading all that scary science fiction. Layered over that was the thought that you don’t stop thinking about good literature when you close the book, and it is stupid to suggest that you can do so. I suspect that someone at the BBC decided that they had to go out with a bang in some way, and that the ending was cobbled together in response without much thought as to what it meant.

Oh Lambda Literary, Clueless Again

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

The Lambda Literary Foundation has been having a bit of an issue with the eligibility criteria for the awards. A while back they decided they would limit eligibility to authors who self-identified as LGBT. This caused something of a ruckus (see here for some links), and they have now changed their minds again.

I should note here that this is not an easy issue. The UK’s Green Carnation Prize has a similar LGBT-only restriction on authors, and one of the consequences of that is that publishers are refusing to submit books because they don’t want their authors to be publicly identified as queer. See here for an example.

Having said that, what Lambda has done is rather bizarre. They now have a three-pronged policy.

1. All judges must be LGBT-identifed, which I think is fair enough.

2. The main awards are open to all authors, which I’m very pleased about.

3. They have some separate awards specifically for LGBT writers, or rather LG(bt) writers, as follows:

LGBT authors will be recognized with three awards marking stages of a writer’s career: the Betty Berzon Debut Fiction Award (to one gay man and one lesbian), the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize (to one male-identified and one female-identified author), and the Pioneer Award (to one male-identified and one female-identified individual or group)

I’m sorry, what is going on here?

First of all, why is one award specifically restricted to “one gay man and one lesbian”, while others are for “male-identified and female-identified” people. At least the latter appears to include some bi people, which the former seems to exclude. As for trans people, apparently they are OK for the first award if they identify as gay or lesbian, but not otherwise, and they are OK for the other two awards is they are male-identified and female-identified, but not otherwise.

My first impression is that this is really sloppy writing. My second impression is that, despite the claim of widespread consultation, Lambda didn’t talk to a single bi or trans person when formulating this policy — or if they did they ignored any objections.

Is it really so hard for someone at Lambda to engage their brain before putting their fingers to the keyboard? Or do they just not care if they offend bi and trans people?

SF & Gender on Radio 4

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting a two-part documentary, “Cat Women Of The Moon”, on gender in science fiction. They are hosted by Sarah Hall (author of the Tiptree-winning The Carhullan Army) and will feature interviews with Iain M. Banks, China Miéville and Nicola Griffith. A press release about the first episode (Aug. 30th, 11:30am), is available here. Hall’s website says the second episode will air at the same time on Sept. 6th. I expect both episodes to be available via the usual podcasting service, but I can’t be certain.

The press release notes:

In many novels the exploration of sexuality is unconventional and experimental. Some societies have more than one sex; in others, people can change sex at will. In other science fiction worlds, people form relationships with aliens or they might have sex with artificial life forms.

I confess to being somewhat nervous about this. I’ve not heard anything about it from Roz, so I’m assuming she wasn’t asked for comment, which probably means there is no input from trans people. I’m sure China and Nicola would be good if asked, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a certain amount of ignorance and prejudice on display.

Update: Just in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick, I’m expecting problems from feminists and BBC arts pundits, not from Iain, who I know fairly well but have never talked to about trans issues.

Update 2: Nicola posts about the programmes here and mentions Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin as also being interviewed.

Many thanks to DH for the heads up on this one.

Two Gender Links

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

No, not me being shouty this time. Other people.

First of all over at the excellent Bad Reputation blog, Juliet E. McKenna talks about writing female characters in fantasy fiction. Juliet does an excellent job of steering a middle way between the people who claim that women were irrelevant in mediaeval societies (save presumably to be raped or rescued) and the desire to avoid something that is as unrealistic as farm boys discovering that they are the long lost heir to the throne.

Also check out the comment from Elizabeth Moon who talks about men who tell her that they don’t read books by women, or with women characters. And worse:

A woman at a booksigning told me proudly that her sons would not read books by women or with girl characters–as she was providing their reading material, it was clear that she approved and probably created their attitude.

*sigh*

Meanwhile over at Fantasy Faction there is an interview with Mark Charan Newton. The interviewer spends several questions talking to Mark about the LGBT characters in his books. As I have said before, I was very impressed by the way Mark went about researching the trans character, Lan. His responses to the questions are very good too.

Women, Wikipedia & Bristol

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Next Thursday (August 18th) there will be another Girl Geek Dinners event in Bristol. The guest speaker is Fiona Apps, who is an administrator on the English Wikipedia and a member of Wikimedia’s Volunteer Response Team. Naturally the topic for discussion is getting women involved with Wikipedia. Go here to book a place.

If you think that’s a non-issue, take a look at this recent research from the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering. One of the significant findings is:

The research indicates that the articles females tend to edit are twice as likely to be about controversial or contentious topics. In addition, female editors are significantly more likely to have their early contributions undone by their fellow editors, and are more likely to be indefinitely blocked by fellow editors. Taken together, these findings hint at a culture that may be resistant to female participation.

The researchers say they are surprised that women tend to edit more controversial articles, but looking at the paper I see that their definition of a “controversial” article is one that has a lot of edit wars. If work by women editors is much more likely to be attacked than work by men, then of course women will appear to be focusing on controversial subjects. I also note that women editors are slightly more likely to be banned from Wikipedia than men. The researchers suggest this may be because male trolls disguise their gender in the hope of more lenient treatment, but my own suspicion is that those women who don’t just give up will often get very, very angry, and get banned as a result.

Oh, and to save you reading the comments at that link, yes there is someone who claims that this proves that women are stupid and incompetent.

NPR Poll – Results In

~ Cheryl ~ 12 Comments

The results of that NPR poll of the top 100 SF&F books/series are now in. You can find them here. There are 15 books by women in the list, so 15%. Is that good? I suspect not. After all, this is an SF&F poll, and fantasy is supposed to be “women’s books”, except when it involves lots of hacking and slaying, of course. A total of 60,000 people voted. There’s no indication of the gender split in voters. (As I recall they didn’t ask.)

Still, there are two SF books by women in the top 25. They are by those well known women SF writers, Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood.

Shadow Man Post-Script

~ Cheryl

The book chat yesterday was very interesting, and threw some new light on Shadow Man that I’d like to share with you.

The first thing I should note is that Shadow Man doesn’t attempt to create an ideal view of a genderqueer society. The focus of the book is on the conservative Harans, not on the more liberal Concord Worlds. What Scott is trying to do is show how silly our treatment of intersex people is, by creating a world in which intersex births are more common. Her entire knowledge of intersex people appears to have come from Fausto-Sterling’s essay, which is now acknowledged to be woefully simplistic. But that’s not really her point, many other made-up, more complex gender systems for humanity would have done the same job.

I was somewhat surprised that some people thought that the Concord Worlds was supposed to be seen as an ideal society. As Matt Cheney noted, Tatian has his own hang-ups, and I think it is simpler and more sensible to assume that’s because he’s a flawed character as well, rather than assuming that the author is trying to portray an ideal view of gender and failing.

And talking of which, if you can’t figure out what the author intended from reading a book, trying to decide whether the author has “failed” or not is a bit pointless. There are books in which it is very clear that the author is pushing an agenda, and may even has a mouthpiece character, but most writers are more sensible than this.

What would have been nice was for Scott to write a sequel in which Warreven gets to travel to the Concord Worlds and find out that they too have odd hang-ups about the wrangwys, but sadly that didn’t happen.

Anyway, if what you are looking for is a book that gives a realistic portrait of genderqueer people (as we know them), with sympathetic characters that you can identify with, then Shadow Man is not the book for you. My apologies if I gave the impression that it might be.

A particular issue that we discussed is that many of the Haran characters in the book seem to think that Warreven was foolish not to opt to be legally female and marry Tendlathe. From our point of view this seems odd, because our practice is for intersex children to be raised as male if at all possible. Why would any parent want a girl when they have an option to have a boy? Well, that’s the way the doctors present the choice anyway. But on Hara intersex kids don’t have to opt for a gender until adolescence, which changes the equation somewhat. In particular Warreven had the opportunity to become the wife of the dictator’s son, and turned it down to register as “male”.

It is hard to get inside the character’s head here. Possibly Warreven had some inkling of the sort of bigot Tendlathe would become, but 3e could still have registered as female. Maybe registering as male made the point more forcefully. Maybe there was a gender identity issue at play. However, Scott seems blissfully unaware of the concept of gender identity, so I don’t think that is likely. For what it is worth, my view is that Warreven was primarily interested in staking 3is right to 3is identity as a herm. I think 3e chose to register as male because he knew that 3is gender performance was closer to feminine than masculine, and consequently this would create maximum incongruence between 3is legal gender and 3is perceived gender. Registering as male may also have helped further 3is career as a civil rights lawyer.

Book Review: Shadow Man

~ Cheryl

One of the books that I talked about a lot in the gender panel at Eurocon was Shadow Man by Melissa Scott. Given that I was so impressed, and in the spirit of talking about science fiction by women, I thought that I should write a review. Here it is.

Update: By the way, if you are interested in doing your bit for intersex people in our world, as opposed to in imaginary ones, there’s a petition on Change.org that’s trying to get the UN to take notice of the problem. (Hat tip to Jane Fae Ozimek.)

Also, Maya Posch, the intersex person that Jane Fae blogged about, is an avid fantasy reader and writes computer games for a living, so definitely one of us. Community support, if you please.

Russ Pledge Action Time

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Over at the NPR website they are running a poll for the “top-100 list of the best science fiction and fantasy ever written”. They started out asking for suggestions, and then got a panel of experts to whittle those down to a long list. Those experts were John Clute, Farah Mendlesohn and Gary K. Wolfe so, while there are a few times where I thought “what were you thinking!”, it is a pretty good list. Of course it is by no means 50:50, but lots of fine women writers are mentioned.

NPR now wants everyone to list their top 10 from the long list. You can vote here. Let’s see if we can manage to make the final top ten not entirely male, eh?

Eurocon Report and Gender Panel Podcast

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

I have (finally, sorry folks) managed to get my report on this year’s Eurocon posted. You can read it, and see the photos, here.

The main reason for the delay is that I wanted to finish the podcast of the gender panel. This featured Kari Sperring (moderator), Ian McDonald, Elizabeth Bear, Johan Jönsson, Kristina Knaving and myself, and I thought it went very well. It should be on the Salon Futura iTunes feed fairly soon, but in the meantime you can listen to it here, or download it.

My thanks once again to Carolina and her team for a great convention, and for allowing me to have the audio recording from the panel.

How to Handle the Shouty

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The absence of women issue is by no means confined to science fiction. The comics industry appears to be far worse. Nevertheless, there are still a few hardy souls willing to risk public humiliation by using the f-word in public (that would be “feminism”, of course). This blog post interviews one such: Kyrax2, who was busily asking awkward questions of people at the recent San Diego Comic-Con. There’s not a lot of point in clicking through unless you enjoy making yourself depressed, but I did want to highlight one thing from the interview.

Kyrax2 is talking about how the head of DC, Dan Didio, had been cleverly avoiding answering her questions. She then goes on to say this:

On the other hand, Paul Cornell came directly to where I was sitting as soon as the New 52 panel ended and said, “I heard what you said, and I’d like to take a minute to try to sell to you directly.” He told me that his new swords and sorcery comic, Demon Knights, would have a majority female cast and that he was committed to keeping it that way. I am utterly uninterested in swords and sorcery, but I will be subscribing to a full year of Demon Knights anyway, because Paul Cornell made me feel like he cared about my opinion, both as a fan and as a human being. I want to give this comic a chance, and I think it would be fantastic if everyone reading this article would at least pick up issue #1 of Demon Knights and give it a chance, too. Cornell’s also writing Stormwatch, and says of Apollo and Midnighter in the linked article, “Yes, Apollo and Midnighter are still gay men. They’re still out and proud. I wouldn’t have written it otherwise.”

And that, dear readers, is how to deal with shouty feminists.

Paul mate, I am so very proud of you.

We Have A Solution

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

To that problem of women writers being unable to sell science fiction in the UK. It turns out to be quite easy. All you have to do is sell the book to a mainstream publisher (presumably coming up with some sort of flimsy excuse as to why the book is “not science fiction”). You might not get too many sales to fans for a while, but the book will be so fresh and different that it may well get nominated for the Booker Prize.

(Hat tip to Sarah Hall for showing the way.)

Some Good Guys

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

Thankfully there are many wonderful persons of the male persuasion in the world. Here are a couple of shout-outs.

Firstly to Joe Gordon who has done a fine post on the Womanthology project.

And secondly to Marco and Lee at Angry Robot. You probably already know that they publish Lauren Beukes, Kaaren Warren and Aliette de Bodard. Also in the pipeline are Jo Anderton and Anne Lyle. And today they added Madeline Ashby. All of these ladies write science fiction. (Aliette’s novels are fantasy, but her Hugo-nominated story is SF set at a later time in the same world.)

See, it’s not hard to find women SF writers when you put your mind to it. Or indeed to publish them and have a massive international success on your hands. My only regret is that, of all those ladies, Anne is the only Brit. I guess it must be something to do with the climate.