Well, not really, of course, but any woman who dares to mention gender bias issues, no matter how cautiously and rationally, is going to get accused of being a shrill, man-hating feminazi by someone looking for a fight. Here are some such.
All worth a read.
This morning a couple of people have pointed me at something called Womanthology. To quote from their “Who we are” page:
Womanthology is an anthology graphic novel created entirely by women for Charity. The purpose of the book is to showcase the works of female creators of every age and experience levels.
They are financing the project through Kickstarter.
The summer issue of the fabulous Mslexia magazine arrived today. Flipping through it over dinner, I noticed two things of interest.
First there was an article titled “The Price of Fame”, in which industry journalist Liz Thomson reveals how much publishers have to pay in order to get their books promoted by chain stores.
Those 3 for 2 offers in Waterstones? It costs £1,000 per book to get included. As for the Richard & Judy Book Club (now a promotion through WH Smiths rather than a TV Programme), that will set you back a cool £20,000.
And no, that does not prove that publishers pay me thousands of dollars to get their books into the Locus Recommended Reading List.
The other item of interest was an article by author Elizabeth Chadwick on writing historical thrillers. Apparently there are several women making a name for themselves writing books that are similar in style to those written by Bernard Cornwell. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at their books. Chadwick’s top tip for success in the field is as follows:
Change your name. If you write a swash-buckling romance choose a gender-neutral name — men are less likely to buy books they think are by women.
No, I am not making this up.
As is inevitable, I have come under a certain amount of criticism for my attempts to avoid any further personal attacks on the subject of gender balance. There are people out there who are convinced that we can only make progress by identifying the bad guys and making an example of them.
Well, who am I to disagree? But this new study by a (multi-gender) research team at the University of Toronto may give pause for thought. What they did was create an experiment in which they would try to reduce the level of prejudice held by their subjects. The subjects were divided into three groups. One group was instructed not to be prejudiced; one group was given information explaining the benefits of being less prejudiced; and the control group was not given any special instructions.
The attitudes of the subjects were measured before and after the study. Those who had been given positive motivation to be less prejudiced did respond to the message. But those who were instructed to be less prejudiced came out of the study with more prejudiced attitudes than when they went in.
Obviously this is just one study, but it is worth bearing in mind. If you tell people they are doing something wrong, they tend to get defensive, and eventually angry. If you encourage them to do things differently, they are more likely to respond. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
I make no comment on the ad that Google served up to go with that article.
Diversity is hard in other ways as well. If you pick isolated examples you really don’t know what has gone into creating the final gender balance. I get accused of being anti-woman too, and I’m sure I will do again, because it is really difficult at times to be balanced.
A case in point. For reasons that may become clear in a few weeks, I have been looking at what new books are being released by UK publishers later this year. I’ve used the Locus Forthcoming Books List as my guide. You can spot the UK-published books easily as the publisher names are highlighted in green. Take a look at the data for Sept-Dec of this year.
I counted UK-published 42 books. Of those, 9 were by women. Here they are: Rae Carson, Kate Elliott, Kristen Painter, NK Jemisin, Leigh Kennedy, Aliette de Bodard, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Janny Wurts, Amanda Downum.
Notice anything? Not one of those women is British. Not one. Aliette is French. All of the others are American.
So if I were, say, reviewing new UK-published books by British writers, and someone looked at the books I covered for the tail end of this year, they are quite likely to conclude that I was ignoring women and have a go at me over it.
I have no idea why there is such a dearth of books by British women. Maybe it is a statistical anomaly — there were two in August. Maybe they are being published by companies that don’t supply data to the Locus list. But when you see a list, don’t immediately assume that the lack of women is due to prejudice on the part of the person putting it together.
On Saturday I mentioned that I had been sent some data about gender splits in anthologies. I have since been taking a close look at it and want to present some of the data. I am doing this:
Before we start I’d like to get a few things very clear.
Firstly, this discussion is, and from my point of view always has been, about gender stereotyping: SF for boys; fantasy for girls (unless it involves a lot of hacking and slaying). The data we have is therefore solely for science fiction anthologies. Anyone who comes back with something like, “well you are ignoring all these paranormal romance anthologiesâ€, or even brings up books like Dark Spires which are mixed-genre, is just trolling, nothing more.
Second, there are all sorts of possibilities for data error. What I think we have here is data on all pure-SF anthologies published in the UK and USA from 2006 to 2010 inclusive. But there may be some books missing. And I haven’t had a chance to check the numbers. And there are all sorts of potential disputes about what “science fiction†actually means. There may be some gender confusion if lesser-known writers have ambiguous names. Nationality confusion is also possible. I have caught and corrected a few such mistakes myself, but there could be more. I’d assume a healthy amount of error on these numbers.
Finally I am not publishing the raw data. There are two main reasons for this:
Having said that, if someone out there has the time and ability to check the data and gather more, I’d be delighted to hand this over.
The starting point is that we have 56 books in total, 17 of which were published in the UK and the other 39 in the USA. All of the UK books are from smaller presses, because the big, multi-national London publishers don’t do anthologies here, but a substantial proportion of the US ones are from DAW, and other New York imprints feature as well.
The most obvious breakdown is by the gender of the editor. Here are the numbers:
| Gender of Editor | % of Stories by Women |
| Male | 23% |
| Female | 44% |
| Mixed | 37% |
This should perhaps not surprise us. Our basic thesis is that men are socially conditioned to prefer fiction by men, while women are more balanced in their tastes. But also women editors are more likely to have friends who are women writers, and that may play a part.
What we don’t know, of course, is how well these books sold. If there is any real justification for male-dominated books it should be that they sell better. I have no proof of that one way or another (and if someone does have data, please come forward). But at least we can see that some publishers are prepared to let women do science fiction. Ten of the books were female-edited, and a further three are by a mixed-gender team.
Now, referring back to earlier discussions, is the situation worse in the UK than in the US? Here are the numbers.
| Country of Publication | % of Stories by Women |
| USA | 30% |
| UK | 23% |
An important thing to note here is that only one of the UK-published books is female-edited. One is mixed; the others are all edited by men. As a result, we should expect a worse performance than the US.
So, question to UK publishers: would you be willing to publish more science fiction anthologies edited by women? Because I think that would help.
The final split that we can do is by nationality of the editor. Here “other†means either that the editor was neither British nor American, or that there was an editorial team of mixed nationality.
| Nationality of Editor | % of Stories by Women |
| US | 33% |
| UK | 16% |
| Other | 27% |
Oh dear. That’s starting to look like a significant difference. That’s because the figures for UK publishers were buoyed up by above average numbers from non-British and female editors, while the one British editor working for a US publisher has below average numbers.
I did promise not to focus on personalities here, but I do want to interject with one significant piece of data. Anthologies edited by Ian Whates have above average numbers for a British editor. I think that demonstrates the dangers of looking at individual books, and bears out the supportive comments made about Whates by women writers.
So, what does all this mean? Before everyone goes rushing off yelling about how British men are all disgusting, chauvinist pigs, let’s consider why the UK might have got into this situation.
Firstly, of course, the fact that all but one of the British editors are men doesn’t do the UK’s chances much good. The American numbers would not look so good if they didn’t have a lot of women involved. If more women did anthologies over here we’d probably see a significant improvement, though of course someone has to be willing to publish them.
In addition, as we’ve noted before, the big London publishers are rather reluctant to publish science fiction novels by women. Given that is the case, it may well be that the percentage of women in the UK writing science fiction is a lot lower than it is in the USA. After all, who makes a living out of short fiction?
Ah, but why don’t the UK editors get stories from foreign women, then? Therein, I think, lies the problem. One of the bits of data that we can’t capture here is whether the anthologies were created through open submission, or through invitation. You might think that an open submission anthology would have more men, as the editor would be deluged with stories from pushy males, whereas invitation allows you to pick your gender balance. But it all depends on who you know. If you don’t have a relationship with a writer, it will be harder to get a story out of them.
Some editors are prepared to go to open submission. My friend Colin Harvey is doing that for his latest project. But I suspect that many of the books we are looking at here, particularly the UK ones, are invitation only. In an interview from last year, Carmelo Rafala, an American of Sicilian extraction publishing in the UK, said:
As a small press we simply don’t have time to read through mountains of submissions or deal with someone who decides to hurl abuse at us because we just can’t understand his genius.
I feel his pain.
Now, suppose you live in the UK, where women SF novelists are few and far between. If you don’t travel abroad to conventions, if most of the writers you know are middle-aged British men, guess what the majority of contributors to your anthologies are likely to be?
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. I know we don’t have sales figures, but given the fact that many publishers seem willing to publish anthologies with women editors, and significant numbers (sometimes more than 50%) of women contributors, it seems likely that girl cooties are not an immediate cause of financial disaster.
Furthermore, with the advent of e-books, international trade in books has become much easier. There is no reason why an independent British publisher can’t get access to the huge American market. Indeed, some of the companies involved in this study already have their paper books distributed in the USA. But if you do that with a book that looks like boys own club material then those shouty feminists across the pond are going to be on your back double quick and your prospects of big sales will be damaged.
I absolutely understand the issue with personal contacts. If you can’t afford to travel it makes things hard. But contacts can be made. I know loads of great women writers outside of the UK. So does Farah. British authors who travel a lot to the US may also be able to help. Reach out. Try to find new sources of stories.
The results may surprise you.
Thinking about this gender debate it the shower this morning, it occurred to me that what irritates me about the whole process is how effectively it is derailed. First of all some women make what they hope is a reasoned argument, backed by facts, with suggestions for how we can move forward. Then a bunch of men spot the discussion and think, “ooh, a fight, let’s pile in!” They get aggressive, they get personal, and they try to wind people up. Finally the people who get targeted by these attacks fight back, complain about how unfair this all is, but put the blame on the issue, not on the way it has been distorted.
I’m sure this has all been said by Joanna Russ.
But there is always hope, and in response to all those people complaining about positive discrimination, quotas and the like I offer this article from today’s Observer. It is about something called the 30% Club, which seeks to significantly improve the proportion of women serving on the boards of major UK companies. It is backed by, amongst other people, the (male) bosses of Centrica (energy company), the Royal Bank of Scotland, John Lewis (major retailer) and Ernst & Young; and by the (Tory) government.
If they can do this, and recognize it is valuable to them to do so, can we not we manage something similar?
My teh intrawebs have been busy this morning. The gender balance thing has fairly exploded over the past few days, and not in a good way.
Personally I expected this, pretty much from the point where the SF Signal Mind Meld got involved. That can be a very entertaining forum at times, but when asked to discuss anything serious it tends to quickly degenerate into “don’t read the comments” territory. Since then most of what has gone on has been a male dominance game, with men on both sides yelling at each other and women mostly taking a back seat, looking on in despair.
The trouble is that posts that ask aggressive questions such as “is science fiction sexist?” or “are you a misogynist?” invite an equally aggressive and entrenched response, and so on in an ever-widening spiral of animosity. And eventually someone says something really outrageous, and it becomes a battle of his friends against everyone else, with the original issue being forgotten in the rush to arms.
Before going into the specific issue at hand, let me say that I think anthology bashing is not terribly helpful. Looking at a single anthology, you have no idea where the real problem lies. It could be the editor, it could be the publisher, it could be the submissions, you can’t tell. Also, just as an individual’s reading and voting habits are more likely to be a product of cultural conditioning than of conscious sexism, so an individual editor is more likely to choose stories based on cultural conditioning than a deliberate intention to exclude a particular group of writers. The objective of pointing out gender imbalances (or any other sort of imbalance) should be to encourage people to examine their cultural conditioning, not to decide who we are going to burn at the stake.
Rather than single out individual books or people, it is better to try to take an overall look at the field. That way, hopefully, you can show that you are examining a social issue, not attacking a particular person. I’ve been sent some interesting data about the gender balance in science fiction anthologies, which appears to back up the suggestion that there is a cultural difference between the UK and US. However, there’s probably not much point in publishing it right now as I’ll only be accused of making it up and being anti-British. We can come back to it when people have calmed down.
Even then, however, it is important to understand the conditions in which people are operating. The US is a much bigger market, and it is easier to make a success of a book that might be seen as going against cultural norms. The really big companies tend not to do anthologies, but I’d be prepared to bet that the level of sales that the likes of Prime, Tachyon, Small Beer, Night Shade and Pyr get for such books is way above what any UK-based small press can expect.
If you are running a small press (which is something I happen to do) you need to make a choice as to whether you are doing it for love, and hope that your projects break even, or you are doing it to make a living. In the latter case, if you believe that you are operating in a market where most male readers won’t buy science fiction by women — and, let’s face it, that’s what the big publishers in London are telling us — then you would be daft to publish much SF by women. You have to take a conscious decision to risk sales if you want to diversify your content.
Obviously I’m sad if someone isn’t prepared to take such risks. For me one the delights of small presses is that they are often prepared to risk profits in search of integrity of various sorts. I’m not going to criticize someone for doing what they need to do in order to keep a business afloat, though I’d prefer to see some direct evidence that this is necessary, rather than people relying on received wisdom along the lines of “green covers don’t sell”. It may be that what you have been told isn’t true at all.
What I will criticize people for is making excuses, or trying to brush the issue off, and I’m afraid that’s the way Ian Whates now notorious post came over to me. While giving lip service to the issue, he repeatedly cited women in fantasy anthologies as evidence for his lack of bias, when the debate has been largely about women being pushed out of science fiction into fantasy. He cherry-picked data such as Lauren Beukes’s Clarke win to try to show that there is not much of problem, and then had the cheek to accuse other people of cherry-picking data. As someone who has tried to present proper data, I’m seriously insulted by that.
Elsewhere, in this comment, Whates said:
At the end of the day, it’s the quality of the story I look at as an editor, and gender is very much a secondary consideration. If the story is a good or even a great one, I’ll snap it up whether written by a man or a woman.
And yet here we have Charlie Stross and Jennifer Pelland claiming that Whates’s anthologies were invitation only, and that he generally didn’t invite women to contribute unless nagged into it by others. Those two things don’t add up, and I’m not at all comfortable with someone suggesting that women writers are no good when he apparently hasn’t given them a chance to compete. Since then, various women writers have come forward and said that they were invited by Whates, but for various reasons were unable to deliver. If that is the case, a less inflammatory response would have been to suggest that perhaps women writers have more pressures on their time, thereby preventing them from submitting as often as men, rather than suggest that they are no good. (This is a very common feminist response to allegations of, “it’s all the wimmin’s fault for not trying!”)
In short, there are ways of presenting these arguments that suggest you understand the problems, and there are ways of doing it that suggest you are trying to brush the issue under the table. Whates, unfortunately, came over as the latter.
At the root of all this we find ideas about correct gendered behavior. Men are put in the blue corner where they are expected to like cars, football and science fiction; women are put in the pink corner and expected to like babies, cooking and fantasy. You can imagine why this makes me very nervous. As female-identified persons go, I am apparently fairly girly. At least several cis-women I know have told me that I am more girly than they are. But this is no real help, because once you are out as a trans person people’s expectations of your gender performance tend to go crazy. If I’m too girly them I’m overdoing it, and if I’m not girly enough then I’m clearly not “really” female. Either way, I am a social embarrassment; people don’t want to employ me or do business with me. This stuff matters.
It is not just trans people who have problems with gender expectations either. Here’s a story from yesterday’s Guardian about a woman who has quit her job at Harrod’s because she’s uncomfortable with their “dress” code that requires female staff to wear full face make-up at all times, and keep it properly maintained throughout the day. I can understand that if she was actually selling make-up, but she worked in the music and video department.
Challenging entrenched ideas like this is not easy. It requires bravery and commitment, and a willingness to risk both profit and social standing. But most of all it requires people to recognize that there is a problem, and be willing to do something about it. If you yell at them and tell them they are bad people, the chances are that they will get defensive and try to claim they have done nothing wrong, and that “OMG YOUS WIMMINS ARE OPPRESHING ME QUOTAS GULAGS MEN REDUCED TO NEKKID CASTRATED SLAVES WOMEN PLAYING FOOTBALL CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER THE END OF THE WORLD!!!1!” (N.K. Jemisin in comments on the SF Signal post).
Is it possible that we could have less chest-thumping and finger-pointing on the one hand, and less bingo card excuses on the other? I hope so. I rather doubt it.
This is primarily for the benefit of the UK SF&F community, and in particular someone I spoke to at Alt.Fiction, but the rest of you may find it interesting too.
As far as I am concerned, it is not OK to tell me that my trans identity is acceptable, because I happen to conform to your preconceived notions of what a “woman” is, and then denigrate and make fun of other trans people because they don’t conform to what you think is “normal”.
This is partly just sisterly solidarity. I know that the trans community is notoriously fractious, and some of them don’t approve of the way I live my life, but for my part I try to be understanding and accepting of people as they say they are. I hope most of them will do the same for me.
But it is also a very visceral reaction. If you call someone “not natural” or a “freak”, well you might not be directing those insults at me, but they are exactly the same insults that other people have levelled at me. Seeing someone else get bullied in exactly the same way I have been bullied is no fun, I can assure you. The fact that I am occasionally able to escape such taunts is no comfort.
This is probably a very good time to post my review of Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder trilogy. Here it is.
So last week the nice people who run the SFWA website contacted me and asked if they could publish one of my blog posts about the women SF writers controversy. I told them I’d much rather write something new, taking into account some of the other material I’ve seen recently, and over the weekend I did so. The results can be found here.
I am looking forward to lots of comments telling me what an evil, man-hating monster I am, and lots more telling me that I have no right to speak for women.
And before anyone gets really angry, no, I did not get paid for that.
Everyone knows that the UK’s Press Complaints Commission is a big joke, an operation run by the media with the express remit of whitewashing everything that the media does. When the BBC misbehaves, however, the government has to get involved, and complaints are apparently handled by Ofcom, the communications regulator. Are they any better? There are no prizes for guessing the answer.
My story begins several months back when a Thai airline decided to hire a few kathoey as stewardesses. Monica Roberts has a recent blog here with pictures of the successful applicants. In the wake of this a “comedian” on the BBC did a sketch purporting to show what would happen if that sort of thing happened in the UK. Christine Burns has more background here, but the basic details of the “joke” were that:
A more textbook case of a dehumanizing portrayal of a minority group would be hard to find. And yet Ofcom managed to find the whole thing entirely innocent, claiming that it was only making fun of budget airlines. It is a piece of whitewashing on a par with an inquiry finding that the prisoner died of natural causes, and the mass of boot-shaped bruises, broken ribs and cracked skull must have happened when he fell out of bed. They even had the cheek to say that the BBC “could have made is clearer that the characters were not intended to be based on transgender or transsexual people.” Exactly how would that be possible when the whole point of the sketch was to respond to the fact that trans people were being given jobs instead of, you know, beaten up or murdered or something?
Paris Lees has a great post on the human cost of trans people being treated with contempt in this way by people supposed to safeguard the public.
In regulatory economics we have a term for this sort of thing. It is “regulatory capture”, and it is what happens when a regulator becomes so caught up in the agenda of the industry that they effectively act as a lobbyist for the companies they are supposed to be guarding us against. Regulatory organizations that get into this sort of situation need to either have their senior management fired, or be disbanded. They are quite clearly a waste of public money, and as Mr. Cameron is so keen to make savings he might profitably take a good look at a few over-paid bureaucrats doubtless too fond of a good lunch with their media executive pals.
Of course that’s not going to happen, because the kow-towing to media executives doesn’t just stop with civil servants, does it?
Over at the Aqueduct Press blog there have been some interesting developments on the “women in SF” debate that has been rumbling away for a while. Last week Timmi Duchamp posted expressing some confusion as to what Gwyneth Jones meant by “feminist SF”. Today Gwyneth responded, and it seems to me that the differences in definition still remain.
Before I go into this, I should note that Gwyneth explains, as I had rather expected, that the Guardian people had rather caught her off guard on the podcast. I’m not surprised. As I’ve said before, the Guardian people seem more interested in generating controversy than in reasoned debate. My sympathies, Gwyneth.
Meanwhile, back with the question in hand. In her post Gwyneth says: “I haven’t stopped being a feminist, I haven’t stopped writing like a feminist, but the Battle of the Sexes is no longer my exclusive topic.” I’m no great expert on feminist theory, but to me this sounds very much like a second wave feminism viewpoint. Let me try to explain.
First wave feminism was the Suffragettes. That’s fairly clear. Second wave feminism was the movement that started in the 60s and 70s. In theory it was about equal rights for women in all areas of life. In practice it was sometimes more about equal rights for middle class white women, and occasionally about the rights of middle class white lesbian separatists. Sheila Jeffreys is a good example of how things can go so very badly wrong.
Third wave feminism, as I understand it, grew out of a cross-fertilization between feminism and the civil rights movement. Basically feminists realized that discrimination against women was just a small part of a much wider social problem. They also got the idea that working together with other groups on the bottom of the social ladder: people of color, the poor, LGBT people, the disabled and so on, would strengthen their position, not weaken it.
Third wave feminism, then, is not just about the “Battle of the Sexes”, it is about human rights. I’ll quite happily label a post about the rights of gay men “feminist”. But not everyone would. If you still see feminism as simply a matter of “men v women” then you may well see some of my posts as “seeing sexism where none exists” (as I and others have been accused of recently).
Where it gets interesting is if you consider the possibility that the idea of third wave feminism hasn’t made it very far in the UK. I learned much of my feminism in the USA, and from Australians who had been to Wiscon. In her post Timmi notes that when she first met Niall Harrison he had a very different view of feminist SF to hers. Gwyneth is based in the UK. Farah Mendlesohn, whose approach appears to be closer to mine, has spent a lot of time interacting with US academics at events like ICFA and online.
Suppose, then, that when Gwyneth says that having her work identified as feminist means that it is, “marked as unreadable by large swathes of the general sf reading public”, what she is concerned about is that her work will be seen as incorporating the ideas of second wave feminism. And she thinks that is likely because when you say “feminist” in the UK that’s most people still think you mean. That might explain why women SF writers find it harder to sell over here and, as Gwyneth suggests, by identifying them as feminist we may be doing them a disservice.
On the other hand, as I have noted elsewhere, the UK seems to be less friendly to LGBT rights as well. I suspect it may be a class thing. We Brits tend to be trained from birth that rocking the boat is a Bad Thing, and saying the wrong things may risk your social standing. That’s a gross generalization, of course, and probably unprovable, but I still think we need a good dose of third wave feminism here.
The other aspect of Gwyneth’s post that I feel I should address is where she lays the blame primarily on the shoulders of UK fandom.
The trouble is, I believe that the “problem†the fans are are worrying over is largely of their own making. We get what we celebrate, says Dean Kamon (inventor and science populariser). I don’t know much about the man, but that sounds right. UKSF fandom has not celebrated female writers. Sf’s highly active fanbase says “it’s the publishers†but I don’t believe that. I’m sure genre publishers and editors have an agenda, and they probably favour traditional male-ordered sf, but they’re not fanatics. They follow the money. If the sf community had been getting excited about women writers, if sf novels by women had been anticipated, talked about, discussed, on an enthusiastic scale, the wider sf reading public would have taken notice, the publishers would have been seeing interesting sales figures and they’d have reacted positively.
To some extent I think she’s right. As Farah has pointed out, the BSFA Awards have a particularly woeful record as far as recognizing women writers goes. On the other hand, we all live in the same cultural bubble. British readers may not have bought women SF writers in very large numbers, but equally I suspect that that when it comes down to decisions as to which books to commission, UK publishers are much less willing to take a risk on women writers than on men. If the books are not available, people can’t buy them.
I also note that a lot of the writers people like Timmi and I enjoy are not published by the big, multi-national New York houses, they are published by people like Prime, Night Shade, Small Beer, Tachyon, Subterranean and Aqueduct. Books by the successful American small presses are harder to come by in the UK than they are in the US. And that’s one reason why I am very pleased to be selling some of them. There’s no point in talking up women SF writers if people can’t buy their books easily. As Gwyneth says, if we see more sales, eventually publishers should sit up and take notice.
Update: Something had been nagging away at the back of my mind with regard to Gwyneth’s comments about publishers. Eventually I remembered it. A few days ago Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a great post for Book View Cafe. The first part is all about “literary” fiction and its pretensions, but the second half deals with publishers’ fixed ideas about YA fantasy. It is true that publishers follow the money, but as Le Guin explains they tend to follow it in a rather blinkered fashion. So once they get the idea into their heads that the SF that sells best is SF by men, then that soon mutates in their minds into “SF by women doesn’t sell”, and a consequent unwillingness to even try.
Ian Sales’ SF Mistressworks project is coming together nicely. In order to help get him started I have offered him a number of reviews I did for Emerald City, and a couple of those have now appeared. They are:
More will be appearing in due course. And of course the site also offers fine reviews by several other people.
Remember the Green Carnation Prize? Well over at The Bookseller Simon Savidge reveals that he’s having difficulty getting submissions from several publishers because of the need for the author to identify as LGBT.
Clearly this is a complex issue. Some authors may not wish to publicly out themselves, in some cases for very good reasons. But equally it appears that there are publishers who do not want their authors winning prizes for being queer, because that would be bad for business, so they think.
The Lammys have problems like this too, and one of the ways around it is to widen eligibility to accept books that contain LGBT content, because then the jury can call really good books in without having to get publisher permission. You can also talk to the writers to see if they will publicly ask their publishers to submit them. But somehow I’m not at all surprised that UK publishers are being coy in this respect. What one does in private is one’s own affair, old chap, but one doesn’t talk about it in public, don’t you know?
No, really, I am trying to stop posting about this stuff, but some of it is too weird to ignore.
Remember the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? That’s the catalog of mental disorders used by the American Psychiatric Association, which is currently undergoing revision. I have said before now that this is less a medical diagnostic tool, and more a tool for social control. Well, it gets worse.
The current plans for DSM V neatly split on political lines. Psychiatrists who are sympathetic to trans people are allowed to diagnose Gender Incongruence, which can be cured by gender transition. But those who are opposed to trans people could diagnose Transvestic Disorder and Autogynephilia, suggesting that the patients are abnormally erotically aroused by wearing women’s clothes, and possibly even sexually obsessed with images of themselves dressed as women.
One of the ways in which the trans community tried to challenge this was to point out how odd it was that this diagnosis could only be applied to male-bodied people wearing “women’s clothes”. It was a classic case of “women who want to be like men are admirably ambitious, but men who want to be like women are crazy.”
So what have the proponents of this daft idea done? You guessed, it, they have extended the definition to women wearing men’s clothes, and have invented another new disorder: Autoandrophilia. And if this is officially adopted into the DSM, it will be possible for a woman to be diagnosed as mentally ill for wearing jeans.
And Julie Bindel says that it is trans people who try to enforce gendered behavior. Sheesh!
Also, you know, even if people do have a clothing fetish, what’s so weird about that? What I find weird is that some people are so obsessed with what sort of clothing other people are wearing. I’m not suggesting that people should be locked up or hospitalized simply for being transphobic. But I do think that they shouldn’t be put in charge of other people’s mental health.
A couple of days ago I wrote about the French convention, Imaginales, run by my friend Stéphanie Nicot. Now I am even more annoyed that I could not go this year, because I learned from Rose Fox on Twitter that Stéphanie has just got married. What’s more Rose saw the story in Le Figaro!
Why is that so? Surely the French are not that interested in speculative fiction editors, are they? Well, no. Stéphanie’s wedding made the papers because she’s a lesbian. They don’t have gay marriage laws in France, but Stéphanie is trans, and apparently this allowed her and Élise to marry. I’m not sure what the status of trans rights legislation in France is, but reading the article in Le Figaro I get the impression that Stéphanie turned down the option to legally change her gender so that she and Élise could marry, thereby striking a blow for lesbian rights. That sounds very like Stéphanie to me, she’s a wonderful activist.
Anyway, my very best wishes to Stéphanie and Élise. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to offer my congratulations in person last weekend, but I hope you had a wonderful day, and will have a very happy life together.
The latest Guardian Books podcast went online today. There is some interesting material, including discussion of the development of language, and an interview with Téa Obreht. The bit that will interest most of you, however, is right at the end. Following on from the dreadful David Barnett article, the podcast interviews Gwyneth Jones about the current state of women in science fiction.
It is a bit embarrassing. To start with the podcast identifies Nicola Griffith as “a blogger” rather than “an award-winning British science fiction writer”, which might have been more appropriate. When asked about women’s involvement in the field, Gwyneth pretty much buys into the invisibility mantra by stating that there were almost no women writing before the 70s. And when asked to name five modern women SF writers she can only manage two: Tricia Sullivan and Justina Robson.
To be fair, I think the latter question meant UK-only, but hey: Liz Williams, Karen Traviss, Jaine Fenn. Also I have no idea what editing The Guardian may have done to Gwyneth’s words, or what warning she will have had about what she was to be asked. But it re-affirmed my opinion that The Guardian isn’t really interested in SF other than as a means to get people yelling at each other in comment threads.
I wasn’t planning on doing any further feminism posts for a while, but last night something newsworthy blew up so I’m afraid here I am again.
It started with Roz Kaveney tweeting about a blog post by the prominent Australian “feminist”, Sheila Jeffreys. The post that Roz links to is an extended rant about the evils of trans people, including the allegation that gender reassignment is a massive exercise in eugenics and drawing a parallel with the Holocaust.
Men, a class which, by the odd definitions Jeffreys and her allies use, includes all trans people, are not permitted to post on the site, but at least one female-born, female-identified ally has tried to respond (and copied her comment to her LJ). Whether her comment be will allowed on the site is still uncertain at the time I’m writing this. Maybe she’s subconsciously male-identified, or has been brainwashed.
You want to know why all trans people are “men” don’t you? It is because trans women are male-born and trans men are male-identified. See, easy when you try.
The question that kept coming up on Twitter this morning was how people who identify as feminists could possibly have got to such bizarre and hate-filled beliefs. Isn’t feminism all about equality and diversity? (Let’s avoid the discussion about how feminists like me are vicious, man-hating harpies. I have had that explained to me here before, thank you.)
Well, who am I to know? I’m just a fluffy-headed pathetic dupe of the Patriarchy. But here are some ideas to play with.
Firstly most transphobic people seem to have odd ideas about the sanctity of “nature”. You often see them complain that what trans people do is “not natural” or “against nature”. I watched the recent documentary, All watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, on the BBC and found it very confused and sloppy, especially as I’ve recently been watching the re-runs of Kenneth Clark’s Civilization. However, Adam Curtis does have a point in that some people do have a concept of “nature” that is pure, simple and unchanging, and therefore Right in some way. Feminists are often environmentalists too, so this may feed into the mix.
Then we should probably consider the origins of feminism. Let’s start with the idea that men and women are equal. There are no biological reasons why a woman can’t do a job that a man can do. There are some obvious exceptions — a woman can’t make another woman pregnant without artificial help — but broadly speaking most feminists would agree with that position.
But if there are no biological differences, how does one become a “man” or a “woman”? That is, a gendered person as opposed to a sexed person. A common feminist argument is that people are socialized during childhood. This is the “nature v nurture” debate. And if you accept that the only way to become a “woman” is to be raised as a “girl”, then naturally trans women are a logical impossibility. If your view of feminism is firmly grounded on such beliefs of the nature of womanhood, then you cannot accept trans women as legitimate without abandoning your belief in the theoretical basis of your feminism. Hence brain explosions.
Obviously a certain amount of flexibility helps here, and I’m sure that there are theoretical treatments that get around the problem. Hopefully someone will explain.
The eugenics angle is quite interesting in that it directly reflects something in The Female Man [buy isbn=”9780575094994″]. Russ postulates that in Manland boys who fail their masculinity exams will be required to become “half-changed” (transvestites) or “changed” (transsexuals). This has definite parallels to the “sterilization of the unfit” ideas that Jeffreys has. Now I’m not at all suggesting that Jeffreys got the idea from Russ, but it does throw some light on how such ideas might arise.
Another issue that has been highlighted by Julia Serano in her excellent book, Whipping Girl [buy isbn=”9781580051545″], is that much of the antagonism displayed towards trans women by feminists is not anti-trans as much as anti-feminine. The idea is that in a non-sexist world no woman in her right mind would waste time on fashion and the like. Women allegedly only take an interest in such things because they are forced into it by men. Trans women, who are often accused of being obsessed with gender performance, are an obvious target for people who are anti-feminine.
A related line of thinking is the psychiatric concept of “autogynophilia”, which holds that trans women are sexually obsessed with images of themselves in women’s clothing. Such ideas also preclude the possibility that a woman might “feel sexy” when she’s dressed nicely, because women are not supposed to be filthy, sexual creatures, don’t you know. But I think this is mainly a male-originated idea, not a feminist one.
Finally there is the whole question of the gender binary. The idea that there are only two legitimate genders is very corrosive, especially for those who identify as genderqueer, genderless, third gender and so on. But if your project in life is to destroy the gender binary then trans people suddenly look like very convenient shock troops. And if that is what you want them to be, then you need to make sure that they don’t conform to the binary after transition. Which in turn leads to feminists who are fully supportive of trans people provided they don’t have surgery, or provided they don’t try to pass.
What I have tried to do here is to show how completely reasonable feminist ideas, if pushed to extreme, can lead one inexorably into transphobia. I probably haven’t caught them all, and I certainly don’t have pat answers, but given the discussion on Twitter I though it would be worth opening up the debate, because then we might all be better equipped to help prevent people falling into the black hole of hatred that Jeffreys has dug for herself.
As you may have seen here in comments, Kari Sperring was a bit concerned that Ian Sales’ list of women SF writers marginalized women who only wrote fantasy. Ian suggested that she did her own list, so she has done. You can find it here. Please add your own suggestions if you have any.
Update: And I should also point you at the Feminist SF Wiki. If you want to do more detailed biographic work about a woman writer, artist or whatever, that would be a good place to post it. (You are welcome to try Wikipedia, but don’t blame me if you spend half your time fighting edit wars against male editors who challenge the importance of any women they see pages created for.)
Although the issues with women authors we have been discussing recently are very real, the situation with artists is much more severe. We hardly ever see a woman on the Best Professional Artist ballot for the Hugos. I was very pleased to see Kinuko Y. Craft, Julie Dillon and Irene Gallo on the Chesley ballot, but I think they are the only women on the whole thing (excluding Lifetime Achievement, of which much more later).
I was reminded of this today because Jeff VanderMeer did a post about Leonora Carrington who was a surrealist artist and also a writer (she was a friend of Angela Carter). She died last week. I’d never heard of her. I should do better.
But my real failure came to light with another death a few weeks ago. Jeffrey Catherine Jones was one of the leading lights of fantasy art. Frank Frazetta apparently called her “the greatest living painter”. She was also, as you may have guessed from the name, a trans woman.
There’s a very nice obituary for her in the June Locus, from which I learned that she has four Hugo nominations, and two World Fantasy nominations, one of which turned into a win. These all occurred before she came out as trans and added the Catherine to her name, but I’m very happy to acknowledge her as being there before me. (Other people may have been too, of course, but I only talk publicly about people who I am certain are publicly out.) More recently, she won a Spectrum Award and was named a Spectrum Grand Master. I see she’s up for the ASFA Lifetime Achievement Award, and I very much hope that she wins.
But I do wish I had known more about her earlier so that I could cheer her on, and I would have loved to meet her. Mea Culpa.
In response to the ongoing discussion about the lack of visibility of women SF writers, Ian Sales has set up a blog that intends to review SF books written by women. He can’t do it all himself, so he is looking for volunteers to write the reviews. You can find the blog here.