Feminism

Danger, Government Employees

~ Cheryl ~ 18 Comments

And if a sports post doesn’t put people off, maybe a trans rights post will.

Some of you may have wondered, at times, why trans people are so paranoid about ID schemes, full body security scanners, and even answering census questions honestly. Here’s an example. Last week a trans woman from San Francisco went into her local Department of Motor Vehicles office to have changes made to her driving license so that it matched her new name and gender. This is all perfectly legal, and the process went through without a hitch. Until Monday, when she:

received a letter from the person who had processed her name change at the DMV. In the letter, which had been mailed to her at home, the DMV employee quoted from the Bible and stated that Amber had made a “very evil decision.” The strongly-worded letter told Amber that she was “an abomination” and said that homosexuals should be put to death.

Further details from Monica Roberts. My friends at the Transgender Law Center are doing what they can for Amber, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the DMV employee in question now has a very expensive lawyer and a bunch of well-financed “Christian” pressure groups lining up to provide protection. The local papers will doubtless be full of people whining about the need for “freedom of religion.” Yes, even in San Francisco.

Because, you know, what chance do trans people have when even Glee finds the word “transsexual” too disgusting to use on television? At Entertainment Weekly, Margaret Lyons is bemused.

Update: And I almost forgot to mention, when Apple’s famously censorious App store thinks demeaning trans people is perfectly OK.

And yes, it might only have been a letter, but the creep in question now knows where Amber lives. From yesterday’s L.A. Times:

Los Angeles police investigators are seeking five suspects in connection with an attack on a transgender woman in Hollywood that left the 25-year-old victim bloodied and battered with a broken jaw and cheek bone.

The victim had just left a bar near the intersection of La Brea and Melrose avenues in the wee hours of Oct. 1 when she was attacked by three women and two men.

According to witnesses, the attackers were beating and kicking the victim in the middle of the street, said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Mitzi Grasso. The victim was kicked in the face and was hit on the head with a bottle, leaving cuts on the victim’s neck.

For those of you not keeping score at home (for which I don’t blame you in the slightest), here’s the list of trans people known to have been murdered in 2010.

TDOR 2010 - November 20th

Pressure Tells

~ Cheryl ~ 59 Comments

It looks as if the long-running “Moongate” saga is coming to an end at last. From today’s World SF News I learned that Wiscon has decided to rescind their invitation to Elizabeth Moon to be one of their Guests of Honor for next year on account of the bizarre Islamophobic blog post she made earlier this year.

From a con-running point of view, this is a highly contentious issue. I don’t think anyone who has been involved in running a convention, or being a Guest of Honor, will be entirely comfortable about this. From one point of view it seems very much like a witchhunt was launched against Moon, and that the convention caved in to pressure. Exactly the same tactics could be used to force another convention to rescind an invitation to a guest because she is lesbian, or a feminist. Indeed, I’m sure someone out there in fandom is just itching to launch such a campaign.

But no decision takes place in a vacuum, and this one has taken a long time to happen. I’m sure that much discussion took place, both in public and in private. At least some people claim to have talked to Moon. Possibly they hoped she would issue some sort of retraction. Obviously she hasn’t done so, or we would have heard about it.

The public reaction has included discussion of the most suitable response, should Moon stay as a GoH. This has, to some extent, had the beneficial effect of putting the issue in the limelight. All sorts of people have written excellent posts challenging what Moon wrote. But at the same time Muslim and PoC fans were unhappy that they were being, as they saw it, required to defend their right to be at Wiscon. And many people simply didn’t want the atmosphere of the convention ruined by demonstrations. I suspect that quite a few people simply decided not to go this year. Membership take-up comparisons with previous years would be interesting.

It is worth noting that the decision to rescind Moon’s GoHship appears to have been taken by Wiscon’s parent organization, not by the convention committee itself. This is exactly the sort of thing that parent organizations are for. A convention committee is almost certainly personally invested in the decisions it has taken. They may see the attacks on Moon as personal attacks against themselves. The parent organization is not so closely involved. Also it is less interested in the current year’s event, and more in the long term health of the convention. You have to assume that they felt the affair was doing Wiscon a lot of damage.

My own feelings on this have been very conflicted. As a Director of an organization that runs conventions I find the whole thing very scary, and I quite understand that many authors feel that a bad precedent has been set.

I’m also generally opposed to the whole “with us or against us” attitude that seems to have driven much of the debate. Moon’s comments might have been abominable, but I’m sure that there are very many Americans, and indeed British people, who think pretty much the same things. They have all been listening to the nonsense pumped out by the popular media over issues like the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”, and now apparently a new panic about Islamic superheroes. Had this turned into an opportunity to get Moon to change her mind, it would have been a good thing. That hasn’t happened, and possibly the ferocity of the original response played a part in that.

Mostly, however, I don’t go in for confrontation on issues like this because I don’t expect to win. I’m so used to being patted on the head and told that the concerns of trans people are not a political priority, and that complaining will only make us more unpopular, that I have internalized that idea. I tend to opt for consciousness raising rather than confrontation. Why jump up and down and yell and get people hating you if you are only going to lose?

Look, for example, at what happened last year when Stonewall chose the rabidly transphobic Julie Bindel as their Journalist of the Year. My friends in London demonstrated outside the award ceremony, but the British LG community closed ranks and thumbed their noses. So much so that they have nominated another transphobic journalist this year: Bill Leckie, who has even drawn criticism from Stonewall Scotland for one of his offensive articles.

Given the way that feminism goes, I’m sure that Wiscon has had transphobic GoHs in the past. I suspect it will in future. One of the reasons I stopped going to Wiscon was that it became clear to me that I was the wrong sort of trans person for them. If I wanted to be more open about myself, Wiscon would not be a safe space for me. So I stopped going, rather than complain.

But you know, strange things happen. Because also in my morning blog feeds today was this article from Pink News. What do you know, Stonewall has caved too! Maybe yelling does work after all.

So where are we? Have we found ourselves in a world of mob rule where anyone with a following on the Internet can hound innocent writers and convention committees into doing their bidding? Or have we found ourselves in a world in which the ignorant expression of hatred for people you have defined as different, and therefore inferior and immoral, has become socially unacceptable?

That Equality Report

~ Cheryl

I promised you a post on the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s new report, How Fair is Britain? Here it is.

As I mentioned on Monday, mostly the report has little to say about the status of trans people in Britain because the EHRC does not have sufficient data to draw any conclusions. This isn’t surprising. The numbers of trans people are very small, they are not a fashionable group of people to study, and even if surveys did ask respondents if they identified as trans many trans people would lie for fear of outing themselves. Nevertheless, there are a number of rather depressing comments.

On Crime

In a small study of the experience of 71 transgender people, over half said that they had experienced harassment, and a smaller proportion (12 people) said that they had been physically assaulted: a large amount of crime against this group appears to go unreported.

A survey of attitudes among 872 transgender people found that two-thirds felt confident that they would be treated appropriately by members of the police service as their acquired gender. However, around 1 in 5 of those who had had contact with the police (68/367) felt that they were treated inappropriately, with attacks against them not being taken seriously and inappropriate searches being carried out.

On Health Care

The ‘Patient Satisfaction with Transgender Services’ which surveyed the opinions and experiences of 647 individuals at all stages of treatment/transition, found that 1 in 7 transgender people who responded to the healthcare section of the satisfaction survey felt that they had been treated adversely by healthcare professionals because of their transgender status.

On Education

In the same survey, transgender students were identified as the group who secondary teachers think are least supported in school (with only 7% of secondary teachers saying that this is the case). Also, only 7% of secondary teachers say that their school is ‘very active’ in promoting equality and respect for transgender pupils.

Despite two-thirds of lesbian, gay and transgender secondary students reporting that they have been victims of often severe bullying (17% of those bullied reported having received death threats), most teachers say that their schools do little to very actively promote respect towards lesbian, gay and transgender young people.

On Employment

Given the size of the transgender population, national survey evidence is unable to shed light on their economic position. However, a small 2008 survey of 71 respondents by the Scottish Transgender Alliance found that among respondents there was a high unemployment rate with 37% (N=26) receiving out of work benefits. There was also a high reported self-employment rate at 20% (N=14) perhaps because some members of the transgender community avoid situations where they do not have control over their work environment and the people with whom they have day-to-day contact.

There is very limited information about the economic position of the transgender population in the labour market, although research suggests that it is not favourable. A small-scale Scottish study (with 71 respondents) found that 55% of transgendered people had an HND/degree or postgraduate degree, but only 30% had a gross annual income of over £20,000, and almost half had a gross annual income of under £10,000.

Although little empirical work has been done in the area of employment for transgender people, it is reported in qualitative research and small-scale survey work that the employment sphere is the space in which transgender people face the most significant and pervasive levels of discrimination.

As a consequence of harassment and bullying 1 in 4 transgender people will feel obliged to change their jobs.

On housing

For transgender people, housing problems or crises can be related to aggression from neighbours and/or others in the local area, or the breakup of families on discovering a member of the family is transgender. These experiences may trigger a housing crisis or lead to homelessness.

I’m not posting this in the hope you folks will feel sorry for me. I know I have been very lucky. I have a home of my own, a decent income, and a wonderfully supportive relationship. But I have been through times when my annual income was in 4 figures (and I was afraid to go to social services for help). I have been through times when suicide seemed like a logical option. It is a bad place to be in, and there are many people in the UK, and around the world, who are in that place now.

Of course there are very many people who are much more seriously disadvantaged because they live in extreme poverty. But this is such a small problem in comparison to their plight. It is a problem that would be largely solved if we, as a society, would just change our attitudes. The economic cost is pitifully small.

So what can we as individuals can do about this? Trans people are such a small and despised minority that they are mostly off the political radar. Writing to your MP won’t help a lot. What we can do, however, is challenge opinions. The main reason why trans people are such a disadvantaged group is that politicians are afraid to do anything to help them. And that’s because when trans people are featured in the media it is generally either as the butt of jokes, or because some journalist is outraged that anything at all is done to support “perverts”. While those media attitudes exist, trans people will always be a political scapegoat rather than a protected group.

So next time you hear or see someone trashing trans people in public, do me a favor and challenge it, please.

You might also read this article by Matt Cheney, which I think is wonderful. If we were less obsessed with gender, and the maintenance of male superiority, we would be a lot less terrified by people who don’t fit our neat social boxes.

Update: For comparison, the National Center for Transgender Equality today issued a report on trans people’s access to health care in the USA. It makes horrific reading. The headline statistic is that 19% of respondents to the survey (of 6450 people) were refused care outright.

List Making Time

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

Over at Torque Control Niall Harrison has embarked on a project to give more publicity to science fiction written by women (and Goddess knows it needs it). Amongst other parts of the project, he wants people to email him with their lists of the 10 best SF novels by women in the past 10 years. Here are some possibilities:

  • Light Music, In War Times – Kathleen Ann Goonan
  • Silver Screen, Mappa Mundi, Natural History, Living Next Door to the God of Love, The Quantum Gravity series – Justina Robson
  • The Archangel Protocol series – Lyda Morehouse
  • Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, Poison Master, Banner of Souls – Liz Williams
  • Solitaire – Kelley Eskridge
  • The Speed of Dark – Elizabeth Moon
  • Memory – Linda Nagata
  • The Etched City – K.J. Bishop
  • Mindworlds – Phyllis Gotlieb
  • Maul – Tricia Sullivan
  • Spin State, Spin Control – Chris Moriarty
  • Not Before Sundown – Johanna Sinisalo
  • The Year of Our War – Steph Swainston
  • The Wess’har Wars series – Karen Travis
  • Dreamhunter, Dreamquake – Elizabeth Knox
  • The Burning Girl – Holly Phillips
  • Hav – Jan Morris
  • Spirit – Gwyneth Jones
  • Boneshaker – Cherie Priest
  • FEED – Seanan McGuire
  • The Hunger Games series – Suzanne Collins
  • Who Fears Death – Nnedi Okorafor
  • Carnival – Elizabeth Bear
  • The Green Glass Sea, White Sands, Red Menace – Ellen Klages
  • Warchild, Karin Lowachee
  • Moxyland, Lauren Beukes

There are, of course, many more. I’ve limited myself to books I have read and am considering for my list. Note that the definition of “science fiction” needs to take into account that fact that Perdido Street Station won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which is why books like The Year of Our War and The Etched City appear here, event though they are often classed as fantasy.

Narrowing this down to 10 is going to be hard.

Trans People and Coming Out

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Today is International Coming Out Day. You can expect to see a lot of LGB people writing happy blog posts about what a positive experience coming out is, and how more people should do it. It is a wonderful, uplifting event. Posts by trans people, in contrast, will probably be rather less common, and not just because there are fewer trans people.

As Hal Duncan noted during the recent Salon Futura podcast on writing LGBT characters, social attitudes towards LGB people have softened considerably over his lifetime. That’s not true everywhere in the world, as yesterday’s reports from Serbia make all too plain. But conditions for trans people, even in the West, are far less friendly. A report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission titled How Fair is Britain? was issued today. Mostly what it has to say about trans people is “we don’t know” because there are so few of them, and they are so rarely studied, but what evidence it does have suggests that they are more discriminated against than any other group included in the report. I’ll comment on this in more detail another day.

On October 1st a new Equality Act came into effect in the UK. Mostly this is a very good thing that extends and consolidates rights for various disadvantaged groups in society. For trans people, however, it took rights away. In direct contravention of the existing Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act states that trans people who have completed gender transition are not to be legally regarded as persons of their desired gender. It states that all trans people can be legally discriminated against in a wide variety of ways. I can legally be denied work and housing, thrown out of pubs and restaurants, denied service in shops, and denied access to transport services, simply because someone else says that they find my presence offensive. The right of other people to do these things to me is enshrined in UK law.

This new law is almost certainly in contravention of both British and European Human Rights legislation, but in the absence of a successful test case it still stands. Given the existence of such legislation, it is unsurprising that trans people are unwilling to be open about their status (though from what I recall of reading early drafts, the Equality Act makes concealing your trans status during a job application a criminal offense).

The argument for coming out is, of course, that the LGBT community needs role models. Gareth Thomas is doing a wonderful job in the rugby world, and the It Gets Better campaign on YouTube is providing much needed emotional support to frightened LGBT teens.

Trans people can be role models too. Chaz Bono has lent his support to the It Gets Better campaign. A potential role model in the UK is Nadia Almada, the Portuguese woman who won Big Brother. Judging from this interview with my friend Christine Burns, Nadia is a bubbly, confident person with a positive outlook on life. She’s busy setting up a new business. But the interview also touches on her suicide attempt following the recent Ultimate Big Brother show, which re-united past winners.

When Nadia was first on Big Brother, her housemates were unaware of her trans status. The programme’s producers played this up to the viewers, who were let in on the secret. That was part of the “entertainment”. For the reunion show, everyone knew about Nadia’s background. As this interview reveals, Nadia’s housemates were allowed to bully her, and this bullying was edited out by the TV company, thereby avoiding the outcry that resulted from the racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty, and making Nadia seem ill-tempered and hysterical to the viewers. This too was part of the “entertainment”. You can say this was all Nadia’s fault for wanting to be on TV, but putting yourself forward in that way is exactly what being a role-model is all about. You can’t inspire anyone if you keep yourself private.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all you were risking was yourself. Unfortunately homophobic and transphobic bullies don’t content themselves with persecuting the objects of their hatred. They often turn their attention to the families of those people too. You may have noticed that I have been rather more open about my own status of late. That’s because I am no longer living with my mother, and her home is no longer at risk of being vandalized simply because I live there.

The average age of gender transition in the UK is apparently around 40. That, I am sure, is an historical artifact. It makes no sense to transition at that age. Those people who want to transition are generally well aware that they are trans when they are at school. The longer you wait, the more time hormones have to make their mark on your body. The younger you can transition, the better. But until recently very few people have had the courage to go through gender transition, let alone come out.

So we currently have a society in which trans people are going through transition in late middle age. Many of them will have married earlier in life in order to appear “normal”, or in an attempt to “cure” themselves of their feelings, just as gay people did in my parents’ generation. Some will have children. If they go public about their trans status, they put their families at risk.

Finally there is the whole question of what it means to be “out” as a trans person. As I have explained elsewhere, there are many different types of trans people. Some are adamant that they are neither male nor female, and are very happy to be identified as something else. Others, however, want nothing more than to be accepted as ordinary members of the gender in which they feel they belong. For them, being out as a trans person means that they can never have that acceptance. It means that people will forever be seeing them as “really” a member of the gender they hate being seen as belonging to. It means admitting to themselves that they can never have the life that they dreamed of as children. For some it is an admission that their lives have been a failure.

Despite the desperate need for positive role models, trans people are very reluctant to come out. I regret that, but I very much understand where they are coming from, and I will try never to condemn anyone for failing to do so. I hope you won’t either.

Playing Catchup

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There was no blogging yesterday because I was busy. I spent a whopping 12 hours on the day job, which was a disaster in every way except that the clients seem happy and I can bill for it. Today I need to get on with Salon Futura #2 in half the time I had hoped to spend on it. But so that you don’t have to be bored for another day, here are a few things to keep you busy.

A BBC survey finds that 18% of British people are “uncomfortable” about having LGB characters on television. That’s depressing, but a good excuse to mention that The Salon this month features Nicola Griffith, Hal Duncan and Cat Valente (and me) talking about writing LGBT characters.

That report doesn’t address portrayal of trans people at all because, as you should be aware by now, the purpose of trans people on British television is to provide the audience with someone who won’t be protected by the Press Complaints Commission that can be the butt of any cruel jokes going. However, the Liberal Democrat part of our coalition government wants to have an “action plan” on transgender equality. It remains to be seen whether the Tories will allow Ms. Featherstone to actually act on the plan.

Talking of gender issues, Kyle Cassidy had a bizarre encounter in a bar last night with someone who is obviously well on the way to becoming a Republican senator. Who would have thought that Hello Kitty could arouse such ire.

Everyone has been blogging about the potentially habitable planet that has been discovered, but in case you missed it, here’s the story.

More worryingly (and because I haven’t given Kendall a “we’re all going to die” story for ages), here are some cosmologists worrying that the amount of time in our universe may be finite. Apparently we only have about 5 billion years left. Warning: even Hannu Rajaniemi might need to work a bit to follow the argument.

And finally on the science beat, the news that dinosaurs might have been a bit taller than previously thought, because they had a lot more cartilage in their joints than we do. It would have been a great article if it wasn’t for this:

Using a “cartilage correction factor,” Holliday determined that many theropod dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus, were only modestly taller whereas ornthischian and sauropod dinosaurs, such as Triceratops and Brachiosaurus, may have been 10 percent taller or more. For example, Brachiosaurus, previously thought to be 42 feet tall, may actually have been more than a foot taller with the additional joint cartilages.

I’m guessing what they mean is that a Brachiosaurus’s legs would have been 10% longer. Much of its height is, of course, in the neck, which perhaps doesn’t have as much cartilage. But really, someone should have raised a red flag before that article saw print.

Bare Faced Cheek

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

The political machinations that surround gay rights organizations are often a total mystery to me. US readers will be well familiar with the battles over Proposition 8, ENDA and DADT. The UK has a number of similar issues. While same-sex couples are allowed to enter into civil partnerships, this is regarded as something different from “marriage”. Bizarrely, opposite-sex couples are not allowed to enter into civil partnerships. This causes particular distress to trans people who are married before they transition and are forced to divorce if they want their change of gender legally recognized, and must then go through a civil partnership should they with to remain with their former spouse. It also annoys heterosexual atheists, who would prefer a more secular arrangement.

The Liberal Democrats are trying to persuade their Tory coalition partners to simplify the whole system by allowing all couples to choose which type of partnership they want, and making the legal status of the two arrangements equal. Stonewall, the UK’s leading gay rights organization, is apparently opposed to this because they think it would cost too much.

Yes, that’s right, the UK’s leading gay rights organization is opposed to marriage equality.

But it gets worse. Check through that Pink News article that I linked to and you will see Ben Summerskill, the boss of Stonewall, calmly telling the journalist that his organization has been talking to the government about changes to the Gender Recognition Act.

Say what? You see, Stonewall is avowedly not an LGBT organization. It is an LG organization that will tolerate B people as long as they don’t embarrass anyone by being B in public, and is rampantly transphobic. If you need a reminder about what Stonewall people think of anyone who isn’t respectably L or G (and gender normative), check here.

So goodness only knows what Mr. Summerskill and his pals think they are doing presenting themselves to the government as representatives of trans people but, as one of Roz’s friends remarks here, it can’t be good.

There will, I gather, be a demonstration addressing these issues in London early in November. I’ll be busy putting Salon Futura #3 together at the time, but if you are interested I can point you in the direction of the right people.

Sex and the Single Embryo

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

The Daily Kos has a remarkable post up outlining the various ways in which human embryos, which begin life largely undifferentiated, acquire gender-related characteristics under the influence of hormones, etc.

The thing that impressed me most about the article is that it starts from the assumption that trans women are women, and trans men are men, they just have a rather more extreme case of developmental skewness than you find in intersex people. This is completely opposite to the usual media and medical (and common Feminist) view that trans women are “really” men and trans men are “really” women who can be surgically altered to look like the “other sex”. As the article makes plain, all human beings start out the same, and any medical treatment for trans people is adjusting what the body has done to itself.

The other important point that the article makes is that the natural variation in human development is far more significant than most people assume, and people with “abnormal” sexual characteristics are much more common than trans people. Furthermore, post-surgery, trans people fit well within the natural range of variation for their gender.

It is the most refreshing and complete article on trans biology I have read in a long time.

Warning: contains biology text book drawings.

Celebrate Bisexuality Day

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Who knew that there was such a thing? Not me. And yet Twitter is a fount of all wisdom. Wikipedia also has some information.

So, my very best wishes to all of my bisexual readers, especially to Cat who I see from Twitter is a little under the weather today. If you haven’t read Palimpsest yet, do give it a try [buy isbn=”9780553385762″]. It wasn’t a Lammy winner and Hugo nominee by accident.

The ICFA Paper

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Some of you will remember that I was due to present a paper on trans characters in SF&F literature at ICFA this year, but could not do so due to being denied entry to the USA. In view of some of the panels it appears I may be on at Au Contraire and Aussiecon 4 it seemed appropriate to publish that paper here so that people attending the panels could read it. It is rather long, and being an academic paper is heavily footnoted, but it is now available for those who would like to read it. See here.

Feminist SF at The Rejectionist

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

A blog called The Rejectionist is having a Feminist SF Week. They already have interview up with Liz Hand and Nnedi Okorafor, but my favorite piece to date is the introduction which contains stirring stuff like this:

Speculative fiction offers us human beings something different: not “common sense” but a sense we have in common that the world is larger and more filled with possibility than we might be able to imagine, a sense that enlarging the opportunities of other people’s lives does not have to mean making our own lives smaller. In fact, quite the opposite. If we’re writing the stories, there’s room on that spaceship for all of us.

Well, unless it is Tom Godwin’s spaceship, of course, but on balance I think speculative fiction does do rather well in this respect.

Judge Walker: Hero

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

So Prop 8 is dead, at least for a while. Of course there will be appeals. Doubtless there will be all sorts of rumblings in Congress. Many words will be written. I just want to highlight two things.

Firstly the State of California defended the case because it was legally obliged to do so. Now that the case has been lost, California will not appeal. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, The Gubernator described the court’s decision as, “an important step toward equality and freedom for all people.” Arnie also declined to appear in court to defend Prop 8.

And secondly, Judge Vaughn is a star. I have been skimming through the text of his ruling, and it is full of utter gems. Here’s one:

The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.

The ruling is a splendid (and delightfully clear) demolition of just about everything the pro-8 camp has done and said, including chastising them for using insulting stereotypes of gay people in their pubic campaign, and then abandoning all of those arguments when they got to court because they knew they would not stand scrutiny. I’m very impressed.

Parliament at Work

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

I have been pointed (thanks Kate!) at a transcript of discussions in the committee stage of the Identity Documents Bill currently going through Parliament. In particular note the comments of Dr. Julian Huppert, MP (LD, Cambridge):

There are a number of different circumstances: there are people who are neutrois and inter-sex people—there is a complicated collection. The simple solution to many of these circumstances is just not to have gender information on any of these identity documents. The people I spoke to would push for that very strongly. They are concerned about a repeat of what happened in Trafalgar square at Pride 2008 when there were inappropriate demands for gender recognition certificates. Hon. Members will know some of the history of that.

There does not seem to be a need for identity documents of any kind to have gender information. It is not a very good biometric; it is roughly a 50:50 split. Military ID, such as the MOD90, which obviously can have quite a high security clearance, contains no gender information. That might be what we should look at. It is certainly what some of the people I spoke to were keen on.

To summarise, the transgender people I spoke to said they did not want this new clause. I therefore do not support it because I support them.

So, Toiletgate makes it to Parliament. And some remarkable good sense being talked by an MP. My congratulations to the people of Cambridge on their electoral choice.

A Little More Progress

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today’s good news is that the UK’s supreme court has firmly told the Home Office that if someone comes asking for asylum because they have been persecuted in their home country for being gay (or lesbian, bi, trans, etc.), telling them to go home and be discreet about their activities isn’t very helpful. Whether this will actually make any difference, at least until a whole bunch of expensive cases have been brought to court and won, and someone in government decides to kick ass to save money, remains to be seen, but it is a step in the right direction.

We’ve Come A Long Way

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Over breakfast this morning I caught bits of a documentary on Sky Arts about the history of the pop video. I was astonished to discover that MTV had initially refused to air the video for Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (1983) on the grounds that the artist was black. Kudos to Walter Yetnikoff of CBS who, according to Wikipedia, told MTV execs, “I’m pulling everything we have off the air, all our product. I’m not going to give you any more videos. And I’m going to go public and fucking tell them about the fact you don’t want to play music by a black guy.”

When I am reminded of things like that, I am in awe of how far we have come in the past few decades.

That Old Silent T

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Today’s Guardian has an article about a new resource produced by Stonewall for prospective university students. As thousands of young people make final decisions about where to spend the next few years of their lives, many will be asking, “which institution will allow them to feel comfortable about who they are?” The article goes on to say:

It is a question the lobby group Stonewall aims to help answer for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students through a new guide to “gay-friendly” universities.

Two Stonewall spokesmen (Luke Tryl and Gary Nunn) are quoted in the piece. Both apparently use the LGBT acronym when talking to the Guardian reporter, Harriet Swain. And yet, if you click through to the document in question it states: “Stonewall’s University Guide is for all lesbian, gay and bisexual students; and all those in-between.”

What exactly does that mean? Well one thing it very clearly means is “NOT T”, because if you read through the document there’s very little mention of that additional letter. For example:

University description: A bit about the University, its unique selling points, the student LGBT society and the local gay scene.

Checklist: An at-a-glance indicator of how gay-friendly a university is by showing what provision they offer to LGB students.

In other words, the university may have an organization that caters for LGB and T students, but the Stonewall guide is only interested in what that organization does for LGB students.

You don’t write something like that by accident. Stonewall has had a long standing policy of not being in the slightest interested in trans people unless they happen to be LGB as well. But why is the Guardian article so misleading? Why, in particular, has the newspaper added a T to LGB everywhere in the list of criteria by which universities have been judged, when the Stonewall document very clearly does not use that T?

All sorts of reasons are possible. It could have been an enthusiastic sub-editor. It could be Ms. Swain’s mistake. It could have been the Stonewall people misleading the newspaper. But whatever the reason is, it is quite wrong for The Guardian to suggest that Stonewall cares about trans people. It doesn’t.

In view of this it is quite telling that the government has started to talk about “LGB and T” rather than “LGBT” (example here). It is a clever political move. On the one hand it makes clear to trans people that they are not just an afterthought, and acknowledges that the issues they face may be very different. On the other it mollifies the people in Stonewall who wouldn’t be seen dead advocating for trans rights.

Anyway, Southampton scored 8 out of 10, and no university did better than 9, so I’m quite pleased with the old place. With I knew how it did on T issues though.

Update: There’s a comment on the Guardian article from someone who claims to be on the executive committee of Warwick Pride (and I have no reason to doubt this claim, but equally no proof it is true). According to this person, one of the criteria by which Stonewall judges a university is whether or not the local LGBTetc. group has signed up to Stonewall’s “diversity” program. A number of universities have allegedly refused to do so because of Stonewall’s lack of inclusivity. If this is true, Stonewall is actually marking universities down for being more inclusive than they like. I’d try to check this, but the Stonewall site linked to above appears to have vanished. Whether this is because it has been hacked, has died under the weight of interest, or been withdrawn in embarrassment I have no idea.

Different for Boys?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Mention forced marriages and the image that immediately springs to mind is some poor teenage girl being traded like a prize cow to a guy she’s never met. Today’s Guardian, however, has a rather different take on the issue. The UK now has something called the Forced Marriage Unit, which aims to help people being dragooned into matrimony against their will. Last year around 13% of their calls were from men. The Guardian’s Amelia Hill explains:

Men report being forced into marriage because they are gay or bisexual, or because their families suspect that they are. But it can also be a result of family commitments to relatives abroad or their own expectations, securing visas or an attempt to control their son’s behaviour or protect a family’s reputation.

As with forced marriages of women, the motivations here are either a desire to avoid “shame”, or the use of children as property in some transaction. The consequences for the boys concerned can be quite severe:

Just two weeks ago, the FMU took a call from a young man living in Leicester whose family had locked him in his bedroom after discovering that he was gay. He told the FMU that his family were downstairs, discussing whether to take him to India and either kill him, abandon him there or marry him off.

The FMU reports that calls from boys last year were up by 65% on the year before, and they look like rising again this year. As the article notes, the biggest problem for boys (and even men) in such situations is that people don’t believe that such things happen. This reminds me of an email exchange I had a couple of weeks ago over a tweet I made about domestic abuse. Again there are men who have been victims of violent wives — I happen to know a couple — but way too many people refuse to take such things seriously.

At root this is really just another example of the failure of the binary. Not all men are aggressive and domineering; not all women are meek and inoffensive. Anyone can become a victim.

Some Trans Links

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

A quick round-up here for those interested in such things.

At Feministing Queen Emily explains why outing trans people can be so dangerous. What she fails to mention is that it is not only dangerous for the trans people in question — anyone who is a member of their family, or who has helped and supported them, is also put at risk.

In The Guardian Roz Kaveney attempts to navigate the minefield of labeling, with predictable results. I’m sure that somewhere out there people are yelling about how “straight” and “white” and “male” are horrible insults that people shouldn’t be allowed to use.

And finally, at The Stranger, Dan Savage discovers a lunatic doctor who is treating pregnant women with experimental drugs in the hope of ensuring that their daughters grow up to be “proper women”. I note that while there is outrage at Dr. New trying to prevent the birth of lesbians, career girls and the like, no one seems to mind the same drug being used to prevent the birth of intersex people.

Unseen History

~ Cheryl ~ 41 Comments

The weekly podcast by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe had a guest conversationalist last weekend. Amelia Beamer was on hand to talk about her debut novel, The Loving Dead, and join in the general flow of conversation. I now very much want to read that book, but the part of the podcast I want to highlight is on a rather different topic.

Jonathan, lover of short fiction collections that he is, was talking about the recent SF Signal Mind Meld on essential short story collections. Discussion has apparently happened (though I’m not sure where, it doesn’t seem to be in the SF Signal comment thread) about the gender balance of the selections. Mike Resnick’s picks are almost exclusively male. Mike (again allegedly, I’m going by the podcast here) defended himself by saying that he had focused on the old days when few women were writing. Other people then came back with names like Margaret St. Clair and Zenna Henderson who, coincidentally, were people from the Periodic Table of Women in SF whose names I was not familiar with.

Of course this is the way it works. As I have explained elsewhere, one of the primary reasons for gender imbalance is that women are invisible to many men. Consequently, when men come to write history, they often only write about what men have done. When we look back on a period in time through the lens of history we see a world in which only men were important, but that’s because it is only what the men did that got written about.

In science fiction criticism history is of interest primarily as a means of tracing influence. There is this idea of The Conversation, in which what each author writes is seen as being a response to what has gone before. In the podcast Jonathan speculates on the influence of these invisible early women writers on the field, and suggests the possibility of an alternate past for SF — a sort of reversal of the traditional alternate history idea in that we still got to where we are today, but we actually got there by a different route.

Is this plausible? If the male writers didn’t “see” the women writers, surely they would not have been influenced by them. Well, no, because one of the things you learn as a a feminist — indeed one of the things that tends to make you a feminist — is that men do hear what women say, they just do so subconsciously.

There is a common phenomenon in office life where a group of people will be having a meeting and the woman in the group makes an innovative suggestion. Everyone ignores her. Ten minutes later one of the men in the meeting makes exactly the same suggestion, and everyone praises him for his cleverness. If you don’t believe that this happens, ask any trans woman who has seen office dynamics from both sides of the gender divide. I assure you, it is very real.

So yes, I suspect that the likes of Margaret St. Clair and Zenna Henderson did have an influence on the early development of SF. One day perhaps some feminist scholar will trace those links. Writing history is an ongoing act of discovery.

(By the way, I’m sure that this phenomenon of selective seeing applies to many other social dynamics besides gender. I’m discussing it in a gender context here because that’s how it arise in the podcast.)