Feminism

Petition the IOC

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

The Organisation Intersex International, a body that fights for the rights of intersex people, has created an online petition demanding that the International Olympic Committee abandon its plans to force intersex women to undergo medical treatment before they allowed to compete in sports. Along the way it also demand that the IOC treat such people with respect rather than referring to them as suffering from a “disorder”. Should you wish to sign, the petition is here. The web site is a little flaky, but my signature registered OK.

If you have missed my coverage of the issue, try this BBC article.

Gee, Thanks Bishops

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

As you probably all know, the UK has allowed civil partnerships for some time. However, when the bill became law the Church of England bishops (who for stupid, arcane reasons have a voice in our government) insisted that they would not allow such things in their churches, and no other religion should be allowed to do so either. At long last someone has pointed out to them that this amounts to religious discrimination, and that if, say, Quakers, or Unitarians, or some Jews, want to bless the union of same-sex couples they should be allowed to do so. As The Guardian explains, the law may finally be about to be changed.

Of course what the bishops are afraid of is that they’ll lose congregations to other Christian churches who are less bigoted. But they are equally afraid of losing congregations to the Catholics if they stop being bigoted. Time to come off the fence, Archbishop?

(Also kudos to the Bishop of Salisbury for being the only serving bishop to have signed the letter to The Times, though I do wonder why so many ex-bishops are sensible when serving ones are not.)

SFX: Some Good, Some Bad

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The latest edition of the Geek Syndicate podcast (another audio fanzine worthy of Hugo considerations) sees Dave & Barry interview Dave Bradley of SFX about the recent SFX Weekender convention. It sounds like things went pretty well, and that the SFX people are learning a lot about con running. I was particularly amused to hear Bradley explaining that they didn’t announce awards in every category on the night because they had worked out that the ceremony would take forever. Yes, exactly. That’s one reason why WSFS has a fit every time someone suggests new Hugo categories.

Paul Cornell was very complimentary about the weekend as well, so I guess it will be with us for a few years yet. I can’t see me going, because the sheer horror of spending a weekend in a Pontins holiday camp will take a lot of getting over. The Tor UK people obviously had the right idea. But it is good to see a decent-sized UK convention being well run, and heartwarming to hear (from the podcast) how good the costuming was.

At this point I’d be very happy to say nice things about SFX, except today I also saw this. Yes, it is sadly predictable. Let a bunch of men to talk about a literary field, and they’ll completely forget that any women are involved, except of course to gawp at and be murdered in all sorts of horrible ways for the “entertainment” of readers.

Trust and Government-Run Charities

~ Cheryl

The EHRC document I wrote about yesterday devotes a fair amount of space to encouraging public authorities that they need to earn the trust of trans people. It will be an uphill struggle. Today’s big media splash illustrates why.

Our current Maximum Leader, Gordon Brown, is well known to be a man with a very short fuse. The Tories, because no gutter is too slimy for a modern politician to wallow in, are busy making much of the fact that staff at No. 10 live in fear of their boss. And because this is a matter of Great National Importance the CEO of the National Bullying Helpline (yes, there is such a thing) has seen fit to talk to the press and explain that yes, someone from No. 10 did come to them for help, and to do so in such a manner that the person in question will be easily identified by other staff at No. 10.

Of course this is the Daily Malice we are talking about here. It is therefore entirely plausible that Christine Pratt was tricked into revealing confidential information, and by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that she never said anything to them at all. However, people working in anti-bullying charities are horrified, and with obvious good reason. Who is going to approach a bullying helpline for support if they think that their story is going to end up in the Malice next week?

Which brings us back to the EHRC document. Public authorities have to earn trust. They can’t do that if their employees exhibit exactly the sort of prejudice that members of minority groups are afraid of. Nor can they do it if their record-keeping is horribly insecure. So, for example, a lot of trans people are afraid of the NHS. That’s partly because there’s a good chance that the staff there will treat them with hostility, and partly because once they use NHS services it is possible that the fact that they are trans will be recorded in a national computer database accessible by thousands of NHS staff all over the country. It is hard to build trust in such an environment, and even harder with things like the No. 10 bullying story around.

Politically Incorrect Trousers

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Last week the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission issued a new set of guidelines for public authorities explaining how they might best go about carrying out their duties to treat trans people fairly. Amongst the things that the EHRC would like public authorities to do is to:

set the example for society challenging stereotypes to
ensure that trans people are treated as human beings who deserve to
access services, goods and facilities with the same respect and
dignity as everyone else.

Yes, the EHRC believes that it is necessary to encourage the British public to treat trans people as if they were human beings.

One of the reasons this is necessary is, of course, because the British media spends an inordinate amount of time trying to convince the British public that trans people are anything but human, and should be laughed at, discriminated against and otherwise bullied and belittled in any way possible. It was inevitable, therefore, that the EHRC’s document would be greeted by some journalist getting into a frenzied panic about how politically correct loonies were threatening our British way of life by catering to weirdo perverts.

Step forward, therefore, Marie Woolf at the Sunday Times, who managed to ignore the vast majority of the EHRC’s document and focus solely on a small section about gender-specific clothing in schools. It was perhaps inevitable that Ms. Woolf would get the details completely wrong. The story would have been much less interesting if she hadn’t. But let’s think about the issue instead.

Gender-specific clothing isn’t a trans issue, it is a feminist issue. The British media fell over itself in its haste to condemn Sudan last year when women were sentenced to be lashed for wearing “indecent” clothing, namely trousers. And yet suddenly when trans people become involved Ms. Woolf discovers that forcing women to wear gender-specific clothing is an integral part of the British way of life that must be defended at all costs. I’m sure that the Sudanese government will be very happy at this change of heart. They might even offer Ms. Woolf a job doing PR for them. I hope she remembers not to wear anything “indecent” if they do.

How to Create a Level Playing Field

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Further to this post, here’s an explanation as to how ski jumpers are handicapped to take account of their weight. It seems to me that using such rules it would be easy to have men and women in the same competition.

Interestingly the rules were introduced to stop athletes from going on unhealthy diets in search of better performance. That’s a much more sensible approach than forcing athletes to undergo potentially harmful drug treatments in order to overcome a perceived advantage, as is proposed for intersex women.

Playing Catch-up

~ Cheryl

So, here I am back in Darkest Somerset, trying to catch up on work after two days away. Here are a few quick notes.

Christine Burns tells me that she won’t have time to edit the audio recording for a while so I’ll see what I can do myself. However, I very much doubt I’ll have time to look at it for several weeks.

One of the things that got discussed during the tour was this excellent article from the BBC on the issue of intersex people in sport. One thing of particular interest is that it appears we can no longer call intersex people “intersex”, we have to say that they are “suffering” from “Disorders of Sexual Development”. So what used to be a purely natural human variation is now a “disorder” that has to be “fixed”. *sigh*

The most interesting thing to come out of the Trans London meeting was the discovery that the UK now has a group called Trans Media Watch (Facebook group here) that will keep an eye on our media in the same way that GLAAD does in the US (though just for trans people, which is necessary because Stonewall is LGB only). I’m delighted to see such a group being formed. However, given the outcome of the Jan Moir / Stephen Gately case, there’s clearly no fucking point in trying to work through the Press Complains Commission. If 25,000 people being outraged and major companies such as BT and M&S withdrawing their advertising doesn’t suggest to the PCC that a journalist has perhaps crossed the line there’s no hope for any future complaints by LGB people, let alone trans folk.

Some LGBT Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

This week is going to be very thin blog-wise because I’m off to London tomorrow to take a look at The Identity Project. Christine Burns is giving a guided tour tomorrow at 3:00pm, and it is a public event so come along if you are around.

On Wednesday morning I should have a chance to find a proper bookshop: one that actually sells books I want to buy. Guess which one that will be.

But blogging will be light as a result. Here, to keep you going, are two LGBT-related Guardian articles.

Firstly there’s the sorry tale of how people convicted of “buggery” are still treated as criminals today, even though the crime itself has long since been dropped from the statue books.

And secondly here’s a bisexual complaining about being discriminated against by lesbians and gays (and sadly he seems to think that being trans is a sexual orientation).

Not Mad In France

~ Cheryl

The New York Times brings the happy news that the French government has removed “gender identity disorders” from a list of “long-term psychiatric diseases.” That puts France well ahead of the USA, which is only now starting to consider that such “disorders” might be “curable” by means other than torture.

Checking the French news, I am not surprised to see this decision being hailed as a personal triumph for my friend Stéphanie Nicot, who is a leading trans rights activist as well as one of France’s best fantasy editors.

Sadly the French government is also well ahead of the International Olympic Committee which is now recommending that intersex athletes such as Caster Semenya be forced to undergo medical treatment before they can compete in order to neutralize any “unfair” advantages that their condition confers. The Huffington Post and Time put the boot in. I look forward to the day when Serena Williams is required to undergo medical treatment so that she can compete on a level playing field with me. I rather fancy winning an Olympic medal for tennis and it is clear that differences in her genetic makeup, not to mention her age, give Ms. Williams an unfair advantage over me.

The Right To Discriminate

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today’s Guardian reports that a Church of England vicar in Kent has told his congregation that, “Wives are to submit to their husbands in everything.” That apparently includes keeping silent when men are talking. He stopped short of saying that women should keep silent when being beaten or raped by their husbands, but that’s exactly what his words imply.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the right to discriminate means. When bishops argue that they should be allowed to hate gays because their religion demands that they do so, it opens the door for them to claim the right to hate anyone for any reason as long as they can find some obscure verse in the Old Testament that justifies it.

Thankfully this idiot is by no means typical of CofE vicars. But he is typical of the reactionary element in the church that the bishops were pandering to when they sought to torpedo the Equality Bill.

DSM-V – First Reactions

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

The draft of DSM-V, the latest revision of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, has been released and reactions are beginning to be posted. The excellent Zoe Brain has a long analysis of the implications for trans and intersex people for those who are interested.

On the plus side, it isn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. All of the suggested language about classifying all trans people as sexual perverts appears to have been dropped. Only the poor transvestites are still left at the mercy of Ray Blanchard’s mad fantasies.

The best part is most definitely the addition of an “exit clause” whereby people diagnosed with the new Gender Incongruity condition (which replaces Gender Identity Disorder) can be said to be cured once they have transitioned to a gender they are comfortable with, rather than having to live with the stigma of mental illness all of their lives as was the case before.

The worst bits are a result of the general desire to expand the scope of the DSM to catch ever more people in the psychiatrists’ net. For example, intersex people who have been brought up in a gender that is uncomfortable for them are now to be regarded as mentally ill even though all that is wrong is the way other people treat them. Equally it used to be the case that a transvestite who was happy with his life could not be diagnosed as mentally ill. Now he has no escape. In a similar vein, here’s The Guardian talking about how things like temper tantrums and binge eating are being added to the ever-growing list of mental illnesses. Thank goodness Blanchard is not in charge of the whole thing, or they’d all be classified as sexual perversions.

Some Brief Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Because I’m overloaded yet again (sigh):

– The Economist reports on a fascinating study about differences in the ways in which boys and girls influence each other when learning.

– Theoretical Physicist Sean Carroll talks about how to write time travel stories. (I haven’t listened to this, but as Sean is also known as “the spousal unit” of the awesome Jennifer Ouellette I’m sure he’ll be good.)

– The Guardian on the odd fact that it is OK to be gay in the British army, but not OK to be a gay soccer player.

– John Holbo at Crooked Timber on the ancient Japanese art of paper theater.

Women Can’t Jump

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

I don’t normally pay much attention to the Winter Olympics, but I have been pointed at an interesting story about the ski jump event (thanks Daniel). This year’s event will doubtless be very competitive, but the record holder on the Whistler Park hill, where the competition takes place, will not be there. She is barred from competing because of her gender.

Ski jumping, it turns out, is one of those sports where the physical advantages of men don’t mean much. Weight apparently has an effect on your speed down the hill, but they can handicap contestants by changing the starting point. The IOC says that it can’t have a women’s event in the Olympics because there are not enough good women ski jumpers to make a reasonable contest. Nevertheless 2009 saw the first women’s world championships, which Van won. She took her case for an Olympic place to court in Canada, but lost.

It seems to me that this is an excellent opportunity to test out Kristin Worley’s ideas for gender-neutral competition. You could put men and women ski jumpers in the same competition and just handicap them by weight. But the IOC is having none of it. Their devotion to gender-separated sport is absolute. After all, what would happen if you let women into men’s sports and a woman won?

Ada Time Once More

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

OK folks, it is that time of year again. Ada Lovelace Day will be upon us again on March 24th. It is time for people to take the pledge and promise to write about women in technology. It’s not hard. You can find what I and some others did last year at these posts:

If anyone has any suggestions as to women I might write about this year, please let me know.

The Economist on DSM-V

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

It takes quite a lot for a news story to get on The Economist’s radar, so I was rather surprised to see them covering the forthcoming new edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). However, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that trans people are by no means the only group that the APA is trying to entangle in its net. Heck, if they are going after Asperger’s sufferers half of fandom could be in danger of being labeled “mentally ill” as they stretch the net to cover anyone whose behavior is at all suspect.

The real issue here is not whether certain people have social problems, it is defining those problems as something “abnormal” that needs to be “cured”. People break limbs, people have problems with their internal organs, people have to have diseased teeth removed. All of these things can be fixed. You don’t consign someone with toothache to a lifetime of psychiatric treatment and drug regimes to help them cope with having toothache in order to avoid the social stigma of having a tooth removed; you just get on and remove the tooth, and hardly anyone is in danger of losing their job because they have a missing tooth. The APA, however, would rather keep people sick so that they can carry on “treating” them. And what they like best of all is inventing new “illnesses” so that even more of the population fall into their clutches. Because if you can’t find any real witches to hunt you invent “signs” that you claim are “proof” that someone is a witch.

Psychiatry should be about helping people who have problems, not an exercise in enforcing social conformity.

Anyway, the first public draft of DSM-V is due out on the 10th. Expect howls of protest from all corners of society.

The Way We Were

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Given the increasing alarm about how badly people get treated by border guards these days (I got email from Peter Watts yesterday and am pleased to hear he’s holding up well), I was interested to see this archive article that The Guardian dug up. If you think having security scanners take nudie pictures of you is bad, find out what female prospective immigrants to the UK were subjected to back in the 1979.

Spreading The Gospel Of Love

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

It has been another one of those days in UK news. The Church of England hates LGBT people. The Pope hates LGBT people (with a “missionary zeal”, no less). Everywhere you look, whether it is here, or in the US, or elsewhere around the world, the thing that defines Christianity is a burning hatred of homosexuals and trans people. What is more, Christians militantly demand the freedom to practice that hatred. (And, to be fair, some other religions seem to be as bad.)

Can you imagine what people would people would say if the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury demanded the right to be allowed to hate people because they were disabled, or because they had red hair? Yet somehow the right to hate LGBT people is a part of “natural law”.

Whatever happened to the Gospel of Love?

Oddly enough, it is still out there. There are plenty of Christian groups who are fully supportive of LGBT people. I wrote about one such group a while back. Also I have many friends who are Christians, even some who are members of the clergy. What concerned me (and I very nearly wrote an angry post about this over the weekend) was that those people didn’t seem to speak out. They were happy to sit back and let the bigots and rabble-rousing politicians in their community set the agenda.

If you poke people often enough, however, they will fight back. This morning’s news stories have prompted Paul Cornell (whose wife, let’s not forget, is training to be a vicar) to speak out. You can read his post here.

I’m delighted that Paul has chosen to speak out, but he can’t do this alone. If you are a religious person (of any faith), and you agree with what he says, please support him, either with a comment or by tweeting using the #godlyforequality tag. Pope Ratty is probably beyond hope, but if enough of you speak up then the bishops and cardinals and other religious leaders around the world will have to take notice of you.

Infinite Recursion

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

The trouble with writing a post about mansplaining is that you immediately get a bunch of helpful men patiently explaining to you that you don’t really understand and that mansplaining doesn’t really exist. And I might be tempted to write something complaining about this, like Justine did, except that I have this awful feeling that I would attract a bunch of helpful men patiently explaining to me that I don’t really understand…

Some Linkage

~ Cheryl

Here’s me being lazy again.

– Lavie Tidhar is looking for books by Western authors that have non-Western settings.

– Justine Larbalestier gives me a word for something that happens to me all the time.

– If you are in the Boston area and have an interest in LGBT issues, here’s a talk in Cambridge you might want to attend.

– The Economist discovers that the traditional way of life in Qatar is under threat… from cross-dressing girls.

– Peggy Kolm on bioengineering mer-people.

– Two interesting developments in fusion research (here and here).

– Some rather depressing psychological research that shows how deeply ingrained sexism is in our minds.

French Destroy Marriage

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Crooked Timber has a fascinating post on the effect of introducing civil unions in France. These are open to everyone, not just gays and lesbians. The result of this policy has been a substantial decrease in the number of people getting married, but a substantial increase in the number of people entering government-sanctioned relationships of one kind or the other.

It is hard to interpret what this means without more knowledge of French law. For example, it may be the case that opting for one of these pac contracts is the only way that French people can avoid a religious wedding. Also, as Henry Farrell notes in the post, the pac is easier to dissolve than a marriage, and that may be a powerful selling point.

(Mes amis français, veuillez commenter.)

Nevertheless it does seem that if you are a Christianist (thanks for the word, Jay) you should be more afraid of allowing straight people to opt out of marriage than of allowing teh gays to opt in. And if you are a social conservative (hello, Mr. Cameron) you should be looking at simplifying government-sanctioned relationships as the best way to encourage people to enter into them.