Feminism

Transgender Mythbusting Comes to Bristol

~ Cheryl

On Saturday I will be running a workshop at LaDIYFest, a fabulous intersectional feminist event. The workshop will be an extended version of the Transgender Mythbusting thing I ran at the Womens’ Equality Party conference with a lot more time for detail and discussion. As with the WEP event, the point of the workshop is to provide feminist campaigners with the tools and information that they need to counter the nonsense that you find in the mass media, and the lies spread by anti-trans activists.

Attendance is free, though they will have a donations jar to help with costs. According to the schedule I am on at 2:45pm, though I’m planning to be there before that because the other sessions look really good.

In the evening there is a music event at Roll for the Soul, the bicycle cafe in the center of town. Ren Stedman is playing, and I hope to be there for his set. You do need to buy a ticket for that, but it is worth it just for Ren.

WEP Conference – Party Business

~ Cheryl

This is the last part of my report on the WEP Conference, and it covers the actual policy debates. I’m not going to go through all 20 items of business in detail. What I want to do is concentrate on areas where the debate got interesting. Please note that these are not official minutes. I believe that the actual text of the motions is being kept private to WEP members for now. Doubtless official positions will appear on the website in due course.

The first piece of business to generate actual debate was the Constitution, and in particular the issue of regionalism. The Scots made the very reasonable point that their country is governed by different laws to the rest of the UK and that policy therefore cannot be universally applied. The party executive responded that they were sympathetic to the issue but the Scottish proposals were in conflict with other parts of the Constitution and could not be accepted as written.

At this point I was expecting the Scots to get up and say that they had tried to reach a compromise but party leaders had been unhelpful. Had they done so I would have voted for them. Instead they got up and repeated their demand for special treatment, and I switched my vote. In debate you need to convince people of your cause, and if the opposition raises objections you need to counter them.

Anyway, the Scottish motion was defeated. However, thanks in part to my new pals in the Cardiff branch there was a Celtic Fringe meeting later in the day involving Scottish, Welsh and Irish delegates. Hopefully we can get this sorted next year.

The first actual policy motion was about Brexit. This turned out to be fairly controversial because the motion assumed that the UK would be leaving the EU. Many members felt that we should be fighting to stay in Europe. That was certainly the position of my friend Rebecca from the Bath branch who thereby became the first ever party member to make a speech from the floor on a policy motion.

Sophie’s position, which I agree with, is that WEP members will have a variety of opinions on Europe, which is fine. What we need to be united on is that the rights that UK citizens currently have as members of the EU need to be protected, whether we are in or out of the community. The motion, therefore, calls on the Government to maintain all of the human rights legislation that we currently have. For most practical purposes that means that WEP has set itself against Brexit, because one of the major reasons for people voting to leave was to junk those rights.

One of the motions I had attached my name to was the one on so-called “revenge porn”. British law is lagging behind some other countries and more can be done, in particular to tackle those websites that pick up on images from “revenge porn” postings and use them on for-profit sites. One member made the very fair point that the motion should be more specifically targeting profiteers rather than foolish, and often very poor, young men. From the courts’ point of view it probably does, because no one is going to waste time trying to extract a massive fine from someone who has no money — they’ll give a community service order instead. However, there is a real issue here in that, given a law to uphold, the police will generally go after the easiest targets, and they might not be the people who were the intended targets. Drafting public policy is hard.

In a similar vein, Conference also passed a motion calling on the police nationwide to follow Nottingham’s lead and class misogynistic attacks as hate crimes.

The next controversial motion was the one on menstruation awareness policy. To my surprise there was quite a bit of opposition to this. To my annoyance some of this was couched as being on behalf of trans people. Now it is true that trans women don’t menstruate, and many trans men do. However, older women don’t menstruate either. I’d looked through the motion earlier and couldn’t see anything in it that was specifically erasing trans people. It seemed to me that we were being used as an excuse to drop the motion. The speaker who said that she didn’t want to be known as a member of the “Period Party” was, I thought, rather more honest. Talking about menstruation is clearly still taboo for some women. The motion ended up being referred back for re-writing, and I expect to be involved in that process. Hopefully we can do better next year, because this is a really important topic.

Also referred back was a motion asking schools to do a “gender audit” to make sure that they weren’t encouraging gender stereotypes. Some teachers spoke against this, feeling that their professional was already too heavily regulated. Others made the valid point that the motion only covered a part of the education sector, and that colleges and universities should be included too. Again this is a really important policy area, so I hope we get a better motion next year.

Some of the motions highlighted areas of public policy that most people know nothing about. For example, I had no idea that self-employed people have nowhere near the same parental leave rights as employed people. Currently the number of people who are registered as self-employed is going up rapidly, and the vast majority of newly self-employed people are women. I was also unaware that fashion companies require models to starve themselves to well below medically safe levels. We all know about people like coal miners needing protection from unsafe working conditions, but it turns out that fashion models need such protections too.

The other motion that had my name on it was the one about making equality in health care a core goal of the party. When WEP was first set up it adopted six core objectives (see them here). Health care was not among them, but it clearly belongs there. Currently women’s health needs are widely viewed as less important than men. Apparently most medicines are only ever tested on males, because menstrual cycles play havoc with testing protocols. That’s as true of rats as it is of humans. I backed the motion in part because equality for all in health care should also mean equality in health care for trans people, and we surely need that.

There were several great motions on things like child maintenance, services for disabled children, sexual and reproductive health services, and workplace provision for carers. All of these are things that scarcely get a mention from the major political parties. There were also motions on various aspects of economic inequality, including pensions and the methods companies use for selection and promotion of staff. Sophie wrote about the motion on child maintenance here.

The big controversy came with the debate on abortion. It is inevitable that in a large gathering of women you will find some who are ardent pro-lifers. Most of the debate centered on the fact that the motion said nothing about time limits. Some people felt this meant it was trying to do away with them altogether. Of course if it didn’t explicitly say it was doing so, then it wasn’t. The makers of the motion made it clear that they had nothing to say on the subject of time limits. What the motion was all about was the fact that abortion is still technically illegal in the UK, because you have to get approval from two doctors, and is pretty much impossible in Northern Ireland. Once all of that was made clear the motion was passed by a fairly substantial majority.

Close to the end Sophie brought up a motion on women in the workforce. Splendidly, she arranged for the motion to be led by a group of girls from the Mulberry School in London. They were all Muslims, and they did a great job.

Very embarrassingly I found myself having to ask to speak against this one. The vast majority of the motion was great, but buried in it was a clause calling for 50:50 representation on company boards between men and women. I got up and explained to Conference that large numbers of people in the world (more than 10% of the human population) already live in countries that recognize three legal genders, and that there is a strong push for the UK to join that group. That means that as a party we cannot go around passing motions that assume that everyone in the world is either male or female. The wording changes are not difficult, but they do need to be done.

Apologies to non-binary people, but I didn’t think that one sentence was worth referring the motion back. Also I wanted those Muslim schoolgirls to have a successful visit to Conference. My objective for this year was education. The good turnout for the workshops, and the opportunity to make this intervention, achieved that. Next year I want to see an audit to make sure that we are not accidentally erasing a whole group of humans from our policies.

Finally there was a motion backing a move to proportional representation for the UK’s parliamentary elections. There’s a very clear link between the use of PR and gender balance in national legislatures. Depending on the system, PR is also very good for getting people from minority groups elected. Of course that does also mean that we’ll have a few more UKIP members in Parliament, but I think it has become quite clear over the past year that there’s very little difference between some Tory backbenchers and UKIP. I’d rather have them elected under their own colors.

WEP Conference – Day 3

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Sunday was all about party business. We got an incredible amount done, including adopting a new constitution and dealing with 20 motions. That’s impressive, but it didn’t all go smoothly. Here are some thoughts on the process (mainly for Kevin’s benefit, obviously).

Being a veteran of many World Science Fiction Society Business Meetings, I am depressingly familiar with parliamentary practice and know how to run such a meeting. Most people had no idea. Indeed, many delegates appeared to have not been paying attention prior to Conference and were surprised to find that there was no process for amending motions on the day. Anyone who has been at a WSFS meeting knows how much chaos that can cause, and we didn’t have a second day of business giving us the luxury of referring motions to a committee overnight to have the wording sorted out.

All of the motions were published to members in advance of Conference, and there was time to submit amendments and discuss them with the proposers. This might lead to amendments being accepted prior to Conference. Indeed I did that on one of the motions I co-proposed.

Having seen an early draft of the motion about so-called “revenge porn” I pointed out that there is a big difference between re-tweeting or sharing a post on social media, and deliberately putting those same details on a for-profit website. We changed the wording of the motion to take account of that. Similar discussions could, I think, have resolved many of the issues raised in debate at Conference.

The party had taken an economic decision not to print either the Standing Orders governing debate or the list of motions. There were 1500 delegates and printing copies would be a major tree-killing exercise. I had copies on my iPad, and the conference staff put documents upon screen during debate. It is possible that there may be technological solutions that would make life easier. For example you could put up posters with QR codes to download documents onto a phone. And just having a PowerPoint presentation rather than fiddling with documents on Windows all the time would help. It is always helpful for the Chair to make it clear exactly what is being voted on before calling for a vote.

The one obvious flaw in the Standing Orders is the procedural motion to Refer Back a piece of business. This basically means that Conference likes the idea of the motion but cannot pass it without some degree of revision. Currently no debate is allowed on a motion to Refer Back. This led on a couple of occasions to members having no idea why the motion was being proposed. Some people did it right by speaking against the motion and then moving Refer Back at the end of their speech. One somewhat clueless person moved Refer Back before any debate had taken place (making it functionally equivalent to a WSFS motion of Objection to Consideration). Inevitably that was defeated.

For next year I suggest that anyone making a motion to Refer Back should be allowed to speak briefly to explain why they are doing so (unless they already have the floor – they shouldn’t be able to use Refer Back to extend a speech against).

The Standing Orders has one other quirk that bemuses me but doesn’t seem to be doing any harm. There is a procedural motion for Next Business which effectively moves on without a vote. Functionally I see no difference between this and Refer Back. It was never used, and I don’t see that it ever would be. Either you refer back, or you force a vote. Debate times mostly are controlled by the meeting staff and discussion was cut short on several occasions because there wasn’t time for everyone to speak, so the system works without this motion.

Another suggestion for next year might be an “Introduction to Policy Debate” workshop similar to the ones we have in WSFS so that people new to the process can learn about it in advance.

In terms of meeting management I would recommend more use of “if there is no objection” by the chair to move on quickly with uncontentious items. You don’t have to put everything to a vote. I despair of the addiction that British people have to demanding that abstentions be counted. Functionally an abstention has no effect on the vote. Furthermore there is no practical difference between an active abstention, failing to vote at all, or missing the vote because you were out of the room when the vote took place. We could save a lot of time in meetings by not asking for abstentions, particularly when the vote is close and tellers are required.

I have one final suggestion for the conduct of future meetings. In WSFS all Business Meetings are minuted, and these days are also recorded on video. One of the reasons for this is the concept of Legislative Intent. It is not always clear, years later, exactly what the movers of particular motion meant by the words they used. Motions should, of course, be accompanied by an explanatory rationale, but that won’t encompass explanations made during debate. It would be good to know what was said, and videoing of the debate would allow it to be shared with members who were unable to attend Conference. Yes, I know it is expensive, but WSFS runs on a shorter shoestring than WEP.

Finally I should report on the results of the elections. As some of you will know, I was a candidate for the Steering Committee. I was asked to stand, and agreed to do so without any expectation of being elected. The competition was fierce, and I think all of the candidates were better qualified than me in every area except their diversity. I stood to prove that I could. No one objected to a trans woman standing for election, and indeed several complete strangers came up to me and said they had voted for me. I count that as a win.

In the next section of this report I’ll discuss the actual policy debates.

WEP Conference – Day 2

~ Cheryl

As I am finally putting the chaos of November behind me I can get back to posting my reports from the Women’s Equality Party Conference. This is from the Saturday.

Saturday began with a brief, introductory business session, after which my first order of business was some trans solidarity. There was a discussion session on housing policy, and one of the speakers was Jack Munroe who is famously non-binary. As far as I knew at the time, Jack was the only other trans person who was going to be at Conference and I wanted to show support.

The fine detail of housing policy is beyond my experience, but it was very clear from the session that the rental market in the UK is a mess. The Welsh and Scottish authorities have gone some way towards sorting things out, but England remains stubbornly dysfunctional. The fact that I have to rent because I can’t afford to buy because people buying to rent are driving up house prices is merely a minor part of the problem. I have rented homes in Australia and California as well as the UK, and I would much rather be in either of those two places than England.

Something that became very obvious during the housing panel is that the Victoria Warehouse was totally unsuitable for breakout sessions of this type. It is, as you might expect, a converted warehouse, and upstairs is supposed to have several separate conference rooms. They didn’t even bother with airwalls for this. They just have railings with blackout curtains to separate the “rooms”. You could hear everything being said in adjacent rooms and some of the panellists had trouble making themselves heard. When we got to questions, the lack of microphone technique on the part of people asking questions was a major issue.

Anyway, Jack did a great job despite the sound issues. We had a brief chat afterwards because I wanted to check a few non-binary issues with them before my workshops. Then it was time to attend Sophie Walker’s keynote speech.

By the time Sophie took the stage the programme was running slightly behind time. I don’t know exactly how that happened, but having arrived on time for Sophie’s speech I caught the end of a very powerful presentation by Gudrun Schyman from the Feministiskt Initiativ, the Swedish Feminist Party. I think that is the first time I have ever heard a political leader talk about the importance of love in politics.

Sophie is a very good speaker. Sandi Toksvig says that she learned on the job, which I guess gives hope to the rest of us. The substance of the speech was good too. While she steered away from potentially controversial jargon, Sophie did talk about how various oppressions “intersect”. I’m sure that she did that deliberately. Much of the power of her stance comes from her position as the mother of an autistic child. She might be a leader of a political party, but she still has to interact with social services on a regular basis. She was involved in disability activism before she became involved with WEP.

I had to skip the end of Sophie’s speech as I wanted to be on time for starting my first workshop even if no one was there. It is probably just as well I did, because no one seemed to be in charge of tech. I had brought a laptop just in case, and got it connected to the projector before anyone arrived. When a tech guy from the venue turned up later he said there were no laptops available. I’m glad I had a backup plan.

We started around 15 minutes late, and the first workshop was fairly sparsely attended. However, by the time I got around to the third session (each workshop ran multiple times to give people a chance to see more than one) we were more or less back on time and the room was packed. I mostly managed to make myself heard, despite having some loud presentations behind me and at the back of the room. As we had no roving mic, I had to stand next to whoever was asking a question then repeat it into the mic for the audience.

I got a lot of questions, for which I was very grateful because the whole point of the workshops was to dispel myths on trans issues. For example, I was twice asked why there are so many more people transitioning from male to female than from female to male. The truth is, of course, that the media is obsessed with trans women whereas trans men are able to mostly fly under the radar.

To my surprise and relief, the current campaign against trans kids being waged by the Daily Malice and New Statesman appears to have mostly escaped the notice of WEP members. There were no TERFs at conference, probably because you had to be a party member to attend and the TERFs hate intersectional feminism so they won’t join.

By far the most common question I was asked – I think six separate people over the course of the weekend – was whether I thought I would not have needed to transition if I’d had a less gendered upbringing. There seems to be a common view among cis feminists that if only trans women had been allowed to play with dolls and wear pretty clothes during childhood they would be happy to grow up to be effeminate men. I’m sorry folks, but this borders on gaslighting. Most trans people I know, and most parents of trans kids as well, have tried everything they could to avoid transitioning, and only come to transition as a last resort. The idea that all of the self-harm, the suicide attempts, the psychotherapy, the expensive and painful surgery, the loss of friends, family and career, could all have been avoided by better parenting seems frankly ridiculous to me.

I should note also that most of the (quack) psychiatric theories about the “causes” of being trans revolve around upbringing not being gendered enough. Trans “cures” pushed by (mainly male) psychiatrists always involved forcing boy children to “man up”. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that cis women think that my being trans is a result of too masculine an upbringing while cis men think that it is a result of too feminine an upbringing. I have only one thing to say to this:

Stop blaming mothers! Please.

That said, I am all in favour of creating a less gender-obsessed society, both for children and adults. If that leads to a reduction in the number of trans people I will be surprised but pleased. My gut feel is that it will result in the same number of people needing full medical transition, but a significant increase in the number of people identifying as non-binary.

Several people approached me during the weekend, both in person and on social media, to say how useful they had found the workshops. No one has complained to me directly. Hopefully party HQ will tell me if they received any complaints, but my initial impression of the weekend is Mission Accomplished.

One of the people who approached me later in the weekend said that they identified as non-binary. So that made at least three trans people in attendance. I’m pretty sure that there were more, but I don’t ask.

A quick shout out here is appropriate for Stella Duffy, whom I have met before and chatted with occasionally on Twitter. She spent the afternoon running an Open Space session. The purpose of this was to provide a venue in which people who felt that the party was still ignoring their concerns could come and have a voice. One of the most obvious complaints was the lack of mention of climate change in Sophie’s speech. Kudos to Stella for doing this because it is a damn hard thing to moderate but the feedback will be invaluable to the party.

Something else that happened when I was otherwise engaged was the cross-party panel. This saw women members of other major political parties in discussion with WEP leaders on a variety of issues. The Tories sent Nicky Morgan, who is the Minister for Women and Equalities. The Greens sent their deputy leader, Amelia Womack. The LibDems sent their candidate for the Richmond Park by-election, whom both WEP and the Greens are supporting. Labour, in the sort of own goal that is depressingly familiar these days, declined to participate.

There was a second set of workshop sessions following mine. Because I needed to decompress for a while, and also vote in the Steering Committee and Policy Committee elections, I missed the first two sessions. I had just settled into the final session of the PR workshop, being run by the party’s comms team, when a fire alarm went off.

It appeared to be a real alarm, so we all trouped off and followed the green signs down the nearest staircase. I never got to the bottom, because people at the front turned round and started coming back up. The only explanation for that was that the fire exit door on that staircase was locked. Thankfully we were able to find another staircase quickly, and it wasn’t too cold outside.

The probable cause of the alarm was smoke from the food stalls in the venue. Obviously all of the catering was shut down during the alarm. When we got back in it was around 17:00 and people were starting to think about dinner. We were initially told that food would be available again in 20 minutes, but after an hour we were told that there would be no further food service that evening save for the paid banquet. My friends from the Bath branch headed out in search of a restaurant. As a speaker I had a ticket for the VIP reception due to start at any moment. Thankfully I was able to find a sandwich at the bar, and the reception had some food too.

The evening entertainment was an all-woman comedy show hosted by Sandi Toksvig and featuring an excellent line-up of talent headlined by Sara Pascoe. The other acts were Vic McGlynn, Cally Beaton, Jenny Collier, Ada Campe and Yuriko Kotani. They were all very good, and I was particularly impressed by Yuriko.

Having been at the VIP party, I spent the evening up on the mezzanine level in a booth with, among others, Stella Duffy and Sophie Walker. That might seem unbearably swank of me, and I could have easily popped downstairs and sat with the Bath branch. However, I wanted to prove a point. People are apparently still questioning whether trans women are welcome in WEP. Well, on the Saturday of the party’s first conference, I spent the evening drinking prosecco in a VIP box with the party leader and one of its most senior members. How much more welcome can you get?

Also in that box was the head of the advertising company that gave their time and expertise to create the party logo. We had a chat, as part of which she explained to me the rationale behind the logo being available in a wide variety of colours. Most political parties have a specific colour by which they are recognised: blue for Tories, red for Labour and so on. WEP has taken a deliberate decision to use a variety of colours to indicate the non-partisan nature of what we do. I note that a by-product of this is that WEP is a rainbow party.

The comedy show ended around 23:00 after which there was a disco. I gave the DJ a few chances before giving up and going back to my hotel. Having decided that she wasn’t going to play my sort of music I collected my coat and was just heading out the door when she put on “Tainted Love”. Ah well, I needed the sleep. Sunday was going to be busy.

Yesterday on Ujima – Manuelita, Barnett, Pinborough & WEP

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s radio seemed to go off OK. Here’s the traditional round-up post.

We began with a live interview with the fabulous Tamsin Clarke of the Popelei Theatre Company. Much of the conversation was about Manuelita, the one-woman play based on the life of the South American revolutionary leader, Manuela Saenz. We also talked about theatre more generally, and about other projects that Tamsin is currently involved in. If you are in Bristol on Saturday evening and you don’t have a ticket for Against Me! then you can catch Tamsin and friends in Carved, a Christmas dinner of absurd anarchical performance and cabaret for the sinful and undeserving, at The Cube.

Next up was an interview with David M Barnett about his forthcoming novel, Calling Major Tom. David and I recorded this at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature back in October, but there was no point airing it until now as the book isn’t out until January (and then only as an ebook). Obviously I had to play Amanda Palmer’s version of “Space Oddity”. Not only is there the Bowie connection, but David’s editor, Sam Eades, used to be Neil Gaiman’s UK publicist.

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

The second hour began with the interview I did with Sarah Pinborough at BristolCon. I think this is the first interview I have done that involved two large glasses of Merlot. Sarah is great fun to interview. She has a great story to tell too. Thanks are due to Gareth Powell because I based a bunch of the questions on Sarah’s Guest of Honor interview, which Gareth conducted.

Finally on the show we had my report on the Women’s Equality Party conference. That includes a whole lot of comments from people who were at the conference, including Stella Duffy, Catherine Mayer and Sophie Walker. I was joined in the studio by my colleagues on the show, Frances and Judeline, and was pleased to see that they liked what WEP was doing.

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

The full playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Edwin Starr – War
  • Cat Stevens – Peace Train
  • Otis Redding – Try a Little Tenderness
  • Amanda Palmer & Jherek Bischoff – Space Oddity
  • Martha Reeves & the Vandellas – Nowhere to Run
  • Diana Ross & the Supremes – Reflections
  • The Temptations – Ball of Confusion
  • Sly and the Family Stone – I Want to Take Your Hand

Amanda aside, all of those tracks were taken from the soundtrack album of the V&A’s new 1960s exhibition which I reviewed here.

WEP Conference – Day 2

~ Cheryl

That was a long, and in many ways very inspiring day. Also it is past midnight, I’ve just got in, and I have had rather a lot of prosecco. So you are just going to have to wait until tomorrow for a report. Sorry.

WEP Conference – Day 1

~ Cheryl

I was up bright and early this morning to begin my journey Up North. Team WEP Bath, all six of us, were taking the train up to Manchester. The journey was blessedly uneventful, despite a tree on the track near Plymouth earlier in the morning, and there was plenty of room on the train.

The conference venue is the Victoria Warehouse in Trafford Park. There’s a big sports stadium just down the road and lots of things are painted red. I gather that some sort of soccerball thing is happening on Sunday evening, but right now the area is given over entirely to a bunch of feisty feminists.

The Warehouse has a brickwork and steel girder aesthetic, by which I mean that the bare minimum of renovation has been done. It works well enough as a venue, however, and parts of it have a pleasantly steampunk feel to them. The street food is good and reasonably priced. The bar is crap and over-priced. As conference venues go, that’s not bad.

The main event of the day was the opening ceremonies in the evening. There were speeches from various people who would be Party Grandees if we had been a party long enough for anyone to become Grand. Sandi Toksvig, of course, will never be Grand, she’s far too irreverent for that. However, there are definite advantages to having a senior party member who is also an accomplished comedian used to doing stand-up shows.

Having said that, my favorite performance of the evening was from poet, Justina Kehinde. She made an impassioned plea for exactly the sort of intersectional feminism that I want to see from WEP. The other speeches mostly backed her up, though they all failed to use the word intersectionality.

After the official speeches the party management opened up the floor to contributions. I was interested to see how this went, and a little worried that people might try to talk back against the inclusive nature of the opening speeches. The first speaker was anti sex work, which worried me further. Thankfully most of the other people who got up were just so happy to be there, and to have a political party that addressed their concerns, that they were not interested in trying to steer policy.

Team Bath was very proud of Emily, our young social media guru, who got up and talked about the pressure put on young women in social life at universities.

I didn’t have a lot to do today, other than say hi to various people. I found the Bristol branch, who have 19 members here. I also caught up with Stella Duffy whom I haven’t seen in ages. Sadly we are scheduled against each other tomorrow. Jack Munroe doesn’t appear to be here yet, but I am very much looking forward to their talk tomorrow.

The membership is very white, but not exclusively so. There were two women of colour officially on platform today, and at least three more who spoke in the open mic. There is a nice mix of ages, and of gender presentations. There are even a few men, because party membership is open to everyone.

Tomorrow I have workshops to deliver, so if you’ll excuse me I am going to rehearse once more.

Me At Eurocon

~ Cheryl

As I mentioned last week, much of this year’s Eurocon is being live streamed. You are being spared the Business Meeting, but you can get to watch my panel on Queer Utopias and laugh at how fat I look. Here it is.

The other panelists are Mariano Martín Rodríguez (Moderator), Lawrence Schimel and Arrate Hidalgo.

I also make a brief appearance at the end of Johanna Sinisalo’s Guest of Honor interview. I’d suggest that you stop watching as soon as the interviewer, Meritxell Donyate, asks for audience questions, but Johanna gives a great reply so you’ll just have to fast forward through me.

Foz Meadows in The Salon

~ Cheryl

Last week I did an interview with Foz Meadows about her recently published novel, An Accident of Stars. As might be expected when you get two ranty feminists with a strong interest in gender together, we had a lot to talk about. In particular I wanted to talk about how Foz manages to do a whole bunch of things I would not normally recommend when writing a trans character and make them work. One of the reasons for this, of course, is that if you create a world in which transphobia doesn’t exist then most of the usual rules go out of the window.

Of course we managed to find lots more topics to discuss as well. In particular Foz sheds some light on her thinking when creating the matriarchal society in the world of her book. Foz also explains how the book is, in part, about the “Susan Problem”, something which all teenage girls who read Narnia will recognize.

Along the way there’s a brief shout out to the wonderful Trudi Canavan, and some words of praise for Seanan McGuire’s wonderful Every Heart a Doorway.

The interview took place over Skype with Foz in Queensland and me in England, so the sound quality isn’t up to studio standards. But hey, video phone call to Australia; we are living in the future.

Finns for Hugos

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

MaresiCore
Yeah, I am lamentably late publishing anything for Women in Translation Month. It is, after all, the last day of August. But I didn’t want to talk about these two books until the current year’s Hugo excitement was over, because they are both candidates for next year.

It would be nice to have a Finnish author or two on the ballot in Helsinki, wouldn’t it?

Of course, this being Finland, both books are by women, and both have strongly feminist themes. I wouldn’t expect anything less of my amazing Finnish friends. Both are translations. But there the similarities end. The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo was originally written in Finnish and is science fiction. Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff was originally written in Swedish and is YA fantasy. Both are great books in their own way.

So if you’d like to know more, check out my reviews. You can find The Core of the Sun here, and Maresi here.

Diversity: It’s Complicated

~ Cheryl

Lots of people talk about diversity these days but, as this famous Media Diversified essay notes, far fewer are willing to do anything about it. What’s more, the word “diversity” contains multitudes of issues. In the LGBT community we know that “diversity” often means “gay white men”. Similar hierarchies occur wherever you look.

Even so, I was shocked to see this article from Fireside Fiction that did the equivalent of a VIDA count for SF&F by black people. By “black” they don’t mean “people of color”, because that term includes a smorgasbord of ethnic identities. I’m not entirely sure what they do mean, but I have taken in to mean people of black African descent. The numbers are stark. Out of 2,039 stories published in magazines in 2015, only 38 were by black people. All of that talk about Afrofuturism, and we still only manage 2% of our fiction from a group that makes up 13.2% of the US population.

Of course the first thing I did was to take a look at Clarkesworld to see how we (I still think of the magazine as “we”) were doing. The detailed stats from the Fireside survey can be found here. In 2015 Clarkesworld apparently only published one story by a black writer. I’m assuming they mean this one. That’s out of a total of 56 stories.

I then did my own count. I did the last 12 months because that was quicker. I counted named authors rather than stories. And I counted non-black people of color too. The results I got were 58 white, 2 black and 21 other PoC.

This shows you one of the reasons why diversity is hard. On the one hand Clarkesworld has almost 40% PoC writers. Thanks to the deal with China it has at least one Chinese writer in every issue, plus some Asian-American writers. It has also had writers from Singapore, Malaysia, the Lebanon and Thailand. And yet it still does poorly where African and Afro-American writers are concerned.

The reasons for this, and the poor showing by just about every other magazine in the field, are complex. We don’t know what submission rates look like. A lot of the stories that Clarkesworld publishes are reprints and older stories may be more skewed white. It certainly isn’t that Neil doesn’t care. He wouldn’t have so many international writers (and artists) if diversity wasn’t important to him. But you do keep having to watch what you are doing, and ask if there is anything you are missing.

With that in mind, I note that I can still count on the fingers of one hand the SF&F authors I know of who have connections to the native peoples of places outside Africa whose populations Europeans have decimated. By this I mean native peoples from all over the Americas, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and Polynesia, the Sami and so on.

Diversity is hard. So we need to try harder.

Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Good

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This evening I took myself off to see one of the most controversial films of the year. The sheer oceans of man-tears that have been shed over the Ghostbusters remake would drown entire solar systems. Goodness only knows what movie they think they would see if they were to actually go and see it. The real thing is pretty darn good.

The showing didn’t get off to a great start because the cinema insisted on putting on a bunch of trailers “specially selected” to go with the main event. So yes, there were trailers for some really bad comedy films that looked at if they had been written by men with the intention of appealing to very drunk women. There was one piece of genius by Celia Imrie, but otherwise the trailers were even more cringe-worthy than the one for Ghostbusters.

Thankfully the film itself is nothing like the trailer. To start with, Leslie Jones’ character, Patty, is much smarter than the trailer gives her credit for. OK, she’s not a scientist like the other women, but she has plenty of brain. They could have done better, but it wasn’t as bad as I had expected.

The film isn’t a continual laugh-fest, and that’s probably just as well, because that sort of thing gets wearing. There are bits that are not as funny or clever as the scriptwriters probably thought. The section at the heavy metal concert, in particular, felt very flat for me.

However, there were many good jokes, and all four main actresses did good jobs. Chris Hemsworth isn’t nearly as good without Loki to be the straight man for, but then again he was only there as eye candy, a job he fulfilled admirably.

Some of the best jokes came after the credits started to roll. I cannot understand why modern cinema audiences get up and leave before the end. Do they not pay attention to anything written about other films?

I am tempted to complain that there was too much of other people’s music and not enough of Ray Parker Jr.. However, if there had been more of that song I would probably have had to get up and dance, which would have been embarrassing for everyone.

As many other people have noted, Kate McKinnon steals the show. As I said earlier on Facebook, if you don’t come out of this film a lesbian then my name isn’t Mrs. Holtzmann.

Thankfully for my straight reputation there is also Mr. Hemsworth (swoon), and his character is called Kevin (double swoon). Now all I need to do is avoid getting the two of them confused…

Most importantly, however, I cannot for the life of me understand what all of the fuss is about. Dan Ackroyd has writing and production credits on the film, and it would be hard to find any other film with such obvious respect and affection for its predecessor. The cameos are brilliant, especially the final one, the one after the credits have started. And if you stayed to the end you will know that there really needs to be a sequel. I’m hoping that Holtzmann’s mentor gets a bigger role in that one.

National Diversity Award Shortlists

~ Cheryl

Ujima’s time as a reigning National Diversity Award champion is coming to an end. In 8 weeks time new winners will be crowned for 2016. The shortlists have just been announced and once again I know some of the people involved.

In LGBT Role Model we have Lee Gale, who is a fantastic trans awareness trainer. Lee works much harder than I do, traveling all over the country to do training. He’s a lovely bloke too.

In LGBT Organizations we have Mermaids (who are awesome), Gendered Intelligence (whom Lee works for), and Trans Pride Brighton, which is the event I am attending this weekend. Lee is here, of course, and he’ll doubtless be helping with the GI stall tomorrow. It’s all happening here.

Finally in the Multi-Strand Organization category we have Off the Record Bristol. They are the people who run Freedom Youth, our LGBT youth group. My friend and colleague, Henry Poultney works for them. Of course they do other stuff for young people too, which is why they are multi-strand. I can’t comment on that, but their LGBT work is awesome.

Best of luck to everyone.

Today on Ujima – Cat Valente, Rape Prevention, Hate Crime & Brexit

~ Cheryl

Sorry about the weird company, Cat. That’s the way it goes with radio some days.

Today’s show began with an interview I did with Cat Valente at Finncon. As usual with such things, I was only able to broadcast about half of it. All of the in-depth writerly stuff got cut. The full thing will appear on Salon Futura in a few weeks. Cat and I seem to have done a lot of giggling in that interview.

In the second half hour I was joined by Charlotte Gage from Bristol Women’s Voice to talk about the “R U Asking 4 It” fiasco, in which members of Avon & Somerset Police were taken to task by a group of Bristol teenagers for entirely inappropriate comments on rape prevention. I should note that following the initial disaster the response of the police has been fantastic. Very senior people have got involved, and I understand that today another email went around the force reminding officers of the need to be on message over such issues.

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

Next up I spoke to Jennie Darch from SARI about the rise in hate crime following the Brexit referendum. SARI is a charity that specializes in helping the victims of hate crime, and there is no doubt that their case load has increased dramatically since the vote. Charlotte also mentioned women talking to BWV about a sudden upsurge in racist harassment.

I was delighted to see that during the music breaks Charlotte and Jennie were busy comparing notes and thinking of ways in which their agencies could work together to tackle this problem.

The final half hour was given over to vox pop interviews about Brexit that I collected at Finncon. My thanks to the many lovely people from around the world who were willing to share their views.

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

The music this week was mostly on the theme of immigration. That included “Get Back” by The Beatles which was very much on an immigration theme before the Fab Four thought better of it and re-wrote the lyrics to be more politically safe (including some casual transphobia). The full playlist is as follows:

  • Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On?
  • Jama – No Borders
  • Bob Marley – Buffalo Soldier
  • Horslips – The Man Who Built America
  • Tabby Cat Kelly – Don’t Call Us Immigrants
  • Maryam Mursal – Lei Lei
  • The Beatles – Get Back
  • Fontella Bass – Rescue Me

Fairy Tales Panel Reading List

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Here as promised is my reading list from the “Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Puss in Boots” panel. Cat and Anne may want to add to it as some point, and feel free to add your own recommendations in comments.

First up, here is the poem by Charles Perrault that I read to open the panel. It is from his popularization of Little Red Riding Hood.

Little girls, this seems to say,
Never stop upon your way,
Never trust a stranger-friend;
No one knows how it will end.
As you’re pretty so be wise;
Wolves may lurk in every guise.
Handsome they may be, and kind,
Gay, and charming — nevermind!
Now, as then, ‘tis simple truth
— Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!

And now, here are some books and stories:

  • Catherynne M Valente — Six Gun Snow White, Deathless, Speak Easy
  • Sarah Pinborough — Poison, Charm, Beauty
  • Robin McKinley — Beauty, Donkeyskin
  • Salla Simukka — As Red As Blood, As White As Snow, As Black As Ebony
  • Angela Carter — The Bloody Chamber, A Company of Wolves
  • Helen Oyeyemi — Mr. Fox
  • Malinda Lo –- Ash
  • Sheri Tepper –- Beauty
  • Genevieve Valentine –- The Girls at the Kingfisher Club
  • Neil Gaiman -– The Sleeper and the Spindle
  • Linda Medley -– Castle Waiting (graphic novel)
  • Joan Vinge –- The Snow Queen
  • Margo Lanagan -– Tender Morsels
  • Greg Frost –- Fitcher’s Brides
  • Kate Forsyth -– Bitter Greens
  • Tanith Lee –- White as Snow
  • Holly Black –- The Darkest Part of the Forest
  • Naomi Novik –- Uprooted
  • Ellen Kushner –- Thomas the Rhymer
  • Patrick Ness –- The Crane Wife
  • Karen Lord –- Redemption in Indigo
  • Anne Sexton — Transformations
  • Christine Heppermann –- Poisoned Apples
  • Bill Willingham — Fables (multi-volume graphic novel series)

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have produced many anthologies of fairy tale based short stories, including the following:

  • Snow White, Blood Red
  • Black Thorn, White Rose
  • Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears
  • Black Swan, White Raven
  • Silver Birch, Blood Moon
  • Black Heart, Ivory Bones
  • A Wolf at the Door
  • The Green Man
  • My Swan Sister
  • The Faery Reel
  • The Coyote Road
  • Troll’s Eye View
  • The Beastly Bride

We also mentioned the TV series, Once Upon a Time, and Grimm.

Jasper Fforde has also done fairy tale re-tellings in his Nursery Crime series, though they are rather different projects that the subjects of the panel.

My thanks to Cat Valente and Anne Leinonen for being great panelists. Nina, I hope you feel better soon, and that I managed to do justice to your original idea.

Introducing Adela Breton

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s history conference was held in the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (yes, of course Bath has such a thing). On the ground floor of the building there was a remarkable exhibition celebrating the life and work of a 19th Century Bath archaeologist and artist, Adela Breton. Ms. Breton spent much of her life in Mexico painting Aztec and Maya cities. As with most other pioneering women scientists, her work has been largely forgotten.

Breton’s faithful recording of the ancient cities have proved invaluable to archaeologists, but the most amazing thing she did was produce recreations of the decorative friezes on the buildings, in full color. Note that this is not a case of an artist fancifully colorizing an ancient artifact, this is an archaeologist painstakingly examining a site for evidence of pigments, and recreating the art as it would have looked when the site was inhabited.

Here’s a frieze from the Temple of the Jaguars at Chichén Itzá as it looks now.

JaguarsOriginal

And here is Breton’s recreation.

JaguarsColored

My favorite piece from the exhibition is this amazing image of a bat demon. The Maya apparently associated bats with the underworld, because they live in caves.

BatDemon

The exhibition in Bath will continue to October 1st, so do pop in if you happen to be in town. Bristol Museum will be doing something soon too.

Pauline Boty and Feminism’s Sex Problem

~ Cheryl

I spent yesterday in Bath at the annual conference of the The West of England & South Wales Women’s History Network. There were many interesting papers. I was rather sad that the one about women in the Mabinogion didn’t happen, but I very much enjoyed the one about women in Pop Art.

You may recall that a couple of years ago I wrote about a BBC documentary on the women of Pop Art. One of the women whose work starred in that show was Pauline Boty. Yesterday I was privileged to hear a talk about Boty by Sue Tate who is probably the world expert on her, or at the very least has written the book.

Boty rose to fame in the 1960s. She was young, blonde, very pretty, intelligent, feminist, and apparently very fond of men. Therein lies a problem, because she worked in Pop Art, a field that is pretty much synonymous with sexual objectification of women. How is an artist like Boty, who thinks that women should be allowed to enjoy sex, to situate herself within a field that is all about men’s sexual exploitation of women? That was basically the subject of Sue’s talk.

Of course in the 1970s feminism tried to solve the problem by retreating from sex. Women were supposed to become sexless, wearing shapeless clothes that disguised bodily shape, cutting their hair short, not wearing make-up or bras, and becoming “political lesbians”. Boty, who sadly died very young of cancer, would have hated that. Lots of other women must have too, because it didn’t last.

After the talk I stuck my hand up and asked Sue for her opinion on Beyoncé. I was pleased to see that I had nailed the topic. The debate around Bey’s work is much the same as that around Boty’s: how is an attractive, sexy woman supposed to be a feminist, if she uses her sexiness in her art?

And of course it isn’t limited to them. Madonna was mentioned briefly, and from my own field I would single out Justina Robson as someone who centers female sexuality in her work and is looked down upon because of it.

I don’t think that it is a debate that is going to go away, if only because which side feminists take tends to depend on how fond they are of sex, and in particular sex with men. I am, of course, obliged to stick my hand up and declare a preference there. However, I don’t think that women can be truly emancipated until they are allowed to have pride in and control over their sexuality.

Oh, and BBC, next time you want to do a documentary about women in Pop Art, get Sue to front it.

Registration for PopSex 2016 Open

~ Cheryl

The blurb says:

The second annual Sex and Sexualities in Popular Culture: Feminist Perspectives symposium is returning to the Bristol Watershed in September 2016. Following an exciting inaugural symposium in 2015, this year’s event will continue our tradition of offering a safe, inclusive space for postgraduate students and creative practitioners to meet peers, share work and learn from each other.

For full details, and to book a place, see here.

I’ll be giving a talk. I haven’t quite settled on a title yet, but it will be something to do with trans women as sex objects in the media.

Yesterday on Ujima: Carers, Harassment, Flash, Trans & Faith

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s show on Ujima began with a celebration of Carer’s Week. Caring for relatives or friends who are unable to look after themselves is an activity that falls disproportionately on women. With the current fashion for austerity politics, social service safety nets and support for carers are both being cut back. I talked to Jan from the Carer’s Support Service and Fadumo, one of her clients.

From 12:30 Frances and I took a look at some of the issues surrounding the recent campaigns to combat internet harassment. It is a sad commentary on how politics is done these days that the main political parties (Conservatives, Labour and LibDems) have to run their own campaign separate from that run by the minor parties (Women’s Equality Party, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru), but that’s where we are.

Then again, I don’t think that the major parties would have done anything had WEP not come up with the idea. That makes it an example of how having WEP around forces the bigger parties to pay attention to women’s issues. Of course the big party campaign has Twitter, Facebook and Google as partners. That pretty much ensures that they won’t come up with any meaningful action, and of course the PR disaster of the Demos report they used has pretty much derailed their campaign.

Anyway, congratulations to the LibDems who have decided to back both horses and who on Monday are putting forward some amendments to the Policing and Crime Bill that will specifically tackle the issue of revenge porn. See here for how you can pester your MP to support this.

Ultimately, of course, what we need is a change in social attitudes, and that can only come about through education. Later in the year I will be doing a more in-depth show focusing on the campaign for compulsory personal, social, health and economic education in UK schools. That’s something that even Teresa May supports, so how lefty and progressive can it possibly be?

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

At 13:00 I was joined by Kevlin Henney and Freya J. Morris to preview this year’s National Flash Fiction Day. Both of them had brought stories to read.

Finally from 13:30 I was joined by Surat Shaan Knan of Liberal Judaism. Shaan is a good friend of mine and the person behind the Twilight People project. Obviously we talked about trans people and faith. Many thanks to Shaan for coming all the way from London to be on the show.

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

The playlist for the show starts with a Muhammad Ali tribute and then goes into a funk festival:

  • R Kelly – The Greatest
  • James Brown – Make it Funky
  • Patti LaBelle – Lady Marmalade
  • AWB – Pick up the Pieces
  • Parliament – Children of Productions
  • Prince – Alphabet Street
  • Janelle Monáe – Dorothy Dandridge Eyes
  • Chic – I Want Your Love

Because of Finncon I won’t be on air again until mid-July, but hey, that is a good excuse.

New Book, Contains Me

~ Cheryl

WisconChron
So apparently I am now a Social Justice Warrior. Or at least a reduxed one.

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that this is the cover of volume #10 of the WisCon Chronicles, an annual anthology of writings arising from the WisCon convention. This year’s editor, Margaret McBride, kindly asked me to contribute an essay on trans issues as part of the Social Justice theme of the book. That essay is titled, “What Should Diversity Look Like For Trans People?”. It is basically telling people to stop writing transition stories and to stop writing just about binary-identified trans women who transition in middle age. This isn’t new, but it is nice to have it in an actual book.

Other contributors include Takayuki Tatsumi, Nisi Shawl, Johanna Sinisalo, Kathryn Allan, Ian Hagemann, Sandra J. Lindow and Ajani Brown. The book also includes the texts of Alaya Dawn Johnson and Kin Stanley Robinson’s Guest of Honor speeches form last year’s WisCon, as well as the keynote speech Julie Phillips delivered at the Tiptree Symposium in December 2015. I am particularly honored to be in the same book as Johanna, and I am sure the rest of the contributions will be great too.

You can buy the book here. Payment for this was a flat fee, so there is no need to worry that you are enabling any of my addictions by encouraging lots of people to buy the book.