Gender

February Schedule

~ Cheryl

I think my schedule is fairly firm now. There are a couple of non-public things that I’m not sure I can talk about, but there’s plenty here.

Thurs. Feb. 1st — I’ll be on Shout Out Radio previewing local events.

Fri. Feb. 2nd — “Trans People in Sumer and Assyria”, The Bateman Room, Gonville & Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge, 18:00.

Wed. Feb. 7th — I’m hosting Women’s Outlook on Ujima Radio from Noon to 14:00. The show will be an LGBT History special featuring Karen Garvey (M Shed), Darryl Bullock and Angel Mel, plus some more things that aren’t firm yet.

Wed. Feb. 7th — “A Short History of Gender” for the University of the West of England Feminist Society. Probably students and staff only.

Fri. Feb. 9th — I’m at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. My talk will be “Die Young, Stay Pretty: Women Warriors in the Ancient World”, which is the Amazons talk. Caz Paige is speaking too.

Sat. Feb. 10th — LGBT History Day at M Shed in Bristol. I’m hosting the event and doing the Amazons talk again. Fabulous line-up of speakers.

Mon. Feb. 12th — The Women in Classics LGBT+ conference at Reading University. My talk is called “How Not To Erase Trans History”. Getting in to see me costs money, but you can see the amazing Jennifer Ingleheart for free.

Thurs. Feb. 15th — I’ll be at the University of Manchester Students’ Union. I’m talking about Romans. Roz Kaveney will be there too, which is cool because my talk has some of her work in it.

Wed. Feb. 21st — I am looking after Stuart Milk for the day. We’ll be in Bath visiting schools and doing the Guildhall in the evening.

Thurs. Feb. 22nd — Stuart and I are in Bristol. The evening talk is at Bristol University Students’ Union.

Fri. Feb. 23rd – Sat. Feb. 24th — I will be at the Historical Fictions Research Network conference in Stoke-on-Trent. I’m giving a paper called “If Your Past Isn’t Queer It Is Not Realistic”.

Tues. Feb. 27th — I will be appearing at the Diversity Trust event in Stoke Gifford. I’m giving a public version of the “If Your Past Isn’t Queer It Is Not Realistic” talk.

Wed. Feb. 28th — I’m at Bath Spa University doing an extended version of “If Your Past Isn’t Queer It Is Not Realistic” to their Creative Writing students. It is open to the public and you can book here.

After which all I can say is thank goodness February only has 28 days.

New Tour Dates, Including London

~ Cheryl

I have a few new speaking engagements for LGBT History Month to announce. And yes, I am thinking of this as like being on tour.

First up, if you are in or near London, please come and see me at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I will be talking about Amazons, and the fabulous Caz Paige will be talking about her life as a trans pilot in the RAF. It is a little ironic that I’m covering cavalry and she’s covering aircraft when the museum really demands a talk about ships, but maybe the Amazons had a navy. If they lived on Paradise Island they would need one, right? Anyway, this will be on the evening of Friday, February 9th. I look forward to seeing some of you there.

On the 15th I am going to be at Manchester University Students’ Union. I don’t know if that is open to the public yet. I will let you know if it is.

And on the 27th I will be at Stoke Gifford just north of Bristol for an event that Berkeley is organizing in collaboration with the Alphabets Youth Group. On the bill with me will be the very wonderful Edson Burton, and Anna Bianchi who has written a lovely book on raising trans kids.

I’ll be doing the short version of my “If Your Past Isn’t Queer it is Not Realistic” talk. The long version will happen at Bath Spa Uni on the 28th and will have a whole lot of extra stuff for the creative writing students. We are still waiting for a room allocation for that one so there’s no booking info just yet.

Stuff & Nonsense

~ Cheryl

Every so often I think I should do a blog post rebutting some of the latest nonsense that the TERFs* have come up with. Then things get even more weird. I’m not going anywhere near the nonsense in the Labour Party because it is not my fight, but he’s a few examples of the bizarre things that have been going on.

As you may recall, the current TERF-fueled media assault on trans people is mostly about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act and is a complete fabrication because a) the legislative changes would not give trans women the rights people are complaining about, and b) we have actually enjoyed those rights under the Equality Act for 8 years. I explained it all here.

Ireland has had a system of self-declaration of legal gender, similar to what has been proposed for the UK, since 2015, and recently there was an article in The Guardian about how Irish trans people had worked together with feminist groups in Ireland to make this happen, and that nothing awful had resulted from it.

Predictably the TERFs started harassing Irish feminists on social media. They also decided to have a public meeting in Dublin to school Irish women on how to be proper feminists. It was billed as being in support of Ireland’s fight for legal abortion, but as it was also part of a UK tour focusing solely on spreading alarm about trans rights the Irish were under no illusions as to what was intended. They issued a scathing open letter.

Since then I have seen TERF accounts on Twitter claiming that the Irish must be anti-abortion for opposing the proposed meeting, and that being pro-abortion is anti-feminist because the only purpose of abortion is to allow men to be less responsible about having sex.

Oh, and Germaine Greer has come out against the #MeToo movement.

Meanwhile it has been a common plank of TERF ideology, despite masses of evidence to the contrary, that trans women are all obsessed with gender stereotypes and act to reinforce the gender binary. Today I learned that, because they insist that being trans is only about gender presentation, they are taking to calling themselves trans because they don’t present in an extremely feminine manner, even though they were assigned female at birth and fully and proudly identify as women.

This is, I presume, another of their silly little psychological games in which they try to mess with trans women’s heads in an attempt to drive us all to suicide. I guess they are hoping that we’ll see anti-trans posts being made by people who claim to be trans in their profiles and be distressed by this. Thankfully you can normally tell because they will write “transwoman” rather than “trans woman” (using transwoman as a noun to indicate that a transwoman is an entirely separate class of being from a woman) and they’ll probably have “XX” in their profile as well).

About the only interesting thing about this is that their tactics are remarkably similar to those used by the miserable remnants of the Sad Puppy movement to harass writers that they don’t like on Twitter. Right down to the fact that their preferred targets are almost always young women.

One day we, as a society, will learn to recognize all of this nonsense and ignore it. Sadly that day is not yet upon us.

* TERF = Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, a term invented by Radical Feminists decades ago to distance themselves from the anti-trans fanatics. TERFs are notable for being neither Radical nor very good at feminism.

LGBTHM Bristol Publicity Rollout

~ Cheryl

We have some publicity up for the LGBT History Day that I am organising at M Shed in Bristol on February 10th. My apologies for the relentless stream of publicity about this that I will have going between now and then.

As you will see, we have a great line-up of speakers. I’m really excited about all of them. There will be in-depth posts about each one coming up on the OutStories Bristol website over the next couple of weeks.

Those of you with an interest in human rights issues will be particularly interested in Jonathan Cooper’s talk. He’s one of Britain’s leading human rights lawyers and today he had a piece in The Guardian about the danger posed to LGBT rights by Brexit.

Forthcoming Appearances

~ Cheryl

The LGBT History Month tour schedule is starting to firm up. Two more talks were announced yesterday. They are:

“Trans People in Sumer and Assyria” at Cambridge University on February 2nd

and, “If Your Past Isn’t Queer It’s Not Realistic” at Bath Spa University on February 28th.

You can’t book for the Bath Spa event yet because they don’t have a room allocated, but I’ll let you know as soon as you can.

Stay tuned for more talk announcements.

Writing and Gender Reminder

~ Cheryl

This is to remind you that on Sunday 28th of this month Cat Rambo and I will be teaching an online course in Writing and Gender. This is what Cat has to say about the course:

Every writer hits the question of how best to write characters other than ourselves, and gender can pose one major difference. How do you write about a gender other than your own? How have Western ideas of gender fractured and what words do we use when speaking of the expanding awareness of trans, genderfluid, genderqueer, asexual, aromantic, and more? How have F&SF writers approached gender and what pitfalls should be avoided? Join Cat and Hugo Award-winning publisher and critic Cheryl Morgan for a workshop that will not just inform but inspire. 2 Plunkett slots still open.

Further details are available here, including how to apply for one of those Plunkett slots and get on the course for free.

February Schedule Firms Up

~ Cheryl

The various events at which I am doing LGBT History talks in February are starting to go public with their schedules. A while back I mentioned the Women in Classics event at the University of Reading. I can now add the Historical Fictions Network conference which is February 24/25 at Stoke-on-Trent. I will be giving a talk titled, “If Your Past isn’t Queer it is not Realistic”. The full program is available here, and booking details here.

Self-Fertilizing Fish

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Every so often I come across a news article that is relevant both to trans science and science fiction. Yesterday was one of those magical days, because I discovered the existence of self-fertilizing fish.

I should probably go back a few stages here by way of explanation.

To start with there is the whole question of what we mean by “biological sex”. Fish do not share the same XX/XY chromosome system familiar from mammals. In fact there are a wide range of different biological mechanisms that fish use to differentiate sex. When I talk about the biological sex of a fish here I mean whether the fish produces eggs, fertilizes eggs, or both.

Readers in the UK are probably familiar with the recent episode of Blue Planet II in which David Attenborough’s team filmed a Sheepshead Wrasse in the process of changing sex. There are, in fact, many fish species that practice what is called Sequential Hermaphroditism, in which the animal is male for part of its life cycle and female for another part. The much loved Clown Fish from Finding Nemo is another example. These fish only exhibit one sex at any one time in their lives.

There are also many fish species that exhibit Simultaneous Hermaphroditism. That is, they are capable of producing eggs and fertilizing eggs. Some species of Sea Bass have these abilities, which is something worth pondering next time you eat one. However, these fish have to have sex with other, similarly hermaphroditic, fish in order to make baby fish. How else would genetic diversity be achieved, right?

However, there is one species of fish (well, more properly two closely related species) that can make babies by individuals having sex with themselves. Enter the spectacularly named Mangrove Killifish.

The killifish is pretty amazing on several levels. It can live in both fresh and salt water, and it can survive for up to two months on land. But self-fertilization is seemingly the most miraculous ability because surely all of the fish would be clones, so how would they evolve? Mutation doesn’t seem an adequate explanation.

However, it turns out that killifish come in two sexes: both and male. The males are very rare, but very popular. If a clone family of both-sex spots one they’ll seek him out and make lots of baby fish. In that way a certain amount of genetic diversity is maintained.

For those who are interested, there is more scientific detail here.

And for those of you thinking of interesting ideas to use in alien biology, have at it!

Referendum by the Back Door

~ Cheryl

An interesting new development in civil rights has been the idea that such things should be put up to popular vote. Ireland did rather well out if it, supporting same-sex marriage so firmly that their frightened government passed a very progressive gender recognition act as well. Australia, on the other hand, was subjected to weeks of bitter argument in the media which involved a great deal of hate-mongering on the part of the anti-LGB lobby. What’s more, the vote wasn’t actually a referendum, it was just a postal survey of people’s opinion. In Australia voting is mandatory, but this was optional. Getting the vote out, or inhibiting it, suddenly became important.

As yet the UK has not had a referendum on LGBT rights. The country has had a rather bad experience with a referendum in the recent past and no one wants to go through that again. Nevertheless, the government is putting LGBT rights up for vote. They have launched a public consultation on the subject of the new sex and relationships curriculum to be introduced to English schools.

Consultations are not exactly new, but mostly they have been a matter for pressure groups, academic experts and so on. This one will be different. Right wing groups are already urging their supporters to flood the consultation with demands to ban all mention of LGBT issues from the curriculum. (See here, for example).

While the consultation is by no means binding, if it does come out strongly against LGBT inclusion, the government will be able to claim that it is the “will of the people” that we return to the days of Section 28. But, as I noted, this is not a referendum. It isn’t even something that the government will publicize heavily. We know that the other side will be well organized, well funded, and will have the likes of the Daily Malice on their side. We have to fight back.

I have had a brief look at the consultation. It is long and involved, and the government is asking for evidence. The anti lobby will doubtless provide prepared text for their supporters to cut and paste. Hopefully that will count against them. It would be good if we could look better informed. If you want to read up on the subject, Stonewall has plenty of information.

It is also important that this new curriculum teaches young people to respect each other, and that sex should be a matter of consent. There is a big opportunity here to deconstruct harmful gender stereotypes. I’m assuming that the Women’s Equality Party will come out with some recommendations in the near future. I will point you at them when it happens.

By the way, one of the talks I have planned for the LGBT History Month event in Bristol on February 10th will be from the leading civil rights lawyer, Jonathan Cooper OBE. I have asked him to address this issue of putting civil rights up for popular vote. It should be a very interesting talk.

Writing & Gender Returns

~ Cheryl

I’m delighted to be able to report that Cat Rambo and I will be offering our Writing & Gender course again in January. How do you go about writing characters whose gender is different from yours? What about all these new, non-binary genders that we hear about these days? Not to mention new sexualities. How can you add gender diversity to your fiction and stay respectful of the various identities you are making use of? Cat and I are here to explain. The course is timed to work for people on either side of the Atlantic (so we can teach it together). If you are interested, details of how to sign up, together with a whole load of other amazing courses that Cat offers, can be found on her blog.

LGBT+ Classics in Reading

~ Cheryl

Here’s a bit of advance notice for an event that I am doing in February. LGBT+ Classics is taking place at Reading University on Feb. 12th. It will bring together academics and activists from around the country, including Jennifer Ingleheart, Beth Asbury, Jen Grove and Alan Greaves, all of whom I have had the honor to meet. My own talk will focus on the various excuses that have been used to claim that trans people did not exist in the past, and why they are all nonsense. The full program is available here.

Tickets for the conference itself cost £11.35 or £22.10 and can be booked here. The higher price includes membership of Women in Classics which I am guessing most of you won’t want. Jennifer Ingleheart’s keynote address is separately ticketed and is free to attend. You can book a place here.

I know it is a bit early to be thinking about this one, but the Eventbrite pages say that ticket sales will end in early January so you do need to get on and book.

Nero’s Trans Wife on TV

~ Cheryl

Earlier this year I made the case that Sporus, or Sabina as she should be more respectfully called, could easily be viewed as a trans woman rather than as a male-identified eunuch who was a victim of Nero’s eccentricity. The stories we get from Roman historians don’t show an unhappy victim, they show someone fitting comfortably into the role of a high status woman in Roman society and being accepted as such by the people.

Last week’s episode of the Bettany Hughes series, Eight Days that Made Rome, focused on Nero. I watched it with some trepidation. This is Channel 5, after all. If Sabina featured at all I was expecting her to be the butt (literally) of transphobic jokes.

What I saw was very different. Though she was named Sporus (which anyone who knows Latin will recognize as a male name), Sabina was portrayed as very feminine with no mention of her origins. She was simply the woman who shared Nero’s bed in his final days, and who loyally accompanied him on his flight from Rome. She was played by cis woman.

I find this astonishing. Not only did a very populist TV show eschew the opportunity to make smutty jokes, but someone, possibly Hughes herself, might agree with me that Sabina probably identified as a woman. Of course it is also possible that the show made this choice in order to avoid any hint of queerness, but that’s not been a problem for British TV for years. Unless I hear otherwise, I’m citing Hughes as a source the next time I talk about Sabina.

So, thank you Bettany for giving support to one of my pet theories about Roman history. And much kudos to Daniela Marinova for bravely taking on the role.

A Little Gay Video

~ Cheryl

Many of you will be aware of the British Museum book, A Little Gay History, by Professor Richard Parkinson. However, I for one was unaware that Professor Parkinson gave a lecture at Oxford in which he talks about the book and how it came to be. And it is available online.

Trans people should be aware that Prof. Parkinson consistently refers to us as “transvestites” or “cross-dressers”, suggesting that he has some sort of biological essentialist view of trans natures, but otherwise the lecture makes excellent points about LGBT+ history.

The embed code for the video doesn’t seem to work, but you can watch it here.

Queering Localities, Day 2

~ Cheryl

Friday was pretty full on, including having to deliver my own paper, but I had a really great time and learned lots. Here are some highlights from day 2 of the conference.

Louise Pawley from Brighton told us about an amazing protest against Section 28. It was a year that the Tory party was having its annual conference on the south coast. One day the Brighton queer community gathered on the beach and gazed out to sea. At the exact time the tide was due to turn they lit torches and turned around to face the building where the conference was being held, symbolizing the tide turning against homophobia. I have no idea how many of the politicians saw this, but it was a magnificent gesture.

My own session included American historian, Susan Ferentinos, who told us all about a range of LGBT+ exhibitions that have been staged in the heart of Red State territory. It is good to know that even in the most conservative parts of the USA people still find ways to celebrate queer culture.

My thanks go to my colleague, Julian Warren, who expertly co-presented with me. It was a pleasure to tell the conference about several of the great LGBT+ history projects we have done in Bristol. It is also, as always, a pleasure to share a platform with Surat-Shaan Knan who was there talking about his Rainbow Pilgrims project.

Probably my favorite paper of the day was Jenny Marsden introducing us to the remarkable photographic archive of the trans community in Cape Town in the 1950s and 60s. Everyone was taken with the idea of the “salon crawl” where visitors would sample all of the various hairdressing salons where the queer community of District 6 worked and hung out.

The final session of the day included three remarkable papers, starting with Anne Balay on the subject of queer truckers in the USA. Truck driving is an awful job, with truckers generally working 14 hour days almost every day of the year. With the advent of “spy in the cab” technology it has also become one of the most intensely micro-managed jobs in the world. As a result, white men have moved out of the business, leaving it to people of color, women and queers (and in many cases people who are all three). Anne learned to drive a truck and worked in the industry for a while to do her research. I’m looking forward to the book when it comes out.

Zhenzhong Mu told us all about the tradition of yue opera in China. Officially these performances are done by women, but there is a sizeable subculture of men who gather together for weekends to stage their own amateur performances in drag, and to have sex with each other, before going home to their wives and jobs.

Rebecca Jennings gave a paper about lesbian separatist communities in Australia and Wales in the 1970s. There was much talk of essentialist views of femininity, and some rather naive ideas about setting up self-sufficient communities far from civilization while remaining defiantly vegan and eschewing all modern technology. “No one told me about wallabies,” complained one European visitor to an Australian site. The cute little creatures would destroy crops and keep people awake with their enthusiastic nocturnal bounding. Goodness only knows what they would have done if the camp had been attacked by drop bears. Thankfully modern feminism is far more about bringing down the patriarchy rather than trying to leave it and setting up an equally authoritarian matriarchy.

My thanks to Justin Bengry and Alison Oram for putting on the conference, and to Katy Pettit for her flawless admin (and the cake).

Now I need to go write a bunch of emails to new friends I have made.

A Brief Word on the Rocket Stink

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As some of you will have noticed, a bit of an upset happened over the weekend over the review site, Rocket Stack Rank. As usual, File 770 is on the case.

For those who can’t be bothered to click through, the site’s owner apparently has a policy of giving an automatic one-star review to any work that uses non-binary pronouns. He also allegedly has the cheek do describe himself as a trans ally, which is an utter nonsense, and even manages to recommend stories that he thinks have good trans content. It is all very head-explody stuff.

This reminds me that when Ann Leckie’s Provenance first came out some annoying people tried to have the book removed from Amazon because they claimed that the non-binary pronouns that it uses were errors.

I’m sure you are familiar with the way these stories go now: “oh -clutch pearls- all of this non-binary stuff is so new and confusing and horrible, how will we ever be able to read if we are subjected to these awful, oppressive, bullying pronouns?!”

At which point it is necessary to remind people that this is science fiction we are talking about. Apparently inventing whole new languages for Klingons, Elves and so on is OK, but inventing new pronouns for people who have different gender systems is not. What ever happened to the “literature of ideas”, people?

Of course there are people out there who “go too far” with all of these new fangled pronoun things. Take this, for example:

Which is to say: everyone is referred to by female pronouns—unless the speaker wants to have sex with the person they are referring to, in which case the pronoun shifts to ‘he’.

Head exploded yet? Ready to write a rant about “kids today”?

Well before you do I should note that the quote above comes from a Tor.com essay by Alex Daly McFarlane. It is about a book called Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. That book was written by some guy called Samuel R. Delany, and was published in 1984.

Young people today, eh?

Update: I’m told the policy is to automatically subtract 1 star for non-binary pronouns rather than give 1 star. I can see I may have mis-understood one of the tweets in the File 770 piece. Either way though it is silly.

Gender Recognition – Not as Scary as You Think

~ Cheryl

A great deal of newsprint and air time has been spent recently on scaring British women over the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. Sadly much of the information that has been given out is wrong, but many people have understandable concerns as a result. I want to address the issues here.

The first thing to note is that legal gender recognition doesn’t protect people from discrimination. It is the Equality Act that does that. A women’s refuge providing services to victims of sexual assault or domestic violence can legally bar various sorts of women from using their services if it is reasonable to do so. It might, for example, exclude a woman who has a highly contagious disease, and possibly even one who is a smoker. I am legally female, but I and other trans women can be legally barred from a women’s refuge now thanks to a special provision in the Equality Act.

Making it easier to change your legal gender will not change the law on whether or not trans women can use refuges.

The whole idea of “making it easier” is complicated as well. The media is suggesting that men will be able to become legally female simply by saying “I am a woman”. That is not how self-declaration works in any of the many countries that use it, and it is not how the Scottish government has proposed the system would work there.

What we will probably get is a system based on a Statutory Declaration. You will have to find a lawyer, pay a small fee, and sign a form that says you intend to adopt a new legal gender for all purposes. I’m sure there will be sanctions available if people use the system in a frivolous manner.

Back now to toilets, changing rooms in clothing stores, and so on. The suggestion has been made that changing the GRA will make it impossible to keep men out of these spaces. But, as I noted above, the GRA is not about discrimination, it is only about legal gender. The only women’s spaces that would be affected are places like prisons which specifically use legal gender to determine who goes where.

For all other spaces it is the Equality Act we should look at. This bars discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment. That is, it specifically protects people who have the characteristic of gender reassignment from discrimination (except in the special case of refuges as noted above). How does one gain this characteristic? Simply by starting on the process of medical gender transition.

To become protected by the Equality Act, all you have to do is visit your GP and ask for a referral to a gender clinic. That is much easier than making a Statutory Declaration. And of course it is a form of self-declaration.

The Equality Act was passed in 2010, so all of these things that we are being told will result from changes to the Gender Recognition Act are in fact already enshrined in law, and have been for over seven years. (Except for access to refuges, which you can bar trans women from and will still be able to bar us from if the GRA changes.)

In all of that time, I cannot recall a single case of a cis man abusing the system to gain access to women-only spaces. I’m sure such an incident would have been all over the newspapers if it had occurred.

Ireland adopted a system of self-declaration similar to what is being proposed by the UK in 2015. They have had no problems with the system. Other countries have been using similar systems for longer.

We should, of course, ask ourselves why a particularly right-wing Tory government is making these changes. Theresa May and Amber Rudd are not exactly big fans of civil rights, after all.

The answer is that the current Gender Recognition Act is manifestly not working. It has made it so complicated, expensive and humiliating to obtain legal gender recognition that most British trans people have not bothered to do so. You can change your passport, driving licence, bank account and so on without changing your legal gender. To the likes of May and Rudd – current and former Home Secretaries – it must be anathema to have thousands of people living a gender different from that in which they are legally recognised. They want to fix that, and they will probably add some means of encouraging trans people to get their legal genders changed so that all of their documents line up. Watch out for the stick that will accompany the carrot.

Much has been made of the issue of people with penises in woman-only-spaces. However, this cannot be avoided without completely undermining the medical process of gender reassignment. Under the current rules, anyone wishing to have genital surgery must have lived full time in their acquired gender for at least 1.5 years. If a trans woman doesn’t do things like using women’s toilets, and changing rooms in women’s clothing stores, the doctors will probably assume that she’s not serious about her transition and deny her surgery.

I can assure you that for many trans women the very idea of someone seeing that we have a penis is horrifying. We certainly don’t want to be waving the damn thing about in public, as it has been suggested we would do if the GRA is reformed. Many of us are glad to be rid of them, and those who don’t opt for surgery have very good reasons for doing so.

Of course there is a small possibility that some man will abuse the system and pretend to be trans. No law is totally bulletproof, and the widespread publicity being given to the possibility of such abuse can only encourage people to try. Someone will doubtless do it just to discredit trans women. But you can’t make laws on the assumption that they must be perfect. The world doesn’t work that way.

Here’s a related example. It is ridiculously hard to get a rape conviction here in the UK. I would like the laws tightened to make it easier. But every time a feminist group suggests this someone in the media will start going on about, “oh, but what if the woman is lying about being raped?”

You can’t have a rape law that is 100% proof against false accusations, and yet we have one because it is needed to protect the vast majority of women who report honestly. With trans women it isn’t even us who are accused of dishonesty, it is that someone else might pretend to be one of us. Is that any reason to deny us fair treatment?

The fact is that men do assault women all of the time. They don’t need to pretend to be trans women to do that. It is just too easy for them the way the world is now. Making it easier for trans people to get legal gender recognition won’t change that. It will help many trans people, and make the bureaucracy involved in gender switching easier and less confusing. That’s nothing to be scared about.

[Note: the above does not address the issue of legal recognition for non-binary people. That’s an entirely different matter, but no threat to women because non-binary people don’t want to be recognised as women.]

Well Done, Trans Pride South West

~ Cheryl

My Friday and Saturday were busy with trans stuff.

First up I did the usual gig of hosting the Trans Day of Remembrance ceremony at Bristol University. Special thanks are due to Alf and Nix for their help in reading the list, to the Students’ Union for the venue and organisation, to LGBT Bristol for the food and drink, and to the Trans+ Mindline for being there because TDOR is a rather stressful event.

That was followed on Saturday by the Trans Pride Community Day, which was a great success. There were plenty of stalls, including one from Stonewall, and some good footfall. I had a lot of interest on the OutStories Bristol stall (and yet another possible invitation to do a talk in February).

Running an event like this isn’t easy, and last year’s inaugural Trans Pride South West left a lot to be desired. This year, however, was very smooth, and provides a solid foundation for the future. If we can have the same venue, a few more stalls and more publicity it should be an excellent event. Sophie, Lexi, Spencer and the crew deserve a lot of credit for what they have done. And if you happen to be a trans person from the South West and can offer to help out please do so.

My apologies to Bristol folks for not being at the Reclaim the Night march. I needed to get home and get some sleep. I’m delighted to see that it went well and will hopefully be at the Bath one (which happens near International Women’s Day). Huge thanks to Charlotte from Bristol Zero Tolerance for turning up at Trans Pride on such a busy day for her.

Update: I’ve just had a press release from Bristol Women’s Voice informing me that they are trying to raise £20,000 to keep the Zero Tolerance initiative going for another year. Presumably this is part of the ongoing defunding of the voluntary sector by Bristol City Council. Details of the appeal are here.

Bristol TDOR & Trans Pride

~ Cheryl


Bristol is having its Trans Day of Remembrance event tonight. That’s because it allows us to combine it with Trans Pride South West which is happening throughout the weekend.

I will be hosting the ceremony of remembrance again. It will be in the Ansom Rooms at the University of Bristol Students’ Union from 18:00 tonight. The main public part of Trans Pride South West is at The Station in Silver Street from 12:00 to 16:00 tomorrow. I will be on the OutStories Bristol stall. Further details here.

At least 325 trans people were murdered in hate crimes in the past 12 months, up from 295 last year. Almost all of them were women of color. More than half of the murders were in Brazil. Further details are available here.

[Thanks to Spencer for the header image.]

Trans in the Workplace

~ Cheryl




LEAD, a new magazine aimed at the world of work and focusing on diversity issues has recently been launched. I met the people running it through the Women’s Equality Party conference last year, and they kindly asked me to write them an article on gender transition at work. So I did, and it is now online. You can read what I had to say here.

There are lots of other interesting articles in it as well. I’m delighted to see a magazine focusing on all of these issues.