Gender

I Am Cait Returns to the UK

~ Cheryl

The UK is once again well behind on getting new episodes of I Am Cait. However, we have now had episodes #1-#3 of the second series. Having been away, I have only just caught up on them, so I guess it is time for a few thoughts.

Episodes #1 and #3 were mainly about Cait’s politics which are sadly naive. Listening to them in the context of the show is bad enough. Listening to them in the aftermath of the North Carolina Trans Panic legislation is utterly surreal. Thankfully the rest of the show is much more interesting.

Episode #2 started on what appears to be a signature theme of the season: exploring issues within the trans community. Knowing that the show is reality TV, I am slightly nervous about assigning views to people because I don’t know how much of what people say on the show is scripted, but with that caveat in mind here goes.

The debate in #2 was all about differences in attitudes between Jenny Boylan and Kate Bornstein. Jenny, like me, identifies as a woman. Kate, on the other hand, identifies as non-binary (and has done since before the term became popular). In the past she has flirted with stating that trans women can never “really” be women, which naturally upsets those of us who think we are.

The matter came to a head over the use of the word “tr*nny”. All three of us come from a time in which many trans people proudly used that term to describe themselves. Jenny has had the unfortunate experience of being beaten up by someone using the word as a slur. Naturally she and Kate had something of a difference of opinion.

Personally I never much took to the term. I understand that people like Kate are attached to it, but I also understand that many younger trans people react viscerally to it. And when I experienced someone using it as a slur I did too. I know that some people are trying to reclaim it, but I’m happy to not use it until such time as that movement has more traction among people more vulnerable than myself.

Episode #3 brought up two more hot button issues. The first was dating as trans women. Candis, who by anyone’s definition is drop-dead gorgeous, has not had good luck with men. I cannot for the life of me understand this, but there is it. Still, would I trade Candis’s looks for Kevin? Not a hope in Hell.

The whole idea of dating freaks Cait out totally. She’s still not really sure what sort of things she’s sexually attracted to, and sexuality can change on transition so she may well need time. She’s still obviously struggling with family issues too, and her family has their own issues to work out. Dating would complicate all of that. There’s nothing usual about this, Cait just happens to be doing it in the public eye.

Also in #3 was an instance where Saint Jenny was in the wrong for once. The team was in Chicago, where a good friend of Candis’s worked in a popular revue bar. Chandi, who started out as a drag performer, had been missing her time on stage, so Candis offered to get them both gigs for a night.

Jenny, as a respected New England academic, has never gone through the “having to do whatever you can to survive” thing. She also seems surprisingly unaware of the very different place that Ball culture has in the African-American trans community. She was suspicious of the drag show because she associates drag with “men pretending to be women”. As she said on the show, she’s not pretending.

But, as anyone who has watched Priscilla should know, there is drag and drag. Some drag performers do happily identify as men (usually gay men). Some of them do drag solely for the purpose of mocking femininity, and can be quite misogynist. But it is equally true that many trans women found themselves through “female impersonation”. April Ashley worked in a show like that in Paris, and her description of the excitement among the girls when Coccinelle came back from Casablanca post-surgery is entirely believable. April wasn’t the only member of the group to follow Coccinelle down that path.

Happily it all seemed to have ended well, with Jenny enjoying the show and Chandi, after a decade or so off the boards, showing that she had lost none of her performing talent.

What’s interesting to me is that, while Season 1 seemed to be all about presenting trans people to a cis audience, Season 2 is being made much more for a trans audience. Perhaps that’s because the studio has come to the conclusion that only trans people watch it, so they might as well appeal to us. Whatever the reason, it makes the show much more interesting to me. It also, I think, means it is much more radical. Jenny seems to agree.

Research Matters

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The talk that caused to me walk out of the trans history conference was so bad that almost every slide was either incompetent or dishonest in some way (it can be hard to tell the difference between someone who is just ignorant and someone who is lying for effect). However, one slide I was prepared to give a pass to because I had heard the same point made in a previous talk. It was the slide that said that being “born in wrong body” was an idea that was originally coined to explain being gay.

I should note here that the wrong body meme is not a very useful concept. It totally erases those trans people who are happy transitioning socially without any medical intervention. It encourages a focus on the gender binary, which is unhelpful to anyone who doesn’t want the whole gamut of medical transition options. And of course it is simplistic, which doesn’t help in a subject as complicated as trans people. These days trans activists tend to avoid using it.

Anyway, soon after the conference someone I know on social media asked for more information about this claim, so I did a bit of digging. That’s when things got interesting.

The wrong body meme was first coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German writer from the latter half of the 19th Century. Ulrichs was possibly the first modern European to advocate for gay rights. In fact we might describe him as the first gay man, as he was the first person to try to describe being gay in modern terms. The word “homosexual” was coined by his friend, the Austro-Hungarian Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a couple of years after Ulrichs went public with his ideas. Ulrichs himself had used the word “urning” to describe gay men.

It is entirely true that Ulrichs characterized a gay man as an, “anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa” (“a female soul confined in a male body” — he wrote in Latin). However, some very quick Googling about Ulrichs also turned up this:

Ulrichs had a sense of himself as being considerably more feminine than the average man. He recalled that as a young child he wore girls’ clothes, preferred playing with girls, and in fact expressed a desire to be a girl.

That’s a quote from this book. You can read the whole chapter on Ulrichs here.

If you do read the whole thing you will note that Ulrichs lived apparently happily as a man, but deemed himself quite feminine and preferred sex with very masculine men. On discovering that not all gay men were like him, he revised his theories to allow for other types.

So far from coining the wrong body idea because he needed an explanation for same-sex desire, Ulrichs coined it because that’s how he felt about himself.

Now that we have done proper studies on trans kids we know that the majority of children who express non-stereotypical gender behavior do not grow up to be trans. Some grow up to be gay/lesbian, and some grow up to be straight. However, in expressing a desire to actually be a girl Ulrichs exhibited evidence that he was fairly far towards the trans end of the spectrum. That he grew up to be happy as a man (or at least as happy as one could be, being a gay man in 19th Century Germany) suggests he was not all the way along that spectrum. Of course in his day there was no concept of being trans for him consider. Had he been born today, he might well have identified as non-binary in some way.

Of course there are still those who think that all treatment of trans people should be halted in order to save innocent gays and lesbians from being turned trans by the Evil Trans Agenda. There are also those who believe that trans people would be much happier if they were to consent to psychotherapy to “cure” them of their feelings so that they could become gay or lesbian (or stop being androgynephile perverts). And of course there are still doctors who try to cram all trans people into the gender binary. All of these people are dangerous.

What we actually need is for people to be more like Ulrichs and come to recognize that there is a whole spectrum of identities out there, and to allow people to find their own way to happiness.

I’d like to see some more research done on Ulrichs because he seems to be a good example of a non-binary person from European history. Not being able to read German, and being very rusty on the Latin, I’m not well placed to do that.

What I found very sad was to see Ulrichs’ non-binary nature being erased by someone who appeared to identify as non-binary themselves in order to provide another stick with which to beat binary-identified trans people.

My Bath Ruby Talk about Trans*Code

~ Cheryl

Is now available on video. Many thanks to the lovely people at Confreaks TV. The video covers the entire third lightning talk session, but if you are not interested in IT stuff you can fast forward to around 8:50 to find me.

I also wholeheartedly recommend Janet Crawford’s talk about the neuroscience of gender inequality.

My thanks again to Bath Ruby for providing such interesting programming.

Thank You, Lambda Literary

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

When I reported on the short lists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards I noted that the Lammys still had a way to go in dealing with inter-community strife. The reason for that is that the LGBT Non-Fiction category included a book that was openly transphobic. Doubtless it got put their by transphobic judges (and there are many transphobic people among LGB folk), but Lambda Literary have since looked into the issue and have decided to withdraw the nomination.

Explaining all of this will take a little while. Back in 2004 the Lammys included a nomination for a book called The Man Who Would be Queen by J. Michael Bailey. This was a very sloppy piece of scholarship which purported to prove that trans people only came in two types: those who are “really” gay men who transition in order to have sex with straight men, and those who are narcissistic perverts who are sexually aroused by images of themselves dressed as women (so-called autogynephiles). Bailey’s work has been roundly condemned by most professionals in the trans health field, and spectacularly debunked in one study that showed that 93% of cis women fit the definition of autogynephiles.

The Lammys, after due investigation, withdrew Bailey’s book from the short list. Nevertheless, he has defenders, and it is one of those, Alice Dreger, who managed to get on a short list this year.

As is the fashion with hate-mongers these days, Dreger is trying to position herself and Bailey as innocent victims of a massive and powerful conspiracy of trans activists. She had the cheek to title her book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, comparing Bailey to the great scientist who was persecuted by the Catholic Church for saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Because of course the Secret Trans Cabal has just as much power as the 16th Century Catholic Church, and it is totally true that we have had Bailey imprisoned and threatened to have him burned at the stake unless he recants .

If you’d like to see an actual scientist take Dreger’s book apart, Julia Serano has done so at length. A shorter and more punchy version is available from Brynn Tannehill at The Advocate.

I don’t suppose that this will hurt Dreger very much. She’s currently undertaking a lucrative lecture tour promoting the book and complaining about how the evil trans activists are totally preventing her from putting forward her ideas. Claiming that you are unable to talk about things that you are actually being paid to talk about is the new fashion in victimhood as far as trans haters go. However, I am pleased that Lambda Literary have once again done the right thing. Hopefully next time they will review the shortlists before they go public with them.

Traveling Privilege

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

I’m spending most of today asleep because of jet lag, but I did want to comment briefly on my travel experience. I have been to North America. I have taken a total of four plane flights. Not once have I had anyone grope my genitals giving the excuse of “security”.

This might not seem entirely surprising to you, but I only managed this degree of comfort because I confined my travel to Canada. Trans women in the USA are groped pretty much every time they fly, sometimes several times per flight. I suspect that I would fare better because I have had surgery and therefore don’t show up as an “ALARM” on the perv scanners. However, the TSA are a law unto themselves and are perfectly capable of demanding to grope someone because they “look suspicious”.

I have lost count of the number of times that I used public bathrooms in Canada. I used the ladies, as I have been doing without incident for over 20 years. However, it will be a lot of times. I spent hours in airports, Kevin and I spent a lot of time in restaurants and tourist destinations, and on Monday I spent the day at a hotel giving a training course for clients. All of those things were only possible because I was able to use public toilets.

My use of women’s restrooms is not a crime in Canada, save for in the fevered imagining of Germaine Greer and her supporters who claim I have committed “rape” by “penetrating” women-only spaces. However, as of yesterday it would be a crime in North Carolina. In less than 24 hours the state’s three levels of legislature — lower house, upper house and Governor — all approved a sweeping bill to repeal and ban all equality-based legislation, and also to require trans people to use the bathroom appropriate to their “biological sex” (whatever that means). There’s a lot in the bill, an I expect most of it to be rolled back quickly, but it was the alleged need to keep women and girls “safe” from people like me that was used as the excuse for pushing it through with such unseemly haste.

Actually I might be OK. According to The Guardian, the bill has an exemption for trans people who have had their birth certificate changed. Obviously I’d need to carry mine with me, which I don’t have to do anywhere else in the world. However, I note that laws governing trans people are not uniform in the USA. There are still some states where, no matter how much medical intervention you have had, you can’t get your birth certificate changed. Also there’s no public health coverage of trans issues in the USA, so the proportion of trans people able to access surgery (always assuming that they want it) is probably much lower than in the UK.

The main group of people who will suffer, however, are trans kids. There is barely a country in the world where trans kids can legally change their gender, and access to surgery is generally restricted until they are legally adult. Obviously they cannot take advantage of exemptions to such laws the way I can. There are even places (hello Kansas) where laws are being proposed that will allow kids to get a substantial reward for ratting on trans pupils who dare to use a gender-appropriate bathroom.

UK readers may think that sort of thing doesn’t happen here, but it does. Today’s Gay Star News has a report by Jane Fae on a pub in Ramsgate that operates a strict “no trans women in the ladies’ toilet” policy. Obviously that’s not a legal requirement the way it is in North Carolina, but the report suggests that the pub’s landlord has had legal advice assuring them that their policy is legal. Jane notes that this seems to contravene the Equality Act, but I beg to disagree. What you can say is that the case has not been proven, because no precedent exists, but the pub’s action may be legal.

The point that will be argued is that a pub toilet is a single-sex service, and the Equality Act contains language that allows businesses to deny trans women access to women-only services if it is reasonable to do so. The recent Transgender Equality Inquiry notes that such exemptions can apply, even if the trans woman in question has a Gender Recognition Certificate and has had her birth certificate changed. Which means that they apply to me. One would hope that a judge would deem that banning me from women’s toilets in the UK would be unreasonable, especially as this contravenes the intent of the Gender Recognition Act, but until such time as the law is clarified, or a test case has been heard, the question is unanswered.

Day Two at #MTHF16

~ Cheryl

Today started off with a lot of international material. Kevin went off to see the paper on trans people in Japan (and discovered that the Japanese language didn’t have gendered pronouns until they started translating English and German texts and had to invent words to make the distinction).

I listened to a presentation by an Indian trans activist, and was very impressed by the government policies in Tamil Nadu. Sadly the rest of India is not so progressive. The speaker made the important distinction between something being culturally accepted and being socially acceptable. Hijra are part of India culture and have been for at least 2000 years, but that doesn’t mean that they are not despised. What is an open question (which I hope one day I can find an Indian historian to help shine some light on) is how much the position of hijra in modern Indian society is a result of European colonialism.

I also got to hear a really great presentation by two trans guys who live in The Yukon. They are dealing with very small communities, which has its drawbacks, but also a significant degree of community support that you don’t get in a big city. I discovered that for First Nations people the word “religion” carries connotations of European colonialism. When speaking of their own beliefs they always use the term “spiritual” rather than “religious”. (To a European, of course, the word “spiritualism” means something very different.)

The next session was given over entirely to a project being done in Calgary on the subject of Magnus Hirschfeld and his relationship to Harry Benjamin and Alfred Kinsey. The scholarship involved is impressive, but when doing work like this there is a serious danger of getting caught up in the narrative created by your subjects. Hirschfeld and Benjamin may well have believed that they were discovering a new phenomenon in human sexuality and had to invent ways of understanding it, but we as historians can’t buy into that idea, or the ways in which they chose to understand transness. My thanks here to the Two Spirit person who chose to challenge the panel on this, and in particular their use of the word “transgenderism”. It is true that the term is commonly used by medical people, but it is also used by TERFs to imply that being trans is a political philosophy that one can chose to reject the validity of.

On the subject of political philosophy, it is an unfortunate fact that in any gathering of trans people you are likely to find someone with entrenched views as to the right way to be trans, and who will push that narrative at the expense of any other. Trans communities are incredibly diverse (a fact which apparently deeply frustrated the arch taxonomist, Kinsey) and it is vitally important that we respect each other. This afternoon there was a presentation from someone who clearly felt that the only way to establish the validity of their own life was to belittle and ridicule other trans people. Not to mention mocking other people’s culture along the way. There is an awful lot wrong with the way that the medical profession has dealt with trans people in the past, and it is absolutely wrong to force everyone into one stereotype of being trans. You don’t have to make that point by making it seem like all people who fit that stereotype in some way are moronic dupes whose feelings about themselves are some sort of false consciousness.

Anyway, I have better things to do with my life that sit around being mocked and insulted. I have Kevin here, and a beautiful part of the world to explore. We found a place called Fisherman’s Wharf, watched the harbor seals perform for the tourists, and ate fish.

Day One at #MTHF16

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Day one of the conference proper saw Kevin and I taking an early morning bus for the University of Victoria. The more I see of this island, the more beautiful it seems, and the university campus did nothing to dispel that impression.

The day began with a paper from Parker Croshaw that was the closest to my interests all weekend. Linguistic theory and comparative mythology are possibly a bit esoteric for a non-specialist audience, but Parker had some very interesting things to say about Shiva. Also any presentation that features dragon-slaying and female Thor is OK by me.

One of my favorite papers from day one was Mary Ann Saunders looking at Ariel from The Tempest. There’s a very good case to be made for Ariel being genderqueer in some way, and I’m rather surprised that more hasn’t been made of this. Mary Ann focused on one such attempt, Julie Taymor’s 2010 film which features Helen Mirren as the mad scientist, Prospera.

Today’s keynote speech was from trans activist, Jamison Green, who is now President of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Jamison is doing great work persuading the medical people to care more about their trans patients.

Despite there only being two streams of programming, I am often finding myself wanting to be in two places at once. That was certainly the case in the afternoon when my friends Jana Funke and Jen Grove were scheduled against presentations on Miss Major and trans pornography.

Not everything went well. The talks are taking place in a room divided by an airwall and there is a lot of sound bleed between the two sections. It isn’t as bad as the infamous 1995 Worldcon, but it is pretty bad at times. Also by no means all of the presenters are good at keeping to time, using a microphone or telling a coherent story. Overall, however, I am very pleased to be here. I have met some really interesting people.

My contribution to the weekend is a poster, which I cunningly had designed for me by the fabulous Ceri Jenkins, who also did all of my PR materials for the LGBT History Festival. I have by far the best looking poster on display. (And people, please, if every you are asked to do a poster, the objective is not to try to cram all of the text of a 20 minute paper onto the page.)

There is lots more good material coming up tomorrow. I suppose I should get some sleep before it starts.

Intersex Activists Speak Out

~ Cheryl

You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media, but intersex activists have been having a major publicity push this past week. There has been a demonstration outside Parliament, people going on hunger strike and so on. I have been getting press releases from Jane Fae. Even the LGBT media appears to have ignored them. The only place I have seen the story covered is in Gay Star News, for whom Jane happens to be a regular columnist. See her piece here for more coverage.

Basically what the activists want is for the government to take a look at intersex equality in the same way they did for trans equality. I suspect that the members of the Transgender Equality Inquiry would be very sympathetic to this. They rather backed off on intersex issues when they found out that there was a lot more to those questions than simply lumping them in with trans. While most of the prejudice we face stems from the same mad adherence to the gender binary, the issues and solutions can be very different, and indeed can be very different between different intersex conditions.

Here’s hoping that someone other than Jane is listening to all of this. I at least have a few rights in this country. According to UK law, intersex people don’t even exist.

Richard O’Brien, meet Lilly Wachowski

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Over the past couple of days my Twitter feed has been full of people getting angry about Richard O’Brien. He was interviewed by a tabloid newspaper and asked to give his opinion on Germaine Greer. Regrettably he agreed with her that trans women can never really be women.

I have no idea what O’Brien was thinking here, but he won’t be the first non-binary person to hold such opinions and he won’t be the last. Some silly transsexuals look down on people who opt not to have medical treatment, and some silly non-binary people look down on anyone who does. A plague on both their houses.

However, I’d like to look a bit more closely at what being “really” a woman means. The USA had (and still has in some cases) a legal concept known as the One Drop Rule, by which if a person has the slightest trace of non-white African ancestry then that person is considered to be black. Germaine Greer’s definition of a woman is a bit like that. The slightest infraction can disqualify you. Assigned male at birth? Then you are “really” a man, no matter when you transitioned, or how long you have lived as a woman. Have a Y chromosome? Then you are “really” a man even if you were assigned female at birth, have lived as a woman all of your life and have borne children (and yes that is possible).

Greer aside, there are obviously ways in which I can be considered not as fully female as other people. I don’t have periods, which I gather is a very good thing. Well there are intersex women who don’t have periods, and indeed don’t have ovaries or wombs, but they still live as women all of their lives and absolutely deserve to be considered as women if they wish to be as far as I am concerned. I can’t give birth, but there are many cis women who can’t conceive but who adopt and become wonderful mothers. I know of at least one trans woman who is a single mother. So motherhood is not that simple either.

And this brings me back to Lilly Wachowski’s press release from yesterday. She says:

To be transgender is something largely understood as existing within the dogmatic terminus of male or female. And to “transition” imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another. But the reality, my reality is that I’ve been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life, through the infinite that exists between male and female as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary. Binary is a false idol.

We’ll all be better off when the media, and those who have access to it, let that sink in.

Lammy Finalists – Congratulations Roz!

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards have been announced, and I am delighted to see Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull listed in the Transgender Fiction category. There are only three finalists listed, which is a bit worrying, but statistically it makes Roz’s chances better.

Elsewhere I see there is a new Transgender Poetry category, which is encouraging. Notorious transphobe, Alice Dreger, has a book in the LGBT Non-Fiction category, which shows that the Lammys still have a way to go in dealing with inter-community strife.

The SF/F/H category is mostly a mystery to me. The only book I have heard of on this list is The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan, which people have been saying really good things about. Frankly the idea of an LGBT SF short list that doesn’t have Luna on it is absurd, but the Lammys are a submission-based award and if a book’s publisher doesn’t think it worth submitting then their books cannot be considered. I’d put Radiance on the list too. It has much less specific LGBT content, but what is there is crucial to the plot. And the central character of Planetfall is a lesbian, though that’s one of the less significant aspects of her character. Then there’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and The Traitor Baru Cormorant. That’s one kickass Lammy shortlist right there. I’m sure there is stuff I have forgotten.

Of course there is always the question as to whether the jury are looking for good SF/F/H books that happen to include LGBT characters, or good stories about LGBT characters/issues that happen to be SF/F/H. That may be down to the make-up of each individual year’s jury.

Well, Hello Lilly!

~ Cheryl

Lilly Wachowski

Most of you will have seen this already as the mainstream media has picked it up, but now we have two Wachowski sisters. Awesomesauce, as my young friends are fond of saying.

Lilly’s official press release is well worth reading in full.

So that’s that sorted. Can we have the next season of Sense 8 now, please?

Also does anyone know if Lana and Lilly have a lot of maternal aunts?

Social Constructivism and Trans History

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

My apologies for delving into theory here, but this is rather important and something I need to think through. Writing blog posts helps.

When you do LGBT history you hear a lot about how we must never impose modern ideas of sexual and gender identity on people from the past. A man in ancient Greece did not see himself as “gay” in the same way that a modern man might see himself as gay, despite the fact that both of them have sex with men. Same-sex relations had a very different place in Classical Greek culture than they do in our own.

The same is true of trans people. We might say that a person from the past identified as a kurgarra, a kinaidos, a gallus, a hijra, a mukhannath, a ninauposkitzipxpe, a quariwarmi, a brother-boy or any of a range of other identities, but they would not identify as a transsexual because the word didn’t exist.

That’s fair enough, but inevitably where trans people are concerned the argument gets taken further and starts to be used as an excuse for invalidation of modern identities.

To start with, just because the word transsexual didn’t exist in ancient times that doesn’t mean that trans people didn’t exist. As the above (very incomplete) list of identities shows, people lived lives outside of the gender binary in most (if not all) cultures throughout history. Where we have no evidence it is probably because such people had to stay under the radar for fear of their lives.

A more subtle argument is that because the word transsexual didn’t exist then trans women from ancient times would not have identified as women, they would always have used a local identity that was some form of third gender.

The most obvious point to make here is that gender identity is not a set of discrete boxes you can pigeonhole people into. Take a look at any group of trans people today and you will find a wide range of identities. Many people change how they identify as they experiment with their lives in search of something that they are comfortable with. Even within my lifetime, non-binary was not a socially accepted identity, and gender clinics used to pressure non-binary patients to either leave or adopt a transsexual identity. The fact that non-binary didn’t exist as an acceptable identity didn’t stop non-binary people from feeling non-binary, any more than the fact that the word homosexual didn’t exist didn’t stop men from having sex with each other.

It therefore seems reasonable to me that if you were to be able to examine a group of trans people from the past — say a group of galli from ancient Rome — you would find a whole range of identities among them. That might include people who have become galli against their will, people who seem to us more like effeminate gay men, people whose gender is non-binary, and people who identify strongly as women.

However, there is a deeper and more insidious danger here. If you argue that trans women from the past could not identify as women because the word transsexual didn’t exist, then you are arguing that if you create a society in which the idea of a transsexual doesn’t exist then you can stop trans people from identifying as women — you are postulating a “cure”. And you are claiming that the whole idea of being trans is socially constructed.

Please, cis academic friends, stop doing this.

Last Sunday in Manchester

~ Cheryl

Dubya as cheerleader

It occurs to me that I haven’t yet blogged about the Sunday of the LGBT History Academic Conference. That’s remiss of me, because it means that only people on Twitter and Facebook will have seen the above photo. It is from Susan Stryker’s presentation about the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, and yes it does show Dubya dressed as a cheerleader.

Interestingly, Susan’s presentation wasn’t really about trans history. It was about something that looks like it might have a trans element, but is in fact far more about upholding existing social structures, with a bit of hazing ritual thrown in. What cross-dressing there is generally has about as much to do with being a woman as blacking up has to do with actually being black. This is an area where you can make this point clearly, as opposed to the minefield of drag which is much more complicated.

One of the most interesting papers on Sunday was one by Gavin Brown about the Gay Rural Aid & Information Network (GRAIN), which provided assistance and networking to gay men in rural communities in the UK during the 1970s. This being the post-Hippy era, there was good deal of what we would now call Hipsterism going on in addition to actual country-based gay people.

I was very disappointed that the Canadian academic who was due to give a paper on trans life in Trinidad didn’t turn up. Maybe I’ll see if he’s in when I’m in Toronto next week.

I did get to hear a paper by Jane Traies from Sussex University based on her forthcoming book about older lesbians. Kudos to Jane for being open to the idea that some of her subjects might have identified as trans men, had they been born a few generations later. Of interest to me was the fact that around 60% of the women interviewed had been married and many said that they had loved their husbands dearly, but they still identified as lesbians.

After the paper I asked Jane about her lack of use of the word “bisexual”. She said that her subjects almost all insisted that they were not bi, often because of a misunderstanding of what it meant. Apparently some of them thought it meant having sex with a man and a woman at the same time. Then again, I have been reading history textbooks whose authors think that “bisexual” and “hermaphrodite” mean the same thing. *sigh*

Finally thanks again to my pal Catherine Baker for her great paper about how history departments, and indeed universities as a whole, continue to marginalize trans students by never mentioning trans issues in classes or, if they do, doing so in a negative way.

There were some things about the weekend that were less good, which basically boiled down to the fact that running events like this is a learning process, especially for cis people. I have had words. As long as people keep trying to learn and do better I am OK with that.

My City, My People

~ Cheryl

I am in Manchester for the final leg of this year’s LGBT History Festival. Tomorrow I am giving a talk and an academic paper, but today I had the pleasure of sitting through Susan Stryker’s film on the Compton Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco, and then listening to Susan talk about the film.

For those of you who don’t know, The Compton Riot took place at a diner in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco in 1966. It involved mainly drag queens and gay hustlers, and was a reaction to police harassment. It happened several years before Stonewall (though after a similar event in Philadelphia).

Two things stood out for me from the film. The first was that the riot was no accident. It was partly a result of the gay night manager at the cafeteria having died a few months previously and the new management being less friendly to the trans hookers for whom the establishment was a welcome haven from the San Francisco weather. But it was also a result of deliberate radicalization of the trans community by a militant gay rights organization called Vanguard which met at the cafe, and a result of self-radicalization by the trans community in the wake of Harry Benjamin having set up a gender clinic in the Bay Area. There’s nothing quite like being offered the possibility of legal supply of hormones and surgery to galvanize a bunch of street girls.

The other thing that I noticed was the reaction of San Francisco to the riot. Stonewall was, in many legitimate ways, the start of the gay rights movement, because it did actually result in a world-wide reaction. Compton did not get much notice. What actually happened was that a bunch of trans women complained about being badly treated by the police, the City shrugged it’s collective shoulders and apologized, and life got back to normal with the police promising to be nicer in future. Of course this was San Francisco at the height of the Hippy movement, and things didn’t stay that way, but it is kind of cool that it happened.

Training the NHS on Trans Issues

~ Cheryl

Today I did trans awareness training at Southmead Hospital in Bristol. Tomorrow I will be in Exeter doing the same thing for Healthwatch Devon. It is great to be able to do this stuff, but the classes are very small in comparison to the number of people who work for the NHS. Last month we had to cancel a course in Frome for Heathwatch Somerset because only one person signed up. Right now I am only reaching the people who want to learn, not those who need to learn.

The biggest need for training is for GPs, but reaching them is very difficult. Like everyone else in the NHS, they are constantly being asked to do more with less resources. Training is at the bottom of their list of priorities. Besides, many of them are old and set in their ways. I’m therefore concentrating on trainee doctors. I did some work with Bristol University Medical School last year, and am talking to them about doing more this year.

That means I reach a few hundred trainee doctors each year, which is great, but it is only one school. Others may not be so forward thinking. We need to keep up pressure on the General Medical Council to make this sort of thing mandatory. I recently became aware of this petition about that very subject, and am delighted to see that it now has over 30,000 signatures. Please consider signing it, and share it widely.

My Manchester Schedule

~ Cheryl

There are two things I am going in Manchester this week. One is giving a paper about trans people in ancient Mesopotamia and Rome at an academic conference. You have to sign up for a ticket for that, but if you are keen to go I believe that there are one or two cancellations so you might be able to get in cheap.

The other one is a repeat of the Michael Dillon talk that I gave in London and Bristol. I have just looked at the publicity for the public talks and…

Manchester LGBTHM flyer

OMG! OMG! OMG! I am on the same bill as Tom Robinson.

Teenage Cheryl flails wildly.

You can see the whole flyer here.

Stuart Milk on Ujima

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’m sat in the bar of a Bristol hotel waiting for Stuart Milk. We were hoping for a little bit of downtime for him today. However, the Democratic primary race is in full swing back in the USA and as someone who campaigned strongly for Obama Stuart’s opinion is in demand. Stuff is happening in Asia too. I have no idea if Stuart is involved in Panasonic’s decision to back same-sex unions in Japan — he doesn’t share details of his work with me because it is often sensitive — but it would not surprise me. It is the sort of thing he helps make happen.

What I did do is get Stuart into my radio studio for almost 2 hours on Wednesday. That was yesterday, wasn’t it? I have trouble remembering what day it is at the moment. He was a bit late arriving as I had to leave him answering emails and make his own way to the studio while I got the show set up. We were joined by my producer, Paulette, who is a retired teacher, and by Lisa Middle who runs the local branch of the National Union of Teachers. The first half of the show was taken up with discussion of oppressive initiatives such as Proposition 6 in California (which Harvey Milk helped defeat) and Section 28 in the UK, both of which were intended to prevent children finding out the truth about same sex relationships. We also talked about what sort of government initiatives we needed to build a fairer society.

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

The second half of the show was given over to talking about Stuart, his uncle, and the great work that he and the Milk Foundation do around the world. We also talked about some of the people Stuart had met in his work, such a the Obamas, and Maya Angelou.

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

The playlist was all LGBT:

  • Diana Ross – I’m Coming Out
  • Little Richard – Tutti Frutti
  • Janelle Monae & Erykah Badu – QUEEN
  • Amada Lear – I Am What I Am
  • Labi Siffre – So Strong
  • Vinyl Closet – Jailhouse Rock
  • Tracy Chapman – Baby Can I Hold You Tonight?
  • Village People – YMCA

LGBT History Festival – Got Programme?

~ Cheryl

Bristol LGBT History Festival Programme
With Bristol’s leg of the 2016 National Festival of LGBT History happening next week, it is time for some more publicity barrage. Above is the electronic version of our flyer (designed by the incredibly talented Ceri Jenkins). Of course shrinking it down to fit in a page does nothing for readability, but click ye to embiggen and all shall be revealed.

For more details of the events, see the OutStories Bristol website.

Booking links for the ticketed events are as follows:

It is all free to attend.

Trans People and Names

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’ve updated my post on the Twilight People project to register a name change for the director to Surat-Shaan Knan. I’ve always known him as Surat before, but he’s changing the name he goes by, as many trans people do. Both names are male-identified in Hebrew. However, the Shaan has personal religious meaning for him that I won’t pretend to fully understand but am happy to respect.

Obviously many trans people change their names on transition. Some are lucky enough to have names that work for more than one gender to begin with. Others being non-binary see no need for a name change. But if you are going from an obviously male name to an obviously female identity you’ll probably want to change. What many people don’t realize is that this isn’t always the end of it.

I was chatting to Shaan about the name change at the V&A on Saturday, and Fox Fisher happened to be stood nearby. He got in on the conversation because he too has recently changed his name. In his case, he told me, it is because his family has come out as supporting him and he wanted to go back to using his family name again. That’s wonderful. I changed my last name on transition to protect my family from association with me. I’m still doing that, because for some people being associated with an out trans person is still dangerous.

There are many other reasons why trans people might change their name a second time. If you pick a name without having tried it out much you might find that it doesn’t suit you. (I was using mine for years before going full time as female.) Or you may settle on a nickname or diminutive of the name you adopted.

Cis people do this too. Women may change their names on getting married, and may change them back again after separation. People become known by nicknames all the time. So hopefully it is fairly easy for people to cope with trans folk changing names. I think it is mainly newspapers who insist on knowing what our “real” names are. And as the Trans Equality Report succinctly put it, there is no such thing as a “legal name” in the UK. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Before Stonewall – Compton Cafeteria

~ Cheryl

Ask most people when the gay rights movement began and they will say the Stonewall Riot in 1969. This is bollocks, of course. Things were happening in Germany in the 19th Century. But Stonewall wasn’t even the first such event in the USA. In 1966 there was a riot by trans people at a place called Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco. It probably wasn’t the first either, but it is the subject of an Emmy-winning film, Screaming Queens, written and directed by Victor Silverman and trans historian, Susan Stryker.

At the end of February, Susan will be in Manchester as one of the headline speakers for their part of the LGBT History Festival. There will be a showing of the film on Friday, 26th February 2015 from 2pm to 4pm. Susan will be present to answer questions. I’ll be there. Hopefully I will see some of you there too. This is a rare opportunity to learn about a key moment in LGBT history, and meet an expert in the field. Tickets available here.