Gender

Please Help Mindline Trans+

~ Cheryl

The last week has been particularly awful for trans people in the UK. I know a lot of people are very frightened and upset. Fortunately the lovely folks at Mindline Trans+, the helpline for trans and non-binary people run by the mental health charity, Mind, is looking to expand. They have a fundraiser going through the Aviva Community Fund and are hoping to hit £10,000 in donations by July 15th. The money will be used to expand their service from 2 nights a week to 3.

I should declare an interest here. The service started in Bristol and I did the initial training for staff from Bristol and Taunton. Also I see that the fundraiser is using a TV interview that Liz Sorapure of Mind and I did for Made in Bristol TV when the service first started up. But I very much believe that this is one of the best projects I have been involved in. And it is never more needed than it is now. Please help.

The Government War on Trans People Begins

~ Cheryl

Today’s papers have the news that the UK government is ready to move forward on reform of trans rights. The government has leaked to the Sunday Times that it will not be implementing the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), and will instead be introducing proposals to protect the British people from dangerous trans folks.

By far the most remarkable part of this is the revelation that 70% of respondents to the government survey on GRA reform were in favour of the proposals put forward by those notorious radicals, Theresa May and Amber Rudd. However, the proposals are still being rejected because the government believes that the Wrong Sort of People responded to the consultation.

If only they had been so sensible about the 52% of people who voted for Brexit, eh?

Also, given that trans people make up around 1% of the population, I find it hard to understand how we could have swamped responses to a public consultation, especially because almost every national media outlet, including the Guardian and the BBC, were encouraging people to reject the reform proposals.

But we are where we are. The government is determined to move forward as it sees fit, and it has made clear that even a supermajority of public opinion will not be allowed to stand in its way. So what does it all mean? Like most things pertaining to trans people, the announcement in the Sunday Times is full of coded language that can seem harmless but may hide all sorts of nastiness.

I should note, by the way, that I have no reason to believe that the Sunday Times has got this wrong. One of their reporters who led their campaign against trans people until recently was rewarded, after the General Election, with a post as a senior advisor to the Prime Minister.

One way in which we can try to decode what the announcement means is to look at what is already being done. Some time ago the government announced a legal inquiry into the operation of the Tavistock and Portman clinic in London, which provides the vast majority of health care for trans youth in the UK. The Tavi is well known to be deeply conservative in its practices. When asked to recommend international best practices for trans youth I normally point people to the official guidelines in the USA and Australia. However, a week and a half ago NHS England issued new guidelines for the treatment of trans youth that characterised the services that the Tavi provides as experimental and dangerous. This gives the inquiry no choice but to find that the Tavi is operating improperly, and to either order them to change their practices or close them down.

Those new guidelines also cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of treatment for trans adults.

One of the proposals listed by the Sunday Times is as follows:

There will be a crackdown on “quack” doctors to ensure that only reputable medics can give approvals.

This is obviously a direct attack on Dr. Helen Webberley and her Gender GP service, but the UK has a long and inglorious history of attacking anyone who sets up in private practice to help trans people. All of these people have been reputable medics with appropriate qualifications, but they have all been attacked (with the connivance of senior NHS doctors). Every single private gender expert that I have seen has been forced out of business. As I understand it, Dr. Webberley has moved her operations overseas.

The reason that private operations such as these exist is that waiting times for a first appointment at UK Gender Identity Clinics (GICs) were around 3 years as of before the pandemic. All services are currently on hold. Once services start up again that will have increased signifcantly. That’s 3 years before you see anyone at all, and probably at least another 6 months before a second appointment and approval for you to start treatment.

One of the ways in which trans people have navigated this problem is to initiate transition themselves. They transition socially. They may obtain medication from someone like Dr. Webberley. And until recently NHS guidelines suggested to GPs that they could provide a “bridging prescription” to tide people over until they could get officially taken on by a GIC. That guidance was withdrawn fairly recently. (Sometime last year, as I recall.) So one of the questions I am asking is, what if “quack doctors” include GPs who have provided treatment to trans patients who are not yet with a gender clinic? Will they soon be banned from doing so, under pain of being struck off?

It is rather ironic that a government that is hell-bent on privatising as much of the NHS as possible is also trying to prevent any private practice in the case of trans health.

The Sunday Times also talks about new national guidelines on access to toilets. They talk about how the general public does “not support transgender women with male anatomy accessing female-only facilities”. This is deeply disingenous of them. The current treatment protocols for trans people require that you show you can live full time in your correct gender for a period of time. The GRA states 2 years, though most GICs currently require less than that. This so-called “real life test” includes navigating public life. If trans women are not able to use public toilets, changing rooms and so on, they will fail the test and not be allowed surgery or a legal gender change.

The Sunday Times report also talks about a crackdown on the provision of gender neutral toilets. This does not protect cisgender people in any way. When asked to give advice on toilet provision I always note that gender neutral facilities should either be an addition for those who need them, or that they should be entirely separate cubicles such as you find on trains and aircraft. Gender-specific toilets can still exist alongside them. That way anyone who is unconfortable accessing a “male” or “female” toilet will have somewhere safe to go. That will include non-binary people, and butch lesbians, as well as pre-surgery trans women. It looks like this option will be banned.

Then there are the waiting lists. There are currently thousands of trans women in the UK who have transitioned successfully but have either yet to be accepted by a GIC, or are still waiting for a date for surgery. All of these women will be left in limbo by such regulations. Even going to work will be difficult for many of them. Thank goodness for Lockdown, because currently no one is surprised that we are afraid to leave home.

What about people like me? I successfully completed all of the required tests years ago when treatment protocols were much more stringent. I’ve had genital surgery and I am legally recognised as female. Will I be safe under these new proposals? Possibly not.

To start with, in the 20+ years since surgery I have had continual problems with GPs who have been unwilling to provide me with the hormones I need to stay healthy. There has been an ongoing spat between the GICs and the Royal College of GPs, with the latter pushing for a position that all health care for trans people should be conducted by GICs because it is “too complicated” for ordinary GPs. The GICs, being massively overloaded, have pushed back against this. They discharge people into GP care as soon as they have had all of the surgery they want.

Remember that I suggested that GPs might be banned from providing hormones to trans people before they access a GIC? What happens if they are banned from providing hormones after surgery as well? The government will say that there is no problem because people like me will be able to go to a GIC for prescriptions. But there will be at least a 4-year waiting list, and having thousands of people like me apply to be taken on will only make matters worse.

None of this will even require any legislation. All that is required is for the NHS to change official guidelines and threaten GPs with being struck off if they disobey. As we have seen with the changed guidelines for trans youth, they are already willing to do this.

Another point raise by the Sunday Times is as follows:

Safeguards will be put in place to protect “safe spaces” for women, reaffirming provisions in the Equality Act.

What does this mean?

UK readers will remember that the Tories have long been opponents of equalities legislation. David Cameron’s government spent a long time trying to find a way to repeal the Human Rights Act. The fact that they were unable to do so while still part of the EU was a significant driving force behind Brexit. The government does not want to do anything to equalities legislation except dismantle it.

A key feature of anti-trans arguments (for example Rowling’s recent screed) is that trans rights somehow take away rights from cis women. They want equalities legislation changed so that “sex-based rights” always trump the rights of trans people. This sort of thing appeals to the government because it can be endlessly extended. If they get this done, then they can argue that the rights of religious people trump the rights of LGBT+ people, that the rights of Christians trump those of non-Christians, that the rights of white people trump the rights of non-white people, and that the rights of men trump those of women.

The government knows that it is impractical to pass a law banning trans women from “women-only” spaces. It doesn’t want to be seen to be responsible for putting police guards on toilets and changing rooms. What they will do instead is to amend the guidance for the Equality Act to note that any person or organisation that allows a trans woman (whether she is legally female or not) access to a “woman-only” space is committing an act of discrimination against cis women. They will then sit back and wait for the rash of law suits that will force organisations to rescind their trans-inclusive policies.

In the USA a couple of days ago the *Unpresident changed legal guidance so that it is no longer an offence to refuse medical treatment to trans people. What I think the UK government is proposing is far worse. They will make it a crime for an orgnisation to be trans inclusive, even if it wants to be.

Finally there is the point about outlawing gay conversion therapy. This is generally being seen as a sop to the LGB community, and an effort to further divide them from their trans allies. “Don’t make a fuss over the trans thing,” the government is saying, “and we will give you this other thing you have always wanted.” But it could be much more than that, because the anti-trans movement has long claimed that gender reassignment is, de facto, gay conversion therapy.

Back when I transitioned, it was absolutely essential that I claimed to be sexually attracted to men, otherwise I would be deemed not feminine enough to be allowed to transition. Thankfully that wasn’t a problem for me, but others had to lie to get through. Suppose, however, that claiming to be sexually attracted to men was also taken as proof that I was “really gay”, because I was “really a man”. Anti-trans LG people firmly believe this is the case, and that “their people” are being stolen by gender clinics.

If the government listens to the anti-trans lobby, and they have shown every sign of doing so enthusiastically, then they could quite easily define gender transition as “gay conversion therapy” as an excuse to ban it.

Now of course none of this has happened yet. It is possible that the government is not in fact as devious and cruel as I think it is. But I’m not going to bet on that. We need to be prepared for the possibility that such changes will be introduced, and that they will be disguised by weasel words to make them seem harmless. The misinformation campaign over GRA reform has shown just how dishonest the opposition can be when it comes to trans rights.

The question is, will anyone care? Obviously vastly more people who do care are on our side than are not. The results of the consultation proved that. But the vast majority of the UK population did not respond. Nevertheless, they should care about what is being done to trans people right now, because we are the canary in the coal mine. Also we are running out of time.

Last week the government confirmed that they would not be seeking an extension to the Brexit negotiations because of the pandemic, and that they will be continuing their intransigent negotiating stance. This means that a very hard Brexit currently looks inevitable, and as a consequence the UK will suffer a massive economic disaster in January. We need to stop this. We need causes to rally around. The Black Lives Matter campaign appears to be one of them. I am hoping that the sheer cruelty of the government’s treatment of trans people might be another one.

The other interesting political wild card is Scotland. The Scottish government has published a Bill implementing the proposed GRA changes, and has promised to progress it once the pandemic is over. I have long wondered why Nicola Sturgeon has insisted on this, given that one of her main allies, Joanna Cherry, is violently transphobic. My assumption is that for the SNP independence always comes first, and that Ms. Cherry is privately prepared to accept a temporary increase in trans rights in Scotland if that provokes a massive row with Westminister.

We surely live in interesting times.

As usual with such things, comments are closed on this. You know how to find me if you need to talk.

Free Webinar on LGBT+ in the Workplace

~ Cheryl

On Tuesday next week (12:30 UK time) I will be a guest on a webinar run by Benefex, a company that helps employers make better use of their employees by treating them better. Given the current atmosphere in the UK, I have no doubt that it will be highly contentious. It might even get me on the front page of The Times again. We shall see.

Anyway, if you are interested, you can sign up for free.

The Dan & Cheryl Show

~ Cheryl

Today I did my thing with Dan Vo for the Queer Britain Lockdown Hunt. It was a lot of fun. I covered a range of queer history books ranging from the 20th Century back to the 2nd. I also mentioned four science fiction and fantasy books. They were:

  • Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
  • Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
  • Friday by Robert A. Heinlein
  • Triton by Samuel R Delany

Obviously there’s a huge amount of queer SF&F that I could have mentioned, and I tweeted about several others, but those four had interesting stories. To find out why I chose them, you’ll need to watch the show.

Coronavirus – Day #83

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

I’m sure I accomplished some things today, but almost none of them were things I had planned to do. There was unexpected Diversity Trust email, unexpected death of a friend, and two good TV documentaries that I had expected to be an hour long and were both two hours. Oh well, I have at least finished the Wizard’s Tower accounts for the month. Now I need to get to bed so that I’m awake to record an interview and to do the thing with Dan tomorrow.

The biggest news in the outside world is that the NHS has updated its guidelines on the provision of cross-sex hormones to trans adolescents. Current regulations say that these can be prescribed at age sixteen, generally after a long period of assessment by the youth gender clinic. The new guidelines are almost laughably unscientific.

They talk about how this treatment might have irreversible effects such as breast growth (in trans girls) or the voice breaking (in trans boys). You don’t say? That’s kind of like saying that cataract surgery can have the irreversible effect of better eyesight.

They note that such treatment might lead to infertility but should not be used as a form of contraception. Really? Who on earth would use it for that? I know that oestrogen is an active ingredient in the birth control pill, but would anyone seriously think of using testosterone?

And finally they talk darkly about the lack of knowledge of the long term effects of such treatment. Well hello! 26 years and counting. And I’m not the only one. There are plenty of us about, many of whom have been on hormones for far longer. But of course no amount of actual evidence will stop these people from scaremongering.

There are two things that we can take from this. The first is that the outcome of the the judicial review into the operation of youth gender clinic has already be decided at a political level. The clinic will be found to be operating unsafely, and it will be shut down, regardless of how much evidence to the contrary is presented, and how many young lives it has improved.

The second is that it won’t stop with kids. The idea that giving trans people hormones is “unsafe” clearly doesn’t only apply to teenagers. GPs now have a carte blanche to refuse to supply them to adults as well. It won’t be long before the adult gender clinics are threatened with closure as well.

On #QBLockdownHunt Tomorrow

~ Cheryl

Those of you who have been following the Queer Britain Lockdown Hunt on Twitter will know that each Friday Dan Vo has been getting people to search out particular items of significance in queer history. We’ve done badges, we’ve done postcards, we’ve done t-shirts and fliers. But tomorrow the object will be books.

As you can imagine, that’s right up my street. Dan has kindly invited me to join him at 3:00pm to chat about books. I’ll be showcasing some science fiction novels of significance, and also some books from much further back in time that are important to queer history.

Dan also has several other guests through the day, including the fabulous Diana Souhami who has written several books on the lives of famous lesbians. The full details are in the tweet below.

Coronavirus – Day #77

~ Cheryl

Another day, more stuff written. Today has been quite exciting from a local history point of view.

These days Fridays are Queer Britain Lockdown Hunt days. Queer Britain is a project that aims to build a bricks and mortar queer museum in the UK. Every Friday my lovely pal Dan Vo does a Twitter takeover where they focus on one particular type of queer memorabilia. Today the object was badges, of which I have plenty. So I did my bit and tweeted some photos.

During the day Dan does brief interviews with various queer celebrities, much as he has been doing for Museum from Home. His first guest today was Sue Sanders of LGBT History Month, who had some announcements to make.

First up, the LGBTHM theme for 2021 will be Mind, Body & Spirit. Sue also announced the five “faces” of 2021, one of whom will be Michael Dillon. That’s a perfect choice (if I do say so myself, ahem!). Dillon was an Oxford graduate, and keen thinker, a champion rower in his younger days, a deeply spirital person, and later in life the first Western European to become a Buddhist monk.

This means, of course, that I am likely to be rather busy next February. I’ve already started the planning process, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to bring you some as yet unknown Dillon facts when we get there. Watch this space!

Out in the world, the UK government continues to be a laughing stock (or laughing at us in the case of Matt Hancock, the Minister for Death). But events here have been overshadowed by the unfolding disaster in the USA. When I saw the rallies that Donny Little Hands did for the Police Union in 2016 I got the impression that he saw a heavily armed police force as his own private militia that he could turn to should he need military backup. It gives me no pleasure to see this coming true.

Anyway, my very best wishes go out to all of my friends in the Minneapolis/St.Paul region, and to all African Americans wherever in the country you might be.

Thank You, Australia #GiveItUp125 #IDAHOBIT

~ Cheryl

Being in Virtual Australia on IDAHOBIT Day is a poignant reminder that I did most of my gender transition while living in Australia. There were a number of reasons for that, but one of them is that the medical support for transition was better in Australia than it is here in the UK. That’s even more true now. I will always be grateful for the support I got from friends in Australia, in particular the folks at the Melbourne Science Fiction Club who accepted me without question.

One of the disappointments about not being able to travel to New Zealand for Worldcon this year is that a planned visit to Melbourne has had to be cancelled too. Maybe another year.

The photo above was taken at the Wilson’s Promontory National Park, which is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

The Queer Britain #QBLockdownHunt Challenge

~ Cheryl

A quick break from Virtual Italy to note that there’s another charity campaign going on today. Queer Britain is a wonderful project that aims to create an actual bricks & mortar exhibition of LGBT+ life in the UK. Today my friend Dan Vo is running an awareness campaign on Twitter and is asking people to find t-shirts and fliers that relate to queer history and post about them. He’s also interviewing a whole bunch of fabulous people. I have rather a lot of material, so I decided to channel my inner Dan and make a video. This covers a lot of my work with OutStories Bristol, how I got involved in doing LGBT History Month Events (sorry Sue, you are stuck with me now), and a little bit about the tragedy of the UK’s lost trans history archives. The latter is an excellent example of why Queer Britain is so badly needed. There’s also a little bit of science fiction in there.

Coronavirus – Day #45

~ Cheryl

I forgot to do a post yesterday, didn’t I. Not that I had a huge amount to report. I was busy.

Today has been much of the same. I have recorded an interview, made a Museum From Home video, and done some Day Job work.

Video editing is hell. So is being in a video. I am so not television material.

Today’s big news, other than Bozo claiming that over 40,000 people dead was a great success on his part, is that doctors in the US have had an idea as to how to help male patients survive the virus. They are going to try dosing them with oestrogen.

This isn’t quite as mad as it sounds. We’ve known for some time that mortality is higher among men than women. This has led to the anti-trans brigade on social media crowing that C-19 is a Y Chromosome Plague that will somehow wipe out all trans women because we are “really men”.

Now there are reasons why having XX chromosomes is good for your health. Having two Xs is a backup strategy. If a gene on one chromosome has an unhelpful mutation, the chances are that you’ve got a correct version on the other. This makes XX people somewhat more disease resistant than XY people. But equally oestrogen is good at helping your immune system and doctors in China have speculated that it might help protect against C-19. It is also possible that it is testosterone weaking the immune system that is the issue. This paper suggests that might be the case (thanks to Julia Serano for the link).

So there’s a whole bunch of different biological reasons why XY people might be more susceptible to C-19 than XX people, and that’s without starting on gender-based issues such as men being more likely to be heavy smokers, work in high-stress occupations, spend more time on crowded communter trains, and so on. But this is a crisis, and we should try everything. Maybe the estrogen trials will work.

Some people on social media have been worrying that if the trials do work then there will be an even worse shortage of estrogen than there is now. That’s certainly likely, though it is easy to make and the recent shortage in the UK was caused mainly by government stupidity rather than a real shortage.

Of course if oestrogen does turn out to be an effective treatment then the anti-trans brigade will start yelling for all trans women to be arrested because we are using valuable medicine that is needed by their menfolk. And despite having spent years complaining that hormone treatment for trans women is untested and dangerous, they will want immediate deployment of it to save people from C-19. Consistency has never been their strongpoint.

In better news the UK has now had a whole week of the number of deaths being lower than they were on the same day in the previous week. That’s a good measure of progress because it eliminates daily patterns in the data. It isn’t over yet by any means, but it looks like we are getting there. Now we have to resist the temptation to all rush back to “normal” before it is safe to do so.

Tribade Visibility Day #LDV2020

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment


In honour of Lesbian Visibility Week I thought I would do a post about lesbianism in Ancient Rome. There are, of course, numerous examples of men having sex with men in Roman literature. There are a lot fewer examples of women having sex with women. That’s in no small part because almost all of the surviving Roman literature was written by men. But the women are there, of you know where to look.

The first thing to note is that sexuality wasn’t a matter of identity for Romans the way it is for us. Sex was something that you did, not something that you were. For Roman men it was far more important to know whether you were penetrating or being penetrated than who you were doing it with. In recognition of that there were at least three different words for effeminate men, though these could often refer to social behavior rather than sexual habits.

For women there was one word, “tribade”. It meant someone who rubs. It isn’t clear whether the Romans actually understood this as having sex, because no penises were involved, but it was certainly something the women might do.

Of course women might have used dildos. They certainly existed at least as far back as Classical Greece. The playwright, Aristophanes, mentions them in his Lysistrata. This is a play about how the women of Athens go on a sex strike to try to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War. It includes mention of an “olisbos” which is made of leather and is used by women when there are no men available.

Mention of Greece reminds us that the Romans would have been familiar with the legends of the Amazons. In an all-female society, women having sex with women would be expected. They would have believed that the Amazons were real as well. After all, they had contact with women warriors of the Scythians who lived north of the Black Sea, with the dark-sinned warrior queens of the city of Meroë south of Egypt, and with the warrior queens of Britannia.

The Romans were also very familiar with the poetry of Sappho of Lesbos. Far more of her work would have been available to them than survives today. In Hadrian’s time, Greek culture was hugely fashionable and it became a thing for upper class women to write poetry “in the style of Sappho”. Sadly this meant writing in Greek and using the same grammatical forms as Sappho. It would be like us writing sonnets using Shakespearean English. It did not mean content.

On the other hand, we know about this at least in part because of some women’s writing that has survived. Julia Balbilla and Claudia Damo were two wealthy Roman women who were part of the entourage of Hadrian’s wife, Vibia Sabina. Their poems have survived because they wrote them (or more likely had them written by slaves) on a rather large statue of Amenhotep III during an Imperial tour of Egypt. Hadrian and his wife had married for political reasons when they were very young and by this time hated each other. Hadrian apparently had no interest in sex with women. It is rumoured that Vibia Sabina had an affair with the historian, Suetonius, but it wouldn’t be surprising, given how much Sappho they were reading, if at least some of the ladies of her court became close to each other.

One place were women might have gathered to have sex with each other is in meetings of mystery cults. These were a strange phenomenon of Roman religious life that we might call secret societies, but which had as their excuse the worship of particular gods. Some mystery cults were more like the Freemasons, which a man might join in the hope of befriending the rich and powerful. Others seems to have been excuses for orgies. Roman men were deeply suspicious of mystery cults that catered to women, on the not unreasonable basis that their wives might be sneaking off to have sex with other people at their meetings. The fresco at the top of this post is from Pompeii and is believed to depict a meeting of a mystery cult.

Some of our most obvious references to lesbian Romans come in works of fiction. The poet Martial wrote about a woman called Philaenis whom, he says, has sex with both boys and girls, allegedly averaging 11 girls a day. Philaenis is also the supposed name of the author of a legendary Greek sex manual, so if this is a real person that Martial is talking about he has probably used a pseudonym, and may even have made her up. However, even if he is exaggerating for effect, it is certainly something that he thinks a woman might do.

However, by far the best example of love between women in Roman literature comes in The Dialogues of the Courtesans (sometimes called The Mimes of the Courtesans) by Lucian of Samosata. This is a satirical comedy in which high class sex workers tell of entertaining encounters they have had with clients. In one of these Leaina tells of a wealthy person known as Megilla who is a client of hers. Although this person is understood to have been assigned female at birth, he dresses like a man and insists on being called Megillos, which is a Greek equivalent of insisting on male pronouns. He even has a wife, a woman called Demonassa.

We need to bear in mind here that Lucian is a satirist. He’s not averse to making things up. He did, after all, write a book about people traveling to the Moon. So while Megillos might sound to us like a trans man, there’s no guarantee that he is based on a real person that Lucian knew. This might be another case of exaggerating for effect.

However, the important point here is not whether Megillos is real, but where Lucian has him hail from. Demonassa, his wife, is from Corinth, but Megillos is from the island of Lesbos. I don’t believe that this is an accident. Sappho lived on Lesbos, and Diodorus Siculus tells us that the island was once an Amazon colony. Lucian chose Lesbos, I’m sure, because although the English word “lesbian” only acquired its current meaning in 1890, as far back as the first Century CE the island of Lesbos already had a reputation of being home to women who loved women.

Coronavirus – Day #36

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

So, birthday under Lockdown turns out to be much the same as any other birthday, but with a lot more (virtual) company.

I began the day by doing a trans history talk for a local LGBT+ group (adults this time), which was fun.

I have a fair amount of work of various sorts to do, but I decided to goof off for the day and do some baking. I don’t have a usable oven, so for Christmas I bought myself one of these (cheap in a Clark’s Village outlet store). I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to use it before today.

I decided to make scones (for cream tea) as they are fairly easy. They turned out suprisingly well for a first attempt. They were a little over-done, but machines like this are very precise and now I know to reduce the heat setting next time.

I had sport! Formula E has launched a sim series with most of the actual drivers taking part, plus a side race for other folks. It was actually the side race that interested me most as it had a combination of amateurs, profesional esports players, and young drivers hoping to break in to the big time. Charlie Martin has a seat in the Techeetah team. Sadly she didn’t do very well, but everyone is learning right now so I hope she’ll perform better in later races.

And of course there was WiFi SciFi 2. Only one panel this time, and it devolved into discussion of the writing business which is less of interest to me, but probably more what the punters want.

Next up: dinner, wine, cheese, TV or movie.

World, what world?

The Book of Koli

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Mike Carey has a new science fiction trilogy underway, and book 1 was officially published yesterday. Normally I would be jumping at this and reviewing it immediately, but I can’t because, as Mike mentioned in the launch event last night, I had a small hand in creating the book. There are a couple of trans people in it, and I helped out with a few details of their characterisation and story arcs. Advising other people about trans issues is, after all, something that I do professionally.

Of course there’s a lot more to the book than just those characters. Indeed, of all the reviews I have seen so far, only one has even mentioned their existence. And in my humble opinion the rest of the book is amazing. Koli’s voice does take a little getting used to, but once you are into the rhythm of it reading becomes very easy. The whole thing about murderous trees is fabulous. The weird place names will probably mean more if you are British and have a vague idea of what the original names were, but if you are not they will just sound like fantasy names.

For those of you who love maps, Mythen Rood is the small town of Mytholmroyd in the Calder Valley, not far from Hebden Bridge. English places names are remarkably bizarre at times.

Of course with us all stuck in isolation and animals starting to wander the streets of our cities, the whole setting of the books takes on a new significance. The books are set a couple of hundred years into the future, so sufficiently far for the current crisis to be merely a small part of what has happened to the world. Nevertheless, the books are set in a world that nature has reclaimed. Asked for a playlist for the book last night, Mike mentioned my favourite Talking Heads song. I think you will see why.

Otherwise Award Winner & Honor List

~ Cheryl


The results of this year’s Otherwise (formery Tiptree) Award have been announced. The winner is Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. The Honor List is as follows:

  • “Dreamborn” by Kylie Ariel Bemis
  • The Book of Flora by Meg Elison
  • Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
  • Meet Me in the Future by Kameron Hurley
  • “Of Warps and Wefts” by Innocent Chizaram Ilo
  • The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
  • The Elemental Logic series by Laurie J. Marks
  • The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya
  • The Deep by Rivers Solomon

I’m not familiar with Emezi’s work at all, but clearly I should be. Nor do I know much about the short fiction (the Hurley and Motoya are both collections). I have reviewed The Calculating Stars and The Deep. I reviewed Fire Logic and Earth Logic back in Emerald City and loved them both. Both books won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Now that all four books are out I have been meaning to re-read the entire series, but of course I have no time. Meg Elison won the Philip K Dick Award with The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, the first volume in the trilogy that The Book of Flora concludes. I have The Book of Flora on my TBR pile, and it has just got a boost up towards the top.

I am, of course, delighted to see so many works with trans themes on the list.

Museum From Home does Trans Romans

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments


I did my thing with Dav Vo earlier today. It was a lot of fun. Indeed I was enjoying it so much that I went a little bit over my alloted 15 minutes.

The star of my talk is the goddess Cybele who rides around in a chariot drawn by lions. It so happens that at this time of year the Romans would have been celebrating the Megalesian Games in her honour. There would have been theatre, chariot racing, and of course much feasting. Cybele’s main temple in Rome was on the Palatine Hill next to the Imperial Palace, and directly overlooked the Circus Maximus.

I illustrated my talk with pictures from museums around the world. Hopefully it looked OK on screen, but if not you can download the slide pack here. In the Notes section of each slide I have put a link to a web page about the object. Sadly Italian museums don’t have much in the way of online catalogues (that I can find in English, they may have them in Italian but Google isn’t finding them) so I have had to resort to Wikipedia.

Dan will be putting all of the talks on YouTube eventually, but for now you can watch via the link below. I note that I was helped by my leonine friend, Augustus, who is alright for a lion, despite being a fan of Imperialism, Patriarchy and English rugby. I see that we’ve had 777 views already. I hope I wasn’t too embarrasing.

Coming on Thursday, Museum From Home

~ Cheryl

My good friend Dan Vo has been entertaining people during Lockdown by hosting a daily Twitter video called Museum From Home. Each day he has a different guest to talk about something museum-related, and probably queer. Today he put out this tweet.

So that’s the cat out of the bag, so to speak. On Thursday I will be Dan’s guest. Despite the emoji he used for me, I will not be talking about Amazons (though I might another day if he’ll have me back). I will be talking about trans Romans. I should note that the show will come with a whole host of content warnings because the Romans were horrible, horrible people by our standards. But if you managed to sit through I, Clavdivs then you should be OK on Thursday as well.

Queer SFF on Tor.com

~ Cheryl

A few weeks back Lee Mandelo asked me to contribute to a mind meld thing for Tor.com on how queer SFF has changed over the past decade. I was deeply honoured to be asked, considering that some of the other contributors are Charlie Jane Anders and Yoon Ha Lee. Tor.com has chosen the Trans Day of Visibility to publish the piece. You can read it here.

On the Trans Day of Visibility

~ Cheryl

Here we go again. Today is the day on which trans people all over the world are supposed to stand up and be counted. Already I have seen a flood of posts on social media celebrating the visibility of trans folks. I’m also seeing posts from trans people saying that they are fed up of being visible; that they are scared of being visible. Part of that is because the world has changed dramatically since TDOV was first concieved, but it is also a matter of how we do TDOV.

A little context is in order. TDOV was created because the only international day that the trans community had was the Trans Day of Remembrance. That’s a pretty depressing, if essential, experience, and it is also one many trans people want kept within the community. It is noticeable that anti-trans extremists now deliberately target TDOR in order to provoke offence and, they hope, mental health breakdowns. We needed a much more positive day.

TDOV is supposed to be that day. However, since it has become popular it has started to have the opposite effect that was intended. That, I think, is because in trying to make trans people more visible, it has ended up as an exercise of They Walk Among Us, which makes us seem different and scary.

Now it is important that trans people be visible. I’m certainly not advocating that we go back to the days of having to disappear into the cis population and fearing that your life will be over if you are ever outed. I’ve been through that fear. It isn’t fun. Not can we pretend that we are “just like everyone else”, because clearly we are not, especially those of us who live far outside the gender binary.

What we do need, however, is to be visible for things other than simply being trans. And there’s no reason why we can’t be, because trans people are fucking awesome. We have to be.

What I would like to see today, therefore, is not just trans people being visible, but trans people visibly doing things in addition to existing. That can be the day-to-day work that they do, but it would be even better to see what trans people are doing to help the community through the current health crisis. I’m sure there are loads of great stories out there waiting to be told. I’ll start.

  • I’m still working with The Diversity Trust, most recently doing an online talk on trans history for an LGBT+ youth group;
  • Through Wizard’s Tower I am helping authors continue in business when mainstream publishing and bookselling are collapsing around them;
  • Wizard’s Tower is also putting out a series of free-to-read short fiction to help people stay entertained during lockdown;
  • And I’m still doing my radio show for Ujima. The next one will be broadcast tomorrow.

Over to you, trans community. What are you doing that you would like to be visible for?

And cis folks, if you are thinking of doing posts, please stop thinking of trans people as a downtrodden minority that needs saving, and start thinking of us as hidden heroes whose contributions to society should be recognised.

Coronavirus – Day #2

~ Cheryl

So far so good. Aside from not going out, today has been a pretty normal Sunday. I did some housework (cleaned the fridge!), did some reading and writing, and got caught up on Formula E. I’m slightly bemused by all of the people on Twitter wondering what they are going to do when they are stuck at home.

The other thing that I did today was go over a draft of a new will. That’s not because I’m expecting to die imminently. It occurred to me a few weeks back that I really should make provision in the will for Wizard’s Tower. The lawyers sent me a draft, and it has taken me a couple of weeks to get around to reading it.

Of course if I do get the virus my chances are good, but not great. Given average worldwide figures I probably have about a 1 in 30 chance of dying. That’s a damn sight more likely than winning the lottery. So I’m not being blasé about it.

This being Britain, Land of Transphobia, the anti-trans brigade are going off on social media about how it is important to know your “biological sex” when going to the doctor. But of course by “biological sex” they mean chromosomes, which have very little effect once you have been born. Interestingly mortality among men is higher than among women, and that’s despite women doing a lot more of the healthcare. An article in The Lancet suggested a number of gendered explanations for the difference, including men being more likley to smoke, and women being less likely to have to go into an office or other workplace in order to keep their job. Being a life-long non-smoker, and a self-employed work-from-home person, I have a more feminine social profile.

But who knows? I’ve had pneumonia in the past. That might make me more vulnerable. Worrying over percentages like this is pointless. My life has got less busy all of a sudden, and while I will miss the foreign trips I am determined to enjoy the additional relaxation time. Back to reading, I think.

A Favour, Please

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

So, there you all are twiddling your thumbs and wondering what to do as the long days of self-isolation stretch ahead of you. Yes, you should be reading books, but hopefully you have time to do something quickly for me.

As you may be aware, governments in the UK have been consulting on changes to the Gender Recongition Act. This is because the current system for obtaining a revised birth certificate (and with it a new legal gender) and a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) is so complex, difficult and expensive that most trans people don’t bother. Changing your ID such as passports and driving licences is much easier, and who ever looks at a birth certificate anyway? But government officials are concerned that many people have ID in one gender yet are legally a different gender, and they want to change that by making it easier for trans folks to make the legal change.

There were a couple of consultations last year, one in Scotland and one in England & Wales. The Scottish one showed 60% of respondents in favour of a change. Westminster has refused to publish the results of their consultation and the new government apparently has no intention of going ahead with the process, but the Scots have published a bill and opened a consultation on that. The consultation closes on Tuesday (17th).

You might wonder what this has to do with you, as most of you are not Scottish. Well, the Scottish government is welcoming input from all around the world, and you can bet that the anti-trans extremists will be doing their best to flood the consultation with responses favouring their view. Trans people in Scotland have been subjected to weeks of relentless and hostile media coverage, and risk losing their civil rights altogether if this consultation produces a negative result. (Transphobes within Westminster are already calling openly for the repeal of trans people’s civil rights.)

The good news is that the consultation is very easy to fill in. There are just five questions. There’s also a fair amount of background information to digest, but I’ll try to summarise things briefly here.

1. All that this affects is the birth certificate. That has almost no effect on day-to-day life. It governs what gender you can get married in, and what gender you are recorded as when you die, but very little else.

2. Scotland will requre a Statutory Declaration to change your legal gender. A false declaration counts as perjury, which is a serious crime with stiff penalties. It will not be possible to change your legal gender on a whim, or easily change back afterwards.

3. Similar systems are already in place in Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Norway and several other countries outside of Europe.

4. If you have any concerns regarding the safety of women as a result of these changes, please read this article from The Scotsman which summarises the responses of women’s servces in Scotland to the initial consultation (spoiler, they were all supportive of the changes).

Question 1 asks, “Do you have any comments on the proposal that applicants must live in their acquired gender for at least 3 months before applying for a GRC?” Simply saying No would indicate that you have no concerns, but a message saying that you support the changes would be helpful.

Question 2 asks, “Do you have any comments on the proposal that applicants must go through a period of reflection for at least 3 months before obtaining a GRC?” Personally I think this is rather silly, but equally it can’t do much harm. If you don’t want to go into the arguments you can safely answer No here.

Question 3 asks, “Should the minimum age at which a person can apply for legal gender recognition be reduced from 18 to 16?” Under current NHS guidelines you can begin medical transition (by taking hormones) at 16, so of course 16-year-olds should be able to change their legal gender along with everything else they will be changing.

Question 4 asks, “Do you have any other comments on the provisions of the draft Bill?” At this point it would be very helpful to ask the Scottish Government to do something for non-binary people. I have worked a lot with organisations from hospitals to domestic violence refuges, and for all of them the lack of any legal recognition of non-binary gender makes it very hard for them to make appropriate allowances for non-binary people.

Question 5 asks, “Do you have any comments on the draft Impact Assessments?” If you are a woman, this would be a good place to say that you do not think that your rights or safety are in any way threatened by the existence of trans people (which is basically the conclusion that the Scottish Government came to).

Some alternative advice, along with discussion of the issues, is available from Mermaids.

The online consultation is available here.

There is no guarantee that the bill will go forward if the consultation delivers a positive result. The anti-trans lobby has plenty of money and powerful friends. But if the consultation delivers a negative result then trans rights in the whole of the UK will in serious danger of being repealed.