History

A Few Words on Versailles

~ Cheryl

No, I am not watching the drama series. Enough of you have expressed utter horror on social media to warn me off that. However, I did take in the accompanying documentary about Louis IV and his court presented by Lucy Worsley and Helen Castor.

Mostly this was good stuff, at least as far as I know because 17th Century France really isn’t my period. However, there was one brief comment that caused me to pause.

Normally BBC history documentaries erase all evidence of LGBT folks from the past. After all, children might be watching, and we wouldn’t want to get a nasty letter from Mary Whitehouse, would we? (Yes, I know she’s dead, but the BBC and Ofcom don’t appear to have twigged that yet.) However, you can’t really talk about Louis XIV without talking about his brother, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans.

Philippe was very gay, and an enthusiastic cross-dresser. So far so good. It is nice to see teh gay actually acknowledged (though the chap playing Phillipe in the documentary isn’t like any gay man I know, and looks positively embarrassed when cross-dressed). However, during the documentary Lucy Worsley blamed Philippe’s gayness on his being treated as a girl by his mother, Anne of Austria.

Lucy, we need to have a word.

To start with, suggesting that a kid can be “made gay” by his upbringing suggests that being gay is something that can be induced, and therefore also “cured”. That’s not a good point to be making.

In any case, we know that many gay men exhibit gender-variant behavior in childhood. When you see people claiming that 80% of trans kids “grow out” of being trans, and have thus been cured of their transness, what they actually mean is that 80% or so of kids exhibiting gender-variant behavior are not trans, and mostly grow up to be happily lesbian, gay or bisexual. Or to be happily non-binary but not want any medical intervention. Or can’t make up their minds as kids but discover their trans identity later in life. Philippe fits right into this pattern.

Which brings me to my second point, Lucy. Blaming a child’s gayness on his mother is anti-feminist. Kids are what they are. My guess is that all Queen Anne was doing was accepting her son’s gender-variant behavior. That’s not bad parenting, it is loving your kid. Mothers have quite enough to do without having people going round blaming them for their kids being gay.

A Day in Hay

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As I mentioned earlier, I spent yesterday at the Hay Festival. It was the first time I have been, mainly because you need a car to get there and until recently I haven’t had one. Of course having a car means that there are other distractions.

The shortest route to Hay from where I am is over the Severn Bridge, turn left at Newport and from Abergaveny head up through the Brecon Beacons via Crickhowell and Talgarth. It is beautiful country, and I wish I had had time to stop and take lots of pictures.

crickhowell
Crickhowell

I will say, though, that it would have been much easier if I had a SatNav system. Hay is not well signposted. In fact as far as the road system goes it seems that the only acceptable way to get to and from the town is via Hereford. That way the signs are HUGE! Any other route and they are practically non-existent.

Part of this may be due to the fact that Hay is very much a border town. Indeed, there is a Welcome to England sign within the town boundary. There may be some confusion in highways departments as to whether the Festival is an English thing or a Welsh one. Thankfully that confusion was not reflected inside the Festival where evidence of its Welshness could be found everywhere.

Beulah Devaney wrote an article for The Independent this year about how elitist Hay is. She’s right, most of the programme was of little or no interest to me. I can’t imagine Hay having someone like me involved the way Cheltenham did. Then again, Hay is necessarily elitist. You can’t even get there by train, and to enjoy it properly you really need to stay in the area for several days. I’m willing to bet that the cost of accommodation goes through the roof during the Festival. People do actually camp, which doubtless helps with the cost, but personally I am allergic to camping.

So no, Beulah, if we want accessible literary festivals, the first thing to do is to not have them in Hay. There are plenty of others we can target. Hay, I think, can be safely left to go its own way.

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The Festival site, with the Brecon Beacons in the background.

Why was I there, then? Well to start with I wanted to see the famous Town of Books. That was a complete failure because the main Festival site is in a field on the outskirts of town. I never got into the town itself, except driving through on my way home.

I also went to see Kate Adair. I hadn’t seen her since Trans Pride in Brighton last year and it was good to catch up. I’m really pleased to see her career in TV taking off. It is amazing that BBC Scotland has given her the ability to make shows about trans people herself. They seem to be only available on social media and in community TV in Scotland, but they still have that BBC tag on them which makes a world of difference. Sadly I’ll be a bit too old by the time Kate gets to be a big name BBC producer, so she won’t be able to help me make my trans history documentary series, but hopefully she’ll do it with someone else.

The other reason I was there was because it was archaeology day. There were actually two talks I was interested in seeing. The first was Paul G. Bahn, who is an expert in prehistoric art. That’s primarily cave paintings to you and me, but is also much more as I discovered. To start with ice age people did a lot of art outside. The reason that we only know their cave paintings is that paintings on rocks outside of caves tend not to last as well.

Of course there are people creating rock art today, and one of the reasons why we know so much about how cave paintings were done is that we can go to Australia and ask people how they do it. This is a tradition with a history of tens of thousands of years, and by some miracle European colonialism hasn’t wiped it out.

Probably this most spectacular thing in Paul’s talk was this:

tuc-daudoubert-bisonClay sculptures of bison from the Tuc d’Audoubert cave in France, made around 13,500 BCE.

After Paul it was on to the main event, a talk by Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe, who is the foremost archaeologist in Britain. I have been reading his books, and watching him on TV, for decades. His new book is about the history of Eurasia and looks at how civilization developed in that vast land mass. This is very much history on a grand scale, but it is also of interest to me because the narrative touches briefly on things relevant to my world.

Sir Barry’s primary thesis is that Eurasia developed civilization rapidly because the major transport routes (the Silk Roads, the Mediterranean) run within regions that are ecologically similar (i.e. east-west, rather than north-south as is the case in the Americas or Africa). That wasn’t quite what I wanted to hear, because I’m actually looking for links between Mesopotamia and India, but I was delighted to find right in the first chapter mention of trading links between the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and those of the Indus Valley. Sir Barry’s book also contains mention of this:

buddahA statue of the Buddah found in Kabul, which is remarkable because he is wearing clothing that looks distinctly Greek or Roman in style.

I should note, by the way, that I am not specifically looking for evidence of cultural diffusion. When I do talks about trans history people tend to ask me about links between people like the galli of ancient Rome and modern day hijra. There are a lot of similarities. It is possible that the Indus civilization picked up religious ideas from Mesopotamia. But then there are the quariwarmi of the Inca empire, and to claim they got the idea from Sumer takes us totally into von Daniken territory. I want to be able to talk about what is known, not make some imperialist point.

I wish I could have stayed longer. The Michael Palin talk was, of course, sold out. Billy Bragg, on the other hand, was a definite possibility. Fortunately for me I have the memories of the Concrete Castle gig in Bridgwater years ago, when I got close to a personal Billy Bragg concert, so I’m OK about missing him.

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The locals are unfazed by all of the bookish excitement.

The History of the Welsh Empire

~ Cheryl

As many of you will know, the first person to use the phrase, “The British Empire”, was John Dee, the philosopher and alchemist from Elizabethan England. Indeed, he wrote a book titled Brytanici Imperii Limites (Limits of the British Empire). However, Britain as such did not exist in Dee’s time. Scotland was still an independent kingdom. Ireland had been invaded by the Normans, but English control of the country had lapsed during the Wars of the Roses and was only just in the process of being re-established. What Dee meant by “Britain” was something rather different than a Victorian, or someone today, would understand by the term.

Dee’s Britain was Prydain, an ancient country dating back to before the Roman conquest that had been conquered by the English. Elizabeth Tudor, her father and grandfather could trace their ancestry back to that ancient land. Indeed, Henry VII claimed descent from the greatest king of Prydain, Arthur himself. Most people in Tudor England knew Prydain by the English name for it: Wales.

Many of you will also be familiar with the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, in which it is claimed that Arthur conquered Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark & Gaul, and established a British empire. It is a rather fanciful tale, and no historian gives it credence, but in Dee’s day history was much less developed.

Besides, there was other evidence. I have come across a great paper on Academia.edu which talks about Dee’s sources for his book. There was a book called Gestae Arthuri which may have been lost by Dee’s time but was discussed in a book by a Dutch traveler, Jacobus Cnoyen van Tsertoghenbosche. Dee corresponded extensively with the geographer, Gerard Mercator, on the subject of the Dutchman’s writings. There was also Archaionomia sive de Priscus Anglorum Legibus libri by William Lambarde, of which Dee owned a copy. Both of these books discuss Arthur’s conquests in the Northlands, including parts of Muscovy, Finland (sorry guys), Greenland and the countries to the west beyond the “Indrawing Seas”. The latter appears to refer to parts of North America which were icebound much of the time and therefore deeply hazardous to Arthur’s ships. In these lands Arthur encountered both little people and people who were 23 feet tall.

It seems pretty clear that both of Dee’s sources were British re-tellings of the voyages of Erik the Red, with Arthur in the hero’s role. If the travel to North America wasn’t enough, the 23 foot tall people story is a dead give-away. So Dee’s empire is sadly imaginary. However, all sorts of things can happen in fantasy. After all, if Patricia Kennealy can write about a Celtic empire in space, I’m sure someone can use John Dee as a source.

Suspension Bridges – Invented by a Woman

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Suspension bridges are one of the iconic features of Victorian England. Thomas Telford’s bridge over the Menai Straits to Anglesey, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s bridge over the Clifton Gorge in Bristol, are world famous. But neither of these great bridges was designed by the engineer credited with their construction. Both were based on a patent filed by another great Bristol inventor, Mrs. Sarah Guppy.

Well, actually Mrs. Guppy didn’t file the patents herself. That would have been illegal in Victorian England. She had to get her husband, Samuel, to file them for her. Mr. Guppy owned a sugar refining company in Bristol. He’s not listed among the residents of Bristol who were awarded compensation under the Abolition of Slavery Act, so we can assume that he didn’t own plantations, though his fortune must have been based in part on cheap slave labor in the Caribbean.

Mrs. Guppy ended up making a fortune in the arms trade. That probably wasn’t her intention, but her invention of a system for keeping barnacles off ships netted her some £40,000 (£3.5 million in today’s money) from the Royal Navy. Of course all of the money went to her husband, because that patent was in his name too.

To give him his due, Samuel Guppy did actually register the patents in the name of “The Guppy Family”. Nor was Sarah unknown to her peers. Telford and Brunel both appear to have been her friends and she advised them both on the design of their bridges. As a good Victorian housewife she asked not to be credited for her work so as not to appear boastful.

The Oxford Dictionary has recently added Mrs. Guppy to its list of notable British biographies, which has given the Bristol Post the opportunity to celebrate her work.

Sarah’s son, Thomas, clearly took after his mother as he became an engineer when he grew up. He’s a character in my story in Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion, where I have him recruited to be the chief engineer on the Severn Barrage (which the Victorians did seriously consider building).

The family is probably best known for Sarah’s grandson, Robert, who became a naturalist and had a fish named after him.

Come Into My Parlour, Said the Mayor

~ Cheryl

This evening I was in Bath for two events. The first was in the Guildhall. There were no fairies, but there was a mayor.

Will Sandry is the 788th Mayor of Bath, and as far as I know the first openly gay one. He has been an excellent friend to the Bath Gender Equality Network over his year in office, and today he invited Ceri and the gang for drinks in the Mayoral Parlour, a room full of bling and history used by mayors for entertaining visiting dignitaries. Thus it was that a bunch of mouthy feminists (many of them trans people), and one young unicorn got to tread in the footsteps of various kings and queens, Baden Powell, Winston Churchill, Emperor Haile Selasie and most recently the Chinese Ambassador. We all behaved ourselves, more or less. There are some pictures on the BGEN Facebook page, but I’m not sure if all of them are public.

The room is a Victorian extension to the Guildhall, so Jane Austen would not have been there.

Huge thanks to Will for inviting us. When I get a chance I’ll process my photos of the bling and history. They have charters signed by Richard I and Elizabeth I, over £1million worth of gold bling, and a nice big sword. It is quite impressive.

Notches Follow-Up

~ Cheryl

Further to yesterday’s post on lesbian erasure, my friend Catherine Baker has also weighed in on the subject. She’s an actual history lecturer, and among other things she compares the questions of sexual and gender identities with the problem of national identities in the post-Yugoslavia Balkans. These things are never easy.

Notches on Lesbian Erasure

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There is a great blog post up on Notches, the history of sexuality website, today. It is by Rachel Hope Cleves who is at the University of Victoria, BC and was one of the organizers of the conference that Kevin and I attended earlier this year.

The subject of Rachel’s post is the erasure of lesbians in history. This comes about partly because of sexism (gay men are important, lesbians less so), partly because gay male sex has always been treated as much more dangerous, whereas lesbian has been more ignored, and partly because historians have an annoying habit of refusing to recognize that an idea or activity exists until it is named.

This is a problem for trans history too. The concept of a transsexual is clearly a 20th century invention. However, there is massive of evidence of people having cross-gender and third-gender identities in history, and even of medical intervention. Making a eunuch is, after all, both surgery and hormone therapy. And yet many historians refuse to admit that trans people existing prior to the 20th Century because the definitions we now use had not been invented.

So I have a lot of sympathy with the lesbians whose anger Rachel is reporting, at least thus far. Of course any tale of lesbian anger is not complete without intervention from the TERFs. As Rachel explains, the TERFs not only believe that lesbian history is being erased, they also maintain that the future of lesbianism is being erased, by trans people. They worry that in future there will be no lesbians, only trans men.

Part of this fear is based on the persistent lie that trans people are “really” homosexuals who are so ashamed of their desires that they “mutilate” their bodies so as to appear heterosexual. No trans person I know is like that. Indeed, the prevalence of post-transition trans folk who identify as gay and lesbian ought to be sufficient proof that the idea is daft. Nevertheless it is an idea that refuses to die.

There is also the fear that the medical establishment will force young lesbians through gender transition in order to “normalize” them. No trans person wants this. If we have an “agenda” at all it is to be left alone to live our lives the way we need to, not to be pushed into any particular course of action by doctors or social convention.

What is true is that there is a grey zone between butch lesbians and trans men. People do cross that boundary. Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, and Feinberg’s own life, are classic examples of the quandary. But this only represents a fraction of trans male identities and, once again, the aim should be to allow people to find a place that they are comfortable with, not to force their choices.

It is, I suppose, possible that there are young female-identified-at-birth people in the non-binary community whose reason for being their is solely sexual attraction to women. But if there are then they are not really non-binary because being trans is not about sexuality. I find it hard to believe that any female-identified people would chose transition when they can be happy as lesbians. People who come up with these ideas have no idea how tough transition actually is.

Mostly, then, I think the fears expressed by the people Rachel encountered are spurious, based on false views of trans people, and what trans people want, spread by TERFs. I’d love to be able to reassure them. Trans people, and particularly trans women, have no desire for lesbians to be phased out of existence. After all, many of us identify as lesbians.

What really annoys me about this attitude, however, is that the prime culprits for erasure of trans people from history are not historians but TERFs. They like to claim that no one had a cross-gender identity before modern medicine invented the idea. That they should (falsely) claim that we are trying to erase them, while they are actively and openly trying to erase us, is a magnificent exercise in hypocrisy.

The Silk Road

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

One of my primary procrastination habits is watching history documentaries. Obviously they tend to be a bit superficial, but you can still learn stuff to follow up. Recently I have been watching Sam Willis’s BBC4 series, The Silk Road, which aired the final episode last night. My guess is that a lot of it is based on the similarly named book by Peter Frankopan, which Guy Gavriel Kay enthusiastically recommended in my recent interview with him, but that’s £30 and long enough to justify the price tag so I don’t think I’ll be reading it any time soon.

So what did I learn from last night? Well for starters I got to see part of the underground irrigation system that Glenda Larke used to great effect in designing the world of The Watergivers. History and epic fantasy truly are joined at the hip.

I also discovered that the distinctive teardrop shape in Paisley fabric designs is Persian in origin and may symbolize the sacred flame of Zoroastrianism.

And finally I learned that the practice of covering walls with mass-produced, pre-patterned ceramic tiles was first developed by Baha’ ad-Din al-`Amili, architect of the Shah Mosque in Isfahan. Yet another great invention that Islamic civilization has given the world.

Juliet on the Mutability of History

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Juliet McKenna has a great post up today about how the “facts” of history change depending on who is interpreting them. She talks in particular about how the existence of same-sex relationships in ancient Greece have been interpreted differently down the years. You can find the post here.

This is a subject very close to my heart, because the way in which trans history is interpreted is also very much culturally subjective. Anything written more than 60 years ago was almost certainly written by someone who didn’t know that trans people existed at all, let alone might have existed in the past. Even today, many historians have still bought into the idea that trans people are a creation of medical science, and that no one was trans before Magnus Hirschfeld and his friends invented the concept.

In contrast, some people who do trans history are all too willing to interpret any evidence of cross-dressing as an example of a trans identity. Some of this is cis people who can’t distinguish between a Halloween costume, a drag queen and a trans woman. And some of it is trans people eagerly looking for anyone and anything that might be like them. If you want to convince professional historians of your case, you have to maintain a fairly skeptical stance.

Much of what I was doing in me paper for this year’s LGBT History Month was looking at the evidence for trans identities in ancient times and deciding how solid it was. Thankfully these days there are cis historians who have heard of people like hijra and two spirits and are willing the make the same arguments that I wanted to make.

By the way, if you are wanting to read that paper, the reason it hasn’t gone online yet is that I have had an offer of publication. I do have a short version just looking at Sumer in peer review for the Notches blog, so that may appear some time soon. Otherwise watch this space.

This Week on Ujima: Cavan Scott, Suffragettes & Art

~ Cheryl

My first guest on this week’s Women’s Outlook was Cavan Scott. Cav is a very busy boy. We first talked about his Star Wars tie-in novels, one of which was chosen for World Book Day and went on to become the best selling book in the UK for a while. We talked about his forthcoming Sherlock Holmes novel, The Patchwork Devil. We talked about his comics and radio play work on Doctor Who. And of course we talked about The Beano, for which he writes Mini the Minx and several other strips.

For Bristol people, Cav’s book launch for The Patchwork Devil is on April 30th at Forbidden Planet. It is a lunchtime event.

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

Next up on the show was our expert on suffragettes, Lucienne Boyce. She was in to tell us all about a local screening of Make More Noise, a compilation of silent film coverage of actual suffragettes from the first two decades of the 20th Century.

Finally I welcomed Ruth Kapadia from the local office of The Arts Council. We talked about the sort of work that The Arts Council does, and how people can apply for grants.

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

Of course I also talked quite a bit about the cricket. West Indies are currently world champions for the Twenty20 format at under 19 level, in the women’s game, and in the men’s game. The entire Caribbean is celebrating, and we celebrated with them. All of the music was related to the cricket in some way. Here’s the playlist:

  • We are the Champions – Queen
  • Dreadlock Holiday – Boney M
  • Champion – DJ Bravo
  • Da Cricket Loba Gatama – Latif Nangarhari
  • Cloth – Bullets
  • Come Rise with Me – Machal Montano & Claudette Peters
  • Gavaskar – Andy Narell & Lord Relator
  • David Rudder – Rally Round the West Indies

Women, History, Comics

~ Cheryl

Last night Neil Gaiman tweeted about a Kickstarter project called She Changed Comics. Run by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, it is essentially a history of women in comics. This morning, of course, the thing has blown through its funding goal in a single day and is almost 50% over budget. It has all gone so quickly that they haven’t announced stretch goals yet. Doubtless there will be some in due course.

Anyway, I am very much looking forward to the book. I suspect some of you will too. If you want to drop them some cash, the campaign page is here.

All That Other Stuff

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Because I need to get it out of my system, I’m going to do a post about all of the other things that were wrong with the talk I walked out of at the trans history conference. Think of this as a follow-up to this post.

So what else was wrong? History, for a start. Modern gender medicine did not begin with Lili Elbe, or even Dorchen Richter who preceded her. Trans men have been having surgery a lot longer. They didn’t get phalloplasty until the late 1940s when Sir Harold Gillies and Ralph Millard invented the techniques they used on Michael Dillon. But trans men could and did have hysterectomies and mastectomies. CN Lester tells me that such operations were performed on a man in Germany in 1912, and there’s a suggestion of a similar operation in the 1890s. I wouldn’t necessarily expect people to know that, but anyone with an interest in trans history should know about Alan Hart.

Hart lived in Portland Oregon and underwent surgery in 1917 and 1918. He’s pretty famous in trans history circles, through I see that his Wikipedia entry now contains reference to earlier operations in Germany. I can, however, think of a reason why the presenter of this talk might want to ignore Hart. You see, Hart was a doctor himself. He wasn’t persuaded into surgery by sexologists, he prevailed upon his medical friends to do the job for him. There’s no way that Hart can be painted as an innocent victim of the medical establishment, because he prescribed his own treatment. If the point you are trying to make is that medical transition is something forced on trans people by doctors then you’ll want to bury any knowledge of Hart.

The talk very much painted Lili as a victim of doctors. It did get right that she died as a result of an operation intended to allow her to have children but she was not, as far as I know, badgered into it. She’d got herself a boyfriend and wanted to marry him and have kids. She was 49 at the time, which seems rather ambitious, but the operation wasn’t doomed because allowing trans women to get pregnant is a daft thing to do, it was doomed because no one at the time knew much about organ transplants and the problems of tissue rejection. Had the surgeons known, there’s no way they would have tried it.

In any case, the idea of trans women wanting children is not ridiculous and unnecessary. It is certainly true that you don’t need to get pregnant to make you a “real” woman, but that doesn’t mean some of us might not want to do it. If womb transplants had been on offer when I was in my teens I’d have been very keen on the possibility.

Then there is science. Most people agree that the pink brain / blue brain thing is nonsensical. Certainly it is true that, as was claimed, if you put a man’s brain and a woman’s brain side by side on a table, a trained neurologist won’t be able to tell the difference by looking at them. But then if you put two lumps of coal, one made of Carbon-12 and one of Carbon-14, on a table together a chemist won’t be able to tell the difference by looking at them either.

The vast majority of gendered brain nonsense arises from people comparing the averages of two heavily overlapping distributions, which is bad science. That doesn’t mean that subtle differences cannot exist, nor that those differences might, in certain specialist functions, make a world of difference.

It is also true that there is no proof that differences in the way that embryos develop result in a trans identity. There is, however, good evidence that the embryo goes through a variety of different growth spurts, and the time during which the brain develops is quite separate from the time during which the gendered differentiation of the body happens, so there is a possibility.

There’s also a possibility of a genetic factor, in that a large number of trans women (including myself) have a preponderance of maternal aunts (that is, a maternal grandmother who had difficulty conceiving male babies). Such apparent coincidences are often clues to a genetic explanation.

In any case, if you poo-poo the whole idea of differences in embryo development then you are effectively erasing intersex people, because they very clearly develop differently from other humans when in the womb.

I’ll certainly agree that there is no evidence of a scientific cause of trans identities. I’d also speculate the any cause that we find will be complex, and quite possibly very different depending on whether the person in question is trans-masculine, trans-feminine or non-binary. Until such time as we know more, the right thing to do is to accept people as they are, not to insist that there absolutely is or is not a scientific explanation.

On to religion now. There are people of faith who believe that God (or Satan), deliberately or accidentally had some hand in making them trans. If that works for them, all well and good. Right now it is no better than any other explanation we have. I’m not going to descend to Dawkins-esque mockery of straw man theological positions to try to discredit them. Theologians have, after all, spent an awful lot of time pondering the meaning of evil and why it exists in the world. It is rather ironic that for an illustration the presenter chose William Blake’s “The Ancient of Days”, which is not actually of God, but of Urizen, a figure who was part of Blake’s Gnostic-tinged theological explanation for the fact that God doesn’t make everything right for us.

And finally stargazy pie is not made from fish guts. I’ll admit that the heads and tails are put on the crust in part to freak out the emmets, but they are for decoration. Even if you cook whole fish into the pie, you fillet them first. It is, of course, rather delicious (and probably very good for you, being traditionally made from those oily fish that nutritionists keep badgering us to eat).

I’m perfectly happy for people to come up with whatever explanation for being trans works for them. It is a very difficult life in many ways. What I won’t tolerate is people who feel the need to delegitimize and mock everyone else’s coping strategy in order to prove that theirs is valid. And at an academic conference I won’t tolerate someone using bad history, bad science and bad theology to make such a point.

Last Minute Hugo Recommendations

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

In filling in my Hugo ballot last night I was reminded of a few things that may be of interest to those of you looking for good work to fill out some of the categories.

Most people will, I suspect, have Novel filled, and in any case it is a bit late to start reading anything now. However, I want to put in a good word for Signal to Noise by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, which I thought was an astonishingly good debut.

Short Story is also fairly easy to fill, and the story I want you to consider isn’t, as far as I know, available online, which doesn’t help. However, I absolutely love “The Haunting of Apollo A7LB” by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is original to his Collected Fiction (Tachyon).

In Related Work I obviously would love to see Letters to Tiptree get a nod. I have a letter in it, after all. I don’t get a share of the shiny if it wins, but I think it is a great project and would be very happy to see it get yet more awards.

Also in Related Work I’d like you to consider Idyl — I’m Age, a collection of comic strips written and drawn by Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Jeff won’t get to a Hugo because she’s dead, but she surely deserves one. She was nominated once in Fan Artist and three times in Professional Artist, but has only won a World Fantasy Award and the Spectrum Grand Master.

The plot of Agents of SHIELD appears to have gone off the rails somewhat of late, but I still think that “4,722 Hours”, in which Jemma Simmons is stranded on an alien planet, is one of the best single episodes of a TV series I have seen in a long time.

I’m kind of assuming that The Expanse Season 1 will be a long-form nominee next year, but just in case we have four episodes to pick from. My favorite of those is “QCB”, the one featuring the assault on the Martian warship, the Donnager.

This is your annual reminder that Clarkesworld is no longer a semiprozine, but that Neil Clarke is eligible for Editor: Short Form.

Two publications that I would like to see considered in Semiprozine are Holdfast Magazine, and Tähtivaeltaja, the amazing Finnish magazine from Toni Jerrman.

I have realized that I hardly ever read fanzines these days. There is too much else to read.

I do listen to podcasts, however. There are lots of good talking head shows, but if you’d like to put something different on the ballot why not give a listen to Ray Gunn and Starbust, a remarkably good audio comedy conceived and written by my friend Holly Rose.

And finally, something I would love to be able to put on my ballot but can’t because I don’t see how I will get to see it in time. Reading Twitter this morning I chanced upon a post from the magnificent Indian feminist magazine, The Ladies Finger. It is all about Bollywood movies that aim for a Game of Thrones vibe. The one that caught my eye was Rudhramadevi, which is about an actual 13th Century Indian queen, and which gets the thumbs up for feminist content from the article’s author, Deepika Sarma.

The historical Rudhramadevi was raised as a boy by her father, but revealed herself as a woman on claiming the throne at age 14. She ruled for 30 years, dying in a battle against a rebel chief.

Anushka Shetty, who starred in the movie, seems to specialize in warrior women. I’m now wondering if she’s candidate for the Xena reboot.

Anyway, here’s a statue of the the original Rudhramadevi. The statue is located in Chandupatla, the village which was the site of the battle where she died.

Rudhramadevi

Photo credit: By Satishk01 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.

And here’s the movie trailer. (The review is right, the CGI is shoddy, but it definitely has the fantasy epic look.)

Launching #MTHF16

~ Cheryl

Kevin and I spent most of today playing tourist around Victoria. The weather was beautiful again, and we are both very footsore as a result. Victoria is a beautiful city, and it has loads of bookstores.

Of course today is St. Patrick’s Day and, just like everywhere else in North America, Victoria goes a bit crazy. There appear to be more bookstores than Irish pubs in town, but only just. Faux Irishness was out in force today.

People keep telling me that Victoria is more British than Britain. This is patently not true, because I checked the local paper and there were no headlines screaming English Cricket In Crisis! In fact they didn’t cover the game at all. The paper did, however, preview the conference I am here for. They even mentioned me. Here’s the online version of the report.

Kevin and I spent the afternoon in the local museum, which has some absolutely amazing art done by the First Peoples of the region. There will be photos when I have time to process them.

First People’s art also featured in an exhibition at the art gallery where the launch event for the Moving Trans History Forward conference was held. Obviously for sheer numbers this didn’t match up to Brighton Trans Pride, but there were a lot of trans folk there, and they had come from all over the world.

We were officially welcomed to Victoria by Madison Thomas, a trans person from the Esquimalt Nation, and by Dr. Aaron Devor, who is the only Chair of Transgender Studies in the world. He’s why the conference is here (and I must say he has excellent taste in places to live and work).

There were two keynote speakers. The first was Shelagh Rogers, who is the Chancellor of the University. She’s also a well known radio host on CBC who specializes in talking about books. It turns out that we have a bunch of friends in common, most notably Guy Gavriel Kay. It was clear from Shelagh’s speech that the University of Victoria takes diversity issues very seriously.

The other keynote was by Randall Garrison who is a local MP, openly gay, and a keen supporter of trans rights. I have been following the saga of trans rights legislation thanks to Merecedes Allen. Things looked pretty dire last year, but the federal election seems to have changed all that. Garrison’s bill looks set to be taken up by the Government, which gives it a much higher chance of actually passing.

All in all, it was a very promising start to the event. I was also pleased to catch up with a couple of UK-based friends (hi Jana & Lauren). Tomorrow we get down to serious business. Expect tweetage (because I have been promised wifi.)

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.

Thank You, Goddess

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Well that seemed to go well. I got several very kind comments about my paper on trans people in ancient Mesopotamia and Rome. For those asking, I have a bit of work to do on it, and may get some feedback from my trip to Canada. Once that’s all done I will post it on Academia.edu, probably around the end of March.

The Michael Dillon talk also went well, and most importantly I was able to grab 10 seconds with Tom Robinson to say thank you for all of the great music.

There were lots of other great papers at the conference today. Here are a few highlights.

Jonathan Shipe telling us abut same-sex relationships in the British Army in the Victorian Era. “The soldier was inebriated, m’lud, and as a good Christian I was kneeling down beside him to see if I could help.”

Chuck Upchurch on Byron, the Duke of Wellington and more military queerness. Apparently Wellington did have a soft side. Two of his friends got arrested (separately) on sodomy charges and he stood as a character witness for both.

Kit Heyam explaining how our views of famous LGBT people in history are critically shaped by how they are portrayed in fiction. Marlow has a lot to answer for.

Fiona McGregor on lesbian gangsters in mid 20th Century Sydney (who got away with murder because Aussie men would not admit that a woman could get the better of one of their mates).

In the evening I finally got to sample Manchester’s famous curry district, more than 20 year after reading about it in Vurt. I may have had a celebratory beer or two.

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.

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.

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.

Schools & Families Day – Museum of London

~ Cheryl

Sir Derek Jacobi learns his lines
The final part of my weekend in London was the Schools & Families Day put on by Schools Out at the Museum of London. Whereas on Saturday I had been mainly supporting trans friends, and speaking myself, on Sunday I got to see new stuff. I had a fabulous day.

One of the first thing I noticed on arrival was a book stall. It turned out to be run by Letterbox Library, who specialize in books for children that have equality and diversity themes. I immediately encouraged them to get in touch with Fox and Sarah about stocking Are You a Boy or are You a Girl?, but I was delighted to see that they had 10,000 Dresses and I snapped a picture to send to Marcus Ewert. The day sort of took off from there.

Stuart Milk was due to read from the children’s book about his uncle, so I wandered along to say hello and ended up doing gopher work as he was expecting some people to come to interview him. I was passing through the museum lobby when I spotted a familiar looking gentleman looking a bit lost. So I introduced myself and took Sir Derek Jacobi up to where our event was taking place. He was due to read some children’s books later in the day, and to my delight he picked Marcus’s book as one of the ones to use. I snapped the picture above and sent it off to go viral, which it duly did.

Then it was back to the lecture theatre to catch up with Juno Dawson. I’d not read any of her stuff before, but having now heard some of it I can thoroughly recommend it. She’s also lovely. We had a bit of a chat about transitioning in the public eye.

Sir Derek was up next, and I managed to get a quick chat with him. I told him how his old friend Claudius had been responsible for making the Rites of Attis part of the official Roman Religious Calendar. (There’s even an official Castration Day, when Roman trans girls got their op done.) His readings of the kids books were fabulous. There was video taken, so hopefully one day I’ll be able to share his reading of 10,000 Dresses with you.

Little did I know that Chris Riddell was also in the audience. He did a few sketches, including this one (thanks to Marjorie for the link):

Next up I went to see a great presentation by Subodh Rathod about gender fluidity in Hindu religion. Vishnu has a female avatar called Mohini who is, naturally, incredibly beautiful. She has a famous dance. Obviously Mohini is of great interest to the hijra community. Subodh was assisted by Kali Chandrasegaram who performed the dance at the end of the talk.

That was at least 2000 years of living trans history right in front of our eyes.

Sir Derek Jacobi learns his lines

I also got to meet the fabulous Juno Roche, got to hear my new pal Laila El-Metoui talk about the amazing work she does on diversity in adult education, and saw the Gay Men’s Choir perform. All in all, it was a pretty fabulous day.

Huge congratulations to Niranjan Kamatkar and his team for putting on a great weekend, and to Sue Sanders for the fabulous work that she does making these things happen. Bristol has a lot to live up to. No pressure, eh?