Time for a good laugh, folks. Here’s me on Made in Bristol TV doing my best to help promote the Trans Mindline set up by the lovely people at Bristol MIND. Just look at some of those facial expressions. Clearly I find thinking very painful. Thankfully I loosened up a lot later on. My thanks to Steve LeFevre for making the experience relatively painless.

I wrote quite a bit about the experience and the issues discussed here. I guess I should also comment on today’s nonsense about gender-neutral school uniforms. Despite what you might have heard on TV, or in social media, having a gender-neutral uniform does not mean forcing all children to abandon gender. It means allowing all children to have the same choice of clothing. That means that girls are not forced to wear skirts if they don’t want to, and boy can choose to wear skirts if that’s what they prefer. This makes space for non-binary people, but also means that binary-identified trans people can wear the clothing they feel most comfortable in without fear of being punished for flouting uniform regulations.

Yesterday evening I did the TV thing for Steve LeFevre’s Crunch the Week show on Made in Bristol TV. I had a lot of fun. My colleague, Liz Sorapure, from Bristol MIND, was having her first TV experience so she was rather less relaxed about things, but I thought she did very well. As for me, I have now done the Watch of Shame to see how I actually did.

Had the interview been on radio I would have been very happy. Some trans people will doubtless be unhappy with some of Steve’s questions, but that’s his job. I’m happy to be tested with that sort of stuff in a relatively friendly environment. I’ll talk more about the content later, but this is TV we are talking about so I need to consider what I got wrong.

First up, I need to smile more. I clearly have a habit of frowning when thinking. This is very bad on TV. I look much better when I smile. I need to do more if it. Second, I need to lose weight. I’m not that overweight, but on TV you are almost always interviewed sitting down, and often without the benefit of a desk to hide behind. Sitting down makes you look much fatter than standing up. Not that there is anything wrong with being overweight, but people do judge, and if you want to make a good impression on TV you have to look good. It is hard enough making the case for being trans without having to make the case for weight not mattering as well.

The other thing I need to do well on TV is facial surgery. Lots of it. But I’m not going to be wasting any money on that at my age.

Now back to the content. One of the things that Steve brought up was a news story about Northamptonshire Police adopting unisex baseball caps rather than gendered headgear for their officers. Their press release spun this as being to attract trans people as officers. I call bullshit. I think they just said that to get a bit of publicity. There are plenty of good reasons for have simple, gender-neutral uniforms, including fairness to female staff and cost reduction. As my pal Bailey from Gloucestershire Police pointed out on Twitter this morning, regulations governing how female officers may style their hair are a real problem for trans-feminine officers. Far more so, I suspect, that the sort of hats they wear.

The most interesting thing about the story was unfortunately ruined by the headline ticker at the bottom of the screen. Steve had carefully positioned a copy of the Daily Malice so that an overhead camera could see the story, but the ticker obscured the associated cartoon. That’s a shame because it showed a policeman with a large trans symbol on top of his helmet. That’s the combination alchemical symbol thing. If you don’t know what I mean, that proves my point. When Berkeley and I do training we recommend use of the symbol to signal inclusivity to trans people, but warn that most cis people won’t recognize it. The Malice‘s cartoonist has clearly made a study of trans culture, and doesn’t consider that symbol to be obscure.

The other thing worth commenting on is the confusion Steve got into regarding sex and gender. That’s not his fault. The two terms are not well defined, and Cordelia Fine spends some time on the resulting muddiness of discourse in Testosterone Rex. I tried to clear it up with reference to a distinction between biology and social construction, but that’s complicated by a number of factors that I didn’t have time to explain.

First up, despite what lots of people seem to think is a “scientific fact”, there are more than two sexes. That’s because there are several different biological factors that go into gendering the human body. They all have to line up to produce someone who is 100% male or 100% female. Often they don’t. Between 1% and 2% of the human population has a recognized intersex condition. That’s about the same frequency as red hair.

As far as I know, I didn’t have an intersex condition at birth. Nevertheless, I do exhibit classic transsexual symptoms. That is, I know I’m female, but my body was apparently 100% male at birth. Now it is, of course, a complex mixture of male and female features. The fact that trans people like me can’t be “cured”, that they are apparently “born this way”, hints at a biological origin, but one (or more likely several) that has thus far eluded medical science.

Whether there is a biological cause is largely irrelevant. What’s important from a medical standpoint is that trans people tend to be very unhappy pre-transition, and much happier afterward.

How we express our identities after transition is, however, culturally contextual. That is, how you choose to express yourself as a woman (or any other gender) will be influenced by the social attitudes towards femininity that you experienced growing up. Evidence from vastly different cultures suggests that social conditioning doesn’t affect whether you will be trans, but it does affect how you express your gender.

And, because so much of gender is socially constructed, people are free to express their gender in new and inventive ways. They can also invent new names for genders, and sometimes those new names will overlap and be generation-specific (think “cross-dresser” and “gender fluid” for example, which have a lot in common).

Alongside this you have a drive toward gender equity. For women to be truly equal to men they mustn’t be forced into gendered behaviors that restrict their ability to function in society and compete on an even footing with men. Equally a reduction in forms of gendered presentation and expression will reduce the ideas that men and women are somehow fundamentally different and unequal. There’s nothing in (sensible) feminism that says women can’t express themselves in a feminine manner. It just says that it should not be obligatory, and does not define what it means to be a woman.

Because of all this complexity, there are many different ways to be trans.

• You could be a classic binary-identified medical transitioner like me
• You could be a non-binary person who wants some medical treatment, but not the whole package
• You could be a non-binary person who only wants to transition socially
• You could be a binary-identified person who only wants to transition socially
• You could be an intersex person who was forcibly transitioned in childhood and wants to get back to a gender you are comfortable with
• And doubtless many other things that I haven’t thought of

Hopefully this explains how we can have 70+ different categories of gender and have a move towards gender neutrality at the same time.

Yesterday afternoon I was contacted by the local ITV news to see if I could come on their show today and talk about trans stuff. I was on my way out to see a client, but I muttered something about my schedule and they said they’d get back to me. When I got home, around 11:00pm, I found an email asking me to be at their Bristol studios for 11:45 today. As that happened to be on my way to today’s client, whom I had to see at 12:30, it all worked perfectly.

Well, perfectly except that I then spent 2 hours doing research so was zombified this morning and running purely on caffeine. Fortunately they only wanted 2.5 minutes of interview, and they were very nice. I think I did OK on content. I know I did really badly on body language, but so it goes.

Anyway, I was on to talk about this lad. We barely scratched the surface of what I could have said about the issue, but at least things are getting into the media and not being treated as a joke.

This evening I had just got back as far as Bath when my phone went. The BBC local news wanted someone to talk trans stuff. Had the call be half an hour earlier I might have been able to do it (except that they would not have wanted me as I’d been on the opposition station that day). I understand that Steffi Barnett from Shout Out did the show. I hope they treated her as well as ITV treated me.

Back when I was a kid, the BBC was known affectionately as “Auntie”. It had this rather Mary Poppins air of a benevolent older relative who was wise and caring but also gave you lots of presents. Unfortunately everyone gets old, and “Auntie” is now more like that elderly relative who has grown grumpy after too many years reading the Daily Mail. “Auntie” has married a beer-swilling, racist lout called Nigel, and all she seems to do these days is rant about the state of the world and the behavior of kids today.

A prime example of this was last night’s documentary about trans kids. It was, as Susie Green of Mermaids said on the Breakfast show today (the coverage begins at around 2:45), rather like running a documentary with some old guy complaining that doctors don’t recommend leeches and blood-letting as a treatment any more. Kenneth Zucker, the man who was portrayed as a heroic campaigner against political interference in medicine, has been thoroughly discredited by his peers, but the BBC is still billing him as a leading expert in the field.

Also on that Breakfast show is a Canadian trans woman who had been a patient at Zucker’s clinic. She explained that one of the “treatments” that Zucker recommended to “cure” trans girls was for parents to always watch the child while she went to the toilet to make sure that she always stood up to pee. The only real mystery with Zucker is how it took so long for the Canadian government to shut him down.

I spent yesterday afternoon working with a group of staff from Bristol Mental Health (including one psychiatrist who is an actual a gender specialist) looking at ways to educate their staff in trans issues. They were all mental health professions. They understand that you can’t “cure” someone of being trans, or gay for that matter, by making them ashamed of who they are. But some of the staff we need to train, not to mention the staff at the two local charities I will be doing training for this month, may have seen that BBC program. That means we’ll need to put a lot of effort into dispelling the nonsense they will have been fed. I’m going to get some practice in by starting on you lot.

Let’s start with a few facts.

1. Trans kids are not normally put through any surgery until they are 18
2. Trans kids are not normally given any hormone treatment until they are 16
3. “Puberty blocker” drugs are not given to trans kids until they start puberty
4. Once a patient comes off puberty blockers, puberty will continue as normal, they do not “change the sex” of the patient
5. Puberty blockers were invented to treat kids with early onset of puberty, and no one questions their use or safety in such cases

Nevertheless we continue to see the media claim that very young children are given actual medical treatment. The BBC did this in a Newsnight show on Wednesday. I’ll come back to why this happens later.

Moving on to more theoretical stuff, I want to make it very clear that gender performance and gender identity are not the same thing. There is a huge difference between a young child, assigned female at birth, playing football, and that same child saying they are a boy. Any reputable gender specialist or trans activist will tell you this. Sadly the media keeps pushing the nonsense about toys and a preference for pink. One of the reasons that Zucker is no longer respected in the profession is that he uses things like what toys you play with and whether you like pink or blue as diagnostic of your being trans.

Interestingly, anti-trans activists such as Sarah Ditum and Helen Lewis regularly accuse gender clinics and trans activists of using things like your toy preferences as a diagnostic indicator. It doesn’t matter how often we say we don’t, they still insist that we do. And yet the one man in the field who does make this fundamental error is the man whom they hold up as the real expert.

The inevitable result of confusion between gender performance and gender identity is that kids who are not trans, know they are not trans, and say they are not trans, get diagnosed as trans, or at least get referred to gender clinics. The generous interpretation of Zucker’s work was that he didn’t understand the distinction and kept making the same mistake. The less generous interpretation is that he knew damn well what he was doing, and knew that he could make a lot of money off worried parents by diagnosing kids as trans, sure in the knowledge that he could later claim to have “cured” them.

Another thing to bear in mind is that gender identity isn’t simple. Some kids who end up in gender clinics will have very clear and strong ideas about who they are. Others will be unsure and need someone to talk to. Many of them will decide, having had time to think about things and talk to psychiatrists, that they don’t need full binary gender transition. They may want nothing at all, or they may want something partial, such as social transition. Others will, of course, insist on getting every bit of treatment they can as soon as they can, but by no means all of the kids who go to gender clinics end up having medical treatment because the point of their going to the clinic is to find out what is right for each individual child.

Back now to this oft-repeated claim of actual medical intervention for very young children. It doesn’t happen, so why do people want you to think that it does?

Well, as I explained, a large proportion of the kids who get referred to gender clinics don’t end up going through full transition, or indeed any transition. Some are misdiagnosed by people like Zucker. Others simply decide that it isn’t right for them. There are claims that the number who don’t go on to opt for full medical transition are as many as 80% of all referrals. That’s not a huge problem as far as I’m concerned. I’d like to see better diagnosis so that kids who do not need referrals are not getting them, but I do want to see kids who are unsure given the chance to talk things over and maybe end up as non-binary adults. The idea that every person who is taken on by a gender clinic must have full medical treatment is ridiculously out-dated.

The media, of course, love quoting that 80% statistic. And they do so alongside the claims of medical treatment for the very young because they want you to believe that those 80% of kids who “grow out of it” have already been subjected to irreversible medical treatment before they get the chance to decide that’s not for them.

There you see the structure of the lie: kids are sent to gender clinics because of what toys they play with, kids are subjected irreversible medical treatment at a very young age, those kids then regret what has been done to them. None of this is true.

Why should anyone concoct such a bizarre fable? Let’s forget about the 80% of kids who don’t need medical transition for the moment and focus on the 20% who do. What about them? They currently have a chance of long and happy lives in the gender that feels natural to them. The point of all of this hoo ha — the lies, the concern trolling and the moral panic — is to shut down gender clinics for kids and prevent that 20% of patients from getting the treatment they badly need.

So that’s my take-away. Don’t worry about the 80% (or whatever % it actually is once people like Zucker are stopped from practicing), those kids don’t have anything bad done to them. Worry about the 20% whose access to treatment is under threat.

By the way, if you want to know what effect this sort of scare-mongering has on actual trans kids and their families, read this.

And of you want to complain to the BBC about the program, this tells you how to do it.

No, Laverne didn’t win one. She was presenting one. How cool is that?

Also she had by far the best dress of the night, and the second best red carpet photo (of which more later).

So, I did not get to Trans*Code today, and I am not at Fringe. I am still sick. But one of the very upsides of being woken regularly through the night by sinus pain is that you get to check on the Emmy results as they come in. This weekend was the high profile stuff: actors, directors and the like.

Game of Thrones won loads of gongs again, and George got to go on stage even though his name wasn’t on any of the trophies, which made me happy. Well done, mate. You’ve done us all proud.

Transparent won two awards: Jill Soloway for Director of a Comedy Series and Jeffrey Tambor for Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. In her speech Soloway said, “We need to stop violence against trans women and topple the patriarchy.” In his speech Tambor said, “please give transgender talent a chance. Give them auditions. Give them their story. I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a transgender character on television.”

Of course it hasn’t escaped people’s notice that it is all very well for a couple of cis people make such comments when being heaped with awards. It is the second year that Tambor has won for the same role. Nevertheless, I think last night was pretty important. Here are a few things to note.

I have to admit that Transparent isn’t for me. I’m not good with TV comedy of any kind. But other trans folk have had good things to say about the show. One of Soloway’s parents identifies as trans, and the show has recruited a whole slew of trans people to work on it behind the scenes. Zackary Drucker has an associate producer credit on the show, which should be very good for her career.

Also here’s what a couple of people in the business had to say.

I am grateful to @jillsoloway for changing the world for people like me.

— Jenny Boylan 🍯 (@JennyBoylan) September 19, 2016

I know well the pace of institutional change. That moment was 40+ years in the making, due to work of countless people. But it's here now.

— Jen Richards (@SmartAssJen) September 19, 2016

Both Boylan and Richards have seen Hollywood from the inside. They understand how the politics works, and the importance of having people like Soloway and Tambor stand up for them. Sure it is privilege at work, but change isn’t going to happen any other way.

I’m particularly pleased for Jen Richards. When she took a stand against the new Matt Bomer film (yet again a cis man playing a trans woman, and with far less justification than is the case with Transparent) it was clear from her tweets that she felt she might have just killed her career. Hollywood doesn’t like people who rock the boat. Thankfully That Moment has come. A few days later she went on to land a recurring role in Nashville. I like to think it was that event that gave Soloway and Tambor the confidence to speak out as they did.

So where now? Eden Lane had a very good point:

Fascinating to see media outlets post @jeffreytambor comments about giving trans talent a chance – but not hire trans journalists #Emmys

— 𝙴𝚍𝚎𝚗 𝙻𝚊𝚗𝚎 (@edenlane) September 19, 2016

Looking over the press coverage, it is interesting to note which outlet’s reported Soloway’s comment about the patriarchy but left out her comment about violence against trans women, or which note Tambor’s win but leave out his support of trans actors.

We saw another major step forward last night, but it is only a step on the road. There’s a long way to go yet.

Oh, and I promised you another photo. You have probably all seen this by now, but it is great so I’m doing it anyway. Her name is Jessie Graff and she’s a stunt woman. Some of her recent work includes doing stunts as Supergirl, and as Bobbi Morse on Agents of SHIELD.