The very talented Kate Adair, who has a regular slot on BBC Scotland’s The Social, has produced her take on this year’s Trans Pride. I have a brief interview with Kate in my audio collection from the weekend. Large parts of it involve Kate and I still giggling over this.

Or possibly not. But I am on video interviewing Sophie Cook, who is the new anchor for The Latest TV, the community TV station in Brighton. Whether any of Sophie’s coverage of Trans Pride, including her interview of me, will make it into a broadcast is unclear, but my interview of her was filmed, and Sophie has kindly put it on her YouTube channel.

Sophie has also posted this report including interviews with other attendees of Trans Pride.

I have finally seen the finale of season 2 of I Am Cait. Clearly it was intended to bookend the season. Back in episode 1 the season started off with the other girls getting angry with Caitlyn over her support of the Republicans, and of Ted Cruz in particular. Episode 8 is the end point of Caitlyn’s journey from right-wing drone to leftist activist. Well, sort of.

More of that later, but first the more interesting part of the show which featured Ella and her relationship with her father. When Ella was introduced to the show it was as the trans daughter of an old friend of Caitlyn’s. In episode 8 we got to meet this guy, who was very supportive of the girls. Afterwards Ella was a bit upset and basically doing the, “you have no idea how much hell he put me though” thing. Eventually Ella and dad get to have a chat, and it all turns out in the end, which was good TV but did feel a but scripted. I hope it wasn’t.

The point of all this is to show how hard things can be for young trans kids, and indeed for any trans person who has a family. With most problems in life, you tend to feel that the one group of people you can turn to for support is your family. For trans people it tends to be the exactly opposite — family are the people who find it hardest to accept you.

Part of that, of course, is that they have known you longer and better than anyone else, and therefore find it harder to come to terms with what they see as a “new” you. But part of it is also that families are very much afraid of the social opprobrium that will descend upon them because of what you have done. It is the same sort of dynamic that leads to honor killings.

We have to hope that in time society will become sufficiently accepting of trans folks that families will no longer feel shame, and be afraid of losing status, because a relative comes out as trans. It appears to have mostly happened (in Western countries) with lesbians and gay men. We are still a long way from it with trans. Ella was lucky, in that her dad was able to get over the shame he felt at having to tell his mates that his child was transitioning. Caitlyn probably helped a lot with that, simply by being very publicly trans and famous. Other trans people aren’t so lucky. Sometimes if you love your family you have to let them go and give them time to get used to you and want to come back.

Meanwhile, back with the politics. As anyone who is following the news knows, Caitlyn hasn’t exactly turned her back on Republicanism. She is still, after all, a very rich person with a lot to lose under a more left-wing government. What she is slowly coming to realize, however, is that a lot of her friends have far more to lose under the likes of Cruz, and that she too could fall victim to that. Losing half a million dollars in taxes when you are worth billions is one thing; losing your ability to participate in public life because you are banned from using toilets and openly discriminated against by many businesses is quite another.

The main thrust of this episode was a trip to Houston to confront the right-wing pastors who led the campaign to repeal HERO, the city’s equal rights ordinance. This was a fairly general piece of legislation promoting equality in a wide range of areas. It was brought down by a campaign that pretended the law was specifically about allowing trans pedophiles into women’s toilets.

I note in passing that I now feel so much less guilty about all those years of yelling abuse at Lance Berkman from the stands at Emperor Norton Field. The guy really is an unpleasant piece of work.

As television the episode didn’t work that well because the crew was refused permission to film at either of the churches they tried to attend. We have only the cast’s reports of what happened. They do, however, ring true. Apparently, while the pastors and older members of the congregations mostly shunned them, the young kids all wanted to take selfies with Caitlyn. Even Kate Bornstein was very positive about the change that Caitlyn is helping make happen.

What the show didn’t show is the controversy that surrounded its making. The trans community in Houston, and specifically black trans people, had been very much involved in getting HERO passed in the first place, and in the fight to keep it. No attempt was made to involve them in the show. Instead the crew brought in Mara Kiesling, a high profile, Washington-based, white trans activist.

I’ve met Mara and liked her. She does a very good job. But the apparent shunning of the local black activists in favor of a Washington-based white one did not go unnoticed. Whether this was the result of cluelessness, or a feeling that the local activists had failed, or that the show didn’t want to upset Texas too much my showcasing people who were black as well as trans, isn’t clear. It also doesn’t matter, because the damage got done either way.

There has been some talk on Twitter about there being a season 3, and I know some people have been agitating for the show to look at trans communities outside of the USA. That would be good. But I think it has work to do inside the USA first. Right now it is very much a show about good-looking, gender-normative, mostly-white trans women. There was the debacle last season over Angelica Ross, and the one this season over Houston. We’ve seen nothing of Laverne Cox or Janet Mock, who are far more articulate advocates for the trans cause than Caitlyn, and we have seen very little of trans guys or non-binary people. Before the show starts to look at the wider world, it needs to look at the whole of the US trans community.

The season finale of season 2 of I Am Cait aired in the USA yesterday. Here in the UK we have just got episode 7, so that’s what I’ll be talking about today.

The first topic of the show was Caitlyn having a heart-to-heart with Kris about their marriage and their future. That sort of thing I tend to think should be private between them and not commented on, but the exchange did further highlight how long Caitlyn has been struggling with her gender issues, and just how unhappy and non-functional people in that situation can become.

Next up was the question of genital surgery. Caitlyn hasn’t had it. She’s not sure that she wants it. That will doubtless come as a shock to some people. Jenny Boylan provided contrast by explaining how important surgery was to her, and how keen she was to get it. That was me all over. I could not wait to get it done, and like Jenny I have had no regrets since. She’s lesbian and I’m not, so there’s difference there. Caitlyn very clearly needed to transition for the sake of her mental health, but genital surgery is not a major issue for her. All of which goes to show just how diverse trans people are.

Jenny brought in Marci Bowers who is a surgeon specializing in gender surgery, and a trans woman herself, so obviously an ideal person to do such work. She noted that only around 20% of US trans people have had genital surgery, and that cost is a major issue there.

The other major storyline was Candis’s desire for a family. Having had zero luck in dating, she’s thinking of adopting. That won’t be easy because she’s single and trans. Adoption is legal, but getting to do it is a whole different ball game. Candis talked frankly about how so much transphobia happens politely, behind the scenes. People are all very nice to you, but somehow what you want is just not possible.

Of course, as Kris pointed out, having a family is by no means necessarily a cakewalk for cis women. All sorts of problems can arise, from infertility to pregnancy complications to husband problems and so on. So maybe things will work out for Candis.

This is the point at which I should note that I’m getting quite fond of Kris Jenner. Not fond enough to watch all of the Kardashian shows, but her public persona on this show is pretty impressive.

When I was at Kingston University last week one of the questions from the audience was about Caitlyn. The students didn’t seem too impressed with her. I asked if anyone had watched the shows, and none of them had. This is sad. Caitlyn’s media profile is pretty bad, and she’s made some horrendous mistakes. However, what she and the rest of the cast are doing on the show is valuable. Much of that is, of course, down to Jenny, Kate, Chandi and so on, but the show would not have happened without Caitlyn, and I rather suspect that her money is keeping it going. If you want to learn more about trans people — trans women in particular — then the show is very useful.

I think we have the season finale next week. This appears to be the show where they get back to talking about religion and politics. Then we’ll see how much Caitlyn has learned.

By the way, is it wrong of me to think that LA Clippers is a reality TV show about hairdressers in Hollywood?

Last night the UK got episode 5 of the second season of I Am Cait. This one focused on the Trans Day of Remembrance and took place in St. Louis because the city was creating a memorial garden to commemorate murdered trans people.

The episode provided an opportunity to let Caitlyn see what sort of lives most trans people have, and in particular trans women of color. It featured Chandi bravely confessing her criminal past, and introduced Caitlyn to the idea of “survival crime” — crimes you commit because you are homeless and have no source of income. Slowly but surely, Caitlyn’s education proceeds.

It is an episode that I’m sure would prove valuable to Fay Wheldon who is launching a new novel based on her amazing new theory that trans women are “really” alpha males who have it all and are jealous of femininity. I wonder how many lobster & Bolly lunches it took her to come up with that ingenious concept.

Of course Caitlyn is Wheldon’s idea of the typical trans woman. For all of the work that the show does to try to dispel that myth, it isn’t watched by many cis people so it won’t disabuse the likes of Wheldon of her strange ideas.

On of the things that Wheldon told The Guardian is that she finds it significant that Caitlyn is still, “still speaking with a man’s voice”. Clearly she has no idea how difficult it is to get your voice sounding feminine after having gone through male puberty. You can’t just chose to sound all girly and have it happen by magic. Nevertheless, this does raise an issue that has puzzled me.

Back when I transitioned, the important things you had to work on were voice and body language. If you got those right, we were told, people could pick up the subliminal cues and you could get away with being tall, heavily-built and square-jawed. Now I totally accept that trans women shouldn’t have to do all of this stuff if they don’t want to, but back then it was very much an issue of personal safety, and for many of us it still is.

Anyway, another element of last night’s show was the introduction of Scott, the recovering alcoholic ex-boyfriend of Kourtney Kardashian and the father of three of Caitlyn’s grandchildren. Mostly this showed Caitlyn at her most patriarchal, but Scott, perhaps because he’s family, also picked up on things that hadn’t changed. Given the amount of money that Caitlyn has obviously spent on her body and looks, it seems odd to me that she apparently hasn’t done anything about voice or body language. It is her choice, obviously, but I’d like to know why.

The show also featured the ongoing saga of Candis’s unsuccessful love life, with yet another guy unprepared to date a beautiful woman simply because she’s trans. It also briefly introduced us to Van, a friend of Zachary’s who lives in St. Louis. Van is now happily married to a cis guy, but she explained that she has been through transition twice. The first time that she tried she found it impossible to get work and had to go back to living as a man for a while. And this is the point where Caitlyn confessed to having started transition back in the 1980s but backed out. She didn’t say why, and that I am not going to ask, but that is totally going in my trans awareness class. Transition is difficult and scary, and no one should be thought less of, or thought wrong, for changing their mind, regardless of whether they try again later.

Episode 4 of the new season of the Caitlyn Jenner show aired in the UK over the weekend. As a few people have expressed an interest in my thoughts on these shows I’ll continue to have them.

This episode saw the girls in Iowa. There was a brief visit to a very small town where they met up with the local trans activist. Yes, there was only one; a very brave lady who took a decision to stay in that small town after transition to be visible and a role-model for local kids. That evening the girls did some sort of event at a local casino, and met up with some local trans youths. The kid they interviewed for the show was overjoyed. Which just goes to show that even reality TV can do some good now and then.

Moving on the Des Moines, the girls caught up with the Democrat campaign circus. Hillary and Bill managed to say all the right things, which melted even Caitlyn’s icy Republican heart. At one point Caitlyn noted that she has to pay $430,000 a year towards Obamacare and isn’t eligible for the benefits. I can see her point — no one likes paying taxes — but at the same time I was thinking about what I could do with that money.

I note in passing that according to the TotalJobs survey released last week around 55% of UK trans people earn less than $27,500 a year (£20,000), and the median salary for the UK is in the region of $39,000 a year (£27,500).

The main reason the girls were in Des Moines was to visit Gracelands University, where Caitlyn went to college and started on her athletics career. Gracelands is part-funded by the Mormons, and has a lot of devoutly religious students. The girls were somewhat nervous of the planned Q&A session with the students, but they seemed to handle it very well. Chandi’s sincere Christian belief, and Kate’s tale of losing her daughter to Scientology, won the audience over.

An unexpected complication arose because one of the girls knew some students at Gracelands. Ella is new on the show this year. She’s the daughter of a friend of Caitlyn’s, and barely out of high school. Like many women who transition young, she is seriously good-looking. It so happened that a good friend of hers from high school, and a boy she had had a crush on there, were both students at Gracelands. She tried to set up a meeting. The friend turned up, the crush did not.

That did not surprise me in the slightest. It is a rare cis guy who is prepared to spend any time in the company of a trans woman if that company might be construed as implying any sexual interest. Currently the trial is taking place in New York of James Dixon, who is accused of beating 21-year-old Islan Nettles to death in 2013. Dixon has confessed to the crime, but is only being charged with manslaughter and is apparently pleading not guilty. In his taped confession he told police:

that he had succumbed to “a blind fury” after his friends started teasing him for flirting with a transgender woman.

I expect him to get off, because there will be cis men on the jury who would feel exactly the same.

Update: It appears that Dixon’s lawyers got cold feet and persuaded him to change his plea to guilty of manslaughter. I understand he’ll be sentenced to 12 years, and if the US prison system is anything like ours he’ll serve no more than 6. The fact that he has been convicted of manslaughter rather than murder does, of course, make it clear that the lives of trans women are valued less then those of anyone else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The irony of the show: the most progressive program on TV has a conservative Republican as its star. https://t.co/3JqWDfuas1

— Jenny Boylan 🍯 (@JennyBoylan) March 28, 2016

Because even I need a break sometimes, I just binged on a TV show. All six episodes. Don’t worry, though, they were only about 10 minutes each. It didn’t eat my entire evening, though I may need a bit of time to calm down.

Her Story is a show put together and starring a bunch of queer women, principally — least from my point of view — Jen Richards and Angelica Ross. You may remember me nagging you about the Kickstarter campaign. It is a short series about the love lives of two trans women: Violet, a waitress with a controlling boyfriend; and Paige, a high-powered attorney. Jen and Angelica take the lead roles. Given how short it is, much more detail than that risks spoilers, but along the way the show tells you a great deal about the reality of trans lives.

The operative word there being “reality”. This is not some exercise in cis gaze, putting the weird trans folk on screen so that “normal” people can see how tragic and pathetic we are. This is actual trans people condensing lifetimes of hurt into an hour worth of TV that they hope will educate people. Whether it will or not, I don’t know, but it sure is real.

It took me a while to get up the courage to watch it. Watching Tangerine made me nervous, but Her Story scared me a lot more. I’m way too privileged to completely see myself in Sin-Dee and Alexandra. Vi and Paige, on the other hand, are both women that I could have been. They do things I have had to do, that scared me horribly at the time. Watching the show simultaneously reminded me how lucky I have been, and how much I miss Kevin.

I could put my critic hat on and pick a few nits with the show, but I’m not going to. Firstly, for what it is — something produced on a shoestring, many of whose crew are new to the business — it is damn good. Secondly it gets the important bits right. And, as I’ve just been saying to someone on Facebook, the show totally makes you care about the characters and want things to turn out well for them.

Here’s hoping something bigger happens as a result. I note that Eve Ensler has an Executive Producer credit, and in fact Laura Zak who co-wrote the show with Jen, and has a major role in it, is Ensler’s campaign manager, so there’s contact to influence there. Her Story isn’t going to win awards. Those are reserved for cis white people, it seems. But it is helping change the world, which is a much more important thing.

You can watch the whole of Season 1, for free, here.

Oh, and that taking a break? I lied. I needed to watch this show for a talk I’m doing later in the year.