Where’s Cheryl?

Travel Planning

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

If you have asked me about my availability recently I have probably said something along the lines of, “not in February, please”. That’s LGBT History Month, and that tends to mean a lot of travel. Today I have been doing some booking. Here’s what it looks like.

Jan 31 – Feb 4 I shall be in Barcelona for a conference at the university on gender in the ancient near east. That will feed directly into my presentations as part of the official LGBT History Month events.

Feb 11-12 I am in Exeter where I am speaking both at the launch event on the Saturday and on the festival day on the Sunday.

Feb 15 I have marked in as the Ujima show devoted to LGBTHM.

Feb 18 I am in Bournemouth doing the same trans people in the ancient world talk that I gave in Exeter on the 12th.

There will probably be some stuff going on in Bristol. I know M-Shed will be busy on the 18th, and on the 22nd. I have the 25th reserved in my diary for a possible talk on trans people in art down the ages.

Mar 3-5 I am in Liverpool for the LGBTHM academic conference.

And that is why (Ceri, Adele) I will not be going to London on Mar 10-12 for the Women of the World conference. I will be asleep that weekend.

Transgender Mythbusting Comes to Bristol

~ Cheryl

On Saturday I will be running a workshop at LaDIYFest, a fabulous intersectional feminist event. The workshop will be an extended version of the Transgender Mythbusting thing I ran at the Womens’ Equality Party conference with a lot more time for detail and discussion. As with the WEP event, the point of the workshop is to provide feminist campaigners with the tools and information that they need to counter the nonsense that you find in the mass media, and the lies spread by anti-trans activists.

Attendance is free, though they will have a donations jar to help with costs. According to the schedule I am on at 2:45pm, though I’m planning to be there before that because the other sessions look really good.

In the evening there is a music event at Roll for the Soul, the bicycle cafe in the center of town. Ren Stedman is playing, and I hope to be there for his set. You do need to buy a ticket for that, but it is worth it just for Ren.

Diversity Trust AGM

~ Cheryl


Today I took the car for a run down to Cheddar, the home of cheese. Sadly it was not a shopping expedition, but it was a good day out. I was there for the annual general meeting of The Diversity Trust. We appear to have had a good year, and are looking forward to a better one next year (assuming the the government doesn’t abolish the Equality Act and Human Rights Act, which is not beyond the realms of possibility).

I’m publishing this little post mainly because there is a photo that has me in it and it is not cringe-worthy. This does not happen very often.

From left to right: Russell, Gary, Berkeley, Derek, me, Aaron, Steve and David. Sadly absent is Frank, hope you feel better soon.

Solstice Shopping

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Uffington Hare - Dru Marland
This morning I popped over to Bradford-on-Avon where the canal folk were holding a floating Christmas market. (It will still be on tomorrow if you are local and want to go.) I did so because the Daily Malice‘s War on Non-Christians has made it almost impossible to buy a solstice card in a high street shop. If I want cards to send to friends and family I have to get them from small businesses. Thankfully I have the fabulous Dru Marland to rely on. The above is the card I used last year. If you like it, and want to guess which card I’m using this year, you can see more at Dru’s Etsy shop.

I also discovered SkyRavenWolf, on whose products I could spend an absolute fortune.

At the House of The Speaker

~ Cheryl

speakershouse
Every year Schools Out runs a launch event for the following year’s LGBT History Month festivities. The actual month is in February, but the launch event usually happens in November. This year, because 2017 will mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of male homosexuality in the UK, the launch event was held in Parliament. I was one of a small group of people lucky enough to have an invitation to an exclusive soiree in the House of the Speaker, which is inside the Palace of Westminster.

It really is the Speaker’s house, by the way. He does live there, though he wasn’t able to be in attendance that evening. As you can see from the photos, it is a rather splendid residence.

It was lovely to catch up with Stuart Milk and have a brief chat with him about the situation in the USA. I have no doubt that he and his Foundation will be doing everything they can to protect LGBT+ Americans from Trump, Pence and their ilk. I also got to have a brief chat with Ben Howlett, the MP for Bath, who told me of his plans to speak in the trans equality debate the next day.

A special hour out is due to my pal Adam Lowe who looked absolutely stunning for the evening and read a great poem. Adam tells me that he’ll shortly be shopping around a couple of science fiction novels. I know his short stuff is great and I’m looking forward to seeing what he produces in the longer form.

fireplace
Photo by Janna Funke

The only sour note of the evening came from Anna Eagle who had the cheek to try to claim that all of the LGBT+ rights legislation passed by the Blair & Brown governments were Labour initiatives. The Gender Recognition Act was only passed after years of fighting the government in the courts, and finally getting a European court ruling in our favor. Thankfully Christine Burns, who got an OBE for her part in getting the Act passed, got to make a speech later in the evening, and she politely but firmly put the record straight.

Christine was also very candid about the current political landscape. She, like Stuart, noted how all LGBT+ rights are currently under threat in the USA, and noted that the same could happen here. “None of my life’s work is safe”, she said.

Probably the best speech of the night was made by Lord Michael Cashman. As well as being a Labour Peer and former Member of the European Parliament, he’s also an actor. He’s been in Doctor Who, but he’s most famous for his time in Eastenders during which he was one half of the first gay kiss on British television. He talked about the importance of the Human Rights Act, and the fact that human rights are intended to be universal. What little we know of the Tories’ oft-aborted attempts to replace the HRA with a “British Bill of Rights” suggests that those replacement rights will not be universal, and in some circumstances will only apply to British people. Trump’s threat to revoke the citizenship of anyone who burns the US flag is a reminder of where such selective rights can lead us.

lordcashman
Me with Lord Cashman

It was a splendid evening, and many thanks to Schools Out for the invitation. It’s a shame that not all of the LGBT History Month hub organizers could be there. (Missed you, Jen and Kit.) However, I did get to meet some lovely people from London museums. That led to my visit to the V&A which I wrote about yesterday, and may lead to things happening in Greenwich in the near future.

mirrorme
I loved this mirror, though judging from the non-Euclidian angles in the photo I may have consumed too much of The Speaker’s nice red wine by the time I took it.

On The Road Again

~ Cheryl

Well, guess who wasn’t home for very long?

I headed off to London this morning, the main reason for which was that it is time for me to be declared sane again. The NHS, bless them, are convinced that trans people are constantly on the verge of suffering massive regret and begging to be changed back to their “real” gender. Fat chance. But I need to go through the hoops to get the medication that I need. It is also good to have regular blood tests to make sure my estrogen levels are OK. I have to pay for all of this privately.

Anyway, it seems that I am still sane and female, so I am spending the night in Camden. I have tomorrow to see people in London, and in the evening I am going to the launch party for next year’s LGBT History Month. This year it is in a little place called the Palace of Westminster. I’ve not been there before so I thought I should check it out. If it is nice I’ll take a few pictures.

Reporting In

~ Cheryl

OK, so I was planning to write up the whole WEP Conference thing yesterday. But then I got invited out for a night on the town in Manchester and my brain was so fried that comedy and booze seemed infinitely preferable to thinking.

Huge thanks therefore to Hazel for the invitation, to Tracy for being great company, and to all of the lovely Mancunians we ended up hanging out with, including Andrew (Happy Birthday!), Rob, Mel and Hannah. Apologies for forgetting lots of names. And a special shout out to Colin, the engineer at the Frog and Bucket, whose taste is music is superb.

Should you happen to be in Manchester on a Sunday night do check to see if Laughing Cows has a gig scheduled at the Frog and Bucket. It is an all-woman comedy show and well worth checking out. If you are very lucky then Bethany Black might be on. And frankly anything that Hazel organizes is probably worth a visit.

I made a start on writing up the WEP thing on the train on the way home. I am by no means finished yet. Tomorrow I am off to London for a few days. Normal service may be resumed by the weekend.

In Which I Do Politics

~ Cheryl

I’m going to be offline a lot over the next few days because I going to Manchester for the weekend. There I will be attending the first ever national conference of the Women’s Equality Party. In addition to participating in the main work of the conference — policy debates — I am also giving some workshops. WEP currently has trans-friendly policies, but they have come under sustained attack from the usual suspects who want them the denounce trans women. Hopefully I can do something about that. More generally I hope I can help WEP stay a party for women, and not become a party that is just for well-to-do middle class cis straight white women who live in London.

Along the way I should get to meet Jack Munroe, who seems a lovely person. There will be several more well-known people there too. I’m hoping a few of them turn up to my workshops, because some of them need to.

I have, of course, taken a good look at the Standing Orders for conduct of party business, and am once again struck by how good WSFS is at this sort of thing.

Eurocon Day 1

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Kevin and I arrived in Barcelona by train late last night. We barely had time to grab some food before needing to get to bed. The one things we did register is that Barcelona is a Food Town. We are going to eat well here.

That was borne out in spades by the hotel breakfast which was magnificent.

We managed to get to the convention center and get registered in time for the Opening Ceremonies that were the usual round of speeches, enlivened by a brilliant chap who noted down everything said (presumably in shorthand given how fast he was going) and then translated each speech into whichever two of Spanish, Catalan and English had not been used by the speaker. Kevin and I were well impressed.

My one panel of the convention was immediately after Opening Ceremonies. It seemed to go well. Certainly some people came up to me afterwards and said they enjoyed it. More on that in a separate post.

Then it was on to a lunch meeting with a new academic pal (Hola Agnès!) to chat about trans women in Mesopotamia and a possible academic conference here in February. Kevin and I also got a short tour of Barcelona University which is absolutely gorgeous in places (the old bits, obviously).

Next up was the Johanna Sinisalo Guest of Honor interview, in which I had to ask a question because everyone else in the audience was too shy. I encouraged her to have a bit of a feminist rant.

Kevin and I then headed back to the hotel for a meeting for small presses. We ended up being quite late due to some banking adventures that Kevin has detailed on his LiveJournal. Having got that sorted, we went and chatted about small press publishing. There are some really great little companies operating in Europe. I’ll try to find out more about some of them.

The same room was used later for the ESFS Business Meeting. I had allowed Saija Kyllönen to persuade me to come along and volunteer to be a UK delegate. Most of UK fandom looks down its nose at Eurocon, and after recent events you probably understand this much better. Other countries send official delegations. The UK delegates end up being whoever is in the room at the time. In this case it was Martin Hoare and myself, meaning that it was actually a Welsh delegation. The downside was that I was stuck there for two hours, missing the Evil Females panel, and the Gender and Post-Humanism panel, and watching Kevin try not to explode over the lack of formal parliamentary procedure.

The meeting went fairly smoothly compared to previous Eurocons I have seen. There was a minor constitutional crisis caused when the Russian delegation proposed an Israeli magazine (written in Russian) and Cheeky Frawg Books (who are of course American) for awards. This was swiftly dealt with by Gareth Kavanagh who pointed out that what the Russians had done was only illegal under the new award rules that we had just adopted, whereas their nominations had been made a month ago under the old rules which did not specify that nominees had to be European.

Personally I am delighted for Ann & Jeff VanderMeer who have done an enormous amount to promote European SF.

The full list of award nominees is available here. I have no idea who made the UK nominations. The voting takes place tomorrow, and as a delegate I apparently have a vote.

Bridget Wilkinson is retiring after 25 years as ESFS Awards Administrator. We gave her a well-deserved round of applause.

The meeting also included news of forthcoming Eurocon bids. Next year’s convention is already seated and will be in Dortmund. The French have a bid for 2018 for the city of Amiens, where Jules Verne spent most of his working life. They are unopposed and seem set to be officially elected tomorrow.

Belfast is bidding for 2019, and plan to hold their convention the week after the proposed Dublin Worldcon. There is also a bid for Rijeka in Croatia for 2020. That’s a very nice city which I visited on my last Croatian trip. Rijeka was where one Fiorello La Guardia worked as US Consul prior to WWI. It is also the place where I discovered a Tyrolean cocktail called The Hugo. Sadly the Eurocon may be out of Hugo season as it is planned for early October.

We had dinner at a tapas bar with some lovely Czech fans, who I may be writing more about later. And now I am busy trying to keep you updated before hitting the hotel bar.

Living the High Life

~ Cheryl

Kevin has arrived safely in London and we have checked in to our usual London haunt, the Holiday Inn at Camden Lock. Kevin is very high status in their rewards program and therefore we often get a room upgrade. Today we are in a penthouse suite on the 5th floor with a nice view over Camden.

For dinner I treated Kevin to a visit to the Darwin Brasserie at the Sky Garden. The food was good but very expensive because you are paying for the view: 35 floors up looking out over the Thames and South London. You can get in for free during the day. We had to do dinner because of our schedule. I heartily recommend the view.

Tomorrow morning we’ll be up before the lark and off to catch the Eurostar to Paris where we change onto a TGV to Barcelona.

Me at Party Conference

~ Cheryl

I spent quite a bit of time in yesterday’s panel talking about the Women’s Equality Party and how to move feminism forward. Huge thanks to the young woman in the audience who had a go at the TERFs so that I didn’t have to.

WEP is having their first annual conference in Manchester at the end of this month. I will be there. That’s partly because I want to see what goes on, partly because I hope to get some interviews for the radio show, and partly because I am going to be running some workshops. The details are here, but to save you scrolling down I have a handy screenshot.

wepconf
And I pleased? You bet!

Bristol LitFest Reminder

~ Cheryl

Tonight I will be chairing a Bristol Festival of Literature event at Bristol University. It is titled “Ageing in the LGBT Community” and we’ll be looking at the issues through fiction and history with the help of authors and experts in social care. Details here.

Sadly Alan Clark is unwell and may not be able to attend, but he has sent me the extracts from his novel, Rory’s Boys, that he intended to read. They are very funny, and we will be reading them.

Also on the panel will be Dr. Jane Traies talking about the lives of older lesbians, plus Dr. Paul Willis and Berkeley Wilde talking about what this all means in the community.

It is a free event, and there is space, so do come along if you are in town.

A Day in Cheltenham

~ Cheryl

I spent Friday in Cheltenham where the Festival of Literature is in full swing. The main reason that I went is because David Barnett (who should be familiar to you from his Guardian articles and the Gideon Smith books) was going to be there. He has a book coming out next year from Trapeze, a new imprint being launched by Orion. The fiction editor is Sam Eades, whom some of you may remember from her time as a publicist.

David’s book, Calling Major Tom, is not being marketed as science fiction, despite the fact that it involves a voyage to Mars. Nor is it being marketed as alternate history, despite the fact that it involves a British space program. It isn’t exactly being marketed as comedy, though it does appear to be very funny. Mainly it is about people. If you want to know more, I bagged an interview with David which I’m planning to use on Ujima nearer the publication date.

The other two Trapeze authors on show were Sarah J Naughton whose Tattertale is a move from YA into psychological thrillers, and Peter Dunne whose 50 Things is derived from a blog he wrote giving fatherly advice to his children.

They made for a very interesting bunch. Sarah is very much a “writing novels is my job” person who religiously produces 500 words a day. David is much more of a “journalism is my job and I’ll write fiction when the muse strikes” person; while Peter was all, “I wrote a blog, and to my surprise someone offered to publish it”.

Anyway, it was a fun day out. It was great to get to meet David at last, and lovely to catch up with Sam. It was also great to spend the day hanging out with book people.

Bristol Festival of Literature News

~ Cheryl

The website for this year’s Bristol Festival of Literature has started to roll out publicity. You can see the whole thing here, but I wanted to highlight a few things that may be of particular interest to you folks.

On the afternoon of Saturday October 22nd there will be an event at Bristol Museum called Ancient Egyptian Story-Telling. It will feature four writers, three of whom should be known to you. Justin Newland, Amanda Huskisson and Piotr Swietlik have all read at BristolCon Fringe, and Piotr has a story in Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. The museum folks have been very efficient with the publicity. You can find out more here.

On Monday October 24th there will be an event at Bristol University called Ageing in the LGBT community. It will feature Alan Clark (author of Rory’s Boys, a comedy set in a retirement home for gay men), Dr. Jane Traies (author of The Lives of Older Lesbians), Dr. Paul Willis of Bristol University and Berkeley Wilde of The Diversity Trust. It will be chaired by me. Attendance is free, and it is 7:00pm at the Lecture Theatre, Helen Wodehouse Building, 35 Berkeley Square. I’ll have an official post up on the OutStories Bristol website in a day or two.

On Thursday October 27th there will be an event called Strong Women. Ominously it is going to be at Arnos Vale Cemetery, and it has a 10:00am start time so though I am on the panel I may be mainlining coffee throughout. I’ll let you know as and when I know more, but I’m sure you are familiar with the panel idea. I will take my copy of Fight Like A Girl to wave at people.

Finally on Saturday October 29th there is BristolCon, with Ken MacLeod, Sarah Pinborough, Fangorn and many other fine SFnal people.

I’ll be on Women’s Outlook on October 19th and I’ll be devoting the whole two hours to the Festival. Guests will include Joanne Hall, Dr. Paul Willis and Gav Watkins from the Festival.

Activism is Work

~ Cheryl

A lot of people these days think that “activist” means someone who sits at home monitoring social media all day and making angry tweets about the state of the world. Of course a lot of good activism can be done online. The campaign to get Tara Hudson moved to a women’s prison was done mostly that way (plus a lot of phone calls), and it was a lot of hard work. But you also have to get off your arse and do things occasionally.

Case in point. Last night, after the radio show, I attended a meeting at the offices of Bristol City Council. It is part of an ongoing initiative in Bristol and surrounding areas to draw up what is currently being called an “LGBT+ Manifesto”; that is a statement of the particular needs of LGBT citizens, and ideas as to what should be done to meet those needs. Along with a couple of other trans folks (hello Henry & Lexi), I have been asked to be on the steering committee.

This morning I headed into Bristol and gave a trans awareness course to teachers at a local school. They were lovely people, very keen to help trans kids. Berkeley and I have been invited back in September to do some more work with them.

Immediately after the course I went back to Temple Meads and took a train to Brighton, where I am now. Tomorrow I am attending a conference run by Brighton & Hove City Council. This will report on their groundbreaking Trans Needs Assessment, which grew out of Trans Pride and has now been going for a couple of years. We’ll hear how the city is responding to that survey, what various agencies like the local police and health services are doing, and where it will be going next. I’ll be bringing all of that information back to the LGBT+ Manifesto group in Bristol.

And on Saturday I’m attending Trans Pride, which for me means doing interviews, and chatting to various people about ongoing projects. Hopefully I will get time to hang out with some friends too.

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.

Travel Day

~ Cheryl

What with getting to the airport, having to be there ages in advance of the flight, the flight time itself, and losing three hours in time zones, I haven’t done much today except travel. At least I have been able to get some work done along the way, which is just as well as I have to give a training course tomorrow.

Come Wednesday morning I should be back in London. I have errands to run in the city and may not be home until the evening. I may spend Thursday dead for jet lag purposes.

Hello Vancouver

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I decided not to go back to the conference today because frankly life is too short to waste it on people who want to invalidate other trans people’s lives and experiences. Instead Kevin and I took an early ferry and made use of the extra time to have a look around Vancouver.

I have to say that, on the basis of the few hours we had, Vancouver is not the world’s greatest tourist city. However, it does have absolutely amazing public transport. In fact it seems like the whole of British Columbia does. We spent an awful lot of today on buses, ferries and trains. Everything ran to time, and all of the connections worked flawlessly.

Vancouver is also interesting in that a large part of its light rail system runs on a linear induction motor system. I remember seeing Eric Laithwaite demonstrating the technology when I was a kid, and everyone expected it to be the next big thing. In fact its most notable achievement was being used as the launch mechanism for Fireball XL5, but it is used for light rail. Vancouver’s system is the biggest outside Asia, but there’s a lot of such systems in Asia.

Please note that the Vancouver system is not maglev, it is an ordinary train, running on rails, that uses a linear induction motor for propulsion. It seems to do a really good job because the track has gradients that no traditional light rail system could handle.

We didn’t do much today except ride trains and boats, and fail to find a decent source of high quality maple syrup. However, we did find a Peruvian restaurant for dinner which was a good thing to have done. Tomorrow morning we go our separate ways: Kevin back to the Bay Area and me to Toronto.

In the Great North West

~ Cheryl

Early this morning I got on a plane from Toronto heading west. A few hours later I was in Vancouver, a new destination for me. But this was only the start of the journey.

The first job was to head over to the international terminal to find Kevin who had flown up from San Francisco. We then headed by train and bus to the ferry terminal and took ship for Victoria. All of the transit connections worked perfectly so we got the 13:00 sailing.

It is a beautiful day here in the Pacific North West. The sky is blue, the sun is shining and the Puget Sound was like a mill pond as we crossed. The landscape here is a lot like Ã…land, but bumpier. The rocks are the same, the trees are pretty much the same, there’s a shallow sea; all that is different is that the landscape has more elevation.

Kevin and I are now safely settled into a palatial suite in the local Doubletree. Goodness only knows how I ended up with this room. Sometimes devotion to the Hilton frequent stay program bears dividends. The conference doesn’t start until tomorrow, so we have plenty of time to get our bearings. And to catch up after over a year apart.

Hello Again Toronto

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I am safely arrived in Canada. It has been a fairly painless trip, thanks in no small part to great friends in London and the excellent staff on the Heathrow Express.

The movie selection on Air Canada was not great, but they did have some good documentaries. First up there was a biography of Mary Tyler Moore which I loved. Obviously back in the 70s I would have settled for just being a woman, any woman, but Mary’s TV show was still a shining beacon of possibility for me. I loved the fact that Oprah shot a version of the opening credits with herself as Mary. And yeah, I have been to Minneapolis and seen the statue.

I also managed to catch a food show about artisanal cheeses in British Columbia. It featured Little Qualicum, Moonstruck and Salt Spring Island. So when I get to Victoria I want to check out this place and see what I can buy.

Oh, and I set the high score on the entertainment system’s trivia game. I have no idea how often the scores are re-set, but it you happen to be flying Air Canada do take a look and see if you have the same aircraft as I had.