Thanks to Farah Mendlesohn I was invited to give a talk at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. That was yesterday, and I was very pleased with how it went. We had about 80 people, and many of them were very kind to me afterwards. It is always good to know that you entertained people.

I was half expecting the local TERFs to turn up. However, some bright spark at the festival managed to program them against me. Julia Long (who is one of the small band of TERFs who picketed the London Dyke March to protest against Sarah Brown being allowed to speak) was doing a talk on pornography that overlapped with mine. If all she was doing was complain about 50 Shades of Grey then she has my full support, but I rather suspect that the main thrust of her talk was full on Beyoncé hate, and the general tone anti-sex and anti-feminine.

What we did have was an old school transgender person who tried to troll the talk by nit-picking my use of language and claiming that I was excluding transgender people. There’s lots I could say about this, but I don’t want to bore you with trans community politics. Here are a few quick points.

It is impossible to maintain a rigid separation of meaning between “sex” and “gender” now that “transgender” has become an umbrella term for the whole community and terms like “gender identity” and “gender surgery” are used in talking about transsexuals.

If blurring the line between “sex” and “gender” means that I’m erasing the existence of people who identify as transgender as opposed to transsexual, doesn’t that mean I’m erasing myself as well?

Claiming that I only talked about transsexuals is an outright lie.

I have little time for people who try to police trans identities by insisting on narrow definitions of what it means to be trans and strict language use, and I have absolutely zero time for people who deliberately set out to wreck a trans-positive public event using such tactics.

I’m afraid that the talk wasn’t recorded in full, though I think some of it was videoed. However, my talk at the University of Liverpool from earlier this year is still online.

Several people asked for a reading list, so here it is:

• The Holdfast Chronicles (Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, The Furies, Conqueror’s Child) – Suzy McKee Charnas
• The Gate to Women’s Country – Sherri S. Tepper
• The Female Man – Joanna Russ
• Triton – Samuel R. Delany
• Steel Beach – John Varley
• River of Gods – Ian McDonald
• Brasyl – Ian McDonald
• Luna: New Moon – Ian McDonald
• The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
• Friday – Robert A. Heinlein
• The Courier’s New Bicycle – Kim Westwood
• Shadow Man – Melissa Scott
• 2312 – Kin Stanley Robinson
• Shadow Scale – Rachel Hartman
• Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper – David Barnett
• Glasshouse – Charles Stross
• Diaspora – Greg Egan
• The Jacob’s Ladder trilogy (Dust, Chill, Grail) – Elizabeth Bear
• The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Wraeththu series – Storm Constantine
• The Culture series (specifically Consider Phlebas, Excession and The Hydrogen Sonata) – Iain M. Banks
• The Drowning Girl – Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan
• All the Birds in the Sky – Charlie Jane Anders (forthcoming)
• The Rhapsody of Blood series (Rituals, Reflections, Resurrections) – Roz Kaveney
• Tiny Pieces of Skull – Roz Kaveney
• The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones – Jack Wolf
• Books by Billy Martin writing as Poppy Z. Brite
• Books by Cathy Butler writing as Charles Butler
• Books by James Dawson
• Books by Jan Morris (I particularly love Hav)
• Redefining Realness – Janet Mock
• Trans: A Memoir – Juliet Jacques
• Man Enough to be a Woman – Jayne County
• Nevada – Imogen Binnie
• The Aleutian Trilogy (White Queen, North Wind and Phoenix Cafe) – Gwyneth Jones
• The Parasitology Trilogy (Parasite, Symbiont, Chimera (forthcoming)) – Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant
• Sense 8 (TV series) – Lana & Andy Wachowski & J. Straczynski
• Comics by Kieron Gillen

Please note that this talk was about how science fiction and fantasy books have speculated about gender. Not all of the books listed above include trans characters, and some that do are problematic in various ways. The Liverpool talk addresses some of those issues. Also I have reviews of many of the books both on this site and at Emerald City. There’s also this essay, which is five years old now and probably needs updating.

The list also includes books by trans authors that may not be SF&F or contain trans characters.

My essay for Strange Horizons on writing better trans characters is here. I also recommend this essay by Vee on The Gay YA.

And finally, for those of you who came to the pub after the talk, the Wonderella cartoon that Kevin sent me that I was so amused by is this one. I am so going to use that head-explody panel in a slide pack at some point.