A Birthday Request

~ Cheryl

I don’t often do this sort of thing, and I am definitely not asking you to give money to anyone. All I want you to do is write a letter. Let me explain.

By now the chances are that you have heard of Wednesday’s ruling by the UK’s Supreme Court which, in a very limited sense, defined a woman as someone whose birth certificate says they are a woman. The Court made it clear in their ruling that this should not be taken as an excuse for a wholesale rollback of trans rights, but neverthless the UK media has been full of stories about how trans people in the UK no longer have any legal rights. In addition various organisations have immediately adopted transphobic policies, and the Equality & Human Rights Commission (which was stuffed full of transphobic staff by the previous Tory government) has promised to bring in statutory guidance to remove all trans rights.

Much of what is going on is a massive overreach given the nature of the judgement but, because this is being done by quasi-government organisations such as the EHRC, it is very difficult to challenge. The only way to overturn what the EHRC is saying is to challenge their rulings in the courts. As we know by now, the anti-trans lobby is extremely well funded and has the power to appeal any case up as far as the Supreme Court, who will find against any trans people, regardless of the merits of the case. So legal cases will only serve to strengthen the amount of legal precedent against trans rights.

The government is very happy about this. It means that they can sit back and watch trans rights being eroded without them having to actually do anything, and thereby avoid any blame. This allows Starmer & co to stay in the good books of the likes of Trump, Musk and Rowling. The media is full of articles about how UK politicians will be breathing a sigh of relief because the trans issue is now “over”. That is, they say, trans people no longer have any rights, and no one of any importance cares.

The only way that we will be able to challenge this is if politicians throughout the UK start to worry that things have gone too far; that their constiuents are actually angry about the way in which a vocal and wealthy minority has been allowed to wage a campaign of hated against a small and largely defenceless group; that constiituents are deeply worried about what these changes in the law will mean for them, even though they are not trans.

I’m busy working with Plaid Cymru to see what we can do from a Welsh Government angle. What I would like you folks to do is write to your MPs. Or, if you are not UK citizens, write to your local British Ambassador, because the UK does still get a lot of money from tourism. Here are a few things worth mentioning.

The new regulations are likely to be applied in a very discriminatory way, in that defining trans people by the sex they were assigned at birth will only be applied to trans women. Trans men will be mostly immune, because no one wants people with deep voices, beards and penises in women’s toilets or changing rooms. Nor does anyone want any excuses for predatory men to force their way into such spaces on the grounds that they are trans men. Goodness only knows what will happen with non-binary people. It will probably be quite random depending on what other folks assume is on their birth certificate.

Having said that, all trans people will suffer from withdrawal of medical services. Trans men may no longer be able to access necessary screening for cervical cancer (and goddess knows it has been hard enough for them already). Trans women may be denied access to breast cancer screening, because it is an article of faith amongst the anti-trans brigade that trans women cannot grow breasts naturally and therefore do not need breast cancer screening. The fact that this is medical nonsense will not stop the zealots at the EHRC from issuing discriminatory regulations.

More generally, trans people, and trans women in particular, will be terrified of having to go to hospital. I’d certainly rather die peacefully at home than be let die in the men’s ward of a hospital by transphobic staff who amuse themselves by abusing me while it happens.

Then there is the whole toilet issue. The EHRC has promised to make it a crime for trans women to use women’s toilets. It will probably also become a crime for an organisation owning toilet premises to allow a trans woman to use women’s toilets. Businesses all over the country will have to get into toilet policing. And doing so effectively will be largely impossible. Of course the transphobes insist that they can “always tell”, but everyone knows that they can’t.

The inevitable result of toilet policing (and similar activities in changing rooms in shops, sports facilities and so on) will be that large numbers of cisgender women, predominantly lesbians and women of colour who do not conform to Western standards of feminine beauty, will be subject to abuse, denial of access to facilities, and even arrest, because they have been mistaken for trans women.

It is worse than that. The British Transport Police have already decided that anyone suspected of being a trans woman must be strip-searched by male officers. Given the shameful record of convictions for sexual abuse by male police all over the country, I’m sure that this will be expanded to other forces. This is effectively providing an excuse for male police to sexually assault any woman they take a fancy to. And because you cannot tell whether a woman is trans by looking at her (even looking at her naked), cisgender women will find themselves having to carry their birth certificates with them everywhere.

Talking of ID, the Gender Recognition Act allowed trans people to obtain driving licences and passports in their acquired gender. The EHRC has vowed to put a stop to that. This will make it impossible for me to travel overseas, because my passport will appear to belong to someone very different from the person I appear to be.

Over the coming weeks we will doubtless discover additional issues that this ridiculous judgement has caused, and I haven’t even begun to touch on the implications for intersex people who are innocent parties in all this. But hopefully you have enough to be going on with. The UK government is relying on the fact that no one cares about trans rights except trans people, and there are too few of us to matter. Please help prove them wrong.

My Eastercon Schedule

~ Cheryl

The programme for this year’s Eastercon has been announced. Here’s what I will be doing.

Friday, 18 April 2025

Looking Back: Harmful Legacies in SFF – Hilton – Boardroom – not streamed – 18:30

SFF has a history of engaging with its own past, but that past isn’t always good. How do we engage with the legacy of John W. Campbell’s editing, and the shape it forced science fiction into? Lovecraft’s racism shaped his cosmic horror, which has gone on to influence writers to this day; how do we tackle that? The Hobbit is so male that Peter Jackson felt compelled to create a female character for his film trilogy. How do we tackle the legacies of science fiction and fantasy of the past in the present day? With: Liz Bourke (moderator), Helen Gould, C.L. McCartney & Jeannette Ng.

Sunday, 20 April 2025

The Ties That Bind: Found Family in SFF – Hilton – Lagan B – 9:30

Fandom is a family, and speculative fiction is full of found families, from quest groups to spaceship crews. We will talk about the attraction of found families, the pitfalls of writing them, and the best examples of found families in fiction… as well as those we’d love to be adopted into. With David Green, Juliet Kemp, Everina Maxwell & Caroline Mersey (moderator).

Monday, 21 April 2025

Who Runs The World? Feminism in SFF – ICC – Hall 1 A – 11:00

Women have been part of the SFF field since it was invented, whether by Mary Shelley or Margaret Cavendish; but often they have been sidelined, especially retrospectively. Now we are seeing another range of rediscoveries of female writers who have been pushed into obscurity, but what could this continual process of obscurity and rediscovery tell us about feminism’s progress in SFF? With Juliet E McKenna, Caroline Mersey, Jeannette Ng & Virginia Preston (moderator).

Queerly Triumphant – Hilton – Lagan A – 12:30

For years, queer narratives were written in the shadow of tragedy, from the formal legal discrimination to the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Throughout that time, though, there have been narratives of queer triumph and queer joy, and in the face of a resurgent anti-queer backlash, we’re seeing a renewed need for such stories today. Our panel discuss the history of queer narratives, the way the spectre of queer tragedy has historically erased the reality of queer joy, and the best queer triumphant writing today. With Sandra Bond, Trip Galey, SJ Groenewegen & Mairi White (moderator).

And not forgetting the BSFA Awards ceremony, which starts at 18:30 on the Sunday night. Come and see if Fight Like A Girl 2 wins an award, and if so whether I can remember how to make an acceptance speech.

You can still buy a virtual membership for just £20. Click here.

A Local Rugby Story

~ Cheryl

As those of you who follow the sport will know, Welsh rugby is pretty shit at the moment. One of the few good things about the national team is the captain, Jac Morgan (no relation), whom even the English accept is a world class player. Before the Scotland game yesterday, the BBC ran a little feature on Jac. You can find it here (though you probably need a UK TV licence to watch it).

I live just south of a town called Rhydaman (Amman Ford in English). Jac is from further upriver: the village of Brynaman (Amman Hill). You may remember me enthusing about the wonderful old cinema they have there. The team that Jac played for as a boy is in the neighbouring village of Cwmtwrch. That means ‘Valley of the Boar’. Specifically, of course, it refers to the giant boar called Trwyth who has a starring role in the Second Branch of The Mabinogion. He’s something of a local hero in these parts. A wild boar is, of course, the perfect mascot for a rugby loose forward.

Going back over the video before writing this post, I noticed that the BBC had changed the background music, probably to avoid having to pay more royalties. The music that they used for the broadcast was a song by Adwaith, the single off their debut album, Melyn. The song is called “Fel i fod”, and has apparently been adopted by the Wales Women soccer team. I have no idea who chose it for the feature on Jac, but it was a very Carmarthenshire thing to have done. I like to think that Jac chose it because he’s a fan.

“Fel i fod” is an unusual track for Adwaith, being much slower and more melodic than most of their fare, but it is lovely. Here are the girls doing a version as promo for the 2018 Green Man festival which, incidentally, takes place in Crucywel (Crickhowell) in the Bannau Brycheiniog a little way east of here.

I see that Adwaith are playing there again this year, along with Tristwch y Fenywod and Gwenno, but tickets are sold out and anyway I’m much too old for camping in a field.

I’m not too old to watch rugby though. I spent part of today at Parc y Scarlets watching our local women’s team. The men and boys national teams might have lost to Scotland this weekend, but Brython Thunder won a closely fought game against Glasgow Warriors. If you want a job done, get the women to do it.

That Time of Year

~ Cheryl

You might not think it, but it is LGBTQ+ History Month, at least in the UK. It certainly isn’t in the USA, where the Fascist Coup is busily trying to erase queer people from history, but here we can at least do some events.

Last weekend I headed down to Llanelli for their first ever such gig. My friend Norena Shopland did a great presentation of the Carmarthen Timeline. What is that, you ask? Well, a while back Norena was charged by the Welsh government to do some training for museums, libraries etc. to encourage them to make queer history more visible. The trainees responded that this was absolutely great, but they had no time, and no money, and were likely to have even less of both in the future. So Norena and some friends set about producing a queer history timeline for each county in Wales that could be used by local authorities with minimum effort by their staff. We believe that Wales is the only country in the world to have such a thing. Cool.

This weekend sees the annual OutStories Bristol event at M-Shed. I’m not speaking at that one, and I suspect I won’t have time to get to it either, but it looks like being a great day.

At the end of the month I am off to Abertystwyth to do an actual talk. The poster for the event is shown above. My talk is the one on Trans Celts (freshly updated with a bunch of new stuff). I am really looking forward to the one on The Mabiniogion. I know that for many of you Aberystwyth is at the arse end of nowhere, but if you can make it booking details are here. It is a great venue. The town museum is housed in a restored Edwardian theatre. Sadly I won’t be on stage, but I can guarantee an excellent audience.

I hope to take advantage of being in town to visit the National Library and do some research.

Just prior to that I will be spending a couple of days in That London, partly for things I can’t talk about yet, and partly to take advantage of being there. The lovely people at Strawberry Hill House are doing a candlelit open evening on the Wednesday (26th), and before going home I plan to take in the Mediaeval Women exhibition at the British Library. They have material by Christine de Pizan and Julian of Norwich, and most amazingly a letter signed by Jean d’Arc herself. Wow.

All of this travel means that Salon Futura may be a day or two late, but I’m not worrying about that.

Solstice Watch

~ Cheryl

This is your regular reminder that the Solstice is tomorrow, and for us in the Northern Hemisphere the very best way to watch it from home is in the wonderful company of Dr Clare Tuffy and Dr Frank Prendergast live from Newgrange on RTÉ. Those of us not in Ireland can follow along on a number of platforms, including YouTube. Full details here. The broadcast starts at 8:40, Irish time (which is the same as the UK).

By the way, English Heritage are warning about fake broadcasts from Stonehenge being advertised on Farcebook. Do check that you are following the real thing, and don’t pay anything.

Comments Closed

~ Cheryl

Thanks to discussions elsewhere I have become aware of problems with the UK’s new Online Safety Act. In theory this legislation is designed to protect children from unsafe material on the internet. It does things like require social media companies to actually enforce their age limits, and to have active moderation policies. In practice it is a poorly-thought-out piece of legislation that will catch a lot of innocent people in its net.

People who run various fora and bulletin boards for volunteer and hobbyist groups have already started taking their sites offline because they cannot afford to comply with the legislation, and can’t afford to ignore it. (You can be fined up to £18m if found in breach of the act.)

My guess is that, much like HMRC puts a lot of effort into prosecuting individuals who might have made a mistake in their tax return, while letting the wealthy and corporations get away with massive tax evasion, the force of this law will fall mainly on private individuals and small companies. There have been suggestions that SWATing-like tactics will be used by internet trolls whereby they seek to place dubious content on sites they have taken against, and then report those sites to the authorities.

In theory, blogs like this are exempt from the law on the grounds that they are not bulletin boards, but rather simply people commenting on things the blog owner has said. However, when the Act was drafted, it did not occur to anyone that it is possible for people to reply to other people’s comments on a blog. And that makes it functionally more like a bulletin board. There is no means in WordPress to prevent that from happening without closing comments altogether. As people hardly ever comment here these days anyway, I have taken the decision to close them entirely. Should things change in the future I can always open them up again. In the meantime, you can always reply to posts via social media.

Of course it would not surprise me if, sometime soon, the UK government decides that all discussion of trans issues is “pornographic” and therefore must be behind an 18+ screen. The Online Safety Act will be the vehicle through which they attack online discussion of trans rights. But I’ll deal with that as and when we get there.

A Little (Trans) History

~ Cheryl

The anti-trans brigade loves to claim that trans people are a modern invention (so much so that I am apparently much younger than my calendar years as I hadn’t been invented when I was born). When you provide them with examples of gender diversity from history they will claim that you can’t really know how people from the past felt about themselves, and anyway being trans would have been illegal back then so they would have been killed if they were really trans.

But what if there is evidence? Not autobiographies, because they can be unreliable, but evidence from independent witnesses who knew the person in question and can testify to how they behaved.

This is the subject of a new post that I have up on Notches, in collaboration with my friend Margarita Vaysman who is a professor of Russian Literature at Oxford. Having discovered the story of Aleksandr Aleksandrov, she started doing some digging. As a Russian speaker (she’s Ukrainian, as was Aleksandrov) she has been able to look at archives written in Russian and she has turned up some remarkable articles by late 19th century Russian historians. These two men were keen to know more about the famous hero of the Napoleonic Wars – allegedly a young woman who abandoned home and family to fight as a man for her country. What they found was clear evidence that Aleksandrov – a name he was given by the Tsar, alongside a Cross of St. George – continued to live as a man for decades after the end of the war.

She was always in male attire: a long black frock coat and narrow trousers, a tall black hat on her head and a cane in her hands, on which she leaned. She endeavoured to walk as upright as her years and strength would allow and had a firm step. She always conducted herself as a man and was offended if she were addressed as a woman; if this happened, she would get angry and respond harshly.

As you’ll see, there is a fair amount of misgendering going on. The learned gentlemen were not quite sure what to make of this strange person, but they were quite clear about Aleksandrov’s sense of self, and also that most of the people in the town where he lived were happy to accept him as a man.

I’m writing this because there is not a lot of background in the Notches articles. The two translated articles are quite enough material for one blog post. They are also rather too long for a typical paper in an academic journal. However, Margarita and I are working on papers, and we want to be able to cite these two pieces. We can’t do that unless they are published somewhere. Justin Bengry and the Notches team kindly agreed to put them online for us, for which we are deeply grateful.

The academics amongst you can look forward to a paper or two in due course. And hopefully I’ll be appearing at one or two conferences on queer history.

Community Action in Practice

~ Cheryl


There has been a lot of talk on social media of late about how communities need to work together to fight the onrushing tide of austerity policies and Fascism, but there has been little idea of how that might be achieved in practice. Well, here in West Wales we have something that is rather special.

My friend Deri Reed runs a top quality restaurant in Carmarthen called The Warren. (I took Kevin there after Worldcon if you need a less biased recommendation.) More recently Deri has founded an initiative called Cegin Hedyn (that’s Seed Kitchen for you English-speakers). This provides a “pay what you can afford” service which aims to ensure that the people of Carmarthen and the surrounding area have “access to nutritious, delicious meals, regardless of financial means.” The service is run by volunteers and relies on donations of money and food from the local community.

Recently Cegin Hedyn has been named as one of the finalists for the Community Food Champion award in this year’s BBC Food and Farming Awards. Consequently it was featured on Saturday’s edition of BBC Morning Live. If you have access to the BBC iPlayer you can watch the segment here (fast forward to 44 minutes). The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Glasgow on December 2nd.

While it would be lovely for them to win, the point I want to make here is that this is very much a grass roots initiative that was set up to benefit the local community in a sustainable way. It is something that we could all learn from. If you would like to help out you can do so via the LocalGiving website.

By the way, Cegin Hedyn serves all of the local community. The BBC video features a couple of people I know from the local queer community. And if you check out the organisation’s website you will see that one of the Directors is my long-time friend, Frank Duffy. Frank provides all of the graphic design for The Warren and Cegin Hedyn. They have also done quite a bit of work for Wizard’s Tower over the years.

It’s That Day Again

~ Cheryl

Yes, today is the annual Trans Day of Remembrance. Indeed, it is the 25th anniversary of the founding of the event by Gwendolyn Ann Smith. It became a global phenomenon, and now it seems it is dying. I’m certainly seeing a lot less interest in it his year, and especially a lot less support from outside the trans community.

From my point of view it is a bit of a relief to not have to spend this evening reading the names of people who have been murdered, often brutally, simply because they were trans. But they are still dying. Indeed, the official figures suggest that there has been an increase of around 10% in the total in the past year. I expect next year to be much worse, especially in the USA where a small segment of society believes that the election result has given them the freedom to harrass and kill anyone they don’t like.

Here in the UK the violence is less obvious but no less cruel. The government has launched an inquiry into health care for trans adults along the lines of the infamous Cass Report. Everyone knows what the result will be. In defiance of international medical best practice, the inquiry will report that transition care for adults is experimental and dangerous, and must be stopped. I’m hearing reports of GPs in England stopping providing hormones to trans patients in anticipation of the inquiry’s findings.

Whether this will extend to Wales or not is unclear, but I have other things to worry about in the coming year. One of the things that the incoming government in the USA has threatened to do is define all discussion of trans issues as ‘pornography’. They will then use that to pressure media companies to stop producing films, TV, books, comics and so on that have trans themes. Discussion of trans issues on the internet is also likely to be defined as pornography. One of the things I have on my to do list for December is to find alternative hosting for my websites in case my US hosting service is forced to shut them down.

Anyway, I intend to keep publishing work by trans writers until such time as the UK government decides to lock me up over it. Tomorrow is release day for Fight Like A Girl 2, which includes three stories by trans women. Two of those, plus one story by a cis writer, are overtly trans positive. It is a small act of resistance, but every little helps.

My Fantastika Schedule

~ Cheryl

Another weekend, another convention. I’ll be off to Stockholm shortly. Here’s my programme schedule.

Friday November 1st, 20:00 – Strong Female Characters
How have gender roles changed over time in SF and fantasy? Female characters take on ever-greater roles in fantastic fiction. Have strong female characters displaced male ones? Is it because women play an ever-larger role in society generally? Do female characters play a more significant role in science fiction and fantasy because more women are writing and creating fantastic worlds? How do changing gender dynamics affect how one reads, or how viewers appreciate what they watch?
With TL Huchu, Elin Holmerin, Jukka Halme and Åsa Lundström (m)

Saturday November 2nd, 16:00 – 50 years of The Dispossessed
2024 marks the 50 year anniversary of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic science fiction novel The Dispossessed. One of the few books to win the Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards, it is widely considered a defining work of SFF literature. What made the book so beloved and what keeps people reading it to this day? Does it read as a political manifesto, a character study, a speculative thought experiment – or all of the above? What themes resonated with contemporary audiences, and what can we take from the novel when rereading it 50 years on?
With Joachim Björk, Saga Bolund, Jerry Määttä and Markku Soikkeli

Sunday November 3rd, 13:00 – “Herding cats” – how to moderate a panel
The success of a panel naturally depends on the subject and the participants, but the moderators impact could be crucial as well. But how do you prepare to moderate a panel? How do you handle a discussion that has steered away from the subject or if one panelist is about to take over the conversation? When should you let the audience in and how do you interrupt an audience question that just goes on forever? This and much more will be discussed in this panel of experienced moderators.
With Johan Anglemark, Jukka Halme, Timothy Johansson (m) and Britt-Louise Viklund

Sunday November 3rd, 15:00 – The State of Publishing: A Conversation
Juliet McKenna and Cheryl Morgan discuss the state of publishing today. This wide-ranging exploration will be between an author and her publisher, between a defender of authors against unjust legislation and a champion of translation and intercultural dialogue. It is likely to cover anything from copyright protections to e-books, publishing corporations to self-publishing, editing to translation.

Book and Convention Schedule

~ Cheryl

This weekend will be BristolCon, which is a two-day event for the first time. The programme is still being worked on, but as far as I know this is what I will be doing:

Saturday, 12:00: Creating A Culture – Building A Working Fantasy / Sf Society

Sunday, 11:00: Book Launch

Sunday, 13:00: Cli-fi – subgenre or necessity?

Of those the most important thing is the book launch. I’d hope that we would have at least 2 books for that, maybe as many as four. As it turns out, the only new book we have since WorldCon is Resurrection Code, and Lyda won’t be at the convention. Both The Green Man’s War and Fight Like A Girl 2 have been hit by life happening. Juliet has written a little more about this on her blog.

So there will be no paper copies of either book at the convention. But I will be taking pre-orders, and I will be selling ebooks because those are ready. If you pre-order paper, you get a free ebook. Those advance ebooks sales will only be at BristolCon. Well, maybe, except.

When I get home I have a couple of days to get turned around and then I am off to Stockholm for Fantastika where Juliet is a Guest of Honour. There’s no way I can get boxes of books to Sweden, but a local bookstore has promised to have some Juliet books available. They may also take pre-orders for the two new ones. I would like to have the ebooks available there as well, but that is complicated as there is VAT on ebooks in Sweden and I don’t want to have to register to sell them. But, remember all that good work that Juliet & Co did back before Brexit in getting the EU to have sensible tax thresholds? That might just allow me to sell stuff. Funny how these things come back around.

The programme for Fantastika is not public yet, but I have some interesting panels, and because I don’t have a dealer table I can do more of them.

As for books, The Feast of the King’s Shadow, the fourth Outremer book from Chaz Brenchley, is waiting on Ben Baldwin to have time to do the cover. That will probably be out in December, followed by the second Helen Brady book, The Elfstone, in January. After that, exciting things are in store, but I can’t tell you about them yet.

My FantasyCon Schedule

~ Cheryl

FantasyCon is only a couple of days away. Here’s where you can find me.

Friday, October 11th 9pm (Baba Yaga Room)
Fantasy In The City – Urban or second world, the city is fertile stomping ground for fantasy. Why? And how do we treat the city like a character? Panellists: Cheryl Morgan, Ella Summers, Liz Cain, David Green, Sandra Unerman (m).

Saturday, October 12th 7pm (Kraken Room)
Queer Role Models in Fandom – There’s nothing quite like the thrill of discovering someone like you in your favourite book, TV show, or movie. What characters are queer role models done well in genre? Panellists: Cheryl Morgan (m), Susan J Morris, Tej Turner +1.

Sunday, October 13th 1pm (Kraken Room)
Demystifying the Editing Process – Every editor is different. Here, they share their methods of working, from developmental editing to line edits, and what writers can expect. Panellists: George Sandison, Claire Cronshaw, Jonathan Oliver, David Thomas Moore, Cheryl Morgan (m).

I will not have a dealer table. If you want to buy a Wizard’s Tower book, let me know tomorrow and I’ll put it in the car before leaving.

My Octocon Schedule

~ Cheryl

This weekend I will mostly be at a writing retreat in Llandybie along with Roz, Jo and various friends. However, I have to rush home on the Saturday evening because I need functioning internet. I am doing one virtual panel at Octocon, as follows:

Saturday, 5 October 2024; 20:30
Stop Passing the Buck: Consent in Historical Fantasy: So often in historical fantasy, we are bombarded with violence we didn’t ask for, particularly sexual violence against women. When this concern is raised, the authors frequently hide behind “I want to stay true to the time period” and “we can’t judge the past by today’s standards”. But why are authors bound to a period that didn’t exist when they’re creating a new society? Why do they hold to this, instead of creating their own? And why does the adherence to the past only seem to show up in violence against women and not to the beauty standards of the time? Why is assault more palatable to an audience than unshaved armpits? How do we go about demanding that this change, or do we have to abandon a genre we otherwise love? – with Faranae, Kat Dodd, Nick Hubble and MaryBrigid Turner (m).

Juliet McKenna is also attending the convention, and she has a panel at 13:30 on Sunday about exploring lesser-known fairy tales. That sounds like something where she might talk about the research she does for the Green Man books.

Full details of this year’s Octocon (and you can still buy a virtual membership) are available here.

Worldcon Ho!

~ Cheryl

In a few days time I will be packing the car with books and heading up to Glasgow. Most of the time I will be in the Dealers’ Room, so I should be easy to find. I have precisely one panel. Here it is:

Sunday, 11 August 2024 – 11:30 – Gods and Faith in Fantasy – Forth, Duration: 60 mins

Faith and the divine have played a huge role in fantasy, from Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods to N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow. This panel will discuss the presentations and representations of the divine in fantasy, the ways writers put faith on the page, and the role of gods in story.

With: Ehud Maimon (moderator), Meg MacDonald & Wole Talabi

My Finncon Schedule

~ Cheryl

It is almost July, and that means I will be heading to Finland for Finncon. This year the convention is being held in Jyväskylä, home of my dear friend, Irma Hirsjärvi. I will be on programme. The convention website is here, but to read it all you will need to know a bit of Finnish. In the main menu: Ohjelma = Programme. In that menu: Perjantai = Friday; Lauantai = Saturday; and Sunnuntai = Sunday. The programme grids for each day describe the English-language items in English. My assignments are:

Friday 5th: 15:00
On Writing, in which I interview Guest of Honour, Ursula Vernon (a.k.a. T. Kingfisher) about her writing practice.

Saturday 6th: 14:00
Wales in the Time of Arthur, in which I talk about Welsh history in the 5th and 6th centuries, CE.

Saturday 6th: 17:00
Masquerade – Ursula and I will be among the judges

Sunday 7th: 10:00
Queer Fantasies, in which a panel of queer-identified folks talk about their favourite fantasy books with queer elements.

Following the convention, I will be attending Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at the University of Helsinki. And because my life is a bit mad, on Saturday 13th I will dialing in to the Marginalised Writers’ Day at Abertystwyth University, from the Finnair Lounge at Helsinki airport.

Talking of that day, my pals at Inclusive Journalism Cymru now have a blog post up about it. Two of my colleagues will be attending in person and reporting on social media: one in English and one in Welsh.

Hustings

~ Cheryl

We have an election happening in the UK. In the past such things have often been of little interest to me. The town where I grew up, and the town where I lived until recently, were both in constituencies where the the Tories could have put up a corpse and still got over 50% of the vote. Ah well, at least I wasn’t in the Bath & North East Somerset constituency, where they did put up a corpse who kept getting elected. However, Rees-Mogg is one of many Tories too chicken the contest the election this time because he knows he’ll lose. That’s not the case for Trowbridge, where the incumbent Tory is still confident of winning.

These days, things are very different. To start with, my local constituency is known to be a hot bed of Plaid Cymru supporters. Secondly, it is one of the constituencies that the Tories gerrymandered. They have stuck us in with Carmarthen which has traditionally been solidly Tory. And with Labour on the rise across the country, people were initially predicting a three-way fight.

Earlier this week some friends and I headed into Carmarthen to see a hustings. It was being held at SERO, a community environment centre, and was therefore likely to attract a more progressive audience. Of the 8 candidates, only 4 turned up. The far-right (Reform) and far-left (Workers Party) candidates did not respond to the invitation to participate. The Green, very sadly, was sick and unable to attend. There was a place set for the Tory, but he didn’t show. It looks like he has given up. So maybe it is only a two-way race.

Ours is one of the few seats in the country to have a Women’s Equality Party candidate. I suspect that is because the incumbent for my town’s old seat was kicked out of Plaid when he was arrested for beating his wife, though he kept his seat in Parliament. However, he decided not to run, which left my new pal, Nancy Cole, with much less to do. It was her first time as a candidate, and with the election having been called in a rush she had no time to get any training. In view of that, she did very well, but I don’t expect her to retain her deposit. On the plus side, both the Labour and Plaid candidates supported most of her positions. Getting other parties to support their policies is one of main purposes of WEP.

The LibDem candidate, Nick Beckett, was the only man among the four candidates. He’s a local councillor, clearly an experienced politician, and he spoke very well. Sadly he has no chance.

The Labour candidate, Martha O’Neil, is very personable. She was born here, speaks good Welsh, and clearly knows the area despite now being part of the Westminster set. She’s young, very smart (won a scholarship to Cambridge), has worked for an animal rights charity, and knows a lot about IT (a skill sadly lacking in Westminster). She could win.

That leaves Plaid Cymru. Their candidate, Ann Davies, is also an experienced local councillor. She owns a small farm near Carmarthen. What I’d seen of her campaign before the hustings was all about being anti building new transmission links to connect renewable generation to the grid. Farmers have a reputation of being very conservative around here, so I was a bit worried.

Thankfully Ann was very different in person. She, along with Nick and Martha, had clearly researched options for getting more renewables online without building pylons through local beauty spots. She was well aware of the culpability of farmers in polluting rivers, and knew something had to be done. Despite being quite a bit older than Martha, she was equally vociferous in supporting the women’s rights issues raised by Nancy. Being a Plaid candidate, she was able to talk about advocating for Wales, whereas Martha, if elected, would be subject to the whims of the very English Labour establishment. And she was the only candidate to mention LGBTQ+ rights, unprompted at that.

To date no one has come to my door canvassing. I’ve had one leaflet from Labour and two from Plaid. The Tories sent a questionnaire asking about my political views, which seemed to be aimed at getting a list of people to be sent to internment camps should they actually win.

Given that it seems that kicking out the Tory is not going to be an issue here, we are more free to vote our conscience. Some of my friends will vote Green regardless. Personally I’d like to vote for Nancy, but I’m also very invested in the Plaid Cymru v Labour contest, because the thought of a government led by Kier Starmer with a massive majority fills me with terror.

Most people in the UK will be better off under Labour. There’s little doubt about that. A few groups of people will not be. That includes trans people. Starmer has been very clear that he supports all of the anti-trans policies put forward by the Tories. In his view, trans women are not women, even if they have a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), and he has promised to ensure that people like me are kept out of “women only spaces”. That means hospital wards, changing rooms, toilets, rape crisis centres and so on.

The hospital thing is interesting because NHS Wales is a separate organisation from NHS England. But this is probably one of the points where we will discover that Starmer does not believe in devolution. I’ll just have to hope that I don’t need a hospital stay any time soon.

Toilets and changing rooms are a different matter. There’s a case before the UK Supreme Court at the moment that will probably end up with a ruling that it is legal to exclude trans women from “women only spaces”, even if they have a GRC. That won’t be enough for the transphobes. What they want, and what Starmer seems prepared to give them, is to change the law so that it is a crime to allow a trans woman to use a “woman only space”.

This will put the onus on service providers–hotels, pubs, gyms, shops and so on–to enforce the law. They will end up getting lots of false positives, causing endless trouble for cis women who are not sufficiently feminine-looking. But they will, very reasonably, claim that the Gender Recognition Act is an obstacle to their upholding the law. I have government ID (passport and driving licence) that say very clearly that I am female. The government would have to demand that I surrender those so that I can’t use them to pee illegally. As I have no desire to have government ID that outs me as trans to anyone I have to show it to, that would be a major inconvenience.

As far as other constituencies go, I would still advocate voting Labour if the only alternative is the Tories. I’d probably be voting Labour if I was still in Trowbridge. But if, like me, you have the option to get rid of a Tory without giving the seat to Labour (or Reform), I hope you will do so. The country needs an opposition.

Friends in Bristol, please vote for Carla, she’s great.

Aberystwyth Does Marginalised Writers

~ Cheryl

My friend Jo Lambert, who is a Creative Writing student at Aberystwyth, is co-hosting a day-long hybrid event for Marginalised Writers at the University of Aberystwyth on July 13th. As a trans writer/publisher, I have been invited to be on a panel. As it turns out, I’ll be on my way back from Finland at the time, but I’m hoping to be able to log in from the Finnair lounge at Helsinki Airport.

The event is aimed at marginalised people of sorts. If you are a person of colour, disabled, elderly, queer, living with mental illness, on a very low income or any other form of marginalisation, this day is for you. While Jo is primarily a novelist, writers of non-fiction are welcome, and indeed the event is being supported by my friends at Inclusive Journalism Cymru. Attendance is free, and you can attend online (though you’ll miss out on lovely Aberystwyth and the free food if you do). Tickets available here.

I hope to see some of you there.

Legal Shenanagins

~ Cheryl

One of the things that has protected trans rights in the UK over the past couple of years is that the Tories are too busy, and too cowardly, to actually repeal the Gender Recognition Act, even though many of their MPs very much want to get that done. The anti-trans lobby is unhappy about this, and is therefore taking matters into its own hands by taking legal action. Very soon, their case will reach the Supreme Court. Should they win, the consequences for trans people in the UK (and equality law more generally) will be catastrophic.

The Gender Recognition Act says, unambiguously:

Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).

However, as I understand it, the argument that will be put before the Supreme Court is that allowing a trans woman to be treated as a woman is, de facto, discrimination against cisgender women, and therefore illegal under the Equality Act. As the Equality Act is a more recent piece of legislation, its provisions should supercede those of the GRA.

Hopefully it is obvious that, should this claim succeed, it will open the doors to equivalent claims such as, “letting Black people into my whites-only pub is discrimination against white people,” and “building a wheelchair ramp is discrimination against able-bodied people.” Thankfully such claims are less likely to pass the Supreme Court.

But the chances of this getting through are very high. And if it does, not only will the GRA be rendered useless, it will create a climate of fear in businesses all around the country. Because it will be possible for a business (or school, local authority, etc.) to be sued for discrimination if they inadvertently allow a trans woman to be treated as a woman. This will lead to a lot of proactive bans being issued at places like public toilets, gyms, clothing stores and so on. Most of the people caught by this will be gender-nonconforming cisgender women, because despite what the anti-trans lobby claims, they can’t always tell, and neither can anyone else.

I say the chances of it getting through are high, because at the moment no trans people or allies will be allowed to give evidence. The anti-trans lobby is being bankrolled by She Who Must Not Be Named (to the tune of £70,000). In contrast, a crowdfunder by The Good Law Project to allow them to intervene in the case stands at just over £10,000. Britain’s only senior trans judge has asked for leave to intervene on the case, but that request may be denied.

My guess is that both Sunak and Starmer will be having messages sent to the Supreme Court judges encouraging them to find in favour of the case, because both main political parties would be delighted if the GRA could be made to vanish without them having to do anything. And of course the judges know that they will be pilloried in the media if they don’t find in favour of the case.

It would not surprise me if, by the end of this year, the UK had become one of the most transphobic countries in the world (rather than just one with the most transphobic media in the world).

Introducing Tir y Dail

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Ah, the Spring Equinox (in the Northern Hemisphere, at any rate). It is a time of new beginnings, and so perhaps a time to talk about new things. Things, at any rate, that have been gestating over the winter.

When I lived in Wiltshire, I knew hardly anyone else who lived near me (which was probably just as well, given how very patriotically English and Tory most people there were). Most of my friends were in Bath or Bristol, so I could visit them, but not hang out for any great amount of time.

Here in South Wales I have several good friends who live locally, and who have many of the same interests as me. Those interests include role-playing; something I have not been able to do seriously for around three decades due to lack of a suitable local group (not to mention lack of time).

At the same time I have read Nicola Griffith’s Spear, and am keenly aware that the place where I live was once the home of the great boar, Twrch Trwyth. This area is as steeped in Arthuriana as the area around Glastonbury where I grew up.

Now it so happens that one of my favourite role-playing game systems is Chaosium’s Pendragon. I ran a campaign many years ago. But Pendragon is very much based on Malory and Le Morte d’Arthur. It is a high mediaeval and English version of the Arthur cycle. Would it be possible, I wondered, to do something more Welsh? Something that was rooted instead in The Mabinogion?

Well, never fear. I did, after all, grow up on Original D&D (the white box version). As a consequence, I never met a role-playing system that I didn’t want to customize. I could do this.

Out of such thoughts grew Tir y Dail, a role-playing campaign set (at least initially) in South Wales, and using a variant of the Pendragon rules to create a distinctly Welsh feel to the game. Specifically the campaign begins in Ystrad Tywi, the same location in which we find ourselves at the start of Spear. But Tir y Dail is not the stylized, mythical land of Griffith’s story. It is something much more similar to the world of Hild and Menewood. Whereas in Spear, Ystrad Tywi is a wild land occupied only by a few peasants and bandits, in Tir y Dail it is a bustling post-Roman culture just beginning to learn to live with the absence of colonial rule.

The most obvious sign of Roman presence is the still-busy port town of Moridunum (Carmarthen), the most westerly outpost of the Roman Empire. From here, local goods can be traded for wine and pottery from the continent. There are two sizeable villas in the region, one south-west of the city, and one north-east. Hill forts are everywhere. Tir y Dail (The Land of Leaves) is the name of the local settlement here in Ammanford, but there are many others dotted about the region. To the north, keeping watch over the Tywi, are the impressive Dinefwr Castle and the stately home that stands in its shadow. Those are more modern constructions, but in the 5th Century the hill on which they stand still boasted a Roman fort, guarding the road west to Moridunum.

I’m telling you all this now for a number of reasons. I am NOT planning to keep a campaign diary. However, I do want to talk about the worldbuilding, and the historical research that went into it. Some of that I will only be able to drop once the players have moved past the events in question. Also I see from BlueSky that my good friend Hal Duncan is working on something similar but based in Scotland (and presumably fiction). I hope people will find the contrast illuminating.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with doing Arthurian stories set in Scotland. We should remember that, before the Romans came, “Wales” – the country of Prydain, inhabited by the Cymry – covered the entire island, at least to the edge of the Highlands. (I’ll talk about the problem of the Picts in a later post.) Glasgow is a Cymric city. The name, Glas Cae, means “blue field”, and is indicative of especially good grazing.

In the time of Tir y Dail, the Ystrad Clut (the valley of the Clyde) is ruled over by the Damnonii tribe whose capital was the imposing fortress of Alt Clut (Dumbarton Rock). It stayed that way until around 870 when Ivar the Boneless and his Viking buddies finally managed to sack the place. The Damnonii then moved their capital to Glasgow – specifically to the area called Govan which is just over the river from the Event Campus where Worldcon will be held. They also fell under the influence of their Gaelic-speaking neighbours, the Scotii of Dál Riada. The new kingdom, known as Strathclyde, remained independent until just after the Norman invasion of England, at which point they joined the kingdom of Alba (possibly because they were conquered by MacBeth).

But I digress. There’s a huge amount of Welsh history that I want to talk about. The Irish will be in on it as well (though mostly as villains to begin with). I’ll stop for now, but there will be more.

LuxCon, For Real This Year

~ Cheryl

Last year I was invited to be a Guest of Honour at LuxCon. It was the weekend after Eastercon which, if you remember, was a massive superspreader event for COVID. So I ended up being sick and unable to go to Luxembourg. The con committee were very understanding, and have kindly invited me back this year.

I think I will be able to make it. When I was first invited the date I was given was the weekend after Easter again. Since then it has been moved two weeks later. So I am now going there direct from an Assyriology conference in Malta. However, I’m confident that my Assyriologist friends will be rather more careful than Eastercon attendees. My main worry is having to go through Heathrow.

Assuming I do get there, it looks like being a fabulous event. I’ve been offered some fun panels. It looks like they have an excellent cosplay culture. And there is talk of a live role-playing game featuring the guests.

I’m particularly impressed with the number of guests from around Europe they have (full list here). Given that everyone in Luxembourg seems to speak at least 3 languages, I guess I should not be surprised.

I will report back in the April issue of Salon Futura.