Author: Cheryl

November Fringe Readings

~ Cheryl

Well, this is a little bit late, but treat it as a timely Solstice present. Here is the audio from the November BristolCon Fringe event, with a bonus interview at the end.

It being just past Halloween, November was a horror month at Fringe. Our first reader was Baylea Hart who describes herself as an IT Technician by day, horror writer by night and a reader everywhere in between. She has a BA in creative writing from Bath Spa University and enjoys watching people grow slightly white after reading her stories. Her short story, “Jack in the Box”, won the 2015 Bristol Horror Writing Competition and her film, Behind the Door, won a Top 50 spot in the Bloody Cuts “Who’s There?” competition and has over 500,000 views on YouTube.

Baylea read from her novel, The Log House, which will be available from Unbound very shortly.

Our second reader for November was Jonathan L Howard, who read from his recently published novel, After the End of the World. This is a sequel to the critically acclaimed Carter & Lovecraft. And yes (spolier!), the world did really end in that book. There is a little bit of explanation as to what is going on in the Q&A, but chapter 1 of the new book stands pretty much on its own. The new world that Dan and Emily find themselves in after the destruction of the world we know is rather different. Explaining just how different allows Jonathan to indulge his passion for alternate history.

No tentacled beings from beyond the stars were harmed in the production of this podcast.

As is traditional, I put both of our authors to the question at the end of the evening. We learned that Baylea has the Best Mum in the World, and that horror writers have dreadful habits as children. Jonathan explained some of the background to After the End of the World. And Gareth Powell ask the very difficult question, “Who would win in a fight: Cthulhu or Godzilla?”

As a bonus, because it is Solstice Day today, here from Salon Futura is the interview I did with Jonathan on my radio show at the start of the month. It has a small amount of overlap with the Q&A, but we make up for that in enthusiastic discussion of Nazi-punching.

Fringe takes a break over the holidays, but we will be back in January with the very wonderful Lucy Hounsom.

Solstice Card

~ Cheryl


Yes, it is that time of year again. And because I am still in the Northern Hemisphere today is the Winter Solstice and a wintery card is required. If you were among the small group of people to whom I still send paper cards (mostly ancient relatives who don’t do the Internet much) this is what you would have got in the mail. The art is, as always, by my very talented friend, Dru Marland. You can find her Etsy shop here.

Happy Solstice, everyone! Thanks for being here over the past circuit around the sun.

Referendum by the Back Door

~ Cheryl

An interesting new development in civil rights has been the idea that such things should be put up to popular vote. Ireland did rather well out if it, supporting same-sex marriage so firmly that their frightened government passed a very progressive gender recognition act as well. Australia, on the other hand, was subjected to weeks of bitter argument in the media which involved a great deal of hate-mongering on the part of the anti-LGB lobby. What’s more, the vote wasn’t actually a referendum, it was just a postal survey of people’s opinion. In Australia voting is mandatory, but this was optional. Getting the vote out, or inhibiting it, suddenly became important.

As yet the UK has not had a referendum on LGBT rights. The country has had a rather bad experience with a referendum in the recent past and no one wants to go through that again. Nevertheless, the government is putting LGBT rights up for vote. They have launched a public consultation on the subject of the new sex and relationships curriculum to be introduced to English schools.

Consultations are not exactly new, but mostly they have been a matter for pressure groups, academic experts and so on. This one will be different. Right wing groups are already urging their supporters to flood the consultation with demands to ban all mention of LGBT issues from the curriculum. (See here, for example).

While the consultation is by no means binding, if it does come out strongly against LGBT inclusion, the government will be able to claim that it is the “will of the people” that we return to the days of Section 28. But, as I noted, this is not a referendum. It isn’t even something that the government will publicize heavily. We know that the other side will be well organized, well funded, and will have the likes of the Daily Malice on their side. We have to fight back.

I have had a brief look at the consultation. It is long and involved, and the government is asking for evidence. The anti lobby will doubtless provide prepared text for their supporters to cut and paste. Hopefully that will count against them. It would be good if we could look better informed. If you want to read up on the subject, Stonewall has plenty of information.

It is also important that this new curriculum teaches young people to respect each other, and that sex should be a matter of consent. There is a big opportunity here to deconstruct harmful gender stereotypes. I’m assuming that the Women’s Equality Party will come out with some recommendations in the near future. I will point you at them when it happens.

By the way, one of the talks I have planned for the LGBT History Month event in Bristol on February 10th will be from the leading civil rights lawyer, Jonathan Cooper OBE. I have asked him to address this issue of putting civil rights up for popular vote. It should be a very interesting talk.

Writing & Gender Returns

~ Cheryl

I’m delighted to be able to report that Cat Rambo and I will be offering our Writing & Gender course again in January. How do you go about writing characters whose gender is different from yours? What about all these new, non-binary genders that we hear about these days? Not to mention new sexualities. How can you add gender diversity to your fiction and stay respectful of the various identities you are making use of? Cat and I are here to explain. The course is timed to work for people on either side of the Atlantic (so we can teach it together). If you are interested, details of how to sign up, together with a whole load of other amazing courses that Cat offers, can be found on her blog.

Up On the Aqueduct

~ Cheryl

It is that time of year when the Aqueduct Press blog blossoms with posts from Aquedistas talking about things that they have enjoyed reading, seeing and hearing over the past year. Today it is my turn. Obviously I can’t talk much about fiction because of the Tiptree judging, but I still managed to go on rather a lot. You can read my post here.

Rick Stein Does Mexico

~ Cheryl

My attempts at catching up on the enormous backlog of science fiction television I’m facing have floundered somewhat because I have found a new cookery series to watch. I’m not a big fan of celebrity chefs, but I do like Rick Stein. There are several reasons for this. His restaurant is in Cornwall. He started his career focusing on fish. And of course the shows are directed by David Pritchard who also discovered the mercurial genius that was Keith Floyd. Stein has nowhere near the personality, nor capacity for alcohol, that Floyd had. However, his shows are refreshingly free of lecturing about diets, healthy eating and so on, majoring instead on simple enthusiasm for good, fresh food well cooked.

The new series, Rick Stein’s Road Trip to Mexico, obviously features Mexican cuisine. However, it started out in San Francisco because there is a tale of Greater Mexico here, before the USA took so much territory away. There is also the story of Mexico’s influence on American cuisine, and of course of the current political fuss over immigration. Safely back in England after filming, Stein can’s resist the occasional dig at the orange-faced monster.

It is the food, however, that is the rightful star of the show. I have long been of the opinion that Mexican cuisine is one of the finest in the world. The combination of chili, lime juice and coriander is irresistible. The slow-cooked meats are utterly delicious. And the burrito is one of the world’s great portable food inventions. All of which is before I get onto the subjects of cooking with chocolate, and the Margarita.

Anyway, I’m hooked. Given that the Winter Solstice holiday is the only time of the year I ever get the time to do some serious cooking, I am looking forward to trying some of Stein’s recipes. I shall sit back on my couch and imagine that I am basking in the warm Mexican sun rather than listening to the rain pour down outside.

LGBT+ Classics in Reading

~ Cheryl

Here’s a bit of advance notice for an event that I am doing in February. LGBT+ Classics is taking place at Reading University on Feb. 12th. It will bring together academics and activists from around the country, including Jennifer Ingleheart, Beth Asbury, Jen Grove and Alan Greaves, all of whom I have had the honor to meet. My own talk will focus on the various excuses that have been used to claim that trans people did not exist in the past, and why they are all nonsense. The full program is available here.

Tickets for the conference itself cost £11.35 or £22.10 and can be booked here. The higher price includes membership of Women in Classics which I am guessing most of you won’t want. Jennifer Ingleheart’s keynote address is separately ticketed and is free to attend. You can book a place here.

I know it is a bit early to be thinking about this one, but the Eventbrite pages say that ticket sales will end in early January so you do need to get on and book.

Nero’s Trans Wife on TV

~ Cheryl

Earlier this year I made the case that Sporus, or Sabina as she should be more respectfully called, could easily be viewed as a trans woman rather than as a male-identified eunuch who was a victim of Nero’s eccentricity. The stories we get from Roman historians don’t show an unhappy victim, they show someone fitting comfortably into the role of a high status woman in Roman society and being accepted as such by the people.

Last week’s episode of the Bettany Hughes series, Eight Days that Made Rome, focused on Nero. I watched it with some trepidation. This is Channel 5, after all. If Sabina featured at all I was expecting her to be the butt (literally) of transphobic jokes.

What I saw was very different. Though she was named Sporus (which anyone who knows Latin will recognize as a male name), Sabina was portrayed as very feminine with no mention of her origins. She was simply the woman who shared Nero’s bed in his final days, and who loyally accompanied him on his flight from Rome. She was played by cis woman.

I find this astonishing. Not only did a very populist TV show eschew the opportunity to make smutty jokes, but someone, possibly Hughes herself, might agree with me that Sabina probably identified as a woman. Of course it is also possible that the show made this choice in order to avoid any hint of queerness, but that’s not been a problem for British TV for years. Unless I hear otherwise, I’m citing Hughes as a source the next time I talk about Sabina.

So, thank you Bettany for giving support to one of my pet theories about Roman history. And much kudos to Daniela Marinova for bravely taking on the role.

Congratulations, Juliet!

~ Cheryl

No, this is not about the VATMOSS stuff, Juliet McKenna has had some other good news. She has been asked to join the jury for the World Fantasy Awards.

As she explains here, this is a lot of work. Yes, you get tons of free books, but you have to read them. Judging the Tiptree requires one heck of a lot of reading, though nothing too much more than I got through when I was running Emerald City. Judging World Fantasy is much worse because you have many different categories, all of which are judged by the same jury. So it is a huge honor, but also a huge responsibility.

This does not necessarily mean that there won’t be anything happening on the fiction front. After all, River Kingdom came out over a year ago. We might still be able to make something happen in 2018.

Ujima Christmas Party

~ Cheryl



Those of you in or near Bristol are warmly welcomed to the Ujima Christmas Party which is taking place in Stokes Croft next Wednesday. Looking at the start time, I’m not going to be able to make it. The Ujima crowd parties late into the night and they are not starting until the time I’d need to leave to get a train home. But don’t let that stop the rest of you. It will be a great night. Plus all ticket sales go towards helping keep Ujima on air.

You can buy tickets here.

VATMOSS – Victory?

~ Cheryl

It has been a long time since I had to write about the nightmare of the EU’s VT changes on cross-border digital sales, but thanks to very hard work by a number of people, including Juliet McKenna, we now have a satisfactory resolution. As Juliet reports here, as of January 2019 there will be an exemption for companies that do less than €10,000 worth of digital trading per year.

Huge thanks are due to Juliet and all of those who helped here (and are listed in her blog post).

So what does this mean? Well, in theory as of January 2019 the Wizard’s Tower bookstore can re-open for direct sales. We have plans. We hope you will like them.

On the other hand, by that time the UK could be out of the EU with a no deal Brexit and Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg as Prime Minister, in which case I will have far more to worry about than VAT.

Yesterday on Ujima – Punching Nazis, Ending Violence, Mental Health

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s radio show began with an interview with Jonathan L. Howard whose latest Carter & Lovecraft book, After the End of the World, sees our heroes transported into a world in which the Nazis won WWII. We discussed how miraculously on point such a book appears these days, and the fabulous Crisis in Earth-X crossover event which sees Supergirl, Flash, Green Arrow and friends doing their own Nazi-punching. Of course we also discussed HPL’s racism and Jonathan’s other projects, including a zombie computer game which might destroy parts of Bristol.

Next up I was joined in the studio by Charlotte Gage of Bristol Zero Tolerance. This is a great project run by Bristol Women’s Voice that aims to make the entire city free of violence against women and girls. Of course this is a bit of an uphill struggle, but at least progress is being made.

Unfortunately, thanks to the continuing squeeze on local council funding, the project (including Charlotte’s job) is currently under threat. There’s a crowdfunding campaign going on, which you can find here, but what Charlotte really needs is for some big company to step up and sponsor the project.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

Charlotte and I continued our discussion in the second hour. We talked about how hard it is these days for any charity to get the day-to-day funding it needs to keep operating. Funding bodies are always happy to sponsor one-off projects, but these typically exclude what is called “core funding”, the stuff that keeps your organization running, and often excludes any funding for staff salaries. Up until now charities have often been able to get core funding from local councils who need their expert skills, but this is all being cut. There’s a major crisis brewing here.

We also had a brief chat about trans-inclusive feminism and the difficulty of getting any sort of dialog going. There is so much going on in feminism right now with attacks on reproductive rights, the #MeToo campaign and so on. It is a huge shame that so much time and energy is being wasted on attempts to keep trans women out of feminism.

Finally on the show I talked to Levi, a young man from Bath who has been working on a project about men’s mental health. Suicide is apparently the number one killer of young men in the UK, and the theory is that much of this happens because men are socialized not to talk about their feelings, and so have no one to turn to when things get bad. I also think that one of the main cause of violence against women is that men are socialized to believe that violence is the only properly masculine way to solve any disagreement. So this is really valuable work that Levi is doing. What’s more it has resulted in a handbook being distributed to children’s mental health services all over the country. Here’s hoping the make good use of it.

Here’s the film he and his friends made:

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

The play list for the show was as follows:

  • Bat for Lashes – Two Planets
  • Jimi Hendrix – All Along the Watchtower
  • Tracy Chapman – Behind the Wall
  • Linda Ronstadt – You’re No Good
  • Renaissance – The Winter Tree
  • Isaac Hayes – Winter Snow
  • Labi Siffre – Sparrow in the Storm
  • Stevie Wonder – Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing

The Labi Siffre song dates from 2006 but is even more on point now. It contains this verse:

The message written on our walls
For the strong to climb : the weak must fall.
This is heresy I guess, but could the strong
perhaps learn to live with less.

Ben, my engineer, joked that I’d be mobbed on social media for playing such heretical views. It has all been quiet thus far, so maybe the world isn’t as far gone as we think.

My next show will be on January 3rd. As I doubt that I will get any guests then, it will probably just be me playing music and highlights from 2017. If anyone wants to do a pre-record interview let me know.

Conventions News

~ Cheryl

SMOFcon, the annual convention for people who run science fiction conventions, is taking place this weekend in Boston. Kevin is there. I am missing Legal Seafood. There have been announcements.

First up there was a joint announcement from the 2018 (San José) and 2019 (Dublin) Worldcons that they will both be presenting Retro-Hugos. These will be for works published in the years 1942 and 1943 respectively.

Also I’m delighted to announce that San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions Inc. (of which I am still a director) has won the right to host the 2018 SMOFcon. It will be held in beautiful Santa Rosa where it will be warm and sunny in December. It is in California’s wine country, and very close to redwood forest. The local airport is the fabulously named Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, though to be honest you may be better off flying into San Francisco and either taking the shuttle or renting a car. I wish I could go.

A Little Gay Video

~ Cheryl

Many of you will be aware of the British Museum book, A Little Gay History, by Professor Richard Parkinson. However, I for one was unaware that Professor Parkinson gave a lecture at Oxford in which he talks about the book and how it came to be. And it is available online.

Trans people should be aware that Prof. Parkinson consistently refers to us as “transvestites” or “cross-dressers”, suggesting that he has some sort of biological essentialist view of trans natures, but otherwise the lecture makes excellent points about LGBT+ history.

The embed code for the video doesn’t seem to work, but you can watch it here.

Queering Localities, Day 2

~ Cheryl

Friday was pretty full on, including having to deliver my own paper, but I had a really great time and learned lots. Here are some highlights from day 2 of the conference.

Louise Pawley from Brighton told us about an amazing protest against Section 28. It was a year that the Tory party was having its annual conference on the south coast. One day the Brighton queer community gathered on the beach and gazed out to sea. At the exact time the tide was due to turn they lit torches and turned around to face the building where the conference was being held, symbolizing the tide turning against homophobia. I have no idea how many of the politicians saw this, but it was a magnificent gesture.

My own session included American historian, Susan Ferentinos, who told us all about a range of LGBT+ exhibitions that have been staged in the heart of Red State territory. It is good to know that even in the most conservative parts of the USA people still find ways to celebrate queer culture.

My thanks go to my colleague, Julian Warren, who expertly co-presented with me. It was a pleasure to tell the conference about several of the great LGBT+ history projects we have done in Bristol. It is also, as always, a pleasure to share a platform with Surat-Shaan Knan who was there talking about his Rainbow Pilgrims project.

Probably my favorite paper of the day was Jenny Marsden introducing us to the remarkable photographic archive of the trans community in Cape Town in the 1950s and 60s. Everyone was taken with the idea of the “salon crawl” where visitors would sample all of the various hairdressing salons where the queer community of District 6 worked and hung out.

The final session of the day included three remarkable papers, starting with Anne Balay on the subject of queer truckers in the USA. Truck driving is an awful job, with truckers generally working 14 hour days almost every day of the year. With the advent of “spy in the cab” technology it has also become one of the most intensely micro-managed jobs in the world. As a result, white men have moved out of the business, leaving it to people of color, women and queers (and in many cases people who are all three). Anne learned to drive a truck and worked in the industry for a while to do her research. I’m looking forward to the book when it comes out.

Zhenzhong Mu told us all about the tradition of yue opera in China. Officially these performances are done by women, but there is a sizeable subculture of men who gather together for weekends to stage their own amateur performances in drag, and to have sex with each other, before going home to their wives and jobs.

Rebecca Jennings gave a paper about lesbian separatist communities in Australia and Wales in the 1970s. There was much talk of essentialist views of femininity, and some rather naive ideas about setting up self-sufficient communities far from civilization while remaining defiantly vegan and eschewing all modern technology. “No one told me about wallabies,” complained one European visitor to an Australian site. The cute little creatures would destroy crops and keep people awake with their enthusiastic nocturnal bounding. Goodness only knows what they would have done if the camp had been attacked by drop bears. Thankfully modern feminism is far more about bringing down the patriarchy rather than trying to leave it and setting up an equally authoritarian matriarchy.

My thanks to Justin Bengry and Alison Oram for putting on the conference, and to Katy Pettit for her flawless admin (and the cake).

Now I need to go write a bunch of emails to new friends I have made.

Queering Localities, Day 1

~ Cheryl

OK, so I was late to this because I have to talk to some lovely police people. I know that many trans people have had awful interactions with the police, but each local force is a big organization full or many different people and the ones who come to the SARI training want to learn and be better. I’m happy to help and encourage them.

The one session I did sit in on was all about Oxford, which is a very queer university. One of the most interesting things about it is that any queer history of Oxford is inevitably a queer history of the British upper classes.

If you want a taste of the history, read all about Parson’s Pleasure. Anyone who was anyone (male) in Oxford in the 1920s (the period in which Brideshead Revisited is set) would have gone there. Including, apparently, C.S. Lewis. I don’t think Aslan would have approved.

Also Oxford did an amazing job this year of queering their museums. Hopefully we can repeat some of that success in Bristol.

Queering Localities

~ Cheryl

I will be off to London tomorrow to attend Queering Localities, a conference dedicated to teaching those myopic London folks that there is queerness outside of their city boundaries. I’ll be joined by my friend, Julian Warren, who for many years was head of Bristol Archives and who has been an invaluable assistant in researching Bristol’s LGBT History. The conference is free and open to all, so if you happen to be around please drop by.

I won’t be there until mid-afternoon on Thursday because I’m training police cadets in Bristol tomorrow morning. Julian and I are in the 11:10-12:30 slot on Friday. That slot also features my good friend Surat-Shaan Knan, who will be talking about LGBT+ migrants and asylum seekers.

A Brief Word on the Rocket Stink

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As some of you will have noticed, a bit of an upset happened over the weekend over the review site, Rocket Stack Rank. As usual, File 770 is on the case.

For those who can’t be bothered to click through, the site’s owner apparently has a policy of giving an automatic one-star review to any work that uses non-binary pronouns. He also allegedly has the cheek do describe himself as a trans ally, which is an utter nonsense, and even manages to recommend stories that he thinks have good trans content. It is all very head-explody stuff.

This reminds me that when Ann Leckie’s Provenance first came out some annoying people tried to have the book removed from Amazon because they claimed that the non-binary pronouns that it uses were errors.

I’m sure you are familiar with the way these stories go now: “oh -clutch pearls- all of this non-binary stuff is so new and confusing and horrible, how will we ever be able to read if we are subjected to these awful, oppressive, bullying pronouns?!”

At which point it is necessary to remind people that this is science fiction we are talking about. Apparently inventing whole new languages for Klingons, Elves and so on is OK, but inventing new pronouns for people who have different gender systems is not. What ever happened to the “literature of ideas”, people?

Of course there are people out there who “go too far” with all of these new fangled pronoun things. Take this, for example:

Which is to say: everyone is referred to by female pronouns—unless the speaker wants to have sex with the person they are referring to, in which case the pronoun shifts to ‘he’.

Head exploded yet? Ready to write a rant about “kids today”?

Well before you do I should note that the quote above comes from a Tor.com essay by Alex Daly McFarlane. It is about a book called Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. That book was written by some guy called Samuel R. Delany, and was published in 1984.

Young people today, eh?

Update: I’m told the policy is to automatically subtract 1 star for non-binary pronouns rather than give 1 star. I can see I may have mis-understood one of the tweets in the File 770 piece. Either way though it is silly.

Gender Recognition – Not as Scary as You Think

~ Cheryl

A great deal of newsprint and air time has been spent recently on scaring British women over the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. Sadly much of the information that has been given out is wrong, but many people have understandable concerns as a result. I want to address the issues here.

The first thing to note is that legal gender recognition doesn’t protect people from discrimination. It is the Equality Act that does that. A women’s refuge providing services to victims of sexual assault or domestic violence can legally bar various sorts of women from using their services if it is reasonable to do so. It might, for example, exclude a woman who has a highly contagious disease, and possibly even one who is a smoker. I am legally female, but I and other trans women can be legally barred from a women’s refuge now thanks to a special provision in the Equality Act.

Making it easier to change your legal gender will not change the law on whether or not trans women can use refuges.

The whole idea of “making it easier” is complicated as well. The media is suggesting that men will be able to become legally female simply by saying “I am a woman”. That is not how self-declaration works in any of the many countries that use it, and it is not how the Scottish government has proposed the system would work there.

What we will probably get is a system based on a Statutory Declaration. You will have to find a lawyer, pay a small fee, and sign a form that says you intend to adopt a new legal gender for all purposes. I’m sure there will be sanctions available if people use the system in a frivolous manner.

Back now to toilets, changing rooms in clothing stores, and so on. The suggestion has been made that changing the GRA will make it impossible to keep men out of these spaces. But, as I noted above, the GRA is not about discrimination, it is only about legal gender. The only women’s spaces that would be affected are places like prisons which specifically use legal gender to determine who goes where.

For all other spaces it is the Equality Act we should look at. This bars discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment. That is, it specifically protects people who have the characteristic of gender reassignment from discrimination (except in the special case of refuges as noted above). How does one gain this characteristic? Simply by starting on the process of medical gender transition.

To become protected by the Equality Act, all you have to do is visit your GP and ask for a referral to a gender clinic. That is much easier than making a Statutory Declaration. And of course it is a form of self-declaration.

The Equality Act was passed in 2010, so all of these things that we are being told will result from changes to the Gender Recognition Act are in fact already enshrined in law, and have been for over seven years. (Except for access to refuges, which you can bar trans women from and will still be able to bar us from if the GRA changes.)

In all of that time, I cannot recall a single case of a cis man abusing the system to gain access to women-only spaces. I’m sure such an incident would have been all over the newspapers if it had occurred.

Ireland adopted a system of self-declaration similar to what is being proposed by the UK in 2015. They have had no problems with the system. Other countries have been using similar systems for longer.

We should, of course, ask ourselves why a particularly right-wing Tory government is making these changes. Theresa May and Amber Rudd are not exactly big fans of civil rights, after all.

The answer is that the current Gender Recognition Act is manifestly not working. It has made it so complicated, expensive and humiliating to obtain legal gender recognition that most British trans people have not bothered to do so. You can change your passport, driving licence, bank account and so on without changing your legal gender. To the likes of May and Rudd – current and former Home Secretaries – it must be anathema to have thousands of people living a gender different from that in which they are legally recognised. They want to fix that, and they will probably add some means of encouraging trans people to get their legal genders changed so that all of their documents line up. Watch out for the stick that will accompany the carrot.

Much has been made of the issue of people with penises in woman-only-spaces. However, this cannot be avoided without completely undermining the medical process of gender reassignment. Under the current rules, anyone wishing to have genital surgery must have lived full time in their acquired gender for at least 1.5 years. If a trans woman doesn’t do things like using women’s toilets, and changing rooms in women’s clothing stores, the doctors will probably assume that she’s not serious about her transition and deny her surgery.

I can assure you that for many trans women the very idea of someone seeing that we have a penis is horrifying. We certainly don’t want to be waving the damn thing about in public, as it has been suggested we would do if the GRA is reformed. Many of us are glad to be rid of them, and those who don’t opt for surgery have very good reasons for doing so.

Of course there is a small possibility that some man will abuse the system and pretend to be trans. No law is totally bulletproof, and the widespread publicity being given to the possibility of such abuse can only encourage people to try. Someone will doubtless do it just to discredit trans women. But you can’t make laws on the assumption that they must be perfect. The world doesn’t work that way.

Here’s a related example. It is ridiculously hard to get a rape conviction here in the UK. I would like the laws tightened to make it easier. But every time a feminist group suggests this someone in the media will start going on about, “oh, but what if the woman is lying about being raped?”

You can’t have a rape law that is 100% proof against false accusations, and yet we have one because it is needed to protect the vast majority of women who report honestly. With trans women it isn’t even us who are accused of dishonesty, it is that someone else might pretend to be one of us. Is that any reason to deny us fair treatment?

The fact is that men do assault women all of the time. They don’t need to pretend to be trans women to do that. It is just too easy for them the way the world is now. Making it easier for trans people to get legal gender recognition won’t change that. It will help many trans people, and make the bureaucracy involved in gender switching easier and less confusing. That’s nothing to be scared about.

[Note: the above does not address the issue of legal recognition for non-binary people. That’s an entirely different matter, but no threat to women because non-binary people don’t want to be recognised as women.]

Well Done, Trans Pride South West

~ Cheryl

My Friday and Saturday were busy with trans stuff.

First up I did the usual gig of hosting the Trans Day of Remembrance ceremony at Bristol University. Special thanks are due to Alf and Nix for their help in reading the list, to the Students’ Union for the venue and organisation, to LGBT Bristol for the food and drink, and to the Trans+ Mindline for being there because TDOR is a rather stressful event.

That was followed on Saturday by the Trans Pride Community Day, which was a great success. There were plenty of stalls, including one from Stonewall, and some good footfall. I had a lot of interest on the OutStories Bristol stall (and yet another possible invitation to do a talk in February).

Running an event like this isn’t easy, and last year’s inaugural Trans Pride South West left a lot to be desired. This year, however, was very smooth, and provides a solid foundation for the future. If we can have the same venue, a few more stalls and more publicity it should be an excellent event. Sophie, Lexi, Spencer and the crew deserve a lot of credit for what they have done. And if you happen to be a trans person from the South West and can offer to help out please do so.

My apologies to Bristol folks for not being at the Reclaim the Night march. I needed to get home and get some sleep. I’m delighted to see that it went well and will hopefully be at the Bath one (which happens near International Women’s Day). Huge thanks to Charlotte from Bristol Zero Tolerance for turning up at Trans Pride on such a busy day for her.

Update: I’ve just had a press release from Bristol Women’s Voice informing me that they are trying to raise £20,000 to keep the Zero Tolerance initiative going for another year. Presumably this is part of the ongoing defunding of the voluntary sector by Bristol City Council. Details of the appeal are here.