Tor.com has published a round table on translated fiction. I was one of the participants. I didn’t have a huge amount to say, but some of the other participants were able to be far more forthcoming, especially those with projects actually underway. You can read the whole thing here.
As previously noted, I have no time for anything until February is over.
With Paulette having retired, we need to put things in place to ensure the continuation of the Women’s Outlook show. I can’t do it myself because I have too many work commitments. But today I was delighted to welcome to the studio three women who are interested in working on the show as presenters. They are Isadora Vibes, Kamaljit Poonia and Esme Worrell. I spent the first hour getting them to introduce themselves and talk about one of their areas of experience.
Isadora is a poet and has been on the show before. She talked about the forthcoming In Between Time Festival, which looks amazing.
Kamaljit has a long career in equality and diversity work. She has been involved in the Bristol Race Manifesto project (which parallels the work Berkeley and I have been doing on an LGBT Manifesto) and she gave an update on that project.
Esme is, among other things, a stripper. We chatted about sex work, which as you will know is a topic of great interest to trans activists because so many trans women can’t make a living any other way.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
The second hour began with a visit from Gabriela Staniszewska who is an award-winning director of short films. She’s based in Bristol and I was delighted to find out that she specializes in science fiction and horror. We got on famously.
Finally I welcomed my friend Russell Thomas who runs the Ground and Burst cafe in Bristol that majors in smoothies. Russell is trying to get people to eat more healthily by eating fruit rather than processed sugar. I was very hungry by the time I had finished talking to him.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
Here’s the playlist. Obviously there was a Bowie song on it.
I’m not entirely sure what will be happening for the next few weeks while folks get trained up. I have some work engagements on Wednesdays that I can’t get out of. But I will definitely be back on February 15th with an LGBT History Month show.
Following up on my Sunday post about my schedule for February, it appears that I need to sound a little warning about the Bristol event on Feb. 25th. Daryn Carter from Bristol Pride tells me that they have over 100 people booked in already so if you want a place you should grab one a.s.a.p. The EventBrite site is here.
Further information about the day’s events is available here. I’m assuming that people are mostly coming to see the lady from the Tate, or perhaps for the new Jake Graf film. Fingers crossed what I’ll have to show will hold up in that company. The blurb for my talk is as follows:
Transgender people are mostly absent from recorded history, leading some people to claim that they didn’t even exist until the 20th Century. However, a few interesting characters have found their way into the history books, and for some of them we even have portraits. Cheryl will present artistic images of trans people from the present day back to 2500 BCE.
Hopefully I will see a few of you there.
Yesterday evening news started to come in that Peter Weston had died. I had to go to bed before we got confirmation, but Kevin did a post for the Hugo Awards website here. Locus also has a brief obituary.
Peter will always be most famous in fandom as the man who created the modern Hugo Award trophy (the rocket bit, the base is different each year), but he was also a noted fanzine editor, con runner (including chairing a Worldcon) and editor. He was also one of the nicest people I have met among old-time UK fans. I didn’t know him that well, but what I did know made me wish I had known him better.
It is that time of year again, and to make my author friends less self-conscious about reminding you of their fine work over the past year I am going to remind you about what I have been up to.
Much to my astonishment, most of what I have eligible is fiction. I had three (yes, three!) short stories published last year. Two of them were in Holdfast Magazine and you can find them as follows:
There is also “Camelot Girls Gone Wild”, which is apparently now available in Fantastically Horny. Kevin tells me he got his copy from the crowdfunding campaign. I have yet to see any sign of it.
I got nine episodes of the Salon Futura podcast out last year, so I guess that is eligible as a Fancast. (That also reminds me that I have a couple in the pipeline that need editing.)
The BristolCon Fringe podcast is also eligible, though if you nominate it you should credit Joanne Hall as well as me because she did all of the work of finding guests and booking the venue. (There may be other people too. I don’t know, I just show up and talk.)
I think that covers it, unless you have a favorite review or something, or if you think it has been long enough since I won Fan Writer for me to have another go. Not a huge amount, but hey, better than the Puppies, right?
My dance card is looking pretty much full for February already. It is going to be a very busy month. Here’s some of the events you’ll be able to find me at.
At the beginning of the month I’ll be spending a few days in Barcelona hanging out with people doing cutting edge research into gender in the ancient near east. Here’s the conference program. It looks awesome.
I’ll be spending the weekend of Feb. 11th/12th in Exeter at their LGBT History Festival. I am one of the speakers at the launch event on the Saturday at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, and I’m also giving a talk at the Phoenix on the Sunday. The Saturday talk will be something about the importance of history in trans activism, and the Sunday one is on Trans Women in the Ancient World, which will focus mainly on Mesopotamia and Rome.
On Wednesday 15th I’ll be on the radio talking about some of the things happening in Bristol to mark LGBT History Month. Fingers crossed I’ll have a studio full of guests.
On Saturday 18th I will be in Bournemounth of their LGBT History Festival, and will once again be giving the Trans Women in the Ancient World talk. I’m delighted to see that Bournemouth’s soccer team (who are currently in the Premiership) is one of the sponsors of that event.
On Saturday 25th I will be at the Watershed in Bristol as part of the Art & Us event being staged by Bristol Pride. I’ll giving a talk titled Images of Transgender People in Art Down the Ages, which will cover 4500 years of trans history.
And because there’s just too much happening in February, and not very many days, the academic conference has slipped into March. On the first weekend I will be in Liverpool for the Sexing the Past conference where I will be giving a paper on Gender and Citizenship in Ancient Rome.
So if you want me to do something for you in February I’m likely to have to say no. Hopefully it will be obvious why.
Yes, I know it isn’t Wednesday. This week’s Women’s Outlook show should have gone out yesterday in the usual time slot, but once again technical gremlins intervened. So instead the show was run in the 10:00-12:00 slot this morning. You can listen to the first hour here, and the second hour here.
As with last week, the show is entirely music, but it is great music. Here’s the playlist:
The Janelle Monáe song is, of course, there to encourage you all to go and see Hidden Figures when it is out in your area.
Here’s a new crowdfunded anthology you may want to back. It is called Problem Daughters, it will be published by The Future Fire, and the editors will be Nicolette Barischoff, Rivqa Rafael and Djibril al-Ayad. The official pitch (taken from their announcement) is as follows:
Problem Daughters will amplify the voices of women who are sometimes excluded from mainstream feminism. It will be an anthology of beautiful, thoughtful, unconventional speculative fiction and poetry around the theme of intersectional feminism, with a specific focus on the lives and experiences of women of colour, QUILTBAG women, disabled women, sex workers, and any intersection of these.
I’ll have quite a bit more to say about this in the coming weeks, but in the meantime here’s an interview with Rivqa from Stephanie Saulter’s blog.
The crowdfunding page is here.
I’m in Oxford. I’ll be spending all tomorrow doing training, and much of Wednesday visiting bookshops and libraries. But because we have a 9:30am start tomorrow I am staying in a hotel on expenses, which is nice.
The hotel, by the way, is a Holiday Inn on the ring road by the airport turnoff. It’s very standard, but very comfortable and the hot tub, sauna and steam room are nice.
It is, however, a long way out of town, and there’s not a lot in the way of restaurants immediately obvious. Also Berkeley hadn’t had lunch and was ravenous. So we took ourselves into town. Our new colleague, Aaron, had found a restaurant he said did good Chinese, Malaysian and Singapore cuisine. It was in Walton Street in the Jherico district. We managed to park OK not too far away and wandered up towards the restaurant. We passed several other places on the way, all of which looked nice and were fairly empty. Then we got to the place Aaron had found, and it was heaving. Fortunately they had a downstairs dining room and were able to seat us.
It was fabulous. I had beef rendang with coconut rice; Berkeley had a Szechuan lamb dish with egg fried rice; Aaron had chicken satay; and we shared some crispy duck for starters. Oh, and Berkeley had soup because ravenous. All of it was very good.
Getting back to the hotel I checked the place out on the web, and the first thing I see on their website is enthusiastic recommendations from Giles Coren and Ken Hom. Well duh!
Nice job, Aaron. And for the rest of you, should you happen to be in Oxford, a very fine place to eat is Zheng.
As a special bonus, the restaurant is indeed named after one of China’s most famous people: Admiral Zheng-He. Who was, I note, a eunuch, and therefore in many people’s view a non-binary gendered person.
Well, the period between Christmas and New Year didn’t go quite as planned. On Thursday I went down with something that involved a screaming headache and extreme tiredness. I spent much of Thursday asleep and unable to do much at all. Friday was spent mostly reading. I seem to be fine now, but I lost about a day and a half, which is very irritating.
Thankfully the time spent reading was very productive. I am now deep in the rabbit hole of research for this year’s LGBT History academic paper, which is all about gender and sexuality in ancient Rome. My recent search engine activity has been very much Not Safe For Work. I hope the folks at GCHQ who have been on duty over the holidays have enjoyed monitoring it.
There’s not a lot I want to say right now, because I need to check stuff before coming to any conclusions, but I can say that Roman ideas about sex and gender were very different to our own. It’s not surprising that the Victorians were totally freaked out by what they found in Roman texts and archaeology. Nevertheless they, like us, had a problem with sexual harassment in the street (in their case boys as well as women were victims). I do love history: so much the same and so much very different.
As many of you will know, LiveJournal recently moved their servers to Moscow. As a result there has apparently been a fresh exodus from the platform. I maintain a LiveJournal account solely because people have told me that’s the way they prefer to read my blog posts — what I post here is (normally) cross-posted to LiveJournal. However, if you are all moving to Dreamwidth then presumably I should set up an account there instead.
I’m agnostic about the whole thing. I’m sure that Russian, US and British intelligence services have me noted down as trans. There’s nothing I can do about that. And as far as I know no one had yet tried to block my site because of that. So I’m happy to do what works best for you folks. Let me know.
Thanks to computers, it is no longer necessary for radio stations to have staff in over the holidays to do shows. Ujima is officially closed for the season, but it is not off-air. Many of us have pre-recorded shows to be broadcast over the holiday period, myself included.
Of course technology doesn’t always work as planned. Doubtless this is the early stages of the robot revolution. So my show didn’t pop up at noon as I was expecting. Thankfully there are a few dedicated staff able to pop in and sort things out. What appears to have happened is that my show and the following one, Steppin Raizer, got swapped around. So my show starts at 14:00 instead.
You can listen to the first hour here, and the second hour here. The content is all music. I was particularly interested in playing longer songs that I can’t use in full on a normal show. Here’s the playlist:
Next week’s show will also be all-music. I’ll be in Oxford.
Something else I did over Christmas, as a bit of a break from the Wagnerthon, was remind myself of the rules for Arabian Nights, just in case I should end up in a game at Chance & Counters. There are solo play rules, and it didn’t take long to get back into the swing of things (not to mention crippled, enslaved, and ensorcelled). However, a couple of questions occurred to me along the way and I was wondering if anyone out there could enlighten me.
First up, I remember from playing the original version that you were not allowed to win if you were gender-swapped. Indeed, I wrote a whole blog post about that a couple of years ago. Checking the rules of the new edition it appears that rule has been dropped. The card for Geas still says you can’t win while you have that status, but no other statuses seem to have that effect. Can anyone confirm this, or have I missed something?
Second, in order to win the solo game you have to become Fabulously Wealthy. That’s not as easy as it seems because so many of the events that increase your wealth level have upper limits as to how wealthy they can make you. The obvious way to do this is to acquire the Giant Diamonds. You can also do it using the Book of Hidden Treasures, the Yellow Kohl or, if you are lucky, the Magic Lamp. What I’m wondering is this: is the solo game specifically a matter of knowing how to get the particular treasures that you need, or are there other ways to win that don’t require you to seek out specific encounters (probably in Places of Power)?
By the way, coming back to the gender-swapping issue, the game still needs a bit of an overhaul to become properly LGBT+ friendly. You ought to be able to play as a gay, lesbian or bisexual character. I also note that the rules are silent on the subject of what happens if you get gender-swapped while married. Even if the marriage is still legal, you are not going to be having any more children. Something to think about when I have an idle moment (which doubtless means never).
There hasn’t been much bloggage, or even social media activity, from me over the holiday period. That’s partly because I have assumed that you lot have better things to do with your time than read about my holiday cooking (which went very well, thank you). However, I have been busy, and mostly not working.
Back in July Sky Arts made television history by being the first TV station to broadcast the whole of Wagner’s Ring Cycle live from the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. There was no way I was going to have the time to watch it live, but I did record the whole thing with the vague intention of watching it over the holidays instead of my usual Lord of the Rings marathon.
Of course one of the things that differentiates Wagner’s epic from Peter Jackson’s is that Jackson is a model of conciseness and brevity in comparison. Der Ring des Nibelungen comprises over 15 hours of opera in four main parts. With the addition of introductory material from host, Stephen Fry, and various Wagner experts the Sky production is over 18 hours long. No way am I that level of couch potato.
Thus far I have worked my way through Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. Those are the two shorter operas. Like Jackson, Wagner got more and more bloated as he went on. Hopefully I will get to the end, because as far as I can see Götterdämmerung is philosophically the most interesting of the four.
My main impression thus far is that the dialog is dreadful, but that’s understandable because it all had to be sung, and what I am seeing is translated from German. Nevertheless the experience is tending to reinforce my deep rooted prejudice that novels are far superior to all other art forms because of the space they allow to develop character.
Having said that, there’s no doubt that the Ring Cycle is a fascinating and incredibly complex work. It is not the sort of thing you can easily comprehend on a single sit through. One of the most obvious examples of this is that at the end of Act 1 of Die Walküre, when Siegmund and Sieglinde disappear off stage to consummate their love, Wagner introduces the leitmotif that he will later use for their son, Siegfried. Once you know this it becomes clear that Wagner is indicating that this is the moment that Siegfried is conceived, but he won’t appear as a character until the next opera in the cycle so you don’t know what that music means when you first hear it.
Incidentally, one thing I do wish Sky had done, but doubtless didn’t have the budget for, is give us an introduction to the various leitmotifs that Wagner uses so that we can listen out for them. But at least they did explain the concept, and explain it brilliantly by using the example of John Williams’ work on Star Wars. Darth Vader’s leitmotif isn’t just used when he comes on screen, it is also used to indicate that his men are up to something in an otherwise unrelated scene.
What Fry and his experts do well is address the primary controversies surrounding the Ring Cycle. First there is Wagner’s person journey from anarchist revolutionary to a vile, old anti-Semite. Then there is Hitler’s co-option of the Ring Cycle as a propaganda tool. Wagner himself seems to have been an awful person, but I also concur with Fry’s assessment that he would have hated Hitler because he hated anyone with that degree of political power. Many present day wannabe demagogues tend to cling to Wagner, presumably because they associate his work with Nazism (hello several senior Tories), but it was interesting to discover that most of the Nazi leaders were bored stupid by opera and resented being dragged along to watch it by their boss. Nigel Farage is, of course, far too boorish to be interested in opera, though by this point Fry was reduced to dropping hints rather than naming names.
The other thing I have found absolutely fascinating about the Ring is the Festspielhaus itself. It is apparently the largest free-standing wooden building in the world. Partly it is wooden for acoustic reasons, but Wagner apparently planned to burn it down after the first few performances so that what was experienced there could never be repeated (and probably, from his point of view, to prevent his perfect creation being debased after his death).
The acoustic design of the building is at least as great a work of genius as the music itself. The orchestra is hidden away in a pit underneath the stage so as to not distract from the visual spectacle. Sound from the orchestra is funneled up onto the stage, and thence reflects back onto the audience, mixing with the singers voices on the way. This is quite different from a traditional opera house where the sound from orchestra and voices both project outwards and mix in the auditorium. A consequence of this is that the singers need to be a fraction of a second behind the orchestra for the whole thing to work. Apparently the acoustic benefits are enormous, though no opera house built since has chosen to copy the design. That might be an issue of expense, of the skill required of the singers, or of the aversion of celebrity conductors to being hidden away where no one but the orchestra can see them.
Finally I am, of course, noting the similarities between Wagner’s story and Tolkien’s. There are many themes in common: the greedy dwarves, the ring, the dragon, the broken sword. One significant difference is that Wagner’s story is full of female characters. That is doubtless in part due to the requirement to balance voice registers, but it is nonetheless welcome. Wotan is the character who ties the story together, but Brünnhilde, even though she doesn’t appear until the second act of her titular opera, is the hero of the tale.
One area of the media in which women are doing quite well is history documentaries. I was very pleased, therefore, to discover a new podcast series hosted by Dr. Janina Ramirez. Titled The Art Detective, it will feature a different piece of art each week, and use that to illuminate issues from history. (Yes children, art has always been political, from ancient sculptures to Star Wars movies.)
The series caught my eye because episode #2, released this week, features one of my historical heroes, Empress Theodora of Byzantium. Guesting on the show, because she’s just finished writing a book on Byzantium, is another star of history documentaries, Bettany Hughes. If you know anything about Theodora you can guess how much fun listening to two women historians talking about her is.
Janina has promised may more guest appearances as the series develops. It seems likely that will involve the likes of Mary Beard, Amanda Vickery, Lucy Worsley, Alice Roberts, Amanda Foreman, Carenza Lewis and so on. And some men, and hopefully some non-binary people, as well.
Of course I have now added to my bucket list getting an appearance on the show. I know exactly which piece of art I want to talk about. It is Sumerian (obviously), and if you turn up to one of my LGBT History Month talks in February you’ll get to see me enthuse about it.
A week or so ago there was a lengthy Twitter conversation between myself, Kit Heyam, and Greg Jenner (who is the historical consultant for the BBC’s Horrible Histories show). It was occasioned by the publication of a new biography of James Barry, someone who is often held up as an example of a trans person from history. This post is not about Barry. I have bought the new biography, which appears to be making the case that Barry strongly identified as female despite living as a man, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. Rather the post is more generally about how we interpret evidence from history.
The first point I want to discuss I owe to Kit. It is that conversations such as the one around Barry do not happen in a vacuum. It is a long-held tenet of belief among certain self-styled Radical Feminists that trans people are a recent invention, and indeed a creation of the Patriarchy. Their view is that trans people cannot have existed in the past because the concept of being a trans did not exist then (and indeed do not exist now other than in our own perverted imaginations). As a consequence of this there is a determined effort to “reclaim†any possible evidence of trans men from history and to prove that these people saw themselves as women. The new Barry biography looks like it may be part of that effort. The musical which portrayed Billy Tipton as a flamboyant drag king rather than someone who lived as a man for most of his life certainly was.
The sort of argument being made comes over very clearly in the Guardian review of the Barry biography. Look at the word choices: “scandalous subterfugeâ€, “adopted a male personaâ€, “was, in fact, a womanâ€, “perfect femaleâ€, “masqueraded as a manâ€, “deception of breathtaking proportionsâ€.
BINGO! And I have only got as far as the second paragraph.
The message is very clear. As far as the reviewer is concerned, Barry was “really a womanâ€, and that presenting as a man was an act of deceit. By extension, the reviewer is also making the case that all trans people are engaged in acts of deceit because, like Barry, we can only “really†be the gender we were assigned at birth. It is not surprising, therefore, that trans people tend to treat such claims with some skepticism, given the level of political bias involved.
In practice, of course, we can never be sure how people from the past thought about themselves. Absent a time machine, we can’t go back and ask them. All we can do is look at their behavior and make judgements based on that. What we see varies enormously. There are people from the past who cross-dress occasionally for festivals and similar occasions, much like people do today for Halloween. There are people from the past who cross-dress for entertainment, like modern drag performers. There are people from the past who cross-dress for economic advantage, but give it up as soon as the opportunity arises. There are people from the past who cross-dress to signal their sexual tastes. And there are people from the past who cross-dress for most of their adult lives.
Cis historians tend to present all of this as masquerade, and assume that all of these people identified with the gender they were assigned at birth. Certainly they talk about them in those terms. A point I make in opposition to this is that cis historians have never suffered from gender dysphoria and have no idea what it is like. Most trans people have strong personal experience of having to live in a gender that does not suit you. We know how hard that is. We find the idea that someone should successfully live most of their adult life in a different gender without having a strong affinity for that gender, to be quite bizarre. It would be incredibly stressful.
A study I would love to see done, but can’t do myself because it would require access to archives in US universities, is a comparative study of people assigned female at birth who fought in the American Civil War. There were a lot of them. Estimates range from 400 to 750. That’s a good sample size, though not all of them will have left much evidence. Why they did this is subject to a great deal of debate. My view is that there is no easy answer, because they will all have had their own reasons:
Again you can’t prove that these people identified as men, but it is possible that they did, and hard to see how they would have coped with life otherwise.
Another point I want to make is that saying that someone from the past was “really a woman†is just as anachronistic as saying that the person was a “trans manâ€. The idea that the human race is divided into men and women, and that never the twain shall meet, is a relatively new one. These ideas developed in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as science began to give us tools to quantify this separation. Before we knew about chromosomes and sex hormones, the existence of other genders was a possibility and often taken for granted.
We should remember, for example, that many ancient societies made significant use of eunuchs in various roles. The Assyrians were the first to use eunuchs in court on a grand scale, but they existed in Sumer too. The Chinese also made extensive use of eunuchs. Cai Lun, the person credited with the invention of paper, was a eunuch. So too was China’s greatest naval hero, Zheng He.
Many eunuchs, of course, still identified as men, but others identified as a third gender, or even (so the Kama Sutra tells us) as women. Indeed there is a long written history of this behavior in India, and it continues to the present day.
It is also worth noting that, if someone was made a eunuch as a child, which was fairly common (and a necessity for making castrati singers) then it constitutes both surgery and hormone treatment (in that male puberty is prevented), which are the two pillars of modern gender medicine.
Interestingly many ancient sources (including the Bible) talk of people who are “natural eunuchs†or “born eunuchsâ€. What this means is not clear, beyond the fact that these are people who were believed to have been born with no sexual interest in women. They may have been intersex in some way, they may have been more like modern gay cis men, or they may have been more like modern heterosexual trans women. My guess is that they would have included all three, because ancient people didn’t have the tools or language to distinguish between these categories.
It is also true that many tribal cultures around the world show evidence of social structures designed to accommodate people who live outside of the gender binary. We have plenty of historical reports, and where those cultures haven’t been destroyed by colonialism those practices continue today. You can find examples in the Americas, in Polynesia and Australia, in parts of Africa, in fact pretty much everywhere that tribal cultures are still found. How these cultures make allowances for trans identities varies considerably: some may have a third gender; some may allow only male-to-female transition; or only female-to-male; and some have both. The fact that these traditions exist proves that a need existed, which must prove that people in those societies identified in some way as being outside of the gender binary.
One of the reasons why social structures accommodating trans people are so varied is that trans people themselves are very varied. The idea that there is only one sort of trans person — someone who wants and needs full medical transition from one binary gender to the other — is just as false a distinction as the binary itself, and one that has caused a great deal of harm to trans people down the years. This brings me to my final point, which is that anyone who says that “trans people†cannot have existed in the past because ideas of medical gender reassignment did not exist back then is using a very limited definition of what “trans†means that doesn’t begin to cover the diverse identities that we see in the trans community today.
The modern trans community includes people who identify as being members of a third gender for social purposes. It includes people whose gender is inextricably bound up with their spiritual beliefs. It includes people who want to transition socially but not medically. It includes people who are gender-fluid: comfortable presenting in more than one gender. It includes people who don’t understand the whole gender thing and wish it would go away. All of these people feel comfortable identifying as trans now that being trans does not require you to undertake full medical transition and adopt one of the binary genders thereafter.
So when I talk about looking for trans people in history, I’m not looking to prove that any of these people would opt for full medical transition where they born today. Some of them might, but others surely would not because if being trans is a natural part of the human condition then we should expect trans people from the past to be as diverse as trans people are today.
My starting point is to look for evidence of people living outside of the gender binary. Providing that they are doing so as part of their normal life, and not just cross-dressing for special occasions, all of those people are trans in some way or another. If I can’t pigeonhole them into a specific part of the modern trans community, well so what? Their identities have to be understood in the context of their local culture anyway. It may be that some of them did strongly identify as their birth gender, but in that case I would want to see proof of that being the case, not taking that as the natural assumption.
And you know, looking at it that way, the past is absolutely full of trans people.
In the wake of last week’s protest at City Hall regarding provision of priority housing for women who are victims of domestic violence, I devoted most of this week’s show to the issue. For the first hour I was joined in the studio by representatives of Sisters Uncut and Bristol Women’s Voice. We also used material from last week’s parliamentary debate on the Istanbul Convention and information provided by the Women’s Equality Party. It was a really good discussion and it provoked quite a bit of audience feedback.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
In the second hour I was joined in the studio by my colleagues, Frances and Judeline, both of whom gave personal stories of their experience of domestic violence.
In the final half hour we wished happy birthday to our producer, Paulette, and also wished her well in her forthcoming retirement.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
Quite what Paulette’s retirement means for the future of the show, I am not sure. I have told the station management that I’m willing to commit to one show a month, but I can’t do more than that because I need to earn a living and I have three businesses to run. However, thanks to the magic of the internet (technology gods willing) I should have shows on Dec. 28 and Jan. 4. These will just me playing some favorite pieces of music; in particular longer stuff that I can’t use on a normal, chat-based show.
It being that time of year, the playlist for yesterday was all Christmas music:
I have a radio show to do today (yes, I am working on a religious holiday), so I have scheduled this post in advance.
My annual northern-hemisphere-winter solstice card (posted here in order to save trees and postage costs) comes, as usual, from the fabulous Dru Marland. You can buy physical copies of the picture (and many other fine artworks) from her Etsy shop.
Capricorn is a sea goat and is a representation of the Sumerian god, Enki (Ea in Babylon and Assyria). He’s the guy who, in the myth of Inanna in the Underworld, created a couple of trans people to go and rescue the goddess. Good choice, Dru.
Capricorn is also, of course, the astrological sign with provenance over the midwinter period. And yes, that is Glastonbury Tor in the background.
I hope all of your solstice celebrations go well, and that 2017 manages to be less awful than 2016.
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.
Social media has been abuzz with the news that National Geographic has done a special issue on gender. I haven’t managed to get a copy yet, but yesterday I saw this tweet from Sophie Walker.
So long as female = pink, we're still a long way from that gender revolution. #fail https://t.co/cf6aSV9Uou
— Sophie Walker (@SophieRunning) December 18, 2016
In confess that my first thought was, “on no, now we are going to have people claiming that WEP hates trans people”. Thankfully that doesn’t seen to have happened. My second thought was, “yes, I agree”. But until I had investigated more I didn’t know just how much I agreed.
I know nothing about Avery Jackson, the young trans girl that NatGeo has put on their cover. Possibly she likes pink as much as that photo suggests. There’s nothing wrong with pink. I wear it a lot. But the fact that she’s on that cover with pink hair and all-pink clothes very much seems to say, “look how pink I am, I must be a girl!” I suspect the photo was chosen as the cover — by the magazine, not by Avery — with exactly that message in mind.
This reminds me very much of the focus on appearance that gender clinics had when I transitioned. Twenty years ago, if you turned up for an appointment wearing jeans you would probably get sent home. Dresses, or a smart skirt with twinset and pearls, were the order of the day. Your hair had to be long, your make-up had to be obvious, and the decision about whether you were behaving in an appropriately feminine manner was made by a middle-aged man. These days we have made a lot of progress in helping the doctors understand that presentation and gender are not the same thing. Lots of cis women never wear dresses or makeup. They are no less women because of that, and trans women are no less women if they do the same.
Sadly the media is still a long way behind the curve. Whenever you see an article or program about trans people there is always an emphasis on feminine performance. Newspapers gush about how parents knew their kids were trans because they loved pink and wanted to play with dolls. TV programs always have a shot of the trans woman putting on her makeup. This gives entirely the wrong impression of what being trans is all about.
NatGeo goes further. In this article about why they did a gender issue they have this story:
Nasreen Sheikh lives with her parents and two siblings in a Mumbai slum. She’d like to become a doctor, but already she believes that being female is holding her back. “If I were a boy,†she says, “I would have the chance to make money … and to wear good clothes.â€
Wait, what?
Liking pink does not make you a woman. Wanting to wear dresses and makeup doesn’t make you a woman, though it may make you non-binary in some way. The only thing that makes you a woman is the unshakeable belief that you are a woman. Equally wanting to be a doctor, and perhaps be safe from gender-based violence, despite being assigned female at birth, doesn’t make you a man; it makes you feminist.
Even NatGeo could see that there was something wrong with this, that it didn’t quite fit into the trans narrative. But that won’t stop the New Statesman running articles about how trans activists are encouraging parents to have their sons “mutilated” because they don’t like football, and their daughters “mutilated” because they want careers. We are not saying these things, but because the media keeps saying this is what being trans is all about its not surprising that people believe we are.
It is all very frustrating. And NatGeo, despite thinking that it is somehow riding the wave of a gender revolution, is actually providing ammunition to the very people who want that revolution stopped in its tracks.