Author: Cheryl

That Was LaDIYfest

~ Cheryl

I spent all of Saturday in Bristol at LaDIYfest, a one-day feminist conference. Most of the day was taken up with workshops at Cafe Connect. In the evening there was a gig at Roll for the Soul, the bicycle cafe.

First up in the workshops was Laura Welti from Bristol Disability Equality Forum. That organisation is the disability equivalent of LGBT Bristol, so Laura and I have very similar experiences of dealing with the City Council and we had some useful conversations. Hopefully I learned a few things, but it is really hard to fund accessible venues in central Bristol without paying a fortune for the rental.

The second workshop featured Camille Barton who was talking about white allyship. Like me, Camille has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it was a great relief to me to have her confirm my suspicion that racism in the UK is often just as bad as it is in America; it is just more polite. Camille is already working with Ujima as part of our Arts Collective, and I’m hoping she will be able to come on my show in the New Year to talk more about her work.

Then there was me. The fourth workshop of the day was cancelled so I had plenty of time to talk. Nevertheless I see to have hit the 45 minute mark almost spot on. There were some really great questions — more than 15 minutes worth — and it was really pleasing to have such an engaged audience. There were a few people there who identified as trans in various ways, which was also pleasing. None of them told me that I was wrong, which was a great relief.

Part of me desperately wanted to go home and sleep, but Ren Stedman was playing in the gig so I made my way into town, had dinner at Tuk Tuck, and settled in for the evening.

Roll for the Soul is a great location, but perhaps not ideal for music. It is a cafe, decorated with cycling gear and the occasional actual bike. It was not designed for acoustics. Some acts did better than others.

First up was Pik-C who has a very interesting voice. I really liked her stuff.

Violet Scott sounded good too, but she was clearly missing her band. If I have understood stuff on Facebook properly they disbanded recently.

Emily Magpie makes really interesting music. Unfortunately it is the sort of music that needs you to listen closely to it, which is hard to do in a busy cafe where lots of conversations are going on in the background.

The members of Drunken Butterfly were also involved with organising LaDIYfest so they had a lot of their friends around to support them. It was great to have an actual band performing, but they had quite a bit of trouble with the tech and I don’t think they ever got the sound mix right.

The lesson, I think, is that for a venue like that you really want the person-with-guitar type acts. Fortunately that’s just what the headliners were.

Sadly I had to leave part-way through Ren’s set because of trains. But we did get to catch up beforehand and he has a very interesting potential project in Brighton that I want to learn more about. You can listen to him here, and buy his music here. One of the songs he did on Saturday was also in his set for Bristol Pride. It is called “Love Wins”. Here he is on the main stage in Bristol.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay for Lilith Ai, but here’s an example of her music.

All in all it was a pretty good day. The organization was a little wonky at times, but that’s volunteer-run events for you. I’m certainly happy I did it.

Istanbul Convention Follow-Up

~ Cheryl

The full Hansard report on the Istanbul Convention debate is now up and I have been able to check a few things. I noted on Friday that Thangam Debbonaire (Lab) and Kerry McCarthy (Lab) attended the debate (and Thangam made a great speech). Bristol’s other two MPs, Charlotte Leslie (Con) and Karin Smith (Lab), did not attend. I hope that Bristol feminist organisations will be asking them a few questions.

However, the name I was looking for in the list of voters was Caroline Flint (Lab). She’s a woman. Her party leader, who is a man, turned up to vote, but she didn’t. Obviously she didn’t think that violence against women was an important matter. And yet she turned up on December 1st to complain that trans women were a danger to women. I think, Ms. Flint, that you need to take a serious look at your priorities.

Dirda on Živković

~ Cheryl

Much of the time book reviewing is a very subjective activity. You like books or you don’t. Some books work for some people, but not for others. Proving literary quality is damnably difficult, which is how come the literary establishment manages to get away with looking down its collective nose at anything outside of the narrow purview of dull realist stories about middle-aged white men.

However, the literary house of cards relies heavily on status, and when a Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic happens to review the same sort of stuff you do, and comes to the same conclusion you do, that gives you every right by their rules to say you were right to praise the work in question. Of course it helps that Michael Dirda has always been something of a fan of science fiction. But is also helps that Zoran Živković really is a very good writer. Here, Dirda says so, it must be true.

Oh, and I love the covers of the new editions of Zoran’s books too.

WE See Change

~ Cheryl

Today was an important day in the House of Commons, seeing that very rare event, a private member’s bill passing second reading.

The bill in question was “Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Bill” which refers to ratification of the Istanbul Convention on Preventing Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. The British Government agreed to ratify the treaty in 2012, but since that time has done nothing. The bill, proposed by Dr Eilidh Whiteford (SNP, Banff and Buchan), is intended to encourage them to get off their backsides and do what they promised.

Although the bill was proposed by the SNP, it was supported by Labour, the LibDems and the Greens. It has also been the subject of a major campaign by the Womens’ Equality Party. The government has also tacitly supported the bill, and did so actively today in the person of Brandon Lewis, the Minister for Policing and the Fire Service, though some Conservative MPs did turn up to speak against.

Chief among them was Philip Davies (Con, Shipley) who fancies himself as the parliamentary representative of the Men’s Rights Movement. He is the chap who, whenever someone in Parliament mentions something about women, pipes up, “But what about the men, we are oppressed too!” Mr. Davies did his level best to derail the proceedings by droning on for well over an hour about how horribly men are oppressed. Thankfully he didn’t have the stamina to talk the bill out.

Getting private members bills passed is hard. The government schedules them for Fridays, which are traditionally the day on which MPs go home to their constituencies to deal with local business. Anyone wishing to speak and vote has to cancel their local business to be present. I understand that at least 100 MPs have to be present for the bill to be allowed to progress. The WEP campaign has focused primarily on persuading MPs to turn up. There was no point in hassling my MP because he’d only vote against if he was there. I’m disappointed in Ben Howlett, the Bath MP, who appears to have spent today doing constituency work. However, at least two of the Bristol MPs — Kerry McCarthy and Thangam Debbonaire — were present. Thangam had the dubious pleasure of following Philip Davies in the debate, and she did a magnificent job.

The full Hansard transcript is available here. On a quick read through I was particularly impressed with the speech by Helen Whately (Con, Faversham and Mid-Kent) who talks about her time volunteering at a homeless shelter before she became an MP:

On one of my most memorable nights doing that, I met a lady sleeping rough on the steps of a church in Brixton. As we took her to a shelter, I asked her about her circumstances. She told me that she was married but had fled her home that night because she was frightened of staying there; because of what her partner might do to her she was frightened for her life. She felt safer sleeping rough on the steps of a closed church in a dark and frightening park in Brixton than spending a night at home under her own roof.

Thankfully most MPs were impressed with this sort of testimony. The bill eventually passed its second reading by 135-2. Those voting against were the aforementioned Philip Davies and David Nuttall (Con, Bury North). The bill now has to go to the committee and report stages, and then come back for a third reading, before heading to the House of Lords where Mr. Davies will doubtless find rather more people sympathetic to his views.

There is, of course, a very long way to go yet, but today is a cause for celebration, particularly for WEP and this is something WE have made a big push on. Well done, team!

Signing the Zero Tolerance Pledge

~ Cheryl


Tuesday evening saw the Annual General Meeting of LGBT Bristol, an organization of which I am a trustee. As is depressingly usual these days, traffic in the city was gridlocked in the early evening and Berkeley, who is the Chair, was unable to get there. So I found myself appointed Chair of Vice (or something like that) for the evening. Thankfully I have been very well trained by Kevin and chairing meetings holds no terrors for me.

One of the things I had to do was sign a Pledge on behalf of the organization. This is part of the Bristol Zero Tolerance campaign which seeks to eliminate gender-based violence in the city. You can find the text of the Pledge here.

The photo above was taken by Charlotte Gage of Bristol Women’s Voice who also runs the Zero Tolerance campaign. From left to right we have Ruth, David, me, Geetha and Sarah at the front; and Lexi and Lesley at the back.

It was a great honor to be asked to sign the pledge on behalf of the organization, and I’m delighted to have LGBT Bristol supporting such an important initiative.

By the way, Charlotte will be on my radio show next week. This news report should give you some context. I’m hoping that someone from Sisters Uncut will be joining us and the City Council has been invited to send someone along.

Transgender Mythbusting Comes to Bristol

~ Cheryl

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

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

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

Up On the Aqueduct

~ Cheryl

My annual Year in Review post as gone up on the Aqueduct Press blog as part of their Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening series. So if you want a condensed version of what I have been up to, entertainment-wise, you can find it here.

Better still, you should just go to the blog and read all of the entries. Other contributors include Nisi Shawl, Andrea Hairston and Lisa Tuttle. More will be added in the coming days.

Diversity Trust AGM

~ Cheryl


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

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

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

WEP Conference – Party Business

~ Cheryl

This is the last part of my report on the WEP Conference, and it covers the actual policy debates. I’m not going to go through all 20 items of business in detail. What I want to do is concentrate on areas where the debate got interesting. Please note that these are not official minutes. I believe that the actual text of the motions is being kept private to WEP members for now. Doubtless official positions will appear on the website in due course.

The first piece of business to generate actual debate was the Constitution, and in particular the issue of regionalism. The Scots made the very reasonable point that their country is governed by different laws to the rest of the UK and that policy therefore cannot be universally applied. The party executive responded that they were sympathetic to the issue but the Scottish proposals were in conflict with other parts of the Constitution and could not be accepted as written.

At this point I was expecting the Scots to get up and say that they had tried to reach a compromise but party leaders had been unhelpful. Had they done so I would have voted for them. Instead they got up and repeated their demand for special treatment, and I switched my vote. In debate you need to convince people of your cause, and if the opposition raises objections you need to counter them.

Anyway, the Scottish motion was defeated. However, thanks in part to my new pals in the Cardiff branch there was a Celtic Fringe meeting later in the day involving Scottish, Welsh and Irish delegates. Hopefully we can get this sorted next year.

The first actual policy motion was about Brexit. This turned out to be fairly controversial because the motion assumed that the UK would be leaving the EU. Many members felt that we should be fighting to stay in Europe. That was certainly the position of my friend Rebecca from the Bath branch who thereby became the first ever party member to make a speech from the floor on a policy motion.

Sophie’s position, which I agree with, is that WEP members will have a variety of opinions on Europe, which is fine. What we need to be united on is that the rights that UK citizens currently have as members of the EU need to be protected, whether we are in or out of the community. The motion, therefore, calls on the Government to maintain all of the human rights legislation that we currently have. For most practical purposes that means that WEP has set itself against Brexit, because one of the major reasons for people voting to leave was to junk those rights.

One of the motions I had attached my name to was the one on so-called “revenge porn”. British law is lagging behind some other countries and more can be done, in particular to tackle those websites that pick up on images from “revenge porn” postings and use them on for-profit sites. One member made the very fair point that the motion should be more specifically targeting profiteers rather than foolish, and often very poor, young men. From the courts’ point of view it probably does, because no one is going to waste time trying to extract a massive fine from someone who has no money — they’ll give a community service order instead. However, there is a real issue here in that, given a law to uphold, the police will generally go after the easiest targets, and they might not be the people who were the intended targets. Drafting public policy is hard.

In a similar vein, Conference also passed a motion calling on the police nationwide to follow Nottingham’s lead and class misogynistic attacks as hate crimes.

The next controversial motion was the one on menstruation awareness policy. To my surprise there was quite a bit of opposition to this. To my annoyance some of this was couched as being on behalf of trans people. Now it is true that trans women don’t menstruate, and many trans men do. However, older women don’t menstruate either. I’d looked through the motion earlier and couldn’t see anything in it that was specifically erasing trans people. It seemed to me that we were being used as an excuse to drop the motion. The speaker who said that she didn’t want to be known as a member of the “Period Party” was, I thought, rather more honest. Talking about menstruation is clearly still taboo for some women. The motion ended up being referred back for re-writing, and I expect to be involved in that process. Hopefully we can do better next year, because this is a really important topic.

Also referred back was a motion asking schools to do a “gender audit” to make sure that they weren’t encouraging gender stereotypes. Some teachers spoke against this, feeling that their professional was already too heavily regulated. Others made the valid point that the motion only covered a part of the education sector, and that colleges and universities should be included too. Again this is a really important policy area, so I hope we get a better motion next year.

Some of the motions highlighted areas of public policy that most people know nothing about. For example, I had no idea that self-employed people have nowhere near the same parental leave rights as employed people. Currently the number of people who are registered as self-employed is going up rapidly, and the vast majority of newly self-employed people are women. I was also unaware that fashion companies require models to starve themselves to well below medically safe levels. We all know about people like coal miners needing protection from unsafe working conditions, but it turns out that fashion models need such protections too.

The other motion that had my name on it was the one about making equality in health care a core goal of the party. When WEP was first set up it adopted six core objectives (see them here). Health care was not among them, but it clearly belongs there. Currently women’s health needs are widely viewed as less important than men. Apparently most medicines are only ever tested on males, because menstrual cycles play havoc with testing protocols. That’s as true of rats as it is of humans. I backed the motion in part because equality for all in health care should also mean equality in health care for trans people, and we surely need that.

There were several great motions on things like child maintenance, services for disabled children, sexual and reproductive health services, and workplace provision for carers. All of these are things that scarcely get a mention from the major political parties. There were also motions on various aspects of economic inequality, including pensions and the methods companies use for selection and promotion of staff. Sophie wrote about the motion on child maintenance here.

The big controversy came with the debate on abortion. It is inevitable that in a large gathering of women you will find some who are ardent pro-lifers. Most of the debate centered on the fact that the motion said nothing about time limits. Some people felt this meant it was trying to do away with them altogether. Of course if it didn’t explicitly say it was doing so, then it wasn’t. The makers of the motion made it clear that they had nothing to say on the subject of time limits. What the motion was all about was the fact that abortion is still technically illegal in the UK, because you have to get approval from two doctors, and is pretty much impossible in Northern Ireland. Once all of that was made clear the motion was passed by a fairly substantial majority.

Close to the end Sophie brought up a motion on women in the workforce. Splendidly, she arranged for the motion to be led by a group of girls from the Mulberry School in London. They were all Muslims, and they did a great job.

Very embarrassingly I found myself having to ask to speak against this one. The vast majority of the motion was great, but buried in it was a clause calling for 50:50 representation on company boards between men and women. I got up and explained to Conference that large numbers of people in the world (more than 10% of the human population) already live in countries that recognize three legal genders, and that there is a strong push for the UK to join that group. That means that as a party we cannot go around passing motions that assume that everyone in the world is either male or female. The wording changes are not difficult, but they do need to be done.

Apologies to non-binary people, but I didn’t think that one sentence was worth referring the motion back. Also I wanted those Muslim schoolgirls to have a successful visit to Conference. My objective for this year was education. The good turnout for the workshops, and the opportunity to make this intervention, achieved that. Next year I want to see an audit to make sure that we are not accidentally erasing a whole group of humans from our policies.

Finally there was a motion backing a move to proportional representation for the UK’s parliamentary elections. There’s a very clear link between the use of PR and gender balance in national legislatures. Depending on the system, PR is also very good for getting people from minority groups elected. Of course that does also mean that we’ll have a few more UKIP members in Parliament, but I think it has become quite clear over the past year that there’s very little difference between some Tory backbenchers and UKIP. I’d rather have them elected under their own colors.

WEP Conference – Day 3

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Sunday was all about party business. We got an incredible amount done, including adopting a new constitution and dealing with 20 motions. That’s impressive, but it didn’t all go smoothly. Here are some thoughts on the process (mainly for Kevin’s benefit, obviously).

Being a veteran of many World Science Fiction Society Business Meetings, I am depressingly familiar with parliamentary practice and know how to run such a meeting. Most people had no idea. Indeed, many delegates appeared to have not been paying attention prior to Conference and were surprised to find that there was no process for amending motions on the day. Anyone who has been at a WSFS meeting knows how much chaos that can cause, and we didn’t have a second day of business giving us the luxury of referring motions to a committee overnight to have the wording sorted out.

All of the motions were published to members in advance of Conference, and there was time to submit amendments and discuss them with the proposers. This might lead to amendments being accepted prior to Conference. Indeed I did that on one of the motions I co-proposed.

Having seen an early draft of the motion about so-called “revenge porn” I pointed out that there is a big difference between re-tweeting or sharing a post on social media, and deliberately putting those same details on a for-profit website. We changed the wording of the motion to take account of that. Similar discussions could, I think, have resolved many of the issues raised in debate at Conference.

The party had taken an economic decision not to print either the Standing Orders governing debate or the list of motions. There were 1500 delegates and printing copies would be a major tree-killing exercise. I had copies on my iPad, and the conference staff put documents upon screen during debate. It is possible that there may be technological solutions that would make life easier. For example you could put up posters with QR codes to download documents onto a phone. And just having a PowerPoint presentation rather than fiddling with documents on Windows all the time would help. It is always helpful for the Chair to make it clear exactly what is being voted on before calling for a vote.

The one obvious flaw in the Standing Orders is the procedural motion to Refer Back a piece of business. This basically means that Conference likes the idea of the motion but cannot pass it without some degree of revision. Currently no debate is allowed on a motion to Refer Back. This led on a couple of occasions to members having no idea why the motion was being proposed. Some people did it right by speaking against the motion and then moving Refer Back at the end of their speech. One somewhat clueless person moved Refer Back before any debate had taken place (making it functionally equivalent to a WSFS motion of Objection to Consideration). Inevitably that was defeated.

For next year I suggest that anyone making a motion to Refer Back should be allowed to speak briefly to explain why they are doing so (unless they already have the floor – they shouldn’t be able to use Refer Back to extend a speech against).

The Standing Orders has one other quirk that bemuses me but doesn’t seem to be doing any harm. There is a procedural motion for Next Business which effectively moves on without a vote. Functionally I see no difference between this and Refer Back. It was never used, and I don’t see that it ever would be. Either you refer back, or you force a vote. Debate times mostly are controlled by the meeting staff and discussion was cut short on several occasions because there wasn’t time for everyone to speak, so the system works without this motion.

Another suggestion for next year might be an “Introduction to Policy Debate” workshop similar to the ones we have in WSFS so that people new to the process can learn about it in advance.

In terms of meeting management I would recommend more use of “if there is no objection” by the chair to move on quickly with uncontentious items. You don’t have to put everything to a vote. I despair of the addiction that British people have to demanding that abstentions be counted. Functionally an abstention has no effect on the vote. Furthermore there is no practical difference between an active abstention, failing to vote at all, or missing the vote because you were out of the room when the vote took place. We could save a lot of time in meetings by not asking for abstentions, particularly when the vote is close and tellers are required.

I have one final suggestion for the conduct of future meetings. In WSFS all Business Meetings are minuted, and these days are also recorded on video. One of the reasons for this is the concept of Legislative Intent. It is not always clear, years later, exactly what the movers of particular motion meant by the words they used. Motions should, of course, be accompanied by an explanatory rationale, but that won’t encompass explanations made during debate. It would be good to know what was said, and videoing of the debate would allow it to be shared with members who were unable to attend Conference. Yes, I know it is expensive, but WSFS runs on a shorter shoestring than WEP.

Finally I should report on the results of the elections. As some of you will know, I was a candidate for the Steering Committee. I was asked to stand, and agreed to do so without any expectation of being elected. The competition was fierce, and I think all of the candidates were better qualified than me in every area except their diversity. I stood to prove that I could. No one objected to a trans woman standing for election, and indeed several complete strangers came up to me and said they had voted for me. I count that as a win.

In the next section of this report I’ll discuss the actual policy debates.

WEP Conference – Day 2

~ Cheryl

As I am finally putting the chaos of November behind me I can get back to posting my reports from the Women’s Equality Party Conference. This is from the Saturday.

Saturday began with a brief, introductory business session, after which my first order of business was some trans solidarity. There was a discussion session on housing policy, and one of the speakers was Jack Munroe who is famously non-binary. As far as I knew at the time, Jack was the only other trans person who was going to be at Conference and I wanted to show support.

The fine detail of housing policy is beyond my experience, but it was very clear from the session that the rental market in the UK is a mess. The Welsh and Scottish authorities have gone some way towards sorting things out, but England remains stubbornly dysfunctional. The fact that I have to rent because I can’t afford to buy because people buying to rent are driving up house prices is merely a minor part of the problem. I have rented homes in Australia and California as well as the UK, and I would much rather be in either of those two places than England.

Something that became very obvious during the housing panel is that the Victoria Warehouse was totally unsuitable for breakout sessions of this type. It is, as you might expect, a converted warehouse, and upstairs is supposed to have several separate conference rooms. They didn’t even bother with airwalls for this. They just have railings with blackout curtains to separate the “rooms”. You could hear everything being said in adjacent rooms and some of the panellists had trouble making themselves heard. When we got to questions, the lack of microphone technique on the part of people asking questions was a major issue.

Anyway, Jack did a great job despite the sound issues. We had a brief chat afterwards because I wanted to check a few non-binary issues with them before my workshops. Then it was time to attend Sophie Walker’s keynote speech.

By the time Sophie took the stage the programme was running slightly behind time. I don’t know exactly how that happened, but having arrived on time for Sophie’s speech I caught the end of a very powerful presentation by Gudrun Schyman from the Feministiskt Initiativ, the Swedish Feminist Party. I think that is the first time I have ever heard a political leader talk about the importance of love in politics.

Sophie is a very good speaker. Sandi Toksvig says that she learned on the job, which I guess gives hope to the rest of us. The substance of the speech was good too. While she steered away from potentially controversial jargon, Sophie did talk about how various oppressions “intersect”. I’m sure that she did that deliberately. Much of the power of her stance comes from her position as the mother of an autistic child. She might be a leader of a political party, but she still has to interact with social services on a regular basis. She was involved in disability activism before she became involved with WEP.

I had to skip the end of Sophie’s speech as I wanted to be on time for starting my first workshop even if no one was there. It is probably just as well I did, because no one seemed to be in charge of tech. I had brought a laptop just in case, and got it connected to the projector before anyone arrived. When a tech guy from the venue turned up later he said there were no laptops available. I’m glad I had a backup plan.

We started around 15 minutes late, and the first workshop was fairly sparsely attended. However, by the time I got around to the third session (each workshop ran multiple times to give people a chance to see more than one) we were more or less back on time and the room was packed. I mostly managed to make myself heard, despite having some loud presentations behind me and at the back of the room. As we had no roving mic, I had to stand next to whoever was asking a question then repeat it into the mic for the audience.

I got a lot of questions, for which I was very grateful because the whole point of the workshops was to dispel myths on trans issues. For example, I was twice asked why there are so many more people transitioning from male to female than from female to male. The truth is, of course, that the media is obsessed with trans women whereas trans men are able to mostly fly under the radar.

To my surprise and relief, the current campaign against trans kids being waged by the Daily Malice and New Statesman appears to have mostly escaped the notice of WEP members. There were no TERFs at conference, probably because you had to be a party member to attend and the TERFs hate intersectional feminism so they won’t join.

By far the most common question I was asked – I think six separate people over the course of the weekend – was whether I thought I would not have needed to transition if I’d had a less gendered upbringing. There seems to be a common view among cis feminists that if only trans women had been allowed to play with dolls and wear pretty clothes during childhood they would be happy to grow up to be effeminate men. I’m sorry folks, but this borders on gaslighting. Most trans people I know, and most parents of trans kids as well, have tried everything they could to avoid transitioning, and only come to transition as a last resort. The idea that all of the self-harm, the suicide attempts, the psychotherapy, the expensive and painful surgery, the loss of friends, family and career, could all have been avoided by better parenting seems frankly ridiculous to me.

I should note also that most of the (quack) psychiatric theories about the “causes” of being trans revolve around upbringing not being gendered enough. Trans “cures” pushed by (mainly male) psychiatrists always involved forcing boy children to “man up”. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that cis women think that my being trans is a result of too masculine an upbringing while cis men think that it is a result of too feminine an upbringing. I have only one thing to say to this:

Stop blaming mothers! Please.

That said, I am all in favour of creating a less gender-obsessed society, both for children and adults. If that leads to a reduction in the number of trans people I will be surprised but pleased. My gut feel is that it will result in the same number of people needing full medical transition, but a significant increase in the number of people identifying as non-binary.

Several people approached me during the weekend, both in person and on social media, to say how useful they had found the workshops. No one has complained to me directly. Hopefully party HQ will tell me if they received any complaints, but my initial impression of the weekend is Mission Accomplished.

One of the people who approached me later in the weekend said that they identified as non-binary. So that made at least three trans people in attendance. I’m pretty sure that there were more, but I don’t ask.

A quick shout out here is appropriate for Stella Duffy, whom I have met before and chatted with occasionally on Twitter. She spent the afternoon running an Open Space session. The purpose of this was to provide a venue in which people who felt that the party was still ignoring their concerns could come and have a voice. One of the most obvious complaints was the lack of mention of climate change in Sophie’s speech. Kudos to Stella for doing this because it is a damn hard thing to moderate but the feedback will be invaluable to the party.

Something else that happened when I was otherwise engaged was the cross-party panel. This saw women members of other major political parties in discussion with WEP leaders on a variety of issues. The Tories sent Nicky Morgan, who is the Minister for Women and Equalities. The Greens sent their deputy leader, Amelia Womack. The LibDems sent their candidate for the Richmond Park by-election, whom both WEP and the Greens are supporting. Labour, in the sort of own goal that is depressingly familiar these days, declined to participate.

There was a second set of workshop sessions following mine. Because I needed to decompress for a while, and also vote in the Steering Committee and Policy Committee elections, I missed the first two sessions. I had just settled into the final session of the PR workshop, being run by the party’s comms team, when a fire alarm went off.

It appeared to be a real alarm, so we all trouped off and followed the green signs down the nearest staircase. I never got to the bottom, because people at the front turned round and started coming back up. The only explanation for that was that the fire exit door on that staircase was locked. Thankfully we were able to find another staircase quickly, and it wasn’t too cold outside.

The probable cause of the alarm was smoke from the food stalls in the venue. Obviously all of the catering was shut down during the alarm. When we got back in it was around 17:00 and people were starting to think about dinner. We were initially told that food would be available again in 20 minutes, but after an hour we were told that there would be no further food service that evening save for the paid banquet. My friends from the Bath branch headed out in search of a restaurant. As a speaker I had a ticket for the VIP reception due to start at any moment. Thankfully I was able to find a sandwich at the bar, and the reception had some food too.

The evening entertainment was an all-woman comedy show hosted by Sandi Toksvig and featuring an excellent line-up of talent headlined by Sara Pascoe. The other acts were Vic McGlynn, Cally Beaton, Jenny Collier, Ada Campe and Yuriko Kotani. They were all very good, and I was particularly impressed by Yuriko.

Having been at the VIP party, I spent the evening up on the mezzanine level in a booth with, among others, Stella Duffy and Sophie Walker. That might seem unbearably swank of me, and I could have easily popped downstairs and sat with the Bath branch. However, I wanted to prove a point. People are apparently still questioning whether trans women are welcome in WEP. Well, on the Saturday of the party’s first conference, I spent the evening drinking prosecco in a VIP box with the party leader and one of its most senior members. How much more welcome can you get?

Also in that box was the head of the advertising company that gave their time and expertise to create the party logo. We had a chat, as part of which she explained to me the rationale behind the logo being available in a wide variety of colours. Most political parties have a specific colour by which they are recognised: blue for Tories, red for Labour and so on. WEP has taken a deliberate decision to use a variety of colours to indicate the non-partisan nature of what we do. I note that a by-product of this is that WEP is a rainbow party.

The comedy show ended around 23:00 after which there was a disco. I gave the DJ a few chances before giving up and going back to my hotel. Having decided that she wasn’t going to play my sort of music I collected my coat and was just heading out the door when she put on “Tainted Love”. Ah well, I needed the sleep. Sunday was going to be busy.

Yesterday on Ujima – Manuelita, Barnett, Pinborough & WEP

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s radio seemed to go off OK. Here’s the traditional round-up post.

We began with a live interview with the fabulous Tamsin Clarke of the Popelei Theatre Company. Much of the conversation was about Manuelita, the one-woman play based on the life of the South American revolutionary leader, Manuela Saenz. We also talked about theatre more generally, and about other projects that Tamsin is currently involved in. If you are in Bristol on Saturday evening and you don’t have a ticket for Against Me! then you can catch Tamsin and friends in Carved, a Christmas dinner of absurd anarchical performance and cabaret for the sinful and undeserving, at The Cube.

Next up was an interview with David M Barnett about his forthcoming novel, Calling Major Tom. David and I recorded this at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature back in October, but there was no point airing it until now as the book isn’t out until January (and then only as an ebook). Obviously I had to play Amanda Palmer’s version of “Space Oddity”. Not only is there the Bowie connection, but David’s editor, Sam Eades, used to be Neil Gaiman’s UK publicist.

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

The second hour began with the interview I did with Sarah Pinborough at BristolCon. I think this is the first interview I have done that involved two large glasses of Merlot. Sarah is great fun to interview. She has a great story to tell too. Thanks are due to Gareth Powell because I based a bunch of the questions on Sarah’s Guest of Honor interview, which Gareth conducted.

Finally on the show we had my report on the Women’s Equality Party conference. That includes a whole lot of comments from people who were at the conference, including Stella Duffy, Catherine Mayer and Sophie Walker. I was joined in the studio by my colleagues on the show, Frances and Judeline, and was pleased to see that they liked what WEP was doing.

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

The full playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Edwin Starr – War
  • Cat Stevens – Peace Train
  • Otis Redding – Try a Little Tenderness
  • Amanda Palmer & Jherek Bischoff – Space Oddity
  • Martha Reeves & the Vandellas – Nowhere to Run
  • Diana Ross & the Supremes – Reflections
  • The Temptations – Ball of Confusion
  • Sly and the Family Stone – I Want to Take Your Hand

Amanda aside, all of those tracks were taken from the soundtrack album of the V&A’s new 1960s exhibition which I reviewed here.

Bristol Celebrates Angela Carter

~ Cheryl

As some of you will know, Angela Carter attended Bristol University and stayed in the city for many years after graduating. A major new exhibition celebrating her life and work is opening at the weekend. Bristol 24/7 has a preview by way of an interview with the co-curators. It sounds very much from what they say that any influences she might have had from or into the world of speculative fiction will be carefully elided. After all, this is the British arts establishment we are talking about here, and one wouldn’t want to stoop to involvement in -gasp- genre, would one? However, Carter’s work stands for itself so I am sure that there will be lots for us folks to see in the exhibition.

In Search of Arthur

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment


This evening I attended a talk at the M-Shed Museum in Bristol on that great West Country mystery, King Arthur. It was given by Professor Ronald Hutton of Bristol University who is an expert on all sorts of things, including medieval paganism and witchcraft. He’s very much my sort of historian, in that he believes in presenting facts and finds it interesting what stories people see in them.

Many of you, I am sure will be familiar with the vast swathes of scholarship surrounding the existence or lack thereof of Arthur. You will have read Gildas, Bede and Nennius, not to mention John Morris and Geoffrey Ashe. I don’t want to hash over all of that. I’m just going to concentrate on what Hutton said that was new to me.

Firstly it is a commonly held belief that Arthur was just a Welsh legend until that memorable chancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, made up a whole load of nonsense for his History of the Kings of Britain. I’m sure Geoffrey would be delighted to accept the credit for inventing the whole Arthurian mythos, and a near-contemporary historian, William of Newburgh, accused him of as much. William was writing in around 1190, some 50 years after Geoffrey published his History.

However, contrary to William’s view, I give you the illustration above. As you can see, it clearly shows a knight named as Artus De Bretani. Other knights in the illustration are named as Galvagin and Che. They are attacking a castle in which can be found a man called Mardoc and a woman called Winlogee. The carving is on the north gate of the cathedral at Modena in Italy. It is believed to date from the early 12th Century, possibly as early as 1120, some 20 years before Geoffrey published his History.

Now obviously there is a certain amount of leeway in historical dates, but it seems pretty clear that the whole Arthur legend, including Gawain, Kay and Guinevere, was well known in Italy at roughly the same time that Geoffrey was writing his book. That suggests that he didn’t make it up but instead, as he claimed, got it from an older work that is now lost.

Fast forward now to 2016, There have been two major archaeological discoveries in Britain this year that have bearing on the Arthur legend. The first was at Tintagel, and was covered in some detail by Alice Roberts in her new series of Digging for Britain that premiered last night on the BBC. The dig at Tintagel has uncovered a major “high status” complex of buildings dating from the 5th or 6th Century. Not only were there impressive stone buildings, but there was clear evidence of extensive trading with the Mediterranean.

If the people of Cornwall were trading with Greece, for which we have good evidence, they were almost certainly trading with Byzantium. I asked Hutton about this and he reminded me that the 6th Century was a period of significant expansion of westward links thanks to a smart Emperor called Justinian, so this all makes a lot of sense. Hutton added that Procopius makes no mention of Britain save to note that it is so far away it may be the place where the souls of the dead end up. But then Procopius didn’t like Theodora and was horribly two-faced when it came to Justinian so I’m not inclined to place much trust in him.

Anyway, if the dates we have for Arthur are correct then he and Justinian were contemporaries. Which means that Guinevere, Morgan and Theodora were contemporaries. I so much want to throw them together in a book and see what happens.

Hutton also noted that the site at Tintagel was abandoned around 700, and yet Geoffrey, writing over 400 years later, knew enough about Cornish history to claim it as the place of Arthur’s birth.

Finally we move to Glastonbury. Pretty much everyone agrees that the claims by the medieval monks to have found Arthur’s tomb are fanciful. The cross on which Arthur and Guinevere’s names were inscribed had a style of writing that was unknown in the 6th Century. And the graveyard in which the monks claimed to have dug has since been excavated and found to be Saxon. Furthermore, there was no clear evidence that there was any monastery at Glastonbury in Arthurian times. The Abbey was believed to have been founded by the Saxons.

Until this week. On Monday archaeologists working on a site at Beckery near Glastonbury announced the discovery of a monastery dating from the 5th or 6th Century. It is now the oldest known monastery in Britain, displacing Iona which is late 6th Century.

There is still no clear evidence for the existence of Arthur as an historical character. But his legend is clearly older, and much more widely spread around Europe, than is generally believed. And the post-Roman civilization in 5th and 6th Century Britain is clearly much richer and more powerful than anyone thought.

Parliament Does Trans Rights

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I spent part of last Thursday in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons watching the first ever parliamentary debate on trans rights. For many of you this is doubtless not very exciting, but considering that trans people had no rights at all in the UK when I first transitioned it was a major step forward for me. Here’s a brief report on the day.

I should start by noting how painless it was to get in. The Parliament website warns you that it may take 1 to 2 hours to get a seat. That’s presumably on a busy day. On a Thursday in December with kids in school, tourists thin on the ground, and no high profile business the House was very quiet. The staff were very polite and helpful, and about the only complaint I could have is that the signage was somewhat confusing. At one point a sign told me that I would have to surrender my phone at the cloakroom, but in fact that wasn’t required. All that they ask is that you don’t take photographs. That’s a weird request given that the whole proceedings are televised, but there it is. Tweeting, however, is perfectly OK. Reception was a bit patchy, but I got a lot of tweeting done.

Those of you who have seen the TV coverage may be dismayed at how empty the House was for the debate. However, that was understandable. There was a by election going on that day. The LibDems had a good chance of winning (and did) so all of their people were out canvassing. Large numbers of Tories and Labour MPs were too. Ben Howlett, the Bath MP whom I had talked to at the party in the Speaker’s House the night before, said he had to ask for special permission from his party to attend the debate.

The one group of MPs with no interest in the by election were the Scottish Nationalists, and they were out in force. In fact they outnumbered the rest of the MPs. Alex Salmond joked at one point that they should be able to make use of their majority, but of course there was little substantive business to discuss.

The debate on trans rights was billed as a parliamentary first because previous discussion had been limited to specific issues. When the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004 MPs were only looking at the narrow issue of legal gender. Although trans people are covered by the Equality Act, there are 8 other protected characteristics that will have had more debate time when the Act was being considered.

We were getting a debate because the Women & Equalities Committee, in the form of its Chair, Maria Miller, has got fed up of government inaction on their Trans Equality Report (published in January). The purpose of the debate was to embarrass the government (ever so slightly, because Miller is a Tory) and encourage them to get on with things.

A few specific things came out of the debate, the most high profile of which is that Ms. Miller introduced a private member’s bill to amend the Equality Act so that it covers “Gender Identity” rather than “Gender Reassignment”. Because the current protected characteristic is tied to people who will have, are having or have had medical treatment, large portions of the trans community are technically uncovered by the Act. Miller’s bill would fix that loophole. The government argues that people are covered if there is a perception that they have the protected characteristic, so there is no need for a change, but that places a much greater burden of proof on those people not having any medical treatment. Also one has to wonder why the government is unwilling to make such a simple, obvious and seemingly uncontroversial change. It remains to be seen how far Ms. Miller’s bill will get.

The SNP announced that 2017 would be the Year of Trans Equality in Scotland. It is as yet unclear what this means. However, SNP speakers were far more radical in their support for trans rights than anyone else. In particular they argued for self-determination of gender, and for gender-neutral passports. Both of these are things the government has firmly rejected. As far as I know, Scotland doesn’t have the right to issue its own passports (yet). However, they do have a lot of their own laws, and a review of those to make space for non-binary people would be a very welcome thing.

For the government, Caroline Dinenage, who is the Minister with specific responsibility for LGBT+ issues, promised to publish an update on the government’s trans equality action plan in 2017. Whether this will actually happen, and if so whether there will be anything concrete in it, remains to be seen. She also noted that the government had committed to an overhaul of the Gender Recognition Act at some point. Hopefully the fact that so many MPs laid into the medical and judicial nature of a process that should be purely bureaucratic will have had some impact on government thinking.

As far as I was concerned, the best thing about the whole day was that MPs from all three of the largest parties spoke warmly and fulsomely in support of trans rights. That’s a massive change from even five years ago. I’m not very confident of actual progress on legislation, but we are now at the point where government has to make excuses for their lack of action while professing to want to make progress. That’s a huge difference, politically speaking, from dismissing the entire idea of trans rights as abhorrent.

Throughout the debate, only one MP spoke against trans rights. That was Labour’s Caroline Flint, who early in the debate tried to derail the whole thing by introducing bathroom panic. The point she tried to make was that women would be at risk from attack by men in gender-neutral toilets, so trans people could only gain rights at the expense of women. This is ridiculous on multiple grounds:

  • No one is asking for all toilets to be made gender neutral;
  • Many toilets are already gender neutral (Maria Miller gave aircraft as an example) and there is no major problem as a result;
  • The sorts of things Flint cited as examples of potential problems are already illegal under existing laws (thank you the SNP member who made this point);
  • Contrary to what Flint might believe, trans women are not indistinguishable from “men in dresses” and many of us already use women’s toilets regularly without anyone noticing or being harmed;
  • Indeed, those of us with Gender Recognition Certificates already have an absolute legal right to use women’s toilets, and have had for 12 years, so it is a bit late to panic now;
  • In any case, in this country, if men want to sneak into women’s toilets to commit assaults, all they have to do is dress as a cleaner;
  • In any case, as Maria Miller noted, equality is not a zero sum game; giving some people rights does not mean taking them away from other people.

The last point is crucial. No one in the chamber picked up on this, but by stating that trans people could only have rights at the expense of women Flint was explicitly saying that trans people (of any type) cannot be women.

Of course it was also deeply embarrassing for Labour to have one of their MPs using the same sorts of panic tactics that are favored by extreme right Republicans in the USA. Stephen Doughty, one of the South Wales Labour MPs who spoke in support of trans rights spent about an hour in quiet but animated discussion with Flint after she had been slapped down. Whatever point he was trying to make presumably didn’t get through because as I left Flint was furiously haranguing Hannah Bardell, one of the SNP members who had spoken in the debate. Later she posted a statement saying that she was in favor of trans rights but quoting Sarah Ditum in her support, which is rather like saying you are in favor of immigrants and then favorably quoting Nigel Farage.

If any women readers happen to live in Doncaster and are constituents of Ms. Flint I suggest you drop her a line and ask her to stop being so silly.

In Labour’s defense I should note that several of their MPs spoke in support of trans people and their chief spokesperson on Women and Equalities, Sarah Champion, made one of the best speeches of the debate.

So, that was an historic day. As I noted earlier, nothing concrete may come of it. But politics is very much a game of setting agendas, and that day very much put trans people’s rights on the parliamentary map.

New Diversity Trust Newsletter

~ Cheryl

The latest newsletter from The Diversity Trust has been published. As usual there is a lot of good content.

I’m delighted to see us getting into the field of easy reading training. That’s essential to so many areas of social engagement.

Our new recruit, Aaron Barnes, talks about the difficulties of getting proper medical testing when you are very obviously a man but happen to have a vagina.

Berkeley talks about issues affecting older members of the LGBT community — something that has grown in part out of the event we did in October as part of the Bristol Festival of Literature.

There’s a section on the wonderful people at SARI whom we work with on hate crime issues. Some of the stories that they tell about things that happen to trans people in Bristol are just terrifying. Much too terrifying to be put in the newsletter.

Also there’s news of a project being run by Bristol University looking at justice and gender-based violence. There’s more information about that here.

You can read the whole newsletter here.

Here Comes the Fannish Inquisition

~ Cheryl

SMOFcon is taking place this weekend in Chicago. Kevin is there, and one of the things he has been doing is videoing the Fannish Inquisition sessions.

For those not in the know, the Fannish Inquisition is that part of SMOFcon where current and future bids for Worldcon, NASFiC and SMOFcon make presentations and are interrogated by the audience of seasoned conrunners. If you are interested in attending, or voting for, future conventions, this is a very good way to get information.

Altogether there are 17 videos in the playlist. They include presentations from the Helsinki (2017) and San José (2018) Worldcons and the San Juan (2017) NASFiC. Some of the presentations are for hoax bids, because fandom is incapable of being serious all of the time. Norm Cates makes the presentation for the New Zealand in 2020 Worldcon bid by video link. Other future Worldcon bids include Dublin (2019), France (2013) and the UK (2024).

You can find all of those videos here.

Solstice Shopping

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

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

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