Local fantasy writer, Sarah Ash, is starting a new blog series highlighting women fantasy and science fiction writers. It is titled, for obvious reasons, “Nobody Knew She Was There…”. The series will start on April 28th with Jessica Rydill and will also include Jan Edwards, Freda Warrington, Stephanie Burgis and Liz Williams. As it is going to be weekly, there’s plenty of time for many more. For more information about the series, see here.
Author: Cheryl
Visibility is Not Enough
Today is the Trans Day of Visibility, an international celebration started in 2009 by US activist, Rachel Crandall. It is also, obviously, a Talk About Being Trans day.
Now visibility is a good thing. For starters there are still many trans people out there living in fear. Being trans is not a comfortable life. It is no longer a death sentence, which frankly my family believed it was when I came out to them 20+ years ago, but it is by no means easy. So knowing that many people can and do lead successful and happy lives while openly trans can be very important to people still struggling with their identity.
Also today is an opportunity to showcase large numbers of trans people. Normally the only trans people who are widely visible are the ones approved of by the mainstream media. That means people who are young, white, able-bodied, good-looking, binary-identified and heteronormative. Today is a day for all sorts of trans people to be visible: those who are old, who are people of color, who are above average size, who are disabled, who have no hope of “passing” or have chosen not to, who are non-binary and genderqueer. They are part of our community too, and they deserve rights just as much as those who are lucky and hard-working enough to conform to the ideals that the mainstream media endorses.
But visibility it not enough. To demonstrate why, I want to talk a bit about a concept I use sometimes in LGBT awareness training. It is a thing called the Riddle Scale after it’s inventor, Dorothy Riddle. Back in the 1970s, Dr. Riddle was working for the American Psychological Association looking at attitudes towards gay and lesbian people. She needed a means of measuring how homophobic people were, and she came up with a scale of attitudes, each typified by a word. The system works just as well for attitudes to trans people (and indeed any other minority). The definitions of those words used in online sources tend to vary, but those in the Wikipedia entry are fair good. Here they are, in descending order of homophobia:
- Repulsion: Homosexuality is seen as a crime against nature. Gays/lesbians are considered sick, crazy, immoral, sinful, wicked, etc. Anything is justified to change them: incarceration, hospitalization, behavior therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, etc.
- Pity: Represents heterosexual chauvinism. Heterosexuality is considered more mature and certainly to be preferred. It is believed that any possibility of becoming straight should be reinforced, and those who seem to be born that way should be pitied as less fortunate (“the poor dears”).
- Tolerance: Homosexuality is viewed as a phase of adolescent development that many people go through and most people grow out of. Thus, lesbians/gays are less mature than straights and should be treated with the protectiveness and indulgence one uses with children who are still maturing. It is believed that lesbians/gays should not be given positions of authority because they are still working through their adolescent behavior.
- Acceptance: Still implies that there is something to accept; the existing climate of discrimination is ignored. Characterized by such statements as “You’re not lesbian to me, you’re a person!” or “What you do in bed is your own business.” or “That’s fine with me as long as you don’t flaunt it!”
- Support: People at this level may be uncomfortable themselves, but they are aware of the homophobic climate and the irrational unfairness, and work to safeguard the rights of lesbians and gays.
- Admiration: It is acknowledged that being lesbian/gay in our society takes strength. People at this level are willing to truly examine their homophobic attitudes, values, and behaviors.
- Appreciation: The diversity of people is considered valuable and lesbians/gays are seen as a valid part of that diversity. People on this level are willing to combat homophobia in themselves and others.
- Nurturance: Assumes that gay/lesbian people are indispensable in our society. People on this level view lesbians/gays with genuine affection and delight, and are willing to be their allies and advocates
The first thing to note about the Scale is that “tolerance” and “acceptance” — two words that cis straight people most often use to signal their support of LGBT people — are actually in the lower half of the Scale. As Stuart Milk is fond of saying, living in Florida means that he has to tolerate mosquitoes; but that doesn’t mean that he likes them. He doesn’t want straight people tolerating him in the same way that he tolerates mosquitoes.
The other thing I want you to consider is where visibility fits in the Scale.
Well we are not in a classroom here, so I’ll tell you. It is right at the start. Because you can’t even be repulsed by someone if you can’t see them. Mere visibility is so transphobic it doesn’t even make it onto the scale.
So why do we have a Trans Day of Visibility? Because for many years it was the best we could hope for.
Think about that.
Kevin and the Hugos
Yesterday in my post on the Hugos Jim Hines asked whether it wasn’t the case that Kevin has said he would decline being a finalist if he were voted in the top five. He and I have been talking about it, and this is how I understand the situation.
First up there have apparently been suggestions that the WSFS Business meeting be nominated for Dramatic Presentation: Long Form. I think that’s a bit silly myself, but if it did make the top five then Kevin would have to talk to the other people responsible for the production. I’m not sure if declining is something he could do by himself.
With regard to the possibility of being a Fan Writer finalist, the charge that is likely to be leveled is that his position as Business Meeting Chair, and Chair of the Mark Protection Committee, give him an unfair advantage over other potential nominees.
Certainly, when I got slung off the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, the impression I was given was that it was felt I had abused my position to unfairly win Hugos, despite the fact that most of my work was behind the scenes rather than public-facing like Kevin’s.
My view on this is that it is one thing to have a high position and get nominated for something else (in my case being on the staff of Clarkesworld). It is quite another to have a high position and get nominated for doing that job. In my case, if my WSFS job was getting me votes for my Clarkesworld work, that could be construed as unfair. (I think it is silly to suggest that it was, and the Business Meeting agreed, but that’s not relevant here.) In Kevin’s case the job and the work are the same thing. So yes, having the job makes him noticed, but he’s being nominated for doing the job. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
Of course it is not my decision. I’m not party to a lot of the behind the scenes wrangling that goes on, and if Kevin thinks that the work he does for WSFS might be imperiled by his accepting a Hugo finalist place then I will wholeheartedly support him in turning it down.
But I still have him on my ballot. Yes, it might be a wasted vote, but I think he did a great job last year (yes, I am very biased) and I think that fandom should tell him so.
Women, History, Comics
Last night Neil Gaiman tweeted about a Kickstarter project called She Changed Comics. Run by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, it is essentially a history of women in comics. This morning, of course, the thing has blown through its funding goal in a single day and is almost 50% over budget. It has all gone so quickly that they haven’t announced stretch goals yet. Doubtless there will be some in due course.
Anyway, I am very much looking forward to the book. I suspect some of you will too. If you want to drop them some cash, the campaign page is here.
Time to Fight Like a Girl
My good friends Jo Hall and Roz Clarke have a new book due out soon. It is called Fight Like a Girl, and it features women SF&F authors writing about woman warriors. Here’s the blub:
What do you get when some of the best women writers of genre fiction come together to tell tales of female strength? A powerful collection of science fiction and fantasy ranging from space operas and near-future factional conflict to medieval warfare and urban fantasy. These are not pinup girls fighting in heels; these warriors mean business. Whether keen combatants or reluctant fighters, each and every one of these characters was born and bred to Fight Like A Girl.
Featuring stories by Roz Clarke, Kelda Crich, K T Davies, Dolly Garland, K R Green, Joanne Hall, Julia Knight, Kim Lakin-Smith, Juliet McKenna, Lou Morgan, Gaie Sebold, Sophie E Tallis, Fran Terminiello Danie Ware, Nadine West
The launch event is in Bristol on Saturday. It promises to be even more spectacular that the event we put on for the Spark & Carousel launch at BristolCon. It will, after all, have a live swordplay demonstration. It will also have a discussion panel chaired by moi.
If you are in the area and would like to attend, tickets are available here (and include food).
And if you can’t, the book will be available from the usual places very soon.
All That Other Stuff
Because I need to get it out of my system, I’m going to do a post about all of the other things that were wrong with the talk I walked out of at the trans history conference. Think of this as a follow-up to this post.
So what else was wrong? History, for a start. Modern gender medicine did not begin with Lili Elbe, or even Dorchen Richter who preceded her. Trans men have been having surgery a lot longer. They didn’t get phalloplasty until the late 1940s when Sir Harold Gillies and Ralph Millard invented the techniques they used on Michael Dillon. But trans men could and did have hysterectomies and mastectomies. CN Lester tells me that such operations were performed on a man in Germany in 1912, and there’s a suggestion of a similar operation in the 1890s. I wouldn’t necessarily expect people to know that, but anyone with an interest in trans history should know about Alan Hart.
Hart lived in Portland Oregon and underwent surgery in 1917 and 1918. He’s pretty famous in trans history circles, through I see that his Wikipedia entry now contains reference to earlier operations in Germany. I can, however, think of a reason why the presenter of this talk might want to ignore Hart. You see, Hart was a doctor himself. He wasn’t persuaded into surgery by sexologists, he prevailed upon his medical friends to do the job for him. There’s no way that Hart can be painted as an innocent victim of the medical establishment, because he prescribed his own treatment. If the point you are trying to make is that medical transition is something forced on trans people by doctors then you’ll want to bury any knowledge of Hart.
The talk very much painted Lili as a victim of doctors. It did get right that she died as a result of an operation intended to allow her to have children but she was not, as far as I know, badgered into it. She’d got herself a boyfriend and wanted to marry him and have kids. She was 49 at the time, which seems rather ambitious, but the operation wasn’t doomed because allowing trans women to get pregnant is a daft thing to do, it was doomed because no one at the time knew much about organ transplants and the problems of tissue rejection. Had the surgeons known, there’s no way they would have tried it.
In any case, the idea of trans women wanting children is not ridiculous and unnecessary. It is certainly true that you don’t need to get pregnant to make you a “real” woman, but that doesn’t mean some of us might not want to do it. If womb transplants had been on offer when I was in my teens I’d have been very keen on the possibility.
Then there is science. Most people agree that the pink brain / blue brain thing is nonsensical. Certainly it is true that, as was claimed, if you put a man’s brain and a woman’s brain side by side on a table, a trained neurologist won’t be able to tell the difference by looking at them. But then if you put two lumps of coal, one made of Carbon-12 and one of Carbon-14, on a table together a chemist won’t be able to tell the difference by looking at them either.
The vast majority of gendered brain nonsense arises from people comparing the averages of two heavily overlapping distributions, which is bad science. That doesn’t mean that subtle differences cannot exist, nor that those differences might, in certain specialist functions, make a world of difference.
It is also true that there is no proof that differences in the way that embryos develop result in a trans identity. There is, however, good evidence that the embryo goes through a variety of different growth spurts, and the time during which the brain develops is quite separate from the time during which the gendered differentiation of the body happens, so there is a possibility.
There’s also a possibility of a genetic factor, in that a large number of trans women (including myself) have a preponderance of maternal aunts (that is, a maternal grandmother who had difficulty conceiving male babies). Such apparent coincidences are often clues to a genetic explanation.
In any case, if you poo-poo the whole idea of differences in embryo development then you are effectively erasing intersex people, because they very clearly develop differently from other humans when in the womb.
I’ll certainly agree that there is no evidence of a scientific cause of trans identities. I’d also speculate the any cause that we find will be complex, and quite possibly very different depending on whether the person in question is trans-masculine, trans-feminine or non-binary. Until such time as we know more, the right thing to do is to accept people as they are, not to insist that there absolutely is or is not a scientific explanation.
On to religion now. There are people of faith who believe that God (or Satan), deliberately or accidentally had some hand in making them trans. If that works for them, all well and good. Right now it is no better than any other explanation we have. I’m not going to descend to Dawkins-esque mockery of straw man theological positions to try to discredit them. Theologians have, after all, spent an awful lot of time pondering the meaning of evil and why it exists in the world. It is rather ironic that for an illustration the presenter chose William Blake’s “The Ancient of Days”, which is not actually of God, but of Urizen, a figure who was part of Blake’s Gnostic-tinged theological explanation for the fact that God doesn’t make everything right for us.
And finally stargazy pie is not made from fish guts. I’ll admit that the heads and tails are put on the crust in part to freak out the emmets, but they are for decoration. Even if you cook whole fish into the pie, you fillet them first. It is, of course, rather delicious (and probably very good for you, being traditionally made from those oily fish that nutritionists keep badgering us to eat).
I’m perfectly happy for people to come up with whatever explanation for being trans works for them. It is a very difficult life in many ways. What I won’t tolerate is people who feel the need to delegitimize and mock everyone else’s coping strategy in order to prove that theirs is valid. And at an academic conference I won’t tolerate someone using bad history, bad science and bad theology to make such a point.
Last Minute Hugo Recommendations
In filling in my Hugo ballot last night I was reminded of a few things that may be of interest to those of you looking for good work to fill out some of the categories.
Most people will, I suspect, have Novel filled, and in any case it is a bit late to start reading anything now. However, I want to put in a good word for Signal to Noise by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, which I thought was an astonishingly good debut.
Short Story is also fairly easy to fill, and the story I want you to consider isn’t, as far as I know, available online, which doesn’t help. However, I absolutely love “The Haunting of Apollo A7LB” by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is original to his Collected Fiction (Tachyon).
In Related Work I obviously would love to see Letters to Tiptree get a nod. I have a letter in it, after all. I don’t get a share of the shiny if it wins, but I think it is a great project and would be very happy to see it get yet more awards.
Also in Related Work I’d like you to consider Idyl — I’m Age, a collection of comic strips written and drawn by Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Jeff won’t get to a Hugo because she’s dead, but she surely deserves one. She was nominated once in Fan Artist and three times in Professional Artist, but has only won a World Fantasy Award and the Spectrum Grand Master.
The plot of Agents of SHIELD appears to have gone off the rails somewhat of late, but I still think that “4,722 Hours”, in which Jemma Simmons is stranded on an alien planet, is one of the best single episodes of a TV series I have seen in a long time.
I’m kind of assuming that The Expanse Season 1 will be a long-form nominee next year, but just in case we have four episodes to pick from. My favorite of those is “QCB”, the one featuring the assault on the Martian warship, the Donnager.
This is your annual reminder that Clarkesworld is no longer a semiprozine, but that Neil Clarke is eligible for Editor: Short Form.
Two publications that I would like to see considered in Semiprozine are Holdfast Magazine, and Tähtivaeltaja, the amazing Finnish magazine from Toni Jerrman.
I have realized that I hardly ever read fanzines these days. There is too much else to read.
I do listen to podcasts, however. There are lots of good talking head shows, but if you’d like to put something different on the ballot why not give a listen to Ray Gunn and Starbust, a remarkably good audio comedy conceived and written by my friend Holly Rose.
And finally, something I would love to be able to put on my ballot but can’t because I don’t see how I will get to see it in time. Reading Twitter this morning I chanced upon a post from the magnificent Indian feminist magazine, The Ladies Finger. It is all about Bollywood movies that aim for a Game of Thrones vibe. The one that caught my eye was Rudhramadevi, which is about an actual 13th Century Indian queen, and which gets the thumbs up for feminist content from the article’s author, Deepika Sarma.
The historical Rudhramadevi was raised as a boy by her father, but revealed herself as a woman on claiming the throne at age 14. She ruled for 30 years, dying in a battle against a rebel chief.
Anushka Shetty, who starred in the movie, seems to specialize in warrior women. I’m now wondering if she’s candidate for the Xena reboot.
Anyway, here’s a statue of the the original Rudhramadevi. The statue is located in Chandupatla, the village which was the site of the battle where she died.
Photo credit: By Satishk01 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.
And here’s the movie trailer. (The review is right, the CGI is shoddy, but it definitely has the fantasy epic look.)
Update on Maresi
Today I have an exciting lesson for you on Hugo eligibility rules. It is going to sound complicated, but hopefully it also shows why the Hugos sometimes do weird things.
All of this started with people pointing out to me that Amazon now lists the publication date of the ebook edition of Maresi as January 2016. It used to say November 27th, 2015. The publishers now claim this was a mistake by Amazon and the book wasn’t actually available. I don’t know when the book went on sale there, but I bought a copy on December 23rd, 2015 and I have the sales receipt to prove it.
At the time there was a lot of award stuff going on and I was concerned about the book’s eligibility. I checked US sites (using TunnelBear to make sure I saw what US customers would see), and found that it was not available on Amazon US or Nook. It was apparently available on Kobo, though I didn’t try to buy it.
What I did today was check the copyright page in the book. (I hadn’t looked at it before, it is hidden away at the back for reasons that those of you who sell on Amazon will understand.) There it says that both the copyright date and the publication date are January 2016.
So what does this means for Hugo eligibility? Well, it means that it is a 2016 book, because that’s what the copyright page says.
“But Cheryl”, I hear you say, “you bought the book in 2015. It was obviously published then.” And it obviously was, but that’s not how the rules work. The rules say we go by what publication date is printed in the book.
Why do they do this? Well one reason is that in the past publishers have “leaked” copies of a book for special events. There might have been a launch event, or a convention the author was a guest at. In such cases publishers may have made some copies available prior to the official publication date, and that might have been in a previous year. That’s not quite the same as making the book available in online stores, but it was clearly something that needed a rule.
In addition, on sale dates are really hard to prove. As we have seen, publication dates listed on Amazon are not reliable either. They can get changed. The one thing that can’t get changed is a date printed in a book. So as far as paper is concerned it is much easier for the Hugos to go by that clear printed evidence than worry about proving where and when a book was available for sale, and who could buy it.
Of course in this case it is entirely possible that the book on my Kindle has been updated by Amazon without my knowledge, because they can do that sort of thing. However, there’s no way of knowing if that has been done, so I can only assume that it hasn’t.
So, much to my relief, Maresi will be eligible for the Hugos in 2017, not this year. Apologies to any Finnish friends who changed their ballot. Fortunately you can change it back easily.
Complicated, this stuff, isn’t it?
Here We Go Again (Hugos)
Yeah, it is that time of year again. And with the nominations deadline only a few days away all of the perennial issues are raising their heads.
I understand that I have once again been left off the Sad Puppies slate. What do they think they are doing? Do these people have no idea how EVIL I am? You would have thought that if they wanted to destroy fandom they could at least have recruited the help of someone who is alleged to have done it, several times. It’s tough being anathema these days. None of these young whippersnappers know who they are supposed to abhor.
Meanwhile Kevin has, as usual, been patiently explaining to people how the rules work. His latest post is all about how you don’t get a second shot at eligibility if you are published once electronically and again in another year on paper. He thinks people get confused because they somehow think that electronic publication is “not real”. I suspect it is far more likely that it is just fans of particular works wanting to nominate their faves as often as possible, regardless of anything awkward like eligibility rules.
Of course there will still be people who will argue that something published electronically is a totally different thing when published on paper. In which case I’ll ask for it to be published on microfiche, or carved on clay tablets, and see if it is eligible yet again.
Mind you, it would help if the publishers themselves understood this. A book I was really looking forward to nominating next year is Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff. It is a great little feminist YA fantasy, and Maria is Finnish so it would stand a real chance of getting on the ballot in Helsinki. The paper edition was published in January, but the publishers put the ebook editions out in November last year. So I am afraid, Finnish friends, that if you want to nominate it you have to do so this year.
Another book that is likely to cause confusion is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. It came out from Hodder & Stoughton last August, but it was self-published by Chambers in 2014 and was actually short-listed for the Kitschies last year, so it has missed the boat. Chambers is still eligible for the Campbell, though, so if you love the book perhaps you should nominate her for that.
On Twitter today I noticed that people are still complaining that they are “not qualified” to nominate. We go through this every year, and I am so very tired of having to make the same point time after time. There are no eligibility requirements for voting other than that you have consumed the material you are voting for, and that you are a member of WSFS because you have a membership in one of the appropriate Worldcons (2015, 2016 or 2017). All that you achieve by self-disqualifying is hand control of the awards over to people who are less moralistic than you are.
I note (because everyone else is doing it) that I am eligible this year. However, as far as I can see that’s only in Fan Writer. I have done stuff like this, and this in 2015, though I suspect it is hardly my best year. Next year I will have at least two eligible short stories, which will be much more fun.
Anyway, enough moaning. I need to get my arse in gear and actually register a ballot.
PS: Kevin is totally eligible in Fan Writer for all of the hard work he did explaining the rules (Hugo and Business Meeting) to people in the midst of the Puppy storm last year. Mike Glyer deserves a medal too.
I Am Cait Returns to the UK
The UK is once again well behind on getting new episodes of I Am Cait. However, we have now had episodes #1-#3 of the second series. Having been away, I have only just caught up on them, so I guess it is time for a few thoughts.
Episodes #1 and #3 were mainly about Cait’s politics which are sadly naive. Listening to them in the context of the show is bad enough. Listening to them in the aftermath of the North Carolina Trans Panic legislation is utterly surreal. Thankfully the rest of the show is much more interesting.
Episode #2 started on what appears to be a signature theme of the season: exploring issues within the trans community. Knowing that the show is reality TV, I am slightly nervous about assigning views to people because I don’t know how much of what people say on the show is scripted, but with that caveat in mind here goes.
The debate in #2 was all about differences in attitudes between Jenny Boylan and Kate Bornstein. Jenny, like me, identifies as a woman. Kate, on the other hand, identifies as non-binary (and has done since before the term became popular). In the past she has flirted with stating that trans women can never “really” be women, which naturally upsets those of us who think we are.
The matter came to a head over the use of the word “tr*nny”. All three of us come from a time in which many trans people proudly used that term to describe themselves. Jenny has had the unfortunate experience of being beaten up by someone using the word as a slur. Naturally she and Kate had something of a difference of opinion.
Personally I never much took to the term. I understand that people like Kate are attached to it, but I also understand that many younger trans people react viscerally to it. And when I experienced someone using it as a slur I did too. I know that some people are trying to reclaim it, but I’m happy to not use it until such time as that movement has more traction among people more vulnerable than myself.
Episode #3 brought up two more hot button issues. The first was dating as trans women. Candis, who by anyone’s definition is drop-dead gorgeous, has not had good luck with men. I cannot for the life of me understand this, but there is it. Still, would I trade Candis’s looks for Kevin? Not a hope in Hell.
The whole idea of dating freaks Cait out totally. She’s still not really sure what sort of things she’s sexually attracted to, and sexuality can change on transition so she may well need time. She’s still obviously struggling with family issues too, and her family has their own issues to work out. Dating would complicate all of that. There’s nothing usual about this, Cait just happens to be doing it in the public eye.
Also in #3 was an instance where Saint Jenny was in the wrong for once. The team was in Chicago, where a good friend of Candis’s worked in a popular revue bar. Chandi, who started out as a drag performer, had been missing her time on stage, so Candis offered to get them both gigs for a night.
Jenny, as a respected New England academic, has never gone through the “having to do whatever you can to survive” thing. She also seems surprisingly unaware of the very different place that Ball culture has in the African-American trans community. She was suspicious of the drag show because she associates drag with “men pretending to be women”. As she said on the show, she’s not pretending.
But, as anyone who has watched Priscilla should know, there is drag and drag. Some drag performers do happily identify as men (usually gay men). Some of them do drag solely for the purpose of mocking femininity, and can be quite misogynist. But it is equally true that many trans women found themselves through “female impersonation”. April Ashley worked in a show like that in Paris, and her description of the excitement among the girls when Coccinelle came back from Casablanca post-surgery is entirely believable. April wasn’t the only member of the group to follow Coccinelle down that path.
Happily it all seemed to have ended well, with Jenny enjoying the show and Chandi, after a decade or so off the boards, showing that she had lost none of her performing talent.
What’s interesting to me is that, while Season 1 seemed to be all about presenting trans people to a cis audience, Season 2 is being made much more for a trans audience. Perhaps that’s because the studio has come to the conclusion that only trans people watch it, so they might as well appeal to us. Whatever the reason, it makes the show much more interesting to me. It also, I think, means it is much more radical. Jenny seems to agree.
The irony of the show: the most progressive program on TV has a conservative Republican as its star. https://t.co/3JqWDfuas1
— Jenny Boylan 🯠(@JennyBoylan) March 28, 2016
Research Matters
The talk that caused to me walk out of the trans history conference was so bad that almost every slide was either incompetent or dishonest in some way (it can be hard to tell the difference between someone who is just ignorant and someone who is lying for effect). However, one slide I was prepared to give a pass to because I had heard the same point made in a previous talk. It was the slide that said that being “born in wrong body” was an idea that was originally coined to explain being gay.
I should note here that the wrong body meme is not a very useful concept. It totally erases those trans people who are happy transitioning socially without any medical intervention. It encourages a focus on the gender binary, which is unhelpful to anyone who doesn’t want the whole gamut of medical transition options. And of course it is simplistic, which doesn’t help in a subject as complicated as trans people. These days trans activists tend to avoid using it.
Anyway, soon after the conference someone I know on social media asked for more information about this claim, so I did a bit of digging. That’s when things got interesting.
The wrong body meme was first coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German writer from the latter half of the 19th Century. Ulrichs was possibly the first modern European to advocate for gay rights. In fact we might describe him as the first gay man, as he was the first person to try to describe being gay in modern terms. The word “homosexual” was coined by his friend, the Austro-Hungarian Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a couple of years after Ulrichs went public with his ideas. Ulrichs himself had used the word “urning” to describe gay men.
It is entirely true that Ulrichs characterized a gay man as an, “anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa” (“a female soul confined in a male body” — he wrote in Latin). However, some very quick Googling about Ulrichs also turned up this:
Ulrichs had a sense of himself as being considerably more feminine than the average man. He recalled that as a young child he wore girls’ clothes, preferred playing with girls, and in fact expressed a desire to be a girl.
That’s a quote from this book. You can read the whole chapter on Ulrichs here.
If you do read the whole thing you will note that Ulrichs lived apparently happily as a man, but deemed himself quite feminine and preferred sex with very masculine men. On discovering that not all gay men were like him, he revised his theories to allow for other types.
So far from coining the wrong body idea because he needed an explanation for same-sex desire, Ulrichs coined it because that’s how he felt about himself.
Now that we have done proper studies on trans kids we know that the majority of children who express non-stereotypical gender behavior do not grow up to be trans. Some grow up to be gay/lesbian, and some grow up to be straight. However, in expressing a desire to actually be a girl Ulrichs exhibited evidence that he was fairly far towards the trans end of the spectrum. That he grew up to be happy as a man (or at least as happy as one could be, being a gay man in 19th Century Germany) suggests he was not all the way along that spectrum. Of course in his day there was no concept of being trans for him consider. Had he been born today, he might well have identified as non-binary in some way.
Of course there are still those who think that all treatment of trans people should be halted in order to save innocent gays and lesbians from being turned trans by the Evil Trans Agenda. There are also those who believe that trans people would be much happier if they were to consent to psychotherapy to “cure” them of their feelings so that they could become gay or lesbian (or stop being androgynephile perverts). And of course there are still doctors who try to cram all trans people into the gender binary. All of these people are dangerous.
What we actually need is for people to be more like Ulrichs and come to recognize that there is a whole spectrum of identities out there, and to allow people to find their own way to happiness.
I’d like to see some more research done on Ulrichs because he seems to be a good example of a non-binary person from European history. Not being able to read German, and being very rusty on the Latin, I’m not well placed to do that.
What I found very sad was to see Ulrichs’ non-binary nature being erased by someone who appeared to identify as non-binary themselves in order to provide another stick with which to beat binary-identified trans people.
Two Interesting Blog LitCrit Essays
As someone who spends a lot of time doing literary criticism I spend a lot of time thinking about how different readers react differently to the same book. That is, after all, important if you are writing reviews. In the last couple of days I have noticed two very interesting blog essays which impinge on this issue.
The first essay is by Dimitra Fimi, and it talks about how authors such as Tolkien and Rowling have tried (largely in vain, I suspect) to control how their work is interpreted by the reader.
Fimi contrasts the control-freakery of these writers with the more relaxed approach of other fantasy writers such as Catherine Fisher (whose work I really need to read). Part of this, of course, will be a result of personality differences between authors. However, Fimi speculates that it is also a result of differences in the amount of worldbuilding done.
Fisher’s books are intrusion fantasies, and so are set in our world. Tolkien, on the other hand, is famous for obsessive subcreation (a term he coined) of a secondary world. Rowling is somewhere in between. Her books are ostensibly set in our world, but much of the action takes place away from the mundane, making the books something like an alternate history. Fimi suggests that the more work a writer has put into subcreation, the more likely they are to want to exert control over how their creation is understood by readers.
Of course worlds are not the only thing that writers create. They also create characters, and that too can result in conflict with readers. I was immediately reminded of the way that Neil Gaiman is often accused of transphobia over A Game of You. Neil, who is wonderfully supportive of trans people, is understandably upset about this. In the paper I wrote for Finncon last year I tried to explain how a certain type of reader (trans women) were much more likely to react badly to the book than other readers. Reader perspective is important, and authors can’t possibly control how every type of reader will see their work.
Which brings me to the other essay. Lucy Allen, whose blog is mainly about mediaeval books, has been musing about why queer readings of books tend to be dismissed as fanciful even when they have as much scholarship backing them up as other interpretations of the text.
I see very much the same sort of thing in reactions to attempts to do LGBT history. There is a common assumption that queer people didn’t exist in the past, and that any history of such people must be (to use an accusation often thrown at book reviews) “reading something into the text that simply isn’t there”.
The answer, I think, is that cis-het readers are primed to not see queer people. We are brought up to not talk about such things. Unless someone is specifically tuned to the sort of clues that queer people are used to seeing, they won’t see the queer aspects of the text, and will be surprised, even shocked, to see them highlighted. That’s especially so if the reader has been primed to regard queer people as disgusting.
All of this has implications for the campaign for diversity in books. As I have probably said here before, although publishers are now very keen to have books with trans content (because we are flavor of the month), what they want is books written for cis people about trans people. They want books that cis readers will find comfortable. I’m sure the same sort of problem applies books set in non-white cultures.
The point of diversity in books is to provide books that a wide variety of different readers can relate to. That means that the books have to appeal directly to those readers.
I guess my point is that authors can’t control how their books are read, because there will always be readers who have very different life experiences to their own. The more real diversity we get in publishing, the more obvious that will become.
My Bath Ruby Talk about Trans*Code
Is now available on video. Many thanks to the lovely people at Confreaks TV. The video covers the entire third lightning talk session, but if you are not interested in IT stuff you can fast forward to around 8:50 to find me.
I also wholeheartedly recommend Janet Crawford’s talk about the neuroscience of gender inequality.
My thanks again to Bath Ruby for providing such interesting programming.
Thank You, Lambda Literary
When I reported on the short lists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards I noted that the Lammys still had a way to go in dealing with inter-community strife. The reason for that is that the LGBT Non-Fiction category included a book that was openly transphobic. Doubtless it got put their by transphobic judges (and there are many transphobic people among LGB folk), but Lambda Literary have since looked into the issue and have decided to withdraw the nomination.
Explaining all of this will take a little while. Back in 2004 the Lammys included a nomination for a book called The Man Who Would be Queen by J. Michael Bailey. This was a very sloppy piece of scholarship which purported to prove that trans people only came in two types: those who are “really” gay men who transition in order to have sex with straight men, and those who are narcissistic perverts who are sexually aroused by images of themselves dressed as women (so-called autogynephiles). Bailey’s work has been roundly condemned by most professionals in the trans health field, and spectacularly debunked in one study that showed that 93% of cis women fit the definition of autogynephiles.
The Lammys, after due investigation, withdrew Bailey’s book from the short list. Nevertheless, he has defenders, and it is one of those, Alice Dreger, who managed to get on a short list this year.
As is the fashion with hate-mongers these days, Dreger is trying to position herself and Bailey as innocent victims of a massive and powerful conspiracy of trans activists. She had the cheek to title her book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, comparing Bailey to the great scientist who was persecuted by the Catholic Church for saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Because of course the Secret Trans Cabal has just as much power as the 16th Century Catholic Church, and it is totally true that we have had Bailey imprisoned and threatened to have him burned at the stake unless he recants .
If you’d like to see an actual scientist take Dreger’s book apart, Julia Serano has done so at length. A shorter and more punchy version is available from Brynn Tannehill at The Advocate.
I don’t suppose that this will hurt Dreger very much. She’s currently undertaking a lucrative lecture tour promoting the book and complaining about how the evil trans activists are totally preventing her from putting forward her ideas. Claiming that you are unable to talk about things that you are actually being paid to talk about is the new fashion in victimhood as far as trans haters go. However, I am pleased that Lambda Literary have once again done the right thing. Hopefully next time they will review the shortlists before they go public with them.
Crowdfunder, Includes Me
The nice people at Far Horizons magazine are running a campaign on Indiegogo in aid of several of their ventures. One of the anthologies included in the campaign is Fantastically Horny, which will contain my story, “Camelot Girls Gone Wild”. For those who don’t remember, Fantastically Horny is a collection of erotic fantasy tales, and my story is the one that I read at the BristolCon flash slam last year. People there seemed to like it, and you can get the ebook for just £5. The Former Heroes anthology looks very interesting too. So why not pop over here and drop a little cash?
Aurealis Awards
It being Easter weekend, conventions are going on all around the world. The Australians, as is their wont, are getting in first. At Swancon this year’s Aurealis Awards have been announced.
I mention this because I am absolutely delighted to see that Glenda Larke has won the Sara Douglass Book Series Award for her Watergivers trilogy (my review here). Epic fantasy is one of those things that tends to miss out on awards because it comes in such long forms, and epic fantasy by women suffers the usual issues of cultural erasure. Glenda is one of the best in the field, and it is very pleasing to see her work recognized at last.
By the way, if you are having trouble with one of those daft people who say that it is “unrealistic” to have women having active roles in epic fantasy novels, you might want to point them at this excellent essay by Kate Elliott.
Back with the Aurealis Awards, I also note that the Convernors’ Award for Excellence has been won by Letters to Tiptree, edited by Alex Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein. I am somewhat biased in this case, because I have an essay in the book.
A full list of this year’s Aurealis Award winners can be found here.
Traveling Privilege
I’m spending most of today asleep because of jet lag, but I did want to comment briefly on my travel experience. I have been to North America. I have taken a total of four plane flights. Not once have I had anyone grope my genitals giving the excuse of “security”.
This might not seem entirely surprising to you, but I only managed this degree of comfort because I confined my travel to Canada. Trans women in the USA are groped pretty much every time they fly, sometimes several times per flight. I suspect that I would fare better because I have had surgery and therefore don’t show up as an “ALARM” on the perv scanners. However, the TSA are a law unto themselves and are perfectly capable of demanding to grope someone because they “look suspicious”.
I have lost count of the number of times that I used public bathrooms in Canada. I used the ladies, as I have been doing without incident for over 20 years. However, it will be a lot of times. I spent hours in airports, Kevin and I spent a lot of time in restaurants and tourist destinations, and on Monday I spent the day at a hotel giving a training course for clients. All of those things were only possible because I was able to use public toilets.
My use of women’s restrooms is not a crime in Canada, save for in the fevered imagining of Germaine Greer and her supporters who claim I have committed “rape” by “penetrating” women-only spaces. However, as of yesterday it would be a crime in North Carolina. In less than 24 hours the state’s three levels of legislature — lower house, upper house and Governor — all approved a sweeping bill to repeal and ban all equality-based legislation, and also to require trans people to use the bathroom appropriate to their “biological sex” (whatever that means). There’s a lot in the bill, an I expect most of it to be rolled back quickly, but it was the alleged need to keep women and girls “safe” from people like me that was used as the excuse for pushing it through with such unseemly haste.
Actually I might be OK. According to The Guardian, the bill has an exemption for trans people who have had their birth certificate changed. Obviously I’d need to carry mine with me, which I don’t have to do anywhere else in the world. However, I note that laws governing trans people are not uniform in the USA. There are still some states where, no matter how much medical intervention you have had, you can’t get your birth certificate changed. Also there’s no public health coverage of trans issues in the USA, so the proportion of trans people able to access surgery (always assuming that they want it) is probably much lower than in the UK.
The main group of people who will suffer, however, are trans kids. There is barely a country in the world where trans kids can legally change their gender, and access to surgery is generally restricted until they are legally adult. Obviously they cannot take advantage of exemptions to such laws the way I can. There are even places (hello Kansas) where laws are being proposed that will allow kids to get a substantial reward for ratting on trans pupils who dare to use a gender-appropriate bathroom.
UK readers may think that sort of thing doesn’t happen here, but it does. Today’s Gay Star News has a report by Jane Fae on a pub in Ramsgate that operates a strict “no trans women in the ladies’ toilet” policy. Obviously that’s not a legal requirement the way it is in North Carolina, but the report suggests that the pub’s landlord has had legal advice assuring them that their policy is legal. Jane notes that this seems to contravene the Equality Act, but I beg to disagree. What you can say is that the case has not been proven, because no precedent exists, but the pub’s action may be legal.
The point that will be argued is that a pub toilet is a single-sex service, and the Equality Act contains language that allows businesses to deny trans women access to women-only services if it is reasonable to do so. The recent Transgender Equality Inquiry notes that such exemptions can apply, even if the trans woman in question has a Gender Recognition Certificate and has had her birth certificate changed. Which means that they apply to me. One would hope that a judge would deem that banning me from women’s toilets in the UK would be unreasonable, especially as this contravenes the intent of the Gender Recognition Act, but until such time as the law is clarified, or a test case has been heard, the question is unanswered.
Travel Day
What with getting to the airport, having to be there ages in advance of the flight, the flight time itself, and losing three hours in time zones, I haven’t done much today except travel. At least I have been able to get some work done along the way, which is just as well as I have to give a training course tomorrow.
Come Wednesday morning I should be back in London. I have errands to run in the city and may not be home until the evening. I may spend Thursday dead for jet lag purposes.
Hello Vancouver
I decided not to go back to the conference today because frankly life is too short to waste it on people who want to invalidate other trans people’s lives and experiences. Instead Kevin and I took an early ferry and made use of the extra time to have a look around Vancouver.
I have to say that, on the basis of the few hours we had, Vancouver is not the world’s greatest tourist city. However, it does have absolutely amazing public transport. In fact it seems like the whole of British Columbia does. We spent an awful lot of today on buses, ferries and trains. Everything ran to time, and all of the connections worked flawlessly.
Vancouver is also interesting in that a large part of its light rail system runs on a linear induction motor system. I remember seeing Eric Laithwaite demonstrating the technology when I was a kid, and everyone expected it to be the next big thing. In fact its most notable achievement was being used as the launch mechanism for Fireball XL5, but it is used for light rail. Vancouver’s system is the biggest outside Asia, but there’s a lot of such systems in Asia.
Please note that the Vancouver system is not maglev, it is an ordinary train, running on rails, that uses a linear induction motor for propulsion. It seems to do a really good job because the track has gradients that no traditional light rail system could handle.
We didn’t do much today except ride trains and boats, and fail to find a decent source of high quality maple syrup. However, we did find a Peruvian restaurant for dinner which was a good thing to have done. Tomorrow morning we go our separate ways: Kevin back to the Bay Area and me to Toronto.
Day Two at #MTHF16
Today started off with a lot of international material. Kevin went off to see the paper on trans people in Japan (and discovered that the Japanese language didn’t have gendered pronouns until they started translating English and German texts and had to invent words to make the distinction).
I listened to a presentation by an Indian trans activist, and was very impressed by the government policies in Tamil Nadu. Sadly the rest of India is not so progressive. The speaker made the important distinction between something being culturally accepted and being socially acceptable. Hijra are part of India culture and have been for at least 2000 years, but that doesn’t mean that they are not despised. What is an open question (which I hope one day I can find an Indian historian to help shine some light on) is how much the position of hijra in modern Indian society is a result of European colonialism.
I also got to hear a really great presentation by two trans guys who live in The Yukon. They are dealing with very small communities, which has its drawbacks, but also a significant degree of community support that you don’t get in a big city. I discovered that for First Nations people the word “religion” carries connotations of European colonialism. When speaking of their own beliefs they always use the term “spiritual” rather than “religious”. (To a European, of course, the word “spiritualism” means something very different.)
The next session was given over entirely to a project being done in Calgary on the subject of Magnus Hirschfeld and his relationship to Harry Benjamin and Alfred Kinsey. The scholarship involved is impressive, but when doing work like this there is a serious danger of getting caught up in the narrative created by your subjects. Hirschfeld and Benjamin may well have believed that they were discovering a new phenomenon in human sexuality and had to invent ways of understanding it, but we as historians can’t buy into that idea, or the ways in which they chose to understand transness. My thanks here to the Two Spirit person who chose to challenge the panel on this, and in particular their use of the word “transgenderism”. It is true that the term is commonly used by medical people, but it is also used by TERFs to imply that being trans is a political philosophy that one can chose to reject the validity of.
On the subject of political philosophy, it is an unfortunate fact that in any gathering of trans people you are likely to find someone with entrenched views as to the right way to be trans, and who will push that narrative at the expense of any other. Trans communities are incredibly diverse (a fact which apparently deeply frustrated the arch taxonomist, Kinsey) and it is vitally important that we respect each other. This afternoon there was a presentation from someone who clearly felt that the only way to establish the validity of their own life was to belittle and ridicule other trans people. Not to mention mocking other people’s culture along the way. There is an awful lot wrong with the way that the medical profession has dealt with trans people in the past, and it is absolutely wrong to force everyone into one stereotype of being trans. You don’t have to make that point by making it seem like all people who fit that stereotype in some way are moronic dupes whose feelings about themselves are some sort of false consciousness.
Anyway, I have better things to do with my life that sit around being mocked and insulted. I have Kevin here, and a beautiful part of the world to explore. We found a place called Fisherman’s Wharf, watched the harbor seals perform for the tourists, and ate fish.