Nicola Griffith has posted details of an event for LGBT writers at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. It takes place at 7:30pm on Saturday November 21 and is supported by the Lambda Literary Foundation. More details from Nicola.

Back when I wrote about the gender balance in SF&F I pointed to a wealth of research showing that many men simply won’t read a book that they think is written by a woman. Often this isn’t a deliberate, conscious action: it is just something they are trained from birth to do by the cultural environment they live in.

Well, it isn’t just SF&F, by a long way. Today Kate Heartfield tweeted about this research which purports to show that male journalists on Twitter have 3 times as many followers as female journalists (the methodology looks a little shoddy, but they may be right anyway).

What got me blogging, however, was this post from Canada about a study that shows that women lawyers with androgynous or male-sounding names do better in their careers that women with obviously female names.

Subconscious gender discrimination runs very, very deep.

I’m a little late on this, but I wanted to say a few words about the unfortunate case of Caster Semenya who has been forced to undergo a gender test after winning the women’s 800m at the current Athletics World Championships.

Despite what most people think, gender is by no means easy to determine. There is no question about Ms. Semenya’s external anatomy. Take her clothes off and almost everyone would identify her as female. Her birth certificate says she is a girl, and she was raised as a girl by her family. Nor is there any suggestion that she has been taking performance-enhancing drugs. Nevertheless, her right to race as a woman has been challenged. Why?

Well, there are a huge number of different medical conditions lumped under the general heading of “intersex”. Some of these are very common (see this Intersex Society of North America web page for some data). And, as this Science of Sport blog post explains, it isn’t a question of whether Ms. Semenya is obviously female, it is a question as to whether she is entirely female.

Except it isn’t. Athletics, like many sports, has developed a policy for dealing with post-operative transsexuals. They recognize that after gender reassignment surgery and a couple of years of hormone treatment your average male-to-female transsexual no longer has the biological advantages of a male and can be allowed to compete as a female.

The same courtesy is apparently not extended to intersex people, even though they may have lived in the same gender all of their lives.

And ultimately it may not be an issue of medicine at all. Monica Roberts points out that the “you’re really a man” charge has been leveled at large numbers of black sportspeople, even when the charge is patently absurd such as with the Williams sisters. The reason appears to be that women of non-white ethnicities don’t always conform easily to Western standards of beauty.

Therein lines the problem for women in sport: if you do well, and people don’t think that you are pretty, then you’ll be accused of being “really a man”. And because of the way that such cases are treated, you’ll be assumed guilty until proven innocent, even though the nature of the tests that can prove you innocent are controversial.

This is not the first case of this type. A couple of years ago an Indian athlete, Santhi Soundarajan, was stripped of a medal in the Asian games after allegedly failing a “gender test”. As far as I can make out, the results of that test have never been made public, and most explanations I have seen suggest that Ms. Soundarajan’s condition was perfectly legal under the IAAF rules. Nevertheless Ms. Soundarajan was hounded out of athletics and later attempted suicide. The good news is that she has since turned to coaching, at which she is apparently very successful.

Update: Here’s Germaine Greer making a complete idiot of herself in the notoriously transphobic Guardian. Someone might have checked current sporting regulations before publishing that piece, but I guess the Grauniad was too keen to get on with its favorite sport of Tranny-bashing to worry about facts.

So, the Obama Administration is currently introducing a bill to Congress that will ban employment discrimination against transgender people. Meanwhile the British parliament is merrily giving passage to a so-called “Equality Bill” that will specifically allow employers (and business, and schools) to discriminate against transgender people, thereby flouting European Human Rights legislation and rolling back much of the effect of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.

Three stories being compressed into one post here. Please bear with me. I’m sticking this behind a cut as it is getting long.
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Thank you again, people of California, and indeed everyone else who commented, joined protests, wrote to the station and so on. We have made progress.

Much of the discussion around the blogosphere about the KRXQ shock jock case has focused on freedom of speech. Surely, people argue, Rob Williams and Arnie States have a right to say what they want about transgender people. And of course under current US law they do. The fact that much of the rest of the country is outraged at their ignorant and hateful comments should be punishment enough. But sadly such issues also have wider ramifications. As one commenter here noted, transgender people are 17 times more likely to be murdered than the average US citizen. Other statistics, published by HRC but now a little old, suggest that transgender people living in the US have a 1 in 12 chance of having their lives ended by murder.

In September 2008 the body of a transgender woman, Ruby Molina, was found floating in the American River in Sacramento – part of the area that KRXQ serves. The police identified her death as “suspicious” and offered a $1000 reward for any information that might help them resolve the case. As far as I can see from trawling the Internet this morning, no progress has been made on this. Whoever murdered Ruby Molina has got away with it.

This is by no means an isolated case. Transgender people are murdered on a regular basis all over the USA. Mostly their killers are not brought to justice. Even if they are, they are often let off because juries take the attitude of another commenter: that transgender people are “weirdos and freaks”. If you dehumanize someone in this way, then killing them apparently doesn’t matter.

My search for news about Ruby Molina did bring up this report from the Sacramento News & Review about a memorial service for Ruby and other victims of anti-LGBT violence. The report quotes Dr. Gregory M. Herek, a professor of psychology at UC Davis:

Herek also pointed out that “when individuals perceive that they have some sort of ‘permission’ to attack members of minority groups, they will do so.”

This is what people like Williams and States have in mind when they launch public attacks against people they hate. They know that they may not get away with murdering people themselves, and probably they don’t have the courage to do so. However, they are well aware that by defaming particular groups of people in strident and defamatory tones on the radio they will encourage other people – people who are less smart and less cowardly than themselves – to do the dirty work for them. Because they haven’t explicitly incited murder they know that they can hide behind their freedom of speech rights and avoid any responsibility for what they have said, but they know all too well what the effects of their words will be on others. It is murder by proxy performed by cowards.