Roz posts about the current state of affairs here. Negotiations apparently continue behind the scenes. I am very carefully not saying anything.
Feminism
Time To Stop Editing
OK, so I promised you all a post on the gender balance question. I seem to have been writing it for ages (and pestering Kevin to read re-writes). I’m still not happy with it, but I’ve decided that I need to stop fiddling and get on and post it. If it means everyone is unhappy with me, well it won’t be the first time. You can find the post here.
Meanwhile back to writing about bathrooms, and maybe air travel, and the Rushdie review…
Double Plus Ungood
This is a disaster. I wasn’t terribly happy about laws against “religious discrimination” to begin with, and now I see I was right. From now on all of the laws the UK has protecting people against discrimination of any sort are useless, because all that the bigots have to do is claim that they have a religious right to be bigoted. I’m sure it won’t be long before some bampot brings a case against an LGBT person claiming that their mere existence infringes his “religious rights”.
Swings, Roundabouts
Every time you start feeling good about your fellow humans – for example the Pride people coming up with an apology for Roz – you get reminded that there are also people with whom you’d rather not associate. I won’t say any more, because Tobias Buckell lays into the miscreant far more effectively than I could.
That’s Mr. Doctor to You
Via my LJ Friends List, an interview with Russell T Davies in which he explains that Doctor Who can never be a woman because it would mean that fathers would have to explain sex changes to their kids.
So, I guess we should all call him just Russell Davies from now on.
ToiletGate: The Apology
The Pride London management has issued an official apology over the ToiletGate affair. I can’t see it online anywhere, so I’ll post the whole thing here.
Continue reading
ToiletGate Makes (Gay) News
Gay News has a short mention of ToiletGate as part of a longer piece about Pride. Pity that they couldn’t manage to spell Roz’s name correctly, despite the fact that they were cutting and pasting from the Trans at Pride web site where it is spelled correctly. Ah well, at least they noticed.
ToiletGate Update
First of all, many thanks to all of you who have joined the Facebook Group, and who have signed the online petition. Your support is much appreciated.
For now most of the lobbying is in the hands of experts such as Christine Burns who have direct access to Those In Authority. However, I am working on an essay about the whole toilet panic nonsense. If it is taking a little while, that’s partly because I’m on the road and partly because elements of it cross over quite strongly with what I was planning to say about the gender imbalance issue. Bear with me, please.
I do, however, want to raise one issue arising from this, because it is an event management issue and therefore has direct bearing on science fiction conventions.
This morning Roz pointed her readers to this post which talks about the fact that large events such as Pride are pretty much obliged to hire private security firms, because in this regulation-obsessed country you can’t do security for a major event unless you have the appropriate qualifications. Willing volunteers from within the community are unlikely to have the necessary licenses, and so can’t be used.
We see this sort of thing already in some respects in Worldcon. Tech crews sometimes have to rely in people who are professionals in the industry because union rules at the convention center only allow union members to operate the equipment. And Worldcons are also often obliged to use professional security staff supplied by the convention center (at ruinous rates). We have also learned, from bad experiences within our own community, that people who want to do “Security” are often the last people who ought to be allowed to do it, because they are more interested in pretty black uniforms and bossing people about than in the success of the event.
The problem with this sort of thing is that the security people you hire may know nothing about the event that they are supposed to be guarding. This can lead to the sort of inappropriate behavior that Roz suffered on Saturday. And with really big events (and Pride is really big) your chosen security firm may subcontract because they don’t have enough staff to fulfill the contract. This makes it very difficult to ensure that the people you hire get appropriate sensitivity training.
And this problem will get worse, particularly in the UK where the government adds new regulatory burdens on a daily basis. The next big problem is likely to be child safety. There are moves afoot that may mean that everyone working on an event has to be vetted to ensure that they are safe around children. That’s going to open a whole can of worms about socially conformant behavior, with the defenders of the Patriarchy doubtless wanting to ban anyone who is gender variant, anyone who is sexually variant, anyone who has ever had a drug conviction and so on. It will be a mess, and it will be just one more nail in the coffin on volunteer activity.
PostCode Lottery
Americans often envy us Brits our wild cultural diversity. Just drive for half an hour in the UK and it can seem that you are in a different country. Of course America is culturally diverse as well, as I keep having to point out to my British friends, it just does it on a much larger scale. But cultural diversity isn’t always a good thing, and one of the ways the bad shows up in the UK is the so-called PostCode Lottery.
This isn’t an actual lottery. The idea is that your quality of life can be strongly affected by where in the country you live. Although in theory we have fairly unified government, the practice can be strongly divergent depending on how local authorities implement national directives. All walks of life are affected. Where you live can determine the quality of schools your kids can attend, the types of treatment that can be obtained on the National Health, and also, it now appears, whether or not rapists get brought to justice.
Generally speaking, of course, the rate of conviction is pretty appalling all over the country. Given that the chances of a successful conviction are, on average, just 6%, whereas the chances of the woman who was raped having her life further ruined by malicious media coverage of the case is pretty much 100%, nowhere in the country has anything to crow about. I was not in the least bit surprised to discover last week that an anonymous survey of members of the Welsh Assembly revealed that three of them had been raped, and not one had reported it to the police. These women, remember, are political activists, but they know than some battles are hopeless. Doubtless the same is true in Westminster. However, the fact that there local differences shows that there is something that can be done. Hopefully pressure can be put on the recalcitrant police forces to clean up their act.
Barking Mad
Well, it appears that I left Pride somewhat early yesterday. Or possibly I didn’t, because if I hadn’t I might be in prison now for assaulting a police officer. It appears that after I left Roz decided that she needed a call of nature. And a steward at Pride told her that trans women were not allowed to use the women’s toilets at the event – they had to use the gender-neutral disabled toilets instead. And then some idiot policeman told her that trans people have to be able to present a valid Gender Recognition Certificate before they are allowed to use gender-appropriate bathrooms.
By the way, I’m not outing anyone here. Roz is well known as a transgender activist. The whole thing is chronicled on her LiveJournal here, and on the Trans at Pride web site here.
I should note here that this does not appear to be an official Pride policy. The stewards were apparently hired help, not community volunteers, but that’s no excuse for the Met. If they have police on duty at Pride they ought to make sure that they are properly trained. But of course what we get instead is more security theater. Our law enforcement officials are far more interested in demanding people’s papers at any and every opportunity than they are in treating citizens with respect.
As for the bathroom nonsense, the whole thing is just ludicrous. Roz is post-op and has been living as a woman for decades. She uses women’s bathrooms in all sorts of places on a regular basis without any problem. The only difference yesterday was that she was at Pride, wearing badges, and thus easily identified as a “tranny” (and a female tranny at that), and therefore became a target for bigots.
I shall write something about bathrooms. But not now. I am too angry.
Busy Day
So I spent most of the day at Pride. Or at least that was the plan. I met up with Roz in the morning, and we were hanging around waiting for our piece of the parade to be given the “go” signal when a careless person managed to whack Roz on the temple with the end of a placard. After a little while Roz decided that sitting down was a requirement, so I took her to get some food. Fortunately things cleared up after an hour or so, and we were able to catch up with the parade shortly before it hit Transfalgar Square. I don’t have as many photos as I’d hoped, but I do have some and will upload them when I have had a chance to clean them up.
Thought for the day: If Brazil didn’t exist it would be necessary for the LGBT community to invent it, though probably anything we came up with wouldn’t have as much grace or style.
Gender (Im)balance Dissected
The good folks at SF Signal have done one of those Mind Meld things on the question of gender imbalance in SF. I was asked to contribute to this, but I turned them down: not because I have anything against SF Signal – the Mind Meld thing is very popular and works quite well, so I was honored to be asked – but because I think that the whole debate has got very narrow and very silly. I may try to write something more general and (hopefully) more useful sometime soon.
Meanwhile David Moles has entered the affray, including the following:
I’d love to edit a fiction magazine that was run like a proper academic journal, by which I mean one based on anonymous independent peer review by experts in the field, which is in this case to say by published authors with expertise in the genre or subgenre of the story under submission.
I’m sure this would be totally dysfunctional, but it would be totally dysfunctional in a different way than our current totally dysfunctional short fiction publishing system.
And that is so true. If there is anything that a career in regulatory economics teaches you it is that no matter how many whiz ways people come up with to “fix” things that are “wrong”, the primary effect of all this huffing and puffing it to create something that is totally dysfunctional in a different way.
Marriage Auction Update
Further to yesterday’s mention of the auction to help defend California’s marriage laws, Tero reminds me that if you can’t contribute work and don’t want to bi on anything you can just donate money to one of the organizations they are working for. I recommend Equality California.
In the meantime, if you are a writer or artist, please consider donating something. I’ve seen Ellen Kushner and Anne Harris mention the auction, so obviously word is getting round, but the more the merrier.
And just so you won’t miss this post, here’s the banner:
CA Marriage Rights Auction
Via Justine I learn about this auction happening on LiveJournal to raise money to combat the Defense of the Patriarchy people who are seeking to deny same-sex couples the right to marry in California. There’s a wide variety of stuff on offer, and hopefully a lot more will be added soon (any authors reading this please note). Details about how the auction works, and how to offer an item for sale, can be found here.
And besides posting that I feel kind of useless. Maybe if I offered not to blog for a week people would pay for that.
Why We Still Need Pride – Part II
Via various reports of the goings on in San Franciso last weekend ended up at this blog post which looks at Pride from an entirely different angle:
Yet right on cue, the day after Pride, the Davids of the blogosphere dished out their heavy-handed dissections of parades around the country. Only this year, there was a palpably nastier tone to an already traditionally nasty annual debate. Blame the election, blame the recent avalanche of anti-gay legislation, but this year, the usual assimilationist arguments went beyond the hypothetical speculations that maybe our Pride parades were too outlandish, that maybe we weren’t doing the movement any favors by showing the country a face that happened to be wearing 6-inch long false eyelashes. This year there was some actual discussion about HOW we were going to “fix” Pride parades. Of how we might go about “discouraging” certain “elements” from taking part in the parades.
Joe goes on about that at length in a very amusing manner. It is good stuff, but it also occurred to me that if you just replaced “trannies” with “costumers” he could have been talking about science fiction conventions.
What’s Good for the Gander
Today’s Guardian has an interesting article by a Sudanese woman about the practice of polygamy.
While formal polygamy might be frowned upon in the West, I know many people who are in polyamorous relationships of various kinds. As long as all participants in the relationships are happy with it I don’t see anything particularly wrong with such practices. The question I would always ask proponents of polygamy, however, is this: “If it is OK for a man to have many wives, is it OK for a woman to have many husbands.” If they answer “no” you can be sure that their interest in polygamy is more about dominance and property rights than about freedom of relationships.
Proud of You, India
The Guardian has a short video of the first ever Pride march in Delhi.
Travel Plans
As I have tickets and accommodation all booked I can now confirm that I will be in London for Pride weekend. Anyone else planning to be at/in the parade?
Why We Still Need Pride
In today’s Guardian there is a report on homophobic hate crimes in the UK. This makes the case fairly clearly:
The poll found a homophobic crime or incident had been experienced by 12.5% over the past year and 20% over the past three years.
One in six of the victims had been physically assaulted and one in eight had been subjected to unwanted sexual contact. Almost nine in 10 had experienced homophobic insults and harassment.
Three-quarters of the victims had not reported the incident to the police, often because they did not think the complaint would be investigated.
Only 1% of hate crimes that were reported to the police resulted in a conviction. Two-thirds of victims who reported incidents to the police were not offered advice or referred to support services.
A graphic demonstration, if ever we needed one, that simply having laws is not enough. Social attitudes, especially amongst members of the police, have to change too.
Score One for Retired Clergy
The Guardian has an article about how many retired clergymen in California are offering to perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples so that their colleagues who are currently in work won’t have to risk their jobs by doing so. The article isn’t very good. It tries to suggest that there is one universal “church law” that all types of Christian, including Mormons, adhere to. But, assuming that the actual events it reports are correct, it is good to see an apparent outpouring of support for same-sex marriage from clergymen.