Gender

Telegraph and Toilets

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today the Telegraph website has an article about gender-neutral toilets. In general it is pretty good. However, I’m quoted in it, and it makes me out to say something I very much do not agree with.

Update: following discussions with Radhika the post has been updated to much better reflect my views.

The basic issue here is whether trans people should be required to use a gender-neutral toilet. Cis people often get hold of the wrong end of the stick and think that there are three genders: male, female and trans. So they think that the solution to the toilet issue is to create a gender-neutral loo that all trans people are required to use.

The trouble is that there are some trans people who would very much prefer the option of a gender-neutral toilet. That includes those currently in transition who are uncomfortable about which loo to use but may change their minds later, and those who are non-binary and will always want something non-gendered. But there are also trans people who fully identify with one or other of the poles of the gender spectrum and will strongly resent it if anyone tries to make them use a gender-neutral loo.

The point I was trying to get across is that there is no single solution (though a long term trend towards less gendering of everything would be good). I absolutely respect the right of people who want a gender-neutral loo to have one. I just don’t want that to be a requirement for all trans folk.

Of course it is hard to get concepts like this across. I talked to Radhika mainly on Twitter and in a phone call while I was on the train to London on Thursday. Misunderstandings can arise, and she will have been working on a bunch of other pieces between then and this going live. It happens.

If you happen to see anyone on social media calling me out for supposedly being down on non-binary people, please point them this way.

And also, next time you see some trans activist quoted as saying something terrible in the media, ask yourself whether they actually said what they are supposed to have said, or whether it might be a misunderstanding, or a deliberate misquote to create controversy.

Film Review – Tangerine

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Last night I took myself off to the Bath Film Festival to see Tangerine. The showing took place in a small arts center that looked and felt more like a folk club than a cinema. The audience looked more like a folk club too, in that they were mostly older than me (sorry Talis). Except of course this was Bath, so they also looked very staid and English middle class. We might have been in church. C of E, of course. I rather wondered what they were going to make of the film.

Hey bitches, we gon’ tell you what’s goin’ down, yo!

Welcome to Los Angeles, alien people of Bath.

Tangerine is a film set among the trans hooker community of LA. It is famous for two things. Firstly it was shot entirely on iPhone 5s. I am not competent to judge the effect or quality of this, though the colors did seem interesting at times. Secondly it not only stars trans women as trans women, it involved them in the production as well. Indeed the script is based on a true life experience of one of the stars, Kiki Rodriquez, who plays Sin-Dee Rella.

The basic plot is that Sin-Dee gets out of jail on Christmas Eve to find that her boyfriend, Chester, has been unfaithful while she was inside. She determines to take revenge. Chester is a pimp and a drug dealer, so perhaps this was all rather predictable.

Yeah, Chester is an arsehole. But then, when you sit back and think about it, every male character in the film is an arsehole in one way or another.

Quite a few of the women are not very nice either. This is, after all, a film about very poor people doing what they think they need to do to get by, and often making very poor decisions in the process.

The film is also a black farce. Because people do make poor decisions and then shit happens and it all kicks off.

This is a very long way from the sort of thing that is currently being done over here, or indeed in shows like I am Cait, to improve public opinion of trans people. I can just imagine the torrent of concern trolling that Sarah Ditum is going to produce over this. “Oh! *clutch pearls*, trans women are criminals, they are drug addicts, they swear all the time. How horrible! We must help them by locking them away and preventing them from doing those disgusting things that they do! Or at least stop them from doing them where we can see them.”

But you come to that conclusion only if you don’t think about what goes on in the film. Here are a few pointers.

Sin-Dee and her best friend, Alexandra (beautifully played by Mya Taylor) are women, pretty much indistinguishable from other LA hookers save for the thing in their pants that makes them valuable to a certain type of John. They are not “men in dresses” because they are not being played by men in dresses trying to channel what it is like being trans.

People do what they need to do to get by. Even Yeva, the Armenian immigrant woman whose husband has a thing for trans hookers, knows that.

Dinah, the white hooker, thinks that she’s better than Sin-Dee and Alexandra. She has, after all, been socialized to think that. She’s not.

Everyone has dreams, whether it is Alexandra’s singing career, Sin-Dee’s relationship with Chester, or Yeva’s happy home life. In Los Angeles most dreams are paper thin, masking the ugly reality beneath.

And when it comes down to it, trans women of color are on the bottom of the pile. All that they have is each other. The relationship between Sin-Dee and Alexandra is the most powerful thing in the film.

The end of the film was greeted in absolute silence. But that means that no one booed, and no one walked out. My indispensable new pal Ceri had her ears well tuned to comments as people left and there was some concern that the film had been exploitative. Trust me, it wasn’t. It was real. The Danish Girl will be exploitative, though most cis people watching it won’t understand why.

The bottom line is that Alexandra and Sin-Dee are girls very like me. They are girls like Roz Kaveney wrote about in Tiny Pieces of Skull. Roz went through a period of having to swim in that world; I got lucky and found Kevin so I avoided it. What Alexandra and Sin-Dee go through is reality for very many trans women around the world. If you can’t accept them because of how they live — if you need to have stories about white, middle class trans women in order to accept us — then you are not really doing the job.

If you’d like to see more of Mya Taylor, she has a staring role in a forthcoming short film about the life of Marsha P Johnson. The production company could do with some help with post production costs. Here’s the trailer.

Official Trailer for Happy Birthday, Marsha! from sasha wortzel on Vimeo.

Legal Limbo

~ Cheryl

Yesterday the Ministry of Justice announced that they will be conducting a proper review of how trans people are housed in UK prisons. This is very welcome. The release of the new guidelines, originally scheduled for just before Christmas, has been shelved and the review will report back early in the New Year. Details of the MoJ statement and the Terms of Reference for the review can be found here.

Naturally I have a few comments. Firstly I am rather disappointed that the MoJ could not manage to find a trans woman to advise them on the review. I’m sure that Jay Stewart will do his best, but this is an issue that specifically affects trans women so we really ought to be consulted.

The ToR says that the review is expected to, “engage widely, openly and transparently at all times”. I trust that will actually be the case.

Mind you, the ToR also says, “the usual practice is for them to be held in a supportive environment away from the main regime of the prison and protected from risk of harm from other prisoners”. What this actually means is, “we keep them in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day”. So just how much transparency we will get is open to question.

However, the key statement in the ToR is the last one. This:

Legal gender is determined by the individual’s birth certificate.

The only way that you can change the gender on your birth certificate is by getting a Gender Recognition Certificate.

It is perfectly possible to live a mostly normal life as a trans person without a GRC. You can change your passport, your driving license, your bank account and any other form of ID that you wish. But you cannot change your legal gender without a GRC. That means that without a GRC the government can, at any time, decide to treat you as having the gender to which you were assigned at birth and claim that this is “the law”. Which prison they put you in is only the tip of the iceberg. Our legal system is riddled with gender-specific clauses.

The latest figures that I have are that around 13,000 people have completed treatment at British gender clinics. A further 13,000 have started treatment but have either not yet been discharged or have elected not to go through the whole process (or have been thrown off the program for some reason, which appears to be distressingly common). An unknown number will be getting treatment privately and/or abroad.

To date only 4,000 people have been granted Gender Recognition Certificates.

That means that at least 9,000 UK citizens have completed gender reassignment but for various reasons have not changed their legal gender. A similar number, possibly more, are likely to be living full time in their preferred gender but, because they have not completed the medical process, are not eligible to apply for a GRC. All of these people are effectively in legal limbo as far as their gender is concerned.

The fine folks who ran the Tara Hudson petition have a new one going about general prison reform for trans people. It is worth signing because it calls for things that the review is only considering. We do need to keep the pressure up.

However, what we really need is a major overhaul of the Gender Recognition Act. If you have a system where less than a third of the people who ought to be eligible for legal gender recognition are actually getting that recognition then something is badly wrong.

Prison Trans Form banner

Farewell Holly, And Thank You

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Holly WoodlawnAs is being reported everywhere it seems, Holly Woodlawn died yesterday. She had been waging a long battle against cancer, and finally succumbed aged 69. She wasn’t the only trans person featured in “Walk on the Wild Side”, but she was the one whom Lou Reed specifically identified as trans, which got me to sit up and take notice about what he was signing about.

I have to say that Holly, Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis (who appears to have been non-binary, though we didn’t use that term back then) were not the best of role models. But they were pretty much all we had back then, and they got the media talking about trans people. That was so much better than being swept under the carpet.

Candy and Holly both died young, but Holly was a fighter. Even cancer had a lot of trouble beating her. 69 is a damn good innings, especially given what she’s been through. Heck, I didn’t expect to make it to 50 when I started to transition. And of course Holly had a long career as an actress entirely separate from her involvement with Andy Warhol. For all sorts of reasons, she is an inspiration to Girls Like Us.

I never met Holly. Neil Gaiman did, and let her know he’d named his eldest daughter after her. Roz Kaveney did too, and she reports today that Holly turned up late at the Stonewall riot but made a point of throwing a brick.

Of course her death means that the media are running obituaries. Trans people are flavor of the month right now. It is instructive to see how they treat her. I got into a long conversation about this with my friend Andrew McKie who, among other things, is an obituary writer for the Telegraph. The point about an obituary is that it is a factual report of the life of the deceased. It is undoubtedly relevant to Holly’s life that she was trans, and I would not expect an obituary to omit that. Deadnaming is another matter entirely.

Lots of people change their names during the lives. Actors, pop stars, authors and so on often go by assumed names. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer has done so. He didn’t like the name his parents gave him, so he changed it; at age 13: respect. On the other hand, many of these people only use their assumed names in public, and most of them (Mr. Osborne presumably excepted) are not embarrassed by their previous names.

With trans people it is different. The names we are given at birth tie us to the identity forced upon us at birth, and many of us are very keen to get away from them. Journalists know this, and make a deliberate point of including our birth names wherever possible, implying that these are our “real” names, and by extension that they indicate our “real” gender. It is code for saying, “this person is a fraud and a liar”.

(I note in passing that it is common for a certain type of left wing activist to refer to Mr. Osborne as “Gideon”, the name he was given at birth. Exactly the same dynamic is at work here. They are deliberately using a name that their target has indicated a distaste for in order to cause hurt. I’m sure they feel that Mr. Osborne deserves it, but the purpose is clear.)

When you are writing an obituary, you always have to make choices about what to include and what to leave out. Sometimes these are uncomfortable choices. It may be necessary to talk about things that the deceased and their family would much rather forget, because those things define the life — or at least the public life — of the person you are writing about. But at the same time you are writing about someone who has just died, and a certain level of respect is in order. Trivial detail, no matter how titillating, is still trivial.

The salient parts of Holly’s life at that she was an actress, a friend of Andy Warhol, was mentioned in a very famous song, and was a trans pioneer. The name she was given at birth is rather less important. To foreground it at the very start of the obituary (as The Guardian has done), or to include it in a very short mention on radio news (as I understand the BBC has done), is to say that you believe one of the most important things people need to know about Holly is who you think she “really” was. It is, in other words, a deliberate denial of her gender, and an insult.

You can find a fine obituary of Holly at Transgriot.

On Trans and Africa

~ Cheryl

Thanks to the fabulous Monica Roberts, I have discovered Iranti, an African queer rights organization based in Johannesburg. They appear to have excellent links to trans rights groups in many parts of Africa, and even put on pan-African conferences. Here is a great little video that they have made:

Right now, of course, such organizations are concentrating mainly on improving the lives of trans people. While some countries do have decent laws, others do not, and medical treatment also lags significantly behind other parts of the world. However, I hope that in due course organizations like Iranti will have the time to do more research into ancient African cultures and the place of trans people within then. I found found glimpses of evidence, but so much has been destroyed by European colonialists, and of course I have no knowledge of any African languages.

That African cultures were more accepting of trans people than European ones seems fairly certain. What evidence I have got parallels similar social systems elsewhere in the world. Also it appears that acceptance of queer people of all types among African Americans was much higher than among white Americans until fairly recently. There’s lots of evidence from musicians involved in the Dirty Blues in the first half of the 20th century, for example.

One of the things that really annoys me as an historian is the tendency of cis people to completely deny the possibility of trans identities in past times. Of course there is no way that we can prove how people from the past identified, and even if we could talk to them we’d probably find that their concepts of transness don’t match entirely with our own. The ways in which trans people understand their identities vary wildly both with time and between cultures. However, it is undeniable that people did lead lives in which they maintained identities that did not correspond to their birth gender, and to insist that all such acts were masquerades and deceits seems to me to do a great disservice to those people, and to be intellectually untenable.

Which brings me to this post on the Beyond Victoriana website, which has a very strong reputation among steampunk fans. It is about Mary Jones, someone assigned male at birth who lived as a woman for much of her adult life. Personal testimony quoted in the article suggests that Jones was happy in her female identity, proud of her womanhood, and accepted by members of her community. Nevertheless, the article goes full on with the misgendering, deadnaming, freak show and deceit narrative. It is at times like this that you realize that cis people who talk about intersectionality tend to have a memory lapse about what the word means when it comes to trans women.

On The Beeb

~ Cheryl

Yesterday while I was at Ujima I got a call from BBC Radio Bristol. They wanted to do a feature on trans people on today’s John Darvall show and asked if they could have me available by phone. Obviously I said yes. The resulting show can be found on iPlayer. I’m in the first half hour, if you want to fast forward through that.

It is always interesting doing trans stuff on the mainstream media. In most ways John did a really good job of trying to be respectful, use the right language and so on. That was a vast improvement on the “born in the wrong body” train wreck they had on the morning show a few weeks ago. However, nothing’s perfect, so here are a few pointers for future shows.

First up, if the show was inspired by Tara Hudson being released from prison, why was the focus on sexuality as well as gender? That just meant that we had to spend a lot of time disabusing listeners of the idea that sexuality and gender identity are somehow the same thing.

One thing I wish I’d been able to talk about, but didn’t get the opportunity to do so, is history. John, like most Westerners, is under the impression that trans people are something new. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you look at just about any other culture through history and around the world you’ll find societies that have a place for trans people in them. Pretending that human gender is binary is an idea that Europeans came up with a few hundred years ago, and then proceeded to export to the rest of the world as part of their colonialist adventurism.

Going back to Tara, we never really got to the bottom of what went wrong. There was very little discussion of Gender Recognition Certificates, and the fact that only a fraction of people who go through gender transition have one. It is so easy to go through most of your life without one, but any interaction with government where one’s legal gender is called into question immediately centers on the birth certificate, not all of the other ID that you have got changed. It is not just a prison issue either. If you have a GRC you can get a pension at the same age as any other woman. If you don’t you’ll be treated as a man. It is also possible (though it has never been tested in court) that the loopholes in the Equality Act that allow discrimination against trans women don’t apply to someone with a GRC.

Throughout the program both John and the news reports talked about how the government is currently reviewing the regulations for housing trans people in prisons. The impression given was that this is somehow a result of what happened to Tara, Vikki Thompson and Joanne Latham. That’s not true. The guidelines officially expired in March and the Ministry of Justice had been working on a new version when Tara’s case hit the headlines. They have, to date, refused to let anyone see the new draft. They have not involved any trans organizations in the creation of that draft. And they are planning to issue it just before Christmas. I think you can guess from that which direction the new guidelines are likely to take.

The one thing that got me really annoyed was the caller, Ben, who was put on right at the end of the first hour. Everyone else had been fairly supportive, but it is an old journalist trick to let one side have their say and then, right at the end, put on someone who spouts a pile of lies, and then cut leaving those lies uncontested.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Ben had just confined himself to saying how trans people are tragic, ugly freaks, but he also actively promoted conversion therapy. There his comment crossed the line from being abusive to being dangerous, because conversion therapy kills people. There’s plenty of evidence to show that trying to bully people out of being gay or trans doesn’t work, and makes the patient unhappy, potentially suicidal. Worse, there are unscrupulous doctors who prey on religious parents and encourage them to brutalize their kids to prevent said kids “growing up gay”. Conversion therapy is illegal in California, and probably would be here too if the psychiatric profession wasn’t afraid that such a law would be twisted to prevent them from providing any treatment at all to trans people.

Thankfully the show had a long time left to run, and John came back to the topic later in the show. Fingers crossed most people who heard Ben also heard the follow-up to what he said.

All in all I thought it was a pretty good program. I get frustrated because there is so much misinformation out there that mainstream journalists just don’t want to tackle. But the media is what it is as sometimes we just have to be grateful for what we can get. It is rare to find someone who is prepared to try. So thank you, John, you were a big step forward.

How Many Deaths Does It Take?

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday the Bath Chronicle revealed that Tara Hudson is to be released from prison this week having served half of her 12-week sentence. Presumably she has been well-behaved while inside.

It didn’t take long, however, for that news to turn sour. Tara looks like she’s going to be OK, but today we learned that another trans woman has taken her own life in a male-only prison. A little over a week ago I reported the sad death of Vikki Thompson. Today we can add to that the death of Joanne Latham. In both cases the prisons service appears to have willfully ignored their own policy of showing flexibility and have adhered strictly to the rule that a Gender Recognition Certificate is required before a trans woman can be housed in a women’s prison.

Following Vikki’s death, urgent questions were asked last week in the Commons (thanks to Cat Smith, Labour) and the Lords (thanks to Liz Barker, LibDem). In both cases the Ministry of Justice simply said that Vikki’s death would be investigated, and that their guidelines are under review.

The fact of Joanne’s death is pretty clear evidence that nothing is actually being done, and that the Ministry of Justice isn’t taking the issue seriously.

To borrow a line from Oscar Wilde, To lose one inmate may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. Any more and it will look like deliberate malice.

Update: There’s a petition here. Sadly I don’t think it will do any good. the MoJ has already shown its contempt for trans people over the non-binary gender petition.

Training the Salvation Army

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Today was a day to do more trans awareness training. I do this in collaboration with Berkeley Wilde of The Diversity Trust, a non-profit company specializing in diversity issues (and of which I got asked to be a director on Saturday). Berkeley does the LGB part of the training, and I do the T.

Normally I don’t worry too much about these things. I’m used to standing up in front of an audience talking about being trans. Today was different, because our client was the Bristol office of the Salvation Army.

Yeah, these people.

Well, not exactly. The people we were training were staff from the organization’s social work division. Specifically they operate a shelter for the homeless. Legally they can’t discriminate against LGB people. Trans folk using such services are another matter because the Equality Act is crap, but I’ll spare you that rant again.

All of the people in the course were very respectful. Some of them were openly supportive. The feedback forms were unanimously positive. And they talked about trying to change the attitudes of some of their clients and colleagues. A couple of the class mentioned that they were committed Christians; one was a pastor.

Most surprisingly of all, given that Pink News article that I linked to above, they told us that their hiring processes anonymized applications so as to avoid bias. They were horrified when we told them that many companies check applicants’ social media profiles for evidence of “undesirable” traits.

Which just goes to show that you never can tell. Some of the most supportive people in the group were older women. I came away feeling quite good about humanity.

The LGBT History Showcase

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Every November Schools Out, the charity which founded LGBT History Month, has a showcase event to launch the following year. I’m not entirely sure why it is so far in advance of February, but I’m guessing that in January people are busy with preparation and the weather is bad, while in December everyone is tied up with Christmas, so late November is about the earliest they can do it.

This is my first year attending the event. It took place at Queens’ College in Cambridge, which is very nice. During the afternoon there was a marketplace where various LGBT-friendly organizations had stalls. Then in the evening there was entertainment. Being a hopeless party girl, I was mainly there for the latter. The theme of this year’s event was religion, belief and philosophy.

The hosts for the evening were Claire Mooney, a lesbian musician, and Cyril Nri, a gay actor. They are both lovely people, and they kept the evening moving smoothly.

The evening was bookended by Rev. Razia Aziz. While her family background is Muslim, she’s a non-denominational minister, making her an ideal person to do the blessings. She’s also a singer and voice coach, which was very obvious from her performance. Sufi mystics have produced some of the best poetry ever.

There was a fair amount of civic stuff to get through. The university, city and county had all signed up to the following Equality Pledge:

We believe in the dignity of all people and their right to respect and equality of opportunity. We value the strength that comes with difference and the positive contribution that diversity brings to our community. Our aspiration is for Cambridge and the wider region to be safe, welcoming and inclusive.

There was a variety of speakers on religious and philosophical issues. Robert Brown (proudly wearing his King’s Cross Steelers rugby shirt) talked about equality in Nichiren Buddhism. My friend Surat Knan gave a great talk about being trans and Jewish. Terry Weldon took on the near impossible task of representing Catholicism to LGBT people, which he did best by regaling us with scandalous tales of gay popes. Dr. Lucy Walker played us some of Benjamin Britten’s church music. Dr. Alison Ainley, from Anglia Ruskin’s philosophy department, talked about some of her favorite LGBT-friendly philosophers.

We had a little bit of film, in the form of two really great animations produced by Bobby Tiwana. They don’t appear to be online anywhere, so if you do see Bobby advertised for an event locally go along and see his films.

Another South Asian contributor was Manjinder Singh Sidhu who became an internet celebrity all over the subcontinent thanks to this amazing YouTube video in which he talks to his mum about how parents should deal with a child who comes out to them as LGB or T.

Music was provided by Mark Jennett who sang “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, a Rogers & Hammerstein song from South Pacific. Take a look at the lyrics. It is rather depressing that people could write such things in 1949 and we don’t seem to have learned anything from it.

Topping the bill was Labi Siffre, who performed his massive hit, “So Strong”. It is as much about being gay as it is about other types of civil rights. Labi also gave a short talk from a rationalist point of view, asking religious leaders who condemn LGBT people to provide evidence that we should believe in their invisible friends, and that they speak for such beings.

What a trooper too. When I was chatting with Sue on email earlier in the week she told me that Labi was unwell and had needed to go into hospital. She wasn’t expecting him to be able to make the event. And yet there he was.

Thanks are due to Sue Sanders, Tony Fenwick and the rest of the Schools Out team who put on the evening. Thanks also to Tony for starting off the evening by stressing the importance of intersectionality to LGBT rights. As he said, if you suffer from intersecting oppressions, difficult choices do have to be made. I have some sympathy with Terry Weldon, because there are times when I have to defend feminism to trans people. I can’t not be a feminist, but sometimes what is done in the name of feminism by others is utterly abhorrent.

After the event a bunch of us headed back to the hotel where the Schools Out crew were staying for a drink. And that’s how I ended up in a hotel bar chatting to Labi Siffre about science fiction. It turns out that he was a huge fan as a kid, and read just about everything that was going. These days he’s more into song writing and poetry, and doesn’t have much patience for long, rambling novels, but I shall hit him up with some recommendations anyway.

To finish up, here’s Labi, doing pretty much what I saw him do last night (except that I think last night was better).

Thoughts on Lili Elbe

~ Cheryl

A few days ago Buzzfeed ran an interview with Eddie Redmayne which suggests he has tried really hard to be respectful in his role as Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl. It’s not like he doesn’t know trans women, after all. He had a major role in Jupiter Ascending, so will have spent a lot of time with Lana Wachowski. The interview was conducted by a trans woman as well, so full marks to Buzzfeed for giving us access there.

However, no matter how good an actor is — and Eddie is very good — he can only work with the material he has been given. This article, written by someone who has seen the script, suggests that the film is going all out for the gone-too-far-fetishist angle. That’s going to make it very uncomfortable viewing.

Of course the film is based on a fictionalized version of Lili’s life, not a biography, so goodness only knows how the narrative has been twisted to fit the requirements of the cis gaze.

I don’t know what first hand accounts are available, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to read the originals. It is possible that we’ll never really know what Lili and her wife, Gerda, were like, or what they thought of each other. What we do have, however, are Gerda’s portraits of Lili. You can see some of them, and some of Gerda’s lesbian erotica, here. Bear that in mind if you find the film portraying Gerda as a betrayed heterosexual wife.

On Mental Illness

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Various things have conspired to make me think a lot about mental health issues this week, by far the most important of which is the sad news that David J Rodger, one of the authors who has read at BristolCon Fringe, took his own life on Sunday. I didn’t know David very well, though the one time I met him he seemed like a fascinating bloke whom I would have liked to know better. Other Bristol writers did know him better, and report that he had been struggling with depression for some time. There are some great obituaries online from Jo Hall and Tom Parker.

Depression is something that I know well. So is the mental unease that comes from gender dysphoria. These two combined might easily have killed me a little over 20 years ago. Instead, thanks to some good drugs, an improving medical climate for trans people, and people who loved me, I was able to embark on the journey that is gender transition.

For many people, however, mental health problems are something they feel that they can’t talk about, and perhaps can’t even ask for help over. Judging from what Jo and Tom say, David was one such person. Suicide is one of the leading killers of men, and I wish that there had been rather more talk about it last week on International Men’s Day, instead of all the MRA nonsense about the pain of being denied sex by uppity feminists.

I have just done an interview with the wonderful Emma Newman, part of which will feature on Women’s Outlook next Wednesday, and all of which I intend to put on Salon Futura in due course. Given the nature of the lead character in Planetfall, we talked about mental health issues, and the stigma surrounding them, quite a bit.

I greatly admire the courage Emma has in talking about her anxiety issues online. We are still very much in a world where any suggestion of weakness of that sort is liable to be held against you. These days, if you are applying for a job, prospective employers will comb social media for any suggestion of character flaws. HR departments, it seems, are less interested in finding someone who will be good at the job, and more interested in screening out anyone who might be seen as “difficult” in any way.

For trans people it is even harder. The medical profession might have (partially) moved away from the idea that we are all crazy, and towards the understanding that transition cures most of our mental health problems. Society has not taken the same leap. For example, this report from California shows how trans pilots are required to prove themselves sane each year, even though the FAA’s official guidelines say it is not necessary. I have similar problems with GPs, all of whom seem to be convinced that I am likely to be Overcome With REGRET! at any moment.

Of course if you are subject to regular harassment as part of your daily life, and many trans people are, you can still have mental heath problems post-transition. Last night we had the Annual General Meeting of LGBT Bristol, of which I am a trustee. The staff spoke eloquently about how many of the people they helped had complex and multiple problems to face in their lives. Not just trans, but trans, depressed and homeless, for example. I have tremendous admiration for the people who make it their day-to-day business to help such folk.

Help is available, and hopefully is improving in quality. Shortly after talking to Emma I got email inviting me to a one-day conference in Bristol in January. It is being run by Mind, and it is focused on suicide prevention for LGBT people. If it helps just one person, it is absolutely worth a day of my time being grilled about what it is like being trans.

That London – More Diverse Than You Think

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

My thanks to Caroline Mullan for pointing me to this article on the BBC website. It is reporting on the results of a DNA study by the Museum of London on human remains dating back to the founding of the city by the Romans some 2000 years ago.

By the time of the Roman conquest of Britain, the Roman Empire already stretched all the way around the Mediterranean. It included Egypt, Carthage and other African countries. The racial make-up of the soldiery, and of the slave community, was highly diverse. The people who built London, therefore, were anything but monochrome white.

And that’s not all. One of the skeletons studied, the so-called Harper Road Woman, was very unusual indeed. She was a native Briton, but although her bone structure clearly showed a female body she had a Y chromosome. This suggests that she had an intersex condition, probably Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Given the time in which she lived, she would not have known this. She would just have wondered why the gods had cursed her with infertility.

There’s another great story for my history of gender variant people.

One Final Thought On TDOR

~ Cheryl

Indian TDOR Ceremony
I wanted to post this to make it clear that the Trans Day of Remembrance is a worldwide event. India has a tradition of trans women in its society stretching back at least 2,000 years. It is hard to say how well accepted they were throughout that period, but they were most definitely there. What we do know is that the British conquest made their lives much more difficult. There were 6 trans murders in India last year, and 7 in Pakistan. Britain has to take some of the blame for that.

That picture is taken from this article on the fine Indian feminist blog, The Ladies Finger. The article, by Nadika Nadja, makes the very good point that we need a day to celebrate trans lives as well as one to mourn them. That, in theory, is what the Trans Day of Visibility is all about, but of course so many trans people have no desire to be visible. Maybe next year we can find a way of celebrating it that doesn’t make those it is supposed to be helping uncomfortable.

Reflections on TDOR

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The Lord Mayor and I
Friday began for me on Thursday night when I headed into Bristol to appear on the trans-special edition of ShoutOut. I was expecting to be talking about the Trans Day of Remembrance, but as it turned out it was more important to cover the Vicky Thompson story.

Also on the show was an extended interview with two of the show’s other trans staff: Steffi and Tara. In it Steffi is reminiscing about the days when the only support groups available to transsexuals were cross-dresser clubs. Transsexuals are people like Steffi and myself who identify as female, and who wish to transition as fully as possible. Cross-dressers generally identify as male, and perform femininity either as a hobby, or as an act of some sort (e.g. as drag queens).

Steffi tells a story about going on a trip to Atlanta with other cross-dressers and their wives. The wives, she reports, hated the few transsexuals in the group. I’m not surprised. For the most part, contact with a transsexual isn’t going to somehow infect a cross-dresser and make him want to transition fully. However, back then many transsexuals were heavily closeted and, as gay men used to do, had married because it was expected of them. Experimenting with cross-dressing was often the way in which trans women found themselves, and came to understand what they needed to do to live happy and fulfilled lives.

Also back then there was no same-sex marriage, and the gender clinics expected trans women to identify as heterosexual. Indeed they might throw you off the treatment program if you said you were a lesbian. There was no expectation that a couple of who loved each other would stay together through transition, as for example Jan Morris and her partner have done.

These days, one hopes, with kids transitioning as young as they can, this sort of issue is quickly becoming a thing of the past. People who need to transition can do so, and meeting female transsexuals should no longer be seen as a threat by the wives of cross-dressers. I hope so. We are all women, after all.

You can listen to the whole show on podcast here.

I stayed with Paulette overnight, because there was no way I was going to get to City Hall for 8:30 the following morning otherwise. The Lord Mayor duly raised the trans flag, and gave a lovely speech in favor of trans rights (thanks Clare!). She had even managed to catch up on the Vicky Thompson story. Rachel Dinning, a journalism student from UWE whom I expect to see on TV one day, recorded a lot of audio, some of which will probably find its way onto ShoutOut at some point. The lad that Rachel brought along to take photos is responsible for the picture above. My thanks to the City Council and to the Lord Mayor for making this happen. There are not many cities in the UK that mark TDOR in this way.

ITV had promised to send a reporter to cover the event. He was half an hour late (Bristol traffic is dreadful), but I knew he was coming so I was able to hang around and talk to him. I have no idea whether any of what I said was broadcast, but I hope that if it was they used the bit where I called upon David Cameron to remove Andrew Selous from his post as Minister for Prisons so that LGBT people can have confidence in the fairness of the system.

After that it was off to the Ujima offices where I was due to be interviewed by another UWE journalism student. I spent well over half an hour chatting to Richard. Some of that will eventually go on a website that he is building as part of his final year project. I’ll let you know when it is up.

There was no point in going home, so I had lunch in Stokes Croft and took in Chris Hubley’s art exhibition at Hamilton House. There is some really good stuff in there, and is free, so do pop in if you can. Doing art in this way, like being a writer, allows trans people to gain recognition for things other than being trans, which has to be a good thing.

After that I hid away in a coffee shop, fed my little electronic pals, and tried to forget about dead people for a while. I drafted a review of Cat Valente’s Radiance, which I shall post when I have stopped being scared that I have failed to do it justice.

I popped into Forbidden Planet on the way up to the University to see if they had a physical copy of Batgirl #45. That’s the one with Alysia Yeoh’s wedding in it. I’m pleased to say that they did.

And so at last we came to the main event of the day. Jamie Cross, the Students’ Union Equalities Officer, had booked the Anson Rooms for us. That’s the concert space in the Students’ Union building. It is large. We didn’t use the stage, but we used most of the floor space. The audience must have been at least 80 people.

When I first started doing TDOR events in Bristol we were about 10 people gathered around a table in City Hall (or the Council House as it was back then). Clearly there has been a huge change since then. Had I still been doing it by myself it would probably still be 10 people. The fact that it isn’t is down to two people. Firstly there is Sarah-Louise Minter from LGBT Bristol. She provided some finance so that we can have refreshments and flowers. LGBT Bristol also paid for the venue hire last year. The venue this year, and the size of the crowd, is down to Jamie. I am very grateful to both of them for allowing us to have such a great event this year.

I am also very grateful to Charlie Oxborough, the President of the University’s LGBT+ Society. She’s a languages student specializing in Spanish so she is far better qualified than I am to read the names of the dead. Getting people’s names right is an important point of showing respect.

Because in previous years I had been reading the list of names I hadn’t really got the full effect of the ceremony. Listening to Charlie really brought it home to me just how many names were on it. The list seemed to go on forever. Reading it is so much easier, at least for me.

Finally I should thank the audience, who came from over the region. Students came in from UWE, the city’s other university. Some of the Tara Hudson campaign team came over from Bath. There were people from Bristol Pride, and from various local trans groups. Perhaps most importantly there were people from Freedom Youth, the city’s LGBT Youth Group.

While Charlie and I did most of the talking, I did ask members of the audience to come forward if they had something they wanted to say. Four people did, for which I am very grateful. Again it made it much more of a community event, not just me making an exhibition of myself.

I have always felt quite uneasy leading a TDOR ceremony. That’s partly because years ago I attended one in San Francisco. There the ceremony is led by people who are directly at risk, and may even have friends on the list of the dead. That changes the tone of the whole event. Even in Bristol I lead a fairly safe life. Of the four people who came forward to speak, one walks with a stick, one uses a wheelchair, one is 17 years old, and one is just 13. They know far more of the reality of discrimination than I do.

Hopefully in another year or so there will be a thriving network of trans groups in the Bristol and Bath area, putting on events and doing political activism. Then there will be people keen to lead the ceremony themselves and they can put the old lady out to grass.

Here’s a photo from the event, which I believe was taken by Daryn Carter from Bristol Pride.

The Lord Mayor and I

More Flowers, More Tears

~ Cheryl

RIP Vikki Thompson

The memorial you see above is for Vikki Thompson, a young British trans woman who took her own life last week.

Details of the case are still sketchy, but there is a memorial group for Vikki on Facebook. According to a post on that group, when Vikki died she was in Armley Jail for men, Leeds. That is, she was in exactly the same peril that Tara Hudson faced just a couple of weeks ago. Unlike Tara, her friends and family were unable to save her in time.

This is why we fight. This is why we will not shut up.

Rest in Peace, Vikki. You will not be forgotten.

From the memorial group:

Please join us on Sunday 22 November 2015 Centenary Square Bradford 11 am. There will be a minutes silence for her at 12 o clock.

Update: Post edited to correct the spelling of Vikki’s name.

And Another Thing…

~ Cheryl

If Germaine Greer really wanted to complain about feminists being censored then she would take note of the UK Government’s plans to remove all mention of feminism from the A Level Politics syllabus. Yes, that’s right, one of the most important political movements of our time, and high school students in the UK will not be taught about it in their politics classes.

It is even possible that Greer is one of the prominent feminist thinkers whose work might be taught in such lessons. But is she complaining about this? Not a peep, as far as I can see. After all, objecting to government policy is so much less fun than bullying a minority group. Nor will it get her fat fees for TV and newspaper appearances.

I, however, am a feminist. Unlike Ms. Greer, I will be taking the opportunity to raise the issue, not only here, but also on my radio show next week.

Petition here for those so inclined.

Lies, Damned Lies and Germaine Greer

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Many of you will have heard how Germaine Greer was viciously censored by a howling mob of trans women, and banned from speaking at Cardiff University this month. (I quote, for example, “Germaine Greer is banned from speaking to students”, from an article in Saturday’s Times). Here’s what actually happened.

Firstly, Cardiff University did not cancel the lecture. Greer withdrew, so that she could then go running to the media claiming that she had been prevented from speaking. She got a lot of TV time, and articles in newspapers about her almost every day since. She also rescheduled the talk for yesterday. I suspect that having it during Trans Awareness Week had always been the plan. When she was complaining that she was being prevented from speaking she claimed that the talk would be nothing to do with trans women, and yet from this Guardian report it seems as if it was very much about us.

Nevertheless, I expect to continue to see newspaper articles claiming that her talk was cancelled and that she has been prevented from expressing her opinions. When you have that level of access to the media, you can get them to say what you want. And still claim that you are being censored while doing so.

On the plus side, her opinions are so foul and irrational that all of this publicity might be doing us a lot of good.

TWOC Girls On Film

~ Cheryl

Trans Day of Resilience

Today in Trans Awareness Week I have news of two film projects about trans women of color.

First up the film MAJOR!, about the life of Miss Major, premiered in San Francisco on Friday. I dropped a fair amount of cash on the Kickstarter for this one because having had the honor of meeting Miss Major I very much wanted to see it happen. Obviously I couldn’t go to the screening, though the production company did do a lovely thing of encouraging people to buy tickets and donate them to poor trans women of color, so Kevin and I did have tickets to the event. Someone who did go is Jules Vilmur, a woman whose trans daughter committed suicide at 17. Jules writes movingly about the experience here.

Also there is a fundraising campaign in progress for post-production on a film about Marsha P Johnson, one of the best known trans women at the Stonewall riot. Sylvia Rivera is also a character in the film. The trailer they have on the campaign page looks very good. As I saw someone say on Twitter, this is what the Stonewall film ought to have been like.

Finally there’s a great article about 19th and early 20th Century trans women over at Autostraddle. Some them are featured in the film, Paris in Burning, and if you are European Coccinelle is actually pretty well known, but the rest I had never heard of. It is a fascinating read.

The illustration for this post is from an art project featured here. The picture I have chosen to use is by B Parker of BreakOUT!.

271 Trans people have been killed as a result of transphobic hate crimes in the last 12 months. Almost all of them were women of color.

Trans Awareness Week Begins

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Jean Grey
This week is going to be very busy for me, and quite emotional towards the end when we get to the Trans Day of Remembrance. However, we have started off on a brighter note with an article I wrote for The Gay YA. I don’t really know much about modern YA, so when they asked me to write something I decided to take a trip down memory lane and say thank you to the girl who was my big sister and role model during my teenage years.

Thanks Jeanie, you were awesome.

Trans Geek Movie – Final Day

~ Cheryl

We are into the final day of the Kickstarter campaign for the Trans Geek Movie. This is a bit of a relief for me, because it means I will be able to wake up in the morning without worrying that I’ll see pictures of me on Facebook. However, the campaign hasn’t yet reached its goal. That probably means they’ll have to try again, which means more pictures of me on social media. You can stop this madness, people. All you have to do is back the project, now!