TransGender Europe have released their official data for known transphobic murders over the past 12 months. The total is 271. That compares to 226 last year, and 238 in 2013. One of the biggest increases is in the USA where deaths have shot up from 10 last year to 27 this year. As always, the vast majority of victims are female-identified and people of color.
Further details are available here.
I spent most of Sunday and Monday in Wales because my colleague, Berkeley, and I were speaking at a conference on trans issues organized by Youth Cymru. It was being held in Port Talbot, which as all Welsh people know is famous primarily for the steel works. However, that’s not all there is to the town. Nearby is Margam Park, formerly a Cistercian Abbey and, following Henry VIII knocking it about a bit, a stately home. It is now a fabulous resource for local people. We took over The Orangery, pictured above. It was very splendid, and just the sort of place to educate various government and voluntary sector people about trans issues.
We got to spend the night in Twelve Knights, a lovely old pub with guest rooms and super-friendly staff. I think my room was bigger than the place where I live. Good food too.
The weather on Monday morning was quite wild. It was just as well that it was cold because I bet the surf was up at Porthcawl.
The conference had a whole bunch of high profile speakers, including my friend Debs from Mermaids; the fabulous Bernard & Terry from GIRES (who were in Twelve Knights with us); Sally Holland, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales; and topping the bill Fox and Lewis from Lucky Tooth Films. Those guys are super-awesome. Fox had flown home from Prague on Sunday night, but he and Lewis were up at 6:00am to drive from Brighton to give a talk.
We were all given headsets so we could listen to live translations of the parts of the programme that were given in Welsh.
Then there was the amazing Fran O’Hara who created illustrations for the talks live as they were happening. Here’s part of her illustration for Fox & Lewis.
The day ended with a live performance of Humanequin, a theatre piece by four young trans men and created with the aid of theatre company, Mess Up The Mess. I understand that other local trans kids were involved in creating it, and have performed in it elsewhere, but only the four lads were able to get time off to be at the conference,
It was all very positive, and I’m very proud to have been a part of it. And especially proud because it was in Wales.
Special thanks go to Rachel Benson who organized the whole thing. Diolch am bopeth, Rachel.
The “Drop the T” petition that I mentioned yesterday, which seeks to dissociate LGB people from those awful, disgusting trans folk, is causing quite a stir. Pink News had to disable comments on their report because of the level of anti-trans hate speech being posted there. If you feel that your brain needs a wash with bile there are screen grabs in Sarah Brown’s Twitter feed. It is good to know that there are plenty of people out there who are certain that I “claim to be transgender” in order to go into women’s toilets and rape lesbians. And yes, those comments are primarily from gay men.
Of course having a petition to throw trans people out of the LGBT community isn’t censorship. Petitions are only censorship when someone uses them to object to transphobic hate speech.
Some of the various campaigning LGBT organizations appealed to by the petition have come out strongly against it. The Human Rights Campaign described the petition as “unequivocally wrong” while GLAAD said that it “stands firmly with the transgender community”.
Meanwhile a counter-petition has been launched stating:
We find the petition by ‘Drop the T’ to be insulting, inaccurate and transphobic and we want to make it clear that this narrow group of people do not speak for the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.
I am, of course, expecting a counter-counter-petition from groups who feel that they are excluded by the LGBTQ+ term.
Currently the Drop the T petition has 1192 supporters while the counter petition has 458, though the former has been online a lot longer.
If you are wondering what sparked this sudden flurry of community in-fighting, it is probably the decision by voters in Houston to scrap equal rights protections for LGBT people, mainly because of a successful campaign by right-wingers who painted the law as allowing male sexual predators (that is, trans women) to enter women’s toilets and rape people. Some LGB people are reacting to this by desperately trying to dissociate themselves from trans folk because they regard us as a liability. Charming.
However, before we get all outraged about this, let’s remember that it works both ways. In looking for news reports about the petition I quickly found a fairly recent piece in Metro by a trans guy who wants to dissociate himself from all this pervy sexuality stuff.
Humans. Sigh.
Today I was in Bath to do some more training for Julian House, a charity for the homeless. Berkeley Wilde of Diversity Trust and I had done a couple of days work with their staff a few weeks ago, and we got such a good report that I was asked to come and talk at a meeting of their board of directors today.
My slot was in the middle of a planning retreat. The way it was structured was that during the lunch break a small number of people were made available to tell their life stories. The directors got to sit and listen to a couple of these tales each. It is a format based on the idea of the “human library” in which people take the parts of talking books, and visitors to the event come and listen to them.
I have been invited to human library events before and have always declined, partly because I find the whole thing a bit creepy, and partly because if you are doing this in a public space anyone could come up and listen to you, which for trans folk may not be very safe. However, this was different. I was there to talk to people about being trans, and the audience was expecting some fairly unusual life histories.
Being a book when you are normally a writer is a strange experience. I had to resist the temptation to get meta, but I did worry a lot about how much of a genre stereotype I came over as. The trans autobiography is most definitely a thing, and I worried a lot that my own story was far too close to the standard narrative. Still, you do what you can. I got to tell a small number of strangers that Kevin saved my life, which made me happy.
I see from the news that “transgender” came second in this year’s Word of the Year contest, meaning that it was the word seeing the second-biggest increase in usage. I’m certainly seeing a tremendous amount of interest, and of course a lot more trans people are getting into the media. On the downside there is an increasingly shrill and desperate backlash from the likes of Greer and her pals, leading to bizarre campaigns such as this one asking to remove the T from LGBT.
The petition had originally claimed that trans people were guilty of sexual abuse of children:
https://twitter.com/auntysarah/status/662325926382936065
but it has since been toned down a little from that. On the other hand, it does have the enthusiastic support of a prominent G*merG*te leader. They also support Greer, of course. Funny how that works.
By the way, the accusations of child abuse these days generally centre around the fact that the majority of kids who express gender-variant behavior during childhood do grow out of it, though many of them end up being gay or lesbian. The TERF claim is that by providing gender services for kids we are forcing huge numbers of children who don’t need it through gender reassignment. This is completely untrue. Much of the point of treating kids is to find out who needs medical intervention and who doesn’t. Not every case is the same. Saying that you should ban gender treatment for kids because the majority who display possible symptoms don’t need it is rather like saying you should ban treatment for pneumonia because the majority of people with similar symptoms only have a cold or flu.
Anyway, on with the work. Tomorrow I get to try to catch up with email. On Sunday Berkeley and I are off to Bridgend where we are speaking at a conference about trans people on Monday. It will be good to get back to Wales, even if only for a day.
I was in charge of the Women’s Outlook show on Ujima again today. My first guest was Sara Zaltash who, like me, has performed at Sanctum. She’s one of those brave people who have been performing there in the middle of the night. And if you think that a trans woman reading science fiction stories is off the wall, just wait until you hear what Sara was doing.
Sara’s parents are Iranian, so along side discussion of her Sanctum performance we chatted about the issue of women’s rights in Iran. That was with reference to this article in yesterday’s Telegraph. I did rather like the idea that women in Iran are getting round laws about being their husbands’ property by refusing to get married. Of course personally I think the solution is to bring back Ishtar worship, but I can see that might be a bit unpopular in some quarters.
After Sara my next guest was Chris Hubley, a local artist who is staging an exhibition of work by trans artists as part of Trans Awareness Month (which November is). That includes a fundraiser party on the 13th at which I might be reading a bit of poetry. Chris and I talked a bit about the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) and how we both want trans people to be known for things other than being tragic. You can find out more about the events Chris is organizing here.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
Chris had to rush off to catch a bus to London, but before he went we had a brief chat about the Tara Hudson case. Chris explains why he doesn’t have a Gender Recognition Certificate. If the Ministry of Justice were being consistent they should hold that, were Chris to commit a crime, he should be sent to a women’s prison. My guess, though, is that it wouldn’t happen. The trouble with the MoJ Guidelines is that they are based on the assumption that the primary goal is to protect the other inmates from the trans person, not the other way around. Trans women, because they are still seen as men by the MoJ, are deemed a danger to other women prisoners. Trans men are also seen as men by the MoJ, and therefore also deemed to belong in men’s prisons.
That only took up 15 minutes as Chris had to go, so in the next slot I brought in Paulette and our new colleague, Zuzana, who were just back from a trip to Calais to deliver supplies to the refugee camp there. They will have a much fuller report on the trip in tomorrow’s Outlook show. It sounds like it will be well worth a listen.
In the final segment of the show I ran a pre-recorded interview with Tade Thompson about his new novel, Making Wolf. Tade and I talk a lot about the background to the novel, which is set in an imaginary country carved off from Nigeria after the civil war. There’s a lot of great material in there.
You can listen to the second half of the show here.
The playlist for the show was as follows:
I am particularly grateful to Sara for introducing me to Mahsa and Sam. I was also very pleased to be able to music by a trans woman of color during our discussion of TDOR.
I’m going to be on Paulette’s education show briefly tomorrow morning. She’s interviewing Roger Griffith and I about performing at Sanctum was how/whether our various educational backgrounds prepared us for being writers. That will be between 10:00 and 11:00.
Thanks to Farah Mendlesohn I was invited to give a talk at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. That was yesterday, and I was very pleased with how it went. We had about 80 people, and many of them were very kind to me afterwards. It is always good to know that you entertained people.
I was half expecting the local TERFs to turn up. However, some bright spark at the festival managed to program them against me. Julia Long (who is one of the small band of TERFs who picketed the London Dyke March to protest against Sarah Brown being allowed to speak) was doing a talk on pornography that overlapped with mine. If all she was doing was complain about 50 Shades of Grey then she has my full support, but I rather suspect that the main thrust of her talk was full on Beyoncé hate, and the general tone anti-sex and anti-feminine.
What we did have was an old school transgender person who tried to troll the talk by nit-picking my use of language and claiming that I was excluding transgender people. There’s lots I could say about this, but I don’t want to bore you with trans community politics. Here are a few quick points.
It is impossible to maintain a rigid separation of meaning between “sex” and “gender” now that “transgender” has become an umbrella term for the whole community and terms like “gender identity” and “gender surgery” are used in talking about transsexuals.
If blurring the line between “sex” and “gender” means that I’m erasing the existence of people who identify as transgender as opposed to transsexual, doesn’t that mean I’m erasing myself as well?
Claiming that I only talked about transsexuals is an outright lie.
I have little time for people who try to police trans identities by insisting on narrow definitions of what it means to be trans and strict language use, and I have absolutely zero time for people who deliberately set out to wreck a trans-positive public event using such tactics.
I’m afraid that the talk wasn’t recorded in full, though I think some of it was videoed. However, my talk at the University of Liverpool from earlier this year is still online.
Several people asked for a reading list, so here it is:
Please note that this talk was about how science fiction and fantasy books have speculated about gender. Not all of the books listed above include trans characters, and some that do are problematic in various ways. The Liverpool talk addresses some of those issues. Also I have reviews of many of the books both on this site and at Emerald City. There’s also this essay, which is five years old now and probably needs updating.
The list also includes books by trans authors that may not be SF&F or contain trans characters.
My essay for Strange Horizons on writing better trans characters is here. I also recommend this essay by Vee on The Gay YA.
And finally, for those of you who came to the pub after the talk, the Wonderella cartoon that Kevin sent me that I was so amused by is this one. I am so going to use that head-explody panel in a slide pack at some point.
I’m having a very busy weekend, but before rushing off to Cambridge to do my talk I wanted to say thank you to all of you who signed the Tara Hudson petition. As you may have heard, the Ministry of Justice finally relented and moved Tara to a women’s prison yesterday afternoon. I would not have happened without the thousands of you who signed that petition. Thank you!
The above is the Twitter storm that we need going between 10:00 and 13:00 UK time tomorrow.
For those of you who can’t see the image, it is: #ISEETARA – WHY DON’T YOU @MOJGOVUK?
(Please note updated Twitter handle for MoJ.)
Oh, and for anyone who doesn’t yet know what this is all about (because I do have an international readership), there’s an explanation here. Tara’s sentence is being appealed at Bristol Crown Court tomorrow and we are very much hoping for a sensible resolution to this travesty of justice.
Jane Fae has been in touch with Tara Hudson’s family and has written a harrowing piece for Gay Star News about what life is like for Tara inside Horfield Prison.
Elsewhere Pink News has the story of an elderly trans woman who is being denied her pension because she didn’t think she needed a Gender Recognition Certificate and so is being treated as a man by the government.
I’m seeing lots of trans people on social media who are very traumatized by the whole thing because they can see this sort of thing happening to them. Personally I’m not doing too bad because my birth certificate does say I’m female. However, I also have personal experience of being victimized by a government bureaucracy that tried me and found me guilty of a crime they won’t even explain to me, let alone allow me to defend myself on.
So here’s what worries me. It is entirely possible that some future government could decide to rescind the Gender Recognition Act and insist that all trans people should go back to living in the gender they were assigned at birth. I don’t think it is likely, but it isn’t impossible either. When I hear politicians saying that they want to scrap the Human Rights Act, this is the sort of thing I expect to come afterwards.
See, I knew I could rely on the Bristol LGBT Community.
There will be a rally tomorrow at Bristol Crown Court. The address is Small St, Bristol BS1 1DA. Please be there from 10:00am onwards if you can.
And film it, people, we are making history here. I want archive material.
Sadly I won’t be there. I have to head to London to do an interview, after which I’m staying with Farah and going on to the Cambridge event on Saturday. But I will be hanging on social media hoping for good news.
Full details of the event are on Facebook.
Update: London folks, rally in support of Tara in Westminster at Noon tomorrow. Details here.
This Saturday I will be in Cambridge giving a talk titled Challenging the Gender Binary through Science Fiction and Fantasy. The talk will be followed by a conversation between Farah Mendlesohn and myself. Full details here. Farah tells me that they have over 70 bookings, which is very heartwarming. And it is free. If you are anywhere near Cambridge, do come.
Most of yesterday was spent either on social media or on the phone. It was a relief to have an excuse to get out of the house and go and listen to Juliet Jacques, who was in Bristol as part of the Festival of Ideas. Juliet has a new book out: Trans: A Memoir. Those of you who enjoyed her Transgender Journey columns in The Guardian will love this too. She’s a sharp, incisive and often very witty writer. And she hasn’t done the traditional trans autobiography thing by any means.
My thanks to Juliet for a great evening, and to Andrew and Zoe of the Festival of Ideas for putting on a very successful trans-themed event.
Well, what a couple of days this has been!
On the one hand, there is still real worry for Tara. We understand that she is in Horfield Prison. She’s probably being held in solitary confinement for her own safety. It must be awful.
On the other hand, the petition in her support is closing in on 65,000 signatures as I type. In the meantime all of this has happened.
Ben Howlett, the MP for Bath, has been busy pigeonholing his colleagues in the Ministry of Justice and putting pressure on them to do something.
Rather briefly I was down to appear on the BBC’s local news program, Points West. Thankfully for the people of South-West England, they managed to get Ben instead.
I had this article about the flaws in Britain’s gender recognition laws published in Bristol 24/7.
That earned me a phone call with a journalist from the Telegraph, which resulted in this article where CN Lester and I give the existing laws (and the Gender Recognition Panel) a good kicking. Thanks Radhika, great job!
Meanwhile Ben was raising Tara’s case in the latest session of the Transgender Equality Inquiry. I suspect that Caroline Dinenage was very relieved to be able to hide behind an excuse of sub judice. There may be stern words passed down to the Bath magistrates court.
Also Tara’s lawyers have been busy. Her sentence will be appealed. The hearing will be in Bristol Crown Court on Friday. Sadly I’ll be on my way to London then, but I suspect that a large part of the Bristol LGBT community will turn up. I’m leaving this in the capable hands of Ceri Caramél, the remarkable young woman running Tara’s petition, and Daryn Carter of Bristol Pride.
We have no idea how much information is getting into Horfield. Probably not a lot, but hopefully Tara’s lawyers have been in to tell her what is going on. It would not surprise me to see her on national news on Friday. Yesterday I was hoping she’d get moved to a women’s prison. Such is the outpouring of support for her in the country that I’m now hoping that her sentence will be commuted to something non-custodial.
If you want to send a message of support to Tara you can do so here. She can’t get email, obvious, but Ceri and her friends are collecting all of the messages and will deliver them as soon as possible.
When I was a kid my father used to read the Telegraph every day. He gave up on it during Margaret Thatcher’s government because he found it too right wing. And now here I am watching a Tory MP and the Telegraph helping lead a campaign for trans rights. You could knock me down with a feather.
I spent this afternoon at a police station in Bristol. Nothing terrible has happened. I was doing trans awareness training for the LGBT Group of Avon & Somerset Police. They are lovely people, all LGB-identified themselves, and very keen to know how they can better help any trans people that they encounter during the course of their work. It is really heartwarming to know that there are friendly, supportive people in the local police force whom I can go to if I am in trouble.
My thanks are due to my pal Annabelle Armstrong-Walter who organized the training and ran the LGB site of things, and the the folks at Diversity Trust through whom I do all of my trans training work.
Coppers the world over seem to be fond of the odd glass of beer, and after the training they dragged me off to the pub. While we were there a very practical example of what I had been talking about turned up. The Bristol Post published this article about a local trans woman who has been sentenced to 12 weeks detention in a male prison. My trainees were uniformly horrified that this could happen, but the case very clearly highlights the shortcomings of UK law on trans issues as it currently stands.
Because most mainstream journalists are clueless when it comes to trans issues the reports in the papers are not a lot of help. Until people get back to work in the morning I won’t know the full facts of the case. However, it is pretty clear that Tara Hudson identifies as a woman, lives as a woman, and has had some medical treatment to help her to do so.
In most cases trans people have no need to make any legal change to their paperwork. You can change your name just by saying you have done so; bank accounts and the like should not require any sort of legal document (though many do and something more official can be obtained very cheaply). However, when it comes to interaction with the legal system, you do have a legal gender. For most purposes that is the gender specified on your birth certificate. That can be changed by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate. If you have not done that, then the courts will still treat you as the gender that you were assigned at birth, no matter how long ago you transitioned or what medical treatment you have had.
The trouble is that the Gender Recognition Act is woefully unfit for purpose. It does nothing for non-binary people or intersex people (neither of whom have any legal existence under UK law); it does nothing for people under the age of 18; and it even fails many people who have transitioned because for various reasons they do not wish, or are unable, to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate.
A large part of the problem is the expense and bureaucratic nightmare involved in making the application. The behavior of the Gender Recognition Panel, a group of cisgender people whose job it is to oversee applications, is also a major problem. I’ve heard horror stories about people having their applications questioned or rejected for fairly trivial reasons.
As I said above, I don’t have the full facts of Tara’s case (in large part because “things written in tabloid newspapers” and “facts” tend to have very little overlap). What I can say is as follows:
1. If Tara does have a Gender Recognition Certificate then the Magistrates’ Court in Bath has made a very serious mistake.
2. The Prison Service is not daft — it has encountered issues like this before — and there are protocols that should be gone through before Tara’s sentence is finalized.
3. Although Tara did plead guilty, it is not clear whether a custodial sentence was mandatory. Given what Tara’s mother has told the press, I’m guessing that Tara’s lawyer did not think it was. This may be another avenue to explore.
I hope to have more to report tomorrow, but it is another busy day as in the evening I have to be at Waterstones in Bristol for Juliet Jacques’ signing tour. I rather suspect that this case will be a topic of conversation there too.
In the meantime, I would be very grateful if as many of you as possible could sign this petition.
My Twitter feed is abuzz at the moment because international best-selling YA author, James Dawson, has just come out as trans. Reading the excellent interview on Buzzfeed (well done, Patrick Strudwick), I recognize of lot of the things Dawson says about himself. I wish him the very best of luck on the journey he had just begun.
Dawson explains in the interview that he’s keeping his male name and pronouns for now. He’s only just had his first interview at a gender clinic and there’s a long way to go before he’ll be happy presenting in public as female. However, he’s made the announcement now because, as a very high profile writer, he has a full diary of public engagements stretching well into next year. People will notice the changes as hormones start to work their magic. That’s a really tough gig.
However, looking at Dawson’s Twitter feed, it is just full of people from the YA community making happy, supportive comments. I got quite teary-eyed reading it all. Doubtless the media will soon be full of stories about the threat to Britain’s children, but many people will be far more horrified by that than anything Dawson could do. Slowly but surely, the world is becoming a better place.
Laverne Cox will be starring as Frank-N-Furter in a new television remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, but I have a great deal of faith in Laverne so I suspect it will be awesome. Anyway, how can you go wrong with a show like that?
BBC Radio Bristol recently ran a couple of trans-themed interviews. I wasn’t on them, but my friend Dru Marland was and she had some thoughts about the process here. Dru makes a number of good points that I would like to follow up on.
The first thing worth noting is the “born in the wrong body” narrative. The BBC Bristol presenters made a lot of use of this but, as Dru says, it is often used unthinkingly, and inappropriately. By no means every trans person wants to modify their body, nor indeed has any issue with their body. If your definition of trans extends to include intersex folks then their point is often that they very much don’t want anything done to their bodies. Also the whole idea that trans people should hate their bodies acts to push people towards surgical options when they may not want them. We are trying to get away from that situation, not encourage it.
Then there’s the question of the upbeat message. The trouble with people only ever hearing about you as a victim is that they will only ever view you with pity, not with respect. Of course it is absolutely true that many trans people have terrible lives, and we want to make them better. But you have to believe that they can be better.
All too often trans people are portrayed as hapless victims who will always need help. And that tends to discourage people from seeking help. When I first came out to my family many of them were convinced that I was ruining my life and would soon be dead. To be honest, I wasn’t that confident myself. But my living happily and moderately successfully for two decades since then I have proved those fears wrong. There’s no doubt that I would be much better off had I been able to avoid transition, but had I tried I probably would have ended up a suicide statistic.
Which brings me neatly on to the “trans people are so brave” narrative. Really, we are not. As Dru says, that suggests that we go into this voluntarily. Trust me, we don’t. We do this because we have to, and because the alternative of not doing it is worse.
To a certain extent being trans in the media is a bit like being someone who has broken their leg, but is now fit again, being interviewed about what it is like to have a broken leg. You’d much rather say how nice it is to be able to walk again, but the interviewer only wants to talk about how horrible it was for you when you couldn’t.
Then again, as Dru also notes, transition is not an end to trans people’s problems. After transition we have a whole load of different issues to deal with. Most of us cope somehow, but these are things that could be solved if only other people would stop being so shitty to us. Interviewers don’t want to talk about that, they want to talk about being “in the wrong body” and about transition, because those are the things that fascinate cis folks, not boring old discrimination.
However, not all media people are just out to exploit us. I happen to know, Laura Rawlings, one of the presenters on BBC Bristol’s breakfast show. We’ve met each other at events in town, and chatted on Twitter when they are covering science fiction. We ended up having a long phone conversation earlier this week about how they had handled the trans interviews they did, and how they might have been doing better. Being in the media myself, I hope I was able to suggest ways in which their coverage could have been better, both for trans people, and as journalism. Laura, of course, can’t promise anything. She has to work with her producer, her co-presenter, and so on. But hopefully I have at least made a start.
That reminds me of something Paris Lees said on Twitter the other day. When she and her colleagues were setting up All About Trans, a group that seeks to actively encourage positive media coverage of trans issues, they asked their media contacts where they got their information about trans people. “From the media,” was the answer. Because there was no other quick and easy way for them to get it.
Here’s the thing, then. We need better stories about trans people in the media. We are not going to get them if we just sit back and wait for them to come and ask us questions. We need to be proactively involved. That can be behind the scenes, as is often the case with Fox & Lewis, or it can be in front of the camera, as is the case with Paris.
There’s a slogan being used by trans media activists these days: “Nothing about us without us.” I think that’s wise, but it means we have to put work in, and it means we have to produce good drama and journalism as a result. We also have to be aware of the need to at least acknowledge the wider trans community, even if we can’t represent it all, because our experiences and needs are so very different. These things are not easy.
Making movies can take a long time, especially when you don’t have a huge budget. Back in 2012 I was interviewed for something called Trans*Geek Movie. After three years, and some 60 hours of interviews, the folks behind the film are finally on the last lap and have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money needed for the final few interviews and post-production. This is, of course, also a good way of pre-ordering your copy of the film (and trust me it will not be coming to a cinema near you). It should be a very important cultural document, particularly in view of all of the nonsense that has gone on around trans women in the gaming community in the years since I did my interview.
With any luck, the bits with me in won’t make the final cut, but if you want to have a good laugh at how horrible I look on film, and also listen to some very smart other trans people talk about their work, you can see a series of clips from the early interviews here.
The latest edition of the StarShipSofa podcast includes an interview with a trans woman, Serah Eley. Tony Smith kindly gave me a preview of this one and I found it fascinating. Unlike me, Serah came into her understanding of her trans identity quite late in life. Her experience is just as valid as mine, but it is one that is only rarely seen in media coverage of trans issues. So well done to Tony and Serah for doing this interview. I hope it helps dispel some stereotypes.
As Twitter followers will know, I spent today in London at an event run by the Government Equalities Office. They wanted to hear from trans activists about our thoughts on the media. Interesting, you would have thought.
Of course the event was in London, and started early enough in the morning to ensure that anyone coming from outside the city either had to pay a fortune in peak hour fares or get a hotel room for the previous night. Even then the fares aren’t cheap. I wouldn’t have been able to go if I wasn’t able to stay with friends (thanks Karo & Tommi), and if LGBT Bristol hadn’t offered to help with the cost. Now I’m feeling guilty about putting in an expenses claim, because the event was a total waste of my time.
That wasn’t because of the government people, who spent the morning either listening respectfully or asking useful questions. Nor was it the fault of Vicky from the LGBT Consortium who organized the meeting. Rather it was because of the relentlessly negative attitude of some of the other attendees.
OK, I know I don’t have much experience of talking to national government. But here are a few things I would think are obvious.
1. If you are asked to provide some positive suggestions of ways forward, don’t spent the entire time moaning about things that don’t work, especially if the things you are moaning about are things that the civil servants you are talking to can’t do much about.
2. If other people put forward positive suggestions, don’t immediately jump on them and dismiss those suggestions.
3. If you are lucky enough to have a local authority offering significant amounts of money for trans people to take a role in local decision-making, don’t tell the national government people that the initiative in question is a waste of time because trans people don’t come forward to take part.
The first half of the morning was actually quite good. We went through the really quite heartwarming amount of media coverage of trans people that is going on. Only yesterday it was announced that a trans actor was being cast in a trans part in Eastenders. That’s huge. Of course there are always things that can be done better, but the improvement over the last few years (basically since My Transsexual Summer aired) has been dramatic.
There were good points made by people like Jane Fae that the national media isn’t making programs for trans people, it is making them for cis people. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t tweak the language, and the narratives, to present trans people in a better light. Sense8 did this very well, and Jane herself came up with some great ideas for how trans characters in soaps could be involved in trans-related plots without everything having to be a transition story.
I was also pleased to see that some people had noticed that the US media do a rather better job on diversity than the UK does, rather than just assume that British is Best. More of this later.
The second half of the morning was where Vicky wanted us to come up with some ideas for going forward, and it was moan, moan, moan, moan, moan, moan, moan, moan, moan.
Sometimes that’s the only thing you can do. Meetings with the NHS tend to go that way. That’s partly because we are talking directly to the people responsible for treating us appallingly, and partly because there’s nothing much we can do to work around the issue. The media situation is different.
I quite understand that people like Helen Belcher and Jane Fae are sick and tired of beating their heads against the national newspapers and getting nowhere. The regulatory regime that we have now is, if anything, worse than we had before the Leveson inquiry. But that’s not just us. Even the Prime Minister can’t stop the Daily Mail writing malicious articles about him. What chance do we have?
In any case, complaining doesn’t work. These days any company or public body worth its salt employs teams of people to ensure than customer complaints are deflected. That’s either passively through endless bureaucracy, or aggressively through legal threats. Again, that’s not just us. Everyone has this problem. There’s not much that anyone in the Civil Service can do to fix it.
Equally we are not going to have much luck with the national TV companies, or with Hollywood, unless we have money (like the Wachowskis) or can pitch them ideas they find attractive.
The reason that the Americans do much better than we do on diversity is that they have a bigger market, and can make money with diverse programming. We don’t have that in the UK. We have local media. The problem is that they can’t make money. Community radio, community TV, operations like Bristol 24/7, all rely to a large extent on volunteer labor. It is the same in publishing. The big multi-nationals are obsessed with finding the next best seller, while small presses do a much better job on diversity.
By working with community media we can get trans people involved in program creation, and even presenting programs. We can also get stories that are much more trans-positive. It’s not sexy. It’s not glamorous. But it makes a difference, and it can be done for comparatively small sums of money. Frankly, most community media companies are so strapped for cash that if they government were to offer small grants for diversity-related programming they’d find people queuing up to apply for them.
However, if I want to make that happen it is pretty clear that I’ll have to do it my myself, or with the help of supportive cis people.