While I was writing my essay on writing trans characters for Strange Horizons, a young person called Vee was writing one for The Gay YA, a website that focuses on LGBT+ issues in YA fiction (of all genres). Vee’s essay is very different from mine. They’ve been looking at the whole range of trans narratives in YA, including fairly high profile books such as Luna by Julie Anne Peters. When I reviewed that book five years ago I felt that on balance it was a good thing because there were so few trans narratives about. A lot has changed in five years, and I’m a lot less forgiving of books that disturb me. Vee has done a fine job of articulating exactly what is wrong with this type of book. If you are planning on writing a book with a trans character in it, or have an interest in trans issues, please read Vee’s essay and take on board what they say.
Gender
The Wonders of Science
There are many ways in which life is easier for trans kids these days. Of course there are ways it is harder too. I don’t know if I would have survived going through school as trans. But I could have avoided male puberty that way, which is an enormous incentive. It’s all about choices. What medical intervention do you want to risk? What can you afford? What are the payoffs? Some decisions are hard, and some are easy. If I were a teenager now I would be saving every penny I had for this.
It’s probably just as well I didn’t have the option, of course. I suspect I would have made a dreadful mother.
(Oh, and please don’t tell me that people with XY chromosomes can’t bear children. They can, and they have.)
Writing Better Trans Characters
Oh, really? What would I know about writing characters? Quite. But I do know a bit about being trans. So I have had opinions, over at Strange Horizons.
Spontaneous “Sex Changes” – For Real
OK, so “sex change” is not a approved term these days, and anyway doesn’t really happen as such, but that doesn’t stop people wishing. I know when I was a kid I used to go to bed dreaming that when I hit puberty I’d grow breasts and start to menstruate. It didn’t happen. I guess that trans boys go to sleep at night dreaming that when they hit puberty they’ll grow penises. And the interesting thing is that some of them get lucky. It really does happen.
Currently BBC2 is running a short series of medical documentaries fronted by Michael Mosley and titled, Countdown to Life. They are all about the weird and wonderful things that can go on during embryo development in the womb. Doctors tend to call these things “developmental disorders”. I prefer to call them expressions of natural human diversity. Some of the conditions Mosley talks about in the series are trans- and intersex-related.
Depending on exactly how things go as you are growing from an egg into a person, interesting things can happen that mark you out from the mass of humanity. You might become left-handed. You might become an albino. You might grow six digits on your hands and feet instead of five. Or you might develop an intersex condition.
You may have heard me talk before about Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. This is an intersex condition in which the body is unable to process testosterone. The child has XY chromosomes, but the Y has no effect because testosterone can’t do the job of masculinizing the body. These people are born looking perfectly female, grow up as girls, and go through puberty as girls. They grow breasts, but probably don’t menstruate. Often they don’t discover the truth about their biology until they have treatment for infertility and discover that they have no wombs.
Last night’s program introduced me to a different testosterone-related condition. It is known as Guevedoce, a term derived from a small Puerto Rican community where it is quite common. Children who have this condition lack the ability to make a special version of testosterone called dihydro-testosterone without which male genitalia do not develop in the womb. Consequently the children are assigned female at birth. But, like the people with AIS, these kids have XY chromosomes. The term Guevedoce translates as “penis at twelve”, because when puberty hits and a new surge of testosterone floods the body the developmental process gets kicked into gear and the kids, quite naturally, grow penises.
The really interesting thing about these two conditions is that most kids with AIS identify as girls, even before puberty, and tend to be distraught when their condition is discovered, especially if, as is generally the case they can’t have kids. In contrast, Guevedoces tend to identify as boys long before puberty reveals the truth about their biology, and they are delighted when they grow penises.
Here we have two very similar intersex conditions, one of which normally results in a gender identity at odds with the chromosomal sex, and one of which normally results in a gender identity congruent with the chromosomal sex. That’s pretty impressive circumstantial evidence that gender identity is a biological thing.
Mosley agrees. Later in the program he features a trans girl from California and explains, as I already knew, that the embryonic process that results in gender differentiation of the brain is separate from, and occurs at a different time to, the process that results in gender differentiation of the body. He sounded convinced that a biological explanation for being trans will be found.
Of course it isn’t that simple. It may well be that the process that causes someone with XY chromosomes to be trans is different from that which causes people with XX chromosomes to be trans. People who are non-binary may turn out to have a mild form of one or other of these conditions, or they may be something else entirely. In any case it shouldn’t matter. Trans people very obviously exist, and treatments are very obviously highly effective. We shouldn’t need a biological explanation to treat trans people as ordinary, sane human beings.
However, the more science like this we discover, the more obvious it becomes that those people who try to claim that “science” proves that trans people can’t exist make no more sense than those people who say that the Bible proves that trans people can’t exist. I think we’ve reached the point where we have to lump them in with evolution deniers and flat earthers.
I Am Cait – Episode 8
The show has clearly been building up to a grand finale of Caitlyn and Kris facing off, and indeed has trailed this whenever they could. Thankfully, while it did take up a substantial part of the show, it was not all of it.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again. When it comes to family, there’s no point in arguing. Unless they have treated you really badly, people will always side with them rather than you. So do what they want. If that means no further contact, or putting up with them going on about what a selfish bastard you are, you just have to put up with it. Any attempt to do otherwise will just prove them right in most people’s eyes. Also, if you really do care about them, give them space to come to terms with what is going on. You have the benefit of finally being free, they don’t.
Anyway, the first half of the show was cringe-worthy. The second half was thought-provoking. Cait decided that she needed a re-naming ceremony, and so Jenny brought in Allyson Robinson, a trans woman who is also a Baptist Minister, to perform it. Candis managed to drag along Boy George to sing, and a great deal of sisterhood was on view.
One way of looking at this is that it was a cynical attempt to get Christian America onside, but Cait does seem sincere in her beliefs so despite my deep distrust of reality TV I’m happy to go along with it. There’s no reason why trans women shouldn’t be spiritual. We have, after all, been deeply involved in religion for millennia.
It was the fact of the re-naming ceremony that got to me. As Cait said, most trans women don’t have one. One of the reasons for that is that we mostly go through the process with little or no support, and often in secret. When I did my official name change I had no one nearby I could celebrate with. When I got my new birth certificate I was in the UK and Kevin was in California, and anyway I didn’t want to be public about it.
I think it would have been nice to have had some sort of celebration, but it would have been even better to have been able to go through the transition process with a bunch of friends. Even Caitlyn didn’t manage that. Perhaps, with all of this new visibility, it will happen more often.
Anyway, I was really happy to see Chandi play a major part in the ceremony, and to see Geena Rocero among the guests at the re-naming. Hopefully that will make trans women of color think that whatever benefits flow from Cait’s show will help them too.
I see from the social media gossip today that the show has been renewed for a second season, despite disappointing ratings. Apparently the audience for the final episode was 1.3 million. I’m guessing that a substantial proportion of that was trans people. There are probably more than 1.3 million of us in the USA. I know that’s cynical of me, but I don’t think most cis people care enough to want to listen to our stories.
I Am Cait – Episode 7
From my point of view the highlight of this episode was where Cait and Candis visit a support group for trans kids in LA that is run by Chandi. That’s partly because Chandi is fast becoming my favorite part of the show. She’s so sensible and grounded, and so amazingly herself. But it was also the real bit of the show. It featured actual trans kids talking about the problems they have getting their ID changed, and the hassle that they get in the meantime. This is the sort of thing that someone with Cait’s level of privilege is able to avoid.
When Cait says that what she is trying to do with the show is make the world a better place for those kids, and for others who come after them, it makes the whole of the rest of it worthwhile.
The rest, in this episode, is mostly about Kris. The show’s producers, understandably, are determined to play up the family drama for all it is worth. There is no way that Cait, or indeed any trans person, can come out of such a situation looking good. Cis viewers, especially female cis viewers, are always going to end up sympathizing with the trans person’s wife. Mostly, I suspect, they’d be right to do so.
The show has tried to make the best of a bad job by bringing in Jenny Boylan’s wife, Deedie. It is good to be able to show that couples can stay together through transition (Jenny says that about a third do), and in the long term come to love and accept each other again. But even Deedie admits that during the transition process she was caught between the terror of the future with Jenny, and the terror of the future without her.
Caitlyn, of course, is too caught up in the desperate need to be herself, and the giddy excitement of having made it happen. I remember that all too well. But she too is worried about facing the rest of her life alone. Having had her family life define her for the past decade or so of living it in the public eye, she’s not prepared to face the black pit of abandonment that so many of us have walked into because there was nowhere else to go.
Of course when I got to the bottom of mine I found Kevin there waiting for me, and things got mostly better from then on. Other people are not so ridiculously lucky.
Her Story – Final Day
One of the big problems for trans activists is that we are not in control of the way we are presented in the media. We are, after all, a fairly small percentage of the population. In addition, until very recently we have been excluded from most forms of employment. So journalists, writers, directors, actors, all tend to be cis people. The result of this has often been inaccurate portrayals of trans folk in the media, and sometimes downright hostile ones.
Slowly things are changing. The Sense8 series benefited enormously from the involvement of Lana Wachowski and Jamie Clayton. Recent reality TV shows, and the sitcom on the BBC, have given trans people more prominence, and some say in how we are portrayed. But what if a group of trans people could make their own TV show, about people like them? That would be something special.
We are almost there. Her Story has completed principal photography and is crowdfunding $35,000 to fund post-production. They are 93% of their way to the target, and today is the final day of the campaign. The show involves Jen Richards and Angelica Ross, both of whom I have mentioned frequently here before. Most of the people involved in it are queer women of some sort. (There is one cis guy, because part of the story involves Angelica’s character struggling with the issue of disclosure.) I’ve backed it, obviously. I hope that some of you will be able to as well.
To learn lots more about the show check out the campaign page, or check out this interview on Autostraddle.
Update: They made it. Thank you everyone who backed the project.
Judge Gove Speaks
Michael Gove is apparently not a wholly bad man. Oh, I know that the teaching profession is overjoyed to be rid of him, but the legal profession is leaping up and down with glee to have a nice, reasonable chap like Gove in charge of them rather than a grasping, amoral monster like Chris Grayling. That’s because Gove is rolling back some of the worst excesses of the Grayling regime at the Ministry of Justice. You know, things like the UK government setting up in business to advise repressive regimes around the world on how best to control their citizens. (Though apparently we will be fulfilling our contract with the Saudis because it would cost too much money to walk away.)
On the other hand, Gove is still Gove. That much is fairly obvious from the UK Government’s response to the recent petition on trans rights.
Just to be clear on this, the petition is not exactly asking for the moon. It is asking for UK trans people to have the same right of self-determination that has just been granted to Irish citizens. It is also asking for legal recognition for non-binary people, something that has already been granted by governments in places such as India, Pakistan and Australia. Sadly the response from the MoJ is not exactly encouraging.
Actually it is interesting that the response comes from the MoJ and not the Equalities Department within the Home Office, because they are the people responsible for trans rights. It is possibly also significant that the response comes a few days after the public evidence hearings for the current Transgender Equality Inquiry, because if any of the witnesses at that event had wanted to point out the desperate state of trans equality in the UK all they would have had to do was quote from the MoJ’s statement.
But wait, there’s another public evidence hearing this coming Tuesday. Get out the popcorn, folks, this could be a cracker.
So what did the MoJ actually say? Well you can read the whole thing here, but as you might have guessed I’m going to comment on the salient points. Let’s start with the outright lie. The MoJ says:
The gender recognition process in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 was developed as a result of the Government’s commitment to allowing trans people to gain legal recognition in their acquired gender.
Well, no. The UK government fought tooth and nail to prevent trans people getting any legal rights at all. The GRA was only introduced following a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (Christine Goodwin v The United Kingdom, Case No 28957/1995 for any legal wonks out there) which found the UK government guilty of discrimination.
Now let’s move on to the willfully naive. As I noted above, part of the petition calls for legal recognition for non-binary people. The MoJ’s argument against providing this is:
Non-binary gender is not recognised in UK law. Under the law of the United Kingdom, individuals are considered by the state to be of the gender that is registered on their birth certificate, either male or female.
It goes on to note specifically that the Equality Act provides no protection for non-binary people, but only for people who are male or female. I’d like to see that tested in court.
Actually, thinking about it, what the MoJ is saying here is that it is OK under the Equality Act to discriminate against someone if they look neither male nor female. That clearly affects trans people, because you can claim that you are perfectly OK about them being trans, but not about them not looking like a member of their preferred gender. In addition it affects LGB people, because you can claim that you are not prejudiced on the grounds of sexuality, but rather on the grounds of gender performance. So the MoJ thinks it is OK to discriminate against a gay man if he looks effeminate, or against a lesbian if she looks butch. This is an issue that affects the whole LGBT community.
Finally they note:
We recognise that a very small number of people consider themselves to be of neither gender. We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment
If ever I saw a call for a social media campaign, that was it. CN Lester noted:
4. …I've been denied schooling, work and adequate healthcare because of being neither male nor female. @MoJGovUK
— CN Lester (@cnlester) September 12, 2015
And went on to say:
Right: If you're in anyway outside of the gender binary, tweet the #SpecificDetriment you've suffered to @MoJGovUK using that hashtag. Yes?
— CN Lester (@cnlester) September 12, 2015
That hashtag is filling up nicely.
Having read a number of government responses to online petitions, it does seem that it is a standard tactic to quote existing law as an argument for not changing it. The MoJ statement has taken this to heart and goes into great detail about all of the hoops that trans people are forced to jump through in order to achieve legal recognition of their gender. As Maria Miller perceptively noted at the Transgender Equality Inquiry on Tuesday, those requirements are now far more stringent than those recommended by the medical profession when approving patients for surgery.
The key sentence in the MoJ response is this one:
A person’s gender has important legal and social consequences.
Basically what that is saying is that differences between men and women are enshrined in UK law, and if we allow trans people to unilaterally switch between genders then the whole fabric of Patriarchy will crumble.
Remind me again how it is that trans people are agents of the Patriarchy who reinforce the gender binary.
By the way, the petition currently has just over 30,000 signatures. If it gets over 100,000 that will force a debate in Parliament. You can sign it here.
I Am Cait – Episode 6
Well that was a lot better. The latest episode of I Am Cait to be screened in the UK spent most of its time allowing trans people (almost all trans women) to talk about their problems, and let Caitlyn sit back, listen and learn.
The main focus of the episode was dating, and the very real dangers that trans women face trying to find love. A side issue is the fact that Caitlyn is deeply reluctant to discuss anything personal, and the implication that this is because she is primarily attracted to women and fears this will make people see her as less of a woman. Jenny Boylan is doing her best, but I’m not sure this is something Caitlyn can do in the public glare.
There were two key things that stood out to me from the show. The first is that Candis, despite being drop-dead gorgeous, incredibly sexy and a famous actress, can’t get a boyfriend. The other was where a bunch of trans women were having dinner together and they all agreed that there was no point in even trying to date cis men, they should just stick to trans men.
Obviously it isn’t the case that no trans woman can find love with a cis man. Janet Mock is an obvious counter-example. So am I. But dating is really hard, and incredibly dangerous. The best you can hope for is to be continually rejected and insulted; violence and even murder are always a risk. However, I find the idea that we should stick to only dating trans men (or trans women if you prefer) very troubling. Not because there aren’t some lovely trans guys out there, there most definitely are, but because it is a tacit admission that we are not women, we are only trans women.
As ever, the stars of the show are the support cast. Jenny Boylan and Canis Cayne were great as always, and I am becoming very fond of Chandi who is an amazing person.
Catching Up With Jazz
My friend Lynn Gold recommended the I Am Jazz TV show as a better representation of trans life than I Am Cait. It turns out it was available on my Sky subscription, and in the On Demand section, so I have binged on the first five episodes. Here’s my initial impressions.
By far the best thing about the show is Jazz herself. She’s a delightful kid, and I’m sure viewers will warm to her. Because she’s only mid-teens, there’s far less trans theory stuff in the show than in Jenner’s. However, Jazz’s life is real in a way like Caitlyn’s never can be. Her family seem well off but are not stupidly rich. She goes to school. And most importantly she’s been living as Jazz for around 10 years. She’s totally comfortable with her identity, and so are her family. Whereas Caitlyn’s story is one of someone coming to terms with transition while a celebrity, Jazz’s story is one of an ordinary teenage girl with something slightly different about her that can at times make her life a misery.
In some ways the show is simply one about a middle class American couple raising four teenage kids. Having twin boys is sometimes just as challenging as having a trans daughter. It is about the very normal fears that any teenage girl will have when she’s about to enter high school. But for Jazz every kid in the class will know that she’s a soft target for bullying, and dating is going to be an absolute minefield. As she’s so normal in every other way, the tragedy of that is really brought home. Anyone who has ever been the “only X kid” in a class can probably relate to what she’s going through.
Of course the show, just like Cait’s, is manufactured. There are things that don’t ring true. For the first four episodes Jazz is presented as this normal teenage girl, but in episode 5 we discover that she’s co-written a kids’ book that has sold over 10,000 copies and has an international fan base. Overall, however, I really liked it, and I think it is probably doing a lot of good.
We’re All Sodomites
Earlier today on Twitter I passed on a news article being shared by the Irish drag queen, Panti Bliss. It was a story about how the Catholic Church has made a ruling that transsexuals cannot be godparents because they “do not meet the moral requirement”. This has caused a lot of confusion in social media because people today equate being “moral” with being “good”. The Church, of course, does nothing of the sort. It equates being “moral” with “not committing sin”, and sadly what constitutes “sin” has not been updated in quite a while.
To some extent this is all Aristotle’s fault. He taught that the human seed is contained solely within the male semen. Women are simply the fertile soil in which men plant their seeds in order for them to grow. If you think about that for a minute, perhaps with your Evangelical Fundamentalist hat on, you’ll see one can conclude that if a man ejaculates without placing his semen inside a woman then he is effectively aborting that seed. You can see where things will go from there, can’t you?
In fact Clement of Alexandria went one step further. In his view, in order to have sex morally, one had to do so with the intention of creating legitimate offspring. So not only was it sinful to masturbate, to have oral sex, or and sort of gay relationship, it was also sinful to have sex with any woman other than your wife. Oh, and it was sinful to have sex with your wife if she was pregnant, because again a legitimate child could not result. He wasn’t very keen on sex, was our Clement.
These days we tend to think of “sodomy” as having gay sex, possibly only as having anal sex, but throughout most of Christian history the definition has been much wider than that. The 16th Century Spanish theologian and pioneering economist, MartÃn de Azpilcueta Navarro, defined sodomy thus: “as when a man sins with a man, a woman with a woman, or a man with a woman outside of the natural vesselâ€. The latter was the case even if the man and woman in question were married. He was quite liberal, though. The 15th Century Diccionario de los inquisidores describes sodomy as “incomparably more serious than having sex with your own motherâ€, presumably on the grounds that getting one’s mother pregnant was preferable to “wasting†one’s seed.
My guess is that almost everyone reading this will classify as a sodomite in one way or another. Sorry about that, folks. Though you may find it useful to remember that when Mr. Wrong fulminates against “filthy sodomites” he doesn’t just mean Hal Duncan, he means you as well. (Mr. Wrong prides himself in being a classical scholar, I’m sure he knows all this stuff.)
But to get back to transsexuals, the thing isn’t that we are not just having sex in unapproved ways; we have modified our bodies in such a way that we can’t have sex in the approved way. For the folks in the Vatican, that is sin right up the wazoo and back again. Which is why they see us as “immoral”.
Life Happens
So as if I didn’t have enough to do, now I need to find myself a new GP (again) and sort out supplies of hormones if I can’t do it quickly. In many ways life was easier before the Equality Act because then if people didn’t want to deal with you they could just say so. Now they are not allowed to be so blunt, so that have to invent reasons for why you are not welcome, and pile on the microaggressions in the hope that you go away.
Still, at least I can afford to go private for hormones (though not for serious healthcare if anything goes badly wrong). Many trans people have to rely on the NHS for all of their treatment. It’s no wonder so many people cite the “health care” they have received as a cause of depression and suicidal feelings.
Women’s Outlook Does Palestine
Yesterday’s show on Ujima was devoted entirely to the plight of the Palestinian people. Paulette is away on the far side of the Atlantic again, and she had left me with a prepared show full of guests for me to host.
What she didn’t leave me with was music. Given that the Palestinian situation is very much about state violence, I figured I could start with “Hell You Talmbout”, the protest song written by Janelle Monáe for the Black Lives Matter campaign. The song features Janelle, Jindenna and the whole of the Wondaland crew chanting the names of people of color killed by police in the USA this year.
Naturally, having done that, I had to read the names of the trans women of color killed in the USA this year. To get some idea of why people are so worried, here’s an historical comparison:
- 2010 – 14
- 2011 – 9
- 2012 – 15
- 2013 – 16
- 2014 – 10
- 2015 – 20 to date
Here are their names: Papi Edwards, Lamia Beard, Ty Underwood, Yazmin Vash Payne, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, Penny Proud, Kristina Grant Infiniti, London Chanel, Mercedes Williamson, Ashton O’Hara, Amber Monroe, India Clarke, K.C. Haggard, Shade Schuler, Kandis Capri, Elisha Walker, Tamara Dominguez, Jasmine Collins, Bri Golec, Mya Hall.
I also wanted to find music by Palestinians. This led me to discover Doc Jazz, who I was very impressed with. Then I found a page of songs about the Palestinian issue, most of which were hip hop. Scanning through I noticed one artist described with gender neutral pronouns, which is how I discovered the wonderful Invincible. That’s another brilliant trans musician I can add to my playlists.
The first hour of the show began with an interview with Ed Hill, a Bristol-based activist who has made several trips to Palestine and knows the situation there well. He did most of the work putting the show together, and his main interest is the forthcoming European Championship soccer match between Wales and Israel which is taking place in Cardiff at the weekend.
Next up I had a chat with Eddy, one of the founders of the Palestinian Museum in Bristol. Thanks to Eddy and Rita, we are fortunate enough to have the first museum in the world dedicated to the Palestinian people. Washington DC has since followed suit, and Amsterdam is now building one.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
Ed Hill came back to talk to me at the start of the second hour. Our main topic of conversation was the arms trade, and how British companies profit from the Israeli military operations again Palestine.
Finally I was joined by the Rev. Sue Parfitt and Eddy Knasel. We wanted to make a point that the campaign in support of the Palestinians is not simply a case of Muslim against Jew, as it is often portrayed in the Western media. Many Palestinians are Christians, and many Jews support the Palestinian cause. Sue is an Anglican minister who has just returned from a visit to Palestine where she helped a local Jewish-run peace organization build houses for Palestinians made homeless by the Israeli army. Eddy is a Quaker, and part of an international, multi-denominational Christian organization called Kairos which is dedicated to helping the Palestinians.
Of course I had to end the show with a shout out to Nalo Hopkinson for becoming the first Jamaican writer to be a Guest of Honor at a Worldcon. Well done, Finnish friends.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
The full playlist for the show was as follows:
- Hell You Talmbout – Janelle Monáe and the Wondaland Jam Authority
- Rising Tide – Doc Jazz
- No Compromises – Invincible
- Gimme Hope, Joanna – Eddy Grant
- The Lebanon – The Human League
- Lei Lei – Maryam Mursal
- Our House – Madness
- Change is Gonna Come – Otis Redding
My apologies once again to Isaac, my engineer, for screwing up the order of play. Apologies also for the pneumatic drilling that you may be able to hear in the background during the show. There was nothing we could do about that. Hopefully the building work will be done by the time I am back on the air in two weeks time, because I am expecting to interview Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.
I Am Cait – Episodes 4 and 5
The more I watch of the Caitlyn Jenner reality show, the more I become convinced that focusing on people going through transition is a really bad thing. There were some good parts to the last two episodes — the introduction of Kate Bornstein, Chas Bono working with trans kids in Los Angeles, Candis giving a shout out to Holly Woodlawn, the crowds at New York Pride — but the was also a lot of what I had feared from the show: relationship drama. Episode 4 contained various confrontations with members of Jenner’s family; and episode 5 some awkward moments with a guy who used to be a close friend of Cait’s while she was still pretending to be male.
Very similar things can be found in just about every book, comic, film and TV program made about trans people. What the authors or scriptwriters want is drama. The easiest way to get drama is to focus in on the hardest part of a trans person’s life — the point at which they are just coming out and they, their friends and family, are all getting used to the new arrangements.
The other thing about focusing on transition is that it almost inevitably shows trans people as half-and-half. They are moving from the social role that they used to inhabit to a new one; they are waiting for hormones to work their magic. Even avowedly non-binary people often don’t look their best when they are just starting transition. For binary-focused trans people, they are pretty much guaranteed to look their worst.
I’m not just dumping on Caitlyn here. You see it everywhere. It was in the recent Transsexual Stories program on BBC Scotland. From the reactions I’m seeing to the trailer it is going to be in The Danish Girl, the new Eddie Redmayne film about Lili Elbe. Transition is what fascinates cis people — writers and audiences alike.
Caitlyn’s show is at least trying. It makes a point of featuring a large supporting cast of trans women who are long past transition: Jenny Boylan, Candis Cayne, Jen Richards and the amazing Chandi who I am becoming very fond of. All of these women give a glimpse of the sort of person that Caitlyn will become in a few years time. The Scottish show managed a bit of it, with the delightful Jan and the amazing transformation of Carla. However, successful trans women are not the focus of these shows, because there is no drama in their lives.
I have no in principle objection to cis people writing trans characters. In fact I’m pleased that so many of them are trying to do so. But I do wish that they would learn to see us as people, and not just as people going through transition. If you need drama, find it in some other way, not in the fact that we are trans.
Attention Cambridge – Coming Your Way
Apparently I have ideas. Or at least they think so in Cambridge, because I have been invited to give a talk at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. It will be called “Challenging the gender binary through science fiction and fantasy”, and the details are Saturday 31 October: 3:00pm – 4:30pm at Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, CB1 1PT. Full details (including a photo by the inimitable Henry Soederlund) can be found here.
The smart people among you will see the reference to Anglia Ruskin and twig that Farah Mendlesohn is involved in this somehow. Indeed, it was all her idea, and she persuaded the University to put forward the proposal to the Festival. Also the event will actually be me in conversation with Farah, rather than an hour and a half of me blathering on. The Festival website seems to have lost this vital piece of information.
Anyway, huge thanks to Farah for getting me this opportunity, and I look forward to seeing some of you in Cambridge for Hallowe’en. Do I need to bring a costume?
Oh, and that title — totally chosen to fool any TERFs who might have a hand in the process that the talk had nothing to do with us awful trans people. Boy are they in for a shock.
Buy This Book, Please
Yeah, I know I have a short piece in it, but it is a very short piece and the book is full of all sorts of fabulous things, including a whole bunch of Tiptree’s correspondence with Le Guin & Russ.
Alex has written a bit about the book here, including links to other pieces of Tiptree material that have been published recently. To that I’d like to add the academic paper I gave in Manchester this year which talks extensively about Alli Sheldon’s gender identity.
Details as to how to order the book can be found here. It is available as an ebook, so you don’t need to have paper shipped from Australia.
Oh, and someone should probably nominate the book for next year’s Tiptree Award. Lots of interesting stuff already recommended, I see. So many books…
Doing Trans History #HistTrans
It was perhaps not the best timing in the world to be spending last weekend in a hotel in Manchester. I was up in the middle of the night on both Friday and Sunday mornings for events at Worldcon. But there was no way I was going to miss the UK’s first ever academic conference devoted solely to the history of trans people. Thank you so much to Emma Vickers and Liverpool John Moore University for putting it on. Here are my impressions of the event.
The keynote speech was given by long-time trans activist, Stephen Whittle. He treated us to a personal account of the history of trans activism in the UK — some of which he was very much a key part of. Stephen is an experienced speaker with a wealth of entertaining and illuminating anecdotes. My favorite was the one about the UK branch of the Transsexual Action Organisation dissociating itself from the US parent organization, in part because they claimed that the Americans were “into the Occult”. I’m pretty sure that means that a lot of the Americans were neo-pagans.
There were seven papers in all, including mine. I’m going to highlight the three I found most interesting.
First up, Jacob Bloomfield, who like me went to great lengths to be there. He is performing at Edinburgh Fringe at the moment. He caught an early train down, and left immediately after giving his paper so that he could be on stage at 8:00pm. His paper was all about cross-dressing revues put on by military veterans after the two world wars. Apparently there were quite a few. Danny La Rue was the most famous graduate of them. It isn’t clear whether anyone involved actually identified as trans, but the circumstances under which they were permitted by the authorities were quite interesting. The fact that the performers were all military veterans was apparently a key issue here as it established their essential virility. There was to be, according to one censor, “no pansy business”. Fascinatingly Jacob suggested that some British people found the idea of Tommy watching men dressed (very convincingly) as women preferable to the idea that he might hook up with some foreign woman while busy saving his country overseas.
Clare Tebbutt had a great paper about “sex changes” in the 1930s. These were nothing like the gender clinic work we know today, though they did center primarily around Charing Cross Hospital. A South African doctor called Lennox Broster became something of an expert in what we’d now call intersex conditions. Many intersex people who had been assigned female at birth were treated by him and a significant number were legally reassigned male as a result. His most famous patient was Mark Weston. The media of the day, having little understanding of the biology, reported these cases as “sex changes” and put them down to the miracles of modern medicine. Reporting was almost always favorable towards the patient, with scare quotes being used for the birth gender rather than the new one. Because of Broster’s particular specialism, the vast majority of the patients were seen as female-to-male, so we don’t know much about how a perceived male-to-female would have been reported, but the media climate then was clearly very different to what we see today.
(By the way, the history of such cases is why Michael Dillon was able to get his legal gender changed so easily, even though he had no intersex condition. The doctors, and the authorities, were used to such cases.)
Finally, my favorite paper of the day, Juthathorn Pravattiyagul on the Thai trans diaspora. Juthathorn is Thai herself, and she has done a lot of research hanging out with Thai trans women in various European cities. Acceptance of trans women is seen as much better in the West than in Thailand, because we have laws protecting us and Thailand doesn’t. That, combined with the obvious economic incentives, has caused large numbers of Thai trans women to emigrate to Europe. Juthathorn has found that the reality of life in the West rarely matches up to their dreams. Partly that’s because of racism, but in addition she found that social attitudes towards trans women are far less accepting in Europe than in Thailand, despite our more supportive laws. I so wish I had known about her work before I put in my submission to the UK government’s Transgender Equality Inquiry as I would have cited her.
It was also great to hang out with friends such as Emma Hutson and Catherine Baker, and to make new friends. I can warmly recommend the 60 Hope Street restaurant that Emma Vickers found for the conference dinner. However, I do have a few concerns about the way trans history is being done.
The majority of the attendees were cis people. Some of them were great. Others clearly don’t quite get it, and it you are doing trans history that’s important. I absolutely accept the idea that we can’t know how people from the past identified. I opened my own paper by saying so. Even if they did, their self-conceptions are likely to be very different from those of a modern trans person such as myself. However, just because we can’t say for certain that person X from the past identified as trans, or as the gender in which they presented for most of their life, we can’t say for certain that they didn’t. To persistently use the birth gender for all subjects, and to characterize them all as cross-dressers, is to erase the possibility of people being trans in the past. Given that the idea that being trans is a modern invention is a key part of TERF ideology, this is deeply political position to take. It is not, as I suspect most of the researchers assume, simply a neutral and default position.
It gets worse too. People do cross-dress for all sorts of reasons. Just take a look at any stag party, Halloween party, Saturday crowd at a Test Match and so on. There are so many more cis people than trans people that my guess is that there were more people in history who cross-dressed and did not identify as trans than there were those who did. Even with eunuchs, who are physically trans, there will probably be more who continue to identify as their birth gender than as anything else. If your “trans history” is focused on the idea of cross-dressing rather than on the idea of trans identities, then you will end up writing a history of cis people and calling it a history of trans people. I do not want to see us go down that route. Hopefully most of the academics involved don’t want us to either.
Trans Duly Historicised
Well that was fun. Some really great papers, and mine seemed to go down well too. I’ll write more about it tomorrow, but I have to be up at 3:30am for the Hugo Award Ceremony so I’m going to bed now. If you want more of a flavor of the event, check out the #HistTrans hashtag on Twitter.
My Sasquan Panel
I managed to wake up in the middle of the night to do the “Exploring Orientation and Gender in Fiction” panel at Sasquan. It was a lot of fun. Many thanks again to Cat Valente for inviting me and providing the Sasquan end of the tech, and also to Heather Rose Jones who is a fellow historian of things LGBT. She has a wonderful online resource here that I shall be spending a long time reading through.
The experience did remind me that 90 minutes is the ideal time for convention panels. Any longer and you’ll probably run out of steam, but any shorter and you’ll barely scratch the surface of the topic. I know an extra half hour doesn’t seem a lot, but when you take out 15 minutes for room change (i.e., a 60 minute slot means a 45 minute panel) and 15 minutes for audience questions you only have a half hour panel. A 90 minute slot doesn’t need to extend either of those, so you get an hour for the panel, meaning you have doubled the time available.
This morning Tero asked me about my experience of participating in a panel by Skype. It was mixed, but I’d still do it again.
The connection to Spokane was a bit spotty. A couple of times I got the dreaded “connection lost, trying to get it back” message. Thankfully the second time worked, but I lost quite a bit of the first half of the panel. Obviously if you are going to do this you have to have a good connection.
Microphone technique becomes much more important if you are using Skype. The mics that are provided in convention centers tend to be sensitive and highly directional. People who keep moving their head while speaking, or who wave the mic around as if they are on Top of the Pops (where, as you should know, everyone is miming) are a menace, because you only get to hear half of what they say.
That goes double for audience questions. Even if you provide people with a mic, the chances are they will mis-use it. Kudos to Cat for realizing this and repeating the questions for me.
Moderators who have one or more Skype panelists should probably keep an eye on the text window. This wasn’t really an issue for us, but if I’d had a problem then texting via Skype might be the only way I had to let the moderator know.
The thing I wasn’t expecting was how much I missed visual clues. I know Cat and Ctein so I could recognize their voices, but I had difficultly telling whether Julia or Heather was speaking, and it was clear that the panel was never quite sure if I’d finished, and was politely not jumping in too soon. Having video as well would probably have helped, except that no one would have wanted to see me at 4:00am.
If there’s anyone who was at the panel who would like to see my lecture at Liverpool University earlier this year, you can find it here.
Book Review – Luna: New Moon
The new Ian McDonald novel isn’t actually out for about a month, but he has been on Coode Street to talk about, and I wanted my review live today so that I can talk about it on the panel tonight. Yes, Ian has done interesting things with sexuality and gender in this book too. My review is a little spoilery, but I don’t think there’s anything much worse that what Ian has already said to Jonathan & Gary. I very much enjoyed the book, and am looking forward with excitement to future volumes, and with some trepidation to the TV series. You can find my review here.
I do hope that people take notice of this book. There are a lot of people out there asking for more diversity in SF&F. That’s a good thing. There are also people trying to deliver, but those asking for diversity often tend not to see it if it isn’t written by a woman and published as YA. I can understand why, but we need this diversity and we shouldn’t ignore any of it.
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