Gender

Some Basic Points

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

Elsewhere I am still seeing people concern-trolling about how unfairly the poor TERFS are being treated by the horrid trans people. Why, people keep asking, are trans folk not prepared to debate important issues? Well, here are a few things to think about, based on stuff I have read elsewhere.

First up, the acronym TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. All of those words are important. The suggestion that its use attacks all feminists, or even all radical feminists, is clearly incorrect. Indeed, most trans activists identify as feminists, and many as radicals.

I am well aware of the claim that “TERF” is a term of abuse. However, it is a simple and factual statement of their political position. If there was a better word, I’d be happy to use it. However, the TERFs themselves prefer to be referred to as “feminists” or even just “women”, this being an attempt to infer that their position has far greater support than it has, and to encourage the sort of confusion I referred to above. Claiming that any word we come up with to describe them is a term of abuse is a tactic used to prevent us from addressing their claims.

I have a Gender Recognition Certificate. Under the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 this means that I have the right, in law, to be treated as a woman. My driving license, passport, and even birth certificate say that I am female. The central thesis of this law — that I and people like me are women — was described as the “extreme form” of trans ideology by the New Statesman last week. Hopefully you can understand why I get a little irritated by constant demands that I “debate” the idea that I am not “really” a woman, should be barred from female-only spaces, and should be forced to use male-only toilets if I need to pee when out in public.

By the way, props to Roz Kaveney for pointing out that these attempts to prevent trans women from using public toilets are very similar to the Victorian idea that by not providing public toilets for women they could be forced to stay at home and not participate in public life.

If your position is that an exception can be made for trans women like me, but not for others, then you need to define how this exception will work. Note, however, that the TERF position is that I am, and always will be, a man, and can never be allowed in women-only spaces. Germaine Greer’s position is that anyone with a Y chromosome is a man, no matter how weird their biology. This include people with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome who are female-bodied, assigned female at birth, raised as girls, identify as women, and in a few cases have even given birth.*

If your idea for how to control exceptions is “PENIS!!!”, what will you do about a 17-year-old who has been living as a girl since she was 5, has not and never will go through male puberty, but cannot legally have gender surgery until she turns 18?

Note also that in order to qualify for gender transition patients at Gender Identity Clinics generally have to spend at least 2 years living full time in their preferred gender role. That includes the use of gender-appropriate toilets.

Currently some 13,000 people have undergone transition under the care of British gender clinics (not all of whom will have had surgery). It is reasonable to assume that getting on for half of them identify as trans women. To date not one of them has been charged with sexual assault of a woman in a public bathroom. (It would have been all over the papers if one had.) Why would anyone say that all of them should be punished by being denied access to toilets, just in case one of them might commit an assault?

If your position is that heterosexual men might disguise themselves as trans women in order to sneak into women’s toilets and commit sexual assaults, why is your solution to that to ban actual trans women from toilets? If you were worried that rapists might disguise themselves as postmen in order to attack housewives, would your solution be to ban mail deliveries?

Why is it that trans men are never seen as a sexual threat (even when TERFS demand that they use women’s toilets)? Why are lesbians not a danger in women’s toilets, or gay men in men’s toilets? Why is it only ever trans women who are seen as potential sexual predators?

And finally, over 200 trans women are killed worldwide every year, just because they are trans. Almost always the killers are men. TERFs know this when they demand that trans women be forced to out themselves to strangers and enter a male-only space if they want to have a pee.

I don’t suppose any of that will put a stop to it. People will go on and on complaining, “why can’t you be reasonable, why can’t you just debate this point?” After all, people keep saying that we should debate the reality of evolution, and climate change, and the moon landings. But there comes a point when you have to say enough. The reality of gender identity issues, and the appropriateness of gender transition as a treatment, is recognized by the UN, by most democratic governments, and by the bulk of medical and scientific opinion. As this post on Skeptoid states, it is time for TERFism to be recognized as a form of denialism so that most of us can stop having these endless “debates”. Mostly they are just excuses for terrorizing trans women, and we need to stop enabling them.

By the way, on the subject of medical evidence, I note from Canadian news that Kenneth Zucker, the primary proponent of the sort of trans “cures” that Julie Bindel advocates, and which led to the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, has been put under a six-month independent review by his bosses.

Also the current evidence used by Zucker and his pals to claim that trans women are mentally ill is the condition of “autogynephlia”, a form of sexual fetish in which we are supposed to be in lust with our images of ourselves as women. I saw recently on the GIRES website that someone has done some proper science to test this condition by introducing a control. The research showed that, using the diagnostic criteria recommended by the inventor or autogynephlia, Ray Blanchard, 93% of cis women tested should be classified as suffering from this “mental illness”. Yet autogynephilia is still included in the current US directory of mental illnesses, and many countries still require that trans people be officially diagnosed as mentally ill before they can even change their names.

* There is a science fiction story to be written in which external incubation of babies becomes fashionable because Greer-like feminists have a horror of being “contaminated” by male cells should they male children. Every woman who has born a son has a bunch of Y-chromosome cells floating around in her body.

Yet More Science

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Thanks to a recent repeat I was able to catch up on a 2013 BBC Horizon program. This was a fix-up show using archive footage from a number of early programs, and connected by a framing narrative provided by Alice Roberts. The subject of the program was Sex, and it is still available on iPlayer.

The first thing that struck me about the show is that Alice’s segments were clearly filmed in Cabot Circus in Bristol. Well, Alice did used to teach at Bristol University, but the idea of Bristol being the UK’s hub of knowledge about sex amused me. There was also some great archive footage of interviews with Alfred Kinsey and some of his subjects. But what interested me were the two segments on gender identity.

The first was from a show about the disastrous affair of Dr. John Money and David Reimer, which I presume you are all familiar with. What I hadn’t seen before were clips from a 2002 film featuring a trans man called Alex Toth. Alex had the dubious honor of being put through a battery of physical, psychological and medical tests before and after his testosterone treatment. The differences, even on the tests of his brain activity, were significant. Judging by the needs of program-making and the changes in Alex’s appearance in the “before” and “after” tests, I don’t think he can have been on testosterone for more than a year or two between them. Nevertheless there were major changes in his appearance, his physical skills, and the way in which his brain worked.

Nevertheless, our TERF friends continue to asset that trans women are “really” men, will always be so, and no amount of medical intervention can change that; and that “science” proves this. Maybe the hormone magic only works one way. Or maybe heads are firmly in the sand.

Evil Exposed! Shock! Horror!

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Secret Trans Cabal Volcano Lair


Throughout the past week British newspapers have been full or articles from prominent left-wing intellectuals explaining how a vicious and violent campaign of bullying and censorship by the “powerful trans lobby” has prevented them from expressing their views in public. Clearly that is horrific enough, but yesterday further news of the perfidy of trans people was revealed — by none other than The Pope.

Some of you may remember that Pope Ratty declared that trans people were a bigger threat to the planet than climate change. Not to be outdone, his successor, Pope Francis, has compared trans people to nuclear weapons.

Of course it is all true. We cannot tell a lie. The picture above shows technicians in the Secret Trans Cabal’s Volcano Lair preparing a Gender Bomb for launch. The exact contents of the bomb are still classified, but I do know that it will contain music videos from a forthcoming Beyoncé biopic starring Laverne Cox.

Further details of the Trans Cabal’s evil plans will be revealed next week in the New Statesman. In order to help you follow the story as it unfolds, here are some of the key members of the Cabal.

Maximum Leader Rozario KavenikovaMaximum Leader Rozario Kavenikova pictured at a recent military parade.

Ninja Sarah BrownSarah Brown prepares for another vicious character assassination of a prominent left-wing intellectual.

Christine Burns directsChristine Burns directs political campaigns from behind the scenes.

Vampire Paris LeesParis Lees prepares to seduce another BBC executive.

CN Lester bandCN Lester and their new thrash sonata band, Gendarok.

MeArtist’s impression of Cheryl Morgan in her younger days (circa 1800 BCE).

Science! It Is Getting Everywhere

~ Cheryl

While I was having a go at the New Statesman over their lack of understanding of biology, people with far more knowledge of the subject than me were also beavering away on articles.

You have probably already seen this article in Nature, if only because John Scalzi blogged about it. Truly, biology is far more weird and wonderful than most of us can imagine.

I’d also recommend this follow-up piece by Vanessa Heggie in the Guardian (science pages, of course, where being nice to trans people is allowed). It points out, quite rightly, that all this is by no means new. One of the mentions goes to Anne Fausto-Sterling whose work was the basis for Melissa Scott’s novel, Shadow Man.

Something that was new to me from that article was the work of Keith L Moore who proposes a nine-axis definition of sexual identity, those components being external genital appearance, internal reproductive organs, structure of the gonads, endocrinologic sex, genetic sex, nuclear sex, chromosomal sex, psychological sex and social sex. I need to check out what some of those mean, but at a first glance it appears that trans women would count as female on only four out of nine, which would inevitably lead to people saying, “Less that half”! See, science proves you are not female!!!”

Then again, I am prepared to forgive Moore a lot for saying this:

Females have been declared ineligible for athletic competition for no other apparent reason than the presence of an extra chromosome…[these tests] cannot be used as indicators of ‘true sex’

Oh how Germaine Greer must hate him.

By the way, as Roz pointed out on Twitter yesterday, science is generally held by RadFems to be an Evil Patriarchal Plot (remember this?) except when it can be twisted to “prove” that trans women are men.

While I’m here, I’d also like to point you at a recent letter to the Guardian attacking Stonewall’s decision to support trans people. I’m often asked why some gay and lesbian people hate trans folk. This brings up some of the issues. In particular there’s this:

Pressure groups are usually single-issue institutions, and this is true of Stonewall and other gay and bisexual charities: the issue being the acceptance of same sex attraction as not being a disease of body nor an illness of the mind. This has been the central platform for the acceptance of all gay rights.

Transsexualism is defined as the disjunction between a mind of one sex and the body of another, a physical or a mental dysmorphia between gender and physical sex, requiring a cure – surgery. This is the opposite of everything that LGB groups, and feminist groups, have been fighting for…

The implication here, of course, is that trans people are sick, whereas same sex attraction is “normal”. And of course the writer claims that this is not a “transphobic” idea, presumably because he thinks it is a “fact”.

The main problem with this is that by no means all trans people either want or need medical intervention. Fighting for trans rights is first and foremost about the right to not have to conform to binary gender roles. That’s an issue that lots of LGB people ought to be able to get behind.

Secondly, what medical options are offered to trans people (by responsible doctors, not by Bindel and her pals) are not intended to stop people being trans, but are quite the opposite. I quite understand the fear that older LGB people have of “cures”, because the sorts of things they remember with horror are still done to trans people. However, there is a huge difference between medical treatment intended to support someone’s sense of self, and medical treatment intended to destroy that identity. I don’t think that support for trans people is the slippery slope that the letter writer fears it might be.

What we should be doing is not trying to claim that one group of people is “normal” while others are “sick”, but to move away from the stigmatization of people who require some medical intervention to get on with their lives happily.

Intersectionality, it is about understanding that other people’s oppression is just as real to them as yours is to you.

Scientifically Illiterate, Medically Dangerous

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The other major piece of anti-trans propaganda that appeared in the media recently is, of course, in the New Statesman. I am fast coming to the conclusion that Helen Lewis and her staff don’t just hate trans women, they want to cause us actual harm. First there was their trolling of Leelah Alcorn, and now this. Let me explain.

For the most part the article is a truly dreadful attempt at Oppression Olympics. It goes on and on about how evil, “McCarthyist” trans women are preventing feminists from saying, well, anything really. The most spectacular part of it is where it tries to insinuate that BlockBot, a tool developed by feminists on Twitter to protect themselves from GamerGate, is in fact a weapon invented by trans women to shut down feminist debate. (And here once again we see the accusation that by refusing to listen to the hate being directed at us we are somehow “censoring” our opponents.)

The reason I am interested in the article, however, is that it makes some specific scientific claims about trans women. (And by the way, you can always tell nonsense articles about trans people because they talk almost exclusively about trans women.) I’d like to take a look at these claims and see how they stand up.

The first thing I did on reading the article was to check the author to see if they had any scientific credentials. The byline is “Terry Macdonald”, which the article freely admits is a pseudonym. I’m guessing that this is an attempt to insinuate that writing about trans women is not safe, and the author has to remain anonymous for their own protection. Goodness only knows how long a New Statesman writer would survive in the shoes of Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn or Brianna Wu, who are actually risking their lives. But hey, trans women, the greatest threat to civilization the world has ever known and all that.

Or possibly, of course, it is some complicated shell game that will end with Sarah Ditum yelling, “See you misgendered me, you are a transphobe, I WIN!!!” Given that the situation is uncertain, I shall use gender-neutral pronouns for Macdonald.

Anyway, the point is that there is no evidence of scientific credentials. Nevertheless, scientific claims are made. In particular there is this:

The core of the ideology I’m referring to is the assertion that ‘trans women are women’. (We hear a lot less from and about trans men.) Exactly what this statement means depends on whether the speaker is using the word ‘women’ to refer to a social category or a biological one. In the first case there is a discussion to be had (though people may reasonably differ in their conclusions), but in the second case the assertion is patently false. Trans women are not, by definition, biological females. Yet in the most extreme version of the ideology, you cannot say that without being labelled a TERF.

I note in passing that there is a third meaning to the statement ‘trans women are women’, and that is a legal one. The good old Gender Recognition Act might have many flaws, but one thing that it has done is make thousands of trans women legally female. Macdonald conveniently ignores this. As to social categories, TERFS are all over how gender is a social construct, except when it applies to trans women, in which case their right to be socially female is suddenly questionable.

I also note that the reason we don’t hear a lot from trans men is that no one is devoting pages and pages of newsprint to preventing trans men from using men’s bathrooms. It is generally accepted that trans men are men.

The claim I want to look at, however, is this one about trans women not being “biological females”. What does it mean? Macdonald doesn’t say, so I am going to run through a bunch of possibilities to try to work out what this is all about.

The most obvious starting point is physical appearance. I often see people claiming that the breasts of trans women are “fake”, implying that they are the result of silicon implants. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can assure you that mine grew naturally, under the influence of estrogen, just like any other woman’s would. Some people also like to claim, because trans women have had their genitalia reconstructed, that our new genitalia are somehow made of dead flesh, and even that they smell of necrosis. The plastic surgeons are much better than that, I can assure you. Finally it is sometimes claimed that because we have our penises “cut off” we are incapable of enjoying sex, a comment so inaccurate that it tends to make me giggle uncontrollably.

How about internal organs, then? Well, trans women don’t have wombs or ovaries, but some cis women have to have them removed for medical reasons and that doesn’t stop them being women, does it? I think not.

One area in which trans women are often accused of being “biologically male” is sport. There is an assumption that a trans woman will have an unfair advantage over a “real” woman because of her “male” body. Well, as luck would have it, there are parts of the Guardian that do publish socially progressive articles about trans people. Their science and technology section can be quite good, but yesterday it was their sports section that stepped up to the plate by carrying an interview with Fallon Fox.

The article quotes Dr Eric Vilain, director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, who helped the Association of Boxing Commissions write its transgender policy, and Dr Marci Bowers, an OB-GYN specialist and a leader in the field of transition-related surgeries. Both of them dismiss the idea that Fox has some sort of unnatural advantage over other female contestants. Dr Vilain is quoted as saying, “male to female transsexuals have significantly less muscle strength and bone density, and higher fat mass, than males”. Obviously there is a range of abilities, because not every woman is the same, but Bowers says of Fox, “There are taller women than her, there are bigger women than her, there are stronger women than her.”

The author of the article, Jos Truit, adds that, “transition could mean a hormonal disadvantage for Fox because of her low testosterone levels.” I’m highlighting that because what the experts say about Fox are not comments on her status as someone who has identified as female from an early age, but on her status as someone who has undergone gender surgery and hormone treatment. That’s important.

Hormones are hugely powerful chemicals responsible for all sorts of systems in the body. There’s a fascinating program about them currently available on iPlayer. Testosterone and estrogen are particularly important. Post-surgery, trans women no longer make testosterone naturally, but they can’t make estrogen either. Because of this, we are put on a lifetime prescription of what is essentially hormone replacement therapy. We are supposed to get regular blood tests too, because the doctors want to be sure that our estrogen levels are typical for adult women. It is a health issue, we are told.

Estrogen, of course, is what causes pre-pubescent girls to turn into adult women; and testosterone turns boys into men. But the hormones don’t suddenly stop working just because you have become an adult. That’s why trans women are able to grow breasts naturally. Estrogen treatment causes other effects as well, including the loss of muscle strength and bone density, and the gain in fat, reported by Dr Vilain.

The upshot of this is that if you were to take a blood sample from a trans woman, or check a whole bunch of characteristics such as those mentioned in connection with Fox, the results you got back would be typical of a woman, not of a man.

So where are we? Trans women appear to be “biologically female” from their external appearance and a whole battery of internal tests. Is there anything else we can look at? Well, Macdonald does admit that some research suggests that trans women have brains that look more like those of women than like those of men. This is fairly contentious stuff, and to be really safe researchers have to be very careful to ensure that what they are measuring is the pre-transition brain, not the brain that has been bathed in estrogen for decades. Up until yesterday I was not prepared to state that a biological basis for gender identity had been discovered.

Then this was published. It is a paper in an academic journal called Endocrine Practice, and it takes the form of a literature review, meaning that it looks at evidence from a wide range of studies. The conclusion of the paper is, “Although the mechanisms remain to determined, there is strong support from the literature that there is a biological basis for gender identity.”

Michael Dillon would be so happy. I don’t suppose that Macdonald has had a chance to read the paper yet, but I’d be interested to know what they make of it.

Finally, of course, we come to chromosomes. That’s the usual last resort of those who wish to “prove” that trans women are “really” men. Women have XX chromosomes, and men have XY, and all trans women are XY, right?

Well, no. Macdonald admits that intersex people exist, but doesn’t seem to know much about them. One of the better known intersex conditions is Klinefelter’s syndrome, which generally involves having XXY chromosomes, though the best known example, Caroline Cossey, has XXXY. The point about Klinefelter’s is that people with that condition are born looking male, and are assigned male at birth. Some of them identify as female, and like Cossey choose to go through gender surgery. They may identify as trans women — Cossey does. I’m interested to know how Macdonald would classify them. Are they “really men”, or do they get a pass because they are also intersex?

One of the most spectacular intersex conditions, however, is androgen insensitivity syndrome. People with this condition have XY chromosomes, but their bodies are unable to process androgens, which are male sex hormones. As a result their bodies develop looking female, and they are assigned female at birth. Their only significant difference from XX people is that they don’t normally have wombs or ovaries.

So if chromosomes trump everything, are people with AIS “biologically male”? Or do they get a pass and count as “biologically female” because they have AIS? And if so, how is a trans woman, whose body doesn’t process androgens because she can’t make them anymore, different?

I suspect that some mumbling about age might be happening in the New Statesman bunker (buried deep underground for fear of nuclear strikes by angry trans women) right now. And there we come to another interesting question: trans kids.

As I mention above, hormones are responsible for the massive changes that humans undergo at puberty. These days, trans kids are able to access treatments that allow them to go through puberty in their preferred gender. A young trans woman today will never have been through male puberty. She will have been through female puberty. How is she not “biologically female”?

But, but… Time for one last throw of the dice. Macdonald says,

Other arguments espoused by some trans activists are entirely lacking in scientific support, since they deny the existence of human sexual dimorphism.

Oh, right humans are a sexually dimorphic species, so males and females must be different. Paging Dr Bowers here:

“Sexual dimorphism refers to the amount of physical difference between the sexes,” Bowers explains. “The fact is, human beings actually differ very little in their sexual dimorphism, much less so than other species.”

That lack of difference is, of course, much less pronounced in children than in adults. And, you know, isn’t that one of the central tenets of feminism: that when it comes down to it men and women are not that different? Why, then, is it so important for some feminists to insist that trans women are, and can only ever be, men?

Basically, I suspect, it is all down to willies. It used to be that TERFs would claim that gender was a social construct, and that trans women were constructed male in childhood and could never change that. As trans girls began to transition at younger and younger ages, it eventually came down to, “but they had willies when they were born, and that makes them men!”

It is the same with the biology. Trans women can be as close as possible, biologically speaking, to cis women — certainly well within the natural range on most tests — and they can transition as young as possible, never going through male puberty. But eventually it will all come down to, “but they had willies when they were born!”

The main point I wanted to make here, though, is not that Macdonald’s argument is scientifically illiterate. I also want to note that it is medically dangerous.

One of the things that modern medical science is discovering is that the health of the body is very much dependent on what gender it is. And that’s not a question of chromosomes, or what gender it was assigned at birth, it is mostly down to hormones. For trans women to remain healthy, it is important for doctors to treat them, in most cases, as biologically female, because their bodies will react like those of other women. By encouraging people to think, against all scientific evidence, that trans women are biologically male, Macdonald and their friends are putting trans women’s health at risk.

Doubtless the argument in the New Statesman bunker is that the thing to do would be to ban gender medicine. Then all of the trans women would commit suicide and the problem would be solved in what they would regard as a humane and civilized manner. Thankfully much of the rest of the world doesn’t seem to share their views.

Free Speech Becomes Newspeak

~ Cheryl

Issues of freedom of speech are all the rage in traditional and social media these days. As this is a political question, there is invariably a lot of subtext surrounding what is actually said. People say loudly that they are in favour of “free speech”, but what they mean by that can vary considerably, and it is wise to understand the issues before offering immediate support to such a call.

This particular post was prompted by a letter in The Observer on Saturday (it is dated Sunday, but it went online on Saturday morning) in which a posse of the great and good decried what they view as a creeping atmosphere of censorship in British universities. This in turn led to lots of people getting very angry on social media, and people getting very upset as a result.

Much of this involves the issue of “no-platforming”, by which student unions say that certain people whom they view as purveyors of hate speech and other objectionable views are not allowed to speak on union premises. This sort of thing has been common in student unions for decades — certainly since I was at university, which is so long ago that we called the study of dinosaurs agricultural economics. I am pretty sure that some of the people who signed that letter will have happily marched around their campuses chanting “no platform for racists and fascists”. The difference these days is that the people potentially being no-platformed are people with a track record of spreading hatred against trans people and sex workers.

It is worth noting that no-platforming is not censorship. It does not say that the people concerned have no right to their opinions, or to express those opinions, it simply says that they should not have the right to express those views on university premises. There are plenty of places where one can spread vile views about trans people and sex workers, the Guardian/Observer being one of them.

Also, of course, one’s access to platforms increases dramatically if one is white, middle-class, cisgendered, Oxbridge educated and so on. If you want to see how British society effectively no-platforms people of color I recommend that you follow @WritersOfColour on Twitter. They publish some really good articles.

Let’s now deal with the substance of the complaints. Sarah Brown has a comprehensive take-down of the various issues it raises here, but I’ll go through them briefly here.

The comedian, Kate Smurthwhaite, was not no-platformed. Her gig was cancelled because only 8 tickets had been sold.

Germaine Greer was not no-platformed at Cambridge. There was discussion between the Cambridge Union (which is a debating society, not the Student’s Union) and student feminists about whether she should be invited to speak. In the event she was. The students organized a rival event, which they have a perfect right to do. Greer used her platform to abuse trans people, which rather proves the point as to why the students didn’t want her to be invited in the first place.

Then there is Rupert Read, the Green Party candidate for Cambridge. He hasn’t been no-platformed either. What did happen is that a bunch of trans activists protested against his views, and some demanded that he be de-selected by the Greens. This happened because of views about trans people that he expressed publicly. I got told on Saturday night that these views were “not transphobic”, and yet what Read was effectively doing was calling for the repeal of the Gender Recognition Act.

The key point about the GRA is that it gives (some) trans people the right to be legally recognized in our preferred gender. Read’s position was that we should not have that right, and that “women” (a group he clearly felt not to include me) should have the right to exclude trans women from female-only spaces if they so wished, specifically bathrooms. How that can be construed as not transphobic is beyond me.

Support for trans people has long been a prominent feature of Green politics, and to see one of their candidates expressing firmly anti-trans views was very worrying. What happened with Read is that the leadership of the Greens took him aside and explained that what he was saying was against party policy. He has since apologized and retracted his remarks. If that is censorship, then so is all party politics. Suggesting, as the Observer letter does, that trans people should not be allowed to challenge political parties on their support for issues directly pertaining to us is very worrying and deeply undemocratic.

Of course there has long been a view amongst prominent left-wing activists that they have fulfilled their moral obligation to trans people by allowing us to dress as we please and have medical assistance to look the way we want. They will then insist that this doesn’t mean that trans women are “really” women, or that trans men exist, and that holding such views does not make them in any way transphobic. My opinion of such sophistry is not printable. We have not forgotten that the one piece of UK legislation that makes discrimination against trans people legal was authored by the Labour Party.

The only actual case of no-platforming I know of involving the people mentioned by the letter is a single incident in which Julie Bindel was banned from speaking at Sheffield University. This is hardly a tidal wave of totalitarianism, deserving of a mass letter to the national media.

Of course the Sheffield students are perfectly within their rights to deny Bindel a platform if they wish. Student politics is not a dictatorship, and if the actual student body disagrees they can vote the current leadership out. Nor has Bindel been prevented from holding a meeting elsewhere in Sheffield, or writing about the situation in national newspapers, who seem only to keen to pay her for her opinions, no matter how vile they are.

I don’t know why Sheffield decided to deny Bindel a platform, but I suspect that it is something to do with her support for “reparative therapy” for trans people — the sort of psychological bullying that caused Leelah Alcorn to take her own life. The letter, very disingenuously, says that none of the people no-platformed have ever advocated violence against trans people. The only one of those people that was actually no-platformed is someone who has indeed advocated grossly inhuman treatment of trans people. I understand that some of those mentioned advocate things that are deeply dangerous to sex workers as well.

To understand why the letter unleashed a Twitter storm you also have to understand the subtext that it contains, and why trans people will have seen it as saying much more than it actually did.

The point here is that trans activists are for the most part fed up of being asked to debate our right to exist, our right to be considered sane, our right not to be labelled “rapists” simply because we are trans women, and our right not to have to respond to accusations that we are can never be “real” women because our vaginas are too smelly (the Jeffreys position) or not smelly enough (the Greer position). Frankly we have better things to do with our lives.

Nevertheless, people do love a good bust-up. We don’t throw people to the lions any more, but we do what are known as “ambush debates”. What happens here is that you invite someone from a minority group along to talk about their experiences, and when they get there they discover that they will be expected to “debate” against someone who hates people like them, and that they will have to spend the entire “debate” responding to lies and insults from the professional hater.

Of course if you decline to be part of such a “debate” then the people organizing it will probably cancel, because they will be deprived of their entertainment. Trans people have discovered that if you use this tactic, and the event is indeed cancelled, then we will be accused of having “no-platformed” or “censored” the person lined up to insult us. This happened to Sarah Brown when she declined to be on a panel with Julie Bindel (something which turned into an appalling example of real world as well as online bullying of Sarah); and it happened to Paris Lees when she declined to be on a Newsnight “debate”.

So when someone says that they are against “no-platforming”, what trans people tend to hear is that they are in favor of having us put in metaphorical stocks while someone like Bindel or Greer throws insults at us. To the trans community, saying that you are against “no-platforming” comes across in the same way as saying that you are concerned about ethics in games journalism.

Next up there is the way that Twitter storms work. Soon after the whole thing blew up I was starting to hear stories that trans activists had unleashed a storm of hate messages against those who had signed the letter, and that this somehow proved what awful creatures trans people are.

It doesn’t work like that.

Twitter is an ideal vehicle for spontaneous mass protest by people normally denied a voice. You don’t have to organize a Twitter storm, and unless you have vastly more followers than any trans activist you probably can’t. They happen quite naturally, because lots of people have access. I have no idea who was the first person to tweet about that letter, but it is entirely likely that it was just the first trans person to look at the Guardian website that day. I heard about it from some young trans people I follow. They are not particularly activists, but they do get angry. One of them, I know, has been thrown out of her family home by her parents because she is trans. People like that get angry easily.

Once a storm gets going, of course, everyone joins in. I’m sure that a few trans activists will have said some fairly vile things. But our cause will have been adopted by people with a grudge against some of the people who signed the letter, by people doing it “for the lols”, and by sock-puppet accounts set up by the TERFS for the purpose of discrediting us. That’s the way that Twitter works.

In addition, prominent trans activists will have been targeted with abusive tweets. That too is part of the way Twitter works. But apparently that doesn’t matter, because it is only the feelings of white, middle-class media celebrities that are important.

The solution to all of this is not to blame the minority group that is seen to be sending abusive tweets, but to demand that Twitter become better at dealing with abuse. And in the meantime to use the “block” button.

Social media has made modern politics rather complicated to navigate. I can quite understand how some older people have difficulty with it. However, it is part of the way we live these days. If you want to carry on having a political voice, you have to understand it. And if you are going to sign up to a high profile statement that is deeply critical of a minority group, you have to understand what that statement is saying.

I don’t expect that everyone who signed that letter in the Observer will be aware of this subtlety, and indeed there has been some suggestion that what they were asked to sign is very different from what finally appeared in the paper. So hopefully some of them will be thinking, not just about how they have been abused online, but how they have been used, and why.

Bleargh

~ Cheryl

I am back from Manchester. I also have a cold. Given how badly I was sneezing on the train on the way south (deeply embarrassing, I can assure you) I elected to steer clear of the two Bristol events I was supposed to attend last night, and instead go straight home. I need to get myself fit again for the launch of Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship on Thursday night.

The one piece of good news from yesterday was the launch of Stonewall UK’s new trans inclusion policy. This looks to have been really well done, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it.

In the meantime, of course, the “feminist” lobby in the mainstream media has been busily stirring up hated against trans people. I may have a few things to say later today.

LGBT History Conference – Day 2

~ Cheryl

Something has gone very badly wrong with the UKIP weather forecast. It was raining in Manchester when I arrived on Friday. It is forecast to rain tomorrow. But for the entire weekend, when the gays have been celebrating their history in the city, it has not rained once. In fact today we had bright blue skies for a while. This is so unlike Manchester, especially in February. It must be am omen of something.

Of course I was inside for most of the day. The conference began with Stuart Milk, the nephew of the famous San Francisco politician, telling us what is actually going on with marriage equality in the USA at the moment. I had some idea, but I didn’t know quite how crazy things had got in Alabama. That will be… interesting.

Then we were into panels, and my paper. Thankfully I was not first up. That honor went to Alejandro Melero, a film studies scholar from Spain who talked to us about how censorship worked under the Franco regime. Franco was a bit nuts about teh gays. In fact one of his first acts after coming to power was to mandate that all army barracks should have three beds to a room rather than two, so that soldiers could not pair off. I guess they just had orgies instead.

Anyway, Alejandro showed that while an awful lot that was gay (and quite a bit that wasn’t but triggered the lurid imaginations of the priests) was censored, a fair amount was not. What interested me was that there were some very recognizable tropes. Alejandro told us about a gay cowboys film (complete with a poster of a man kissing a pistol), a lesbian vampires film, and even a transvestite killer film. Truly, there is nothing new in Hollywood.

Next up we had actual Latin grammar neepery as Kit Heyam took us through possible different translations of medieval accounts of the gayness or otherwise of King Edward II. Much of this hinged on how one understand the word “sodomy”, which we now take to mean male-male sex, but which in those times could mean any non-procreative sex. It is interesting how modern day scholars tend to mis-translate the Latin to make it more explicit that Edward had sex with Hugh Despenser.

Then there was me, and apparently I did not disgrace myself, which was a big relief. I have given presentations as literary conferences before now, but this was my first gig as an historian.

After a coffee break we had a presentation on trans history from Professor Stephen Whittle, OBE, one of the people responsible for getting the Gender Recognition Act before Parliament. To my relief, he made pretty much the same points that I did, though he used very different examples. He did bring up an Inuit tribe that recognizes nine genders. That I need to follow up on. Also we both had very different examples of how RadFems try to claim Billy Tipton as a lesbian, something I am sure would horrify him if he were still alive.

After lunch we had a group workshop about the use of archives, in which I unexpectedly found I had a lot to say because of the work that Out Stories Bristol has been doing with Bristol Records Office.

Then there was the final set of papers, which I think was my favorite session of the lot as it ranged all over Europe. It started with a group of Norwegians talking about a national archive of LGBT history that they are setting up. I sent them away with a request for evidence of gender variance in pre-Christian Scandinavia. I figured that if Loki could get away with it, and if Valhalla was full of women warriors, there must have been something interesting going on. Swedish and Danish readers, do feel free to chip in. (Icelanders, hold off for a moment, I have more for you.)

Next Jennifer Ingleheart talked to us about Romosexuality. Those Romans got up to all sorts of things, and had a particular obsession with giant penises. I rather wished that Tansy had been there. Jennifer has promised to dig out some stuff about Elagabalus for me, for which I cam very grateful.

Finally Marianna Muravyeva talked to us about LGBT history in Russia, of which there is, of course, rather a lot, even if Mr.Putin doesn’t want to admit it.

A bunch of us then went off to the pub and I had a long conversation with Marianna, mainly about fiction, but we did also get onto the subject of witchcraft. In the West we are used to it being women who are accused of this crime. In Russia, however, it was mainly men. Russian villages tended to have both a male and female witch. The woman was responsible for the health of the humans of the village, but the man was responsible for the health of the animals. And if there were problems with the horses or cows in the village then the authorities would prosecute the local male witch. Female witches were only prosecuted if someone died as a result of their treatment.

It turns out that there are very few countries in the world where the vast majority of witchcraft prosecutions are of men rather than women. Russia is one; Iceland is another. Why, Icelandic friends? What made you so different from the rest of Scandinavia?

I had a great time over the weekend, and am already wondering what I can do for a paper at next year’s conference. My thanks to Sue Saunders, Jeff Evans and the rest of the team for a really enjoyable and thought-provoking event.

I’ll get my paper up on Academia.edu once I have got home.

I Do Trans History, With Penguins

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Talk in progress - photo by Mary Milton
I spent yesterday afternoon in Bristol giving a talk on the history of trans people at the M-Shed on behalf of Out Stories Bristol. As you can see from the photo (for which thanks to Mary Milton), I actually had an audience. In fact I’m told that we sold out on Eventbrite, which was quite encouraging. Also the feedback was very pleasing.

The talk begins with the following quote which comes from the notorious appearance of the leading TERF academic, Sheila Jeffreys, on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour program last year.

“… the phenomenon of transgenderism which is a social construct of the 2nd half of the 20th century and which has become particularly common in the last couple of decades…”

The point of the talk was to prove Jeffreys not just wrong, but spectacularly and hilariously wrong. In pursuit of this objective I took a lightning tour through 2000 years of history and all five continents, producing evidence of the existence of, and social acceptance of, trans people in many different cultures and at many different times in history. The only thing different about the 20th century was a step change in the medical technology available, and a start on reversing the drastic curtailment of trans rights that took place in Western Europe in the past few hundred years. Hopefully my audience went away understanding that the negative view we have of trans people in the UK, and throughout Western “civilization”, is the exception rather than the rule.

I had a lot of fun researching the talk. I wasn’t able to find evidence of trans people in every country in the world, but I did manage quite a lot. I was relieved to finally track down something in the Inca empire, because Latin America was looking a bit thin. It turned out that English translations of a key Spanish source on Inca religion had omitted the sentence that makes it plain that members of a particular priesthood were trans people. I was also very pleased to find evidence of trans people amongst the indigenous people of Australia. Given how long they were isolated from the rest of mankind, and the slow pace of change in such cultures, it seems reasonable to assume that trans people have been with us for over 50,000 years.

I did draw a blank in a few places. There is evidence of trans people in many African countries, but Europeans seem to have done a particularly efficient job of destroying their local cultures. Things like the rinderpest epidemic of the 1890s resulted in a mindboggling death toll. (And by the way, America, measles is a direct evolutionary descendent of rinderpest.) I had no luck with the Aztecs either, but they did have a god of gay men so I forgave them.

The biggest problem was Antarctica, because there are no native people. However, I did manage to find evidence of the world’s first known trans male penguin, which is a pretty awesome thing.

I’ll be giving a repeat of the talk at Bath University on the 26th, and hopefully I’ll get to do it in some other places in the future. I think I have a recording, but I’m a bit hesitant about making it public because I had to skim so quickly over so many different cultures. I’d prefer to do some more in-depth posts on particular aspects of the talk.

Thanks For Nothing, Florida

~ Cheryl

Given that I can’t enter the USA these days, I can’t go to ICFA anyway, but if I could a new law being put before the Florida State Legislature would give me pause for thought about going. Why? Because if the bill passes and I were to use a women’s restroom in Florida then I would be liable for up to a year in prison. Also anyone else in the restroom at the time would be able to bring a civil suit for damages against both me and the company on whose premises the restroom is located. Full details at Slate.

Somehow I doubt that this is likely to become law, and even if it did I’m pretty sure that it would get ruled unconstitutional in due course. But you never know. A very bad part of me rather hopes that it does become law, and that a whole lot of hairy, muscular trans guys descend upon Florida and start using the women’s restrooms.

February Schedule

~ Cheryl

It is LGBT History Month, so I’ll be rather busy. On the off-chance that some of you might be daft enough to want to attend one of my talks, of just catch up, here’s where you can find me.

Saturday 7th (14:30) – “A Potted History of Gender Variance” at the M-Shed (in which I intend to show that the much-vaunted gender binary is something of an aberration in human history).

Saturday 14th & Sunday 15th – I’ll be at the National LGBT History Festival in Manchester. On Sunday at around 11:00 I’ll be giving a paper: “Their-stories: Interrogating gender identities from the past”.

Monday 16th (18:00) – The Bristol University Student’s Union Festival of Liberation is hosting “How do we make the Women’s Movement Intersectional?” I’ll be there if I get back from Manchester in time, and maybe dropping in on BristolCon Fringe (John Hawkes-Reed & Stark Holborn) if I can get away in time.

Thursday 19th (18:00) – I’m hosting a book launch at Foyles, Cabot Circus. This is for The Ship by Antonia Honeywell, which is proving a very interesting read.

Wednesday 25th (18:00) – Back at the University, the Festival of Liberation asks, “What Next for the LGBT+ Movement Following the Passing of the Same Sex Marriage Act?”. I’m on the panel, as if Daryn Carter of Bristol Pride.

Thursday 26th (19:15) – I’m reprising the history of gender variance talk at Bath University.

Friday 27th – I’m giving a lunchtime trans awareness talk at a Bristol hospital. Then in the evening I’ll be at Josie McLellan’s “Glad to be Gay Behind the Wall” – 19:00 start at Roll for the Soul.

Saturday 28th (14;00) – Out Stories Bristol will be hosting “Opening Our New Chapter”, a launch event from some new local LGBT history projects at Hamilton House in the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft.

The Wheels of Government Turn

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

This afternoon I headed into Bristol for this event, billed at “Government’s Women’s Engagement Event for Lesbian, Bisexual & Trans* Women In the South West”.

It was part of a government initiative to gauge the views of the nation’s women on a variety of subjects. In other words, it was a sort of focus group. This, dear readers, is how the UK government consults with citizens these days.

I guess I should start by noting that Bristol was somewhat honored. You see, we were the only place in the country asked for our opinions on LGBT issues. Obviously the South West must be an exceptionally queer place. As we were the only such meeting, people came from a long way away. I met a couple from South Wales, and one woman who had come all of the way from Leeds.

There were around 30 of us I think, to represent all LB & T women in the UK. (And yes, similar groups must have represented other groups — the disabled, ethnic minorities and so on — elsewhere in the country.) Gee, I hope we were representative.

Well actually we weren’t, because around a third of the attendees were trans. That has to be more you would expect. Part of it, I am sure, is because so many of us are self-employed or unemployed, so have the time to attend such things. Part of it is that we have so much more to be worried about as far as public policy goes. And part of it is that most of the lesbian and bi- women will have jobs and won’t have the time to attend a Friday afternoon event.

There was only one obvious person of color, though I think two attendees identified as such. That’s a massive under-representation.

I can think of so many better ways to sample the views of the nation, starting with SurveyMonkey, but maybe that wasn’t the point.

We had just two hours, one hour of which was spent on speeches by the invited panel, and half an hour was given over to a refreshment break. Only half an hour was allowed for us to give opinions.

Baroness Jolly (LibDem, Health, House of Lords) chaired the session. For her speech she mostly read from something prepared by her staff. There was a lot of spin in it. In particular it glossed over the Spousal Veto, and the fact that the Governments trans equalities program ground to a shuddering halt when Lynne Featherstone was removed from responsibility for it. I may have had a few things to say. Baroness Jolly gracefully accepted that it is a politician’s duty to take the hit when her staff write fluff for her.

There were four other speeches. My colleague, Sarah-Louise Minter, from LGBT Bristol did a kickass job, making an impassioned plea for a proper diversity policy in schools. I was also impressed by Deborah Reed of Exeter College, who told an anecdote about a vacation to the USA and discovering that Coca Cola World really gets diversity, whereas UK institutions (including hers) are still very much white, cis and heteronormative. The other two speakers, including Carol Steel from Transfigurations, a Torbay-based trans support group, were clearly much less experienced at public speaking and lacked confidence as a result.

For out input we were divided into four groups focusing on Health, Safety, Access to Services and Education. I joined the latter. In theory we had five questions we were supposed to answer. In practice we managed two. When it came time for the groups to give feedback, what our moderator said seemed to me to bear little relation to what we had actually discussed. So here, for the record, are the two points that I made.

Firstly, I am sick to death of cis people doing training on behalf of trans people. We have got a little better over the past few years, in that “LGBT” training does now sometimes actually include T. However, the chances of it actually involving a trans person are low, particularly where education is concerned. That has two effects. Firstly it reinforces the view that trans people are unfortunates who are incapable of speaking for themselves; and second it means that what gets taught may well be ill-informed. Deborah Reed said that they had asked trans people to talk at Exeter College but it proved too expensive. Cue sound of a door being firmly shut in my face yet again.

Second, the only way we will solve any of this — sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, etc. — is if we teach kids about gender, and how gender stereotypes screw up society. I may write something about this for next month’s Bristol 24/7 column.

There were a few other good points raised. Briefly:

– Yes, we need more women governors in schools, and in particular more LBT women.

– Yes, teachers are only human, and can’t be expected to be experts on everything (which is one of many reasons why I love the folks at TIGER).

– And yes, sometimes the trans community it is own worst enemy, with the insistence of young activists on adherence to an ever-shifting set of language rules and terminology.

That was my experience of being asked my opinion by the government. If I sound a little cynical, well I guess I am. I have run focus groups before. I remember well one I did for a government organization in California at the end of which the civil servants complained about how the invited members of the public said all of the wrong things, and they had to find some way to make sure that the next focus group gave the answers they wanted.

The net result of this one will, I suspect, be that the Government ticks a box to say that it has consulted the LBT women of Britain, and that a report will be written that reflects what the civil servants in charge of the program want said.

In Which I Destroy Feminist Science Fiction

~ Cheryl

I have been boring you on Twitter for days now about the Queers Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter, but I’m going to mention it again because I can reveal that I have a part in it.

You may remember that last year for the Women Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter they asked various people to write personal essays to entertain visitors to the campaign website. I wrote one of those, and as the campaign hit the necessary stretch goals my essay got included in the final book.

Well, for #QDSF Wendy Wagner kindly asked me to contribute another essay. That went online today. Given the title of the book, I felt that it was only fair that I should actually destroy something, so I have trained my queer pink laser canon on a classic text of Feminist Science Fiction, The Female Man by Joanna Russ. If you want to know what I said, go here.

Of course this does mean that I have been kicking TERFs twice in one day. That was a coincidence. Or maybe it is something I do every day, but not as publicly. Anyway, enjoy.

And while you are there, please consider backing the campaign. I’m pretty sure that the stretch goal for including the essays in the final book has been met, but I have this flash fiction story that I’d really love to submit to Queers Destroy Fantasy, should that be open to submissions, and for that book to happen we have quite a way to go.

Dealing With A TERF Infestation

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

As some of you may know, Bristol University recently suffered an attack of TERFs. Some of those terribly persistent Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists decided to try to make trans students at the University feel unwelcome and unsafe there. This all blew up earlier in the week and I’ve been a bit busy, so I didn’t manage to do much other than tweet while it was happening. However, there were some great articles in various papers:

Nothing in The Guardian, you will notice, but equally nothing from the New Statesman about how important it is to keep The Menz, meaning trans women, out of female spaces.

Anyway, today I got caught up, and have done an article for Bristol 24/7 on the subject. You can find it here.

Thanks are due to Jamie Cross of LGBT+ Bristol, the student group responsible for the original poster campaign that the TERFs were attempting to parody. He’s dealt with the whole thing really well. Also thanks to Alice Phillips, the Students’ Union Equalities Officer, who has been right on the ball sorting this out.

Of course the TERFs are only concerned with trans women using the women’s toilets. They think we are going there with a view to raping them, rather than with a view to having a pee, which is a rather more likely explanation. The possibility of trans men using men’s toilets doesn’t occur to them, because they don’t think that such people exist. It is rather a shame that bathroom panic concentrates so much on trans women, because trans guys have a real issue with bathrooms. They are much more likely to get beaten up, or worse, if read because they are going into a very male space. If people were really worried about bathroom safety, that’s the first thing I would look at.

History – It’s (Mostly) Fun

~ Cheryl

I used to really enjoy history as a kid, and I might well have taken it up as a career had my parents not so badly wanted me to be a scientist. Running role-playing campaigns allowed me to indulge my passion for a while, but that was a long time ago. It hasn’t really been until I got involved with Out Stories Bristol that I have been able to get back to it again.

Over the past few weeks I have been researching my main talk for this year’s LGBT History Month. It has been a lot of fun, and I have learned a lot about some interesting people, and the way in which different cultures around the world have been accepting or otherwise of gender-variant people. Those of you who can get to Bristol can see the talk on February 7th at the M-Shed.

It has been quite heartwarming to discover just how many different cultures all over the world have been accepting of people like me, and a bit scary to realize that our modern Western culture is one of the least accepting. Probably the least fun bit, however, was seeing how hard cis people work to deny the validity and even the reality of trans people. The accounts I have been reading have been full of amateur psychoanalysis purporting to explain away why trans people are the way they are (none of it flattering). Texts on gender history tend to be written by feminist academics who are particular hostile to trans women. LGB historians insist that all gender variance is evidence of same-sex attraction. And I have found myself wishing I had more language skills because English translations of original sources have a habit of changing or editing out eye witness accounts to as to remove any taint of “immorality” from the text.

Overall, however, it has been a positive experience. I look forward to seeing some of you in Bristol next month, and will try to find other ways to make the talk available. At least, unlike the LGBT Superheroes talk, this one does not rely heavily on copyrighted art.

It’s Destroyin’ Time

~ Cheryl

Here I am channeling my internal Ben Grimm. Or possibly my internal Drax. Whatever, it is time to destroy science fiction again. This time we are doing it with glitter.

Yes, as you may have noticed from Twitter, the Queers Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter campaign launched yesterday. In under 24 hours it not only fully funded, it blew through its first stretch goal. There are still 31 days to go, but that’s OK because there are more stretch goals to come. These include funding the companion Queers Destroy Horror and Queers Destroy Fantasy titles. Destruction is good, right?

Why do we need this? Well the first personal essay is up on the campaign page. It is by Michael Damian Thomas who quotes from a 1-star Amazon review of his Queers Dig Time Lords anthology:

“Just another attempt to gain civilizations approval of their flawed agenda. What does LGBTQ have to do with Sci-Fi and Doctor Who and what is there to celebrate? Kinda desperate to me….”

What does LGBTQ have to do with Doctor Who? Oh, that poor, hopelessly sheltered little dudebro. He has no idea. I think we have a duty to educate, don’t you?

In case you need further encouragement, here’s Mark Oshiro:

The UK Takes A Stand On Conversion Therapy

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Today the UK Council for Psychotherapy is meeting with the Department of Health to launch an agreement on actions to end the practice of conversion therapy in the UK. You can find the UKCP announcement here.

While this is generally good news, there are two things to note about this. Firstly it applies only to conversion therapy intended to alter the sexuality of the patient. There is no mention of the sort of cruel treatment suffered by Leelah Alcorn and other trans children. Secondly, the practice of conversation therapy will not be banned, only officially discouraged. I’d like to address these two points.

On the question of the inclusion of trans therapies, it is important to understand that the wheels of government move very slowly at times. All of this was put in place long before Leelah’s story became headline news. Also the Memorandum of Understanding that UKCP produced was written in response to a government request that specifically limited the question to sexuality. Some therapists, in particular the good folks at Pink Therapy, definitely want to extend the discussion to gender issues.

There are multiple possible explanations for why gender isn’t yet included. It could be that the same TERF-driven policy makers who came up with the Spousal Veto are also responsible for keeping trans people out of this initiative. However, there is also the problem that being trans is still listed as a mental illness in the major international directories, whereas being gay is not. While trans people are still officially deemed to be “sick”, it will be very difficult to stop people from trying to “cure” us. The World Health Organization will be publishing a new edition of their directory this year and I have some hope that it will address that problem.

By the way, it was inclusion of being trans in these directories of mental illness that got trans people included in the driving ban in Russia. I see from the Moscow Times that the Russian Health Ministry has tried to clarify their position. It is pretty clear that they went by the international definitions of mental illness in deciding who to ban, and they now claim that trans people will be allowed to drive as long as nothing in their condition makes it unsafe for them to do so (which basically means giving a lot of leeway to the police and courts).

As to the question of banning these treatments, Dominic Davies of Pink Therapy has a very interesting blog post on the subject. He lists three reasons why he thinks an outright ban is not advisable.

Firstly he raises the specter of “religious discrimination”. I’m not hugely impressed by this. If a Christian group cited the story of Abraham and Isaac as justification for sacrificing children no one would think they had a leg to stand on. Driving your children to suicide through torture should be treated in the same way. However, I do accept that there would be a big PR problem if an outright ban were advocated, because the Daily Malice would be right there with the religious discrimination argument.

Secondly he raises the issue of definition. This is a fair point. All sorts of people offer “therapy”, and by no means all of them are accredited in any way. Actually enforcing a ban would be be very difficult. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t have one, it just means that it would not work as intended.

The best argument is the one that a ban would make offering any help difficult and dangerous. The blog post notes that 1 in 6 of the UK’s professional therapists admits to have either offered sexuality conversion therapy or referred a patient to someone else who practices it. This means that a lot of (presumably very scared) people are coming to therapists asking for treatment. Davies argues that if a ban is in place then practitioners are likely to refuse to help the patient at all because of the risk of being struck off for offering a banned treatment. If conversion therapy is merely officially discouraged then the patient can be treated, and hopefully can be helped to view their sexuality in a much more positive light.

Anyway, as I said above, this is definite progress in the right direction. Also the Pink Therapy folks promised me via Twitter that they would continue to fight for trans issues to be added to the Memorandum of Understanding. More power to them.

Too Crazy To Drive

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Just in case anyone is wondering why I am not going to the Eurocon in St. Petersburg this year, here’s a clue as to one reason. According to that BBC report, trans people are now banned from driving in Russia on the ground that, as sexual deviants, we are too mentally unstable to be allowed to drive.

I eagerly await the New Statesman article praising the Russian government’s modern and enlightened approach to mental health and public safety.

By the way, the Russian fans running the convention are lovely people, and I have bought a membership. I still hope that one day in the future it will be safe for me to visit their country.

Leelah – A Shared Grief

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well that was interesting. Normally this blog averages around 200 visits per day. For the first five days of 2015 it averaged over 1500 visits.

It is obvious why this happened. The story of Leelah Alcorn has struck a nerve with the general public. I very much wish that it wasn’t necessary to write about a tragedy like this before people will pay attention to trans issues, but at the same time I need to take advantage of the opportunity while it lasts, because Leelah is the tip of a very big iceberg and we need to stop tragedies like hers from happening again. While I do talk a bit about trans issues here, I’m much more likely to be talking about books, so many of the people who have discovered me over the past few days will soon get bored and stop reading. I’m going to do what I hope is one last post while there is still interest in the subject.

Today I received email from the organization promoting the petition to outlaw conversion therapies in the USA. It asked me to imagine myself in Leelah’s place: alone, cold and seeking solace in death. That wasn’t hard. I’ve been there. Most trans people I know have.

Also today I saw this NPR interview with Greta Martela, the founder of a national (US) suicide helpline for trans people. She says she started it because she could have done with one herself. When she tried calling one of the big suicide prevention hotlines it was less than helpful.

“the operator didn’t know what ‘transgender’ meant, and so I had to explain that to him,” she says. “And once he did understand what I was talking about he got really uncomfortable.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Greta says about Leelah, “I think every trans person I know was crying about it the day that it came out.” I’m pretty sure that was the same for me.

Why? I refer you to this 2012 survey (PDF) of British trans people conducted by Scottish Trans. It reported that 84% of the respondents had considered suicide at one point during their lives. Eighty-four percent.

And yes, those numbers do include me, as I participated in the survey. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, suicide isn’t just something I considered in the past, it is something I know I need to plan for in the future as I get older.

When people say that Leelah’s suicide note struck a chord, we mean it. We have pretty much all been there. We know how she felt, because most of us have had those feelings, and nearly all of us know someone who has. Many of us have lost friends to suicide.

Why? How does this happen?

Well to start with it was the timing. Leelah died just after Christmas. That’s a time of year when many people are talking happily about shared family experiences, about spending time with their loved ones. By no means all trans people are openly rejected and abused by their families, as Leelah was, though many are.

I was talking last year about a charity trying to raise money to buy a house where homeless trans kids in Jamaica can shelter, because right now they are living in a sewer, having been kicked out of their homes by their parents. For some it really does get that bad. And I see from their Facebook page that over Christmas the police raided the place where the kids were sheltering and beat them up.

For many trans people Christmas is a time for gritting teeth as elderly relatives constantly mis-gender us and call us by the wrong name. Others are simply not welcome at family gatherings because of the friction it would cause, or get asked when they are going to “get over” the “phase they are going through”. It’s no fun. It is often easier to stay away. So Leelah died at exactly the right time of year to trigger memories of family issues.

You might think that your family is the one group that ought to support you. Again, not everyone is like Leelah’s parents. The trouble is, however, that the better someone knows you, the harder they find it to come to terms with a gender change. The way we humans interact with each other is so heavily influenced by gender that we find it very difficult to change how we see someone if their gender changes. Also parents tend to imagine futures for their children the minute that the midwife has pronounced the gender of the baby. If they are not sufficiently clued up to look for signs of gender discomfort, they will have nurtured those hopes for years before they find out there is a problem. Truly, families are a minefield for trans folk.

Something else that will have struck a chord with almost all trans people is the part where Leelah talks in her note about feeling that she is running out of time. Puberty is a shit time for an awful lot of people, but for trans folk the problems are multiplied many times over, because we find ourselves turning into monsters.

When you are a kid it is possible to hold on to crazy dreams about how the whole gender thing is a dreadful mistake, and when puberty hits it will all come right. Maybe you have some intersex condition that no one knows about, but will manifest itself when you need it. When puberty hits, these dreams come crashing down in ruins. Trans teenagers find their bodies changing in ways that horrify them; ways that they know can only be fixed by painful and expensive surgery. No wonder they think that their lives are over.

In some ways it was easier for me, because I didn’t know that anything could be done. Sure people like April Ashley had got hormones and surgery when they were older, but teenagers had no access to that. Modern teens like Leelah know that isn’t true. Treatments do exist, and you can get them if only your parents and doctors will let you. There must be a very real sense of seeing an opportunity pass you by.

I’ve seen some very passionate posts about how it is wrong that trans women should feel it so important to conform to classic standards of beauty, and I can see the point. The trouble is that from a very early age we are bombarded with messages telling is that being pretty is the most important attribute a girl can have. It takes considerable strength of will to resist that sort of conditioning.

There is also the matter of personal safety. Trans people — trans women in particular — do suffer from a much higher level of violence than non-trans people. If, as a trans woman, your looks are somewhere in the average range for non-trans women, then you will be much safer from such attacks than if they are not. That might be a dreadful state of affairs, but it is a simple fact of life.

So the process of going through puberty, the process of acquiring an adult body of the wrong type, is a deeply traumatic thing for trans teenagers. Every trans person who has known about their condition from childhood (and not all of us do) will have gone through that. Most of us have also wrestled with the knowledge that our families don’t fully support us, or the fear that they won’t if we tell them. The feelings that drove Leelah to take her own life are common to the vast majority of trans people.

Eighty-four percent.

Truly, there but for the grace of the Goddess, go I.

And one final thing. One more reason why, despite the awfulness of Leelah’s story, people are so keen to share it. The media has finally taken notice. With a few dishonourable exceptions, it is covering the story sympathetically. This is rare and unusual. We’ve got lucky, and we need to exploit the moment for all it is worth while that luck lasts.

We know, for example, that around the world a couple of hundred trans girls like Leelah are murdered each year. Mostly these killings are not reported outside of local media, or at all. If Leelah had not been white, her story would probably have got much less media attention, and would have been spun very differently.

If you are sensing an air of desperation, of a feeling that this too is an opportunity that could easily slip away, and we have to make the most of it while we can, well you’d be spot on.

Fix society. Please.

Leelah – The Establishment Closes Ranks

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

As many of you will know, Leelah Alcorn’s online presence has been erased. Not just her suicide note, everything: her blog, her art, her music. I’d rather expected this because Leelah was only 17 and was probably a minor under US law. However, Jane Fae has been investigating the situation and her report suggests that even this excuse wasn’t necessary. The mere fact that Leelah’s parents were “direct family” was enough for Tumblr to give them control over her legacy. (And yes, it was the Daily Mail that dug that up. It is a strange world in which the Daily Mail is more trans-friendly than the New Statesman.)

This is quite worrying. As Jane notes, the law in Europe may be different, but all of my online presence is hosted by US-base companies. I already knew that I needed to get my will re-written this year. It looks like I also need to make sure that Kevin has some ownership over my online presence so that no one can take it down if I die.

Something else that Jane has been investigating (content warning – Jane reports on some extreme transphobia) is a hate page on Facebook which was looking to bully other trans kids into killing themselves. Unlike most of the newspaper and social media coverage, this site was explicit about the method of Leelah’s suicide. It also directly encouraged copying it. Despite frequent complaints from trans activists over a period of 24 hours, Facebook moderators insisted that the page did not breach any of their community standards. Only when Jane took an interest, and mentioned that she wrote for major newspapers, did Facebook decide to take action. My guess is that the page will be back up again in a few days, probably after the New Statesman has published an article by Sarah Ditum defending Facebook’s right to freedom of speech in the face of bullying by trans thugs.

This is the sort of thing that drives trans people to take their own lives. No matter how much support we have, no matter what laws are passed to protect us, when it comes down to it there always seems to be this closing of ranks whereby those in power cite endless regulations justifying their mistreatment of us. Sure, we might have rights these days, but enforcing them is another matter entirely.

Illegitimi non carborundum.