Gender

Some Quick Leelah Links

~ Cheryl

While media feminists in the UK were busy trying to bury the story of Leelah Alcorn, media feminists in the USA have been offering support to the trans community. On today’s episode of the Melissa Harris Perry Show there was a segment featuring Leelah’s story, followed by a feature on Angelica Ross whose organization TransTechSocial, gets trans kids off the street and teaches them technology skills.

There was a vigil for Leelah in London today. I couldn’t get there, but I understand that it was very well attended. Sarah Brown gave a speech, which she posted to her blog. It is concise, to the point, and most importantly is aimed at the real villains here, the therapists who claim to be able to cure people of being trans.

Sarah says she’ll be doing what she can to ban such therapies in the UK. I wish her every success. These methods are banned in California for treatment of gays and lesbians, but not for treatment of trans people. In the UK, although the Health Minister described their use on gays and lesbians as “utterly abhorrent”, he refuses to ban it, and such treatments are apparently being paid for on the NHS. If is happening with respect to sexuality, I am sure it will be happening with trans kids too.

If you’d like to see conversation therapy for trans people banned in the USA, please consider signing this petition.

Cis People Know Best, They Tell Us

~ Cheryl ~ 19 Comments

Surely as night follows day, support for a cause leads to a backlash. The huge outpouring of sympathy and support for trans people that came from the sad death of Leelah Alcorn was inevitably going to lead to attacks on trans people. Unsurprisingly to any trans activist in the UK, the first salvo has come from the New Statesman.

On the face of it, Sarah Ditum’s article is supportive and caring, but it is actually a very clever piece of concern trolling. What Ditum wants to happen, is for people to stop writing about Leelah. Her excuse for this is that it is against Samaritans guidelines to publicise suicides, least this encourage copycat attempts. Technically, of course, this is correct, in that yes, the Samaritans do advise this. Practically it is quite another matter.

To start with, Leelah did a darn good job of publicising her suicide herself. She posted her suicide note on Tumblr, and by the time I woke up on Tuesday morning my Twitter feed was full of the story. Many young trans people have few friends outside of the Internet because they dare not tell anyone who might gossip about them to their parents, their teachers or other kids at their school. The bush telegraph of Tumblr and similar sites is very effective. Any additional publicity was mostly going to reach cis people, who are not the people at risk.

Secondly, many of the trans activists who covered the story (myself included) deliberately pointed to Leelah’s own words because we know how badly our stories can be mis-represented in the media. If a community is used to having news sources tell lies about it, then it will want the right to speak for itself.

Then again, there’s the question of least harm. If a teenage girl had killed herself because her parents were sexually abusing her, would people want this made known so that the parents could be brought to justice? I’m pretty sure that most of you would say yes. Well Leelah wanted the world to know that she was being abused too. Her parents had forced her to undergo “therapy” to “cure” her feelings. I don’t think they use electric shocks like they did when I was a kid, but this sort of thing is still very much psychological torture. The aim is to make the kid associate having the “undesirable” feelings with pain and unhappiness. In many parts of the world, using these methods on gay and lesbian people is banned by law. It is still commonly advocated for trans people.

By the way, while Leelah’s parents certainly bear some responsibility for what happened, personally I would prefer to see the blame land squarely on the preachers and quack psychiatrists who peddle these supposed cures. They prey on worried parents for profit.

But couldn’t the publicity that Leelah’s death has got encourage other trans kids to kill themselves so they could become famous too? If you believe that trans people are all attention-hungry and mentally ill — and many radical feminists do appear to believe that — then maybe yes. However, trans kids are killing themselves in ridiculous numbers anyway. As recent surveys have shown, the number of suicide attempts per head of population for trans people is over 40%. Roughly speaking, a trans person is 10 times more likely to attempt suicide than a straight cis person, and twice as likely as a gay or lesbian cis person.

As this Salon article notes, “Trans people don’t commit suicide because they’re trans; they commit suicide because the rest of us don’t treat them like people.” Leelah knew this, and said so. Her eloquently written note ended with a plea for trans people to be treated like human beings. It led to exactly the sort of outpouring of support from the mainstream media that she must have hoped for. No wonder some people want her silenced.

Given that the trans community was all getting the story on social media anyway, a deafening silence in mainstream media would have confirmed everyone’s worst fears. Publishing supportive articles was a far better way of preventing copycats than silence.

Like all good pieces of concern trolling, Ditum’s article contains some good points. She certainly sounds like she cares. But what she doesn’t say is also very telling. For example, she makes use of the #TransLivesMatter hashtag, but says absolutely nothing about the #RealLiveTransAdult hashtag that was very popular in the wake of Leelah’s death. Why did she fail to mention it? Could it be that it was because it was solid proof of the trans community doing something positive to try to prevent further tragedies? That would hardly fit with the narrative of people needing to be protected from themselves now, would it?

The real viciousness of the column, however, will be invisible to most readers, because it lies in the choice of author. You see, Sarah Ditum has a reputation amongst trans people in the UK as a leading TERF. In fact it would be hard to find any journalist more hated by the UK trans community. I guess they could have asked Julie Burchill to write that piece, but she’s incapable of the sly subtlety that Ditum has mastered. If the New Statesman’s editorial team (and yes, I do mean you, Helen Lewis) wanted to commission something guaranteed to cause hurt and anger amongst the UK trans community, they could not have done better than to ask Ditum to write it. This looks like Fox News level viciousness.

So why does this happen? On the face of it, the New Statesman is a very liberal, progressive newspaper. It publishes some great articles by Laurie Penny, who is a good friend to the trans community. Why do they have this hate on for trans people?

It would be simplistic to say that they are all radical feminists stuck fighting a battle that they lost back in the 1970s. It is certainly true that Ditum believes that trans women are “really” men. I’m sure she’ll take any criticism by trans folk of what she writes as “male bullying”. But that’s not the whole story. If it was she wouldn’t be able to do the concern troll thing so well, and Lewis wouldn’t think she was doing right by publishing it.

No one thinks of themselves as a villain. Conservatives tell themselves that they are following the world of God, or that the oppression of the poor is simply the Law of the Jungle in operation. When liberals want to oppress someone, they tell themselves that they are doing it for that person’s own good.

What I see here is a deep-seated belief that trans people are mentally ill; that they are not capable of speaking for themselves, because they are so clearly deluded. They need protecting from themselves, and curing of their sickness. When I see Ditum say that she cares about trans people, what I hear is that she wants us in asylums, where she hopes that we can be made to be not trans. I hear exactly the sort of dehumanising behaviour that drove Leelah Alcorn to take her own life.

So yeah, if there is anything at all written about this case that is likely to cause more trans suicides, it is that piece in the New Statesman. And they will tell themselves that it is for our own good.

Some Reflections on Leelah

~ Cheryl

Yesterday was interesting from a trans activism point of view. Leelah Alcorn’s story hit a number of mainstream media outlets. Here’s The Independent, for example. It also prompted an outpouring of support on Twitter.

The most obvious result was the hashtag, #RealLiveTransAdult, which was an attempt by adult trans folk to give hope to young people like Leelah who may be despairing of ever having a good life. I say attempt because one of the more obvious results was a lot of cis people congratulating those of us who have survived on how well we have done. That wasn’t the point, folks. We didn’t do this for bragging rights, and my apologies if my own tweet made it sound like I was doing so. Surviving as trans is by no means only down to personal effort. One of the more interesting tweets of the evening was this one by Sarah Brown.

https://twitter.com/auntysarah/status/550026336203714560

That was certainly the case for me, though as far as I’m concerned there’s a good case for replacing “fortunate enough” with “smart enough” or “too cowardly”, because I was shit scared of what would happen if I told anyone, and I was right to be scared. I should also add that I was fortunate enough to have been born white, to have had a good education, and to have been smart enough to get a good job.

One of the things that worries me about the current situation as far as trans folk goes is that kids like Leelah have access to plenty of information about being trans, and what to do about it, but will be coming out into a society that still isn’t ready to accept them. Even with all of the advantages I had, if it had not been for Kevin and my mum I would probably not be here now.

Something else I noticed was at least two separate announcements of people starting new trans support groups. Folks, I know you mean well, but lack of support groups was not Leelah’s problem. There are plenty of them. If you want to help families with trans kids, please check out Mermaids in the UK, and TYFA in the USA. In the UK kids of Leelah’s age can find support through Gendered Intelligence, and in the USA through Trans Student.

What is actually needed, as Leelah noted, is education. And on that front I was delighted with this tweet from the new head of Stonewall.

https://twitter.com/ruth_hunt/status/550226729495973889

Education for parents is particularly important, as this infographic from Trans Student shows:

Why supportive parenting matters

There’s still a long, hard road ahead. However, little by little we are making change happen. I just wish I was in a position to make it happen faster.

Famous Last Words?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

This morning I woke up to the news of yet another trans person who had taken her own life. Leelah Alcorn was just 17. I never met her, had never even heard of her until today. There are, after all, millions of trans people in the world. But she’s another hole in my life, and in the lives of every other trans person out there who knows that, save for a bit of good luck, and some very good friends, they could have gone the same way.

What I can say for Leelah, though, is that she could write. She left a suicide note on her Tumblr account. You can find it here. It goes into some detail about how badly her family treated her, but the note ends with a stirring call to action:

The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.

We don’t count suicides in the number of trans people murdered each year, because people would nit-pick that and use it against us. Nevertheless, killing themselves is often something trans people are told it is their duty to do, so as to avoid bringing shame upon their families. And sometimes it is just necessary because there is no hope, and death seems preferable to putting up with how other people treat you.

I’m not in that place yet, though I am often amazed that I have survived as long as I have. One of the things that helps is having something to live for. It being the time of year when we are supposed to make resolutions, here’s one from me.

I can’t make your death mean something by myself, Leelah. Few people have much influence in this world. But what I can do is keep working hard for trans rights, to try to create the sort of world you have dreamed of. I have to believe that one day we will get there. I wish you could have believed that too.

First National Festival of LGBT History

~ Cheryl

As we lumber towards 2015, various things are starting to ramp up. One of the events in my sights is the UK’s first National Festival of LGBT History, which will take place in Manchester during February (because that’s when we do LGBT History Month in the UK). You can find lots of exciting details at their newly revamped website. You may also note that there is an academic conference attached to the event, and if you look carefully through the programme you will find that I’m giving a paper. I may be talking a bit about Alice Sheldon.

Book Review – Straight

~ Cheryl

OK, so I spent part of Christmas reading a book about sex. It was interesting.

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, by Hanne Blank, does exactly what it says on the cover. It looks at the history of the phenomenon that we understand as heterosexuality, and how that concept has changed in nature over the years. You can read my review here.

Magnificently Missing the Point on VIDA

~ Cheryl

The LA Review of Books has an interesting article by Katherine Angel on the subject of gender in literature. Much of it is about the whole VIDA count issue and the various excuses that publications such the the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books come up with to justify their overwhelmingly (white) male focus. Angel does a great job of skewering them, but I can’t help but feel that she missed an opportunity to follow up on some of the material at the beginning of the article.

To me one of the most interesting sections is where she is talking about the contrasting reactions received by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk. I’m not very familiar with either of their work, but I understand that both have written deeply personal, autobiographical works in which they don’t come over as very nice people. The point that Angel makes is that Knausgaard has been fairly universally praised for his bravery in writing such work (despite some rather ordinary prose) whereas Cusk has been viciously attacked because of what she reveals about herself. A “brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist” was how one (female) reviewer described her.

The very obvious point here is that men and women are held to very different standards in their written work (and personal lives). Behavior that is seen as admirable in a man is seen as disgraceful in a woman. But Angel leaves this point hanging. When she goes on to talk about the VIDA count and the various vacuous excuses that publications use for avoiding gender balance, she doesn’t return to it at all, despite having the opportunity to do so.

Angel quotes the LRB as saying that women “often prefer not to write critically about other women”; and that men are “not so frightened of asserting themselves” and are “not so anxious to please.” She responds to this by noting, “I’m skeptical of this characterization of women writers as meekly afraid to criticize.” And, you know, we’d all like to think that we are smart enough, and brave enough, to do criticism on the same level as the boys. Certainly there are some very good, and very brave, women critics out there. But equally we know exactly what happens to women when they poke their heads over the parapet. If a man complains about how badly women are treated on social media he gets praised for doing so; if a woman does the same thing she gets a torrent of rape and death threats.

So is it really surprising that women are less eager to indulge in public criticism of other writers? And that when they do they tend to pull their punches a lot more than a man would? I’m all in favor of editors making a conscious decision to publish more women, as Angel suggests that they do. But I’m not sure that will solve the problem. Before women can compete on equal terms with men as literary critics, or indeed experts of any sort, we need to create a world in which women are seen to have the same right to have opinions as men do.

How TERFs See Us

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Mentioning that horrible Woman’s Hour program in my Radio 4 post reminded me that Sarah Brown came across some really weird stuff online recently. It is a sort of pop-psychology test designed to tell whether you are a trans woman or not, but written by a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. It tells you a heck of a lot about how TERFs think, but very little about trans women.

There were a few questions I answered yes to; for example:

  • Do you spend a lot of time online? (TERFs do, it is where they do most of their harassment)
  • Do you want to be pretty? (Would have been nice, bit late now.)
  • Have you attended a male-only educational facility? (Not my fault, I hated it.)

There were a lot of questions that rather suggested that the author had read Triton and assumed that all trans women were like Bron:

  • Do women really “have it all”?
  • Are feminists whiney bitches?
  • Do women have no right to speak on the topic of gender?
  • Have you always known you were very angry for some reason and it was women’s fault somehow?
  • Tired of no one noticing what a Special Person you are?

There were also quite a few that clearly came from odd stereotypes of the sort of man the author thinks would claim to be a trans woman:

  • Have you been in the military?
  • Have you been in prison?
  • Do you own more than three firearms?

There were one to two that betrayed a general hatred of femininity:

  • Do you celebrate the cultural subordination rituals (“femininity”) that are forced onto females?
  • Do you have a phoenix or butterfly tattoo?

And finally there was some genuine WTFery:

  • Do you have a successful STEM career? (‘Cos that proves you are a man, right? Real women can’t do science.)
  • Long time Dungeons and Dragons shaman of undecided loyalty? Or whatever the fuck?
  • Are you an identical twin?

I’m sure that an actual psychologist could have a field day with it. You can find the whole list of questions here.

By the way, I did also click through and do that COGIATI test that Sarah mentions. I came out as only borderline trans, mainly because the test was stuffed full of gender-essentialist questions about how good you are at reading emotions (surely a learned skill), good navigation skills, and inability to do maths, all of which were assumed to be firm indicators of true femininity.

Meanwhile, In Bristol – Enviroment & Race

~ Cheryl

My latest column for Bristol 24/7 is all about women in the environmental movement. In 2015 Bristol will be the European Green Capital, so you can expect to hear lots more green stuff from me through the year. This week’s article focuses on the fact that there are very many women doing important work in green organizations, but when it comes to public recognition, and especially to handing out money, it is suddenly white men to the fore.

One of the questions I asked in the piece, and I wish I’d had more space to go into detail (but hey, 500 word limit) was whether women are more predisposed to the message of the green movement. I based that solely on social conditioning: girls are raised to be cooperative and nurturing, boys to be competitive and self-reliant. However, I was interested to hear Stuart Lorimer say on the Radio 4 program about trans women that hormones do have a significant effect on how people interact with society.

Checking the Bristol 24/7 site today, I was delighted to see that David McLeod has won a victory of sorts in that the City Council’s education department has formally apologized for its insensitivity of hiring Gill Kelly and will be terminating her contract with them as soon as is feasible. I imagine that there is celebration all round at the Ujima studios today. Here’s hoping that the City Council takes race issues a little more seriously in future.

Radio 4 Does Trans

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

You can’t move for falling over trans-related programming on Radio 4 at the moment. This is rather heartwarming after the appalling Women’s Hour program earlier this year that basically gave a notorious TERF an opportunity to spread lies about trans people.

If you are after something light-hearted I can recommend Andrew O’Neill, a cross-dresser who was inspired to become a comedian after seeing Eddie Izzard perform. Mr. O’Neill, as with many cross-dressers, is unfortunately flippant about language, but he is very funny. Have a listen to this. He skewers the whole gender thing rather well.

There’s also a documentary and a play about raising trans children. I haven’t listened to either of these yet, and probably won’t listen to the play because my life has enough family drama as it is without having to listen to someone making it up.

What I found most interesting, however, was a pair of documentaries made with the collaboration of Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic. The first show centers on trans men, and the second on trans women. The contrasts between the two are significant. There’s much more talk about discrimination in the program about trans women. Also the idea that many trans men don’t opt for any genital surgery is glossed over with hardly a comment, whereas in the case of women genital surgery is presented as something essential.

The programs are very gender-normative and binary-focused, which is what I would expect from Charing Cross, but they were still more trans-friendly that I would have predicted. Obviously a lot of the old guard have moved on since I avoided Charing Cross like the plague, but hearing James Barrett saying positive things about trans people was a bit of a jaw dropper.

What came across clearly to me from the programs was that Charing Cross knows it is under threat. The current government is not trans-friendly, and the next one will be even less so. Budgets for GICs all across the country are under pressure, and at the same time GPs are increasingly trying to force all care of trans people back onto the GICs so that they don’t have to shoulder the costs (or interact with people that many of them still believe are selfish perverts who don’t deserve help). Someone at Charing Cross has worked out that in order to survive they are going to have to appeal to public sympathy for trans people, and they are going to have to work with us to do so. You find allies in the strangest of places.

Update: Adjoa Andoh puts her acting skills to magnificent use in the documentary about her trans son. Well worth a listen.

Voter Supression Update

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This is a follow-up to my post from Monday about the new UK voter registration system that will force trans people to out themselves is they want to vote.

Various people have taken an interest in this (thanks Talis), and I brought it to the attention of Bristol City Council who promised to take action on it. One of the things that has come up is that legally the government has no right to ask about name changes that happened more than a year ago. So what are they doing? Well the existing website has been fixed, but the government says they are planning to change the law so that they can demand information about name changes more than a year old.

So in addition to all of the VAT nonsense, I also have to write a letter to Nick Clegg. As if I didn’t have anything better to do than respond to constant government attacks on my personal safety and livelihood.

So Much For Voting, Then…

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

With a General Election due up in May of next year it seemed likely that the current UK government would follow the example of parts of the USA and try to prevent people who might disapprove of it from voting. They are starting small, on a group of people unlikely to get much sympathy from the media: trans folk.

As this Gay Star News article explains, registering to vote in the UK now involves either sending off a huge amount of paperwork, or using an online form that demands you reveal if you have ever changed your name. This is in direct contravention of the Gender Recognition Act, and is probably a violation of EU Human Rights legislation as well. I think I’m OK, in that I am already registered, so I shouldn’t be asked to go through the process again unless I move home. Other people won’t be so lucky.

I changed my name 20 years ago, and have had passports and a driving license issued in the new name. I even have a birth certificate in my new name. But apparently there is still doubt about my identity that can only be resolved by outing myself to whichever people happen to be responsible for the register of voters. Oh well, at least the form doesn’t ask for my “real name”.

Less of the Freak Show, Please

~ Cheryl

It is fairly rare that I get absolutely furious with someone on Twitter, but if I do it is almost always with the LGBT History Month account (@LGBTHM). They have a poor track record of insensitive posts about trans people. Today’s tweet was a classic:

Stunning Before And After Photos Depict The Journey Of Gender Confirmation Surgery

I don’t know what that says to you, but to me it screams loud and clear, “FREAK SHOW! COME AND GAWP!!!”

There was a link in that tweet to an article in the Huffington Post. This one. It is the sort of coverage of trans issues that makes me want to beat my head on my desk until it bleeds.

Ostensibly, of course, it is all very sensitive. The article talks about “respect”, “ambition” and “empowerment”. Practically it is all about click bait, and the aforementioned freak show.

It is entirely plausible, of course, that the people in those photos are proud of what they have done and empowered by it. I know that other trans people are very comfortable with “before” photos being displayed (and see the footnote about genderfluid people). But I tend to view such material with some suspicion when it is framed using a narrative written by the person making the pictures rather than the trans people themselves.

For example, think back to My Transsexual Summer. Most people agree that the series did great things for the trans community. It was certainly far less exploitative than most television about trans people. But the series was by no means a bed of roses for the stars. Check out this interview with Fox, in which he explains some of the awful things that were done to him by the production crew.

The people photographed for that HuffPo article are all from Cuba, which is not the most affluent place in the world. My first question on seeing the article was to ask how many of them posed for those pictures willingly, and how many did it because they were being offered a lot of money to do so.

Even if some people are willing to pose for such photos, however, it doesn’t mean that making them, and posting them in that way, is a sensible thing to do. The “before and after” photo is a staple of tabloid coverage of trans issues. They do that because of the freak show aspect of it, and also because it panders to transphobes by giving them an image of what the trans person “really” looks like. The “after” photo is seen, if not always presented, as a picture of a person in disguise.

Huffington Post knows this, and for all their weasel words about respect and empowerment, the headline makes it very clear that this is a freak show article.

Much of this comes back to issues I covered in the article I wrote for Holdfast recently. Cis people are fascinated by the transformation aspect of trans people. If they write about us, if they make films or photos of us, what they want to show is the change. That’s not treating us as people, it is treating us as objects for their entertainment. There’s far more to trans people than that, but who cares, right? The fact that we are ordinary people is not news, the fact that we can be presented as freaks is.

In any case, many trans people are deeply traumatised by images of themselves pre-transition. That’s what Gender Dysphoria means: you are distressed by your body. I understand that some people might be proud of their transition, but those people need to be aware that by encouraging “before and after” photos they are putting pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. The very first things most journalists ask for when doing a trans article are your “real” name and a photo of what you “really” look like. Except of course they’ll say your “former” name and a “before” photo, so it doesn’t sound quite as exploitative.

Don’t encourage them, please.

Even if all is well with that article, however, and all of the people pictured are delighted with what was done, nothing excuses the headline. “Stunning Before And After Photos”? That’s pure, exploitative click bait. That much at least should be obvious to anyone.

On Twitter, of course, we are limited to 140 characters. There may be a link as part of that, but by no means everyone who reads your tweet will click through. On Twitter, therefore, we have to be very careful about repeating click bait headlines. If you are going to link to a problematic article, using that article’s exceedingly problematic headline as your tweet is not wise.

Footnote: someone is going to read this as say that it is deeply offensive to genderfluid people. That’s not the intention. If an important part of your identity is your ability to manifest more than one type of gendered appearance, by all means go for it. But that HuffPo article was very specifically about people who had undergone gender confirmation surgery. I did consider using “transsexual” in place of “trans” to make this clear, but it’s not a very good word and I try to avoid it these days.

What Exactly Constitutes a Terrorist Threat?

~ Cheryl

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me taking a renewed interest in the case of Monica Jones. She’s an American trans activist whose case I wrote about back in April. Recently Monica flew to Australia to do some research on AIDS as part of a college course she has been doing. As this Advocate article reveals, she was stopped at Sydney airport and deported because her name was on a no-fly list as someone as someone who might be considered a “possible threat” to Australia. Gosh, is she a terrorist? Well, I guess that depends…

You see, Monica is in trouble with the law back home in Arizona. She has been found guilty of “manifesting prostitution”, which basically means that a police officer saw her in the street and decided that she was soliciting. No other evidence than that is required for conviction. In other words, Monica was found guilty of walking while black and female. And for this she was put on a no-fly list and barred from entering Australia.

Oh, and she’ll fail her college course because she was unable to complete the research.

Just what are you afraid of, Australia?

Ah well, at least she didn’t have a Hugo in her luggage. And I’m not even going to start on the whole saga of a TV crew being tipped off about her being stopped and Aussie immigration then using that as part of their excuse for deporting her.

The point is that these days we are living in a “Your Papers, Please” society, and the less privilege you have, the more likely it is that you will suddenly find that your papers are not in order and you no longer have any rights.

The TDOR Ceremony

~ Cheryl

The head table at TDOT 2014

Our TDOR Remembrance Ceremony took place last night. It was attended by 28 people, most of whom were trans, and at least three of whom were people of color. (I say “at least” because I don’t know how everyone identifies.) Inevitably it was a solemn affair, but we did also have a constructive discussion about progressing trans rights in Bristol afterwards.

Thanks are due to the Rainbow Group, the City Council’s LGBT staff network, who provided the money to hire the venue, and to Sarah and her colleagues from LGBT Bristol who provided the refreshments & flowers and did most of the work.

My apologies to Jamie and the rest of the Bristol University group for missing their event. Lots of people wanted to talk to me after the ceremony, and I needed to stay and listen to them.

The discussion, perhaps inevitably, focused primarily on health issues. There is a huge amount of anger amongst the UK trans community at how badly we are treated by the NHS, and how specialist gender services appear to be getting steadily worse. Sadly there is not a huge amount that the City Council, and bodies funded by it, can do about this. However, there are other things that can be moved forward, and hopefully I’ll have more news in a few weeks.

Flag in the Post

~ Cheryl

The flag raising party

The raising of the trans flag at City Hall has made it into the Bristol Post (I’m guessing only the website, but if there is a paper version I’d love a copy). The caption for that photo is: “Bristol City Council equalities officer Simon Nelson, Lady Mayoress of Bristol Sarah Watson, Lord Mayor of Bristol Councillor Alastair Watson, Martin Spellacey and Amy Mosley of Bristol City Council Rainbow Group, Bristol City Council employee Jessica Davidson and Cheryl Morgan of TransBristol” and the photo credit is Amy Jones, the Council press officer I have been working with.

I would have liked more trans people in the photo, but many of those who attended are naturally nervous of such things. My job in TransBristol, such as I have one (it being an anarchist collective), is to be the person who fronts up to the media so that other people don’t have to.

What I’m much more pleased about than the photo is that Amy and her colleagues used quite a bit of the material I sent them for the press release. The Lord Mayor then quoted me at the flag raising ceremony, and the Post used the same sentence:

By raising the transgender flag over City Hall on this important day, Bristol is sending a clear signal to the many trans people who live and work in the city that they are valued members of the community, with as much right to life, health and happiness as any other citizen.

Yeah, that.

By the way, a number of City Councillors attended the event. I don’t know them all by sight so I can’t give you names, but I did spot Daniella Radice, the leader of the local Green Party. Simon tells me that there was good support from Labour, and the only Tory to turn up was the Lord Mayor.

TDOR in Progress in Bristol

~ Cheryl

Flag raising

Well that went very well. We had a large group of people at City Hall to witness the raising of the Transgender Flag. Many of them were trans. There were also lots of allies, including the Rainbow Group, the Council’s LGBT staff network, who had organized the event; Simon Nelson, who I had on the radio yesterday; Out Stories Bristol, witnessing the historic event; Bristol University LGBT+, who ran such an awesome trans awareness campaign on Twitter this week; Bristol Pride; and LGBT Bristol.

The flag was raised by the Lord Mayor of Bristol, the Rt. Hon. Councillor Alastair Watson (who is a Conservative).

Some of the very many people in attendance are pictured below.
Flag raising

I was interviewed by Edward from Made in Bristol TV. I have no idea when/if that will air, but it was great to have them there. I just wish we’d had someone more photogenic lined up to talk.

Also I have edited a clip from the Lord Mayor’s speech for broadcast on Shout Out tonight. My guess is that it will go in the news section at the front of the show. I’m pleased about that because the Council folks cribbed much of the speech from the press release material I had written for them.

This evening we have two remembrance ceremonies: one in the city, and one later at Bristol University. I am reading The List at the first one, and hope to attend the second. There will also be people from LGBT Bristol and the Council on hand to engage with the trans community and hopefully take forward some of the issues that Simon and I discussed yesterday.

Trans Day of Remembrance 2014

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

TDOR 2014

While TDOR is still a very sad and solemn event, one of the benefits is that there is increasing media interest in it. That means slightly more favorable coverage of trans issues than we are used to. In yesterday’s Guardian there was an article giving the results of a mental health survey of British 16-24-year-olds. They found that 48% of those who identified as trans had attempted suicide, as compared to 6% of the general population. So young trans people are 8 times more likely to try to take their own lives than non-trans people of the same age.

Those numbers tally well with a 2012 survey of British trans people. In fact the number is exactly the same: 48%. That may strike you as odd. You would have thought that the percentage would go up as people got older. I’ve seen suggestions elsewhere, though I don’t have a source yet, that trans people are 4 times more likely to attempt suicide during the transition process than before or after. That is, while they are under the “care” of the NHS they become distinctly more likely to try to kill themselves. But there are two good reasons why the number doesn’t go up.

Firstly, a lot of trans people know that something is wrong very early on in life. Being a teenager is hard enough, without being trans. So if you are trans the likelihood is that your first suicide attempt will be when you are very young.

Secondly, these surveys only count attempted suicides. They don’t count the dead. So 48% of young trans people attempt suicide. And 48% of those who survive to be older attempt suicide.

As Paris Lees notes today, actual suicides are a reality for trans people. I want to talk about one she didn’t include.

Jacqueline Cowdrey from Worthing, Sussex, is on this year’s TDOR list. When her body was discovered, the police assumed that she must have been murdered because of the extent of her injuries. However, further investigation, and a coroner’s report, revealed that, yes, she had been very badly beaten, but she had made it home, and had then taken her own life.

No one knows why she did this, but there are two strong possibilities. Firstly she may well have wanted to get away from neighborhood bullies, but also she may have been afraid to get medical help for her injuries, on the assumption that this would only result in more bullying and humiliation. Because that happens, a lot.

The main point of TDOR is to raise awareness of the appalling body count in places like Brazil and Mexico. But if it can also help educate people in the UK and other supposedly civilized countries, and stop them treating trans people as badly as they do at the moment, that would be a very good thing.

Trans Awareness Interview

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

It being Trans Awareness Week, I figured this would be a good time to post the interview that I did on the Kizzy Morrell Show last month. It being live radio, it is not perfect. I’m particularly annoyed with myself for having failed to mention trans guys and non-binary people. I should be better than that. On the other hand, Kizzy, while knowing next to nothing about the subject, was wonderfully supportive, which always makes a huge difference.

Anyway, here’s the audio. See what you think.

Thanks, Sir Elton

~ Cheryl

As some of you will know, Sir Elton John founded a charity devoted to helping people with HIV/AIDS. They work primarily by granting money to other charities, to research projects and so on. Yesterday they announced a grant of $200,000 to one of my favorite organizations, the Transgender Law Center. The money will be used to undertake a national (USA) needs assessment of trans people living with HIV. For further details, see this news story. I’m delighted to see Elton, not only standing up for trans people, but also putting his foundation’s money forward to help them.