Trans Pride has also been covered by The Latest, a Brighton-based community TV company. Their coverage is on YouTube and embedable so I can share it with you here. You may want to close your eyes for the first few seconds as there’s a brief section of the march in which I can be seen messing with a microphone. The horror is over after about 10 seconds.
Gender
Trans Pride on TV & Radio
The local ITV channel covered Trans Pride for their evening news broadcast. They’ve made the video available online, but sadly no embedable, so to watch it you’ll need to go here.
You’ll be relieved to hear that I’m not visible at any time during the film.
I’ve passed some of my audio over to Shout Out. There should be something very newsworthy on this Thursday’s show, and we’ll be doing some in depth coverage on Aug. 14th.
Trans Pride – Day 3
The only activities today were the beach picnic and the group swim. I had to leave before the swim took place, but I spent a few hours at the picnic and grabbed a few more bits of audio.
The picnic also reminded me why, much as I love Brighton as a city, and the people who live there, I don’t think I could make it my home. I grew up on the sandy beaches of South-West England and South Wales. Brighton doesn’t have a beach, it has a pile of rocks. Even super-tough Aussie flip-flops designed for walking on coral reefs won’t save you, because the rocks move and get between you and the shoe. Also the water is freezing, despite Steph Scott saying that it was the warmest for 15 years. Lake Doom in Jyväskylä was warmer, although I suppose that Doctor Doom’s secret lake-floor lair generates a lot of waste heat.
The final numbers for the event are not in yet, but everyone seemed confident that it was larger than last year. There seemed to be more stalls too, and more events.
One thing I did say to Fox & Steph today was that we need some more uplifting stalls. Aside from the committee stalls, Brighton*Transformed and the food vendors, every stall was about helping trans people in some way. We are apparently in danger of catching sexually transmitted diseases; of suffering violence, domestic or otherwise; of having mental health issues; and so on. Where help was offered, it was always from cis folks: from local councils, social workers, health workers, trade unions, parents. Anyone but ourselves.
Now obviously for some people these services are desperately needed, so they should be on offer. However, I’d like to see a few more positive stalls next year. Something that recognizes the creativity and positivity that you see on the performance stage, in the film festival and so on. These days by no means all trans people are desperately in need of help. Some of us are standing on our own two feet, holding down jobs, starting and running businesses, and blossoming amazingly thanks to transition relieving us of the burden of trying to live a lie. I want to see more of that being proud of ourselves in Trans Pride.
One final organizational niggle that I think will go away with growth is program planning. The main stage and the afterparty both mixed types of acts. I’m not convinced that an open-air stage is a good venue for stand-up comedy, or even for poetry reading. You want somewhere smaller and more intimate. The afterparty should have been a better venue for Beth, but because she was just the opening act for a band and a dance party she had to deal with a whole bunch of people who were only there for the music, many of whom were wandering in while she was on. Beth, of course, has dealt with some really bad audiences, so it didn’t phase her, but it didn’t make best use of her talents either.
The problem is that a small event can only run with the hand it has been dealt. There are only so many trans and trans-friendly performers, and only so many places to put them. A bigger event might be able to do better. Then again a bigger event would need more volunteers, and could easily outstrip the ability of the local community to support it.
Finally, of course, we all want to maintain the friendly and politically aware nature of the event. While the attendees were all very cognizant of the many political issues facing trans folk these days, there was none of the divisiveness you tend to see on social media. Also we don’t want to turn into a big, commercial party, a fate that has overtaken so many LGBT pride events.
Anyway, well done to Fox, Sarah, Steph, Sabah, E.J. and the rest of the crew in Brighton. The weekend was a momentous achievement. Here’s hoping that it continues to build on that success.
SDCC Does Trans, Badly
San Diego ComicCon is taking place this weekend and Tor.com has lots of reports from the event. Yesterday I was alerted to a post about a panel on trans themes in comics. This is, of course, something I know a bit about. I had a read of the article. Head, meet desk, repeatedly.
It is hard to tell where the fault lies, because I wasn’t at the panel so I don’t know whether it was badly done, or badly reported, but the overall effect was not good. The starting point appears to be that there were no trans people on the panel, and the article was not written by a trans person. Did any of them have a clue what they were talking about? I know it is really bad to make comparisons with race, but so often articles by cis people about trans issues remind me of a white person trying to write about race by talking about Al Jolson.
Obviously Michelle Nolan is a comics historian and I’m just an amateur who has been diagnosed insane, and it could be the article writer at fault, but anyone who is researching trans characters in comics and manages to miss Madam Fatal, Wanda in Sandman, and Rachel Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol isn’t really trying.
There’s also quite a bit to say about how you interrogate cis people’s portrayals of gender switching. I have a lot to say about that Superboy Becomes A Girl story in my LGBT Superheoes talk. Nolan, and again this may be the fault of the article, appears to have missed all of the nuances.
I suspect that quite a lot of people in the audience will have challenged what was said by the panel. The article certainly suggests that robust discussion took place (even if some of it did come from Ashley Love — *sigh*). But can we just let trans people talk about themselves for once?
Oops, sorry, I forgot. I’m a Dupe of the Patriarchy who is causing division within the trans community with my out-moded views of what being trans is all about. I shall put on a fake beard and go and read some Judith Butler as penance.
Trans Pride – Day 2 Revisited
Yesterday was a beautiful day in Brighton. I gather from Bethany Black that other parts of the country were actually hot (by which I mean over 30C), but here it was warm with a cool sea breeze. It was ideal for just about everything except spending the whole day out in the sun on your feet, which is of course exactly what I was planning to do.
I began with an hour’s stroll along the sea front from Hove to Kemptown. You can very quickly tell why Brighton has a trans pride, because trans people don’t particularly stand out here. I passed a lot of people in (fake) grass skirts on their way to an event in Hove. When I got to Brighton there was a big group of obvious gay boys heading to the beach wearing Victorian women’s bathing costumes. Later in the day there was apparently a mermaid march through the town in aid of marine conservation (something I would love to have supported). And at night the stag and hen parties come out, both of which appear to involve adopting over-the-top feminine gender presentation.
This year saw the first Trans Pride March, and by “first” I mean not just for Brighton, but apparently for the whole of Europe. I know, San Francisco friends, what took us so long, eh? But we have got there. The marchers, some 450 in all, assembled at the Marlborough and walked up St. James St. through Kemptown to the park where the Pride was being staged. I was lucky enough to be invited to sit in on the rehearsals for Rainbow Chorus, Brighton’s LGBT choir, who provided some of the music for the march. You’ll be hearing more from them on the radio in the coming weeks.
The event was officially opened by Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion (and therefore for Kemptown). She gave a rousing speech calling for an end to discrimination against trans people by the media, the government and the health service. I was very impressed.
After the opening ceremonies I went for a sit down out of the sun, finding a lovely little Thai restaurant called Sawadee just around the corner. There was a large party of young Thai people in there, so you don’t need my recommendation.
The afternoon was spent gathering interviews. I have a bunch of vox pops that I need to edit together, plus a number of longer pieces with people like Sarah Savage, Fox & Lewis, and trans model Nicole Gibson who was MCing the event. Alice Denny gave me a reading of a poem that she had written for the event, and I can guarantee you’ll get that on the radio soon.
During periods when there were rock bands on stage and interviewing was impossible I tried to get some shade and rest. Huge thanks to the barmaid in Neighborhood Kitchen who made me a wonderful non-alcoholic mojito when I desperately needed something long and cool that wasn’t water.
Part of the celebrations for the day were provided by Brighton*Transformed, a local history project focusing solely on the trans community and managed by my friend Kathy Caton who also produces the Out In Brighton radio show. They had got large posters featuring photographs of their subjects in many of the shop windows along the route of the march. In the evening they projected 30-foot square photos onto the wall of the (very supportive) Unitarian Church. Here’s the one of Sarah:
As you can see, this took place in a very busy location, with lots of local people and tourists out on the town for Saturday night.
The final event of the evening was the afterparty, for which the opening act was comic, Bethany Black. Beth has given me a lovely interview about the new Russell T. Davis TV series that she has been acting in. That too will be on the radio soon. And of course I finally got to see Beth perform, which was great.
I managed to get back to the hotel just before midnight. The damn seagulls woke me up at 6:00am again. It is definitely seagull pie for them if I catch them.
Update: I forgot to note that, despite it being Saturday night, I got a table at Indian Summer, one of the finest Indian restaurants I know. It is a foodie place — obviously, I like it — but if you like that sort of thing it is well worth going to.
Trans Pride – Day 2
I should write a very long blog post, but it is gone midnight and checking the audio recordings is more important so I’m just going do describe the event thus: mostly awesome, with a side of sore feet and mild sunburn.
Special thanks to:
- The Rainbow Chorus
- Caroline Lucas, MP
- The barmaid who made me the non-alcoholic mojito
- Fox, Lewis & Sarah
- Kathy Caton
- Alice Denny
- Bethany Black
- Indian Summer restaurant
- The weather
Trans Pride – Day 1
Today I headed down to Brighton for their annual Trans Pride. The trains, thankfully, more or less behaved themselves, and I got a good chunk of Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon read. I’m loving it thus far.
The only event today was the film festival, which took place at the Duke of York’s Picturehouse. It is a fabulous old building, and claims to be the oldest continually operating, purpose-built cinema in the UK — it opened in 1910.
For those who don’t know, Brighton has a long and honorable history in the movie business. William Friese-Green had a studio here in addition to the one in Bristol. His sometime partner, Alfred Esmé Collings, went on to shoot a number of short films in Brighton in 1896. That includes one with the fabulously Brighton name of Train Arriving at Dyke Station, though sadly that actually refers to a local beauty-spot called Devil’s Dyke, not to any actual dykes.
There is a full history of Brighton’s involvement in films available here.
But enough digression. Back to the evening’s entertainment. The first hour was mainly material from Fox & Lewis’s My Genderation series, much of which was being screened for the first time. The star of the show was undoubtedly a 9-year-old trans boy called Kai who is totally lovable. There were a lot of really moving scenes of trans folk with supportive friends, families and partners. Fox and Lewis have also shot films interviewing their own families. My mum would totally relate to what Fox’s mum says.
The rest of the program was a diverse range of films from around the world, plus some comedy shorts featuring Claire Parker (and at one point guest-staring Lewis as a sexist laborer).
My favorite of the additional material was a Scottish film called James Dean. It is shot entirely in a car as a family — parents plus two teenage children — is about to set off to visit an aunt. One of the children is trying to get her parents to admit that the aunt is a lesbian, but the parents insist that the kids are too young to know what that means. Meanwhile the other child is trying to come out as trans. It is very funny, and brilliantly acted.
It all went very well, and then many of us headed down to the Marlborough. Part of the celebrations this weekend is the launch of Brighton Transformed, a local history of trans people in Brighton. You’ll hear a lot more about that from me on Twitter tomorrow. But as a taster here is a montage of images posted on one of the outside walls of the Marlborough.
Girl On Film
A couple of years ago I was interviewed for something called the Trans*Geek Movie. It is essentially a documentary project about trans people who are involved in geekdom. The project is being run on a shoestring so it is taking a bit of time to come to fruition, but last weekend a preview was shown at GaymerX2, the QUILTBAG gamer conference in San Francisco. Much to my surprise, parts of the interview with me were included. The whole thing is available on YouTube, and my bit starts around 9:40 (though I recommend that you watch all of it).
My first reaction was, of course, “OMG, I look so FAT!!!” That, of course, is my own fault for being so fond of good food, and not exercising enough. However, I seem to look better on film that I do in photos, the voice sounds OK, and most importantly I do not seem to have said anything particularly stupid.
My thanks once again to Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights for allowing me to use their store for the interview.
Liverpool Coverage Elsewhere
This isn’t new material. All of the interviews I have from the Unstraight Conference in Liverpool are on the podcast. However, a few people have kindly asked to use parts of that material elsewhere.
First up, Mary Milton took an edit of material to create a report focused on the April Ashley exhibition for Shout Out last Thursday. That show is available as a podcast here.
In addition the folks at the Tom of Finland Foundation have posted my interview with Durk Dehner on their blog.
Many thanks to both of them for the additional signal boost.
I note also that Durk and Homotopia were at Helsinki Pride yesterday. It looks like it was a great event, and it was lovely to see my LGBT contacts and science fiction contacts both reporting from the same event on Twitter.
An Open Letter to Stonewall
Dear Ruth Hunt,
On the Stonewall website you asked trans people to give their opinions on the question of closer cooperation between your organization and the trans community. Here I am offering my 2 cents as to why and how we should work together.
Much of this is, of course, naked self-interest. In the UK, and doubtless in most other countries as well, political progress doesn’t happen because you have the moral high ground, it happens because you have wealth, influence and power. These are things that Stonewall has, but which trans people find it very hard to obtain.
I should add also that, at least from this side of the fence, Stonewall appears in the past to have viewed trans rights as a bargaining chip that can be “given away†(as if they were yours to give) so as to provide the right wing with a victory to crow about while leaving your core objectives intact. Clearly that is very bad for us, though superficially useful to you.
However, the mere fact that our respective causes can be intertwined in this way — that our enemies can perceive a defeat for us as being a defeat for you as well — illustrates just how closely our interests coincide. Even the name of your organization bears this out, because you are named after a riot that was, in a large part, led by trans people.
It goes without saying that many trans people identify as gay, lesbian or bi in their preferred gender. It has often been suggested that the proportion of non-heterosexuals in our community is higher than amongst cis folk, and given that many of us eschew the gender binary altogether that’s hardly surprising. More generally, support for your cause is, I suspect, far higher amongst trans people than amongst cis people.
In addition I suspect that many of those you regard as your natural constituency have much in common with us. You may have achieved some stunning victories over the past few years, but there is a perception that they have been won at the cost of a requirement for LGB people to look and behave like heterosexuals. I suspect that the recent growth in the numbers of young people openly identifying as genderqueer, and therefore trans, is in part a result of a perception that LGB people who are not gender conformant have been abandoned by their political leadership.
Finally I note that, even if we had nothing in common, some of the issues we face are shared. An obvious example is that of discrimination faced by older people who are in care.
The question remains, however: how can we go forward from here in an atmosphere of mutual trust and support, given all that has happened in recent decades? Here are some things I think need to happen.
Whatever trans campaigning group is set up to work with(in) Stonewall needs to be led (and visibly led) by trans people. There should be actual paid jobs for trans people. You can’t do proper political activism without full time staff.
That group needs to represent all trans people, not just a subset of them. There should be no exclusion of people because they identify as heterosexual, or because they are somehow the “wrong sort†of trans person. You will need to be fairly careful in your choice of which trans activists to work with, because we are a notoriously fractious lot.
Talking of representation, while your organization needs, for obvious reasons, to be based in London, it would be nice if it remembered that the rest of the country exists. (Which of course goes for trans activists as well.)
In particular there should be no appeasement of the TERFs. A quick examination of their positions will show that most of them are “political lesbians†and that they are just as opposed to actual same-sex relations as any other homophobe. They are not allies you need to keep onside.
Finally all parts of your organization need to work together towards a common goal. We can’t have turf wars in which, for example, the trans activists in your organization are condemning the non-trans people for lauding an openly transphobic gay person, or vice versa.
If we can manage all of this, I’m sure we can move forward together to make the world a better place for all of us. The Scots appear to have been doing it well for some time, so I don’t see why the rest of the country can’t follow suit.
Oh, and while you are thinking about diversification, could you try to recruit a few non-white people as well, please?
Unstraight Conference – The Interviews
I have done a podcast of the various interviews I did at the Unstraight Conference in Liverpool last weekend (see here and here).
As you might expect, mostly I talked to people about the April Ashley exhibition, but hopefully it will be of general interest.
The people interviewed are:
- Janet Dugdale – Director of the Museum of Liverpool
- Gary Everett – Director of Homotopia
- Bev Ayre – Project Director for the April Ashley exhibition
- Jenny-Ann Bishop – a local trans activist
- Sara Davidman – a photographic artist who works with trans people
- Surat Knan – Project Manager for Rainbow Jews
- Sarah Blackstock – Heritage Project Manager for LGBT Birmingham
- Michael Fürst – Schwules Museum*, Berlin
- Durk Dehner – Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles
My thanks to them all for their time.
For anyone coming to this blog because of the conference, my podcast feed for gender-related material can be found here.
The Un-Straight Conference – Day 2
Day 2 in Liverpool was a bit of an anti-climax because the schedule was constructed around April Ashley’s keynote speech. As she was too ill to attend, there was a big gap in the day. The organizers filled it with what I gather is a very rare film about early trans women, including April. I’d love to see that one day, but I chose not to do so this weekend as I wanted to have a look around the rest of the museum, and grab some vox pops for Shout Out and podcasting.
Before that, however, we had some excellent presentations from museum professionals. The first session featured Zorian Clayton from the V&A and Marcus Dickey Horley from the Tate. Both talked about how staff networks within the London museums had worked to put on special events interpreting museum exhibits through a queer gaze. These have been very successful, and I have some hope that similar things can be done in other museums around the world.
Marcus was responsible for the wonderful Transpose event at which a number of trans artists presented their work at Tate Modern. That included CN Lester, Juliet Jacques and Raphael Fox, all of whom I have the honor to have met. He also came out with the best Twitter fodder of the weekend. The Tate now asks visitors whether they identify as LGBT as part of the demographic survey on their feedback forms. He said that 20% of respondents under the age of 20 tick that box. And that, of course, is only the proportion that are prepared to self-identify for a survey. That’s hugely valuable data when making a case to cater for LGBT visitors to a museum or gallery.
The other session featured international visitors: Hunter O’Hanian from the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York, and Michael Fürst from the Schwules Museum in Berlin. This got me questioning the statement yesterday that there are only 2 LGBT museums in the world. Strictly speaking, the Unstraight Museum is more of a virtual installation, and the Leslie Lohman is an art gallery. However, I see I have a comment on Friday’s blog post listing a whole bunch more. We are still well short of the 312 Elvis museums, but I’m delighted to see that these places are out there.
A common feature of both Hunter and Michael’s talks was how an establishment that was originally set up as exclusively about gay men has shifted its focus to cater to the whole QUILTBAG spectrum. The Leslie Lohman was founded in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, so it inevitably had a male focus. For the Schwules it was more a case of lesbian separatists refusing to have anything to do with it at first.
Which reminds me, one of the more delightful aspects of the weekend has been the complete absence of TERFS.
There were two more breakout sessions to attend. The first was from Kati Mustola, a Finnish academic who talked about how an LGBT presence in Finland came about via an interest in social and community issues. The other was a presentation by the amazing artist, Andrew Logan. His glass portrait of April is one my favorite things in the exhibition.
I have a huge number of photos, and quite a bit of audio, to process. That will take time, and this coming week is ferociously busy. Please bear with me. I would, however, like to thank Sarah Blackstock from Birmingham LGBT and Surat Knan from Rainbow Jews for enabling me to bring some diversity to an otherwise fairly white event. There was a strong feeling amongst the attendees that we wanted to do more events like this, and hopefully future conferences will be larger and more diverse in many ways.
The Un-Straight Conference – Day 1
Well, that was a roller-coaster of a day.
The conference thus far as been excellent. I tweeted a lot (the official hashtag is #UnStraightConference if you want to see what other people are saying about it. Also several major sessions are being webcast here. Here’s a quick run-down of what went on today.
We began with Nicholas Hasselqvist from the actual Unstraight Museum, which is based in Sweden. He talked quite a bit about how even Sweden fails dismally when it comes to things like helping LGBT asylum seekers or standing up to the International Olympic Committee. He also talked about some of the amazing outreach work he and his colleagues do around the world. One of the key stats he mentioned is that there are around 55,000 museums in the world; of them 312 are dedicated to Elvis Presley, but only two (his and the Schwules in Berlin) are dedicated to LGBT lives.
During the Q&A on Nicholas’s talk we chatted briefly about the difficulty of assigning identities to people from history. He mentioned the case of Queen Christina of Sweden, whom many Swedes believe to have been a lesbian or even trans.
After the break Nicholas has us all participate in the creation of a museum exhibit. We had all been asked to bring an artifact that had personal importance to us. We then had to write a brief blurb for it, do a short video talking about it, and have our photos taken with it. Each personal entry was put together to form an exhibit item. In under an hour we had created a really great little exhibition. There were some very moving stories being told, and a few extraordinary exhibits. Several people mentioned pop stars as having been inspirations. One exhibit was a pair of sunglasses that were once owned by David Bowie. (Lauren, I am so jealous!) Being utterly shameless, I gave them a photo of me with a Hugo trophy. That should infuriate a few people in fandom.
After lunch various people from Liverpool museums and Homotopia, the arts foundation that did most of the work creating both the April Ashley exhibition and this conference, talked about their work and how they managed to create such a high profile event. I was seriously impressed at how much commitment and buy-in the diversity project had from senior management in Liverpool’s museums. Nor were they content with just exhibiting stuff, they wanted to change people’s minds through doing so.
Of particular interest was Ann Bukantas from the Walker Gallery, which has put on a lot of LGBT-themed art exhibits of late. (They had a David Hockney exhibition recently, and now have Grayson Perry). From her I learned about the transvestite artist, Phil Sayers, whose specialty is appearing as a woman in his own art, often recreating famous works of art with female subjects. Sayers is the only artist in the over 100-year history of the Walker whose art has been attacked by an irate member of the public.
Finally we came on to the creation of the April Ashley exhibition itself. I’ll have more to say about that later, but for now here’s the official trailer for it.
The bit at the end where April talks about finally getting official confirmation of her identity after over 45 years (thanks to the passage of the Gender Recognition Act) totally tore me up. I very nearly sobbed out loud, which would have been very embarrassing.
The rest of the day was given over to breakout sessions. I attended two. The first was about an exhibition viewing punk history from a queer perspective (with particular focus on Poly Styrene). The second was about the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, which exists to preserve the work of the great Finnish gay artist.
One of the more interesting questions we addressed during the day was what level of openness about LGBT issues straight people are prepared to tolerate. Val Stevenson of Liverpool John Moores University, who gave the presentation about the punk exhibition, noted that the shopping mall where she was exhibiting was very prudish about sexualized images, despite its shops being covered in advertizing featuring highly sexualized pictures of near-naked women. Durk Dehner from the Tom of Finland Foundation said he and his colleagues are very reluctant to let any of their collection out of their control because so much of Tom’s art is deeply sexual and they fear other organizations would want to sanitize it before putting it on display.
Back, then, to April. I had a look around the exhibit, and I must say that it is beautifully done. It looks great (though April is so beautiful it is hard not to have her looking great), and the content is good too. Some younger trans activists are likely to be outraged by it because it does include the whole man-into-woman narrative, but sadly such things are still necessary when reaching out to the general public. Bev Ayre, the Project Director, said that April was initially reluctant to have her pre-transition life mentioned at all. However, taking it out would have erased both her connection to Liverpool (where she was born and grew up) and her suicide attempt.
I should note that Bev and her colleagues put in a huge amount of work to get the local trans community involved with the project, and to have them tell their stories alongside April’s. Credit here should go to local trans activist, Jenny-Anne Bishop, who worked tirelessly to get the local trans community on board. Several local trans people have been working as volunteers at the conference.
The final event of the day was also trans-themed. It was the opening of a small exhibition titled, “Ken: To Be Destroyed”. Some of you may remember this Guardian article from late last year about a woman called Sara Davidman who discovered that an uncle of hers had been trans. Sara has created a small museum exhibit about her relative (K, as Sara now calls her) which is now installed alongside the April Ashley exhibition. In many ways it is a very sad story, because of the way in which K had been forced to live in the closet all of her life, and how even now members of Sara’s family don’t want to be associated in any way with what they perceive to be the shame of K’s existence.
I was expecting this trip to be fairly emotional, but I didn’t realize quite how bad it would be until I started looking around April’s exhibition and I was reminded of how much she had inspired me as a teenager. Of course there was no way I’d ever have been that glamorous but she was, as Laverne Cox has it, a Possibility Model. She showed me that life was possible. Sadly April is currently very ill and her planned appearance at the conference tomorrow has been cancelled, so I will not have a chance to thank her personally. I am doing so here instead.
April, I would not be me without having had your help.
Off to Liverpool
I’m heading to Liverpool today for a very unusual conference. This one. For all of you who did not click through, that’s The Un-Straight Museum, a conference on telling QUILTBAG stories in museums. It is being run by people from Sweden, and there will be folks from Finland there too, and from the Tom of Finland people in Los Angeles. The event is being held in conjunction with the April Ashley exhibit at the Museum of Liverpool, and on Saturday we get to meet April herself. Prepare yourselves for epic fangirl squee.
Man Trouble
While I was out and about in Bristol yesterday, my Twitter feed was buzzing with comment from outraged women. There were two main issues.
The first one is that Dave Truesdale has gone and put his foot in his mouth again. The regularity with which he does this is such that a generous interpretation would assume that he understands outrage marketing and was deliberately trolling female writers and fans in search of traffic for his website. Sadly I’m not convinced that Truesdale is that bright. When he says that he’s not seen even a smidgeon of racism or sexism in science fiction, what he probably means is that he views the supposed intellectual and moral superiority of the white male as a scientific fact, and that therefore stating it cannot be seen as discrimination.
Of course this is the sort of attitude that leads to Men’s Rights Activism and claims of “reverse racism” when it comes up against how the rest of the world sees things.
Anyway, the day did produce one superb blog post: this one in which Amal El-Mohtar recruits famous female SF writers from the past to make her case for her.
While women readers and writers of science fiction around the world were dealing with an actual case of sexism, the white feminist media cabal in the UK (otherwise known as the Lobster & Bolly Set) were up in arms over what they believe to be a far more dangerous threat to feminism: trans women.
Yes, it has been penis panic time again. Our TERF friends appear convinced that all trans women have secret penises with which they will mercilessly abuse any non-trans women that they can find. Now it is certainly true that not all trans women have surgery. Some can’t afford it, some have good medical reasons for not risking it, many are simply on their way through transition, and some have their own reasons for not opting for it. But for the TERFs it is a case of once-a-penis-always-a-penis. So I guess I have a political penis: it might not exist in reality, but for TERF political purposes it is just as real as any man’s pride & joy, if not more so.
Pressed on this, the TERFs are likely to claim that anyone raised as male (even if only for the few brief years needed for them to learn to talk) will have been culturally conditioned for masculinity, and will forever more exhibit behavior that is ineluctably masculine (yes, I did choose that word deliberately). However, even if they were to find a trans woman who looked and behaved in a way they deemed entirely female, they would simply claim that this person had successfully “deceived” them by hiding their “true” nature.
So there you have it. As far as your typical British media feminist is concerned, my supposed political penis is far more threatening to them than anything that Dave Truesdale, or even Elliot Rodger, could come up with. It is good to know that they are keeping their eye on the really important issues while the rest of us are busy with trivial stuff like campaigning on behalf of women writers.
I’d like to see some of them come to Finncon and demand that I be forced to use the men’s sauna.
Meanwhile, because at least one of them is undoubtedly screaming BUT SCIENCE! at this point, here’s an actual science article titled, “What your science teacher told you about sex chromosomes is wrong”. Odd that the same bad-science excuses used by men to justify sexism are used by TERFs to justify their hatred of trans women, isn’t it.
Update: via CN Lester on Twitter here is an excellent overview of how different types of animals decide what sex they are. Hint: it is hardly ever anything to do with chromosomes.
Yeah, THIS!
You go, girl!
Mind you, that is America. In the UK prominent white feminists are busy crowing over how driving a trans woman to a nervous breakdown was a moral duty, and complaining that her writing about what happened is bullying and abusing them. Is it any wonder that I want nothing to do with the feminist establishment over here?
More Mad Gender Biology
Via Gio Clairval on Twitter I found this article from Cosmos magazine. It is primarily about the way in which the function of the Y chromosome has evolved in mammals. From my point of view, the most startling thing about it is that two species of rodent — mole voles of Eastern Europe and spiny rats of Japan — have no Y chromosomes at all, and yet they still manage to produce males.
Those TERFs who yell “but science!” in support of their contention that chromosomes can be used to rigidly divide humans into males and females are looking sillier and sillier all the time.
Conchita and the Evolution of “Transgender”
I didn’t watch Eurovision last night, though it was very obvious from my Twitter feed that many of you lot did. I was, of course, very happy to see Conchita Wurst win, given the threats by various countries to black out her performances.
Doubtless there has been a fair amount of nonsense in the media today, though mainly what I have noticed is that mainstream media outlets are perfectly happy to refer to Conchita as “she”, even though Tom Neuwirth makes it clear that she’s a character he plays, but when they cover stories about trans women they insist on mis-gendering us, and make an effort to seek out and use past names even though we have changed them legally.
Then again, Neuwirth’s performance is not just drag. He has been very clear that he’s deliberately playing with perceptions of gender. On Twitter Stella Duffy noted that he doesn’t use padding to give Conchita a more feminine shape, as most drag acts do. Earlier in the day I had been telling the RMT folks that it is much harder for people who identify as male to adopt feminine gendered performance than it is the other way around. Perhaps Conchita’s win is an indication that this is slowly changing.
What has interested me most, however, is the discussion of the use of the word “transgender” in relation to Conchita. When that word was first coined it was intended to indicate someone who was NOT a transsexual. It got used by people such as Virginia Prince who were full or part-time cross-dressers who did not identify as women. There are still people who identify as radical transgenderists who spout TERF propaganda and claim that anyone who has medical treatment for gender issues is transphobic because they are unable to accept themselves as they “really” are.
Over time, “transgender” came to be used as an umbrella term for all sorts of gender variant people. That was in no small part because people came to understand that any word containing the syllable “sex” tended to lead people to assume that you were describing some sort of pervert.
What I noticed in the discussions surrounding Conchita was that people were using “transgender” to specifically mean someone undergoing medical gender transition, not a cross-dresser. That may have Ms. Prince turning in her grave.
As anyone who has seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert should know, the distinction between a drag queen and a trans woman can be a very fine one, and yet it is deeply important to those on either side of the line. Conchita’s new-found fame has probably caused considerable distress to some people undergoing gender transition because friends and family assume that they are just like her. Equally, what she’s doing to destabilize social notions of acceptable gendered behavior is invaluable to all trans people. I do so wish it was possible to explain all that without getting confused by shifting definitions of the word “transgender”.
Talking to the RMT
The LGBT group of the RMT, a trade union specializing in transport industries, held a conference in Bristol over Friday and Saturday. Via Bristol’s LGBT Forum, I was asked to give a short presentation on trans issues. The conference was quite small, but it was very encouraging to see a trade union taking an interest in LGBT issues, and even better to know that they do care about the T.
Giving a talk to a group you don’t know is always a bit scary, but I was made very welcome and what I had to say seemed to go down well. I was struck by the number of people who said that they knew someone who was trans. Slowly but surely, it is becoming commonplace, rather than strange and frightening.
While I was there, the conference discussed which pride events it was going to support. I gently nudged them in the direction of Trans Pride in Brighton. Hopefully they’ll be there. Sarah, Fox & Co. need all of the support they can get.
Thank You, Judith Butler
Much of Butler’s work on gender is very densely-written and difficult to follow. This, however, is a very clear statement of support for trans people, and a denunciation of the mis-use of her work as the basis for TERF-ism.