Jeffrey Catherine Jones Film Update

Last year I blogged about a Kickstarter project to fund Better Things, Maria Paz Cabardo’s film of the life of Jeffrey Catherine Jones. The fundraiser didn’t make it, but the film still got made and, judging from the comments coming back about it from showings at film festivals, it is pretty good. It is also very much about art as well as about Jones, and I’m delighted to see people such as Moebius and Roger Dean involved.

I’m not going to be able to get to film festivals. I hope that it will be shown at World Fantasy, but there’s no guarantee of that; it’s just something I would want to do if I were running the con. But what we actually need is a DVD release. And lo, there is a fundraiser on IndieGoGo to facilitate just that. Do check out the video clips in the Gallery section.

Better Things

Trans History: It’s Complicated

Last year I blogged about the excellent talk that Juliet Jacques did for me as part of Bristol’s LGBT History Month program. The stars of the talk were Ernest Stella Boulton and Frederick Fanny Park. At the time I commented on how difficult it is for an historian to truly know how people from history self-identified. This year a new book has been published. Fanny & Stella, by Neil McKenna, tells the story of these famous Victorian cross-dressers, and apparently tries to get inside their heads. A review in The Guardian notes:

Using free indirect speech he [McKenna] ventriloquises Stella and Fanny’s inner worlds, creating a camp stream of consciousness in which the two young men think and function as lascivious women.

But did they actually see themselves as women? Would they have self-identified as trans had they known such a thing was possible? The Guardian‘s reviewer, Kathryn Hughes, doesn’t seem to be much help. She seems to buy into the view that Victorian society had of the pair, that they must be “gay men”. She even describes James Barry as a “sexual deviant”, even though there is no evidence that he lived as a man for sexual purposes. Indeed, all of the rumors about him during his life were about his being gay.

Ultimately it doesn’t really matter how Stella and Fanny saw themselves. What matters (and I say this after having spent part of this morning discussing the problems of dealing with gender-variant kids) is accepting that there are no rigid boxes that you can put everyone into. People cross-dress for all sorts of reasons, not just because they are gay, or just because they are trans, and trans people exhibit the full range of human sexual orientations. So I wouldn’t want to claim Stella and Fanny as trans pioneers, but equally describing them as definitely gay men buys into the assumption that all trans women are “really” gay men.

It sounds from the review that McKenna has done a lot of research and had access to contemporary documentation. I’ll be interested to read the book and see what he makes of it all.

Ujima’s LGBT Show

I’ve now managed to listen to all of yesterday’s Women’s Outlook show on Ujima. I think we did OK. I’m still very much learning to do radio. It requires a lot more thinking on your feet than blogging, and sometimes you just can’t make the points you want to make because the discussion has moved on. Also Ujima is much more of a working class environment than the parts of the blogosphere I move in. I don’t expect the people I end up talking to there to have the same nuanced understanding of sexuality and gender that is expected of people online. I’m much more interested in knowing that people’s hearts are in the right place, than in having them use “correct” language all of the time.

Anyway, the first hour of the show is available here. In it we talk books, and I get to enthuse about Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, and Stella Duffy’s Theodora. There’s also a lengthy digression on the subject of Julie Burchill. That’s followed by a segment on lesbian life with my friends Annabelle, from the City Council, and Janet, a recent arrival from Australia. Annabelle explains that Bristol Council has placed 21st overall, and 3rd amongst local authorities, on this year’s Stonewall LGB employer index. Janet contrasts the legal situation for lesbians in the UK and Australia. I get to be rude about Stonewall and explain intersectionality.

Toward the end of the hour you get to hear some background noise as Donald pops in to tell us off for using bad words, followed by Paulette apologizing for having quoted Julie Burchill. Later on we talk quite a bit about the forthcoming Revealing Stories Exhibition, and I talk about Michael Dillon.

Hour two, available here, starts off with the standard “lighter side of life” segment, which Paulette and I agonized over a lot beforehand. We ended up talking a lot about cross-dressing in comedy, and I think I got all of the right points in eventually. I also got to enthuse about the very wonderful Bethany Black.

The second segment is, I’m afraid, all about me. Everyone except Kevin can fast forward through that and on to the final segment in which a group of us chat generally about sexuality and gender. I get to comment on the relationship between LGBT folks and gender, and to dump on the Tories.

Next week the topic for the books section will be “warrior women”, which will be my opportunity to enthuse about the likes of Mary Gentle and Kameron Hurley. Even if you are not interested in the LGBT stuff, I hope you’ll take a listen to the books segments of these shows. Sooner or later someone at Ujima will notice they are getting downloads from all over the world.

Bristol’s LGBT History Month Events

February is almost upon us, and Bristol will once again have an extensive program events to mark LGBT History Month (yes, US readers, we celebrate it at a different time of year). The key event is the exhibition at the M-Shed, which has been occupying a great deal of my time over the past few months. If you need extra incentive to come, I note that the other exhibition they are hosting in February is all about chocolate.

Out Stories Bristol (well, Kim) has also arranged a program of external events. You can find a list of them all here. I’d like to draw your attention in particular to this one. The blurb for it is:

Michael Dillon was the first person in the world to undergo medical gender transition from female to male. Oxford educated, he trained as a doctor and played a key role developing the modern medical view of transsexuals. He also assisted with the UK’s first male-to-female gender surgery. Cheryl Morgan explains how the modern history of trans people began here in Bristol, and how two World Wars helped make this gender revolution possible.

Other LGBT groups around the city are also putting on events, and the City Council has produced a comprehensive list (PDF).

We didn’t quite have time to arrange the erection of a statue of Julie Burchill to mark her contribution to trans rights (she was born in Bristol), but perhaps we can manage that next year.

On Shout Out: #TransDocFail, Doctor Who And Me

Last night’s episode of Shout Out is now available online. It includes Nathan and I talking about #TransDocFail, and a news report about a group of gay Doctor Who fans. That all starts around half way through, but there’s more mention of #TransDocFail and Julie Burchill earlier in the show. You can listen here. (If you come to this link more than a year after I posted it, you’ll need to scroll down to the January 17th episode.)

I could have done a lot better on the show. There were some key points I didn’t manage to get across. Practice. I need practice. But it is good to have these things out there.

Couldn’t Make It Up

I’m sorry to keep coming back to this story, but it is a fine illustration of the depths to which the British media will sink when they think that they have a defenseless minority that they can persecute at will. Let’s have a brief recap.

It all started when Suzanne Moore said something mildly insensitive (possibly out of ignorance) in an article, and was questioned about it on Twitter. Instead of engaging with her critic, she flung off a series of insults about trans people, got the predictable response, then left Twitter in a huff claiming that she had been driven away.

Then Julie Burchill leapt to her friend’s defense with an article that was basically a whole string of insults about trans people all gathered into one place and held together with protestations of Ms. Burchill’s poor, working class nature, as compared to the wealthy and highly educated trans community. The Observer got a lot of stick for publishing this, so they withdrew it, probably to escape the embarrassment of the huge amount of criticism they were getting on their website. Burchill immediately re-sold the piece to her old working class buddy, Toby Young (the son of Baron Young of Dartington), who published it in the Telegraph, where it remains online to this day.

We have since been treated to a succession of articles by concerned journalists explaining how bad it is that Ms. Burchill should be treated in this way, because getting paid twice for a piece of writing that is currently available to be read all over the world means that she has been subjected to censorship thanks to the lobbying of the evil and powerful trans cabal.

Yesterday Roz Kaveney was summoned onto BBC Radio 4’s Media Show to discuss the issue with Mr. Young (who, by the way, goes by @toadmeister on Twitter). You can listen to it here. You may notice, as I did, that Roz’s comments have been clumsily edited so that she’s cut off in mid flow several times. Toadmeister, on the other hand, is allowed to talk freely. Roz explains what happened here.

The irony of someone being accused of censorship of an article that is freely available worldwide having her words edited out of a debate on the subject is presumably lost on the commentariat. However, I was chatting with Roz on the phone earlier today and we both agreed that the BBC probably didn’t intend any malice. It is just that they had a debate between a member of the nobility on one hand, and on the other a representative of a minority group, all of whom the World Health Organization and the NHS regards as mentally ill, and they gave prominence to those speakers accordingly.

Meanwhile Suzanne Moore has taken to the Guardian to explain how belief in freedom is incompatible with equality, so equality has to go. She reports her recent experiences thus: “The wrath of the transgender community has been insane.” Well of course. As we are all mentally ill, what does she expect? But of course you will all have seen the vile and vicious way in which I have attacked Ms. Moore here. (Julie Burchill must be sick with envy of me.) And there’s more. If you really want to see how leading members of the trans community have poured hatred and bile on poor Ms. Moore’s head I recommend that you read Christine Burns and Paris Lees.

The original fuss, of course, was caused by Moore’s unfortunate use of “Brazilian transsexual” as a punchline. Well Pink News discovered that a Brazilian trans woman was murdered this very week. That’s not actually very surprising as the murder rate for Brazilian trans women is currently running at between 2 and 3 every week. But hey, they had a picture of the unfortunate woman in a skimpy costume, and as nothing says Important News Story more loudly than big boobies they ran with it to help explain why some trans people were so upset with Moore.

Moore threatened them with legal action.

Because, you know, freedom of speech.

This morning Moore is claiming that her threat was just a joke. I guess you can interpret that in two ways. On the one hand she may still be in desperate need of lessons on how to use social media [Hint: 😉 is good for indicating a joke]. But it is also possible that she has learned very quickly how to troll for outrage so that she can then continue to paint herself as a victim.

There is one aspect of the whole thing that I find troubling. Some trans people are saying things like, “It would never happen if I was black/disabled/Jewish/Muslim/etc.” Ironically these are some of the same people extolling the virtues of intersectionality. There is no greasy totem poll of oppression, people. This sort of highlighting of the actions of a few extremists in order to smear the bulk of a despised group gets done to many different groups, not just us.

Still, I have learned from this how a proper journalist is supposed to behave, and now I am going to put it into practice. You see, SFWA has just issued the 200th edition of its magazine, the SFWA Bulletin. The cover is graced by a picture of a good looking red-haired woman (see below). Inside Mike Resnick has an article about sexy women editors. In true journalistic tradition, I am assuming that this is All About Me, and will sue.

Firstly there’s breach of copyright. SFWA has clearly used my picture on the cover of their magazine without permission. (And by the way, people, that’s scale armor I’m wearing, not a chain mail bikini. Even I’m not that stupid.) Secondly, if Mike has failed to list me amongst his list of the totally hawtest women editors in the community, I shall sue for defamation.

As a well-known and outspoken feminist writer, I am sure that I can rely on the support of the UK media in my quest for fair treatment.

SFWA Bulletin #200

And see here for some alternative versions, given that Jim Hines and John Scalzi are not available to model.

Picking Your Fights

The row about Julie Burchill’s Observer article continues to rumble on in the UK media, becoming more and more meta by the day. The current situation is that everyone is up in arms about how a journalist who decided to vilify and threaten an oppressed minority because she said they were bullying her friend is now apparently being bullied in turn by that same evil minority group. Given that Burchill is such a shy and retiring individual herself, all of her friends are queuing up to defend her from awful people like me. My heart bleeds for the poor dear, it really does.

Sadly, however, I can’t fight on behalf of all oppressed minorities, so I’ll have to leave defending poor Julie to the rest of the Bolly and Lobster consuming commentariat. I have other things to do. Most of yesterday was actually spent working on the day job, but in the evening I headed off to Bristol to talk to Freedom Youth, a local LGBT Youth group. My colleague, Andy Foyle, and I were there to encourage them to get involved in the LGBT History Exhibition. It was a really fun evening, and I think I came over quite well thanks to my knowledge of superheroes, Buffy, Xena and so on.

Today I was in Bristol again for an appearance on Ujima Radio. This was for the launch of Paulette’s new Women’s Outlook show. We had a great half hour on women in literature, in which I got to talk about Tolkien, Eowyn and the forthcoming Kij Johnson lecture. That’s the first part of this podcast (and yes, the Ujima website has got the name of the show wrong). The second half hour of that podcast has women from three local feminist groups as guests. I was delighted to hear Anna Brown of the Bristol Feminist Network talking about their inclusive policy (and her colleague, Sian Norris, has been very supportive over the Burchill debacle).

Talking of Sian, there will be a Women’s Literature Festival in Bristol in March. Stella Duffy will be there, and therefore so will I.

I also got a couple of slots in the second hour of the show. It begins with a slightly silly session on public toilets, in which I argue the merits of gender-neutral bathrooms. The final half hour is devoted to discussion of Female Genital Mutilation. Paulette kindly let me get a mention in right at the end for Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death. Hopefully that will get Nnedi a few more sales.

Tomorrow night I’ll be on ShoutOut with a couple of other trans people talking about #TransDocFail, which I happen to think is far more important than Miss Stroppy Pants Burchill.

And next week on Ujima we have a whole hour devoted to LBT issues, so I’ll have lots more of me to link to after that.

Missing The Point

Well, yesterday was “interesting”, and might have been more productively spent. The outpouring of support for trans people, however, was amazingly heartwarming. More people spent more time defending the rights of trans people than I think they did in the whole of the past year. I haven’t seen that much support since the My Transsexual Summer TV series. And indeed I’d like to publicly thank the MTS7 for putting themselves out there so bravely and educating people. Had they not done so, I am sure that Julie Burchill would have got much more support.

Inevitably some of the commentary missed the point. I’ve seen people saying what a horrible person Julie Burchill is, and others saying that we should ignore the whole things because it is only Julie Burchill doing what she always does. This is true. Burchill has been busily offending people for as long as she has been a journalist, but it is also not particularly important. What matters is that staff at the Observer saw fit to publish her rant. I see that they have now removed the evidence, which conveniently also removes all of the comments complaining about the piece.

There has been some right of reply. The Guardian commissioned Roz Kaveney to pen something, and she’s been brilliant as ever. Laurie Penny also has something in the works (after having insisted that an actual trans person get the first right of reply). Brooke Magnanti has a nice piece in the Telegraph pointing out that sex workers get the same sort of treatment from Burchill, Bindel, et al. And the New Statesman is running an entire week of trans-related stories. However, neither Roz nor Laurie’s piece will appear in print editions (Burchill’s did), and I imagine that by next Sunday the Observer will be assuming that everyone has forgotten about the story.

Elsewhere some of the “support” has been a little less than helpful. We’ve had the usual outrage trolls searching Twitter for people who are being supportive but can be attacked for doing it in the wrong way, or who can be misinterpreted as supporting Burchill. And we’ve had the finger waggers lecturing at length on what people are allowed to say. Last night I saw a cis woman telling her readers that “transsexual” was a bad word and that we are not to use it. I guess she got that from some ardent transgender activist. I’ve also seen a supportive cis person being told off on the grounds that she has no right to speak on behalf of trans people. This sort of thing is not helpful. Last night I was in danger of having my own Suzanne Moore moment, so I gave up and went to bed with a book.

Which brings me back to the other area where people are missing the point. There’s no question that some people were extremely mean to Suzanne Moore on Twitter. Some of them were undoubtedly trans people. Others were cis people. Probably some of them had PhDs in gender theory. I say this because I’ve been told off for “doing trans wrong” by such people before. But in the telling this story has become one of Moore being attacked solely by trans people as a monolithic whole (or the “trans cabal” as Julie Bindel would have it); then her and Burchill responding by attacking all trans people (which they inevitably caricature as comprising only trans women). As ever, when large numbers of people are involved, it is easier to demonize a group as a whole, rather than respond to the actual people behaving badly. It makes a simpler, and therefore better, story. As a result, even though we got all that support, the dominant media narrative is quickly becoming one of trans people as a unified and vicious group of social media harpies. As we have no influence on the media, we can’t do much to challenge that.

I worry about where we go from here. On the one hand it is good that the message is occasionally getting out. On the other I’m sure that the campaign to shut down all health care for trans people will continue, and that more articles like David Batty’s will appear. In the meantime, someone has to try to turn things around. Firstly we need evidence. Things that can’t be dismissed as the “alleged” complaints of deranged people. One of Christine Burns’ colleagues has produced this helpful blog post detailing how GPs in the North West of England responded to attempts to find out how trans patients are being served, and to provide trans awareness posters for waiting rooms. It includes such gems as, “Another refused to use the poster on the grounds that ‘women and children come in here'” and “There aren’t many around here in Cumbria because they’d stick out like a sore thumb”.

Meanwhile I spent the morning talking to a friend who has done Equality & Diversity training for the NHS in Somerset about how we might continue to offer such training throughout the South West. And I’ll be doing a slot on ShoutOut about TransDocFail on Thursday evening. I also need to get on with running my various businesses.

By Their Words Shall Ye Know Them

It is not often that I will post a link to a British tabloid newspaper, but today the Daily Mirror ran an article about what it called the “Ugly Face of UKIP”. For US readers, UKIP is a right wing minority party previously best known for its hatred of the European Union which is now trying to rebrand itself as Libertarian. Last week they sacked the leader of their youth wing because he supports marriage equality. Nevertheless they try to claim respectability. So someone (presumably an insider) leaked a few choice comments from UKIP’s internal web forums. Here are some extracts from the article:

On the forum, senior UKIP member Dr Julia Gasper branded gay rights a “lunatic’s charter” and claimed some homosexuals prefer sex with animals. She added: “As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the ­subject.”

and:

Another member complained about the impact of immigration on the NHS, writing: “I am informed by past media that Black Caribbean and not Black African have a higher instance of schizophrenia.

“I wonder if this is due to inbreeding on these small islands in slave times or is it due to ­smoking grass.”

which pretty much confirms my opinion of the sort of people who join UKIP.

Meanwhile, over at the Observer, Julie Buchill takes up arms on behalf of Suzanne Moore, managing to produce one of those rare articles in which the comment thread is far more civilized than the main text. You probably don’t want to read the whole thing as it is one long exercise in ignorant stereotyping and throwing insults. The final paragraph will do:

Shims, shemales, whatever you’re calling yourselves these days – don’t threaten or bully us lowly natural-born women, I warn you. We may not have as many lovely big swinging Phds as you, but we’ve experienced a lifetime of PMT and sexual harassment and many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust me, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You really won’t like us when we’re angry.

A lot of people are asking how such mindless, frothing hatred can be published in the Observer (the Sunday edition of the Guardian). Sadly it doesn’t surprise me. The fact that Guardian staff are willing to publish such rot goes a long way towards explaining why they are willing to publish the far more dangerous clever lies of people like David Batty. Burchill represents the reality of what many Guardian staff and their friends think about trans people.

I’ve also seem people saying, “I bet they wouldn’t have published that if it had been about [some other minority group]”. But an Afro-Caribbean friend of mine challenged this, claiming that his people too get this treatment and, just like trans folks, get accused of political correctness if they complain. Here’s Burchill, from the same piece:

The reaction of the trans lobby reminded me very much of those wretched inner-city kids who shoot another inner-city kid dead in a fast-food shop for not showing them enough “respect”.

I wonder which sort of people she’s stereotyping there.

The one thing that has cheered me about the whole affair is the number of cis people who have expressed their horror at Burchill’s article. Many of them have been people from the science fiction community (who I guess also know a bit about being stereotyped in the press). One of the best pieces was this one on LGBT.co.uk. It is by Jane Carnall. I don’t know how many trans people she knows, but I’m one of them. I once seconded a motion that she put before the WSFS Business Meeting. Small world.

By the way, if any of you feel like making a complaint about Burchill, the Press Complaints Commission website is here. However, a quick scan of the comment thread on the article suggests that the PCC regards “comment pieces” as outside of their purview, and will therefore ignore any complaints. Self-regulation my arse.

Update: The Independent is cheekily running a poll to gauge reactions to Burchill’s article. You can vote here. I see that the trans cabal have been deploying their PhDs to good effect, as someone must have hacked the poll to have it running 9:1 against poor Julie.

Update 2: Have corrected spelling of Burchill’s name. Sorry folks. Tired and emotional today.

Wanted: Someone To Hate

The ongoing fallout from #TransDocFail continues to generate blog posts. Mostly people are a bit bemused. Dru Marland notes that the sort of abuse documented in #TransDocFail should be investigated by crusading journalists. It won’t be. Those stories have already been relegated to the status of “alleged abuse”, the deranged fantasies of people who are widely regarded as insane.

On Twitter Christine Burns is asking why all of the journalists who are wringing their hands about the failure to believe the victims of the serial pedophile, Jimmy Savile, are not listening to the tales of trans people abused by doctors. It is a nice point, but nothing will happen.

Kat Gupta notes how professional contacts within the media have allowed Suzanne Moore to respond easily (and dishonestly) to the way her abusive comments about trans people have been received. Moore has plenty of friends in the media, while trans people do not.

Savile, of course, had plenty of friends in the media (and in politics, he was a close friend of Margaret Thatcher). And of course he was well loved by the public. All that made him untouchable while he was alive. Even though many people knew the truth, no one would speak out. Or, of they did, they would not be believed. The victims of child sex abuse are generally not believed when their abusers are celebrities, or other powerful people such as priests. But that’s not all there is to it.

Gupta, who is an academic specializing in gender and the media, also notes something interesting about the nature of existing trans coverage: it is all very personal. That is, journalists look for individuals whom they can write human interest stories about. This should give us a clue as to why #TransDocFail won’t get any further traction in the media.

You see, journalism is all about stories, and just as in traditional fiction you need compelling characters: heroes and/or villains. Richard Curtis makes a good villain because he’s a doctor in private practice with an office near Harley Street. I’m also self-employed, and my guess is that he earns a lot less money than the NHS consultants who are trying to put him out of business, but it is easy to spin a story that paints him as a rich private doctor who ruthlessly exploits the “mentally ill” (i.e. trans people).

Savile too, now that he’s dead, makes a good storybook villain. But #TransDocFail has no obvious heroes and villains. It is about large numbers of disgusting freaks ordinary people being routinely abused by large numbers of other ordinary people. That makes it bad story material. Without an obvious hero, victim or villain, the press won’t be interested.

Last night Helen Belcher was tweeting about what I assume is another case of trans abuse. “And then I come back to a story of repeated abuse in an NHS hospital which has left me completely stunned”, and “Every so often you stumble across a story of abuse that’s so bad, it takes your breath away”. It sounds awful, but Goddess help me I found myself wondering if this was the story we need to keep this issue in the news. I see that Jane Fae is on the case. Watch this space.

More #TransDocFail Links

I know you are probably getting fed up with this stuff by now, but this story does illustrate very clearly just how manipulative the press can be if they want to be, openly spreading ideas that they must know to be false when there’s a minority group that they want to pillory. I noticed yesterday some discussion on Twitter about how applications from students from South Asia wishing to study in the UK were down sharply in the past year — a 25% drop from India, 13% down from Pakistan. This was blamed squarely on the Daily Malice stirring up hatred against foreign visitors and immigrants, which in turn leads the immigration service to impose ever more draconian policies.

I’ll bring this back to Leveson at the end, but first lets look at some of the press coverage.

First up, here’s Ed West in the Telegraph, claiming that there is no medical evidence that gender reassignment improves trans people’s lives for the better, and that academics who try to prove this are being hounded out of academia. On the face of it the article sounds quite sympathetic towards trans people, but anyone who knows a bit about the subject can quickly see that it is all founded on lies and distortions.

A key feature of West’s argument is the story of J. Michael Bailey and his book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. Bailey claims that there are only two types of trans people. There are “homosexual transsexuals”, by which he means trans women who are sexually attracted to men, and there are “autogynophiliacs”, by which he means trans women who are sexually attracted to women. Like most people who make a living from publicly abusing trans people, Bailey largely ignores the existence of trans men. They don’t rate anywhere near the same amount of column inches in the media. You’ll note also that Bailey’s terminology clearly implies that trans women are, and can only ever be, men.

According to Bailey’s theory, “homosexual transsexuals” change gender primarily so that they can have sex with as many men as possible. It’s not clear what evidence he has for this, but he notes, “Nearly all the homosexual transsexuals I know work as escorts after they have their surgery” and “Prostitution is the single most common occupation that homosexual transsexuals in our study admitted to”. It doesn’t occur to Bailey that these people might be working as prostitutes because they can’t get jobs thanks to endemic discrimination against trans people in the labor market. Instead he notes that they “might be especially suited to prostitution”. Remember, this is people like me that Bailey is talking about.

As for the autogynophiliacs, I’ve written about this strange, made-up condition before. Basically Bailey is suggesting that people change gender because they are sexually obsessed with the image of themselves when cross-dressed. It would be laughable if the idea wasn’t treated with such seriousness by the American Psychiatric Association.

The publication of Bailey’s book was accompanied by a publicity campaign trumpeting its challenging and ground-breaking science, and on the basis of that it was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. The Lammys, remember, are for books which promote LGBT people. There then followed an outbreak of outrage amongst the trans community, and several complaints against Bailey by people who had been his research subjects. Amongst other things, we learned that, as part of his research, Bailey had had sex with at least one of his subjects. Great devotion to science there!

West claims that Bailey was “effectively hounded out of academia”, but in fact his college ignored or dismissed all of the complaints against him. All that happened is that a book that vast numbers of trans people regarded as offensive and defamatory was dropped from the nominees list for an award intended to promote positive images of LGBT people. You can read more about the story from trans academics, Lynn Conway and Joan Roughgarden.

As to the absence of medical evidence for the efficacy of gender reassignment, well, I’ll admit that searching for academic papers can be hard, but I had a go. It took me about 10 minutes to find this. It is a review of NHS gender treatment produced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. It includes references to a number of academic studies looking at outcomes of treatment. Here are some of the results:

Charing Cross is a very large clinic with a long-standing reputation in the field; in twenty years of practice, they have only had three patients who reverted to their original gender – Shirzaker et al. (2006) Oxfordshire Priorities Forum – Minutes of Meeting 27/09/06

in over 80 qualitatively different case studies and reviews from 12 countries, it has been demonstrated during the last 30 years that the treatment that includes the whole process of gender reassignment is effective – Pfafflin & Junge. (1998) Sex Reassignment. Thirty Years of International Follow-up Studies After Sex Reassignment Surgery: A Comprehensive Review, 1961-1991; English Ed. by Jacobson & Meier

no patient was actually dissatisfied, 91.6 per cent were satisfied with their overall appearance and the remaining 8.4 per cent were neutral – Smith, YLS. Van Goozen, SHM. Kuiper, AJ & Cohen-Kettenis, PT. (2005) Sex reassignment: outcomes and predictors of treatment for adolescent and adult transsexuals, Psychological Medicine 35:88-99.

A survey in the UK also reported a high level of satisfaction of 98 per cent following genital surgery – Schonfield, S. (2008) Audit, Information and Analysis Unit: audit of patient satisfaction with transgender services.

A further study on outcomes in trans women shows that they function well on a physical, emotional, psychological and social level – Weyers, S. Elaut, E. De Sutter, P. Gerris, J. T’Sjoen, G. Heylens, G. De Cuypere, G. & Verstraelen, H. (2009) Long-term assessment of the physical, mental and sexual health among transsexual women, Journal of Sexual Medicine 6:752-760.

Now of course the Telegraph is the sort of publication that is likely to claim that there is no scientific evidence for climate change, evolution or heliocentrism, so I’m not surprised at West’s claims, but if you look the evidence for the value of gender treatments isn’t hard to find.

Gay Star News also covered the Richard Curtis story, and as you might expect it did a rather better job, but it also did it’s best to cover it’s backside by supplying what journalists euphemistically call “balance”. It notes a Facebook campaign in support of Dr. Curtis, and gives almost equal space to someone who has spoken out against it. Now of course there is an actual complaint from a real patient here, and that needs to be investigated. But it should not be “investigated” by means of articles in national newspapers that throw in a whole lot of spurious additional accusations of malpractice and attempt to cast doubt on the wisdom of providing anyone with treatment. Also there are currently 259 people in the Facebook group. I’ve only noticed two complaining. Journalists know that the amount of space you give to an opinion is critical in determining how much credence readers give to that opinion. By giving almost equal space to the contrary view, Gay Star News is suggesting that the trans community is equally divided on the issue. That’s not what I’m seeing at all.

They are very careful to describe the stories being related on the #TransDocFail hashtag as “alleged”. That’s often journalist code for “probably made up”. And the examples they pick to showcase are mainly name-calling. The much more serious incidents are ignored. You can get a much better idea of the level of abuse by looking at this useful list of lowlights from the hashtag.

The Guardian tried to add a little balance of their own by accepting this article by Jane Fae which does a pretty good job of covering the issue. Spectacularly it also makes a first appearance in The Guardian for my vagina. Not a picture, of course, but definitely a mention. I’m going to count that as an almost Amanda Palmer level of awesomeness, though I’m sure that Amanda herself has done far better.

Unfortunately The Guardian also chose yesterday to publish an article by Suzanne Moore in which she argued that trans women should put up with being abused and ridiculed by her because of the need for feminist solidarity. She also repeats the classic Janice Raymond and Julie Bindel line about trans people reinforcing the gender binary (and so are anti-feminist). You can find a more nuanced (by which I mean not written by Moore herself) view of the whole furor over at The F-Word.

Finally in this round-up of links I’d like to give credit again to Sarah Brown for starting the whole thing. Here she is talking about it. Her article also includes a link to a 5-minute slot on BBC Radio Cambridge in which she and Christine Burns discuss the issue with a very supportive interviewer.

Now, I promised you a link back to Leveson. Thanks to my pal Eugene Byrne, I discovered this blog post by the Met Office complaining about lies and distortions being spread about their service by the Daily Malice. Incredibly, the Malice article even contained a lie that had been the subject of a successful complaint to the Press Complaints Commission when it first appeared in the Telegraph. So not only does the Malice feel free to print lies, it will do so even when another newspaper has already been censured for doing so. And this is not some despised minority we are talking about here, this is a matter of the accuracy of scientific work. So next time someone tells you that British newspapers can be trusted to self-regulate, I recommend asking for a balanced assessment.

Trans Anger Hits The Headlines

Well, yesterday was busy. That #TransDocFail hashtag that I mentioned was far more popular than anyone had anticipated, which just goes to show how angry trans people are about how they are treated by the medical profession. This is the key to the Richard Curtis story. He may, or may not, have made mistakes with a few clients. That’s a proper subject for an investigation (and not for trial by media). However, his treatment of the majority of his clients is so much better than what they have got from the NHS, and no one in the NHS ever gets brought to book for their behavior. Indeed, it seems that mostly they don’t care. Remember, 84% of NHS staff believe that trans people should not be allowed NHS treatment for their gender issues.

Thankfully that’s not 100%, and those opposed to the use NHS funds for surgery may still be perfectly happy providing normal GP services. Someone has noticed, because this article about the #TransDocFail phenomenon appeared on a medical news site. I note also that many of the issues reported under the hashtag are as much a function of ignorance as of malice. If NHS staff got training about gender issues the situation might get a lot better.

It would also be better if trans people actually complained about how they are treated. The hashtag is a promising start. Jane Fae suggests that this may be our “Stonewall moment”. I’m not happy with that label, because the Stonewall riots were started by trans people. The fact that the name “Stonewall” has been co-opted by transphobic gays such as Ben Summerskill is a source of constant irritation. Nevertheless, the outpouring of anger was hopeful.

The other side of the story is brought to light by this article in New Statesman. I spent some time corresponding with Charlie Hallam last night and I’m pleased to see what a fine job she has done. I note also that she was up until 6:00am writing this article, and then had the alarm on for 9:00am so she could be available when her editor got into the office. That’s dedication.

Charlie had a word limit, and was barely able to scratch the surface of the issues raised by the hashtag, but she got right to a core point: trans people don’t complain about how they are treated by the NHS because they believe, with good reason, that they will only be treated worse, or denied treatment altogether, if they object. Indeed, the whole philosophy by which trans patients are currently tested to see if they are suitable for transition is to put as many unpleasant roadblocks in their way as possible to see how determined they are. The theory, I think, is that if someone can put up with how they are treated by their doctors then, and only then, will they have a strong enough personality to cope with how they will be treated by the rest of the world after they have transitioned.

What I want to know is, whatever happened to “do no harm”.

Some Follow-Up

Last night Christine Burns posted a few links on Facebook that illustrate the institutional issues surrounding discrimination in the NHS (and, of course, the media).

First up we have a horrifying story of a Polish doctor who was eventually awarded £4.5m after a sustained campaign of bullying and manufactured disciplinary complaints against her. The treatment that Dr. Michalak suffered is far worse than that being suffered by Dr. Curtis, although of course the consequences for patients are far less.

Secondly, for an example of the sort of thing you can get away with if you are white and male (and your patients are women), here’s a BBC report on a doctor from Cornwall who was allowed to continue in practice despite 12 investigations into his competence and numerous botched operations. Is this the sort of thing that David Batty might report on? Apparently not, Mr. Batty is only interested in allegations of medical malpractice if they can be used to help deny treatment to trans people.

And finally, if you are on Twitter, take a look at the #TransDocFail hashtag, which started earlier today. It contains a massive and damning collection of stories about how trans people are denied treatment, lied to, and abused by NHS staff. Next time someone asks what is meant by “institutionally transphobic”, all I need to do is point them to that.

GMC – The Wider Issue

When I wrote the post about Richard Curtis I couldn’t find any links to the issues that Christine Burns has raised. However, she has kindly sent me some links via Twitter, which I’ll now share with you.

First up there’s a Department of Health paper (PDF) on the need for “revalidation” of doctors, particularly in the light of recent equalities legislation. The problem is that, once a doctor is certified to practice, she can carry on doing so for life. There is no requirement to keep up with best practice, or to familiarize yourself with issues that might never have been addressed when you were trained.

The section on trans people is quite illuminating. The headline statistic is that 84% of GPs and hospital staff are opposed to the funding of gender reassignment on the NHS. It is not surprising, therefore, that post-op trans people are treated in a hostile manner when they present themselves for treatment for ordinary health issues. Now of course the NHS is massively overstretched, so I appreciate concern about the use of funds. But given the suicide rate amongst trans people, the relative cheapness of the treatment (surgery costs are a tiny fraction of the levels typically quoted by newspapers, and the NHS would make a profit on my hormone prescription if I could find a GP willing to prescribe them), and the very high success rate, I suspect you’d find that gender reassignment was one of the more cost-effective live-saving treatments around.

In addition I can report, from personal experience, that there is often a double standard applied here. While NHS employees do not want trans people treated by the state, if you do opt for private medicine they don’t thank you. What they do is accuse you of having self-medicated, and assume that any further health problems you have, of whatever sort, are a result of that self-medication, and therefore also not worthy of treatment by the NHS. Being a post-op trans person is like being someone who smokes 50 cigarettes a day and is massively overweight as far as some NHS staff are concerned.

This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. The report I linked to goes into detail on all nine strands of the Equality Act, and there are problems with all of them. Furthermore Christine sent me a link to this report (PDF) produced by the University of Bradford on the disproportionate use of disciplinary action against black and minority ethnic workers in the health service. The headline stat there is that a BME member of staff is twice as likely to be disciplined as a white person. Because these days managers and HR departments are adept at phrasing their attacks on minority staff in ways that avoid allegations of discrimination, they get away with this. (And indeed I’ve suffered it myself. In the last job I had, I quit because it became obvious that the HR team was fabricating a disciplinary complaint against me so as to avoid being subject to California’s trans equality legislation.)

The good news is that the problem is being recognized, and Christine also sent me a link to this conference being held at the University of Manchester in March to discuss the problem, not just in the health service, but throughout all so-called “professional” occupations.

The GMC’s War Against Trans People Continues

This week I’ll be going up to London to do some research on Michael Dillon, an Irishman who because the world’s first female-to-male transsexual while living in Bristol. Dillon not only holds a record for his own gender change, but also trained as a doctor and later assisted with the UK’s first male-to-female gender surgery. In many ways he kickstarted the whole transsexual phenomenon. It is ironic, therefore, that this week also sees the beginning of what may well be the end of medical treatment for trans people in the UK.

I refer you first to this article that appeared on the Guardian website last night. It may seem fairly innocuous, but to trans people the mere sight of the byline “David Batty” is enough to signal that this will be a deeply distorted piece of reporting.

The article details a long list of supposed malpractice charges brought by the General Medical Council (GMC) against a gender specialist, Dr. Richard Curtis, working in London. None of these charges are proven, and obviously I have no knowledge of their substance. However, I am one of Dr. Curtis’s patients, I’m very happy with how he has treated me, and yet the substance of Batty’s article leads me to suspect that one of the people Curtis is accused of mistreating is me. Let me explain.

We should start by noting that the practice of medicine is by no means easy. Doctors can, and do, make mistakes. Just as an example, a year or so ago my mother was mistakenly prescribed pills ten times stronger than she needed. Had she taken then, she would have suffered kidney failure and might have died. Thankfully someone noticed in time and phoned her up to warn her not to take them. It was later discovered that the diagnosis for which the pills were prescribed was faulty, and even the correct strength pills were actually making her sick. No one was disciplined over this. It was accepted that getting the correct diagnosis can be very difficult.

A week or so ago my friend Christine Burns, who is an Equality and Diversity Programme Manager at a Strategic Health Authority, was tweeting about a report that showed that black and minority ethnic (BME) doctors were much more likely to be disciplined and struck off for mistakes than their white counterparts. No one ever makes a complaint saying, “this person is a bad doctor because she’s black”. That would be illegal. And yet when you look at the statistics it is very clear that a BME doctor who makes a mistake is likely to be disciplined, whereas a white doctor who makes a similar mistake will probably be let off. It is one of many ways that racial prejudice is alive and well in Britain, despite laws supposedly protecting people.

Now here’s another statistic for you. It isn’t a very good one, because the sample size is only four, but of all the gender specialists I have seen in my life, 75% of them have been accused of malpractice. Also, 100% of those so accused had their cases prejudged by being dragged through major newspapers in a way that would probably result in contempt of court proceedings had an actual court been involved. (I’m not sure what happened to the fourth — the clinic where she worked appears to have been closed, probably due to the California budget crisis.) I submit that this is not an accident. Rather it is because there is a group of “crusading” journalists, including David Batty and Julie Bindel, who make it their business to seek out unhappy post-op trans people and exploit them to try to get the doctors who treated them struck off.

There’s more to it than that, though. Back when I transitioned, the National Health Service had a really poor reputation when it came to treating trans people. Basically you went to them only if you could not afford to go private. And you knew that if you did go to them you would be put through a cruel obstacle course of tests intended to prove whether you were worthy of treatment; part of those tests being conforming to absurd stereotypes of gendered behavior that were firmly rooted in the 1940s.

The people responsible for that have since retired. New, younger doctors have taken over, and are trying to move the NHS to be more in line with international guidelines on responsible treatment of trans people. Part of this is a requirement to treat your patients as human beings rather than as dangerous lunatics. However, I understand from trans activists that one of these old men has taken it upon himself to harass anyone following modern treatment guidelines, and sometimes instigates malpractice suits against them. Hence the nature of most of the complaints against Dr. Curtis.

In this case, however, there is an additional complication. As the Telegraph shamefully reveals (in direct contradiction of ethical guidelines for reporting stories about trans people), Dr. Curtis is himself trans. In any sensible environment, this would be applauded as he will obviously have a unique insight into the problems faced by his patients. However, in the warped mind of the old men at the GMC, who believe that all trans people are, by definition, insane, such a person should not be allowed to practice medicine at all, let alone minister to his fellow lunatics.

By the way, while Batty did refrain from outing Dr. Curtis, he will have been well aware that once he broke the story other papers who care even less about press ethics would do the outing for him. This is not a case of the Guardian doing the right thing. It is a case of the Guardian being cowardly and encouraging other people to do their dirty work for them.

Zoe O’Connell takes issue with the substance of Batty’s article here, and shows how most of the charges look to have been manufactured to prevent Curtis from following modern best practice. I’ll just concentrate on one issue — how this applies to me.

I became a patient of Dr. Curtis several years ago. My existing doctor had taken voluntary retirement having got tired of being hounded in the press by a journalist called David Batty. I needed to see a gender specialist in order to get hormone prescriptions. As I have explained here before, although international guidelines state clearly that post-op trans people are cured of their gender dysphoria, and require regular doses of hormones to stay healthy, a succession of GPs have refused to accept that and have either refused to supply a prescription at all, or would only do so if an independent gender specialist certified me sane.

So I went to see Doctor Curtis, presented my medical records from the UK, Australia and California, and he agreed to prescribe hormones for me, on my first visit. Batty’s article implies that this was malpractice on his part. He goes on to state that the GMC now insists that:

“He [Dr. Curtis] must not prescribe hormonal treatment for patients with gender dysphoria, or refer any patients for gender dysphoria surgery, unless those patients have undergone a recent mental health or psychological assessment carried out by an appropriately trained mental health care professional.”

Batty may be mis-stating the condition somewhat, but if he isn’t that means that Dr. Curtis will no longer be able to write prescriptions for me unless I regularly undergo psychiatric testing, presumably at my own expense. And this is to get a prescription which the international guidelines say is essential for my continued health.

I could apply to an NHS gender clinic, but the waiting lists at all such places are several years long. I don’t have enough supplies to get through such a period. And of course I’d then class as a new patient and be required to spend a year or two surviving without hormones to prove that I was worthy of them.

The obvious solution is to find another private doctor. I understand from friends on twitter that there is one, though how long that person will be free of malpractice suits is another matter. You see, there is a bigger game in play here.

Under the old National Health regulations, funding of gender clinics, and referral of patients to them, was a matter for individual Primary Care Trusts, which were regional bodies. Gender medicine was one of a number of areas that fell victim to what the UK calls the “postcode lottery” — that is, depending on where in the country you lived, you might or might not be able to get treatment. Tabloid newspapers often fulminated against those PCTs that funding gender treatment, and praised those that did not, even though a point blank refusal to fund under any circumstances was actually illegal.

The reforms brought in by the current government will do away with this. Instead the decisions on what types of treatment can be funded will take place at a national level. You can be sure that Bindel, Batty and their allies will be working hard to ensure that NHS funding for all gender medicine is stopped at this convenient central spot.

The only loophole in that strategy is that the government is also very keen on private medicine. If the NHS can’t afford to fund something, well private doctors can take up the slack. However, if anyone who dares to go into practice in gender medicine is quickly shut down by spurious malpractice suits, well then the disgusting tr*nnies will have nowhere to turn, will they?

The end result will be more people like me (indeed, probably including me) risking their lives by buying essential medical supplies on the black market over the Internet. There will also be more suicides. And with every death I expect that Batty, Bindel and their allies at the Guardian will do a little dance of joy.

Update: Post edited to give Christine her correct job title. Also please see this post which goes into the wider issue of discrimination against minorities in the Health Service and other “professional” occupations.

Gender Policing: Just Stop

Most of us are used to gender policing in mainstream culture. The problems of “girl’s toys” v “boy’s toys” is especially acute at the moment. But it may come as a surprise to you that the problem extends into the trans community.

Over the vacation my friend Dru Marland was interviewed by a local magazine in Bristol. It was a pretty good interview, and the journalist tried hard to be respectful. Yet Dru got email from another trans person who was distraught that anyone could be so foolish as to openly admit to being trans, and claimed that Dru was causing her great damage by doing so. I quote:

… how you want to call yourself is up to you off course, but if any body calls or labels me “a trans person” then I’m disgusted and angry as any woman would be. How dare you suggest that I’m ugly or look like a man.

I’ll not link to the rest of it because after some discussion the person concerned calmed down a lot and hopefully that’s sorted, but it is fairly typical of the sort of attack that trans activists get from those who prefer to keep themselves very private. If you’d like to read the interview, it is here, on page 46.

I haven’t had any of that, but I have been complained at from the other end of the spectrum for being supposedly overly feminine. Well I’m sorry, but I refuse to grow a beard so that everyone can see that I’m trans (and yes, I have been told I have a moral duty to do that).

This sort of thing is sadly common in the trans community, but my jaw dropped earlier today when I read a blog post by Brit Mandelo about her anthology, Beyond Binary. One of the interesting things about the book is that it provided a whole spectrum of different ways of a challenging the gender binary. The book was a bit limited due to being a reprint collection, but I thought it did a fine job of providing a range of different views on gender. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover that Brit has come under attack from non-binary-identified people for Doing Non-Binary Wrong. (Her post is here, but it’s on LiveJournal so good luck actually getting it to load.)

Really, people, this is madness. There is nothing to be gained from abandoning one “one true way” approach to gender, only to adopt another that is often even more rigid. I wish people could see that.

Scalzi on Trans

Yesterday John Scalzi did a post explaining his attitude to trans people. It is, as I have come to expect from John, very positive and trans-friendly. I’ve already thanked him there and on Twitter, but I wanted to do so here as well.

What surprised me, however, is how interesting the comment thread has become. Normally I don’t read comments on trans-themed posts elsewhere, especially in high traffic sites, as they tend to be full of hate speech and trolling. But I figured that John might need support, if only against well-meaning-but-clueless cis women accusing him of supporting trans people in the wrong way. So I read the comments, and found them mostly very supportive. Quite a few people took the opportunity to air their unease with their own instinctual reaction to trans people, and that’s very useful from the point of view of understanding why transphobia exists, and what can be done about it.

So thank you again, John, it has been a very interesting and useful exercise.

All I Want For Christmas

While I might loathe most Christmas music (and almost all Christmas television), I am a total sucker for a sentimental Christmas story. Liz Hand’s “Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol” is, of course, a particular favorite of mine. Now I have something else to get all teary over. Sandra McDonald has sent me a link to her contribution to the genre, a story about a little boy who wants nothing more at Christmas than to be a girl.

Diana Comet and The Christmas Quilt

Oh, and Diana, if you are listening, all I want for Christmas is to be able to travel to the USA again.

Men In Dresses

Earlier this week, John Scalzi and Jim Hines did a charity thing in which they did parodies of a “silly female pose” book cover. If you haven’t seen the pictures then you have probably seen people laughing at them. Well, this morning I woke up to discover that concerned feminists were angry about this. Apparently anyone who laughed at the pictures was guilty of transphobia. Jim even saw fit to issue a public apology. Update: Scalzi also has a post on the subject here.

Let me see. I didn’t exactly laugh out loud, but I did groan and appreciate the joke. I guess that makes me a wicked transphobe.

No, wait, let’s step back a minute. What John and Jim were doing was drag. Now drag is a complex phenomenon that I’ve never been part of, but I do know some stuff about it. I know, for example, that it can take many forms, from gross parody in which the performer is making fun of extreme forms of gender presentation, to impersonation, where the idea is to look convincing when cross-dressed. I also know that some drag performers self-identify as trans, while others adamantly do not. And I know that some cis people mistakenly believe that drag and trans are one and the same thing.

Now what John and Jim were doing was pretty clearly in the parody category. They weren’t trying to look like women, and they were deliberately mocking the way that women are portrayed on book covers.

In contrast, trans people, for the most part, are not intending to parody anything, though some may do so at times to make a political point. It’s true that there are genderqueer folks who enjoy mixing and matching elements of gender presentation, but they take pride in their appearance. Indeed, some of the genderqueer people I know are incredibly stylish and good-looking. Even the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Goddess bless them, have their own, off-the-wall aesthetic, as exemplified by Project Nunway.

I note also that drag performers (with one or two dishonorable exceptions) do not set out to mock trans people, they are mocking cis people.

It never crossed my mind that John & Jim might be seen as mocking trans people. Of course there are going to be idiots who comment on the pictures saying things like, “Hur, hur, u look like a tr*nny!” That’s why you should never read the comments. But the connection between parody drag and trans people was in their minds already, John and Jim didn’t put it there.

The connection can be in other minds too. When I hear someone say, “Anyone who laughs at those pictures is transphobic”, what I actually hear is, “Well, we know that trans women are actually ugly men in dresses, and can never be anything else, but you still shouldn’t laugh at them.”

You know, I appreciate the concern, but I’m not sure that I want to be defended by people who think I look like John & Jim do in those pictures. Nor do I want the idea spread that those pictures are what trans people look like.

Marriage: L&G But Not Equal

The UK government’s marriage equality legislation got its first airing in the Commons today. Here’s a brief overview.

If you are gay or lesbian and not Church of England you’ll be pretty happy.

Sorry, Church of England people, yours is the one religion in the country that will be banned from performing same-sex marriages. Most people can, of course defect to another branch of Christianity, but this is really rough on C of E clergy who want to minister to L & G people.

It is possible that straight couples where one decides to transition will now be able to keep their marriages. However, I understand that Northern Ireland is holding out against this and as yet the government isn’t willing to go forward without them.

And of course straight couples still can’t have a civil partnership, even if they want one. That means that a gay or lesbian couple with a civil partnership where one decides to transition will have to convert to a marriage in order to avoid having to dissolve their relationship.

It would be so much easier if a) the government didn’t have to appease the bishops, and b) we didn’t have Stonewall continually whispering in the government’s ear, “hey, we know what will appease them, why not screw over the trannies again, no one cares about them.”

Update: The Scottish government has published its marriage equality bill. You can find it here. There is lengthy and respectful discussion of the issues affecting trans people. It makes it clear that the problem with the divorce requirement is that the Gender Recognition Act is a UK-wide piece of legislation and, with Northern Ireland holding out firmly against same-sex marriage, any changes need to be agreed nation-wide.