Gender

Question Design – Help Please

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

I’m hoping that I have a few helpful academics amongst my readers here.

As I guess most people know, a lot of research in various fields revolves around questionnaires. You get this in politics, in marketing, and in sociology. The matter of questionnaire design is therefore important, because badly designed questions can bias the results, right?

Now suppose you are designing a survey to measure public attitudes towards something, say science fiction. It seems to me self-evident that if your questionnaire is relentlessly negative about the subject then you will a) encourage a negative response and b) leave your respondents with a more negative view of the subject than when they started. To illustrate the point, here are two short sets of questions.

Neutral Questions

On a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) please rate the following:
1. How intelligent are science fiction readers compared to readers in general?
2. What is the quality of writing like in science fiction compared to other fiction?
3. How likely are you to want a science fiction reader as a friend?

Less Neutral Questions

One a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) please indicate how you feel about these statements:
1. Science fiction readers are stupid people who live in fantasy world.
2. Science fiction books are very poorly written.
3. Science fiction readers are dull, boring people with poor personal hygiene.

See what I mean?

I’m sure that someone, somewhere has done research into the comparative effectiveness of these two strategies. But finding that research isn’t easy, and an academic who has inherited the “less neutral” methodology from previous work in the field isn’t going to be able to challenge those previous methods without proof that they are suspect. Has anyone out there ever done any work on questionnaire design, or read any work on it, that might help?

Of course the survey I’m actually interested in isn’t about science fiction readers, but I think you can probably guess what sort of social minority it is still viewed as acceptable to study in this way.

Ignorance at Work

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Following trans-related groups online means that I get to see quite a few surveys aimed at or about trans people. I try to fill them in because I feel that gathering data is generally a good thing to do. Every so often, however, you see a survey that is so bad that you quickly come to the conclusion that whatever results it produces will be a waste of time because the people who put it together have no idea what they are doing.

Today I discovered this survey. It was created by Drs Daragh McDermott and Poul Rohleder with the assistance of Ashley Brooks of Anglia Ruskin University, whom I name specifically because I think they need to be publicly shamed for an appallingly shoddy piece of work. It purports to be a survey about prejudice against trans men and women, but it is pretty clear from the poor way that the few questions actually about trans people were worded that the originators of the survey have no understanding of what “trans men and women” means beyond what they might have read in the pages of the Daily Malice. Given the survey’s obsession with aggressively negative questions about gay men and feminism, and the way in which it appears to try to lead respondents into expressing prejudice against both, I strongly suspect some sort unethical agenda at work here.

Sadly it is quite a long survey, so I don’t want to encourage you to do anything with it. Also I don’t want you to get to the end feeling as angry as I did. My only consolation is that “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” will be as upset about the waste of taxpayers money on this nonsense as I am.

Gender in 2312

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Bloggage has been limited this week, partly due to my going to London, but mainly because I have been deluged with paying work. This is a good thing.

However, just to show you all I haven’t forgotten about this blog, here’s a quick post.

Those of you who follow my blog for gender-related posts may not always pick up on the book reviews, especially when they appear to be about hard SF books. Well, I’ve just submitted a recommendation for Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 to the Tiptree jury because of its portrayal of a post-binary-gender world. If you want to know more, go read the review.

On The Radio

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As Twitter followers will know, I was on Bristol Community Radio today. A few weeks ago I was honored to be asked to help interview Livvy James, an 11-year-old trans girl who had been hounded by the UK media. This was part of the Shout Out Bristol show. You can find the whole program here. There is some news stuff first, but a large proportion of the middle of the show is given over to the interview.

My thanks to Mary the Producer for inviting me onto the show, and to Livvy and her mum, Saffy, for being such amazing people.

(Please note: if you come to this post more than a week after it was posted then you will need to scroll down on the Shout Out page. They don’t provide direct links to individual shows.)

Gender: Stranger Than We Thought

~ Cheryl

Gender science is a complicated business. Quite aside from the difficulties of doing the job, you have to somehow steer a path between the idiot males who assume that any slight biological difference (such as having boobies) is scientific proof that all females are inferior to all males in every way, and the equally daft hardline feminists who refuse to countenance any biological difference whatsoever. Nevertheless, people still persist in trying to find ways in which male and female behavior might somehow be defined by biology. One of the reasons that they may not have got very far is that in many animals the source of difference may not be in the brain, but in the nose.

Yes, you read that right. Most vertebrates have a small sensory organ in the nose called the vomeronasal organ. Recent research in Harvard has discovered that, at least in mice, this organ controls gender-specific behavior. Remove that organ from an adult female mouse, and she’ll start adopting typical male gendered behavior, including becoming sexually aggressive and losing interest in child-rearing. Hormone levels in the female mice were unaffected.

Mice, of course, are not humans. To start with we, in common with our nearest primate relatives, do not have a vomeronasal organ. Also we have larger brains and complex social behaviors that all help complicate the issue of gender. Nevertheless, the discovery that an apparently unrelated organ can have such a dramatic effect on gendered behavior has thrown a huge spanner in the works of gender science. The more we find out, the more we discover that we don’t understand.

Here too is a question for those evolutionary biologists who love to concoct theories as to why arbitrary social codes are the result of evolutionary necessity. How come higher primates evolved to lose this organ which so successfully suppresses male-like behavior in females? Could it be that, for highly intelligent and social animals, having strong gendered behavioral differences proved a disadvantage?

(On second thoughts, don’t answer that. Quite enough nonsense gets talked under the banner of evolutionary biology already. Let’s not create more wild hypotheses.)

Beyond Binary in Stock

~ Cheryl

Here’s a book I have been waiting eagerly for. Beyond Binary is an anthology from Lethe Press edited by Brit Mandelo. I’ll quote briefly from the blurb:

These seventeen stories explore the ways in which identity can go beyond binary—from space colonies to small college towns, from angels to androids, and from a magical past to other worlds entirely, the authors in this collection have brought to life wonderful tales starring people who proudly define (and redefine) their own genders, sexualities, identities, and so much else in between.

It has stories by such wonderful people as Nalo Hopkinson, Ellen Kushner, Sandra McDonald, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Delia Sherman and Catherynne M. Valente. There will be a proper review sometime soon, but in the meantime you know what to do, right?

The Aurealis Awards

~ Cheryl

While I was talking about DC and Vertigo comics in Bristol, much excitement was happening in Sydney where the annual Aurealis Awards were being handed out. The full results are available here (PDF), but I want to highlight three particular winners.

The Science Fiction Novel category was won by Kim Westwood for The Courier’s New Bicycle, while the YA Short Fiction category was won by “The Nation of the Night” by Sue Isle from her collection, Nightsiders. Both of these books feature positive and sympathetic portrayals of trans people as the central characters in the story. This makes me very happy indeed. Thank you, Australia. And thank you Kim and Sue for writing such great stories.

Congratulations are also due to my pals Alex, Alisa & Tansy at Galactic Suburbia who have done so much to promote interesting writing about gender. They won the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award, which is given to people who have done something spectacular for the SpecFic community that doesn’t otherwise qualify for an award.

Equal Under The Law?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

One of the supposed cornerstones of democracies is that we are all equal under the law. Rich people, of course, always have means of avoiding consequences, but once you end up in front of The Beak (that’s a judge, non-UK readers) you expect to be treated fairly. Well, some of you do.

You’ve doubtless all heard of the case of Trayvon Martin who was gunned down in Florida earlier this year. His killer, George Zimmerman, claimed that Martin had attacked him and he had acted in self-defense. Martin was armed with a hoodie, some iced tea and a packet of fruit candy. The local authorities initially declined to take any action against Zimmerman. Florida is one of the parts of the US that has a “Stand Your Ground” law that protects people acting in self defense.

As a comparison, consider the case of trans woman CeCe McDonald. Last year she and some friends, all African-American but not all trans, went out to buy groceries in Minneapolis. As they passed a bar a gang of white people began yelling transphobic abuse at them and attacked them. CeCe had a glass smashed in her face which cut her cheek. The group ran, and were chased down the street by their assailants. At some point, CeCe decided that enough was enough. She took a pair of scissors out of her bag and stopped. Dean Schmitz charged at her, was impaled on the scissors, and later died.

The reaction of the Minneapolis authorities was very different to that in Florida. CeCe was arrested and charged with murder. Yesterday she accepted a plea bargain for a charge of manslaughter that carries a custodial sentence of 41 months. Well, she did kill someone while trying to defend herself, and Minnesota does not have a Florida-style Stand Your Ground law. But it is the way the trial was conducted that shows how the justice system can be perverted.

Firstly it is entirely legal in Minnesota to remove someone from a jury because they are LGBT. The assumption is that such people would be biased against decent, upstanding citizens, and in favor of, well, people like themselves. So CeCe would be facing a jury comprised entirely of straight cis people. Then there’s the matter of what evidence would be presented. Judges, at least in Minnesota, have quite a lot of leeway in defining what they deem relevant to a case. CeCe had a previous conviction for passing a bad check, and the prosecution was planning to mention that as evidence of her criminal nature. Schmitz had three previous convictions for assault. They were all domestic abuse cases. He had attacked his ex-girlfriend, her father, and her 14-year-old daughter. He had a swastika tattooed on his chest. He judge refused to allow any of this to be mentioned in court. He also refused testimony from an expert on the dangers faced by local trans people. Some of Schmitz’s friends, who would be standing as witnesses, had convictions for theft. Again the judge refused to allow this to be mentioned.

There’s a lot more in this article at Bilerico, but the basic fact is that CeCe could either accept 41 months in jail, or go to trial on a murder case that was clearly being stacked against her by the judge, and expect a 40-year sentence.

You might ask why she chose to defend herself. Wasn’t that a little unwise? Well, here’s what happens to trans people who don’t defend themselves. On Sunday night Brandy Martell and two friends were sat chatting in Brandy’s car in Oakland. Two men came up and talked to them. The fact that the women were trans was mentioned. The men went away. Some time later they came back with an automatic weapon and opened fire. The two other women got away, but Brandy died from gunshot wounds.

It took until yesterday (Wednesday) for the San Francisco Chronicle to run an article on the murder. Kudos to Laura Anthony of ABC News who appears to have been the only local journalist from a major outlet to cover the story the day after the murder. As the Daily Kos put it, “Transgender Woman Murdered in Oakland. Nobody Cares”.

One thing we can conclude, of course, is that Brandy and her friends were not prostitutes. It would have been all over the media had there been any evidence of that. In fact Brandy worked as a peer advocate at the TransVision center in Fremont, the Bay Area city where Kevin and I had our home. I wasn’t much involved with the local trans scene when I lived there, but had I been I would have met Brandy, possibly known her as a friend.

Well, you may say, that’s America, and Oakland at that. And it is true that people don’t wander around the streets with automatic weapons in every country. But don’t assume that the sort of official manipulation of the justice system that happened to CeCe can’t happen anywhere else.

Felix Wamala is a gay man from Uganda who is seeking to stay in the UK, where he has lived since 1995. He has been in detention since 2010 when his request for asylum was “lost” by the Home Office. Uganda is a country where instituting the death penalty for homosexuality has been seriously discussed in parliament recently. The British authorities have already tired to deport Felix twice, once on December 24th and once on January 2nd. I’m not sure why the previous attempts failed, but there have been cases of pilots refusing to accept such deportees onto their planes on humanitarian grounds. Another attempt to deport him will be made tomorrow. Note that all of these actions have been timed for holiday weekends.

Felix has been trying to get his case reviewed. A post on the LGBT History month blog explains what happened.

But there are further signs that Felix has been strait-jacketed in terms of his appeal. First, he cannot challenge the Judicial Review of the 22nd of March because he has not been provided with the deportation order on paper that he needs to appeal against. Second, a 14 year rule application that he made on the grounds that he has lived here for over 14 years, and which he sent to the Home Office with the correct funds was returned month ago with the funds returned. It was then refused on the grounds that he had not provided “sufficient funds” to secure the application!

The Borders Agency has also said that they can’t grant him asylum because he can’t prove to their satisfaction that he is gay. One wonders how he is supposed to do that. So much for fair treatment under the law.

If you are white and a UK citizen things are probably a bit different, but even so I’m not inclined to take chances. My sole brush with the courts was almost 20 years ago, and thankfully it wasn’t anything that might have resulted in a criminal conviction. Nevertheless, like CeCe I quietly took whatever the judge chose to throw at me. I well remember my lawyer saying, “There’s no justice in British courts for people like you.” Since then we have had the Gender Recognition Act, so hopefully things are better, but I’m not going to assume that.

Major Trans Rights Breakthrough In USA

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

This morning my Twitter stream was full of rejoicing from the far side of the Atlantic thanks to a major breakthrough in trans rights. Here’s what happened.

The story began when Mia Macy applied for a job with a government agency in San Francisco. She was extremely well qualified for it, and was given the post, but she had applied in her male name and, when she explained that she would be transitioning prior to taking the job, the offer was withdrawn and someone else appointed. Mia and her partner tell their story here.

The good people at the Transgender Law Center took up they case, and they referred it to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requiesting the right to sue for sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yesterday they were granted that right.

This is a landmark decision in two ways. As the NTCE explains, this will be of huge help to people in states where the local state government has refused to pass protection laws for trans people. There is now a federal decision that applies to such cases. In addition the EEOC has recognized that discrimination on the grounds of gender is still discrimination, regardless of how well or poorly the person in question conforms to the gender binary, which is a major philosophical victory.

I had the pleasure of meeting Masen Davis and his colleagues at TLC a few years ago, and interviewed them for Press for Change. I was very impressed by them then, and am even more so now. Well done folks, that’s a huge breakthrough you have achieved.

I should add, by the way, that Mia’s story is far from over. Yesterday’s ruling only gives her the right to bring a case. Given the EEOC’s ruling, it is highly unlikely that she would lose, but even then there’s the question of whether she then wants to take up a job with an employer that despises her. While she has helped make life better for thousands of other trans Americans, there’s no guarantee of a happy ending for her. Hopefully someone will find her skills attractive.

In Which I Meet Awesome People

~ Cheryl

Today I was off to Bristol again, for a rather special meeting. Mary the Producer from Shout Out had asked me to help with an interview that she was recording for broadcast later in the year. The interview subject was Livvy James, an 11-year-old trans girl who has become a bit of a media celebrity in the UK, and who I have written about before. I wasn’t there to ask questions, or indeed speak much. Mary is a very capable interviewer. But I guess my presence would have helped reassure Livvy and her mum, Saffy, that the show was trans-friendly, and also if any issues came up about the wider trans community I could offer expertise that Mary doesn’t have.

Although Livvy and Saffy have been in great demand in the media since they hit the headlines last year, we were the first LGBT show they had ever been on. As such, we provided them an opportunity to set the record straight in a number of ways. For example, Livvy didn’t suddenly decide to become female last year. As with many trans people, she had known from a very early age that her body and identity didn’t match. She’d been living as a girl at home since the age of 7, and only pretending to be a boy when she had to leave the house. Livvy and her family never had any intention of becoming media celebrities. They were outed to the press by the parents of other children at Livvy’s school, and have been dealing with the fallout from that ever since. They have never asked for payment for a media appearance.

Listening to the interview, I was struck by how similar Livvy’s experience was to my own, and yet how different. When she talked about hating having to wear boy’s clothes, about wanting to play with toys that are deemed “for girls”, or about her fear of puberty, that could easily have been me. And yet here she was, living as a girl, with a wonderfully supportive family, and with a promise of medical intervention when she needs it to save her from the ravages of testosterone.

I can’t blame my parents for this. When I was Livvy’s age, hardly anyone in the UK had heard of trans people. It wasn’t until the April Ashley divorce case hit the headlines in 1970 that I even had a word to describe what was wrong with me. Had I acted on that knowledge, the medical profession would probably have told my parents that I needed to be sent to an asylum so that I could be “cured”. And because they would have wanted the best for me, they would have agreed. The world is very different now.

Meeting Livvy, I can’t imagine how anyone who encounters her can fail to see how happy and comfortable she is as a girl. She’s every inch the “little princess” that parents dream of. But she’s also incredibly brave, determined and selfless. She and Saffy talked about how they saw their unfortunate outing and subsequent notoriety as a gift that enabled them to talk to a wider audience and help other families in the same situation. Of course, like all other representatives of minorities who finds themselves in the public eye, Livvy and Saffy tire of the constant need to explain to the clueless. One day soon, I hope, they will be able to retire gracefully and let someone else carry the load. But in the meantime they are amazing ambassadors for the trans community, and we are very lucky to have them.

I don’t know, as yet, when the interview will be broadcast, and the end result will only be about 15 minutes of the hour plus we spent talking, but I will let you know when it is online. And Mary, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to meet such wonderful people.

Marriage, It’s Complicated

~ Cheryl

The UK government is currently running a public consultation on the subject of equality in marriage law. Last night my friends at Shout Out Bristol were right on topic when they chose to interview a trans couple about the legal difficulties of transitioning when married. (April 12th show if you come to it late, segment begins about 24 minutes in.)

As you may know, the UK currently allows “marriage” for opposite-sex couples, and “civil partnerships” for same-sex couples. Neither type of couple is allowed to have the type of union reserved for the other, although legally the options are very similar. Transitioning while married drives a coach and horses through this ridiculous system. As Nicola and Meg explain on the program, if Nicola wants to be recognized as fully legally female in the UK it would be necessary for the couple to have their marriage annulled. That’s not just a divorce, that’s saying that it never, ever happened, because it would have been illegal.

Some couples, like Nicola and Meg, have elected to preserve their relationship and fore-go the legal recognition of the gender change. Others have spent a lot of money on lawyers exchanging their marriage for a civil partnership. If you are a UK citizen and are responding to the government consultation, please remember these people and ask for something to be done for them.

Some Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

There was no bloggery yesterday as I was in London all day. That may turn into a project of some sort, but I won’t know for a while. Now I’m catching up. Here are a few stories of interest.

Locus has launched a Kickstarter project to help digitize the vast collection of SF-related photos and ephemera that the magazine has collected over the years. Jonathan talks about it here. Please help if you can.

Yesterday Niall Harrison posted an analysis of gender breakdowns in SF&F reviewing from 2011. There are a couple of things that particularly interest me about it. Firstly I see that the number of books received by Locus in 2011 from US publishers are split roughly 50:50 between men and women, whereas books received from UK publishers included twice as many books by men than by women. Obviously there are caveats on the data, but that’s such a startling result that it has to be significant. Secondly I’m interested to know what criteria were used to select the venues for inclusion.

Via Monica Roberts I learn that a massive public outcry has forced Miss Universe Canada to change its mind and re-admit Jenna Talackova to the contest. Of course this is a classic example of how trans rights are taken much more seriously if the trans people in question are lucky enough to conform very obviously to the gender binary, but at least one trans woman is getting a chance to live her dream, and one more piece of discrimination has been swept away.

Finally a rather old post (from 2000), but one I only learned about today. It is a survey of stories from abortion clinics about the attitudes of openly anti-abortion women to whom they have provided services. Here’s a taster:

I have done several abortions on women who have regularly picketed my clinics, including a 16 year old schoolgirl who came back to picket the day after her abortion, about three years ago. During her whole stay at the clinic, we felt that she was not quite right, but there were no real warning bells. She insisted that the abortion was her idea and assured us that all was OK. She went through the procedure very smoothly and was discharged with no problems. A quite routine operation. Next morning she was with her mother and several school mates in front of the clinic with the usual anti posters and chants. It appears that she got the abortion she needed and still displayed the appropriate anti views expected of her by her parents, teachers, and peers.

That example was from Australia. There are others from the USA, Canada and The Netherlands.

Being Visible #GirlsLikeUs

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Today is the International Trans Day of Visibility. It is held at the opposite end of the year from the Day of Remembrance, and the idea is to have a positive alternative to that dark shadow, a time in which the achievements of trans people can be celebrated. Unfortunately it is often hard to find much to celebrate.

I did my bit yesterday. Two of the stars of My Transsexual Summer, Sarah Savage and Karen Gale, were due to appear at a nightclub in Bristol. Prior to that, Bristol Pride organized a special event in conjunction with TransBristol that would allow local trans people to meet with Sarah and Karen in a more private setting. I went along to do my bit of being a (hopefully) positive role model.

It was a lovely evening, and I met lots of new people. Sadly I didn’t get to chat much to Sarah and Karen, but I’ve met them before and it was more important to let them have time with new people. What I did do was chat to some of the cis folks there. In particular I chatted quite a bit to Peter Main, a gay man who will shortly become the new Lord Mayor of Bristol. Peter is very keen to do something positive for the local LGBT community while he is Mayor, and I was delighted to see him determined to ensure that trans people are included in that.

In addition I got to meet a young lady who is one of the LGBT liaison officers for Avon & Somerset police. She and her girlfriend, who works on Bristol Pride, had gone along to make contact with trans people so that we knew we had someone we could come to if we were in trouble. The contrast to the way the world was when I transitioned is startling, and heartwarming.

Jenna TalackovaMoving on to other people, by far the most visible trans person around at the moment is Jenna Talackova. This Canadian girl was kicked out of the Miss Universe Canada contest because she is not a “natural born female”. Beauty pageants are a minefield for trans women. If we compete in them (or indeed take on any other career that relies on our good looks) then we get yelled at by the RadFems for reinforcing the gender binary. But if we don’t share Jenna’s good looks then we get laughed at for failing to live up to social standards of feminine appearance. Just like a woman has to be twice as good as a man to hold down an equivalent job, so a trans woman has to be twice as beautiful as a cis woman to be deemed pretty enough to count as female. The excellent Mercedes Allen does her usual fine job of tiptoeing through the minefield from both a trans and Canadian perspective here.

There are a couple of salient points to be raised about Jenna’s case. As usual, people are making stupid comments about how she is “really a man”, but in a very real sense she has never been one. Jenna is one of the lucky younger generation of trans people who are able to start hormone treatment very young. She may have spent part of her life living as a boy, but she never went through puberty as a male. Her adolescence was spent under the influence of estrogen, not testosterone. Then there is this question of being a “natural born woman”. Jenna, as far as I know, was born naturally. So was I. I also have a birth certificate attesting that I was born female. That is one of the benefits I acquired under the UK’s Gender Recognition Act. Canada, I guess, does not have a similar law. Perhaps it should.

The best comment on Jenna’s case, however, was this article in the Huffington Post by trans actress, Laverne Cox. She neatly sidesteps the issue of beauty pageants by asking whether trans people are allowed to dream. Jenna’s dream growing up might have been to be a beauty queen, and looking at her she surely deserves to succeed. But growing up trans doesn’t just debar you from such contests, it debars you from all sorts of careers and life choices that cis people take for granted. Recently Roz Kaveney has been writing about an idea called the “cotton ceiling”, which denotes the fact that most trans people can’t expect to find love and companionship outside of the trans community because cis people, even those who claim to be trans allies, react with revulsion to the idea that they might actually have sex with trans people, or even be thought by others to be considering such a thing.

I am well aware that I have been very lucky in this respect. I cannot begin to count the ways in which Kevin has made my life immeasurably better. And yet, compared to the dreams I had of my life as a teenager, or even my hopes for continuing my career after I transitioned, my life has been a dismal failure. Even winning a few Hugos, for which I am eternally grateful, hasn’t been much help. Science fiction fans are so despised in the UK that I’m no use to the trans community here as a public role model. I’m more like proof of what sad, pathetic people trans folk are. I’m still somewhat surprised that I have survived this long, and have no expectation of a long and pleasant old age, despite my health being excellent. As Laverne says, as a trans person you get so used to being at the bottom of the social pecking order that you are absurdly grateful for a life that most people would view with horror.

All I can say is that things are getting better, and are doing so at a rate much faster than I ever expected. It may be too late for me, but people like Jenna, Laverne and Janet Mock are doing great work across the Atlantic, and the likes of Paris Lees and CN Lester are having similar success over here. With any luck, by the time the latest generation of trans kids have grown up, there will be no limit to the dreams that they can achieve.

Of course they are not getting better for everyone at the same speed. A case that you may be unaware of is that of CeCe McDonald, who as a black trans woman is absolutely on the bottom rung as far as the US justice system is concerned. Or there’s the case of Alex Kaminski (name changed), a German girl whose estranged father went to court to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital rather than allow her to continue her gender treatment. The court ruled that Alex’s gender identity had been “induced by her mother”, who is supportive of her. Thankfully the hospital in question wants nothing to do with this. As Jane Fae explains, the doctors have refused to attempt forced “cure” and have threatened to sue newspapers over their reporting of the case.

There’s a constant battle to be waged here. While we definitely appear to be winning, there are always more horror stories waiting around the corner to ambush us. And with the current fashion for right wing politicians here and in the US to take Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a blueprint for a political utopia, there is always the worry that yesterday’s victories will be taken away from us. Which is why, despite the fact that it kills my blog stats, I am poking my head above the parapet once again. Thank you for listening.

(The hashtag, by the way, is a Twitter campaign started by Janet Mock to support Jenna and draw attention to other successful and talented trans women.)

Film About Jeffrey Catherine Jones

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Some of you will remember my post from last year on the obituaries written for Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Thanks to Anne Gray I have discovered that a film is being made about Jones’ life, including many interviews with contemporary artists and writers (Moebius, Roger Dean, Dave McKean, Neil Gaiman). The filming was done while Jones was still alive and able to participate. It will be called Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones and you can find the official website here. The director, Maria Paz Cabardo, has a blog here.

I’m mentioning the film in part because I’m looking forward to seeing it, but also because it is pretty much a one-person endeavor and without a cash injection it is unlikely to be finished any time soon. There’s an appeal for funds here. Here’s the trailer.

A Trip to Manchester

~ Cheryl

Yesterday afternoon I headed up to Manchester, and in the evening gave a talk to the local trans group. Manchester has a very well-organized and active LGBT community. It is a very inclusive group as well, as far as I can see. The city is the host to the annual Sparkle festival, the UK’s national trans festival. And the organization I went to see, the Trans Resource and Empowerment Centre, has space in the Lesbian & Gay Foundation‘s offices in the city center.

As befits an organization whose name abbreviates to TREC, the Manchester folks took kindly to a talk about science fiction. I was made extremely welcome, and even the folks there who said they didn’t read SF were very polite about the talk. Afterwards we went off to a nearby pub called, rather appropriately, The Molly House, where I discovered lots of beers I’d never heard of before.

Anyone from Manchester looking for the list of books mentioned, you can find it here. I also added the following:

The Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson.

The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Also if the lady who asked about Marxist SF writers should happen to drop by, I recommend China Miéville, Ken MacLeod and Kim Stanley Robinson.

This morning I did a quick tour around the city center taking photos. They turned out to be mainly graffiti, statuary and trains.

[shashin type=”album” id=”53″ size=”medium”]

Lies, Damned Lies and Bishops

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Over the past couple of the weeks the UK’s bishops, both Anglican and Catholic, have been bleatingly mightily about the government’s plans to legalize same-sex marriages. Apparently letting a gay or lesbian couple get married is an abomination on a par with abortion and slavery. And what’s more, churches will be forced to perform these marriages, even though they find them morally abhorrent.

Well, actually, no.

The government’s proposals, issued today, make it quite clear that the change in the law will apply only to marriages conducted by civil authorities in registry offices. It will still be illegal for same-sex couples to marry in church. That’s stated clearly by Home Secretary Theresa May here, and by Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone here. And it is set out clearly in the government’s consultation paper here (PDF).

I find it very hard to believe that the bishops did not know that they would be offered this protection. Why would the government not have told them that they were doing this? It has to be a piece of horse trading. And yet the bishops have publicly argued that the government’s plans were exactly the opposite.

Worse still, as this provision is only in there as a sop to the bishops (large portions of their congregations, and even many of their clergy, seem perfectly happy with same-sex marriages), look at the effects. In order to justify their own bigotry, the bishops have persuaded the government to ban all religious organizations from conducting same-sex marriages, whether they approve of them or not. As the Pink News article linked to above notes, many religions, including Quakers, Unitarians, Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism, want to be able to solemnize same-sex marriages, and will continue to be prevented from doing so. Where exactly is the “tyranny of tolerance” in all this?

There are other issues to be resolved as well. For example, the government expects that same-sex couples who previously enacted civil partnerships will want to convert their relationship to a marriage. There will be opposite-sex couples who would prefer to have a civil partnership, which the government does not propose to allow. Hence the need for a consultation period to work out what provisions need to be enacted.

Crucially from my point of view, there should be recompense for couples in which one partner has undergone gender transition. Because of the bishops’ insistence that same-sex marriages are abhorrent, the Gender Recognition Act stipulates that anyone wishing to change gender must end any existing marriage and, if desired, enter into a civil partnership with their former spouse. The government proposals state that this will no longer be necessary, but they offer no recompense to people whose marriages were forcibly dissolved. If they want to be married again, they will have to pay to convert their civil partnership to a marriage. The number of couples involved is not that large, and this seems to me unnecessarily cruel.

It is worth noting that the final legislation will not necessarily reflect the provisions set out in the consultation. We (British citizens) can change things for the better. Equally the bishops and their allies will be clamoring for the provisions to be watered down. Sadly I expect S’onewall to be whispering in the government’s ear that it will be OK to offer a further sop to the bishops by removing the sections relating to trans people. It won’t be the first time that they have presented themselves to government as legitimate representatives of Britain’s trans population while at the same time promoting transphobia within their own ranks.

Further information, including a link to an online response form, is available from the Home Office here. It is important that as many people as possible do respond, because the bishops will be mounting an aggressive campaign to get their side to respond. In particular it is important that non-trans people support the rights of trans people. The trans community itself is so small that if only trans people speak for it their arguments will seem insignificant.

There are some useful ideas for things to say in the consultation here.

Finally I should note that this really is a problem of bishops, not of Christians. I have many Christian friends, including a Catholic Priest, a Methodist Minister and an Anglican Curate. Large numbers of Christians are perfectly OK with LGBT people. Their leaders refuse to accept this, and are doing untold damage to their faith thereby. I wish God would hurry up and drop a clue stick on some of them.

Wellington, I Love You!

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

So, were any of my NZ pals involved in this?

If any of you are wondering why Ms. Greer deserves glitter-bombing, Pink News and Diva explain.

The comments about how trans women would all change their minds if they were required to have ovaries and a uterus show how little Greer understands about what she is talking about. As was pointed out on Twitter earlier today, one of the first people to undergo male-to-female surgery opted to try a uterus transplant. The transplant didn’t take and she died. No one risks it these days, but it is still the holy grail of MtF surgery.

Triton Fly-By

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

On Friday I’ll be giving a talk on trans characters in SF&F to a trans group in Manchester. It will be pretty much the same as the one I gave in Bristol, but I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Samuel Delany’s Triton and I’d like to know what other people made of it. Inevitably this post is spoilery, hence the fold.
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