Thank You, World

One of the downsides of trans people getting more exposure in the media, and being treated more fairly by society, is the inevitable backlash. Many of you will have heard the heartwarming story of a Girl Guide troop in Colorado that agreed to admit a young trans girl to their ranks. Fewer of you will have heard that some senior Guides have since disbanded their troops and set up a rival organization. And now there is a call for a nationwide boycott of the famous Girl Guide Cookie sales. Monica Roberts has details. So a Washington DC based ABC affiliate decided to run a poll on their website asking people whether they thought trans kids should be allowed into the Guides. You can find it here. The current score is as follows:

Bigots 399
Rest of World 24,428

That’s what I call a result. 🙂

The Least Studied Human Organ?

There are all sorts of things that I might expect to be doing on a Sunday morning, but reading an article about the biology of the clitoris is not one of them. Kate Elliot lives in Hawaii, so it would have been Saturday evening when she tweeted about it, which is maybe not so weird. Anyway, I was busy doing housework and stuff yesterday and didn’t get around to writing about it. Today you have no such protection.

You can find the article here, and as Kate says in her tweet it is exceptionally illuminating. I’m not entirely surprised, because one thing you learn when you study the biology of gender is that apparently “different” human organs are actually the same structures that grow differently under the influence of hormones. So testicles and ovaries start off the same, and so do the clitoris and penis. What the article reveals is that the clitoris we are familiar with is not a very small penis, it is the tip of a similarly large and sensitive structure, most of which is inside your body.

The obvious thing that the article brings to mind is that all this talk about “vaginal orgasms” really needs to be informed by a bit of biology, then it will all make a lot more sense. The thing that stood out to me, however, is the possibilities this knowledge offers to unfortunate women who have had their clitoris mutilated by religious fanatics. The correct solution to this is, of course, to stop people doing it, but for those who have already been brutalized in this way it is apparently not too late. “Hope springs internal”, as the article puts it.

Overall, however, the clear message we can take from this is that there is one part of the human body that medicine doesn’t want to know about. It is pretty scandalous that so much medical information can be so badly wrong. It may only be extremists who resort to mutilation, but not wanting to talk about female sexuality is endemic.

I guess also someone is going to offer this as “proof” that trans women can never be “real”, because surgery can’t possibly reproduce something so wonderfully complex. After all, I still occasionally see (male) doctors insisting that trans women can’t ever have orgasms because they have lost their penises. Actually it is the inability of surgeons to provide a functioning womb that really upsets many trans women. As far as sex goes, yeah, trans women don’t get the full deal. But what they do get can be pretty awesome.

Discrimination in Practice

When we think about discrimination against minorities we tend to think of people like Rick Perry or Fred Phelps spouting nonsense on TV. That sort of thing doesn’t happen much in the UK. Outright bigotry is reserved for lunatic fringe political parties, Conservative members of the House of Lords, and of course the Daily Malice. Nevertheless, discrimination can still be widespread, it just takes place behind closed doors, or convenient excuses, so that people can pretend that it doesn’t happen.

What has prompted this post? Well, some of you may be aware that the Malice and similar publications often devote a lot of column inches to complaining about trans people getting treatment on the NHS. You may not be aware that they routinely inflate the cost of this treatment by an order of magnitude or so in order to generate more outrage, but given that they lie outrageously as a matter of course you have probably guessed.

This is, however, a real issue. Amidst all of the outpouring of support that the My Transsexual Summer TV series received, the one genuine sour note I detected on Twitter (as opposed to the deliberately offensive trolling) was that people didn’t want NHS money spent on trans people. It is a difficult argument to have, particularly with people whose relatives need life-saving operations and are seeing waiting lists get ever longer.

Of course there is another side to it as well. Many of my activist friends wanted Lewis to stand up to his local health authority and demand treatment, which legally he is entitled to do. If people don’t do that then the NHS will continue to get away with denying treatment to trans people. But fighting could have taken a very long time, and been emotionally draining, and I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t feel up to that battle.

However, the whole question as to whether you can go private or not is moot if no private practitioner is available. For surgery UK-based trans people routinely go overseas, but that’s a one-off process. Treatment for transsexuals requires lengthy psychiatric counseling, monitoring through a two-year “real life test” in which you have to prove that you are comfortable living in your preferred gender, and a lifetime of hormone treatment. These things are not easy to get access to.

To start with some health authorities have been caught operating blanket bans on any gender treatment, even though this is illegal. And if you can get a referral, waiting lists can be years long, not just months.

Think about that for a moment. You go to a doctor with a condition that is known to result in abnormally high rates of suicide, and you get told that you won’t be able to see a specialist for a year or more. What does that tell you about how much the NHS cares about you?

Even when you have successfully transitioned, you still need those hormone treatments. Many GPs refuse to supply the necessary prescriptions. Indeed, some refuse to take trans people as patients at all. On a personal note, almost all of the health services I have used since transitioning have had to be purchased privately because NHS staff were either unable or unwilling to supply them.

What is the medical establishment’s reaction to this? Are doctors grateful that private practitioners exist so that valuable NHS funds can be spent on other services instead? Not a bit of it. What they are actually doing is conducting a campaign to drive gender specialists out of private practice through the use of malpractice suits. There isn’t enough business in gender medicine to support a lot of private practice. The one person in the UK doing the job back when I transitioned has since been struck off the medical register. His successor has now been put on probation by the General Medical Council (GMC), and if things go as I expect an excuse will be found to bar him from treating gender patients soon as well.

Obviously there are serious issues in play here. Treatment of people with gender issues is a difficult process, and you can end up making matters worse by allowing patients to proceed with surgery when they are not suitable for it. Nevertheless, the standards for treatment are continually evolving and are by no means subject to general agreement. It is therefore fairly easy to generate a malpractice suit on the basis of differences in approach. The GMC isn’t giving out any details to justify their decision. The doctor in question isn’t allowed to discuss the case, beyond saying that the complaint against him was raised by NHS staff.

At best this is restraint of trade by an already massively over-subscribed service seeking to eliminate all possible competition. More likely it is professional jealousy — one supposed expert in a highly complex area of medicine insisting that he alone knows how to treat patients. It would not surprise me to find out that this was an attempt to shut down access to treatment for trans people unless they conform precisely to one aged, straight, white male’s view of gender normative behavior.

Of course the decision was announced in the run-up to the holidays, thereby ensuring that very little can be done about it for several weeks — another clue that the GMC knows that this is a politically motivated action rather than one taken in the best interests of patients. There’s no point in anyone trying to do anything right now. But I will most definitely come back to this in the New Year. It is quite annoying enough to have to pay for medical services that other British taxpayers receive free as a matter of course. The thought of being unable to access those services at all because the GMC will not allow anyone to provide them privately makes me very, very angry indeed.

Honouring Dead Authors

I have been following the debate over the World Fantasy Award trophy with some interest. For those of you who have managed to miss it, the story started with this blog post from Nnedi Okorafor, and discussion has ranged far and wide, including on the latest episode of the Coode Street Podcast.

I don’t particularly want to comment on the issue of Lovecraft and racism. I think Nnedi has dealt with the issue very well and I don’t have much to add beyond noting that the Lovecraft bust used as a World Fantasy trophy is spectacularly ugly, and I too am pretty sure that Gahan Wilson did that deliberately with Lovercaft’s nature in mind. I like the fact that it is ugly, and that it is rather reminiscent of an Easter Island head.

Lovecraft on Easter Island

(image from The Lovecraftsman)

I have, however, been pondering how social attitudes change, and what I’d think if I ever won a trophy that was named after someone who was rampantly transphobic. The thing is that if you go back far enough then pretty much everyone was transphobic. Did Hugo Gernsback despise trans people? Probably, if someone had told him about such things. Would Verne or Wells be disgusted by me? Quite likely. Joanna Russ at least had the good grace to apologize later in life. I’m still waiting for an apology from Mary Gentle, but that doesn’t stop me loving most of her books.

One the one hand, hardly any of the authors whose work I admire had said anything bad about trans people, because there are so few of us that we didn’t come to the notice of most people until recently. On the other hand social attitudes have been such that, prior to the turn of the century, trans people were almost universally despised, so the chances are that anyone who was alive at the time was prejudiced against us.

Then again, if you go back far enough (and it doesn’t have to be that much further) then most white people had some fairly racist attitudes. The difference with Lovecraft was that he was spectacularly racist (and misogynist, and anti-Semitic, and so on), and made his feelings known in his writing. I’m not sure how I’d feel if I won an award whose trophy was a bust of Julie Bindel.

So I guess I’m still a bit confused about it. I can quite see where Nnedi is coming from. Equally I think that women, Jews and now People of Color winning the World Fantasy Award would have exploded Lovecraft’s brain. Hopefully it is also exploding the brains of people who still think like him. Goodness only knows what he would have made of me, but I’d like to continue to have the opportunity to do more brain exploding. If World Fantasy does decide to change the trophy, I shall still treasure my Howie pin and occasionally talk to it to remind HPL just how wrong he was.

Dual Natures

Oh dear, I haven’t blogged all day, have I? Bad Cheryl.

More books tomorrow, but for now here’s something much more weird. In my Google Reader feeds today I found this post about a new type of experiment in quantum physics. One of the really odd things about quantum theory is that particles can behave as either waves or particles, which to our eyes is hugely inconsistent of them. The new experiment, if I understand it correctly, says that we are wrong, not the particles. That is, particles have a consistent nature but, due to our flawed understanding, or possibly perception, of the universe, we can only see them as having this odd dual nature.

Er, can someone who understands physics better than I do please check to see if I have understood this correctly?

And talking of dual natures, Demon Knights #4 is out. Paul Cornell has been trailing this as featuring the origin of the Shining Knight, and so it does, but we don’t really learn much. For those of you not following the book, the Shining Knight is a) Welsh and b) apparently trans or intersex. You can see why I am interested. DC and the other characters in the book consistently refer to the Knight as “she”, but the Knight is drawn fairly androgynously and rejects the female label. Well, in the new issue we find out how the Knight got super powers and a quest, but not much more than that. There’s one key panel in which Marlin says, “You interest me, young squire. You have two natures”. And that’s all we are getting, for now.

Wave/particle. Male/female. Maybe we are not just looking properly.

And if that hasn’t broken your brains, here’s Andrej Pejic being fabulous.

The Government Has A Plan

Today is a rather significant day in this history of trans rights in the UK. For the first time ever a government has issued an Action Plan with the intention of advancing trans equality. You can find the document on the Home Office website.

Of course, like much of what governments do, this is largely words. There are very few firm commitments to legislation. The one notable distinction is a promise to amend the Criminal Justice Act to provide for a minimum of 30 years as the sentence for transphobic murders. Most of the rest of the commitments are to provide guidance, to engage in consultations, and so on.

On the one hand, actual government guidance on trans issues is a very good thing. In many cases discrimination arises as much from ignorance as anything else, and the mere fact that official government instructions now exist is bound to improve things. On the other hand, the document says precisely nothing about the primary problem: the media. I’m sure that someone at the Daily Malice is working on an article about how this is all “political correctness gone mad”, and encouraging citizens to ignore any directions that the government might issue.

Still, there is an opening, and the Action Plan includes a 3-month consultation period next year during which trans activists will be able to suggest ways of making the plan actually work.

Also, I’m pleased to see that Action Plan making specific mention of what they call “non-gendered” people, which shows that the message about the diversity of the trans community is getting through.

MTS Ep. 4 – It’s a Process, not an Event

The final episode of My Transsexual Summer aired last night, and I was able to get to watch it despite being on the road. Public reaction is still very heartwarming, though there were a few people on the hashtag last night who had clearly come spoiling for a fight. The usual rules apply, don’t feed the trolls.

Something that people may not be getting from the programmes, however, is that transition is very much a process, not an event. There are many ways in which that is evident, but an obvious one is appearance. Some of the comments I was seeing were along the lines of how, for example, Lewis and Donna look very convincing, but Sarah and Karen don’t, and therefore never will do. Partly that’s age, of course, but it ignores the very real changes that happen during transition, some of which take many years to unfold. You can get a glimpse of that by seeing the changes in Sarah from episode #1’s “bad tranny” to the much more elegant and self-assured person in episode #4. Some of that will have been a result of help and advice from her new friends (remember, many trans women have to learn make-up, fashion and so on by themselves – they don’t get to learn from mothers, sisters and school friends). Much of it is simply the self-confidence she’s gained from finally being happy about herself. But in the years to come hormones will make a big difference. Your appearance really does change.

By the way, one of the really cruel things about the way trans people are currently treated is that some medical people required them to live full time in their preferred gender for a couple of years before they will allow them hormones. That makes the process so much more difficult. And I see that Sarah has started a donations page to help her afford treatment. You can find it here.

Transition is also a process from the social acclimatization. Karen was getting a bit of flak last night for wanting to get a job as a secretary, having had very “male” jobs beforehand. I’m sure that Julie Bindel will have a field day over it when she finally gets to write about the series, and she’ll claim that all trans women are like that. Well of course some women never become feminists either, but many do, and that tends to be a result of experiencing life as a woman in a male-dominated world. It takes time for some trans women to process that experience, but process it most of us do. I’m sorry if this bursts your little prejudices, Julie, but actually there are very few things more likely to convince one of the necessity of feminism than the loss of privilege that happens when you transition from male to female.

Of course a common feminist idea is that women should try to break into male-dominated environments, and the fact that Karen wants to move away from that into a more female-dominated environment looks like letting the side down. But women who do work amongst men know that it can be rough. What they don’t necessarily know is what utter shits some men can be about women when they think that no women are around. Karen will have heard stuff that most women don’t, and I don’t blame her for wanting to get away from it for a while.

The process also affects family as well. It was lovely to see Lewis finally establishing a close relationship with his dad last night. Transition can be harder on families than anyone else. There are many reasons for that, but one is that they care about you and don’t want to see you hurt. Sometimes you need to prove that you can make a success of your new life, rather than end up selling your body for drugs on street corners, which is the life that tabloid newspapers want us to believe all trans people lead.

Anyway, that’s a wrap on the series for now. I rather hope that C4 decides to re-visit the cast in a year or so, because life isn’t just about transition, it is mainly about what happens afterwards. I think it will help a lot to show the audience how our seven new celebrities get on with their lives. It will make a big difference to have TV showing trans people doing something other than transitioning.

Oh, and did you see how steampunk Fox looked last night? One of us? I think so.

MTS Fundraiser Updates

I suspect I will miss Episode 4 of My Transsexual Summer as I’ll be in London tomorrow night, but I’ll have it on record to watch when I get home. Meanwhile, if any of you were planning to donate to Lewis’s chest surgery appeal, that’s now open again. Also Max has launched a fundraiser to help him with the cost of his rabbi training. So all three fundraisers are:

Er, ladies?

And for those of you who were wondering, that petition asking the UK media to treat trans people with respect, on just one day a year, currently stands at 216 signatures. *sigh*

The Comedy Business

Over the past week I have been having an interesting email conversation with Bethany Black. Regular readers will know that I have been concerned about how some comedians appear to target trans people, and the effect that this can have on how trans folks are perceived by the general public. Beth is a professional comedian, and an out trans woman. She regularly performs as a stand-up comic. I think that she is incredibly brave. I’m also very grateful to her for her insights, as I think that the trans community can learn from them, and thereby be more effective in challenging transphobia in the media. Here’s a summary of what I have learned.

The first thing that we all need to be aware of is that comedy in which men dress as women, or women dress as men, has been going on for centuries. This doesn’t have anything to do with trans people. What’s often happening here is that people are mocking extremes of gendered performance. There’s no way we are ever going to be able to challenge that, and indeed I don’t see why we should try. I have seen some of the responses that the BBC makes to complaints about apparently transphobic humor, and they always use the long history of cross-dressing jokes as an excuse. In order to be able to complain effectively, we have to be able to separate and identify actual transphobic humor, as distinct from jokes about gendered performance.

Beth also explained the concept of “status” in comedy. This is how comedians understand power relationships in their work. So, for example, a responsible comedian won’t make fun of vulnerable people. That’s not joking, that’s bullying, and audiences will tend not see it as funny. Of course it is not always that simple. It all depends on who you are supposed to laugh at. For example, Penelope Keith spent much of her career playing upper class twits, such as Margo in The Good Life. When Margo says something offensive, we are not supposed to laugh at her target, we are supposed to laugh at her for being such a bigot, and you’ll be able to tell that by the way that other characters react. So the simple fact of having a transphobic comment made in a sketch is not, in itself, always something we should complain about. It all depends on the context.

In order to complain effectively we need to establish that the joke in question is directly aimed at trans people, and that it is harmful rather than funny.

Of course all comedy is, to some extent, subjective. There’s no guarantee that a comedian will know much about trans people, so it may well be that what is required is education, not a complaint. All of this will need careful work, and given how clueless I have been I’m nervous of trying to make suggestions, but here’s a possible start.

Firstly we’d need to establish that the joke in question actually references trans people. If the joke simply involves a man dressed as a woman (or vice versa) we won’t get very far. Beyond that we should establish that the joke plays off a harmful stereotype about trans people, such as:

• That trans women are all ugly, and therefore laughable;
• That trans women are all sex workers;
• That trans women seek to deceive men;
• That trans women are “really” heterosexual men acting out a fetish.

Yes, I know those all refer to trans women, not trans men. I’ve yet to see a joke about a trans man, though I’m sure they exist.

Beth and I also talked about how the comedy business works. This is important to bear in mind when considering who is responsible for a transphobic joke. A stand-up comic will generally write her own material. However, as soon as you move to TV or radio shows things get very different. A panel show will have a team of writers providing witty remarks for the stars to perform. The stars may or may not have input to that. The more famous (and therefore busy) they are, the less likely that is. The production team may spend 3-4 hours recording material that they edit down to a half hour show. A sketch show is even more complicated. The crew will shoot a number of sketches, written by a team of people, which are then tested on trial audiences. Programs are put together based on which sketches get the best responses. Sometimes a sketch may go before several audiences before getting either the thumbs up or thumbs down.

There are two lessons that we can learn from this. The first is that the person who tells a joke on TV is by no means necessarily responsible for writing it. He may even hate the joke himself, but he has a job and if he wants to further his career he may have to film what he is given. Obviously there are ways in which performers, especially big name stars, can influence what jokes get used but, as I noted above, if they are don’t have a good understanding of what might be offensive then they may not know to object.

The other lesson is that the comedians themselves are probably the wrong people to target. Script writing teams are difficult to identify. It may well be that the best way forward is for people like TransMediaWatch to work with senior management, and with the producers of comedy shows, to develop guidelines that enable production teams to identify potentially offensive jokes before they even get filmed.

I still think that comedy is hugely important, because most people aren’t very witty. If they want to bully someone, they will tend to recycle jokes they have seen on TV. But there is little that an individual comedian can do to change social attitudes. And individuals will only so their bit to help if we talk to them and get them onside.

MTS Ep. 3 – Funding Surgery

The key issue arising from episode 3 of My Transsexual Summer is that of funding for surgery. Lewis and Fox both need “top surgery” (breast removal) if they are to be able to live without painful bindings and baggy t-shirts to disguise their shape. Lewis applied to the NHS for funding and was turned down.

Before getting into the issues here I’d like to point out that both lads have set up online appeals for help. If you have enjoyed the programmes (bearing in mind than none of the MT7 were paid for their involvement) you might consider donating. (And of course you might anyway, non-UK friends.) Lewis’s appeal is currently frozen for bureaucratic reasons — he needs to link his bank account to PayPal — but he’ll get that fixed soon, and Fox’s is still open. You can find them here:

The GoFundMe site accepts PayPal and debit/credit cards.

So, what are the issues here? Well first of all it is by no means certain that Lewis’s local NHS Trust was within its rights to refuse him funding. Other trans people have had the surgery funded. It is quite possible that if Lewis dug his heels in and got help then he’d be able to force the NHS to cough up. Certainly my activist friends have been telling him that’s what he should do. And from a political point of view such decisions need to be challenged, otherwise all funding for treatment of gender issues could be stopped.

From a personal point of view, however, individuals may choose to go private. One obvious reason for this is time. The NHS, as is often the case, has waiting lists. Going private means you can get your surgery much more quickly.

Also NHS funding for gender affirmation operations is highly contentious. One of the top tweets from last night was from someone who said he supported trans people, but did not think they should get NHS money. Whatever you think of that attitude, the fact that the tweet was popular shows that many people share that view. Members of the MT7 may take the view that they don’t want to risk the massive public support that they have by challenging the NHS.

For the record, most of my treatment, including my surgery, was paid for privately. When I was living in Australia I wasn’t eligible for public health care, and back when I transitioned the NHS was a lot less friendly to trans people than it is now. I was lucky enough to be given the money for the surgery by my mother, who in turn had got lucky during the financial services boom of the 90s.

For my own part I don’t want to make judgements about individuals. I can see the political arguments for and against challenging NHS decisions, but I think that individual trans people have enough to cope with. In particular the MT7 have given themselves over to the cause in a massive way. I’m happy to leave them to decide how they want to go forward from here.

In the meantime, I’m off to donate to Fox, and Lewis as soon as he can accept money again.

Why They Get Away With It

Yesterday in my TDOR post I mentioned this petition, which is intended to get the UK media to give a bit more respect to trans people, at least on one day a year. I know Sunday is a bad day to publicize anything online, and I know the petition probably won’t have much effect, even if thousands of people sign it. But right now the total number of signatures is 124. A substantial number of those are from outside of the UK, which is very nice to see, but will be discounted by the targets of the petition.

So on the basis of that evidence, less than 100 people in the UK care about how our media treats trans people. Doubtless it will grow a bit with time, but not substantially. And next time that TransMediaWatch complains about some repulsive nonsense in a newspaper, the Daily Malice folks (because it will almost certainly be them) will be able to turn round and say (in not quite these words), “Look, if it had been badgers or foxes there would be a million signatures on that petition. No one give a shit about you freaks, why should we?”

Hopefully it will get a boost during the next episode of My Transsexual Summer. That will actually be good evidence for the value of the show. But I’ll be out tomorrow night (AGM of the Bristol LGBT Forum) so someone else will need to boost it on Twitter.

Transgender Day of Remembrance #TDOR

TDOR 2011Today is the 13th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, they day on which we remember people who have been murdered simply for trying to be themselves. To mark the day I have written an article about the idea of living “in stealth” — why the idea started, why it gets trans people into trouble with the Left, why is causes divisions in the trans community, why it is still very necessary for some, and why I believe that it is fast becoming impossible. As the article is rather long, and contains mention of a particularly horrific murder, I have put it on a separate page. If you don’t read it, at least take away one piece of data: globally the average lifespan of a trans person is just 23 years.

While I am on the subject, I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks to all of the non-trans people who have supported the day by making their own posts, or re-tweeting those of trans people. Special thanks to Anne Lyle who changed her Twitter avatar for the day. If you do want to express support, one of the best things you can do is sign this petition, which calls for the UK media to respect TDOR.

American papers such as the Miami Herald and Seattle Post Intelligencier have run stories in support of the day. Even the US Department of Justice has got in on the act. This far in the UK, the only recognition outside of the LGBT community that I have seen has been in The Guardian. What is said about us in the media makes a huge difference to how we are treated by the general public. Please help by asking the UK media to give us a little respect, at least on this one day of the year.

MTS: Follow the Money

Fame is a funny thing. Almost everyone seems to want it, but many of those who get it find that it isn’t all it is cracked up to be. In particular, though we often talk about “fame and fortune”, those two by no means always go together.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the young people involved in My Transsexual Summer to see how the show is affecting them. Sarah has blogged about being “homeless and penniless”. Max has been tweeting about needing an apartment and money for rent.

“How the heck did that happen?”, you ask. They are on national TV, with an audience of over 8 million people. The media are after them for interviews. Surely they must be rolling in it?

Well no, as this rather testy blog post from Max explains, they didn’t get paid anything for making the programmes. Max notes, “I also lost my job, in part because of the exposure I received and the amount of time I was required to give to filming.” He and his colleagues were told that they could not be paid because that would affect the integrity of the show.

So now the MTS Seven are the best known trans people in the country. And guess what being openly trans means? As Drew found out in Episode 2, it means it is very difficult to get work.

The Seven are now clearly celebrities, of course. As I understand it, the way celebrities make money is to hire a publicist who will get them gigs opening supermarkets, appearing on chat shows and so on. But who is going to want a trans person to open their store?

Max has launched a petition to try to persuade Channel 4 and the production company, Twenty Twenty, to share some of their profits. He says that Twenty Twenty were paid £180,000 per episode. A lot of that will have gone on making the programmes, but presumably there was some profit. C4 should be doing very well out of the advertising revenue for a programme that has become a surprise hit. I’ve signed it, though I don’t know how much good that will do.

MTS Ep. 2 – The Trans Employment Issue

Last night saw the broadcast of episode 2 of My Transsexual Summer. The narration is still pretty ropey — as if someone at C4 is trying to be respectful while also catering to those viewers who have tuned in for a freak show — but the cast continue to endear themselves to the nation. I spotted one troll on Twitter this morning saying that they should all be shot, but the vast majority of the messages have been very supportive. That’s really positive.

The issue that caught most people’s imagination last night was the sequence in which Drew applied for a job at a bridal store and was turned down in a fairly insulting way. This led to a lot of discussion on Twitter about employment legislation and how easy it is for trans people to find jobs. That’s what I’m planning to address here.

There are two principal pieces of legislation of interest here, the Gender Recognition Act of 2004, and the Equality Act of 2010. The former deals specifically with trans people, and the latter brings together many different forms of anti-discrimination legislation under one umbrella.

The first thing to note is that these laws are very much mired in the view that the only trans people deserving of protection are “classic” transsexuals. The Equality Act reads as follows:

A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.

Drew is on hormones, so she’s probably protected here, but I can see it being argued that unless she’s on a specific course of treatment intended to lead to surgery then she’s not covered. Certainly someone who is simply living androgynously would not be.

There are also a bunch of specific exemptions to the legislation, primarily involving religious organizations and the armed forces. More relevant here, however, is that the bridal store is probably a very small business and if they have fewer than (I think) 5 employees then they are allowed to discriminate in various ways when hiring employees.

As a small business owner myself, I have a certain amount of sympathy here. If you are running a very small company there are all sorts of legal requirements that you don’t have the time or resources to follow. The government likes to encourage small businesses, and gives them exemptions from legislation to help them get off the ground and grow. On the other hand, there are basic issues of human decency to be considered here. I’ll get back to them later.

Before I do that, however, there is one final aspect of the “Equality” Act that deserves mention. The Gender Recognition Act basically stated that anyone who had gone through a full gender reassignment process was legal a member of their desired gender and should be treated as such. The “Equality” Act, however, has a section on “Occupational Requirements”. What it is trying to do here is define jobs in which it is a requirement for the applicant to be either a man or a woman. In doing so it effectively contradicts the GRA and states that trans people, even after surgery, are not legally members of their preferred gender.

This language was, I believe, introduced to allow the military and the church to continue to use gender-based requirements to exclude trans people, but the door is also left open for other employers to argue that gender is an occupational requirement. Even worse, as Zoe Imogen notes here, the guidelines about the Act issued by the Equality & Human Rights Commission appear to add a requirement that the victim must be “visually and for all practical purposes indistinguishable from a non-transseuxal person of that gender” in order to be fully protected.

Which brings us back to bridal stores. Is it an occupational requirement that staff involved in things like fitting women for their bridal dresses be women, and by “women” does that mean someone assigned to be female at birth, or does it also include trans women? As no one has yet brought a test case, no one actually knows. And if such a ruling was made against a trans person it would certainly be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights. But the fact remains that the UK government has gone back on the idea that trans people can legally change gender in all respects. Although the Act was passed by the current government, it was drawn up by the previous Labour administration, so this is cross-party back-stabbing we are talking about here.

The store owners, of course, clearly believed that it was inappropriate for brides to be served by someone who, as every tabloid journalist would have it, is “really a man”. Their “what would the customers think?” excuse was one that has been used to justify discrimination down the centuries. One tweeter noted that it was equivalent to saying, “I’m not racist, but my customers might be”. Farah noted that it was just an excuse, and suggested that the store owners should “own their bigotry”. Both of those responses were granted “top tweet” status, which I think means that they were re-tweeted lots.

One of the owners singled out Drew’s fairly prominent Adam’s Apple as an obvious giveaway, and said that could never be altered. Well of course it can. There are surgeries for that. And here I want to note that the frequent tabloid articles raging about how the “cosmetic” nature of trans surgery means that it should not be paid for on the NHS. Now sure Adam’s Apple reduction sounds cosmetic, but here’s Drew being told that she can’t have a job because of something that a relatively easy operation could fix. That’s no longer just cosmetic then, is it?

It is easy to be angry at the store owners here, and I hear that they had to shut down their Twitter and Facebook accounts within hours of the broadcast being shown because of the volume of negative attention they were getting. But they are also right, in that their customers are transphobic. Or at least a substantial proportion of them are, because despite the legislation transphobia is very much socially accepted in the UK. You can argue that they lacked courage and moral decency, but there is no doubt in my mind that if they had given Drew a job then sooner or later they would have to deal with some idiot who raised a stink about being served by “a man”. The customer’s case would be taken up by the Daily Malice. They’d lose business over it.

So by all means be angry with the store owners for their cowardice, both in being unwilling to stand up to bigoted customers, and being unwilling to confess to their own prejudices. But remember also that they exist in a social climate created by tabloid newspapers, television “comedians” (update – see below), radio shock jocks and the like, all of whom bombard them with the message that trans people are freaks who should be despised and hated. Those are the people we should really be going after.

I’d also like to question the whole set-up of that job interview. It is easy for us to forget, when watching television, that the camera is there, because that’s exactly what drama programme makers want us to do. When watching documentaries, however, we should always remember that they are being filmed. There appeared to be at least two camera involved in that shoot. They could have been hidden, but that would have involved manufacturing an excuse for two other people to present in the interview, or to have had them planted secretly. So presumably the store owners knew that something was up. They may even have known in advance that Drew was trans, and taking part in a documentary about trans people. And if they didn’t they may well feel that they were set up.

I have no doubt that Drew would be absolutely brilliant working in a bridal store. But I do have to question why, in following her search for work, the programme zeroed in unerringly on one of the few jobs where a) she probably could be legally discriminated against, and b) where a large number of people were likely to think that the store owners had a point. It strikes me as a piece of artificially manufactured drama, and that causes me to have less faith in anything else I see on the show.

The final thing that I want to discuss is the reality of trans employment issues. Laws are all very well, but without the support of the general public they can’t work in practice. So while it might be illegal to discriminate openly, it is very easy to do so quietly and subtly in such a way that the victim doesn’t stand a chance in court.

I have a certain amount of experience of this. I have been kicked out of two very well paid jobs, once in Australia, where I don’t think I had legal protection, and once in California, where I did. In both cases what the employers did was carefully designed to make it look like my being trans was not the issue, but it very clearly was. In Australia I tried to transition on the job. The Aussie staff were largely very supportive, but head office in the UK insisted that they get rid of me. The Californian company hired me knowing that I was trans, but when they were bought up by a larger, East Coast organization it quickly became clear that HR was looking for an excuse to get rid of me. I quit when I realized that they were encouraging other staff to make complaints about me so they would have a case if I tried to argue I was being discriminated against.

These days I don’t bother applying for jobs. I’m stuck in the UK, and the number of people involved in my chosen career is sufficiently small that word would quickly get round if I did so. It is actually a criminal offence for one employer to warn another off an applicant by revealing that the person in question is trans, but to prove such a case you would need written evidence. In any case, I’ve been very open here about my background, so I have no protection there.

In addition the various disruptions to my career that have been caused by my transition mean that I have never managed to rise to the level of management that would be expected of someone of my age. Even if an employer didn’t know that I was trans, I’d be viewed as having been a failure at work because of my lack of seniority. And age discrimination is rife. Employers know that older people are not prepared to work the 10-hour-day, 7-day-week schedule that younger people put themselves through in search of advancement in the consultancy business.

As it happens, I can keep myself going with self-employment. I had a meeting with my bank manager yesterday and she’s still happy with me, despite the ongoing losses at Wizard’s Tower. But it has been a rough road. There have been years when my net income has been well under £5k, I’m in rented accommodation, and I have very little in the way of pension provision. I would not have survived this long had it not been for the love and support of my mother and Kevin. Sooner or later I know that my luck will run out.

On the other hand, I have been lucky enough to live in a time when great strides have been made in the area of human rights. This morning I listened to a radio interview with Jocelyn Bell (the lady astronomer who discovered pulsars). What she had to go through, starting a science career back when I was a kid, was in many ways as bad as what trans people have to go through these days. The situation for women in science is now a lot better, though by no means perfect. I very much hope that the situation for young trans people like those on My Transsexual Summer will be better than it was for me, and I think that their being so open about themselves on national television will do a lot to bring that about.

Update: I’ve been hauled up on Twitter by trans comedian, Bethany Black, who objected to my putting the word comedians in inverted commas. Beth is one of a small number of trans people making a name for themselves on the stand-up comedy circuit. She’s very good. I’m sure the others are too. They’d have to be. Sadly a lot of the people who get on national TV still appear to be the sort of people who like to go for easy laughs by pillorying the vulnerable. There are exceptions, of course (hello again Tim Minchin), but it is a serious issue for trans people because it establishes an environment in which we are seen as people to be laughed at. I certainly wasn’t intending to tar all comedians, and my apologies to Beth and others if it seemed so.

Beth also notes that if people laugh at a joke then it is indeed comedy, and she has a point. I guess I’d counter that some things appear funny only because there is a social climate that deems them funny. Years ago you could raise a laugh from mocking people because of the color of their skin. Ricky Gervais still thinks it is funny to mock Downs Syndrome people. I’d like to see us get to a point when the mere fact that someone is not wearing “gender appropriate” clothes is not seen as funny.

Update 2: Beth tells me that Ricky Gervais has apologized for the recent upset. Good to know. More progress.

Bindel – The Musical

Over on Twitter various trans folks have been suggesting the sort of documentary they might make, had they been in charge of My Transsexual Summer. The hashtag is is #diytranssummer if you want to check it out.

For context, I probably need to remind you that prominent lesbian journalist and one of Britain’s foremost trans-haters, Julie Bindel, once suggested that a convention of trans people would look like the set of Grease. It you remember what I said on Wednesday about people in transition having a tendency to overdo the gender performance you’ll know where she got the idea from. Trans people go through a second puberty with their hormone treatment, but to some extent they go through a second adolescence as well. Suggesting that we are always like that all the time, however, is a silly stereotype for which Bindel has been repeatedly berated.

Anyway, I suggested that my #diytranssummer would include the trans people staging a performance of Grease with all of the cast dressed like Julie Bindel. A few people kindly found this amusing. Unfortunately, having thoroughly earwormed myself, I had to go on and produce something. It turned out slightly different.

Bindel – The Musical (a trans love story)

The action takes place at a high school where the kids are divided into two gangs: the Pink Boys, who are all gay, and the L-Birds, who are all lesbians. There’s a strict dress code. The Pink Boys are all very metrosexual, and the L-Birds adopt k.d. lang chic.

At the start of a new term, Danny Zuko confesses to his Pink Boy friends that over the summer vacation he met a wonderful butch girl, and is worried that he might be straight and trans. Unbeknownst to Danny, Sandy Olsson has just enrolled in the school.

The bad kids in the class, Ben and Julie, bully Danny and Sandy mercilessly, accusing them of being traitors, perverts and dupes of the patriarchy. Much misunderstanding and misadventure ensues. However, the rest of the kids think it would be cool to introduce a bit more gender diversity into the class. They encourage Danny and Sandy to cross-dress.

Enter Danielle and Alexander. They look like fairly conservative teenagers (think Sandy and Danny at the start of Grease), but the Pink Boys have gone for the full Priscilla drag queen look, while the L-Birds are all Dykes on Bikes. Danielle is rather embarrassed and wracked with guilt, but with encouragement from her friends she soon relaxes into her new identity. Here’s the big song and dance number.

Danielle:
I got chills, they’re multiplyin’, and I’m losin’ control
Cause the gender I’m displayin’, it is so dismayin’

Danielle:
I better shape up, and look like a man,
it’s the normal thing to do
I better shape up, I should be a man,
to my chromosomes be true
It’s the right, it’s the only thing to do

Chorus:
You’re the gender you want
(you’re the gender you want), ooh ooh ooh, honey
The gender you want (you are the way we want),
ooh ooh ooh, honey
The gender you want (you are the way we want),
ooh ooh ooh, honey
It’s what you need (how you should be),
oh yes indeed (yes indeed)

Alexander:
Give your life new direction,
You’ll be happy this way
I can give you affection, what d’ya say?

Danielle:
I better shape up,
cause I want a man

Alexander:
I’ll be the man,
Who can keep you satisfied

Danielle:
I better shape up, I can be your girl

Alexander:
You be fine, and I want you by my side
Are you sure?

Danielle:
Yes, my self I cannot hide

[repeat chorus]

At the end of the song Ben and Julie confess that they have been swept away by the romance of it all and will be becoming androgynous so that they can have a relationship without sacrificing their principles. Everyone lives queerly ever after.

The End.

Gender Agenda?

As I rather expected, the UK trans community is arguing furiously over aspects of the My Transsexual Summer documentary. I spotted Roz using the hashtag #halffull today and smiled ruefully. I hope people listened.

On the other hand, there does seem to be a story of some sort emerging. As you may recall from my post yesterday, one of the concerns expressed was the apparent lack of representation of people who don’t identify as either male or female. There was a brief hint from Donna, but nothing more to suggest that any of the other participants saw themselves as anything other than “classic” transsexuals — that is assigned one gender at birth, but preferring the other. It now appears that this is very much not the case. In this blog post Max bemoans the fact that almost everything the group said that suggested they were not all signed up to the gender binary got edited out. On Twitter he added “every interview where i talked about gender binary has been edited out”.

You might think, given that I have a boyfriend and am about as girly as it gets in many respects, that this wouldn’t matter much to me. But if you are going to make a TV show about multiple trans people it really would help to cover the whole range of trans experiences, not try to cover some of it up. Also, it is attachment to notions of gender essentialism that lies behind most of the hatred and fear of trans people by the rest of society. Only by getting away from the idea that everyone must be either male or female, and never the twain shall meet, will we ever get to the point where society can accept the wide diversity represented by trans and intersex people.

The Kids Are Alright

Last night the UK’s Channel 4 aired the first episode of a new reality TV series, My Transsexual Summer, following the lives of seven (mostly) young trans people. The series is unusual, firstly because of the number of trans people involved, and secondly because it was produced with input from TransMediaWatch, a UK pressure group that aims to improve the image of trans people in the media. As this is a subject about which I know somewhat more than the average person, I thought it might be worth elucidating some of the issues involved.

One of the interesting things about programmes like this is that expectations vary wildly. Those on the front lines of trans activism are liable to be outraged no matter what is said and done, because they hold everyone to extremely high standards. Others who are long-time post transition are liable to be cringing in embarrassment and worrying what this new round of the freak show will mean for them. TV critics will doubtless be asking whether the freaks are freakish enough for people to want to keep watching. There’s probably no such thing as a middle ground, but I’ll try to cover all the bases.

Let’s start off with the things I have seen friends of mine complain about. The most obvious trigger point is the frequent use of the word “tranny” by the participants to describe themselves. This is problematic, because people disagree as to whether it is a term of abuse or not. For many people, the word has meaning only as an insult shouted at them in the street, or used by “comedians” on TV. For others it is a vaguely affectionate term, and yet others regard it as a term of abuse that it is OK to reclaim for use within the community, but not to be used by others. The latter is apparently the official line of TransMediaWatch, but clearly the programme participants didn’t get the memo.

Another issue that is being raised by trans activists online is the breadth of coverage. With no less than seven people, from a variety of backgrounds and in different stages of transition, you might think that the whole spectrum of trans experiences is represented. The show seems to be presenting itself in that way. But at least 6 of the 7 appear to be what one might call classic transsexuals seeking full gender transition. Those whose sense of gender identity is less certain or fluid are feeling somewhat invisible.

Finally there is the question of clichés. In her preview of the show for The Guardian Paris Lees, the TransMediaWatch staffer who acted as a consultant on the show, mentions the Trans Documentary Drinking Game. If those of us watching the show had indeed taken a drink every time we saw a cliché we would have been rat-arsed after the title sequences.

Having said all that, I thought the show was remarkably good — much better than I expected, and that was down largely to the participants, and how they were able to speak for themselves rather than simply be subjects of voyeurism.

Let’s go back for a minute to the question of the selection of participants. I have no idea what the producers had in mind when they put the show together. They might have had only seven volunteers. They appear to have tried to get people who are going through different stages of transition. Some, I suspect, will assume that the programme tried to find people who obviously looked trans, though that’s by no means the case for all of them. What I am hoping they did, however, and appear to have succeeded at, is to pick people who have happy, outgoing personalities, get on well with others, and are generally fun to watch.

Looking at the comments on Twitter after the show, I was quite encouraged. There was the usual sniping from some. One bloke said he wanted to murder all of the participants (and if challenged doubtless said it was “only a joke”). Someone else raged, “God will judge them!” But by and large the watching public seemed charmed and touched by the people that they had seen and the stories that were told.

One area that I think the show may have missed out on is including someone who is many years post-transition. I know that goes against the set-up, which is to have a group of people all going through the same difficult life changes, but it may have added some perspective. Transition is a difficult process, and there’s a terrible tendency to over-do the gender performance in order to try to fit in. By concentrating on people in transition, TV programmes can give a rather unbalanced view of what the typical trans person is like.

The one cliché that the show has managed to avoid thus far is that of the “tragic transsexual”. Even Sarah, who has run away from home at the age of 28 in order to start transition, and is worried sick about what her family will say when they find out, manages to find her moments of hope and optimism. Yes, all of these people face terrible struggles in their lives, but they are also getting to be themselves. The standard narrative for a trans documentary, at least those that I have seen, is that the subject is deeply unhappy, but after much difficulty finally manages to start transition; the programme closes with the ominous suggestion that this will only lead to more unhappiness as the subject will never be accepted as the person they believe themselves to be. There wasn’t any of that last night. Despite all of their problems, these people were fun.

It is odd what some people think of themselves, of course. Drew apparently spends 2.5 hours doing her make-up each morning. I can’t imagine ever doing that. Fox spent much of the programme worrying that he doesn’t look masculine enough compared to Max and Lewis. Well maybe he’s not a hairy hunk, but he’d fit right in to any boy band. I bet there are teenage girls with posters of him on their walls already. If I wasn’t (ahem) many years older than him, I might have one too. But trans people obsess about their appearance like no one else. It comes with the territory.

Someone on Twitter mentioned that the programme passed the trans Bechdel Test. I’m not sure that it did, because I can’t remember any conversations which were not about being trans. But it may get there in later episodes.

One worry that I had was that the programme makers, in search of added drama, would encourage the participants to argue amongst themselves and compete to see who passed best. Listening to Max Zachs being interviewed on Radio 4 this morning I was pleased to discover that this didn’t happen, though I have no doubt that if this series is a success then someone will try to take the format down market (and some trans people will be desperate enough for money and fame to participate).

From my point of view, the ultimate test of such a programme is whether it is likely to improve the lot of trans people amongst the general public. As I said, the reaction on Twitter was, on the whole, very encouraging. There’s something inspiring about people being positive and happy in the face of great adversity. The reaction in the mainstream media has been less encouraging. The Guardian’s review of the programme starts by deliberately mis-gendering the participants, something that the programme never did, thereby showing that Lucy Mangan’s natural prejudices hadn’t been shaken one jot by watching it. If that’s what happens in The Guardian, I shudder to think what other newspapers have done.

Channel 4 are not exactly covering themselves in glory either. The programme makers may have listened to TransMediaWatch, but those responsible for promoting the show clearly haven’t. The adverts in the papers yesterday showed a picture of Drew with the caption “Ex Man”. On the radio today Max said he didn’t regard what surgery he had undergone to be a matter for public discussion, but the C4 website page about the programme leads with details of exactly what he has had done. It is still very much the case that many people in the media see trans people solely as freaks to be exploited.

Ultimately, however, these things are all incremental. Social change doesn’t happen overnight, it is a generational process, but it does get there. Back when I transitioned, which is not that long ago, such a programme would have been unthinkable. I’d like to finish by noting another article in yesterday’s Guardian. In it, a senior UK judge, Jonathan Sumption QC, complains that judges in the UK are becoming too politicized in this country, thanks to the influence of the European Court of Human Rights. One of the influences that court has had on UK law is to force our government, much against their will, to consider the human rights of trans people.

While I was transitioning, I had occasion to interact with the British legal system. The advice my lawyer gave me was as follows: “don’t contest anything, there’s no justice for people like you in British courts, and if you try to stand up for yourself the judge will throw the book at you.” Thanks to the European Court of Human Rights, that’s no longer the case. If that means that our courts are “too politicised”, well I’m all in favor of it. But courts by themselves don’t change social attitudes. The media has a huge role to play, and on the basis of the first episode My Transsexual Summer has added one more small nail to the coffin of transphobic bigotry. Progress.

Why Comedy Matters

Regular readers will know that I have a very short fuse when it comes to “comedians”. Many of them, particularly in the UK, are a waste of space as far as I’m concerned. I thought it might be useful if I explained why.

We hear a lot these days about the need to stop the bullying of LGBT teens. This story from Canada last week is merely the latest in a long string of preventable teen suicides. But think back, for a moment, to your own schooldays. Many of you, I am sure, will have been bullied to some extent, and you’ll know that it’s not a simple phenomenon.

The sort of bullying that is easy to combat is the sort that arises from the class thugs. If one kid beats up another the teachers can deal with it, because it is obviously wrong. And thugs, generally, are not too smart. The type of bully that is really dangerous is the class comedian. He’s the one who eggs everyone else on by making snide remarks about you, the one who encourages the dumb kids to acts of violence, and then sits back and laughs as you take a beating and they get into trouble. If his actions are ever challenged, all he has to do is say that what he said was “just a joke”. If he’s smart, and he generally is, he’ll get away with it. If he’s good enough he’ll get some of the teachers joining in with the mockery.

Now roll that forward to the adult world. We can have reasonable hope that the thugs who brutally murdered Stuart Walker at the weekend will be brought to justice. But events like that don’t happen in a vacuum. If, as is strongly suspected, this was a homophobic hate crime, the people who did it will have been influenced by things they have read and heard. Some of that, of course, will have come from the pages of the Daily Malice and other such publications, which are pretty much immune to challenge because media regulation in the UK is such a joke. But they will probably also have been influenced by comedians.

As with school bullies, adult comedians know that one of the easiest ways to get a laugh is to pick on someone who is different in some way. There are, of course, right wing comedians who do this all the time, but a disturbing number of left wing comedians are not immune to temptation where they think they can get away with it, and where the target is a group they don’t care about.

So last week we had the undignified spectacle of Ricky Gervais encouraging his Twitter followers to make fun of Downs Syndrome people. The most common target, however, is trans people. Stephen Fry and Charlton Brooker have been spotted having a go, and I’m pretty sure there are others. When called on it, these people generally ignore the criticism or, making full use of their natural talent, laugh it off. After all, they have impeccable left wing credentials, how can they possibly be in the wrong?

When the right wing comedians and shock jocks have a go at trans people, they are heard by the thugs, but when left wing comedians do so they also are heard by very different people — the sort of people who might end up running complaints departments at TV stations and newspapers.

There are, of course, fine people like GLAAD and TransMediaWatch who spend a lot of time trying to educate the media about trans issues. If they see trans people being mocked they will put in a complaint. The defense that comes back is that the item being complained about was simply “reflecting society”. That’s a code term for, “look, if these popular left-wing comedians think that you are laughable then the painful truth is that you are laughable, get over it.”

And so the bullying goes on.

We see this all over the place, of course. The young man who can’t possibly be sexist because he’s a righteous anarchist; the woman who can’t be racist because she’s a righteous feminist; and so on. There’s a terrible temptation to assume that your own cause trumps everyone else’s. The reason I like a lot of what happens in feminism these days is that it reaches far beyond gender issues. All for one, and one for all, as I have been reminded to say by the arrival of what looks to be a very bizarre movie.

We need comedians to be on board with this, because they are a touchstone of what is deemed socially acceptable, and what can be legitimately despised. A minority that it is OK to make jokes about is a minority that it is OK to hate, fear and discriminate against.

I was reminded of this by a minor Twitter storm last night in which Tim Minchin was called on his attitude to trans people (as I recall by top-rated trans pink-lister, Sarah Brown). Initially Tim got very defensive, going through the usual “look at my credentials” routine. He got yelled at a bit, including by me.

Thankfully, when I woke up this morning, I found that Tim was listening a lot and that people far more shouty than I am were praising him for it. As one of my friends noted, it was an internet argument that ended up with everyone happy. So many thanks to Tim for being prepared to listen, and my apologies for getting shouty.

If only more people could be like that.

The Pink List

Every year The Independent on Sunday produces a “Pink List” of the most prominent LGBT people in the UK. Last year we kicked up a little bit of a fuss as only one T person featured on the list. The list got criticized for other reasons too, and the paper responded by soliciting nominations from the public, and appointing trans activist Paris Lees to the judging panel. This year, I am pleased to say, representation is much better.

Amongst the trans people on this year’s list are the fabulous Roz Kaveney. Also Christine Burns and Bethany Black, whom I have had the honor of meeting.

Other people on the list that you may know include John Barrowman, Val McDermid, Stella Duffy and Russell (T) Davies. Some other people are so well known that they have been named National Treasures, including Stephen Fry, Graham Norton, Sandi Toksvig, Alan Bennett, Adele Anderson and Julian Clary. And there are lifetime achievement awards for Jeanette Winterson, George Michael, Sir Ian McKellen, Neil Tennant, Jan Morris and Elton John (amongst others).

The promising newcomers list includes Juliet Jacques and Laurie Penny, both of whom I have been privileged to meet. And with Paris on the jury was former Wales rugby star, Gareth Thomas.

The paper still has a long way to go. Their editorial today talked exclusively about LGB issues until the final paragraph, where T gets tacked on purely as it is part of the acronym. But there is progress, and for that we should be grateful.

That BBC Intersex Programme

Well, I watched it, and like most some things it had some good points and many bad ones. It turns out that the program was made in conjunction with the Oprah network, and if you want to see it you can do so here – no DRM, no region restrictions.

I’m seeing a lot of complaint online from intersex activists, and this focuses primarily on the pathologising of intersex conditions. Unsurprisingly there is continued outrage at the use of the term, “disorders of sexual development”, and I noted that Dr. Devore, the one intersex medical expert involved, carefully used the word “differences” instead of “disorders”. In addition the programme, with the usual emphasis on “balance”, gave plenty of time to doctors who believe that surgical intervention to “cure” intersex babies is necessary and right. Intersex activists prefer to call this practice “mutilation”. As it can not only be painful and terrifying for the young children involved, but deprive them of sexual sensation when they are adults, you can see why.

Of course you can see why it happens too. The social stigma that is attached to having a child who is not clearly male or female is intense. Frightened parents are told that their children will be mercilessly bullied at school unless “corrective” action is taken, and in part this is true, though the bullying may well happen anyway. Parents have no way of knowing whether their kids will be happy with the decision they take, no matter which way they go, and the temptation to take action to protect your child against an apparent threat is very strong.

One thing that surprised me was that there was very little mention of gender identity, and none of it by the medical people. Transsexuals often start expressing a gender identity around the age of 2 or 3. You don’t have to wait until the children become adults to know what gender they think they are. But of course social pressures demand that you decide on a gender for your child from the moment of birth. No one is allowed time to make up their mind. Thus intersex kids are often assigned a gender, and are surgically “corrected” to conform to that gender, only to be very unhappy with that assignment as they grow up.

A further complication is that intersex people who want this fixed later in life cannot do so in the UK without jumping through a bunch of potentially unwanted hoops. The Gender Recognition Act applies only to transsexuals. You can’t just say, “look, my gender was indeterminate at birth, I was assigned X and I’d rather have Y”. This in turn has knock-on effects with things like the right to marry.

One other thing that struck me from watching the programme was that of the hierarchy of conditions. At one point a parent (or possibly an actor playing a parent) commented that it would have been so much easier if her child had been diagnosed with cancer, because at least then she could talk about it and people would be sympathetic. Instead her child had a condition that she would have to lie about because it was so shameful. This is idiotic, but given our society’s obsession with the gender binary it is the way the world is.

Possibly programmes like this will help. Although aspects of it were annoying, some of the participants, particularly Dr. Devore, were very impressive and may have helped change some minds. I was also pleased with the variety of different intersex conditions shown — intersex people are by no means all the same. So plus one to Oprah and the BBC for making an attempt. Equally, of course, many people may have been convinced by the doctors saying that treatment is necessary, so minus one there. That’s what you get when you try for “balance”. And finally, one of the things that really stands in the way of acceptance for intersex and trans people is how they are portrayed, not in specialist programmes like this, but in the general media. While the BBC and others continue to regard merciless bullying of anyone who doesn’t fit social gender norms as a legitimate form of “comedy”, the problems that intersex kids face will never lessen. The ball’s in your court, BBC.