It is past time that I should have mentioned some new podcasts up at Christine Burns’ Just Plain Sense site. Christine tackles a range of equality and diversity issues, and her latest episode is an interview with Karen Machin, a disability rights campaigner. As Christine says, the idea that hate crimes are carried out against people because they are disabled or have a mental illness is particularly hard to understand, yet it is by no means uncommon. Listen here.

The other recent podcast is with trans writer and fanatical soccer fan, Juliet Jacques. If you have been following her blog in The Guardian, here is a chance to listen to her speak. She talks about the relationship between trans people and the media, and she’s very good.

There was a high profile court case in the UK this week. A gay couple has been turned away from a small hotel by the proprietors who, as hard line “Christians”, refused to have “immoral” goings on in their establishment.

The judges’ decision, as explained by The Guardian, is rather interesting. The hoteliers claimed that they were not biased against people for being gay, but rather were unwilling to have immoral activities in their hotel. To support their case they cites instances where they had turned away heterosexual couples who were unmarried.

However, the gay couple claimed that they were married. They had a proper civil partnership, blessed by the UK government. The hoteliers refused to recognize that as a legitimate marriage, and it was on this basis that the judges ruled that there was indeed discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. As far as the judges were concerned, there was no material difference between a heterosexual “marriage” and and a gay or lesbian “civil partnership”.

The implications of this for UK law, which currently holds that only heterosexuals can have a “marriage” and only gays and lesbians can have a “civil partnership” have not gone unnoticed. Hopefully sometime soon the government will put an end to this silly division.

You may be wondering what would have happened if one or both of the couple had been trans. Under the Gender Recognition Act trans people who have undergone full gender reassignment are legally members of their preferred gender. Consequently, if they are heterosexual in their preferred gender, they can contract a “marriage”. So I can marry a man, or have a civil partnership with a woman. However, under the recent Equality Act (authored by the previous Labour government and rubber stamped by the incoming LibCon coalition) it would have been perfectly legal for the hoteliers to have refused admission to any trans person, whether married, in a civil partnership or single. The “Equality” Act specifically exempts trans people (and only trans people) from its protections.

Everyone has been busily tweeting and blogging about the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but here’s another big win for you. Remember that story about the UN resolution against executing people because of their sexual orientation? Well, the vote happened, and we won, fairly decisively.

The original committee vote in November had only 70 countries in favor of explicitly defending people on the grounds of sexual orientation and 79 against. Yesterday’s vote in the General Assembly saw 93 countries in favor, and only 55 against. Thanks are due to South Africa and Colombia, whose decisions to join us will have influenced many smaller countries in their local regions. Thanks are due also to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Ambassador Susan Rice from the USA, and Secretary General Ban Ki Moon of the UN, for leading the charge on behalf of gay and lesbian people. Further details here.

I note also that, despite the demise of DADT, being found to be a trans person is still cause for discharge from the US military. Also, despite considerable lobbying by human rights groups, the UN refused to extend specific protection from execution to trans people. I have no intention of blaming this on the evils of foreigners, on the UN as an institution, or using it as an excuse for Islamophobia (I’m looking at you, Guardian). I know that my own government and other religions are equally culpable.

The news in from California last night is that Thomas Demartini, the DMV clerk accused of harassing Amber Yust, has resigned from his job. No disciplinary action has been taken against him, beyond his being given several weeks paid vacation at the expense of California taxpayers. However, now that they have managed to wash their hands of their troublesome employee, the DMV have finally admitted that his behavior was “unacceptable and wholly unauthorized”.

What exactly is going on here? I have seen it suggested (in comments here) that if the DMV had tried to take any action against Demartini he would have sued them for unfair dismissal and probably got his job back along with considerable damages. However, given what he did, this seems highly unlikely. If he had behaved the way he did against a member of almost any other minority group he would have been escorted from his desk faster than you could say “breach of confidentiality.”

What I suspect has happened is that the DMV is afraid it may lose the law suit that Amber is bringing against them, and is taking action to limit the damage. Allowing Demartini to resign means he gets away without any actual punishment, while at the same time the DMV can claim that they were going to punish him, but sadly he’s gone so there’s nothing they can do. It is a shocking display of contempt for the private citizens who entrust their personal data to DMV staff.

Well, one small sub-set of private citizens anyway. The ones who don’t actually class as human beings and can therefore be abused with impunity.

I understand that the law suit against the DMV will go ahead. I hope that the judge throws the book at them. However, given the state of the California budget, there may well be pressure to minimize any payout.

Remember that big blogosphere storm around the end of November about the UN supposedly voting to approve execution of people for being gay? There were a number of disappointing things about how that was reported, and one that I’ve only just found out is that it was only a committee vote. It doesn’t come into effect unless it is ratified by a vote of the General Assembly. That vote will happen on December 20th.

The UN Secretary-General and the US Ambassador to the UN are pushing hard to have the vote reversed, and to add gender identity as a specifically protected category, but they could do with some grass roots help. There’s not a lot most of us can do. Europe, North America, Australasia and a number of major countries such as Brazil, Argentina, India and Japan are all solidly in line. Russia and China are being awkward for political reasons, and there’s not a lot that can be done about countries with military dictatorships or hardline religious leaders. But there are a lot of small countries, and most of Africa, on the other side. So if you happen to have connections with the Caribbean, or somewhere in Africa, please look here for details of how to pressure your government.

For everyone else there is a petition to sign. (The actual voting form is suffering traffic overload right now, but will hopefully be back up later.)

So, less than 24 hours after being threatened with a law suit, the DMV has finally issued a public statement. They have apologized to Amber Yust, and now claim that the clerk who harassed her was put on “administrative leave” back in October. This raises a couple of interesting questions.

Firstly, why did it take the threat of a law suit for the DMV to try to reassure the public that they do actually care about keeping personal data confidential?

And secondly, as Amber’s lawyer has pointed out, the perp hasn’t actually been punished. In fact he’s been rewarded by being given a vacation on full pay until such time as the DMV’s management feels that the the fuss has died down and they can put him back to work. What sort of message does this send to other DMV employees?

Some of you will remember my post from late October about Amber Yust, a trans woman in San Francisco who was sent hate mail by a DMV employee after she had been into the city office to change her driver’s license. It has been 6 weeks now, and in that time the DMV has done absolutely nothing. They won’t talk to the media, they won’t talk to the Transgender Law Center, they haven’t even had the decency to apologize to Amber for what happened, presumably because they don’t want to admit any liability.

At this point Amber and the TLC have no choice but to initiate legal action, because really you cannot allow this sort of thing to go on.

In the intervening time other facts have come to light. Not only did the perp send Amber hate mail himself, he passed her address on to an extreme right wing religious group who also contacted her. And when I say “extreme right wing”, I’m talking people who split from the Catholic Church because the Pope was not conservative enough for them. (See this Chronicle article.)

Also it seems likely that the perp in question has previous. There was an earlier instance of a DMV clerk refusing to serve a trans woman. After that event the DMV got people in to provide “sensitivity training” for their staff (see MSNBC). But it looks like behind the scenes what they actually said to their staff was, “if you must be a bigot, don’t do it on the job, wait until you are out of the office so that we can deny responsibility.”

It is hard to see what the DMV’s problem is here. This is such an egregious breach of confidentiality that it would be hard to make it a religious persecution issue. The local media has been very supportive of Amber, and one of the most supportive reactions I got to my post about the case was from a Christian (thank you, Ben). They might have been concerned about political ramifications, given that elections were due in November, but now that California has returned Democrats for both Governor and Attorney General I can’t see that anyone’s job would be on the line for doing the decent thing. The only conclusion that I can come to is that the DMV’s management just doesn’t fucking care. They think that allowing wacko staff to persecute trans people is perfectly OK, because who gives a damn about that sort of person anyway?

And yes, this is in San Francisco.

So, legal stuff will happen. My best wishes go out to my pals Masen and Katrina at TLC who will have a difficult job ahead of them, and of course to Amber who is bravely putting herself in the firing line.

This is probably going to be expensive, and I’m guessing that the major LGBT communities in California have committed most of their funds to fighting Prop. 8, so TLC will probably need help. You can donate here. I have just done so.

I’ve been busy doing Salon Futura stuff today and haven’t had much time to blog, but here are a couple of interesting links that show how people subconsciously enforce social norms.

First up is a study by researchers at Yale that show that LGB teenagers are much more likely to be punished for their behavior than straight kids who indulge in similar activities. As far as I can see, the study did not try to measure whether the teachers, parents and police involved were consciously homophobic, but I’m guessing that many would deny it if asked.

A very similar phenomenon is at work in this study of people who work in jobs not seen as traditional for their gender. The researchers, again from Yale, found that women holding high status jobs (a police chief, a CEO of an engineering firm, a judge) were much more likely to be heavily criticized for mistakes than a man in a similar job making similar mistakes. It is possible that a similar effect applies to men holding jobs traditionally reserved for women, but that’s harder to measure given how few such high status women’s jobs exist. Again I think it is likely that if you asked the people complaining about the mistakes if they were sexist they would mostly say no, but they act as if they are.

So, all of you who had issues with the It Gets Better campaign (issues such as the ones that Hal Duncan addressed so brilliantly in his video on the subject), here’s what you were looking for. A group of kids from Seattle have given their take on things (and believe me they don’t want to wait for it to get better), and are working on changing things now.

Watch.

Reteaching Gender and Sexuality from Sid Jordan on Vimeo.

Earlier today I tweeted about a poll on Fox News that asked, “Would you be bothered by a transgendered person being in a public restroom with you?”. Neil Gaiman kindly re-tweeted it, as a result of which I think we handily crashed the poll and I got my handle RT’d all over the place.

Some people asked me questions about the poll, which I will try to address here.

The reason the poll exists is because of this story. Tyjanae Moore, a trans woman living in Houston, was arrested and jailed for using the ladies’ restroom because, in the opinion of the arresting officer, she was “really” a man. This is despite the city’s non-discrimination ordinance covering gender identity enacted earlier this year. The story was covered on the local Fox affiliate, hence the poll.

I’m not sure why the link to the poll was anonymized, but I’m guessing that it was done to enable trans people to vote without risking being tracked by people working for Fox. I got the story from a trans activist in London, and I suspect she got it from Monica Roberts, who is a native of Houston.

Some people also asked what the heck this is all about. For the benefit of those of you who don’t follow US news, the American right currently has its knickers well and truly in a twist over the “dangers” of trans people in bathrooms. Remember, as far as “Christian” fundamentalists are concerned, a trans woman is “really” a man, and a trans man is “really” a woman. So the Forces of Idiocy want to require people like this to use the men’s restroom:

Can you guess why fine, upstanding “Christian” men want the likes of Miss Addams (above) in their toilet? I can. And I don’t think it is anything to do with “protecting” women.

Of course is they are going to be consistent the same should apply the other way around. Are there hordes of concerned “Christians” demanding that people like this use the women’s toilet?

No, of course not. Funny how they have these double standards, isn’t it.

Update: Shortly after I went to bed I got a tweet telling me that the poll had closed. When Monica first tweeted about it Yes was at over 44%. When the poll closed it was down to 16%. Thank you, everyone!

I won’t be attending any memorial services this year. I have a busy day of meetings — the BristolCon committee in the afternoon, and an SFSFC Board Meeting in the evening. So in lieu of a memorial service, I’m doing a post.

First, the roll call. At the last count 179 trans people were murdered this year simply because they were different. Details here. The numbers appear to be going up, year-on-year, though that may simply be because the reporting is getting better.

Over at Just Plain Sense, Christine Burns has posted a very moving recording of a tribute to this year’s dead. Please give it a listen.

There are memorial services in many UK cities, though none near me. In London Roz Kaveney will be reading a poem. It is on her LiveJournal, but I don’t think she will mind me reproducing it here.

Death and Solidarity

So many dead. And how do we go on?
They shoot us, stab us and erase our name.
They beat us, bludgeon us, and try to blame
The victims. When their murders are all done

we are still here and watching. We’re a crowd
of angry mourners and we won’t forget.
They’ve killed so many innocents and yet
we won’t be silent and we won’t be cowed.

Just standing, naming, mourning is an act.
It’s not enough, but it says we are here
and going nowhere, and we will not fear
to live our lives. For centuries we’ve lacked

our voice, and were killed silently. That death
cries out now through us. Without pause for breath.

Roz Kaveney, November 2010

What with all of the suicide news, and a couple of high profile cases where schools have banned trans kids from homecoming king/queen contests, you could be forgiven for thinking that life in America’s schools was pretty grim for trans teenagers. But not everywhere. Step forward, Culver City High School, which has just voted Niko Walker as their homecoming king. Monica Roberts has the full story.

Slowly but surely, the world becomes a better place.

Have you ever written a recommendation letter for a female colleague? Could it be that you inadvertently ruined her chances of getting the job she was applying for?

Sadly, yes. A group of researchers at Rice did a study of recommendation letters in academia. What they found was that people writing such letters tended to conform to gender stereotypes. So women were typically described as “affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, nurturing, tactful and agreeable” whereas men were typically described as “confident, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, daring, outspoken and intellectual.” There are no prizes for guessing which descriptions were more likely to help the applicant get the job, even with all gender markers filed off the application.

Further details here.

The Bay Area Reporter has an update on the Amber Yust case that I reported last week. Basically the DMV position is that the case is “under investigation” and that no action will be taken until due process has been concluded. While I appreciate that these things have to be done properly, this is starting to sound suspiciously like the DMV is hoping the fuss will blow over and they can get away without doing anything that will draw fire from “Christian” fundamentalists.

As this all took place in San Francisco rather than across the bay, I’m afraid there is no chance that any law suit will come before Vicky Kolakowski.

And if a sports post doesn’t put people off, maybe a trans rights post will.

Some of you may have wondered, at times, why trans people are so paranoid about ID schemes, full body security scanners, and even answering census questions honestly. Here’s an example. Last week a trans woman from San Francisco went into her local Department of Motor Vehicles office to have changes made to her driving license so that it matched her new name and gender. This is all perfectly legal, and the process went through without a hitch. Until Monday, when she:

received a letter from the person who had processed her name change at the DMV. In the letter, which had been mailed to her at home, the DMV employee quoted from the Bible and stated that Amber had made a “very evil decision.” The strongly-worded letter told Amber that she was “an abomination” and said that homosexuals should be put to death.

Further details from Monica Roberts. My friends at the Transgender Law Center are doing what they can for Amber, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the DMV employee in question now has a very expensive lawyer and a bunch of well-financed “Christian” pressure groups lining up to provide protection. The local papers will doubtless be full of people whining about the need for “freedom of religion.” Yes, even in San Francisco.

Because, you know, what chance do trans people have when even Glee finds the word “transsexual” too disgusting to use on television? At Entertainment Weekly, Margaret Lyons is bemused.

Update: And I almost forgot to mention, when Apple’s famously censorious App store thinks demeaning trans people is perfectly OK.

And yes, it might only have been a letter, but the creep in question now knows where Amber lives. From yesterday’s L.A. Times:

Los Angeles police investigators are seeking five suspects in connection with an attack on a transgender woman in Hollywood that left the 25-year-old victim bloodied and battered with a broken jaw and cheek bone.

The victim had just left a bar near the intersection of La Brea and Melrose avenues in the wee hours of Oct. 1 when she was attacked by three women and two men.

According to witnesses, the attackers were beating and kicking the victim in the middle of the street, said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Mitzi Grasso. The victim was kicked in the face and was hit on the head with a bottle, leaving cuts on the victim’s neck.

For those of you not keeping score at home (for which I don’t blame you in the slightest), here’s the list of trans people known to have been murdered in 2010.