Today is the 11th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. A list of those who are known to have been murdered because of bigotry and fear during 2009 can be found here and a list of events marking the day worldwide is here.
I’m useless at writing about such things, but here’s Gwendolyn Ann Smith, who started the TDOR project, and here’s a very powerful video.
Why yes, I am desperately trying to catch up.
I’m working on my paper for ICFA next year and I have a question about terminology I’d like help with. As all knowledge is contained in the blogosphere I’m hoping that someone will have an answer for me.
The terms “sexual preference” and “sexual orientation” are generally understood to mean whether one is gay/lesbian, bi or straight. The object of one’s attraction can be assumed from one’s own sex.
However, in a trans context, particularly in a science-fictional trans context where sex changes are common, this gets more complicated. So I need a way of distinguishing the nature of one’s sexuality (i.e. is one G/L, B or straight) from the object of one’s attraction (i.e. is one attracted to men or women or both). “Bi”, I think, does duty is both cases. But if, say, a gay man becomes a lesbian woman, is that preserving sexual orientation or changing it? The person is still G/L, but the object of attraction has changed.
For the benefit of those thinking ahead, yes, I am trying to find words to explain the daftness of Steel Beach.
I should really be reading novels, but I have been distracted by the latest issue of the academic journal, Science Fiction Studies. It is a special issue on “Science Fiction and Sexuality”. Most of the material is fairly sense, but there’s also a symposium comprising a bunch of short essays (and in some cases rants) by well known writers and academics, including Nicola Griffith and Farah Mendlesohn. You can find that online here, together with the abstracts for the papers in this issue. Academics can be a dry lot at times, but they have wide-ranging interests. The paper titles include things like: “Technofetishism and the Uncanny Desires of A.S.F.R. (alt.sex.fetish.robots)” and “Kill the Bugger: Ender’s Game and the Question of Heteronormativity”.
I am mildly annoyed that if I had been able to attend ICFA last year my paper from there might have had a chance to be in this issue, but at least I should get a chance to present it next year.
Over the last couple of days various blogs I read have been commenting on the issue of violence against women. Here are David Moles and Kameron Hurley.
While I agree with Kameron that we women need to take responsibility for our own safety, and can’t expect someone else to “save” us from violent men, I’d be pretty damned annoyed if men continued to maintain that it wasn’t their problem. Thankfully, not all of them do.
My friend Christine Burns has made a couple of posts about the White Ribbon Campaign, an organization run by men and dedicated to opposing violence against women. There’s a brief video statement by the organization’s UK Director, Chris Green, here, and a longer audio interview with him here. More information is available on the White Ribbon UK web site.
The White Ribbon Campaign was founded in Canada and the Canadian web site is here. There are also organizations in several other countries, for example Australia and Finland. As far as I can see, there is not specific White Ribbon affiliate in the USA, though several similar organizations exists.
So come on boys, what are you waiting for? Take responsibility.
You what?
Well, November 20th will see the 11th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), dedicated to remembering those people who have been murdered in the past year simply because someone disapproved of their gender presentation. In view of this, some folks at Bekhsoos (described as “a queer arab magazine”) have started Operation: Sex change on Facebook.
The idea is very simple. To support the campaign, all you have to do is change your gender on Facebook. I’ve done it. It didn’t hurt. You don’t need to change your profile picture or anything if you don’t want to. (Indeed, it may freak people out more if you do not.) But hopefully other people will notice, and that will bring TDOR to the attention of more people. And just maybe we’ll have fewer people to remember next year.
There’s an article just gone up in The Guardian about the presence of anti-androgens and estrogen-like substances in common household goods. This being science journalism in a popular newspaper I’m a little skeptical, and I’ll try to find the EU report on which it is based. However, this paragraph did catch my eye:
Research has suggested that male foetuses around 8-12 weeks after conception can be effectively demasculinised by exposure to such chemicals.
Just in case anyone needs reminding, our understanding about how the physical and psychological aspects of gender develop is very poor, and if that process is being disrupted it becomes even more important that we move beyond the simplistic, and in many cases cruel, straitjacket of a binary gender system.
The latest issue of Crossed Genres went live this evening. It is an LGBTQ special. It includes an article by me and an interview with Kate Bornstein.
So this year we have had an LGBT panel at Worldcon and an LG panel at World Fantasy. In both cases the write-up of the panel was all about whether the subgroup in question is now fully accepted by society, with the underlying premise that the answer to that question was “yes”. In both cases the people on the panel answered the question with a resounding “NO”.
Yeah, sure, President Obama has just signed the Hate Crimes Act, and lifted the ban on HIV positive people entering the USA. But you know, if queer people were fully accepted by mainstream society they wouldn’t need hate crimes legislation, would they?
So do you think that maybe next year we could not have any more of those panels, and maybe talk about something else with LGBT themes instead?
It all comes down to tokenism in the end. Having a token gay character in a book might be progress from not having at characters at all, but having just one gay character who appears to stand for all gay people, and whose portrayal is heavy on the stereotypes, and whose function in the story is to highlight the problems of gay people in society, is still all about gay people being a problem. And so are panels like this.
Sadly they are still necessary, because one of the first comments from the audience was someone going on about how as a reader if he discovers that a character is gay he immediately wonders why the author has chosen to make that character gay. And that means that in his mind being gay is somehow exceptional, not “normal”. Being white and male heterosexual is “normal”. Anything else the author is expected to justify in some way. -sigh-
But we did have a good panel today. One comment of Malindo Lo’s that I tweeted got a lot of notice. She said she has got a lot of questions about how realistic it was to have a fantasy world in which there is no homophobia, because didn’t she know that in medieval times people were really homophobic. And she tends to answer those questions by pointing out that her book has fairies in it too. Is it really easier to believe in fairies than in a society that is free from homophobia? Apparently it is.
I also discovered the Doselle Young is a really awesome panelist, so if he’s coming to a convention you are running make sure that you use him.
And finally, to get back to the question of tokenism, I got in a comment about how a single L, G, B or T person tends to get seen as standing for the entire group, which makes writing that character quite difficult. I think it was Grá Linnaea who said, “You know, it is really odd for a gay character not to have any gay friends.”
When she is a female Intersex or Transsexual person and lives in Australia, apparently.
I got this story via Kate Bornstein on Twitter. It sounds too crazy to be true. (Kate had doubts at first as well.) But I have been checking it out and it looks real. Here’s the story.
A common issue for both some Intersex people and male-to-female Transsexuals is suppression of male hormones. For Intersex people who identify as female this can help avoid the masculinizing effects that their unusual biology forces upon them. So someone like Caster Semenya, who has grown up female and identifies as such, may take pills to stop the excess of male hormones in her body making her look too much like a bloke.
For male-to-female Transsexuals such therapies are very important in the crucial period between being accepted for treatment and surgery. Most countries require MtFs to live as women for a few years to show that they can cope in their new gender role before allowing them to undergo surgery. That task is much more difficult for them if their bodies are still pumping out male hormones unchecked. Just think facial hair. Most FtMs can stop taking these treatments after a few years, but some, either through choice or because of medical conditions, are unable to have surgery.
A commonly used drug for these purposes is Androcur (the trade name of cyproterone acetate). It is even, as this site notes, prescribed to people who are raised female with no obvious intersex condition but who develop a problem with facial hair.
But not in Australia. Because in Australia, under this regulation, you can only be prescribed Androcur if you have prostate cancer or if you are a male sex offender who is being treated to reduce your sex drive.
As a result, doctors treating Intersex people and MtF Transsexuals in Australia — in the absence of a cancer diagnosis — have to register them as “sexual deviants” who are receiving treatment for dangerous behavior. Understandably some people in Australia are not too happy about this.
As I said earlier, this is so bizarre than both Kate and I were initially skeptical. However, I have since found this report by the Australian Human Rights Commission which clearly states:
the health system is not inclusive of people who are sex and gender diverse. Several responses mentioned that in order to receive specific hormone treatment a person must be labeled a sexual deviant.
I’m currently trying to find out exactly what the consequences are of this labeling, and whether the patients are necessarily aware of being so labeled. The explanation that I currently have suggests that the records in question are kept by a body called the Therapeutic Goods Administration, and they may go no further than that, but on the other hand they could be searchable by potential employers. I’m also interested in when the regulations came into effect. The information I have so far suggests 1995 or 1996.
If anyone in Australia has more information on this I’d be delighted to hear from them.
Update: More information here from Caitlin Ate who is a prominent Australian blogger and therefore hopefully won’t get accused of being anti-Australian for discussing the issue.
Update 2: More information on this comes from Zoe Brain. Two rather bizarre pieces of information. Firstly people in Australia can apparently be prevented from seeing their own medical records on “privacy” grounds. And secondly the list of “male” sex offenders kept by the TGA is apparently so discredited that being on it is no barrier to getting security clearance, especially if you happen to be a woman. Isn’t bureaucracy wonderful?
While I was away at FantasyCon the UK newspapers were of of stories about trans people. Mainly this appears to have been sparked by a 12-year-old kid whose transition was announced publicly at her school. Naturally the kids told their parents and someone immediately phoned The Sun. Goodness only knows what the school thought it was doing. However, not all of the stories have been bad. The Independent has a nice feature on Kim Petras, who appears to be a remarkably talented young lady. The Herald has an interview with Richard O’Brien that is purportedly about his new musical but is mainly about his struggle with his own gender identity.
The top story, however, continues to be poor Caster Semenya. The results of her “gender test” have still not officially been announced, but the IAAF appears to have enough leaks to sink a battleship and salacious rumors continue to fly. It is beginning to look awfully like the South African athletics authorities knew about her condition from the start and put her in competition anyway because they were greedy for medals, while people within the IAAF have been trying to embarrass the South Africans with no thought for the poor girl whose life they are ruining.
Yesterday’s Independent had a fascinating article by another intersex woman which really brings home some the issues. If you have been raised a girl from birth, and are happy with your gender identity, it must be awful to discover that in fact you have no ovaries and can never have children. To have people saying that you are “really” a man, and in Semenya’s case to have people doing so in newspapers and TV reports all over the world, must be unbearable.
Sarah Graham’s article also lays bare the web of deceit that is often woven around intersex children. Meddling doctors often remove some organs to “normalize” their victim’s body. Parents are either not told, or are so embarrassed by their “freak” offspring that they go along with the cover-up, not telling the child until it is way too late for objections. Having an intersex (or trans) child is still viewed as a matter of shame for a family in our supposedly liberal and civilized culture. About the only thing we don’t do to intersex kids is practice “honor” killings. It is time we started treating them with a bit of respect.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been looking at participation in Wikipedia and, according to Mashable, has come up with some interesting results. Apparently only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women, and only 31% of Wikipedia users are women. This is perhaps because Wikipedia is a steaming heap of fetid dingo’s kidneys and most women have more sense that to have anything to do with it. Your mileage may vary. Your explanations welcome in comments. Go!
(This post especially for Lisa Gold).
Shortly after Worldcon, John C. Wright, a man whose bizarre ideas about sex and gender should come as no surprise to anyone, posted a deeply homophobic rant (since deleted) on his LiveJournal. This prompted a group of people to found The Outer Alliance. Those who have signed up (of which I am one) adhere to the following:
As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.
Today is the first ever Outer Alliance Pride Day. Members around the world are posting about queer issues. I have a number of posts I’d like to highlight.
I have finally completed the write-up of the Future of Gender panel that I moderated at Worldcon.
As part of that I had to write a brief Gender 101, which I have posted here.
Given that book reviewing is something I do, I have written a review of a book by a lesbian author which has a lesbian central character: The Red Tree, by CaitlÃn R. Kiernan.
And finally, as almost everyone else is posting fiction, I figured I had better point you at something. This is something I wrote last year: a short tale of gender confusion in ancient Greece. It isn’t very good, and I keep meaning to find the time to work on it, but it is all I’ve got.
A round up of all posts can be found here, but here are a few highlights I have seen so far today by friends of mine.
I’d also like to point you at this post about the LGBT issue of Crossed Genres, which I will have an article in once I get around to writing it.
And finally, mention of John Coulthart reminds me that the city of Manchester celebrated its Pride Weekend a few days ago. As part of the celebrations the local LGBT community put together a little video based, with kind permission, on Lily Allen’s magnificent anti-bigotry rant, “F**k You”. Listen and enjoy.
Update: added Nicola whose post doesn’t seem to have come through the OA email system.
Testosterone has been much in the news of late. Word has leaked out that Caster Semenya’s “gender test” showed her to have abnormally high levels of testosterone in her body. No one is accusing her of taking supplements. The assumption is that she was born with some sort of abnormality that caused this. I note that if she had been born abnormally tall, abnormally strong, abnormally graceful or with any of the other abnormalities that it takes to be a really world-class athlete, no one would have batted an eye. But because she was allegedly born with abnormally high testosterone she gets branded a cheat.
Testosterone was also featured in the financial press as a result of a study that suggests women who do well in banking are successful because they too have abnormally high levels testosterone. The Independent runs out all the usual dismissive stereotypes, but The Economist is a little more thoughtful. The fact that testosterone encourages risk taking is well known and has been a matter of concern recently given where risk taking by bankers has got us in recent months. Here’s a good overview of the issue.
Estrogen is also well known to have physical effects (for example encouraging breast growth) and is also believed to affect mood.
Why am I interested in this? Well, apart from the fact that testosterone can be pretty dangerous at times, I’m thinking about gendered behavior. Hard line feminists insist that gender is purely a learned behavior. And yet here we have pretty clear evidence that certain chemicals affect not only the physical appearance and abilities of humans, but also their behavior as well.
Nicola Griffith has posted details of an event for LGBT writers at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. It takes place at 7:30pm on Saturday November 21 and is supported by the Lambda Literary Foundation. More details from Nicola.
Back when I wrote about the gender balance in SF&F I pointed to a wealth of research showing that many men simply won’t read a book that they think is written by a woman. Often this isn’t a deliberate, conscious action: it is just something they are trained from birth to do by the cultural environment they live in.
Well, it isn’t just SF&F, by a long way. Today Kate Heartfield tweeted about this research which purports to show that male journalists on Twitter have 3 times as many followers as female journalists (the methodology looks a little shoddy, but they may be right anyway).
What got me blogging, however, was this post from Canada about a study that shows that women lawyers with androgynous or male-sounding names do better in their careers that women with obviously female names.
Subconscious gender discrimination runs very, very deep.
I’m a little late on this, but I wanted to say a few words about the unfortunate case of Caster Semenya who has been forced to undergo a gender test after winning the women’s 800m at the current Athletics World Championships.
Despite what most people think, gender is by no means easy to determine. There is no question about Ms. Semenya’s external anatomy. Take her clothes off and almost everyone would identify her as female. Her birth certificate says she is a girl, and she was raised as a girl by her family. Nor is there any suggestion that she has been taking performance-enhancing drugs. Nevertheless, her right to race as a woman has been challenged. Why?
Well, there are a huge number of different medical conditions lumped under the general heading of “intersex”. Some of these are very common (see this Intersex Society of North America web page for some data). And, as this Science of Sport blog post explains, it isn’t a question of whether Ms. Semenya is obviously female, it is a question as to whether she is entirely female.
Except it isn’t. Athletics, like many sports, has developed a policy for dealing with post-operative transsexuals. They recognize that after gender reassignment surgery and a couple of years of hormone treatment your average male-to-female transsexual no longer has the biological advantages of a male and can be allowed to compete as a female.
The same courtesy is apparently not extended to intersex people, even though they may have lived in the same gender all of their lives.
And ultimately it may not be an issue of medicine at all. Monica Roberts points out that the “you’re really a man” charge has been leveled at large numbers of black sportspeople, even when the charge is patently absurd such as with the Williams sisters. The reason appears to be that women of non-white ethnicities don’t always conform easily to Western standards of beauty.
Therein lines the problem for women in sport: if you do well, and people don’t think that you are pretty, then you’ll be accused of being “really a man”. And because of the way that such cases are treated, you’ll be assumed guilty until proven innocent, even though the nature of the tests that can prove you innocent are controversial.
This is not the first case of this type. A couple of years ago an Indian athlete, Santhi Soundarajan, was stripped of a medal in the Asian games after allegedly failing a “gender test”. As far as I can make out, the results of that test have never been made public, and most explanations I have seen suggest that Ms. Soundarajan’s condition was perfectly legal under the IAAF rules. Nevertheless Ms. Soundarajan was hounded out of athletics and later attempted suicide. The good news is that she has since turned to coaching, at which she is apparently very successful.
Update: Here’s Germaine Greer making a complete idiot of herself in the notoriously transphobic Guardian. Someone might have checked current sporting regulations before publishing that piece, but I guess the Grauniad was too keen to get on with its favorite sport of Tranny-bashing to worry about facts.
Via Hal Duncan (on Twitter) I have just discovered The Outer Alliance, a new group dedicated to intelligent discussion of LGBT issues in speculative literature. Here’s the mission statement and pledge.
Naturally I have asked to join. Equally naturally I will be keeping an eye on them to make sure that this is an LGBT group and not an LGb(t) group.
And y’all should sign up too.
Some time ago I signed one of these online petition things asking the UK government whether the proposed ID card scheme would provide protection for transgender people who could be put at risk if their full personal history were made available to anyone doing ID checks. The Government’s response is now available on the 10 Downing Street web site, and it includes this:
As such, when an individual is using an identity card to prove their identity to an employer and a confirmation of their details is requested from the Register, their gender history would not be revealed.
Unfortunately, since that petition was submitted, the Government has published a new “Equality” Bill. The provisions of that bill include granting firms the right to declare any job as unsuitable for transgender people, and making it a criminal offense for a transgender person to fail to disclose his or her status when applying for such a job.
Um, #joinedupgovernmentfail?
So, the Obama Administration is currently introducing a bill to Congress that will ban employment discrimination against transgender people. Meanwhile the British parliament is merrily giving passage to a so-called “Equality Bill” that will specifically allow employers (and business, and schools) to discriminate against transgender people, thereby flouting European Human Rights legislation and rolling back much of the effect of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.