This is a disaster. I wasn’t terribly happy about laws against “religious discrimination” to begin with, and now I see I was right. From now on all of the laws the UK has protecting people against discrimination of any sort are useless, because all that the bigots have to do is claim that they have a religious right to be bigoted. I’m sure it won’t be long before some bampot brings a case against an LGBT person claiming that their mere existence infringes his “religious rights”.
Gender
That’s Mr. Doctor to You
Via my LJ Friends List, an interview with Russell T Davies in which he explains that Doctor Who can never be a woman because it would mean that fathers would have to explain sex changes to their kids.
So, I guess we should all call him just Russell Davies from now on.
ToiletGate: The Apology
The Pride London management has issued an official apology over the ToiletGate affair. I can’t see it online anywhere, so I’ll post the whole thing here.
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ToiletGate Makes (Gay) News
Gay News has a short mention of ToiletGate as part of a longer piece about Pride. Pity that they couldn’t manage to spell Roz’s name correctly, despite the fact that they were cutting and pasting from the Trans at Pride web site where it is spelled correctly. Ah well, at least they noticed.
ToiletGate Update
First of all, many thanks to all of you who have joined the Facebook Group, and who have signed the online petition. Your support is much appreciated.
For now most of the lobbying is in the hands of experts such as Christine Burns who have direct access to Those In Authority. However, I am working on an essay about the whole toilet panic nonsense. If it is taking a little while, that’s partly because I’m on the road and partly because elements of it cross over quite strongly with what I was planning to say about the gender imbalance issue. Bear with me, please.
I do, however, want to raise one issue arising from this, because it is an event management issue and therefore has direct bearing on science fiction conventions.
This morning Roz pointed her readers to this post which talks about the fact that large events such as Pride are pretty much obliged to hire private security firms, because in this regulation-obsessed country you can’t do security for a major event unless you have the appropriate qualifications. Willing volunteers from within the community are unlikely to have the necessary licenses, and so can’t be used.
We see this sort of thing already in some respects in Worldcon. Tech crews sometimes have to rely in people who are professionals in the industry because union rules at the convention center only allow union members to operate the equipment. And Worldcons are also often obliged to use professional security staff supplied by the convention center (at ruinous rates). We have also learned, from bad experiences within our own community, that people who want to do “Security” are often the last people who ought to be allowed to do it, because they are more interested in pretty black uniforms and bossing people about than in the success of the event.
The problem with this sort of thing is that the security people you hire may know nothing about the event that they are supposed to be guarding. This can lead to the sort of inappropriate behavior that Roz suffered on Saturday. And with really big events (and Pride is really big) your chosen security firm may subcontract because they don’t have enough staff to fulfill the contract. This makes it very difficult to ensure that the people you hire get appropriate sensitivity training.
And this problem will get worse, particularly in the UK where the government adds new regulatory burdens on a daily basis. The next big problem is likely to be child safety. There are moves afoot that may mean that everyone working on an event has to be vetted to ensure that they are safe around children. That’s going to open a whole can of worms about socially conformant behavior, with the defenders of the Patriarchy doubtless wanting to ban anyone who is gender variant, anyone who is sexually variant, anyone who has ever had a drug conviction and so on. It will be a mess, and it will be just one more nail in the coffin on volunteer activity.
Barking Mad
Well, it appears that I left Pride somewhat early yesterday. Or possibly I didn’t, because if I hadn’t I might be in prison now for assaulting a police officer. It appears that after I left Roz decided that she needed a call of nature. And a steward at Pride told her that trans women were not allowed to use the women’s toilets at the event – they had to use the gender-neutral disabled toilets instead. And then some idiot policeman told her that trans people have to be able to present a valid Gender Recognition Certificate before they are allowed to use gender-appropriate bathrooms.
By the way, I’m not outing anyone here. Roz is well known as a transgender activist. The whole thing is chronicled on her LiveJournal here, and on the Trans at Pride web site here.
I should note here that this does not appear to be an official Pride policy. The stewards were apparently hired help, not community volunteers, but that’s no excuse for the Met. If they have police on duty at Pride they ought to make sure that they are properly trained. But of course what we get instead is more security theater. Our law enforcement officials are far more interested in demanding people’s papers at any and every opportunity than they are in treating citizens with respect.
As for the bathroom nonsense, the whole thing is just ludicrous. Roz is post-op and has been living as a woman for decades. She uses women’s bathrooms in all sorts of places on a regular basis without any problem. The only difference yesterday was that she was at Pride, wearing badges, and thus easily identified as a “tranny” (and a female tranny at that), and therefore became a target for bigots.
I shall write something about bathrooms. But not now. I am too angry.
Gender (Im)balance Dissected
The good folks at SF Signal have done one of those Mind Meld things on the question of gender imbalance in SF. I was asked to contribute to this, but I turned them down: not because I have anything against SF Signal – the Mind Meld thing is very popular and works quite well, so I was honored to be asked – but because I think that the whole debate has got very narrow and very silly. I may try to write something more general and (hopefully) more useful sometime soon.
Meanwhile David Moles has entered the affray, including the following:
I’d love to edit a fiction magazine that was run like a proper academic journal, by which I mean one based on anonymous independent peer review by experts in the field, which is in this case to say by published authors with expertise in the genre or subgenre of the story under submission.
I’m sure this would be totally dysfunctional, but it would be totally dysfunctional in a different way than our current totally dysfunctional short fiction publishing system.
And that is so true. If there is anything that a career in regulatory economics teaches you it is that no matter how many whiz ways people come up with to “fix” things that are “wrong”, the primary effect of all this huffing and puffing it to create something that is totally dysfunctional in a different way.
Marriage Auction Update
Further to yesterday’s mention of the auction to help defend California’s marriage laws, Tero reminds me that if you can’t contribute work and don’t want to bi on anything you can just donate money to one of the organizations they are working for. I recommend Equality California.
In the meantime, if you are a writer or artist, please consider donating something. I’ve seen Ellen Kushner and Anne Harris mention the auction, so obviously word is getting round, but the more the merrier.
And just so you won’t miss this post, here’s the banner:
CA Marriage Rights Auction
Via Justine I learn about this auction happening on LiveJournal to raise money to combat the Defense of the Patriarchy people who are seeking to deny same-sex couples the right to marry in California. There’s a wide variety of stuff on offer, and hopefully a lot more will be added soon (any authors reading this please note). Details about how the auction works, and how to offer an item for sale, can be found here.
And besides posting that I feel kind of useless. Maybe if I offered not to blog for a week people would pay for that.
Why We Still Need Pride – Part II
Via various reports of the goings on in San Franciso last weekend ended up at this blog post which looks at Pride from an entirely different angle:
Yet right on cue, the day after Pride, the Davids of the blogosphere dished out their heavy-handed dissections of parades around the country. Only this year, there was a palpably nastier tone to an already traditionally nasty annual debate. Blame the election, blame the recent avalanche of anti-gay legislation, but this year, the usual assimilationist arguments went beyond the hypothetical speculations that maybe our Pride parades were too outlandish, that maybe we weren’t doing the movement any favors by showing the country a face that happened to be wearing 6-inch long false eyelashes. This year there was some actual discussion about HOW we were going to “fix” Pride parades. Of how we might go about “discouraging” certain “elements” from taking part in the parades.
Joe goes on about that at length in a very amusing manner. It is good stuff, but it also occurred to me that if you just replaced “trannies” with “costumers” he could have been talking about science fiction conventions.
Proud of You, India
The Guardian has a short video of the first ever Pride march in Delhi.
Indy Gets Pride
With Pride London only a couple of weeks away The Independent has run a number of LGBT-related articles.
Firstly they look at how civil partnerships have been a roaring success, despite the occasional idiot fundie protest. California please note.
Secondly there’s an article on why we still need Pride (just in case anyone thought that all of the battles had been won).
And thirdly one of interest to me about raising children in LGBT families. This was actually very encouraging:
When I started working in this field more than 30 years ago, there were assumptions about children being bullied, that the boys would be feminine and the girls would be masculine and that they would struggle with their own sexuality. And while all the evidence points to this not being the case, the same assumptions still come up today.
So sure, there are still problems, but with time we are gathering evidence that, once again, the sky is not falling.
There are several other articles in the series as well, all accessible via a helpful “related articles” box.
More Theories
OK, so maybe the guys in Italy were wrong. Maybe is isn’t evolution that makes men gay. Maybe it is reading “emasculating” YA literature. Ah well, maybe Mr. McCain can promise to make a priority of burning all of those politically incorrect YA novels (and their authors) when he gets into office so that America will once again be a country in which it is safe for little boys to grow up.
Score One for the AMA
And no, I don’t mean the band from Illuminatus!
I was talking just yesterday about how the British Psychological Society came to the defense of LGBT people when an idiot politician tried to label them insane. Now I’m pleased to report that the American Medical Association has leaped to the defense of transgenders.
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Cheney on Langauge and Determinism
Matt Cheney has joined in the discussion of biological “causes” for LGBT people being the way that they are. In particular he points us as this article in Language Log. It figures that if you read that Swedish brain study closely you find that the data isn’t anywhere near as clear cut as most reports made out, so well done to Mark Liberman for reading the paper and checking that out. But I was just as impressed by Liberman’s analysis of the media coverage, which suggests that for most news outlets the message that they were attempting push by covering the story was not “homosexuality is biologically determined”, or even “homosexual people have brains similar to straight people of the opposite sex”, but actually “gay men = women”. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
Proof the Evolution is Evil?
Some clever people at the University of Tornino have come up with a new piece of biological determinism. According to them, male homosexuality is caused by evolution. I can’t wait to see how the fundies spin that one.
Happy Wedding Day, California!
Yeah, I know they started last night, but I was asleep then, and I didn’t think to do a delayed-time post.
But happy wedding day anyway. Here’s to all you happy couples getting married at last after so long being denied the right to do so. Long may it continue.
More Biological Determinism?
It appears to be Sweden day in the LGBT corner of teh intrawebs, as two major studies looking for biological explanations for sexual orientation have hit my feeds.
The first, reported in The Guardian and conducted by the Stockholm Brain Institute, claims that brain scans of gay men are in some ways more similar to those of straight women than of straight men, while corresponding similarities exist between lesbians and straight men.
The second experiment, conducted by the Karolinska Institute, claims that the largest twin study in the world thus far proves that social attitudes have no influence on our choice of sexual partners.
Regarding the second, I refer you to Kathy Sedia’s withering denunciation of twin studies. I don’t have a neuroscientist friend to hand, but it seems to me that no amount of medical evidence is going to convince your average fundie or DUP politician. As ever, the point should be that human beings are naturally diverse, and that there’s nothing wrong with being different.
Score One for Pychologists
I had cause to mention the odious DUP a while back, and in case you are wondering just how odious they are, one of their members has managed to get a staring role in a post on Pharyngula. Obviously there’s no point in my adding to one of Mr. Myers broadsides – it would be like firing a pea shooter in the wake of a cruise missile. However, I would like to note that the British Psychological Society has firmly rejected the idea that LGBT people are mentally ill.
I’m slightly less impressed with the statement in that article that transgender is a “sexual orientation”, but that bit isn’t in quotes so it may be an error on the part of the journalist rather than by the BPS folks.
On Victimhood
I’ve just been listening to a podcast of an interview by Tim Franks who is the Chief Executive of PACE, a London-based charity that provides mental health services to LGBT people. Given all the uproar last month over what is happening in the US, it is a pleasure to listen to someone who is able to grasp the concept that LGBT folks may sometimes be in need of help from psychiatrists, but that doesn’t mean that they are crazy because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Being able to start a relationship with a therapist from a position of normality rather than having to first establish that you are not a freak or a pervert is incredibly liberating.
But what struck me most about what Franks said was that a major benefit for PACE’s clients was that they could get away from being victims, and that this was a Good Thing. And it is. It is all too easy, if you are immersed in the blogosphere, to think that you need to identify yourself as a victim, because it is such a well-proven way of winning an argument. But actually continually thinking of yourself as a victim is deeply corrosive. It engenders feelings of powerlessness and anger, and aside from winning debates on blogs it doesn’t actually get you anywhere. This maps back to what I was saying in the Riki Wilchins review about identity politics. Defining yourself into an ever-narrower oppressed minority doesn’t get you anything much except unhappiness with your lot and the state of the world.
Or at least, so things seem at 11:40pm. Hopefully I won’t wake up tomorrow and discover that I shouldn’t write philosophical blog posts when I ought to be going to bed.