Gender Recognition – Not as Scary as You Think

~ Cheryl

A great deal of newsprint and air time has been spent recently on scaring British women over the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. Sadly much of the information that has been given out is wrong, but many people have understandable concerns as a result. I want to address the issues here.

The first thing to note is that legal gender recognition doesn’t protect people from discrimination. It is the Equality Act that does that. A women’s refuge providing services to victims of sexual assault or domestic violence can legally bar various sorts of women from using their services if it is reasonable to do so. It might, for example, exclude a woman who has a highly contagious disease, and possibly even one who is a smoker. I am legally female, but I and other trans women can be legally barred from a women’s refuge now thanks to a special provision in the Equality Act.

Making it easier to change your legal gender will not change the law on whether or not trans women can use refuges.

The whole idea of “making it easier” is complicated as well. The media is suggesting that men will be able to become legally female simply by saying “I am a woman”. That is not how self-declaration works in any of the many countries that use it, and it is not how the Scottish government has proposed the system would work there.

What we will probably get is a system based on a Statutory Declaration. You will have to find a lawyer, pay a small fee, and sign a form that says you intend to adopt a new legal gender for all purposes. I’m sure there will be sanctions available if people use the system in a frivolous manner.

Back now to toilets, changing rooms in clothing stores, and so on. The suggestion has been made that changing the GRA will make it impossible to keep men out of these spaces. But, as I noted above, the GRA is not about discrimination, it is only about legal gender. The only women’s spaces that would be affected are places like prisons which specifically use legal gender to determine who goes where.

For all other spaces it is the Equality Act we should look at. This bars discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment. That is, it specifically protects people who have the characteristic of gender reassignment from discrimination (except in the special case of refuges as noted above). How does one gain this characteristic? Simply by starting on the process of medical gender transition.

To become protected by the Equality Act, all you have to do is visit your GP and ask for a referral to a gender clinic. That is much easier than making a Statutory Declaration. And of course it is a form of self-declaration.

The Equality Act was passed in 2010, so all of these things that we are being told will result from changes to the Gender Recognition Act are in fact already enshrined in law, and have been for over seven years. (Except for access to refuges, which you can bar trans women from and will still be able to bar us from if the GRA changes.)

In all of that time, I cannot recall a single case of a cis man abusing the system to gain access to women-only spaces. I’m sure such an incident would have been all over the newspapers if it had occurred.

Ireland adopted a system of self-declaration similar to what is being proposed by the UK in 2015. They have had no problems with the system. Other countries have been using similar systems for longer.

We should, of course, ask ourselves why a particularly right-wing Tory government is making these changes. Theresa May and Amber Rudd are not exactly big fans of civil rights, after all.

The answer is that the current Gender Recognition Act is manifestly not working. It has made it so complicated, expensive and humiliating to obtain legal gender recognition that most British trans people have not bothered to do so. You can change your passport, driving licence, bank account and so on without changing your legal gender. To the likes of May and Rudd – current and former Home Secretaries – it must be anathema to have thousands of people living a gender different from that in which they are legally recognised. They want to fix that, and they will probably add some means of encouraging trans people to get their legal genders changed so that all of their documents line up. Watch out for the stick that will accompany the carrot.

Much has been made of the issue of people with penises in woman-only-spaces. However, this cannot be avoided without completely undermining the medical process of gender reassignment. Under the current rules, anyone wishing to have genital surgery must have lived full time in their acquired gender for at least 1.5 years. If a trans woman doesn’t do things like using women’s toilets, and changing rooms in women’s clothing stores, the doctors will probably assume that she’s not serious about her transition and deny her surgery.

I can assure you that for many trans women the very idea of someone seeing that we have a penis is horrifying. We certainly don’t want to be waving the damn thing about in public, as it has been suggested we would do if the GRA is reformed. Many of us are glad to be rid of them, and those who don’t opt for surgery have very good reasons for doing so.

Of course there is a small possibility that some man will abuse the system and pretend to be trans. No law is totally bulletproof, and the widespread publicity being given to the possibility of such abuse can only encourage people to try. Someone will doubtless do it just to discredit trans women. But you can’t make laws on the assumption that they must be perfect. The world doesn’t work that way.

Here’s a related example. It is ridiculously hard to get a rape conviction here in the UK. I would like the laws tightened to make it easier. But every time a feminist group suggests this someone in the media will start going on about, “oh, but what if the woman is lying about being raped?”

You can’t have a rape law that is 100% proof against false accusations, and yet we have one because it is needed to protect the vast majority of women who report honestly. With trans women it isn’t even us who are accused of dishonesty, it is that someone else might pretend to be one of us. Is that any reason to deny us fair treatment?

The fact is that men do assault women all of the time. They don’t need to pretend to be trans women to do that. It is just too easy for them the way the world is now. Making it easier for trans people to get legal gender recognition won’t change that. It will help many trans people, and make the bureaucracy involved in gender switching easier and less confusing. That’s nothing to be scared about.

[Note: the above does not address the issue of legal recognition for non-binary people. That’s an entirely different matter, but no threat to women because non-binary people don’t want to be recognised as women.]

Well Done, Trans Pride South West

~ Cheryl

My Friday and Saturday were busy with trans stuff.

First up I did the usual gig of hosting the Trans Day of Remembrance ceremony at Bristol University. Special thanks are due to Alf and Nix for their help in reading the list, to the Students’ Union for the venue and organisation, to LGBT Bristol for the food and drink, and to the Trans+ Mindline for being there because TDOR is a rather stressful event.

That was followed on Saturday by the Trans Pride Community Day, which was a great success. There were plenty of stalls, including one from Stonewall, and some good footfall. I had a lot of interest on the OutStories Bristol stall (and yet another possible invitation to do a talk in February).

Running an event like this isn’t easy, and last year’s inaugural Trans Pride South West left a lot to be desired. This year, however, was very smooth, and provides a solid foundation for the future. If we can have the same venue, a few more stalls and more publicity it should be an excellent event. Sophie, Lexi, Spencer and the crew deserve a lot of credit for what they have done. And if you happen to be a trans person from the South West and can offer to help out please do so.

My apologies to Bristol folks for not being at the Reclaim the Night march. I needed to get home and get some sleep. I’m delighted to see that it went well and will hopefully be at the Bath one (which happens near International Women’s Day). Huge thanks to Charlotte from Bristol Zero Tolerance for turning up at Trans Pride on such a busy day for her.

Update: I’ve just had a press release from Bristol Women’s Voice informing me that they are trying to raise £20,000 to keep the Zero Tolerance initiative going for another year. Presumably this is part of the ongoing defunding of the voluntary sector by Bristol City Council. Details of the appeal are here.

Bristol TDOR & Trans Pride

~ Cheryl


Bristol is having its Trans Day of Remembrance event tonight. That’s because it allows us to combine it with Trans Pride South West which is happening throughout the weekend.

I will be hosting the ceremony of remembrance again. It will be in the Ansom Rooms at the University of Bristol Students’ Union from 18:00 tonight. The main public part of Trans Pride South West is at The Station in Silver Street from 12:00 to 16:00 tomorrow. I will be on the OutStories Bristol stall. Further details here.

At least 325 trans people were murdered in hate crimes in the past 12 months, up from 295 last year. Almost all of them were women of color. More than half of the murders were in Brazil. Further details are available here.

[Thanks to Spencer for the header image.]

New Digging for Britain

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The latest series of Digging for Britain, the BBC archaeology series that reports on the best digs of the past year, has just started. I caught up with last night’s show over dinner and have been blown away by some of the discoveries.

Let’s start at Meonstoke in Hampshire where the University of Winchester has been excavating what was thought to be a Roman villa but has turned out to be a temple complex dedicated to the goddess Dea Nutrix. What is interesting about this goddess is that she’s not Roman. She is generally shown breastfeeding children, but Roman women were not big on breastfeeding. They had slaves to do that for them. Celtic women, on the other hand, did breastfeed, and these temples are found in the Celtic parts of the empire. That probably means that we are looking at a Celtic goddess who has been incorporated into Roman religious life in much the same way as Isis became popular in Rome. The site in Hampshire may well be similar to Bath in that it is a Roman temple built on the location of an ancient Celtic holy site.

There were two features on Stone Age Britain. One looked briefly at the mysterious “square circle” discovered at the heart of the Avebury ring. There’s still a lot to be learned about that, but it is clear that Avebury was a populated settlement, not just a religious site. Far more interesting for me was the news that we appear to have completely misunderstood long barrows such as Cat’s Brain in Wiltshire. Rather than being burial mounds for individuals, they appear to be mounds constructed over communal longhouses that have been decommissioned and burned. What is buried is perhaps not a person, but a community.

My favorite report was one on the dig by the University of Bristol at Repton on what they believe to be the first over-winter camp of a viking army in Britain. The camp is known from later reports in viking sagas, but we’d not had any proven archaeology until now. The new dig has found clear evidence of an army camp, including evidence of weapon-making and ship repairs. The site is associated with a mass grave of some 300 vikings, presumably killed in the battle with the Mercians reported by the sagas. Excitingly several of the dead are women, some apparently with battle wounds. Obviously we can’t prove that they were warriors, but isotope analysis of their teeth shows that they came from Scandinavia with the army.

Oh, and Alice Roberts has adopted my hair color, so I feel properly professorial now.

Trans in the Workplace

~ Cheryl




LEAD, a new magazine aimed at the world of work and focusing on diversity issues has recently been launched. I met the people running it through the Women’s Equality Party conference last year, and they kindly asked me to write them an article on gender transition at work. So I did, and it is now online. You can read what I had to say here.

There are lots of other interesting articles in it as well. I’m delighted to see a magazine focusing on all of these issues.

Who Gets to do History?

~ Cheryl

The blog posts following on from the Creative Histories conference have been coming regularly for several weeks now and we have got to the point where my contribution has been posted. I talked about who gets to do history, and in particular the idea that certain groups of people (mostly old white men) are somehow able to be “objective” while other groups (mostly women and people from minority groups) are seen as having a biased view. You can read my post here.

Tade Thompson Interview

~ Cheryl


As promised last week, I have dug out the interview with Tade Thompson that I did for Ujima and made the whole thing available on Salon Futura. We had a whole pile of issues with the Skype recording on this one so the sound quality is not good, but there is more here than I was able to broadcast on the show.

Tade’s novel, Rosewater has just become the first ever winner of the Best Novel prize in the Nommo Awards from the African Speculative Fiction Society. It seems like there should be a lot of renewed interest in the book, and in Tade’s other work, and that therefore I should share this podcast with you.

In the interview Tade talks about some of the ideas behind Rosewater, about his now released novella, The Murders of Molly Southbourne, and about writing a ghost story.

Transgender Day of Remembrance, 2017

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today is the day on which we remember all of those trans people whose lives were cut short by hate-motivated murders during the past year. Bristol’s official ceremony won’t be until Friday, which is just as well because I have Fringe to host tonight. However, I did want to do a post to remind you all of the occasion.

As usual, the statistics of the year’s murders can be found at the Transgender Europe website created for the purpose. This year the total number of murders is 325. That is up significantly from 295 last year. The increase is entirely due to a massive rise from 123 to 171 in Brazil. Most other countries have seen a fall, though the total for the USA has risen from 23 to 25.

Thankfully there have been no trans murders in the UK this year. However, given the amount of hate being pumped out by the mainstream media right now, I think it is only a matter of time before someone gets killed. I know that friend of Roz Kaveney’s was assaulted badly enough to need hospitalization recently, and the intensity of the rhetoric has been ramping up every week. I’m also seeing a lot of very upset young people on social media. It is one thing for me to be worrying about having all of my civil rights stripped away after a long and happy life; it is quite another if you are 19 or 25.

Fringe Tomorrow

~ Cheryl

Tomorrow will see the final BristolCon Fringe event of 2017. As usual it will be at the Naval Volunteer pub from 7:00pm. Here are the readers.

Baylea Hart is an IT Technician by day, horror writer by night and a reader everywhere in between.

In 2013 she wrote, directed and edited the short horror film Behind the Door, which won a Top 50 spot in the Bloody Cuts “Who’s There?” competition and as of 2015 has over 430,000 views on YouTube.

In October 2015 she won the Bristol Horror Writing Competition with her short story “Jack in the Box”, and had her story published in the Far Horizons E-Magazine. Her short story “Eyes Open” was published in the 12th issue of 9Tales Told in the Dark in 2016.

Baylea graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and enjoys watching people grow slightly white after reading her stories. Her first novel, The Log House, is due to be published in 2017 via Unbound.

In the early 1990s Jonathan L Howard worked as a scriptwriter and video game writer, including writing credits on the highly successful Broken Sword series of video games.

Following one very positive review of the writing, Jonathan says:

“All this positive feedback made me think that just possibly I might have the ability to make it as a professional writer. I dug out a lot of my old notes from years before, and started working on them again. One set of notes was about a necromancer called Johannes Cabal.”

His first novel, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, was published in 2009. The fifth, The Fall of the House of Cabal, was published in 2016. Jonathan was one of this year’s Guests of Honour at BristolCon. At Fringe he will be reading from After the End of the World, the second in his Carter & Lovecraft series. Eldritch horror can be expected.

I will be hosting, and putting the readers to the question, as usual. Hopefully I will see some of you there.

Bristol’s Great Menopause Event

~ Cheryl ~ 17 Comments

I spent yesterday at City Hall in Bristol for the Great Menopause Event which I reported on for Ujima a couple of weeks ago. Of course menopause isn’t something that is going to sneak up on me at any time soon, but a lot of my friends are going through it and as I am on HRT (due to having no gonads) I’m interested to know whether I should be considering lowering the dose as I get older. No one does research on trans people’s long term health issues, of course.

The event had a variety of speakers covering lots of different aspects: the social, the medical, employment rights and so on. My biggest take away is that every woman is different, and therefore every woman experiences menopause in a different way. Some people hardly notice it, others have an awful time. Some women, and this surprised me, go through menopause at 30, which can be a major medical problem. If you have mild symptoms there are all sorts of natural sources of estrogen that you can take, though none of them are as powerful and effective as actual HRT. Lack of GP knowledge about menopause, and unwillingness of some male GPs to even discuss women’s health issues, were highlighted as major issues. It was all very interesting, and all very taboo busting.

I understand that the slides from the various talks will be made available in due course. They will probably be on the City Council’s Women’s Health Task Group web page.

I now have a pile of follow-up to do, much of which involves public policy issues. All of this will doubtless feed in some way into the development of the Women’s Equality Party health policy.

Oh, and no one seemed to object to my being there, which was a great relief considering the torrent of anti-trans propaganda being pumped out by the English media these days.

The 2017 Nommo Awards – Africa’s Finest

~ Cheryl

The Nommos are awards given out by the African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS). I’m delighted to see Africa, and the African diaspora, coming together like this. Many of the winners are unknown to me, as it should be. However, the top two awards went to Nigerians who live in the West. The novella prize went to Nnedi Okorafor for Binti. That will be no surprise to many people. And the novel prize went to Tade Thompson for Rosewater.

I’m not familiar with the other novel finalists, but I have read Rosewater and it is a fabulous book. What’s more, hot on the heels of of the award announcement came the news that Orbit has bought a trilogy from Tade, of which Rosewater is the first. I’m absolutely delighted.

Somewhere I have an interview with Tade about Rosewater that I broadcast part of on Ujima. I’ll dig it out and stick it on Salon Futura over the weekend.

Tade, mate, when are you coming to read at BristolCon Fringe?

M. John Harrison in Bath

~ Cheryl

Last night I took myself into Bath where M. John Harrison was reading from his latest collection, the wonderfully titled You Should Come With Me Now. The book is a mixture of short stories and flash fiction, and shows that Mike has lost none of his sentence-crafting skill, nor his biting wit.

The centerpiece of the reading was the magnificent “Psychoarchaeology”, inspired by the discovery of the (alleged) burial of Richard III under a car park. The story is a meditation on the heritage industry, and is both cutting and hilarious.

There’s always a rights issue. Where does the latest Tudor belong? Does he belong where he was found? Or whence he came? Who gets the brown sign? One wrong decision and York won’t talk to Leicester, the knives are out again after hundreds of years of peace. Contracts torn up, the industry at war with itself, we all know where that can lead: diminished footfall in the visitor centres. No one wants to see that.

Elsewhere there are some lovely flash pieces, including one in which the ruins of human civilization are discovered by aliens who can’t understand us because their means of data storage is completely unlike ours, though it is rather like jackdaws.

Mike, of course, loves deconstructing popular genre tropes. There are piss-takes of space opera in book, and of fantasy as well. One of the stories will appear in a much modified form in the Christmas Special edition of New Scientist. Mike describes it as, “a five volume fantasy trilogy in a thousand words.” If only he could be allowed to edit the new Amazon Middle Earth series.

I, though, am a novel reader at heart. Thus I am delighted to report that Mike is working on a new novel. He says it has fish people in it.

Fish. People.

I know what that brings to mind for me. These fish people, however, do not live on Devil’s Reef off the coast of rural Massachusetts. They live in Britain. Obviously they want to take over. Beyond that we know little. Perhaps they have taken over already. What else could explain Michael Gove?

Naturally the audience asked for recommendations. If Mike says that Hassan Blasim writes some of the best weird fiction around, then I am definitely going to give him a try.

Equally naturally, he can’t read everything. Mike, if you can’t remember the two books that I suggested to you they are: Amatka by Karin Tidbeck; and Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.

Unexpected TV

~ Cheryl


After the radio show yesterday I was having lunch in a cafe with a friend (plotting feminist revolution, as one does) when I got a message from the lovely people at ShoutOut Radio. Apparently the BBC were looking for someone to come onto Points West, the regional news program for the South West, and talk about trans issues.

So I got in touch with them to see what they wanted. As it turned out, they were running a feature on pioneering Bristol trans woman, Rosalind Mitchell. They wanted someone to comment on how things have changed for trans folk since she transitioned back in the 1990s.

That was an easy one for me except for the timing. I was due in Bath for a Women’s Equality Party meeting at 6:00pm. The show was due to air at 10:30pm, and I’d need to get a train home. Thankfully we were able to pre-record an interview and get me back to Temple Meads for the 10:22pm train. My thanks to everyone at WEP Bath and the BBC who helped make this happen.

Of course I wasn’t otherwise prepared. I’d managed to forget to pack a lipstick and didn’t find out about the mistake until I was at the WEP meeting and it was too late to go and buy one. My hair needed washing and I was wearing very much the wrong thing for hot studio lights. But I got it done.

If you have access to iPlayer you can watch the broadcast here up until 10:45pm today. Sabet Choudhury was great to work with, and I was pretty pleased with my responses. Sadly I still need a lot of practice on controlling my facial expressions while on TV. I frown way too much, mainly because I’m being serious. But every opportunity to practice is good.

Yesterday on Ujima – Babbers, Gender, History & World Fantasy

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s show began with a chat with my Ujima colleague, Gail Bowen-Huggett. Gail is a great presenter who works on a show called Babbers. It goes out in the same time slot as mine, but on a Monday, and it caters primarily to older listeners. The Babbers team is looking to recruit new members, so Gail and I had a bit of a chat about what is involved in doing radio and how much fun it is. If you are over 55 and interested in getting involved, here’s some details of the awareness day that Gail and her colleagues are running.

The second slot should have featured another Ujima colleague, Angel Mel, but poor Mel has been struck down with the Dreaded Lurgy and consequently I had to improvise for half an hour. Fortunately I can rant for Wales about trans politics, and it is Trans Awareness Week, so I had plenty to say. Mainly it was about Trans Pride South West and about the forthcoming changes to the Gender Recognition Act.

You can listen to the first half of the show here.

At 13:00 I was joined by Leonie Thomas from Bristol University. She is an expert on the history of women in radio, in particular in the early 20th Century. She was there to talk about Una Marson who was the first black woman to front a BBC show. This is the YouTube clip that Leonie and I talked about.

Finally I had an interview with GV Anderson about her success in the World Fantasy Awards. You can find her award-winning story here.

Sadly the recording appears to have cut out after 38 minutes of the final hour. You can catch all of Leonie’s interview here. The interview with GV Anderson is not all there, but it was a pre-record and I have a rather longer version that I will put on Salon Futura fairly soon.

The playlist for the show was:

  • Jamiroiquai – Cosmic Girl
  • Gloria Gaynor – I Will Survive
  • Janelle Monae featuring Erykah Badu – Q.U.E.E.N.
  • Sylvester – Mighty Real
  • Duke Ellington – It Don’t Mean a Thing
  • Maya Angelou – Stone Cold Dead in the Market
  • Earth, Wind & Fire – Fantasy
  • Bat for Lashes – The Wizard

My next show will be on December 6th and will feature Jonathan L. Howard talking about his latest book, After the End of the World.

Ujima Tomorrow

~ Cheryl

As there are five Wednesday’s in this November I have volunteered to fill a gap in the schedule by doing an extra Women’s Outlook show tomorrow. I’ll be on at the usual time of Noon-14:00 and my topics this week will be:

  • How older people can get on the radio
  • Diversity in the Bristol music scene
  • A Caribbean woman presenter on the BBC during WWII
  • An interview with GV Anderson

As usual you can listen live online, and I will post the Listen Again links when I get a chance (though probably not tomorrow as I have a very busy day).

Canadian Indigenous & Black SF

~ Cheryl

The other week I was talking about Polynesian science fiction. Today it is the turn of Canada. CBC Radio’s show, The Current, has done a feature on science fiction by native and black Canadians. I features the inimitable Minister Faust, and also two indigenous writers. If you’d like to take a listen you can find it here.

New Gendered Voices Magazine

~ Cheryl

Earlier this year I attended a really great conference at Bristol University called Gendered Voices. The group that puts it on also publishes a magazine, and for the latest issue they kindly asked me to contribute an article. So I wrote them something on trans people in the Inca Empire. They also put me in the cover collage, which is dedication above and beyond the call of duty.

There are lots of other really interesting articles in the issue, and you can read it for free, here. Enjoy!

Cheese Tasting

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Yesterday I was at M-Shed in Bristol for a meeting, and I took the opportunity to visit the new Bristol Cheesemonger. Rosie Morgan (no relation) has already garnered quite a reputation for her little enterprise, and it was past time I gave it a try.

Of course it is hard to surprise me with cheese because I spend a lot of time looking for new stuff. Rosie, however, came up trumps.

First she introduced me to Cornish Gouda. Dutch friends may, of course, feel a little aggrieved by this, but I have to say that what I bought has exactly the fabulous nutty taste that you would expect. I have only tried the semi-mature thus far, and that has a great flavor. I look forward to trying the older offerings.

Her other suggestion was Renegade Monk. This is a soft blue with an ale-washed rind made in very small quantities by a little Somerset dairy. It has a great taste, but having tried some of it I think I need to leave it a few days to get the full effect. More later, I hope.

And thank you, Rosie, I will be back.

Seven

~ Cheryl

Is the number of trans people elected to political office in the USA yesterday. Helen Boyd has the full list. That’s a nice little black eye for the whiny child in the White House.

As usual the media has been talking all sorts of nonsense about people being the “first”, as if trans people were only invented yesterday. Monica Roberts has a nice post on the history of trans people in US election.

Of course none of those people were elected to a position in national government. However, seven also happens to be the number of trans people worldwide who have achieved that honor. Again Monica Roberts has done the research.

The UK is somewhat behind the curve on this. Indeed, we are in serious danger of going backwards. The Scottish Government released some (excellent) proposals on reform of the Gender Recognition Act today. Westminster is expected to follow suit. Because there will be a public consultation, there will also be a very well-funded campaign aimed at getting the government to scrap the Act altogether. The flood of (deeply dishonest) news articles about trans people we have been seeing over the last few weeks is just the softening up operation. I’m afraid I will have to be asking for your help in the near future.