Today I was in Bath to do some more training for Julian House, a charity for the homeless. Berkeley Wilde of Diversity Trust and I had done a couple of days work with their staff a few weeks ago, and we got such a good report that I was asked to come and talk at a meeting of their board of directors today.
My slot was in the middle of a planning retreat. The way it was structured was that during the lunch break a small number of people were made available to tell their life stories. The directors got to sit and listen to a couple of these tales each. It is a format based on the idea of the “human library” in which people take the parts of talking books, and visitors to the event come and listen to them.
I have been invited to human library events before and have always declined, partly because I find the whole thing a bit creepy, and partly because if you are doing this in a public space anyone could come up and listen to you, which for trans folk may not be very safe. However, this was different. I was there to talk to people about being trans, and the audience was expecting some fairly unusual life histories.
Being a book when you are normally a writer is a strange experience. I had to resist the temptation to get meta, but I did worry a lot about how much of a genre stereotype I came over as. The trans autobiography is most definitely a thing, and I worried a lot that my own story was far too close to the standard narrative. Still, you do what you can. I got to tell a small number of strangers that Kevin saved my life, which made me happy.
I see from the news that “transgender” came second in this year’s Word of the Year contest, meaning that it was the word seeing the second-biggest increase in usage. I’m certainly seeing a tremendous amount of interest, and of course a lot more trans people are getting into the media. On the downside there is an increasingly shrill and desperate backlash from the likes of Greer and her pals, leading to bizarre campaigns such as this one asking to remove the T from LGBT.
The petition had originally claimed that trans people were guilty of sexual abuse of children:
https://twitter.com/auntysarah/status/662325926382936065
but it has since been toned down a little from that. On the other hand, it does have the enthusiastic support of a prominent G*merG*te leader. They also support Greer, of course. Funny how that works.
By the way, the accusations of child abuse these days generally centre around the fact that the majority of kids who express gender-variant behavior during childhood do grow out of it, though many of them end up being gay or lesbian. The TERF claim is that by providing gender services for kids we are forcing huge numbers of children who don’t need it through gender reassignment. This is completely untrue. Much of the point of treating kids is to find out who needs medical intervention and who doesn’t. Not every case is the same. Saying that you should ban gender treatment for kids because the majority who display possible symptoms don’t need it is rather like saying you should ban treatment for pneumonia because the majority of people with similar symptoms only have a cold or flu.
Anyway, on with the work. Tomorrow I get to try to catch up with email. On Sunday Berkeley and I are off to Bridgend where we are speaking at a conference about trans people on Monday. It will be good to get back to Wales, even if only for a day.
I’m not managing to review all that many of the books I read these days, but I did want to do one for Carter & Lovecraft because I think my friend Jonathan has done something exceedingly fun with it.
Ivor Hartmann has sent me a review copy of the new edition in his Afro SF anthology series. This one is a bit different, in that rather than a bunch of short stories it contains five novellas. All are, of course, by Africa writers. Here’s the line-up: