Today on Ujima : Sanctum, TDOR, Tara and Tade

~ Cheryl

I was in charge of the Women’s Outlook show on Ujima again today. My first guest was Sara Zaltash who, like me, has performed at Sanctum. She’s one of those brave people who have been performing there in the middle of the night. And if you think that a trans woman reading science fiction stories is off the wall, just wait until you hear what Sara was doing.

Sara’s parents are Iranian, so along side discussion of her Sanctum performance we chatted about the issue of women’s rights in Iran. That was with reference to this article in yesterday’s Telegraph. I did rather like the idea that women in Iran are getting round laws about being their husbands’ property by refusing to get married. Of course personally I think the solution is to bring back Ishtar worship, but I can see that might be a bit unpopular in some quarters.

After Sara my next guest was Chris Hubley, a local artist who is staging an exhibition of work by trans artists as part of Trans Awareness Month (which November is). That includes a fundraiser party on the 13th at which I might be reading a bit of poetry. Chris and I talked a bit about the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) and how we both want trans people to be known for things other than being tragic. You can find out more about the events Chris is organizing here.

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

Chris had to rush off to catch a bus to London, but before he went we had a brief chat about the Tara Hudson case. Chris explains why he doesn’t have a Gender Recognition Certificate. If the Ministry of Justice were being consistent they should hold that, were Chris to commit a crime, he should be sent to a women’s prison. My guess, though, is that it wouldn’t happen. The trouble with the MoJ Guidelines is that they are based on the assumption that the primary goal is to protect the other inmates from the trans person, not the other way around. Trans women, because they are still seen as men by the MoJ, are deemed a danger to other women prisoners. Trans men are also seen as men by the MoJ, and therefore also deemed to belong in men’s prisons.

That only took up 15 minutes as Chris had to go, so in the next slot I brought in Paulette and our new colleague, Zuzana, who were just back from a trip to Calais to deliver supplies to the refugee camp there. They will have a much fuller report on the trip in tomorrow’s Outlook show. It sounds like it will be well worth a listen.

In the final segment of the show I ran a pre-recorded interview with Tade Thompson about his new novel, Making Wolf. Tade and I talk a lot about the background to the novel, which is set in an imaginary country carved off from Nigeria after the civil war. There’s a lot of great material in there.

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

The playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Thieves in the Temple – Prince
  • So Blue – Mahsa Vahdat & Mighty Sam McClain
  • Pressure Off – Duran Duran with Janelle Monáe & Nile Rodgers
  • Love will save the day – Koko Jones
  • Appletree – Erykah Badu
  • Lovin’ You – Minnie Riperton (dedicated to Kevin)
  • Killer on the Rampage – Eddy Grant
  • Jezebel – Sade

I am particularly grateful to Sara for introducing me to Mahsa and Sam. I was also very pleased to be able to music by a trans woman of color during our discussion of TDOR.

I’m going to be on Paulette’s education show briefly tomorrow morning. She’s interviewing Roger Griffith and I about performing at Sanctum was how/whether our various educational backgrounds prepared us for being writers. That will be between 10:00 and 11:00.

Planetfall Drops

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Talking of Planetfall, it is officially published today. I’m hoping that Forbidden Planet Bristol will have copies tomorrow as I’m in town to do the radio show. If you haven’t got the message about this book yet, why not listen to Emma Newman read the first couple of chapters at BristolCon Fringe.

Goodreads Choice Awards

~ Cheryl

The first round of voting for this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards has opened. Although they claim to be voting on the best books of 2015, the eligibility window is actually from mid-November 2014 to mid-November 2015, which is rather silly.

Anyway, the usual categories exist, and the usual nonsense about gendered reading habits is being perpetuated. Of 15 finalists in science fiction, only one (Ancillary Mercy) is by a woman. Fantasy looks rather better with 9 women out of 15. In Young Adult SF&F 14 of the 15 finalists are by women. Horror has 4 women out of 15.

Mostly the finalists look uninspiring, and occasionally oddly categorized. Uprooted is in YA, and I don’t recall it being sold as such. Charlie Stross’s The Annihilation Score is in Horror, though personally I read the Laundry novels for the comedy. Bizarrely, neither Radiance by Cat Valente nor Planetfall by Emma Newman has made the SF finalists list. However, you are allowed write-in votes at this stage. Much as I love Ancillary Mercy, I’d rather see one of those two get the prize this time around. Luna: New Moon should be on the list too, but isn’t.

The Graphic Novel category, however, is full of awesome: Saga, Rat Queens, Lovelace & Babbage, Goddess of Thunder, Ms. Marvel, Squirrel Girl, Lumberjanes. I was spoiled for choice.

Should you wish to vote, the ballot is here.

A Morning In Prison

~ Cheryl

Now there’s click bait for you.

So yes, I spent this morning in prison. To be precise, I was in Ashfield Prison near Bristol, which is a specialist prison for male sex offenders. I can see the TERFs rubbing their hands with glee at this “proof” that I am in fact a violent rapist.

Sadly for them I was actually there to do some trans awareness training. I was accompanied by colleagues from LGBT Bristol and Diversity Trust who gave presentations on our work, on hate crime, and on LGBT mental health. It was, in many ways, a standard gig.

The first major difference was that it took place inside a prison. It took us forever to get past security. As I joked to my colleagues, it was harder to get into prison than to get into the USA. The security rules were even more weird. No chewing gum, no mirrors, but apparently safety pins were OK even though they are sharp and pointy. We all had mugshots taken and got patted down. No one questioned my ID.

I’d not been much involved in the planning and I thought we’d mainly be talking to staff. There I was wrong. Half of the audience was made up of people from other local area services who were there as much to get some experience of the prison as to listen to us. The other half were inmates. And when we had finished our talks several of them did short presentations about the diversity-related work they do in the prison.

So we had someone from the age awareness group, someone from the disability group, someone from the military veterans association, someone from the BME group, someone from the interfaith group, someone from the foreign prisoners group, and of course someone from the LGBT group (which, given the population, is mainly a GB group, but they have had trans inmates).

Yes, you did read that right. The inmates of a sex offenders prison have organized diversity awareness groups of various sorts for their community. What’s more they told us that they think this is pretty much unique in British prisons. Several of them had come to Ashfield from other establishments, or had been in other establishments at other times in their lives.

How did this happen? Well partly it appears to be down to the hard work of Hannah, the prison’s diversity officer. Partly it is, of course, down to the Equality Act, which has made people much more aware of such issues. And partly it is good prison management.

As one of the inmates put it, if he was outside he’d be mixing primarily with people from his own social and ethnic community. Hating people who are different would be easy. But inside the prison he’s part of a population of a few hundred, only a handful of whom share his background. So he has to learn to get along with lots of people from other backgrounds that he might never have become friendly with otherwise. Teaching the inmates to have respect for each other’s diverse backgrounds helps prison life run more smoothly.

There is one final point too. Over lunch I was chatting to one of the inmates and expressed surprise that this amazing community had been started in a privately run prison rather than a government one. (Ashfield is run by Serco.) He responded that government-run prisons don’t have much responsibility to anyone, whereas Serco is firmly regulated by government and is required to show that it is following its obligations under the Equality Act, or it might lose the contract.

I have two caveats here. Firstly I am well aware that I saw only a small fraction of the total prison population, and presumably those that there most enthusiastic about the diversity program. Secondly I’ve seen first hand how large companies can and do avoid complying with equality legislation. You have to have people willing to actually obey such laws before they can work well, so there’s no guarantee that a privately run prison will be better. But, even with those caveats I was hugely impressed.

It wasn’t until after I had left that I realized that I had just spent several hours in the company of a bunch of convicted sex offenders, and the only time I had felt threatened was going through security to get in.

Well, That Was Sanctum

~ Cheryl

I did the Sanctum thing last night.

The actual site is lovely. Temple Church looks great, and the performance space that Theaster Gates has built is really nice. It is also not nearly as cold as I had feared. The staff there were all really helpful. And there was an audience.

Well, there was when I started anyway. Probably the best thing that can be said about my experience there is that it could have been worse. No one booed, no one threw anything, and I didn’t get hauled off stage by the management. However, about half the audience walked out during my performance, often not waiting breaks between items, and one person started talking loudly to his companion while I was reading.

Part of that is understandable in that I’m not that great a writer. I know many people who are far better at short fiction and poetry than I am. Part of it in undoubtedly because I had been scheduled to perform late at night on my way back from Cambridge. I was very tired when I got there, and had little time to rehearse. I have definitely done better performances.

On the other hand, I think this was probably the best I could have expected from the evening. The lack of a published schedule meant that I didn’t know most of the audience and they had no idea what to expect from me. They almost certainly were not expecting a trans woman reading science fiction and activist poetry. That isn’t an easy sell. One of the stories I read had gone down a storm in Cambridge the day before, but fell flat at Sanctum. The poem I did for 50 Voices went down really well there but was much less well received last night. Audiences differ, and given the sort of thing I write I’m never going to be particularly popular with an audience made of of random people who would attend a high profile art event.

It is what it is, as they say. More generally, Sanctum seems to be going very well. I very much hope to get to see some of it myself at some point. And I’ll have one of the performers on the radio with me on Wednesday.

Trans SF&F at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Thanks to Farah Mendlesohn I was invited to give a talk at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. That was yesterday, and I was very pleased with how it went. We had about 80 people, and many of them were very kind to me afterwards. It is always good to know that you entertained people.

I was half expecting the local TERFs to turn up. However, some bright spark at the festival managed to program them against me. Julia Long (who is one of the small band of TERFs who picketed the London Dyke March to protest against Sarah Brown being allowed to speak) was doing a talk on pornography that overlapped with mine. If all she was doing was complain about 50 Shades of Grey then she has my full support, but I rather suspect that the main thrust of her talk was full on Beyoncé hate, and the general tone anti-sex and anti-feminine.

What we did have was an old school transgender person who tried to troll the talk by nit-picking my use of language and claiming that I was excluding transgender people. There’s lots I could say about this, but I don’t want to bore you with trans community politics. Here are a few quick points.

It is impossible to maintain a rigid separation of meaning between “sex” and “gender” now that “transgender” has become an umbrella term for the whole community and terms like “gender identity” and “gender surgery” are used in talking about transsexuals.

If blurring the line between “sex” and “gender” means that I’m erasing the existence of people who identify as transgender as opposed to transsexual, doesn’t that mean I’m erasing myself as well?

Claiming that I only talked about transsexuals is an outright lie.

I have little time for people who try to police trans identities by insisting on narrow definitions of what it means to be trans and strict language use, and I have absolutely zero time for people who deliberately set out to wreck a trans-positive public event using such tactics.

I’m afraid that the talk wasn’t recorded in full, though I think some of it was videoed. However, my talk at the University of Liverpool from earlier this year is still online.

Several people asked for a reading list, so here it is:

  • The Holdfast Chronicles (Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, The Furies, Conqueror’s Child) – Suzy McKee Charnas
  • The Gate to Women’s Country – Sherri S. Tepper
  • The Female Man – Joanna Russ
  • Triton – Samuel R. Delany
  • Steel Beach – John Varley
  • River of Gods – Ian McDonald
  • Brasyl – Ian McDonald
  • Luna: New Moon – Ian McDonald
  • The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
  • Friday – Robert A. Heinlein
  • The Courier’s New Bicycle – Kim Westwood
  • Shadow Man – Melissa Scott
  • 2312 – Kin Stanley Robinson
  • Shadow Scale – Rachel Hartman
  • Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper – David Barnett
  • Glasshouse – Charles Stross
  • Diaspora – Greg Egan
  • The Jacob’s Ladder trilogy (Dust, Chill, Grail) – Elizabeth Bear
  • The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Wraeththu series – Storm Constantine
  • The Culture series (specifically Consider Phlebas, Excession and The Hydrogen Sonata) – Iain M. Banks
  • The Drowning Girl – Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan
  • All the Birds in the Sky – Charlie Jane Anders (forthcoming)
  • The Rhapsody of Blood series (Rituals, Reflections, Resurrections) – Roz Kaveney
  • Tiny Pieces of Skull – Roz Kaveney
  • The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones – Jack Wolf
  • Books by Billy Martin writing as Poppy Z. Brite
  • Books by Cathy Butler writing as Charles Butler
  • Books by James Dawson
  • Books by Jan Morris (I particularly love Hav)
  • Redefining Realness – Janet Mock
  • Trans: A Memoir – Juliet Jacques
  • Man Enough to be a Woman – Jayne County
  • Nevada – Imogen Binnie
  • The Aleutian Trilogy (White Queen, North Wind and Phoenix Cafe) – Gwyneth Jones
  • The Parasitology Trilogy (Parasite, Symbiont, Chimera (forthcoming)) – Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant
  • Sense 8 (TV series) – Lana & Andy Wachowski & J. Straczynski
  • Comics by Kieron Gillen

Please note that this talk was about how science fiction and fantasy books have speculated about gender. Not all of the books listed above include trans characters, and some that do are problematic in various ways. The Liverpool talk addresses some of those issues. Also I have reviews of many of the books both on this site and at Emerald City. There’s also this essay, which is five years old now and probably needs updating.

The list also includes books by trans authors that may not be SF&F or contain trans characters.

My essay for Strange Horizons on writing better trans characters is here. I also recommend this essay by Vee on The Gay YA.

And finally, for those of you who came to the pub after the talk, the Wonderella cartoon that Kevin sent me that I was so amused by is this one. I am so going to use that head-explody panel in a slide pack at some point.

Thank You, Everyone

~ Cheryl

I’m having a very busy weekend, but before rushing off to Cambridge to do my talk I wanted to say thank you to all of you who signed the Tara Hudson petition. As you may have heard, the Ministry of Justice finally relented and moved Tara to a women’s prison yesterday afternoon. I would not have happened without the thousands of you who signed that petition. Thank you!

Help San José in 2018 Choose Prospective Guests of Honor

~ Cheryl

Worldcons have often been criticized for overlooking potential candidates for Guest of Honor because those making the decision don’t have a broad enough knowledge of the whole field (books, movies, TV, art, comics, you name it, in every country). To counteract this the San José in 2018 team is asking for suggestions for potential Guests of Honor, should they win their bid to host Worldcon.

Worldcon’s Guest of Honor appointments function as a sort of lifetime achievement award for contributors to SF & F literature, arts and the community. SJ in 2018 asks people to send guest recommendations to goh@sjin2018.org, and to include in their recommendation how the candidate meets the basic criteria for consideration and why they think the candidate should be honored.

Recommendations will be accepted through December 15, 2015.

The traditional criteria for Worldcon Guest of Honor consideration are:

  • An established career, usually considered to be 30 years from entry into the field.
  • Current relevance, usually considered to be current activity and notability. In the case of writers, availability of their back catalog in print/distribution is an excellent yardstick.
  • No prior recognition as a Worldcon Guest of Honor (for past guests, see here).

For full details see the SFSFC website.

Tara Hudson – Tomorrow’s Twitter Storm (please RT) #ISeeTara

~ Cheryl

Tara twitter storm

The above is the Twitter storm that we need going between 10:00 and 13:00 UK time tomorrow.

For those of you who can’t see the image, it is: #ISEETARA – WHY DON’T YOU @MOJGOVUK?

(Please note updated Twitter handle for MoJ.)

Oh, and for anyone who doesn’t yet know what this is all about (because I do have an international readership), there’s an explanation here. Tara’s sentence is being appealed at Bristol Crown Court tomorrow and we are very much hoping for a sensible resolution to this travesty of justice.

The Nightmare

~ Cheryl

Jane Fae has been in touch with Tara Hudson’s family and has written a harrowing piece for Gay Star News about what life is like for Tara inside Horfield Prison.

Elsewhere Pink News has the story of an elderly trans woman who is being denied her pension because she didn’t think she needed a Gender Recognition Certificate and so is being treated as a man by the government.

I’m seeing lots of trans people on social media who are very traumatized by the whole thing because they can see this sort of thing happening to them. Personally I’m not doing too bad because my birth certificate does say I’m female. However, I also have personal experience of being victimized by a government bureaucracy that tried me and found me guilty of a crime they won’t even explain to me, let alone allow me to defend myself on.

So here’s what worries me. It is entirely possible that some future government could decide to rescind the Gender Recognition Act and insist that all trans people should go back to living in the gender they were assigned at birth. I don’t think it is likely, but it isn’t impossible either. When I hear politicians saying that they want to scrap the Human Rights Act, this is the sort of thing I expect to come afterwards.

Tara Hudson Support Rally

~ Cheryl

See, I knew I could rely on the Bristol LGBT Community.

There will be a rally tomorrow at Bristol Crown Court. The address is Small St, Bristol BS1 1DA. Please be there from 10:00am onwards if you can.

And film it, people, we are making history here. I want archive material.

Sadly I won’t be there. I have to head to London to do an interview, after which I’m staying with Farah and going on to the Cambridge event on Saturday. But I will be hanging on social media hoping for good news.

Full details of the event are on Facebook.

Update: London folks, rally in support of Tara in Westminster at Noon tomorrow. Details here.

Sanctum Is Here

~ Cheryl

Temple Church, Photo credit: Max McClure

Photo credit: Max McClure

Some time in the next few weeks I will be performing in this building. It is Temple Church in Bristol. Like many local churches it is somewhat the worse for wear, mainly thanks to the Luftwaffe. It is, however, an English Heritage site, and for the next few weeks it will be home to a unique arts event: Sanctum.

The event is the brainchild of American artist, Theaster Gates. For the next 24 days there will be continuous performances — yes even through the night — at the venue. Over 500 artists are involved, including many of my writer friends such as Kevlin Henney, Pete Sutton and Tom Parker. There will also be music, performance, probably magicians and acrobats. Theaster and his team have tried to make things as varied as possible.

One of the conceits of the event is that there is no published program. You turn up for an hour and see what you get. Yes Forrest, just like a box of chocolates. So I can’t tell you when my set will be. However, I do promise to report back on how it goes. I will also be doing some trans-related material, and there is no better time to be doing that in Bristol. I may also have written a fantasy story involving a ruined church.

For further information about the event, see Bristol 24/7.

The Twitter tag for the event is #sanctumbristol.

Cambridge Reminder – Gender in SF&F

~ Cheryl

This Saturday I will be in Cambridge giving a talk titled Challenging the Gender Binary through Science Fiction and Fantasy. The talk will be followed by a conversation between Farah Mendlesohn and myself. Full details here. Farah tells me that they have over 70 bookings, which is very heartwarming. And it is free. If you are anywhere near Cambridge, do come.

Juliet Jacques in Bristol

~ Cheryl

Most of yesterday was spent either on social media or on the phone. It was a relief to have an excuse to get out of the house and go and listen to Juliet Jacques, who was in Bristol as part of the Festival of Ideas. Juliet has a new book out: Trans: A Memoir. Those of you who enjoyed her Transgender Journey columns in The Guardian will love this too. She’s a sharp, incisive and often very witty writer. And she hasn’t done the traditional trans autobiography thing by any means.

My thanks to Juliet for a great evening, and to Andrew and Zoe of the Festival of Ideas for putting on a very successful trans-themed event.

Tara Hudson – A Miracle In Progress

~ Cheryl

Well, what a couple of days this has been!

On the one hand, there is still real worry for Tara. We understand that she is in Horfield Prison. She’s probably being held in solitary confinement for her own safety. It must be awful.

On the other hand, the petition in her support is closing in on 65,000 signatures as I type. In the meantime all of this has happened.

Ben Howlett, the MP for Bath, has been busy pigeonholing his colleagues in the Ministry of Justice and putting pressure on them to do something.

Rather briefly I was down to appear on the BBC’s local news program, Points West. Thankfully for the people of South-West England, they managed to get Ben instead.

I had this article about the flaws in Britain’s gender recognition laws published in Bristol 24/7.

That earned me a phone call with a journalist from the Telegraph, which resulted in this article where CN Lester and I give the existing laws (and the Gender Recognition Panel) a good kicking. Thanks Radhika, great job!

Meanwhile Ben was raising Tara’s case in the latest session of the Transgender Equality Inquiry. I suspect that Caroline Dinenage was very relieved to be able to hide behind an excuse of sub judice. There may be stern words passed down to the Bath magistrates court.

Also Tara’s lawyers have been busy. Her sentence will be appealed. The hearing will be in Bristol Crown Court on Friday. Sadly I’ll be on my way to London then, but I suspect that a large part of the Bristol LGBT community will turn up. I’m leaving this in the capable hands of Ceri Caramél, the remarkable young woman running Tara’s petition, and Daryn Carter of Bristol Pride.

We have no idea how much information is getting into Horfield. Probably not a lot, but hopefully Tara’s lawyers have been in to tell her what is going on. It would not surprise me to see her on national news on Friday. Yesterday I was hoping she’d get moved to a women’s prison. Such is the outpouring of support for her in the country that I’m now hoping that her sentence will be commuted to something non-custodial.

If you want to send a message of support to Tara you can do so here. She can’t get email, obvious, but Ceri and her friends are collecting all of the messages and will deliver them as soon as possible.

When I was a kid my father used to read the Telegraph every day. He gave up on it during Margaret Thatcher’s government because he found it too right wing. And now here I am watching a Tory MP and the Telegraph helping lead a campaign for trans rights. You could knock me down with a feather.

It’s World Fantasy Outrage Season (Again)

~ Cheryl

Today has been pretty much swallowed by the Tara Hudson case, and looks set to continue that way. I’ll update when I can. In the meantime here’s some SF&F content for you.

Last weekend something called the Women’s Freedom Conference was taking place. It looked like a really great event, especially in the support it was giving to trans women of color. But it used the hashtag #WFC2015, which I kept reading as World Fantasy Convention. It was very confusing.

Of course WFC is generally on Hallowe’en weekend, so it will be starting in a few days time. Sadly it doesn’t look anywhere near as much fun. Last night Natalie Luhrs raised the alarm over this year’s WFC’s harassment policy. Outrage ensued, including this magnificent rant from John Scalzi.

Well at least I don’t have to worry about boycotting WFC this year. It’s in the USA, so I can’t go. But it is somehow comforting to see the outrage continuing without me. Were it up to me, my protest would be to have the most amazing cosplay all weekend.

Trans & The Law – Theory & Practice

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I spent this afternoon at a police station in Bristol. Nothing terrible has happened. I was doing trans awareness training for the LGBT Group of Avon & Somerset Police. They are lovely people, all LGB-identified themselves, and very keen to know how they can better help any trans people that they encounter during the course of their work. It is really heartwarming to know that there are friendly, supportive people in the local police force whom I can go to if I am in trouble.

My thanks are due to my pal Annabelle Armstrong-Walter who organized the training and ran the LGB site of things, and the the folks at Diversity Trust through whom I do all of my trans training work.

Coppers the world over seem to be fond of the odd glass of beer, and after the training they dragged me off to the pub. While we were there a very practical example of what I had been talking about turned up. The Bristol Post published this article about a local trans woman who has been sentenced to 12 weeks detention in a male prison. My trainees were uniformly horrified that this could happen, but the case very clearly highlights the shortcomings of UK law on trans issues as it currently stands.

Because most mainstream journalists are clueless when it comes to trans issues the reports in the papers are not a lot of help. Until people get back to work in the morning I won’t know the full facts of the case. However, it is pretty clear that Tara Hudson identifies as a woman, lives as a woman, and has had some medical treatment to help her to do so.

In most cases trans people have no need to make any legal change to their paperwork. You can change your name just by saying you have done so; bank accounts and the like should not require any sort of legal document (though many do and something more official can be obtained very cheaply). However, when it comes to interaction with the legal system, you do have a legal gender. For most purposes that is the gender specified on your birth certificate. That can be changed by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate. If you have not done that, then the courts will still treat you as the gender that you were assigned at birth, no matter how long ago you transitioned or what medical treatment you have had.

The trouble is that the Gender Recognition Act is woefully unfit for purpose. It does nothing for non-binary people or intersex people (neither of whom have any legal existence under UK law); it does nothing for people under the age of 18; and it even fails many people who have transitioned because for various reasons they do not wish, or are unable, to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate.

A large part of the problem is the expense and bureaucratic nightmare involved in making the application. The behavior of the Gender Recognition Panel, a group of cisgender people whose job it is to oversee applications, is also a major problem. I’ve heard horror stories about people having their applications questioned or rejected for fairly trivial reasons.

As I said above, I don’t have the full facts of Tara’s case (in large part because “things written in tabloid newspapers” and “facts” tend to have very little overlap). What I can say is as follows:

1. If Tara does have a Gender Recognition Certificate then the Magistrates’ Court in Bath has made a very serious mistake.

2. The Prison Service is not daft — it has encountered issues like this before — and there are protocols that should be gone through before Tara’s sentence is finalized.

3. Although Tara did plead guilty, it is not clear whether a custodial sentence was mandatory. Given what Tara’s mother has told the press, I’m guessing that Tara’s lawyer did not think it was. This may be another avenue to explore.

I hope to have more to report tomorrow, but it is another busy day as in the evening I have to be at Waterstones in Bristol for Juliet Jacques’ signing tour. I rather suspect that this case will be a topic of conversation there too.

In the meantime, I would be very grateful if as many of you as possible could sign this petition.

It’s Not Your Lawn

~ Cheryl

On Friday Kevin got a bit grumpy with old-time fans who assume that announcements about Worldcon should cater only to Worldcon regulars. Quite right too. If you want a community — any community — to grow and prosper, then you have to encourage new people to get involved. And you won’t get that if all of your communications assume a high level of insider knowledge. The Helsinki Worldcon campaign was a breath of fresh air in the way that it has encouraged new people to become part of the WSFS community. I very much hope that the San José bid continues that process.

Award News from China

~ Cheryl

China’s premier science fiction awards, the Xingyuns, have been announced at a ceremony in Chengdu. They have an interesting set of award categories, including “Best Achievement”. This was won, unsurprisingly, by Liu Cixin for becoming the first Chinese writer to win a Hugo Award. However, there are other categories too. As this China Daily report notes, this year for the first time there was a Xingyun for Best Screenplay. It was won by Of Cloud and Mist, written by Wang Kanyu and Wu Shuang. That may mean nothing to you, but if I were to say Regina Wang and Anna Wu a few light bulbs might come on. Regina in particular has been very active in traveling to Western conventions, including Finnish events and last year’s Worldcon in London. I’m absolutely delighted for her.

Well Done YA Community

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

My Twitter feed is abuzz at the moment because international best-selling YA author, James Dawson, has just come out as trans. Reading the excellent interview on Buzzfeed (well done, Patrick Strudwick), I recognize of lot of the things Dawson says about himself. I wish him the very best of luck on the journey he had just begun.

Dawson explains in the interview that he’s keeping his male name and pronouns for now. He’s only just had his first interview at a gender clinic and there’s a long way to go before he’ll be happy presenting in public as female. However, he’s made the announcement now because, as a very high profile writer, he has a full diary of public engagements stretching well into next year. People will notice the changes as hormones start to work their magic. That’s a really tough gig.

However, looking at Dawson’s Twitter feed, it is just full of people from the YA community making happy, supportive comments. I got quite teary-eyed reading it all. Doubtless the media will soon be full of stories about the threat to Britain’s children, but many people will be far more horrified by that than anything Dawson could do. Slowly but surely, the world is becoming a better place.