UnCommon Sense

Women of the Year

2011-12-30T18:37:00.003+01:00

Looks like it is women who have been the ones taking the lead doing the most courageous, the most daring and the most difficult things for humanity this year

- Mona Seif, for her strident resistance to the Mubarak regime in Egypt

- Pauline Pearce, for telling rioters to go an do something useful and stop rioting

have been two which some journalists have decided to give special mentions to. However I would like to mention some others who I believe deserve as much, if not greater, recognition for their struggles and courage this year.

- Aun Sung Suu Kyi for her continuing struggle and sacrifice,

- Dorli Rainey, the brave octogenarian who was pepper-sprayed by police during an #occupy demo in America, and still came up saying more coherent things than any politician,

- Vandana Shiva for her tireless campaign against economic imperialism by billion-dollar mutinationals in India,

- Professor Diane Ravitch, for her well-supported and reasoned campaign against schools privatisation and "reform" in the US, which has helped inspire resistance to Gove's delierate wrecking of the education system here,

- "Livvy" the brave transgirl who had the courage to face down adults who verbally assaulted her for having the temerity to be herself,

- Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen, the lesbian couple in Norway who risked their lives to save the young people targetted by fascist Breivik

and

- all women protesters this year, who have braved deliberately targetted police brutality in a systematic attempt to intimidating them and others not to protest.

STOP PRESS: I forgot to include Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman who both won the Nobel Peace Prize this year for their work in promoting women's rights in extremely difficult circumstances.

Brave and inspirational women. The nominations for the men of the year, which have hit rock bottom with the inclusion of David Cameron, seem utterly pathetic in contrast.

Cameron’s Europe: Collective Fantasy vs. Reality

2011-12-11T13:25:00.001+01:00

David Cameron’s Idiotic and badly-informeddecision to leave Europe will be bad for the UK in the long run. All of AlexSalmond’s birthdays and Christmasses have come at once, as Cameron’s actions inEurope have greatly increased the likelihood of a “yes” vote to Scottishindependence. Britain’s influence in Europe has been effectively marginalizedand reduced to that of bystander status.

However Eoin Clarke argues that none of this will harm Cameron, and this is important. There are still many thingswhich Britain does not lose from being the Third-Class European, such as freetrade and free movement of UK citizens around the EU, yet this is not the fullstory. Although it is becoming clear that what is left of British business isquite fearful of what Cameron has done.

But nothing will have any short-termeffect; that will come later. It will come through Japanese, Korean andAmerican companies not investing in the UK. The UK will no longer be regardedas a springboard to Europe, and, of course European countries, from Peugeot toVW, are now also much less likely to invest in the UK. It also means that the UK haslost influence in resisting legislation which it considers to be contrary toits interests. The veto has been shown to be worthless, it is influence,alliances and diplomatic engagement which count in the EU. It is here whereCameron has been shown up to be a political lightweight by president Sarkozy.One could not imagine Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major or Margaret Thatcherallowing that to happen.

Yet his misadventure may well play toCameron’s advantage. The right-wing feral media, his own lunatic right and anumber of “think tanks” will hit overdrive in an effort to present this loss as a victory. The City money pouring into Tory Party coffers at the rate of amillion pounds a month will be used ruthlessly by the Tories to present Labourand the Lib Dems as people who would sell out Britain’s interests. The wholeEurophobic culture of the Little Englanders will be ratcheted up in the comingmonths. Indeed Cameron may well use any short-term blip in Tory opinion pollsas an excuse to call a general election which the other parties will not havethe resources to fight, and before the economic consequences of hismisjudgments start to come home to roost. The delusion of British independence will have obscured the harsh realities of an interdependent, globalised world. Exchanging some mythical dictatorship by Brussels for a more real but less visible colonisation by Bejing is the reality. Cameron has truly sold out the national interest for the sake of short-term personal political gain. He will go down in history as one of the worst British prime ministers.

What to watch out for:

Cameron deliberately precipitating ageneral election by forcing the Lib Dems into a position where even they can nolonger compromise. A manufactured election, catching the other parties on thehop and with a huge ratcheting-up in propaganda and right-wing media support,is what we can look forward to. Ed Miliband needs to start becoming morevisible and more vocal. People will still be scared, frightened of the economicconsequences of Cameron’s stupidity, he needs to be seen touring factories andbusinesses which do a lot of business with Europe, to drive that point home orhe will be the first victim of a political ambush.

The Dead Hand of Michael Gove

2011-12-04T12:48:00.001+01:00

I take no pleasure in being right, and Igenuinely hate to say “I told you so.” But I told you so. The latest “fundingagreement” published by the Department for Education sets out conditions forAcademies and “Free” schools to receive funding. Included in those conditionsis the rule that they have to teach the “importance of marriage” over all othertypes of relationship.

This represents the perfect example of whatI said would happen; academies and “free” schools would soon come under the directcontrol of Whitehall. In effect all these schools are now controlled by MichaelGove.

This comes after the incoming Tory-led governmenttold us that these schools would be controlled by local people, and gave us alot of talk about local control of public services, as part of the “big society”.I warned then that the opposite was going to happen. Now parents of children in theseschools will lose control over their child’s school as elected parent governorsare replaced by those appointed by the private company or group of religiouszealots which controls the school. But, in a double whammy to local democraticcontrol, the dead hand of Michael Gove now hangs over every “free” school andacademy in the country, as he dictates what can and cannot be taught in thoseschools. Local control has been replaced by the Stalinist control of one of themost partial and extremist members of the 1%.

The result of this is nothing less than aslimmed-down, dumbed-down, rigid and uninspiring curriculum imposed on ourchildren and a sustained effort on the part of Gove to reintroduce the homophobic Section 28 through the back door.

The Tories, especially Michael Gove, were fond of describing the local control of schools as the "dead hand of local authority control". This has always been a myth, eagerly propagated by the 1%-controlled media. Local authority schools have always been independently run, with parents having a majority on the governing body. I know I have served as a school governor, an elected one not an appointed one. Now these schools will be controlled by people appointed by, guess who? Yes, representatives of the 1%. The 1% who have wrecked our economy, are now in control of a large chunk of the nation's schools...

My “Sneaky” Response to Mish

2011-12-01T00:33:00.001+01:00

Mish seems to engage in what many people dowhen they can’t win an argument; putting words into their opponents’ mouths.This is similar to Dreger’s manufacturing of a mythical group of trans peoplewho are apparently trying to force children to become transsexual against theirwill. Mish also appears to deliberately obscure issues;

“Theseresearchers are refuted by positing there is a significant number ofproto-trans kids who never reveal themselves as children, or are not brought tothe attention of researchers (while it is only kids who are not who do,apparently…). Really? Is this like all the adults who were really happy withgenital surgery as kids, but never actually come forward to confirm this?”

…and in doing so appears deliberately andhighly disingenuously to confuse trans children with intersex children. Shealso fails to mention that the other reason I have suggested that this “research”is questionable in its validity.

She continues in the same vein;

“Or, maybe they just found evidence for something that a lot ofpeople who aren’t transsexual seem to be well aware of – that most kids who gothrough this kind of thing do not end up transsexual. But because of who theyare, and because we don’t like their conclusions, we are going to put them allin the transphobic bucket and ignore them – and call anybody who dares cite anyof their findings a transphobe too. Wow! Neat system dude”

…providing no evidence whatsoever that the implicationsof my empirical research are not true. I suspect she intends to suggest fromthis that I am accusing the researchers, which Dreger doesn’t actually quote,of being transphobes. This is another example of her putting words into mymouth, as I have said, a classic strategy for people who are unable to make acoherent argument to support their case. I have suggested, as have many others,that these “researchers” use psychological torture in the form of “reparative”therapy on trans children, and that they have a pecuniary interest in the outcomeof their research, which, in my view, significantly undermines the validity oftheir findings.

In fact Shannon Minter (1999) carried out a detailed study ofthe “research” carried out by the psychiatrists comprising the InvisibleCollege and demonstrated that their research findings contradict both eachother and themselves. Their data has never, to my knowedge, been made availableto any kind of external audit; indeed there is quite a wide variation in thepercentages they claim as if they are grabbing numbers out of thin air. As such Dreger’s claims are based onunvalidated data from people whose research has been shown to be muddled and whomay benefit financially from demonstrating that most trans children becomenon-trans adults. That is the point I made. Others have also questioned thevalidity of this data, suggesting that these trans children may well have notbeen “cured” but have simply decided to pretend that they have to avoid more“treatment”. To suggest that I accused these researchers of transphobia,however, is a lie.

Mish continues;

“yourepeated what Dreger said herself – sneaky.”

So, quoting someone else is “sneaky”. Iguess the whole output of pretty much every academic and journalist over thelast few centuries must be “sneaky” in that case. Once again these are thetactics of someone whose argument fails to stand up.

“Yousee, another writer might say “Dreger makes clear that the analogy is weak,because people cannot be trains, and do grow up transgender, and do have genderidentities” – but you don’t do that, you say Dreger is transphobic, becausepeople cannot be trains, and do grow up transgender, and do have genderidentities – so she is transphobic for saying what you said, except that shesaid it first.”

Again my mouth is full of Mish’s words. Idid not say that Dreger is transphobic because, after she wrote about the boywanting to believe he is a train, she said that this was a false analogy. I amsaying she is a transphobe because she included the story about the train. Ifthe story of the boy who wants to be a train is not relevant why did sheinclude it? However, and this is important, and I am glad Mish brought this up;she has missed a crucial difference between what I said and what Dreger saidabout this analogy. This is what Dreger said;

“letme be clear that I don't think being a transgender adult is like being a childwho imagines he is a locomotive.”

Read it carefully, Dreger is NOT sayingthat a child who wants to be a locomotive is different from a child who says heor she is a different gender. She is saying that the child who wants to be a trainis different from an ADULT trans person. In other words she is not comparinglike with like. IMO this is significant and represents a deliberate attempt toavoid being labeled transphobic whilst being transphobic. The only way this canbe read is that she is therefore equating a child assigned female at birth butwho says he is a boy with a child who says he is a locomotive. I am saying thatDreger is a transphobe because the only inference that can be made from thissection is that she equates train-boy’s desires with those of trans children.She may be attempting to disguise it with carefully-chosen words but this womanhas a PhD, and people with PhD’s are used to being very careful with words.

IncidentallyMish later accuses me of generalizing from the particular to the general (whichI don’t, read it carefully), whereas Dreger is clearly doing just that by usingthis anecdote.

In fact Dreger quite obviously uses theanalogy to suggest that trans children’s desires are the same as the fantasiesof the train-boy, only she chooses to do that in a particularly underhand way.

Predictably for someone who appears not tohave read the article or my response to it very closely, Mish also lectures meabout listening; “It is time you startedlistening to people like Dreger, and dealing with what they actually say, whenthey have something reasonable to say – instead of just demonising them astransphobic and hoping that will get you off the hook of having to actuallydeal with what they are saying.”

I have engaged closely with what Dreger issaying, and my accusation of transphobia is not made lightly. I have explainedexactly why I think she is transphobic above and also because of the way sheconsiders transsexual surgery to be the worst possible outcome, whilst anyother outcome is OK. This is remarkably similar to the thinking ofRaymond/Jeffries.

Here Mish contradicts herself;

“Sheconsiders an outcome that involves surgery is not the best possible outcome –hey, guess what, so do I.”

“Sayingthere are people who do not have to have transsexual sex reassignment surgeryin order to deal with gender dysphoria is not transphobic. It is not saying oneis better than the other.”

She also comes out with this;

“Itis saying that people are different – diversity, remember?”

… whilst at the same time suggesting, in a kindof sweeping generalization that;

“non-surgeryis preferable to surgery, if at all possible.”

Again there areplenty of trans people who would disagree with this. I know one who is awaitingsurgery right now and is desperate to have GRS so that she can get on with herlife. How much longer, under whatever Mish system she would like to seecreated, would she have to wait before assorted shrinks have a go at making herchange her mind? One “therapist”, Az Hakeem, recently suggested that “years” ofpsychiatric therapy could “cure” transsexuals. I fail to see how years ofmessing with someone else’s mind is better than a relatively short time in anoperating theatre. If I was given the choice I would rather people do things tomy body than to my mind any day.

Mish again;

“–because surgery is surgery, it involves putting people under anesthetic andcutting them up, as opposed to leaving them alone.”

A disingenuous assertion. The alternativeto surgery is usually years of psychiatric treatment, not “leaving them alone.”She goes on…

“Itis like thinking that liposuction is not the best approach to losing weight,but that does not mean I’m ‘fattist’, far from it.”

Words fail me; gender reassignment surgeryis equated with liposuction.

Mish adds the following;

“Atno point does she imply these surgeries are being forced on children againsttheir will. So, it seems it is you who is being disingenuous.”

Dreger’s article however says this;

“I amalso sick and tired of trans-rights advocates acting like a certain current-dayendocrinologist is ever-so-progressive because he essentially starts preppinggenderqueer kids for surgery the moment they are presented by their distraughtparents.”

On this subject Mish has this to say;

“Theonly people I hear arguing they should be medicalised and given endocrinedisrupting drugs in preparation for a delayed puberty which will be inducedusing sex steroids in alignment with SRS, are some transsexual adults &activists, some physicians, and some parents. I do not hear many cis-genderedpeople demanding kids be treated – normalised – this way”

A desperate argument. Why should anyone whois not involved in trans activism, a physician dealing with trans children, orthe parent of a trans child, be arguing for this treatment? However Iparticularly find problematic the way she uses the word “normalized” here. Thisseems to be done in the same way that pathologizing psychiatrists did as theypositioned trans children in particular, and trans people in general, aspassive objects with no preferences, agency or desires of their own. Theinference being that trans people are passive objects being subject to andmanipulated by others. Something Sandy Stone demonstrated as long ago as 1992to be the fiction of certain “radical” feminist transphobe. This really doesshow how much further trans people have to go, before the rest of societyconsiders us people rather than objects.

What my research, as well as that ofShannon Wyss, Surya Monro and the writing of Cris Beam, does is show that transchildren are active agents who make decisions about their own lives, usually invery difficult situations, they are human beings with agency, their own minds,and their own feelings.

But the most dishonest aspect of bothDreger’s article and the response to it is the elephant in the room, which shefinally can’t resist mentioning; hormone blockers. That is the differencebetween my position and that of Dreger. When she says “let the children alone”she isn’t just talking about 5 or 6 year olds, which might appear to be thecase from the story of the locomotive-boy with which she starts the article. No, what I suspect she really means, and the article makes no sense otherwise,is; “Don’t give trans adolescents hormone blockers.” I am particularly gladMish made this connection; it brings everything out into the open.

Teenagers and toddlers are very different. Oneof the particularly misleading things opponents of hormone blockers tend to inferis that they somehow have an inevitability about them. They do not. Hormoneblockers are entirely reversible, and are given to trans adolescents, after thestart of puberty, in order to give them the breathing space they need. This cansave transboys from suffering the trauma (and physical discomfort) ofdeveloping breasts, and having periods, and transgirls from having to deal withunwanted erections, wet dreams, a deepening voice and facial hair. If transteenagers change their minds they simply stop taking them and puberty in thegender they were originally assigned at birth commences.

Mish’s suggestion that they are givenhormone blockers to help them pass better as adults is, of course only a smallpart of the story, but I am sure readers are getting used to this sort of distortionby now. In fact, other than saving young trans people from the trauma ofpuberty in a body with which they do not identify, hormone blockers are also prescribedbecause they can result in transsexuals having less surgery (something one would have expected Mish, from what shehas said, to support). Transmen may not require double mastectomies, transwomenwill not need extensive hair removal and are much less likely to need anyfacial feminization surgery or treatment to prevent scalp hair loss.

However the assumptions she makes in thestatement “The argument is that otherwisehealthy kids will be given hormone blockers” represents everything whichappalls me about her arguments. This statement effectively dismisses thefeelings of trans children. Children who are tormented or traumatised by beingborn in the wrong body may appear physically well but are unlikely to be havinga good time mentally. A sound physical body does not necessarily make a healthychild. This effectively represents an erasure of trans children’s lived experience.Trans people are usually born with bodies that have nothing physically wrongwith them; trans people manifest no physiological signs that they are trans,that is the problem. Convincing adults that they are trans represents theironly option. If the adults around them are constantly equating theirself-perceptions with much younger children who think they are trains theirproblems multiply. The way these children’s feelings are dismissed in this way issomething I find particularly unacceptable.

Deliberately Disingenuous Dreger

2011-11-29T17:18:00.001+01:00

Alice Dreger's spectacularly appalling article published in an issue of a journal edited by a known transphobe has IMO shown her up to be exactly what she claims she is not; a transphobe. I hope I am wrong about this but there are so many things wrong with this article that it is as difficult to draw any different conclusion as it is to know where to start.

So I will start at the beginning. Although she claims she does not intend it to be analogous to trans people, she uses a story of a very young boy who, we are told, believed he was a railway locomotive, using this story to suggest that children who believe they are the other gender are engaging in similar games or childish make-believe. This is an appalling start to a truly vicious and deliberately misleading article about trans children. The idea that a child who claims he is an inanimate object is equivalent to one who claims he or she is a different gender of the same species is simply not comparing like with like. A person who is assigned a gender at birth that is different from that with which they identify is asserting their right of self-identification as a human being, not playing engaging in harmless childish play. A train is not a person, therefore a person who says they are a train is not to be taken seriously because an inanimate object does not have the capacity for self-determination or the ability to express an identity of any kind. A girl trapped in a boy's body, on the other hand, does have this ability. As such her allusion fails, it is one which has been employed over and over again by transphobes, and one I regularly have to deal with. The fact that it is being used by someone who claims not to be a transphobe is neither here nor there.

However Dreger's argument is based on many more false premises and untruths than that. The first of which being her reliance on evidence which supposedly shows that gender variant children most often grow up not to be trans adults.

“Most transgender activists do not want to hear that most children with gender dysphoria end up nontransgender; they want transgender to be understood as a biological, permanent, unchangeable, acceptable, natural variation.”

She provides us with a link to the evidence. Unfortunately this link only sends us to another paper she has written which asserts this but provides us with no links or references to any empirical research that provides evidence to back up her claim. Now we have all been guilty of referencing our own work, but when I do that I link it to something which supports the assertion I am trying to make with empirical evidence, rather than simply me asserting the same thing with no supporting evidence. Indeed, if Dreger were writing this as an academic paper rather than a piece of journalism for an editor claimed by many in the trans community to be trans community to be a transphobe, she would be guilty of an academic crime.

The problem for Dreger is that the evidence that the majority of trans children grow up to be non-trans is weak to put it mildly, it is highly contested, mostly carried out by individuals who have a pecuniary interest in exaggerating the results, and my own research has suggested that it is based on skewed and unreliable sampling. This research is largely carried out by psychiatrists belonging to what Ansara & Hegarty (2011) describe as an “invisible college”, a group who cite each other in order to make their own work appear more important that it really is. The problem for this research is that it is carried out on a sample that probably comprises less than 5% of trans children. This is because they only study what I have termed “apparent” trans children, and do not account for the other 95% who do not make themselves known to any adult as trans (I have called them “non-apparent” trans children). Further, the sampling is likely to be further distorted by some parents deciding not to take their trans child to a psychiatrist, or who take them to one which is not known or suspected to practice “reparative” therapy (ie psychological torture) on these children. It is also likely that any child who is becomes a victim of “reparative” therapy will pretend to be cured in order to get the shrink in question out of their lives. Some sociologists are currently following up former patients (“victims” would be a more accurate description) of these “psychologists” to find out if this is the case. I look forward to their report.

We do not have to look far to find empirical evidence that young trans people are active agents in concealing their gender identities from adults, Shannon Wyss’s (2004) careful and detailed research confirms this.

One of the most serious inferences from this article is that trans people are trying to prevent children who might otherwise grow up or identify as “genderqueer” or some other non-transsexual variant, from expressing gender variant natures. Of course no evidence is put forward by Dreger to support this contention. Unfortunately for Dreger, there is evidence to suggest that those who force genderqueer kids into making a gender binaried choice are not trans people, but cisgender people. Brill and Pepper’s (2008) wonderful book about transgender children describes what happened to Marlow/Marla. Marlow was a boy who liked to have a female appearance, including wearing dresses, who played with “girls’” toys and engaged in “girls’” activities. However he was still very clear about the fact that he was a boy and went to school calling himself Marlow and insisting that male pronouns be used about him. He soon found that he was subject to the most severe bullying, mostly exclusion bullying, by the other children, and suffered greatly. He subsequently agreed, at the suggestion of his teachers, to adopt a female name and be called “she”. He didn’t like this but went along with it and the bullying was greatly reduced. In Marlow’s case no trans person was forcing him into the gender binary, the cisgender children and teachers in his school were.

So Dreger has produced no evidence that trans people are forcing gender variant children into a transsexual gender binary position, yet I have produced evidence to demonstrate that cisgender people do. The experience of Marlow is far from unique, I have recently spoken to the mother of a trans child in the UK who had a very similar experience.

Dreger’s reference to the Samoan Fa’fa’fine is particularly worrying. Although these people are permitted in Samoan culture they are subject to serious restrictions on their roles within society, as are many other third gender individuals, so for her to advocate this as a cultural model in the West would effectively mean allowing genderqueer/non-binary people to exist but to greatly restrict the jobs they can do and the roles they can play in society including restrictions on their sexuality and marriage rights. In the West we have trans academics, teachers, lawyers, pilots, musicians, etc. In fact we have trans people of many different sexualities and in any number of different jobs, including, in Poland, a member of parliament.

The whole tone of Dreger’s piece seems to me to position any outcome which involves transsexual surgery as worse than any which does not. In reality an outcome which includes surgery is a very good outcome if you are a transsexual. Ask any transsexual and they will tell you that the path to obtaining the surgery they need is a long one and one filled with obstacles. To suggest, as she does, that this is an outcome which is being forced onto children against their will is simply to ignore reality.

It seems to me that on this point Dreger’s position is little different from that of Janice Raymond or Sheila Jeffries; two notorious “radical” feminist transphobes who have both advocated hate-crimes against transsexuals, whilst being less concerned about non-transsexual trans people. If this is the case Dreger appears to be advocating little more than a less unsubtle version of this “rad” fem hatred.

Her conclusion, to leave gender variant children alone and allow them to freely express their gender-variant nature is the correct one, however we should be clear about where the responsibility for pressure to conform to the gender binary is coming from, and it is not coming from any trans activists, it is coming from ordinary cisgender people.

Trans People on the Pinklist 2011. Who are they?

2011-10-25T11:25:00.000+02:00

It has been wonderful to see seven trans people appearing in the Independent On Sunday’s Pinklist of top LGBT people in the country. Firstly, it needs to be said that this increase has largely been due to the efforts of one young lady; Paris Lees, one of the leading lights in Trans Media Watch and editor of the imminent Meta Magazine. So the first thing is to give Paris a big mention. Although I do not know all of these people, I am acquainted to various extents with 5 of them; Sarah Brown, Christine Burns, Jay Stewart, Roz Kaveney and Bethany Black, so I thought I would write a little about them in hopefully not merely a dry factual account (if you want that Wikipedia is the place) but from the perspective of having known these people.

Sarah Brown
Sarah is only the second trans person in the UK to be openly elected as a trans person. She was elected Cambridge City Councilor in May 2010. She has survived and prospered despite initially coming in for a lot of criticism by many other trans people on the left (myself included) for her support for the coalition government. It is important not to underestimate Sarah’s achievement, although there have been other trans people elected to office, including the mayor of Cambridge, Sarah is the second openly trans person in the UK to be elected anywhere. This may not sound much of an achievement compared with other trans politicians that have been elected in other countries; New Zealand, Italy and most recently Poland have elected trans MPs in their national parliaments, and in Tokyo (more populous than many countries) Aya Kamikawa has been a city councilor since 2003.
The difference for Sarah, and to underline her achievement, is that all these people have been elected on list systems, not under systems where individual candidates represent individual wards or constituencies as in the UK. The UK system is dramatically harder for minorities like trans people to break into, since trans people can represent a significantly higher risk, from a party point of view, as people vote for individuals rather than parties. If trans people were truly represented in proportion to our numbers in the population there would be 200 councilors and 6 MPs who are trans.
Sarah’s emotional speech at the Liberal Democrat Party Conference in 2010 about how she was forced to divorce her wife and remarry in a civil partnership after her gender reassignment may have been one of the contributory factors to current proposals to extend the right to marry to same-sex couples.

Christine Burns MBE
Christine is a grandmother, a diversity expert in matters relating to the NHS and now mentors younger trans human rights campaigners. She was instrumental in the successful campaign by Press For Change, to achieve legal recognition for transsexual people in 2004 and has contributed immeasurably to helping trans people in the UK and around the world in their struggles for the human rights which most other people take for granted. Although she is no longer engaged in frontline activism, she still does a great deal of work behind the scenes and her advice has helped younger trans activists achieve some of the subsequent gains for trans people. She was one of the prime movers behind Press For Change’s successful campaign to introduce the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, a landmark piece of legislation which has resulted in huge improvements in the lives of all trans people.
For me she was the main motivation to become a trans activist after I saw her speak in the summer of 2007, at the Trans With Pride conference in Bethnal Green. In her speech she noted how, despite the gains made for transsexuals in the Gender Recognition Act, those trans people who did not have gender reassignment surgery could still be lawfully discriminated against. Since then she has helped me and countless others with advice and contacts as we campaign to improve things for trans people. An example of this has been the recent decision by Charing Cross gender identity clinic, to allow referrals for young trans people 6 months before their 18th birthday to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in treatment for them and no interruption in support for them as they transfer from child to adult support services.
Christine’s blog, Just Plain Sense is one of the most popular and respected blogs about trans and diversity issues.

Jay Stewart
Jay is co-founder of Gendered Intelligence, a pioneering organization which has worked very successfully to improve the lives of young trans people and others. Recently he has become a father, which has added a great deal of pressure to his already very busy schedule. He organizes events through Gendered Intelligence, which often involve using creativity as a means of helping trans people express themselves and become more confident. Gendered Intelligence also provides diversity training in the area of gender variance with schools, colleges and universities and has collaborated with a number of other trans organisations.
Jay, currently completing a PhD in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, has campaigned for trans people’s rights and was a past chair of FTM London. As organizer of the annual Trans Community Conference Jay has contributed to a bringing together of the trans community in a way which has been inclusive of younger trans people and their parents, something which is particularly important given their virtual erasure from public view as they conceal their gender identities out of fear of bullying or victimization. Gendered Intelligence has also pioneered a trans youth group in London which, until recently was run by a full-time fully trained youth worker, who also provided outreach training to others running trans youth groups around the country. This is a huge, and particularly positive step and has doubtless improved the lives of many trans people, helping them at a particularly difficult point in their lives. It has been particularly heartening to see how Jay has kept this valuable resource going despite numerous challenges and setbacks, and at a time when he is also doing a PhD and has a young family. An example to many of us in the trans community for his dedication, tenacity and organizational skills, the only thing I do not understand is why he was not in the PinkList list earlier.

Roz Kaveney
A feminist and a graduate of Oxford Roz transitioned from male to female in 1979, at a time when the prevailing received feminist wisdom was that being transsexual represented a false consciousness. This was the year that the famously hateful and misleading book by Janice Raymond, “The Transsexual Empire” was published which Roz reviewed in Gay News, a publication for which she was already working. Despite receiving for this what has now come to be a predictable volley of abuse from sections of the feminist community, Roz has always considered feminist scholarship an important part of her career. She was an advisory reader for Virago womens’ press and worked on numerous reference works such as the Cambridge Guide to Women Writing in English. She is still a thorn in the side of those feminists who despite describing themselves as “radical” harbour quite vicious hatred of trans people. Indeed her critiques of radical feminist transphobia have contributed to the marginalization of such views and raised the confidence of the trans community in the face of what has seems to have become an irrational and misguided hatred.
In a career which has also spanned journalism, as a reviewer for the Independent and the Times Literary Supplement and a commentator on Culture and Religion for the Guardian, she has also written for the New Statesman. Roz has also been very active in politics, becoming Deputy Chair of Liberty as a result of her work with Feminists Against Censorship, an organization she co-founded.
Roz has contributed to a great deal to the campaigns for trans human rights over the years. As a representative of the Gender and Sexuality Alliance she sat on the committee, with Christine Burns and Stephen Whittle, which negotiated the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.
Her belief in solidarity and respect in gender and sexuality reflected this in her scholarship in the area of pop culture in her insistence that the same levels of seriousness be applied to pop culture as “high” culture. It is most notable that throughout her diverse career her work has led to the normalization of the presence trans people in areas such as feminist scholarship, literary criticism and politics.

Bethany Black
Like many trans people Bethany struggled with life when she was young, and her attempts to commit suicide, her struggle with drug and alcohol addiction and having to come out to her family twice; as trans and as a lesbian, are sadly, things which many trans people will feel all too familiar. It seems however that these experiences gave her the strength and tenacity to make a career in the tough world of stand-up comedy where she is now the country’s only “Goth, lesbian, transsexual, stand-up comedian.” Despite the inevitable knock-backs and struggles to gain recognition and work on the stand-up circuit Bethany has thrived and forged a career in this challenging line of work since leaving university and undergoing gender reassignment surgery, describing her life as getting “better and better” since then. Her biggest influence in comedy was Josie Long, who demonstrated to her that not all comedians have to be older people. She started as a compere for a music club in Preston but the hostile reaction there did not prevent her from moving onto actual comedy clubs. She was eventually a finalist in the Funny Bones New Comedian of the Year Competition 2006 and the Chortle Student Comedy Awards 2007, and was nominated for “best debut” award in the Leicester Comedy Festival 2008.
Bethany is however also planning and looking forward to the future with a possible adaptation of her “Beth Becomes Her” show for TV and has co-founded Funny’s Funny, a group which plans to provide a free-entry comedy competition for female comedians.
It is good to see her active in promoting opportunities for women comedians since stand-up comedy, like most areas of the media and show-biz, is very male dominated. The only time I ever met Bethany was as a fellow panelist for a discussion organized by the first Bristol Pride committee. Her story about how she came out to her mother being particularly vivid. She described how her mother reacted, and how, despite having never been parted from her husband for more than a couple of days since they were married, she would have been prepared to leave him if necessary in order to support Bethany. Why other parents of trans people cannot give that level of unconditional love to their children is a mystery to me. An example of Bethany’s stand-up routine is available here. (look out for the joke about .pdf files, that had me rolling on the floor)

Finishing with Bethany Black represents the clearest example of why I believe these five people have made the 2011 Pinklist. Talent and quality. These people are good at what they do regardless of their gender identities. The right-wing media may describe the Pinklist as just “PCGM” (Political Correctness Gone Mad), but the PCGM brigade ignore the fact that these people are genuinely talented people who have made successful careers in their fields despite, not because, of their gender identities, unlike right-wing journalists who tend to have obtained employment because of their politics rather than their journalistic skill. This is why they are in the Pinklist and why they deserve to be there and deserve to be recognized as having made significant contributions to the life of the country as well as to raising awareness of trans people. Trans people are not just trans people, they are writers, diversity experts, politicians, scholars, parents, comedians, teachers, lawyers journalists, etc. Trans people are people and their inclusion on the Pinklist is a recognition of that and by proxy, a recognition of the entire trans coimmunity.

Getting trans people elected….

2011-10-14T12:43:00.002+02:00

The UK is supposed to have one of the most trans-friendly legal systems in the world these days, yet we seem to be a long way behind the rest of the world in terms of having trans people elected. We represent 1% of the population and so there should therefore be at least 6 trans MPs in the House of Commons, one trans MEP some of the time in the UK section of the European Parliament, and a massive 200 trans local councillors across the country.The current total representation of trans people in elected positions is however, way below that; we have just one local councillor; the wonderful Sarah Brown, who sits as a Lib Dem on Cambridge City Council.Sarah’s achievement is particularly good when the treatment of trans people generally is considered, however as a country we are doing much less well than many other countries. The news that Poland elected its first trans MP was particularly pleasing since there appears to have been trouble with homophobia and transphobia in the recent past in Poland. However there have also been trans people elected to national governments in Italy and New Zealand, there has been a senior trans politician elected in Hawaii, and there is a long-serving Tokyo City councillor for Setagaya ward in Tokyo; a city with a population greater than that of Holland. Indeed Aya Kamikawa, is currently the longest serving elected trans official, having been first elected in 2003, and subsequently re-elected, something which no trans politician has ever achieved to date.So how why is our representation on elected bodies so low in the UK when trans people in other countries are being elected to more senior political positions? The answer lies, I believe, in the electoral systems. The UK mostly relies on First-Past-The-Post for elections, which means that people vote for individuals rather than parties. With the exception of Hawaii (where trans people are accepted to a much greater extent than most countries) Poland, Italy and Japan all use party list systems. This means that people vote for parties rather than individuals. The problem with voting for individuals is that, especially in closely-fought electoral contests, where the result really matters parties are reluctant to put forward candidates who might alienate enough voters to give the seat to a competitor. Parties are therefore likely to be much less willing to have a trans candidate where a cisgender candidate is available. Where a contest is likely to be personalised, where people are voting for a candidate as much as a party, the personal becomes more important, and even if only a relatively small number of people change their votes as a result of transphobia, that would be enough to make a difference in a large number of cases. The personalisation of politics also results in the media taking a greater interest in individual candidates rather then their policies and party lines, which could mean that electoral contests attract unwelcome attention from the Daily Mail, the Express, the Sun and other sensationalist right-wing media, which could have implications for the party across the country.The solution then, to getting more trans people into elected positions in the UK, is to concentrate them in the small number of elections where party lists, or top-up lists are in operation; the London Assembly and the European elections, here total party votes count and the direct link between a candidate and a particular seat extends through their party rather than a particular geographical area. The First-Past-The-Post system has not only saddled the country with a corrupt, incompetent, dishonest and destructive government, but also has the effect of reducing diversity in elected positions; this is particularly the case for minorities, like LGBT people, who tend not to be concentrated in particular geographical areas in the same way that ethnic minority populations are. The result is a government drawn mostly from wealthy male privately-educated Oxbridge graduates, and the disastrous policies which have flowed from such an out-of-touch group of people.

Facebook: a manipulation too far.

2011-09-26T00:28:00.005+02:00

If you go to "Help" on Facebook and "Basics" and "News Feed Basics" you will find the following piece of information in their FAQ;

"How does News Feed determine which content is most interesting?

The News Feed algorithm bases this on a few factors: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is..."

The key word here is "determined"; a euphemism for "Decided."

In other words, a computer somewhere in Facebookland, controlled by Mark Zuckerberg, is deciding what appears in your news feed.

Not you.

Zuckerberg.

If the government decided that only phone calls, letters, newspaper reports, TV programmes, songs and radio news reports which were vetted by a computer algorithm it controlled could be seen by you, it would be described as Orwellian, and it would be; by the time it happened we would have already been taken over by a totalitarian state.

So how come no-one minds when a private company does this? State censorship is state censorship, private censorship is "just business..."

In fact on other websites people are used to being able to control what they see and how it functions, being able to control all sorts of settings. This control has largely been removed by Facebook, it is now a much more centralised, top-down, regimented outfit than it was in the past. Doubtless this controlling centralisation will be refined further until you only see posts which mention certain brands or which contain no political (or politically left-wing) content. This is something which will start to become frustrating for Facebook users, especially now those randon, throw-away one-liner conversations which made social networking a pleasure now seem to have become a thing of the past.

I'm starting to migrate onto Google+ for the moment, which at least isn't trying to impose its own thought control on me, I suspect someone with a bit of technical skill and an element of opportunist entrepreneurship will find the niche in the market for a social networking site that lets users control what they see, when how and in what order...

Zuckerberg has ended up destroying the goose that layed the golden egg; he will end up with a meaningless, over commercialised sanitised social network which bores more and more people until only the mindless use it, the rest of us will have gone elsewhere...

Breakdown of who has set up the first "free" schools.

2011-08-29T23:24:00.008+02:00

• Religious 9

• “charitable” trust in chains with academies 3

• Ex private school 3

• Private company 2

• No information 2

• Community 2

• Teacher 1

• “journalist” 1

• “Asian Trade Link” 1*

* Asian Trade Link claims to be a 'community organisation' It is suggested by local press that it will not have any premises available by the start of the school year

Propaganda in the media asserts that they are being "set up by teachers, charities, education experts and parents." yet only one is set up by a teacher, three by parents three by companies describing themselves as "charitable trusts" and none at all by education experts. This makes a total of seven out of 24 which are set up by the groups the propaganda machine is telling us are setting them up.

In contrast to the propaganda three are simply former private schools getting taxpayers' funding, two are being run by private companies and a whopping nine are religious. Despite the fact that these three groups of schools make up more than half of the total number of "free" schools they are not included in the headline description. (In fact the three set up by "charitable trusts" are effectively run by private companies in all but name). I know I have worked for one of them in the past.

Once again the media has (willingly?) allowed itself to be duped into making it look like "free" schools are riding a wave of parental activism, when in fact only three out of 24 are. It is time for the media to stop swallowing press releases about education without doing some proper journalism first.

Ed Media Watch's first engagement with the press over biased educational journalism - in the Guardian!

2011-08-29T12:03:00.002+02:00

Dear Chris Elliott,

I am writing as founder member of Education Media Watch, a new group forming to respond to the high level of misrepresentation and one-sidedness about education issues in the media. We are a group of educationists, teachers and parents who are working to challenge reports in the media which present one-sided stories about the education system. I have to admit I did not expect to have to write to you about a Guardian article so soon.

The article in question is this;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/aug/28/first-24-free-schools

This is an article which represents exactly the kind of thing Ed Media watch is being set up to deal with; it presents 'Free' schools effectively from Michael Gove's perspective as though they are not controversial. It appears to have been 'churnalised' from AP and includes figures in support of the idea by the government but nothing from those opposed to free schools (a considerable number of people, particularly teachers).

In fact the figures quotes by the government at the end of the article referring to Charter Schools in New York, which are what 'free' schools are modelled on, are highly misleading and mask a high degree of selectivity in New York schools in relation to non-charter schools.

For example; although they tout an 86% catch-up with "schools in the wealthiest suburbs" in Maths and a 66% catchup in English these statistics appear to have been manipulated Chuchillian-style to be highly misleading. In fact although just over half (51%) produced gains in maths, only 29% produced gains in reading. In other words nearly half produced no significant improvements in maths and 71% no gains in reading. Nationally in the US, only 14% of charter schools have better results than local schools compared with 37% doing worse than local schools and 46% the same.

These phantom 'improvements' in school results in New York have come about despite huge funding imbalances which Joel Klein (now working for Rupert Murdoch) managed to engineer which has also resulted in resources being taken away from local schools and given to charters, this has resulted in smaller class sizes and other material advantages for children in charters. In addition charters take a lower percentage of children with special needs, a lower percentage of children for whom English is an additional language, and a lower percentage of hispanic and immigrant children, when compared with New York City averages. The imbalance in these figures is even higher when compared to local schools situated near the charters.

I could quote more data about charter schools in the US and in NYC in particular which provide substantial evidence that on average charter schools are failing in the US and failing despite being given huge increases in resources, money which, if it had been invested in normal local schools, would almost certainly have produced significant gains accross the board. For data supporting the figures I have presented here, and further information demonstrating that the assumptions implicit and explicit in the article are neither uncontraversial nor correct please refer to the links below;

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/01/13/2010-01-13_new_york_city_charter_schools_need_to_focus_on_the_neediest.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/09/27/2009-09-27_the_charter_school_problem_results_are_much_less_positive_than_a_new_study_sugge.html

I feel that the publication of this article (I don't know whether this was just online or in the print version) displayed a high degree of bias, largely by omission, but also presented the issue of 'free' schools as uncontroversial, when it is, in fact highly controversial. I also feel that this article represented the worst type of churnalism, which is something I have come to expect the Guardian not to indulge in.

I would like to ask that someone is given the space to respond to this article. I know it sounds odd to say 'respond' in relation to an article which is a report rather than an opinion piece but education news reports have become so one-sided and selective in their content (and here I am referring to the media as a whole, not just the Guardian) that articles like this are effectively opinion pieces in that they promote on particular view of the events to which they refer. In addition I would like to know why comments were not enabled for this article, and the contact details of the journalist or member of editorial staff who included the article. The article has no byline, merely saying it came from PA. It is Education Media Watch's policy to engage in a dialogue with journalists and editors when reports like this appear, to point out errors such as those apparent in this article and suggest how they might improve their own and their organisation's coverage of education issues in future. As such I would also like to ask for contact details of the individual responsible for the appearance of this piece such that we can ensure he/she is aware of the issues and able to make better journalistic decisions in the future.

Kind regards,

Natacha Kennedy

The Conservative Party Descends into Barbarism.

2011-08-13T11:01:00.004+02:00

Possibly the most illiberal jurisdictions in the world are now North Korea and Wandsworth, south London. Why? They both impose punishments on the families of lawbreakers.

It has been well documented that the world’s only remaining Stalinist government punishes the relatives of those convicted of any crime, imposing terrible hardships and penalties on innocent people. Now Conservative-controlled Wandsworth council has joined Pyongyang in adopting the same approach to unconvicted relatives of criminals. The decision demonstrates how rapidly the Tories have descended into barbarism following the riots earlier this week.

Not only does the imposition of collective punishments go against every pillar of every civilised democracy in the world, but collective punishments have, in the past been shown to have incalculable negative consequences, particularly or those who impose them. For example most historians agree that Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated to a significant extent by the collective punishment imposed on the German people following the first world war.

However the knee-jerk lashing out at the mother of a young boy accused of involvement in the riots by Tory council leader Ravi Govindia is most worrying because it shows how the depth of anger revealed by the rioters is equalled by the viciousness of the Tories as they aim to extract retribution from anyone, for riots which have shown up their government’s policies for the charade they really are.

It is also likely that Mr Govindia is not merely engaging in a rabble-rousing persecution of innocent people however, but is doing what Tories around the country have attempted to criticise everyone else for; playing politics with the situation. It became clear very quickly, following the disturbances, that, other than David Cameron, who has played a bad hand appallingly, the person who has come out of this worst is Boris Johnson. Having gone from looking like a shoe-in for a second term as London Mayor, his appearance on the streets of Clapham has looked like the end of his political career. Here is a man you cannot rely on in a crisis, here is a man who hasn’t got a clue. The race for London Mayor has been thrown wide open once more, it is going to be a great deal closer than expected, it really isn’t looking good for the Tory candidate.

As such Govindia’s plan to evict council tenants who are relatives of people convicted of involvement in the riots does not merely represent a level of barbarity that even the fanatics of the Tea Party have dared to sink to, it represents a cynical attempt to rid London of a few potential Labour voters as his party tries to hold onto the office of Mayor using any dirty tricks it can.

Education Media Watch...?

2011-08-04T19:01:00.006+02:00

Welcome to education readers from Twitter. This blog is normally about trans-related issues, but I didn't have anywhere else to post this, so please bear with me, I think this might be quite important and I would invite anyone who cares about education and the damage being done by the "media-Tory complex" to read this...

Natacha

This idea has, up to now, been little more the germ of a thought. Someone on twitter was complaining about things that are said in the media about teachers, I think it was following the publication of the KS2 SATs statistics when the papers spout their usual stuff about... some kids can't read/write etc because they haven't got level 4...etc. So it occurred to me that we should start an Education Media Watch group like the successful Trans Media Watch (TMW) which has worked to improve the portrayal and reporting on trans people & trans issues in the media.

They work by responding to media items about trans people and complaining to the PCC/Ofcom/BBC complaints/individual editors etc. to hold journalists to account. They seem to be steadily changing media portrayals of trans people. It seems that they don't generally do it by open and direct confrontation but by personal contacts and presenting journalists/editors with information and arguments which they might not otherwise consider and being available for them to ask questions.

So maybe Ed Media Watch might be able to do the same in terms of promoting greater respect for teachers, but would probably need to go beyond this and get people working in the media to present stories about education with different perspectives. Too often the government’s line that it is "improving schools by doing x,y or z" is never challenged, or only occasionally so, and then normally only by union leaders. There seems to be a kind of “doxa” in the media that more testing, less teacher autonomy, more privatisation, less teacher training, more discipline, more accountability, more Ofsteds, more phonics...etc, etc, etc is what we need to improve education.

It seems to me that according to this media consensus simply by becoming a teacher you become inherently untrustworthy overnight and need to spend huge amounts of time on accountability activities (in contrast to City types who, despite having bankrupted most of the planet, don't need to be held accountable). It also seems that most people in the media seem to think teachers don’t work hard enough and don’t deserve “long” holidays because we only work 9-3.30 and so more and more burdens are continually placed on us. Have you ever been to a staff meeting where the head has suggested that we do less work?

I think that one of the main reasons that teachers have so consistently been portrayed negatively in the media is

a) to put us on the defensive and

b) to make it appear that ‘something must be done’ to shake up these feckless, lazy and irresponsible teachers.

In many cases these journalists, who are portraying us so badly probably don't know any better and often aren't aware of any alternative arguments or criticisms of these policies, because this media orthodoxy is so ubiquitous.

A really good example of this media consensus was when Matt Damon (yes the Matt Damon Supremacy!) who is the son of a state school teacher in the United States spoke to reporters after his speech at the Save Our Schools rally in Washington DC a few days ago. Even the cameraman somehow quoted at him a figure of 10% of teachers that are incompetent. This figure appears to have been going round media circles in the US yet it is not based on any research. To my knowledge there has been no data compiled on the quality of teachers in the United States, which gives any figure for ‘incompetent’ teachers. Compiling such figures would actually be a huge task involving a large number of observations of lessons, and as far as I know nothing like this has ever been achieved anywhere to date. So where did this figure of 10% that even the cameraman knew about come from? I suspect it came from powerful interests in the media, or large corporate interests, like the Gates Foundation and Newscorp which campaigns to get control of as many schools as possible.

I don't know about you but I have felt, for years now, that whenever any government announces an education policy, its basic premises are almost invariably accepted without question by the media, and these policies have all too often, centered around blaming teachers rather than the system. The journos simply indulge in "churnalism" using government press releases. So my idea would be to promote a set of alternative arguments to each plank of education policy and make that available to journalists together with a means of getting hold of someone to speak about them, give quotes, interviews etc, like Trans Media Watch's Memorandum of Understanding, only probably a bit more complex. Combine this with a response to detrimental comments in the media about teachers, and we have a means of holding journalists to account, or at least letting them know they are "under the eye" and that they may have to deal with a long and tedious exchange of emails if they are not a bit more even-handed.

I guess we would probably have to start by monitoring media output on education as well to see where the biggest problems are occurring. So a group of teachers, likeminded parents (and maybe even the odd lecturer in education like me) getting together to set up some sort of organisation to do this would probably be the best way to start It looks like teacher/journalist Phil Beadle is interested and it may be a good idea to involve those nice people at Local Schools Network and maybe even potentially friendly journalists like Mike Baker.

I suppose initially we need to get started with some sort of strategy because we are not going to be able to deal with the huge amounts of education-related articles in the media all at once, so it may be that we have to think about dealing with certain elements of education reporting first or certain media organisations first. Trans Media Watch started by getting C4, New Statesman and the Guardian onside and then the Independent and now the BBC appear to be cautiously coming round. With the BBC’s charter requirement to maintain balance in its broadcasts, that may be a good place to start…

Anyway, any thoughts about how to proceed would be appreciated, I really only thought of this a couple of days ago so. In the meantime I will try and pick the brains of the founder of Trans Media Watch, the wonderful Jennie Kermode, who has, following the success of TMW, been advising trans groups in other countries on how to set up their own TMWs, and also other types of groups in the UK; apparently there is now a Disability Media Watch and an Islamic Media Watch, representing groups that are misrepresented by the media. Use the hashtag #emw.

Natacha Kennedy. London. 4 Aug 2011

Yet another nail in the coffin of Rad Fem transphobia.

2011-07-31T19:46:00.009+02:00

It is not as if the transphobic “Radical” Feminists need any more discrediting, “Rad Fem Hub” has done that job already. Sheila Jeffries’ transphobic rant has even raised questions of the sanity of those involved. Indeed her rant effectively marks the nadir of a campaign of hatred, which has seen many low points and has rarely climbed out of the sewers. Gendertrender's blog which reads like carpet chewing fascism has even tried to 'out' trans people by recording and searching the IP addresses of those who post on her vile blog, something which could endanger trans people's lives.

Indeed the well-known incitement to hate-crime, which Janice Raymond wrote back in 1979 set a low tone which subsequent equally transphobic rants adopted, based on conjecture and supposition rather than evidence or empirical research.

Once of those pieces of conjecture and theorising has formed the Rad Fem article of faith that, since girls are brought up to have lower self-esteem than boys by a sexist and misogynistic society, transwomen can never be real women. The fact that, despite this theory being around for quite some time, it has never been tested through research, suggests that, despite the Rad Fem hatred of transwomen being largely centred on this, the Rad Fems had little confidence in their own arguments.

Now, however, this crucial supposition has been tested empirically. A Swiss study, carried out in the US has shown that girls and women between the ages of 14 and 30 have no difference in their levels of self-esteem than males of the same age. Indeed the only differences in self-esteem were found to be culturally dependent rather than dependent on gender.

In other words, girls do not end up with lower self-esteem than boys as a result of their upbringing. One of the central arguments of Rad Fem transphobia has been comprehensively undermined. The entire theoretical basis for their hatred has been shown through empirical research, to be based on false premises.

This is not to suggest that I expect them to stop hating trans people. Their hatred has clearly become emotionally-based. It is as if Rad Fem transphobia has taken on the characteristics of a religion. The fact that the devil has been proven not to exist will not alter their beliefs that transwomen are evil.

One suspects they will scrape around to find some other theory, this time one which they hope will be impossible to disprove through empirical research. Meanwhile they sideline themselves as the rest of the world, especially other women, increasingly view them as some kind of eccentric cult which security services ought to keep half an eye on...

Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch & the New Education "Reformers"

2011-07-31T11:27:00.012+02:00

If you read any of the right-wing press in the US it would appear that the people who know the most about education are not teachers, educationists or parents but billionnaires. Billionnaires have been getting involved in education "reform" in a supposed effort to "transform" American schools.

However his latest pronouncement, that schools can improve educational outcomes even when its pupils come from a poor socioeconomic background, suggests that he is getting desperate. I suspect he would like it to be true, but he needs to face facts, it is never going to be true. The biggest single determinant of educational failure is poverty. You can control for all other variables and find schools able to educate children regardless or ethnicity, religion, disability etc, but when you look at poverty, there is a particularly high correlation, which no education system has been able to change.

One can understand Gates's position; he is a very rich person. He woud like to believe two things; that his success is not down to his own good fortune for being born in the right bed, and that he is not rich becaiuse others are poor. In other words the billionnaires's refrain that the educational cart can be put before the horse is personal. It is about assuageing their own guilt, it is about making them feel that they became rich entirely deservedly and not because of any amount of good luck. It is also about trying to promote the ideology of the rich that the poor are only poor because of their fecklessness and laziness.

So the failed 20-year involvement of the very rich in schools in the United States is, underliying the need of the wealthy for personal justification, ideological. It is about trying to justify their own "success" and justify their oppression of the poor. Oppression which includes not paying their taxes

The problem is that right-wing billionnaires like Gates are able to shout louder when it comes to just about anything. They can both control and hog the media, and the constant repetition of this ideological position results in it being taken as self-evident, in the way Dr Goebbels constant repitition of lies made them "true".

Bill Gates used to be at the vanguard of a new age; whether or not you hate Microsoft, it was his operating system that made computers and the internet accessible to us all, and which initially helped enable the exponential generative growth of online and offline resources. However he has now become just another sad right-wing billionnaire, misusing his wealth to oppress the poor and disempower others.

Gates is part of a movement of right-wing ideologues, many of whom are very rich, who want to control education and force teachers to work in ways they think are best, even though they have never taught a class themselves in their lives. Why large amounts of money makes them "experts" on education is a question none of them have answered. Another of these right-wing ideologues with too much money is Rupert Murdoch, who is getting involved in education through the UK's right-wing education minister; Michael Gove. This is quite frankly alarming; after we have seen the way in which he runs his newspapers, one has to fear for any children who end up in Murdoch High School.

However Murdoch is not just getting involved in education in the standard way, sponsoring "Free" or "charter" schools like Gates and others; he is making "educational" softeware which will result in teachers having even less freedom to teach and making lessons even more boring and repetitive for children. The problem for rich oligarchs like Gates and Murdoch is that their "reforms" can only be implemented by destroying teachers' professional abilities. Their solutions all involve a high degree of centralisation and an excessive amount of testing, leaving teachers with little or no opportunity to exercise their professionalism as educators to benefit the children they teach.

Their educational ideology been shown to fail; schools in many parts of the US including New York and Wisconsin have had the ologarch's kind of education system for many years and have conspicuously failed to deliver the reform or "transformation" they have told us it can. Nonetheless they want to import it to the UK. It will be another expensive failure.

Yet there is an alternative; the education system in Finland works without any testing at all, it emphasises teachers' professionalism and trains them very highly, giving them the tools for the job they do and allowing them to get on with it. And it has worked. Finland's economy went from being almost exclusively reliant on timber in the 1970s to being a high-tech industrial/post-industrial economy today, thanks to its education system. It produces more patents per head of population than any other country in the world, and has a population which has been described as one of the most creatively entreprenurial on the planet.

Schools can do fine in terms of educating children without making them the playthings of the very rich and their lackeys on the political righ. It is time to say No to centralisation of schools, No to more testing and No to the failed policies of Murdoch, Gates and Gove. All we need them to do is shut up and pay their taxes.

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." - Martin Luther King

2011-07-10T19:05:00.010+02:00

Regular readers of UnCommon Sense will have realised that I have been taking a bit of a break from blogging recently. The pressure of work and to get some more of my studies done has been the reason for that. However the Murdoch outrages we have been hearing about recently have prompted me to post this...

Whilst the revelations about NewsCorp and News International are welcome, Murdoch is by no means defeated. If his bid to get 100% control of Sky TV is turned down then it will most likely be Ofcom deciding that he is not a "fit and proper" person to own it. If this does happen, his global empire will be in serious trouble; many other countries have similar laws, including the US, Oz, NZ and India. If he is deemed not to be fit and proper to own a TV station in the UK then it is likely he will also be deemed unfit and improper in these, and many other countries. Despite his empire being worth many billions of dollars, the possibility of bankruptcy is staring him in the face.

As such the Murdoch family will fight tooth an claw to make sure his bid goes through. It is likely that this will happen by public means as well as devious means. Already we have been told that News International has directly threatened Ed Miliband. So I would expect blackmail, threats and all kinds of cloak-and-dagger tactics to be deployed against politicians, members of Ofcom, the police and journalists on other newspapers.

When you add to this the fact that the Tories are gauleiters who have benefitted most from Murdoch's dictatorship, there is still a formidable organisation trying to push for his SKY takeover. The right-wing agendas they push in everything from industrial relations to social policy, education, economic policy and the pursuit of wars around the world, have been the policies of Rupert Murdoch. They stand to lose most from Murdoch's loss of power, and in particular David Cameron stands to lose a great deal as the undertow of the ship News International starts to drag others down with it. His relationship with Rebekah Brooks and his decision to employ Andy Coulson and to suffer from memory lapses when it comes to the fact that he was warned about him, suggest that he is on the verge of becoming a lame duck Prime Minister already.

So despite all the revelations about the Murdoch press being uncovered, and the liklihood of further revelations in the coming months, we're not out of the woods yet by a long way. There will be a fighback from the Murdochs, there will be a significant number of people in the Tory party who will try to further Murdoch's interests, including, I suspect, David Cameron and George Osborne, whose careers remain too entangled with the Evil Empire for comfort.

Martin Luther King also said "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals." Now is the time everyone in the country stands up and demands independence from the opression of the dead hand of Newscorp. Things are moving but we still have a fight on our hands. It ain't over till the fat lady sings...

Is Stonewall Institutionally Transphobic?

2011-06-10T17:49:00.004+02:00

Organisations can be institutionally racist, sex discriminatory, homophobic by their very structures and procedures. This is when the way it functions in terms of its structures or systems acts against the interests of one particular group.

I am currently trying to see if I can get Ofsted to change its standards for assessing teacher training providers because I believe they are institutionally racist. This is not to suggest for one moment that Ofsted intends to discriminate against black people or Asians who want to become teachers but that the unintended consequence of the way it functions can cause teacher training providers to be less likely to choose black or Asians students to come on their courses. Black and Asian teacher trainees are more likely to need to take time off from the course for family reasons, either having family responsibilities or relatives abroad. Yet Ofsted penalises teacher training providers if too many students interrupt their courses. If this continues teacher training providers will become less likely to admit black and Asian students onto their courses, and the teaching profession will remain dominated by white teachers.

This is not what Ofsted intends but it is the unintended outcome of one of Ofsted’s systems.

The unintended outcome resulting from structures or systems within an organisation is what causes most institutional racism, homophobia, sex discrimination etc. It now appears that the unintended consequence of Stonewall’s activities is transphobic. Stonewall may well be institutionally transphobic.

The problem comes as a result of its activities as a provider of diversity training for teachers. It provides training for teachers and other education professionals in diversity issues about Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual (LGB) people. So far so good, but most people these days don’t talk about LGB people, they talk about LGBT people, so when Stonewall sends its trainers to train teachers, despite the fact that nothing is said about trans children, the senior managers of the school are very likely to tick the “done LGBT equality” box, some may even consider that T has been covered.

But this is not all. Stonewall’s conference this year is a huge event entitled, without a hint of irony, "Education for All" and has attracted some big names including Gok Wan, Sue Gregory, one of the heads of Ofsted, and the hideous Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister. The event is being held in the sumptuous surroundings of the British Library.

This highlights the problems with the way funding and such like, from charities and other sources finds its way to Stonewall but not to other groups which are inclusive of trans people. As a result, whilst Stonewall can attract big name individuals and hold conferences which people who have power over schools will attend, trans organisations have neither the funding nor the visibility to do this.

Now Stonewall will obviously counter that they are simply campaigning for their people and are not involving themselves in trans issues. They probably do not wish to involve themselves in trans issues. The problem is that in both these examples, their activities result in problems for trans people, in that issues of transphobia in schools are not included in training for teachers and that issues of transphobia are not raised with people like Nick Gibb and Ofsted who have an increasing amount of power in the increasingly centralised education system. This may not be Stonewall’s intention but it is the outcome of Stonewall’s actions. It is institutional transphobia.

So what could Stonewall do about this? It is clear that for an organisation which promotes diversity to be institutionally transphobic is a serious blow for their credibility, as such they need to find ways of ensuring that trans people are not specifically disadvantaged by their actions.

Firstly, Stonewall could agree to permit a percentage of its funding, from those donors who do not object, to be channelled to trans organisations. Or it could ask those donor organisations to donate, say 5% of what they donate to Stonewall, to trans organisations. This would enable trans people to set up education conferences and attract top names like Stonewall does as well as start to build up an element of visibility and acceptance in the way Stonewall has done.

Secondly they could make it clear, as part of their diversity training to teachers, that they do not cover issues of discrimination of trans children and to provide schools with contact details of organisations which can.

I know Stonewall is an organisation which does not include trans people but that does not mean that they are absolved of all responsibilities for trans people. The BNP is an organisation, which acts against the interests of black people yet it was forced to alter the way it does things to avoid being institutionally racist. The fact that Stonewall’s actions, indirectly but concretely, are discriminatory against trans people in general and trans children in particular, means that it is time they took steps to rectify this.

GRS without psychiatrists? Maybe...

2011-06-09T19:52:00.003+02:00

Is there already a route, still not very widely known, for transsexuals who wish to access surgery without having to go through to a psychiatrist? It is looking like there may well be.

It depends on the provisions embodied in the Equality Act, which is a piece of legislation the Tories are working very hard behind the scenes to get rid of, or at least to manufacture an excuse to get rid of. The Act makes provision for a trans person who, with no surgery and who lives in a different gender (and passes in that gender) permanently to change their legal sex/gender. The only proviso being that they can pass in their new gender (and a pretty nasty and very discriminatory proviso at that). They can then live their lives as men or women with all their ID in their acquired gender.

Once this has been accomplished, it has been suggested that trans people can simply go to their doctor and request surgery to enable their body to conform to their legal gender. It is unlikely that the doctor would have any grounds for refusing this treatment. If a patient turns up and he is legally male then a double mastectomy should be available with no psychiatric consultation required. Indeed this is the case with legal males who suffer from gynecomestia.

This could be important since it may well end the monopoly on gatekeeping, which the psychiatric profession has on GRS. Of course it is a completely untried route as yet, but given that a pre-op transsexual told me recently that she would say anything or do anything to obtain her GRS it is significant that this possibility is opened up. In effect this makes a mockery of the psychiatric consultation, which, as both Sandy Stone and Judith Butler have described as effectively little more than a game, the rules of which trans people have to abide by while they are transitioning.

This is something for transsexuals, who are not confident about approaching psychiatrists, to think about. Will it work? That is a big unknown, but there do appear to be some in the NHS who are prepared to take the possibility of this new route seriously...

Conservative feminist separatists - things get nasty (again).

2011-05-28T12:37:00.003+02:00

Many of us have got used to the internet, and social media in particular, being a force for good in trans people’s lives. As a small, geographically dispersed population, the internet has been a godsend and enabled trans people to connect with each other and create the kind of social capital and mutual support that has made it easier for many to come out and feel accepted and more comfortable in their lives as well as fight for the kind of human rights others take for granted.

However there are clear signs that the forces of conservatism and oppression are gathering and becoming more organised to push the genie of internet freedom and back into the bottle. In the United States far-right organisations and those representing conservative and oppressive religious bigots have combined to contaminate the web with lies and deception. This goes well beyond the dreary conservative blogosphere and includes right-wing conservatives organising to post bad reviews of left-wing books on Amazon, and good reviews of right-wing books. They have got organised to troll places like Comment is Free, where regulars can see right-wing comments posted by one-off posters with identities that never appear again.

The fact that is that this is all organised using money from shady right-wing organisations using money from even more shady right-wing millionaires or billionaires, to look like it is spontaneous is all the more disturbing. Not grassroots but Astroturf.
The fact that the Conservative Feminist Separatists (they call themselves “radical feminists” but they are about as radical as the Daily Mail) are using the same dishonest and deceitful tactics is both a cause for concern and for optimism.

It is a cause for optimism because they are losing the argument, their dubious and hateful arguments underpinned by a carefully concealed Heidegger-inspired desire for “gender purity” or “gender cleansing”. The esprit fasciste underlying this being something they try hard to obscure.

It is a cause for concern because they are resorting to the kind of duplicitous tactics of the right-wing conservatives. For all I know they may even be getting paid for this by the aforementioned shady ultraconservative organisations. The most recent example of this was a poster on Juliet Jacques’ article about trans history in New Statesman. In a clear attempt to drive a wedge between the trans and the LGB communities, someone using arguments which had, a couple of weeks earlier, been used elsewhere by a conservative feminist. The argument itself was as disingenuous as it is possible to be, blaming trans people for the actions of Iran’s cisgender religious bigots forcing one half of a gay couple to have gender reassignment surgery on pain of death.

Another Conservative Feminist Separatist has used her blog to attempt to ‘out’ trans people, despite the fact that doing this could have dire consequences for the individuals concerned, up to and including death. This is a serious cause for concern, the fact that they are prepared to put individual trans people’s lives in danger.

Of course these people have form in this area. The activities of so called “Radical” feminists in the US during the Reagan government, who connived with the Republicans to deny thousands of transsexuals in America access to the healthcare they desperately needed. There is no telling how many trans people have died as a result of this, either from suicide or as a result of going into prostitution to pay for private healthcare. The consequence of this hatred is a murder rate of 1:12 for American trans women.

The trans community has reacted impressively when faced with the institutional transphobia of the Royal College of Psychiatrists over their, abandoned transphobic conference. What we need to be careful of is the influence of the Conservative Feminist Separatist bigots. They know that they cannot win the argument by legitimate, open and honest debate, and as such they will resort to behind-the-scenes manipulation and secret back-door deals with influential individuals and organisations, as well as the kind of duplicitous anonymous interventions on social media, and in mainstream media as well.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, something which is likely to become more significant to trans people before long.

The Death of Bin Laden

2011-05-02T12:34:00.004+02:00

When notorious murderous conquistador Cortez attacked Montazuma's citadel they destroyed the entire Aztec civilisation within a day. However the Spanish forces, despite overwhelming military superiority failed to destroy the Apaches in 300 years and eventually gave up trying.

The reason for that was the horizontal, cellular structure of the Apache civilisation which, in contrast to the hierarchical, centralised pyramidal structure of the Aztecs, permitted them to absorb attacks without their society being whiped out. If one leader was killed, another simply took his place. This is the model for Al-Qaeda's organisational structure. Of course symbolically Al-Qaeda will suffer, "those who laugh last laugh longest." Yet it will not be the end of Al-Qaeda. They may not respond straight away but this increases the likelihood of retaliatory attacks in the medium term. Doubtless another leader will spring up, and the ultra-conservative zealots who make up the bulk of Al-Qaeda's and the Taliban's membership will be just as fanatical, indeed in the short term they may even be motivated by his supposed "martyrdom".

Let us get this straight; Al-Qaeda is a fanatical right-wing organisation which is racist, homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic. Bin Laden was an old-fashioned bigot, whose ideology functioned to spread this kind of hatred and has been instrumental in the oppression and death of thousands, if not millions of people worldwide in Muslim countries and in other places. The death of the architect of this group, the main aim of which further the kind of extreme hate-crimes and violent crimes pepetrated by this organisation.

My main hope now is that President Obama can now move forward on Guantanamo, and rid America of this blight to its claim to be a free and just country.

The Met forgets that trans people are people.

2011-04-30T20:12:00.007+02:00

The issue of the transphobic sexual assault of a trans person by the Met as they tried to protect Wills and kate from unarmed demonstrators more than a mile away from the Royal Wedding has caused outrage amongst trans people.

There appear to be serious problems relating to diversity training for police officers, yet the issue is much deeper than this. The apparent open sexual assault of a trans person was not simply down to training and diversity. It is an issue of how trans people are perceived. The manner of the assault was something which would never have happened to a cisgender individual, no police officer of either gender would considering doing what was done by the squad in Soho Sq yesterday, to a cisgender man or woman. Yet it happened, in effect without thought, because the individual concerned was considered to be transgender.

As such this represents an issue of humanity. It has often been argued that being intelligble as either male of female (by no less a person than Judith Butler amongst others), is a prerequisite to being considered human. In other words, people in our culture generally appear not to accept as a human being, anyone who does not appear to be gendered either male or female. This is probably the root cause of yesterday's assault. The perception that trans people are not people.

This is an issue which goes beyond policing, it is the reason journalists, "comedians", some psychiatrists and even teachers discriminate against trans people; because they do not see trans people as people. In my opinion it is the theme running through Trans Media Watch's Memorandum of Understanding; the desire for trans people to be accorded the respect that is due any human being. It is the reason why some psychiatrists think they can force us to conform, as though they are training a dog or a performing seal, it is one of the reasons why some Rad Fems incite violence and hatred against us. As the Nazis succeeded in doing in the 1930s, dehumanisation carries with it enormous consequences; once a group of people is considered less than human, any treatment becomes possible.

The issue here is about much more than sexual assault. It is about our humanity, a humanity which is still denied to us by a hostile and institutionally transphobic culture.

Destroying Teachers TV: Educational Vandalism

2011-04-21T17:40:00.002+02:00

The government’s decision to get rid of Teachers TV is a deliberate act of vandalism which reveals a huge amount about the motivation behind their policies and the direction they intend to take.

Firstly it shows up their stated commitment to increase the quality of teachers to be a lie. TTV has helped both new teachers and more experienced ones over the years and has won over people, who, like myself, were initially sceptical. If something this popular with teachers is destroyed, how is that going to help improve their quality? The TTV website is even telling us that some of the videos which teacher educators have downloaded and kept may not be used after the 28th April.

The truth is that the government does not want good teachers. A well educated population has never been, and will never be in the interests of the Conservative Party and its big business backers. Gove’s action in vandalising a cheap and easily available resource to help teachers makes this abundantly clear.

From Farce to Fiasco: The Royal College of Psychiatrists conference debacle.

2011-04-19T13:14:00.004+02:00

Newsflash: The Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic has just put out the following statement:

“The team at the WLMHT Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) at Charing Cross Hospital notes the apparent shift of emphasis in the Royal College of Psychiatrists Gay & Lesbian Special Interest Group conference, ‘Transgender: Time To Change’ on May 20th and feels compelled to withdraw on this basis.

When we were originally asked to take part, GIC clinicians understood that our role was to outline the work we do within our own service and explain the very considerable evidence base which underpins it. We are very happy to do this and our more than 55 years of experience as the country’s leading NHS provider gives us a rich and robust data set from which to draw observations.

It now appears that the conference comes at trans issues from a very specific agenda, namely, to explore the validity or otherwise of gender diagnoses as medical and psychiatric phenomena. So long as this is the case, we feel we can’t support it.

Although we were somewhat wary of engaging in what is essentially a clinical discussion with a predominantly non-trans panel, which, moreover, features a non-clinician whose personal opinion is already well known, we agreed to do so in order that discussion might focus on evidence rather than anecdote.

The Royal College should be aware that there is a great deal of disquiet around this event within the trans community and interested parties should note that the discussion as it now stands will be one-sided at best..”

The sudden withdrawal of the Charing Cross GIC from the Royal College of Psychiatrists conference following widespread anger amongst the transgender community and pressure from trans activists, represents a massive blow to the College’s credibility.

If they haven’t already decided to do so, then they should seriously consider cancelling this event, which has gone from farce to fiasco. The RCPsych’s arrogance and unwillingness to engage with trans people objecting to the basis of the conference is now pouring humiliation on the College’s senior management. When you are in a hole, stop digging.

It seems inconceivable that the conference can now go ahead and the RCPsych should bow to the inevitable. Their supercilious attitude to trans people’s wishes and feelings is coming back to haunt them. The contempt with which they treated all efforts to negotiate some sort of compromise has resulted only in increased anger and determination on the part of the transgender community. The Gay & Lesbian Special Interest Group was always an inappropriate forum at which to discuss trans issues, and the RCPsych should have seen that and should be asking questions about the way this group is constitutes and run. Now that their failure to act and to listen to trans people has blown up in their faces for the RCPsych the message is clear; welcome to the real world.

The Charing Cross GIC have obviously put a great deal of thought, both into their position on whether to attend the conference in the first place and subsequently whether to withdraw, and they should be congratulated for a sensible and courageous decision, and one which demonstrates that this is an organisation that truly considers the interests, and the feelings of its clients. It is time the RCPsych realised that trans people are people.

The Dawn of the Teacher-Bot.

2011-04-18T11:25:00.002+02:00

Chris Woodhead, the first head of Ofsted, and now aiming to be head of a private corporation running a number of schools, ultimately on a for-profit basis, has appeared in the news again.

We have to remember where Woodhead stands on most educational issues; during his reign as head of the educational establishment, he stated categorically and emphatically that teachers should not use their imagination or creativity, and that children should not be taught to think creatively.

This man now wants to make money out of removing the training of teachers from universities, where it has been done increasingly successfully, and dump this responsibility onto schools.

His schools, no doubt.

If I were considering entering the teaching profession (or “craft" as his friend Michael Gove wants us to think of it) the last place I would want to be trained would be in a training school. Especially one of Woodhead's. It is clear that those schools which do bid to become training schools are likely to do so on the basis that there is profit to be made from it, and that students will be treated as unpaid supply teachers. It is also clear that the training would result in my being trained as a drone in order to do as I was told, to deliver pre-programmed schemes of work in a manner decided by someone else. No longer a member of a profession with professional standards and able to make decisions about how best to educate the children in my classes through my own professional decisions. I would simply be a cog in a machine, there to take orders, not to think.

Chris Woodhead’s and Michael Gove’s Brave New World of education will produce Teacher-bots. These automaton-like drones will be taught basic didactic lecturing skills, will have no knowledge of the important educationally relevant theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, Hatano, Bruner, Socrates and even Foucault, they will not be able to integrate pupil-pupil interaction into their classrooms, they will not be able to use active learning and discovery learning techniques. Most of all, they will be much less able to function in schools which have challenging pupils.

This dumbing-down of the teaching profession will be the precursor to the dumbing-down of our children. An ever narrower curriculum taught in an ever narrower way by an group of people with less knowledge of learning than ever before and with no regard to inspiration, motivation or excitement.

The Teacher-bots, will produce dumbed-down boring lessons and zombie-like children who will rebel against this treatment in the only way they know how to rebel…

Newsflash: Transphobic Conference

2011-04-16T12:29:00.003+02:00

Some very interesting news. I have heard through the grapevine that there is a reasonable possibility that the conference may be cancelled! It looks like the pressure is working, so it is time to maintain pressure and be ready to consider our next course of action. I wouldn't like to speak too soon but if this is true this could well represent a significant victory for trans people over transphobia, and we should be ready to make a big deal about it if it does.

No decision has been taken yet, so we should maintain pressure, but the mere fact that this is a possibility should be taken as a battle won. Our actions are having an effect and this is very encouraging. Fantastic stuff everyone!

Email Correspondence with the Royal College of Psychiatrists about the "Transgender: Time to Change" Conference.

2011-04-12T19:51:00.009+02:00

Below is the email correspondence me and Jane Fae have been having with the RCPsych. As I am sure you will appreciate, they do not seem to be that happy to discuss anything with us.

Natacha

From: jane
 To: efox: natacha kennedy
 Subject: Introductions and update 
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2011 10:56:10 +0100

Liz,

Just to update where i/we are with this. As I mentioned, I think, in my last e-mail, I’ve handed over writing about your conference to Jess, who edits Pink News. I therefore passed on both your quotes and your contact details to her and if she decides to run with this nearer the time, she’ll liaise directly with you.

Last night I spoke to Natacha Kennedy (copied in on this mail) who sort of represents the other side of the argument: well, OK…she and I both agree that the RCPsych conference is problematic, but maybe I’m more of a talker/negotiator, she more of a doer.

I told her that I’d been in touch with you and she said she’d like to speak with the RCPsych too: therefore I have copied both of you in on this e-mail. Like myself, she is concerned about the origins of this conference, emerging from within a body that is broadly seen by the trans community as not exactly aligned with our interests. The analogy I drew before, of a neo-Nazi group organizing a conference on Judaism in the 21st century may be a bit extreme…but only a bit.

That’s because of my second point, in respect of choice of speakers, with Bindel not especially representative of current feminist thinking, but on record as effectively calling for the eradication of transgender in its present form. As you can imagine, that is not something viewed lightly by the trans community and as I also said in my initial conversations, seemed to indicate either that the organizers were courting controversy or hadn’t researched the field too well.

Hakeem is also a bit on the eradication side of the fence, too.

I passed back to Natacha your comment that the organizers were looking for someone to present to the Conference from the point of view of trans experience and…I think that means you are both now up to date with all the conversations I have been having.

No doubt we’ll speak again.

All the best,

Jane

*************************************
From: Natacha Kennedy
 Sent: 04 April 2011 16:55 
To: jane; Elizabeth Fox 
Subject: RE: Introductions and update

Dear Ms Fox,

 Now that I have been copied in on Jane's emails with you I would like to raise serious concerns with the way the conference "Transgender: Time to Change" has been constituted. The presence of Az Hakeem being one of the main elements to this,
although Julie Bindel's presence is highly problematic also. I have just read Hakeem's most recent paper and I am preparing an academic response to it. I am particularly disappointed that someone who produces such a low standard of publication should be permitted to address a conference of this type. Hakeem's paper appears to present trans people as problematic in themselves, which is a proposition that trans people cannot, and will not accept. The kind of problematisation which Hakeem proposes is in itself transphobic.

 As such Jane's description of the conference being regarded as analogous to a Nazi grouporganising a conference on Juadism, or indeed Robert Mugabe organising a conference on Homosexuality is, thus far the way this conference is being regarded by the trans community around the country, and indeed internationally.

The fact that Julie Bindel, who is neither a psychiatrist nor an academic has been invited to speak (and then, as Jane says about a version of feminism which is particularly marginal) has further discredited both the conference itself and the RCPsych. Obviously we are not opposed to people discussing trans people and trans issues themselves, however it is highly problematic that trans people do not appear to have been involved in organizing this conference. So far it appears that there is one (token?) trans person speaking, which is not acceptable, especially since there are plenty of trans academics who could contribute to this conference in a much more constructive way.

However the main problem we have with this conference is not merely that people are talking about trans issues
"behind our back" but that a group so constituted is likely to produce outcomes which we believe represent an attempt to alter the way transgender people are treated by the NHS. This is where Julie Bindel comes in. Julie Bindel's close friend in the US, Janice Raymond, is notorious for working with Republicans to prevent trans people receiving the medical care they need. This would appear to be Julie Bindel's position, now that a Conservative/LD coalition government has been installed. There is no other explanation for her involvement other than as an attempt to change the way trans people are treated by the NHS, and she is doing this because she has a particular ideological opposition to the existence of trans people. By including Julie Bindel in the conference, especially alongside Az Hakeem, you are effectively identifying yourself, by your actions, as an organization that is institutionally transphobic and which is prepared to permit a platform for transphobes and involve yourselves in political action against the interests of trans people.

Indeed even the title of the conference "Time to Change" is perceived as a threat by trans people - Why is it "time" now? Is it because there is a new government which wants to cut public spending, is this conference which is attempting to provide it with an excuse for removing treatment for trans people on the NHS? And why "change"? Change can mean many different things and can mean change in positive terms or negative terms. A conference including these two speakers, as well as another that has been accused of transphobic behaviour, which is titled thus, is of course going to be perceived by those in the trans community, as a threat and treated as such.

 As I am sure Jane has already said, if you want to talk about us, you should talk to us as well. To do otherwise effectively represents a hostile act towards the trans community, and to expect it to be perceived in otherwise would be perverse. This is especially the case since it would appear that Julie Bindel would like to use the RCPsych as a vehicle for her own particular political activities, which have nothing to do with improving treatment for trans people and everything to do with trying to erase trans people; a kind of Heidiggerian cleansing of gender.

I know the accusations I am putting to you are rather strong, but believe me they are moderate in comparison to those expressed to me by the majority of the trans community. To be fair, I can understand how you may have come to be at this juncture, not necessarily being a specialist in trans issues nor being aware of the nature of trans/transphobic politics, as such it is your response to this state of affairs that will be crucial. The "About us" section of your website says that you "work with service users". Yet, as things currently stand, service users have effectively been excluded from this conference. Unfortunately your site does not permit me to see your Equality and Diversity section. The trans community already harbours an element of distrust for psychiatrists, adding to this distrust by hosting a conference at which two transphobes are speaking, would appear to be working against this and aimed at actively alienating service users, something which is unlikely to be in anyone’s interests. This conference could not be justified in that it is likely to increase delegates understanding of trans issues, as it would appear to be providing a heavily one-sided view, with little input from a range of trans people themselves. Trans people, to be perfectly frank, are fed up with others speaking for them, we have the right to a voice also.

I would suggest that, as a bare minimum, you should consider setting up a 'fringe' event at the conference and adjusting the conference timetable to permit delegates to listen to speakers in that event, perhaps during the lunch break. I suggest this because I suspect that you will find it difficult to find people from the trans community who would be prepared to share a platform, in the main event, with Bindel or Hakeem given what they have written and what they are advocating, we would not lend them credibility by doing so.

I hope those in positions of responsibility in your organisation are able to consider a way forward to help repair relations with the trans community and the psychiatric profession and that they will think more carefully about the way conferences about trans issues are constituted in the future. As I said, a great deal depends on the way they respond to this situation, we are open to suggestions and willing to consider any serious proposal to address the concerns I have outlined above. This could be an opportunity to mend fences and open up a dialogue with the trans community, I hope they are able to seize the moment and respond appropriately.

Regards,

Natacha Kennedy

*******************************

Dear Natacha

As I said yesterday, I forwarded your email on to members of the RCPsych’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Special Interest Group (SIG). They have asked me to respond to you.

The conference aims to explore the recent academic, clinical and contemporary thinking on transgender issues. The SIG has invited speakers for their differing perspectives, including a speaker to give a personal perspective on transgender issues. The invitation of particular speakers does not mean that the SIG share the speakers’ views on the topic.

In your email, you raise concerns that the conference is “likely to produce outcomes which we believe represent an attempt to alter the way transgender people are treated by the NHS”. The SIG is not aiming through the meeting to reflect, develop or produce any specific statement or policy from the Royal College of Psychiatrists on this issue. They seek only to offer a forum for various, independent views to be shared for discussion.

You also say that the conference is “going to be perceived by those in the trans community as a threat”. The intention is not to cause alarm and distress to the transgender community, and we regret if our organising this event has done so.

Best wishes,

Liz

***************************

From: Natacha Kennedy
Sent: 05 April 2011 16:55
 To: efox; jane 
Subject: RE: Introductions and update

Dear Liz,  
Thank you for your reply, I understand the points you make but I cannot agree that this is unlikely to be used as a starting point for attempts to alter policy. Julie Bindel would be unlikely to attend if it were not. It is her inclusion and the inclusion of Hakeem, which has caused alarm. As for your point about "Various" views, it would appear that this represents a forum in which a rather narrow range of views is being expressed. Indeed similar views to those expressed in other conferences of psychiatrists which I have been involved with in the last few years. Once again trans people feel that they are being talked about rather than being engaged with over trans and psychiatric issues, it is this which is the problem and it is a problem that your organisation has within its power to do something about. I appreciate that you express regret at the organising of this conference but as I said, what is crucial now, is how those in charge of your organisation respond to the growing anger within the trans community.  

Natacha

***********************

From: efox
To: natachakennedy
 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2011 13:47:38 +0100 
Subject: RE: Introductions and update
From: jane
RE: Introductions and update  Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2011 15:42:54 +0100

Natacha,

Thanks for bringing me back into the loop.

(Liz: if you don’t object too much, I’d be grateful if you kept me in, since I am likely to be involved in discussions with various groups with views on this matter, so it helps to get info first hand rather than second).

At risk of sounding a tad portentous: I think both the politics and perception of trans issues is on the verge of changing rapidly and radically. The culmination of a decade of organizing, awareness building – not to mention legislation to give the trans community a modicum of rights on a par with others in the LGBT spectrum is just part of that.

One result of that change, it seems, is a refusal to put up with what is perceived as historic discrimination against trans individuals: a second is that a polarization is probably on the cards, with views being taken as to which groups are in the way of progress, which are allies. It may or may not come as a surprise to learn that the psychiatric community as a whole is viewed with deep suspicion – and that a conference of this sort is likely only to entrench hostility further.

I hear what you are saying, Liz: I can imagine that many of the organizers have acted from the best of motives; may well have no idea of the suspicion with which this event is being viewed. But I’d add also that I am fairly cynical of platitudes now that we have reached this point.

The proof is in the eating. Furthermore, the battlecry of the disabled community – “nothing about us without us” – is also pretty relevant here.

What I think I am trying to say is: you are putting across a point of view that would probably be acceptable were it not for the long history of mis-treatment of the trans minority in the UK. But that history exists: a view of the Psychiatric position already exists.

You are fire-fighting: but it feels like far too little too late.

That means that if the perceived solution to criticism from the trans community is to continue organizing without input and without consultation, then that, itself, becomes a very loud message going out to all those who view this event with alarm.

That is not meant to be arm-twisting. Merely to suggest, from my long years as someone who has worked in political lobbying and providing advice on PR to political groups, that something a bit more radical than fine words is what is needed now.

At this junction, the RCPsych has a choice: to throw open its doors and engage in real and meaningful dialogue; or simply to seek to manage criticism. How the Psychiatric profession is viewed over the next few years is likely to be influenced greatly by how this conference is organized.

At the end of the day, I really, really hope that the answer will be: positively. My fear is that the outcome will be the exact opposite.

Jane

************************

From: Natacha Kennedy
Sent: 08 April 2011 17:36
 To: jane; Elizabeth Fox 
Subject: RE: Introductions and update

Dear Liz,

I was, to say the least, somewhat disappointed to receive your reply to my last email. As a transgender person I have grown accustomed to such responses worded in PR-speak, which essentially mean "We do not want to talk to you."

So, once again I would ask that you put your bosses in contact with me and/or Jane, we are trying to discuss serious issues regarding a conference which is causing a great deal of anxiousness in the trans community. The tone and content of your response is only serving to make matters worse. as Jane has said, trans people have grown very suspicious of the psychiatric establishment and the continued refusal to speak to us is only serving to increase that suspicion. Indeed it seems to me that your employers are behaving in a highly unprofessional manner in not engaging with us on this issue.

This is compounded by what appears to be institutional transphobia, since the RCPsych website states the following about lesbian and gay people;

""The Royal College of Psychiatrists believes strongly in evidence-based treatment. There is no sound scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed. Furthermore, so-called treatments of homosexuality create a setting in which prejudice and discrimination flourish.  There is now a large body of research evidence that indicates that being gay, lesbian or bisexual is compatible with normal mental health and social adjustment. However, the experiences of discrimination in society and possible rejection by friends, families and others, such as employers, means that some lesbian, gay and bisexual people experience a greater than expected prevalence of mental health and substance misuse problems.  Good Psychiatric Practice (3rd Edition) clearly states: 'A psychiatrist must provide care that does not discriminate and is sensitive to issues of gender, ethnicity, colour, culture, lifestyle, beliefs, sexual orientation, age and disability' (page 12, point 13). The Royal College of Psychiatrists expects all its members to follow Good Psychiatric Practice. "

If the RCPsych has a policy that homosexuality is not "treatable" and that such treatments create an environment of discrimination towards gay man and lesbians then it is surely hypocritical of thr RCPsych to provide a platform for a speaker who advocates such treatment for transgender people. The inclusion of Az Hakeem in this conference is contributing to an environment in which transphobia can flourish. Your statement is also clear that being LG or B is compatible with normal mental health and social adjustment, yet you are inviting someone to speak who is trying to associate transgender people with personality disorders. It is the transphobia spread by such people that is responsible for the discrimination by society and rejection by friends, families and others resulting in greater substance misuse and mental health problems.

I can understand why your employers do not wish to engage on this matter if they are fearful of having to deal with charges of hypocrisy, transphobia and acts of deliberate discrimination, which the RCPsych appears to be involved in. Their continued silence on this matter speaks volumes. Given that they also tell us that they "work with service users" and are still unwilling to engage in any kind of dialogue, it is becoming apparent that these charges might actually be sustainable.

There is a saying, with which I am sure you are familiar; "When you're in a hole, stop digging." I would suggest your employers take heed of this. In this case silence is the shovel.

Regards,

Natacha Kennedy

**************************
Date 12.4.2011 15.01
From; dhart
to Natacha Kennedy

Dear Natacha

I am contacting you in my capacity as Director of Communications at the College. Liz Fox passed your enquiry to me as you had asked that it be referred to her line manager.

I note that considerable email discussion that has been ongoing since your initial enquiry. We have passed your enquiry to the organisers of the conference as you have requested, although I cannot guarantee that they will be willing to continue this debate.

The College is involved in organising numerous conferences about a wide range of issues. Any opinions expressed by individual contributors at these meetings are the personal opinions of those contributors and cannot be taken to represent the views of the College.

I feel that the previous correspondence from Liz Fox clarified the College’s position on this issue and that nothing further can be gained by continuing this debate as we have nothing further to add.

Best wishes

Deborah Hart
Director of Communications and Policy
Royal College of Psychiatrists
17 Belgrave Square
London SW1X 8PG

"I would rather have a live daughter than a dead son."

2011-04-11T14:27:00.004+02:00

Cemeteries can be pretty bleak places, but when it is on the outskirts of a faceless Dutch suburb under a grey January sky, it feel about as about as desolate as you can possibly get. When you are visiting the grave of a child who killed herself in her early teens, the feeling of despair, especially when accompanied by her mother, gives way to an urge to weep bitterly. It is an urge which I am unable to resist as I do the maths subtracting the date of death from the day she was born. It is one thing to be told Juliaantje* was only 14, but to see it carved in marble was too much to bear. Holding her photograph her mother sobs uncontrollably as I hug her while she in turn hugs a precious photograph.

The picture is of a sunny, smiling, apparently bubbly teenager, with long hair and a grey T-shirt. There is nothing in the picture to suggest that she was transgender, but that is the reason she took her life.

When she was 12 her mother tried to have her put onto hormone blockers to delay puberty. She didn’t want to develop body hair, a deep voice or have wet dreams. She had already self-harmed when young, trying to slice her penis off with a pair of scissors. However, in what was clearly a borderline decision, the psychologists decided to that she should not be given these drugs. She should be given counselling instead. In despair her mother, a single parent, tried to take her to the United States, but the air fare and the £200 a month cost of these drugs was way beyond her means. Her father had no money either and both sets of grandparents didn’t want to know.

Two years later the talking therapy failed. Juliaantje took a massive overdose and died, having self-harmed, abused alcohol and other substances for more than a year before that.

“She was an intelligent and lively girl.” Her mother tells me through the tears and a large glass of Genever in a nearby café, probably the only thing that can deaden the pain of losing her only child. “She had a great future ahead of her, she could have done anything, been a doctor, a lawyer her teachers said…” Her voice breaks. Her happy nature had disappeared when male puberty really hit. “Her voice broke and she started to get facial hair and hair on her chest. She wore make up and turtle-neck jumpers to hide it all, but she simply couldn’t deal with the way her body was developing…”

Did she blame the psychiatrists? No. Psychiatry is never going to be an exact science, there will always be people who don’t fit into their categories. She does however, feel that they could have given her the benefit of the doubt. “The effects of hormone blockers are easy to reverse, you just stop taking them…” There would have been no risk to her daughter if, at any time she decided that she did not want to be a girl she could simply have stopped, and male puberty would have started.
Hormone Blockers are essentially a way for young trans people and children to leave their options open. They open an extended open window of choice, which gives them time to think about their future, a time during which young people can decide whether they wish to remain the sex they were assigned at birth, whether that be male or female, or whether they need gender reassignment surgery after the age of 18. Talking to mothers of transgender children in the UK who have been prescribed hormone blockers, usually at great cost (£200 a month plus the cost of a consultation in and flight to the United States) one thing comes across loudly and clearly; “I would rather have a live daughter than a dead son.” One of them told me. One mother had remortgaged her house to pay the cost of these drugs knowing what her child was like, she realised that this would probably be the only way to keep her alive.

Another mother talked of how her young child had been prescribed a cocktail of a dozen drugs, including Ritalin, because of behaviour problems at home and at school. Yet when her child was recognised as transgender everything changed. As soon as she was treated as a girl, the tantrums, the bedwetting, the crying, the screaming, the hyperactivity, the violence, just stopped, as did the need for any of the drugs. “She became happy and contented almost overnight, just because we treated her like a girl! The psychologist who spotted this probably saved her life.”

Predictably the accusation of “child abuse” has been levelled at those who advocate prescribing hormone blockers to children between the ages of 12 and 15 (they already are prescribed to those over the age of 16) in the UK. This flies in the face of the evidence in both the United States and Holland, where these drugs have been successfully, and harmlessly prescribed for many years. It also flies in the face of the experience of parents of transgender children, who have lived a day-to-day existence, hoping that their child is still alive and in one piece. Until her daughter was prescribed hormone blockers at age 16 one mother told me of the anguish she and her husband felt when their child had gone missing for a few days when she was 14. “We really thought we would never see her again. Every time the phone rang we thought it would be the police wanting us to identify a body.”

Now that this technology has been developed, not making it available to all those children who need it is child abuse. Three years ago the trans community was shocked by the suicide of a transgender child who was only 10 years old. The allegation of “child abuse” has been levelled at parents who permit their transgender child to express the gender they prefer and who let them have hormone blockers. Yet this is effectively child abuse in reverse. Not to allow trans children to express their gender identities is actually child abuse. Those who throw accusations of child abuse around without knowing the facts are the ones who are child abusers by proxy; putting pressure on parents to force their children to conform to the gender they were assigned at birth no matter what the consequences
.
Hormone blockers save lives and extend trans children’s options. Whether you believe the studies which variously claim that “50%”, “66%”, “75%”, “90%” or “98%” of trans children become cisgender adults, the fact is that all these drugs do is keep their options open. The fact is that sociological research has shown that these (psychiatric) statistics are based on thoroughly unreliable data, wildly overestimated at best and downright misleading at worst.

Wittgenstein famously said “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” I wish some people would do some serious research before making up their minds.

*Not her real name

The Plural of Anecdote is not Data

2011-04-09T10:44:00.001+02:00

If you met Saori Kimura you would immediately notice that she is a very tall girl. In fact at 6’1” she is the tallest player in the Japanese women’s volleyball team. In indeed she, and her team-mates were the only Japanese people you had ever met, you would think the Japanese were on average a very tall race.

The problem is that if you tried to generalise from Saori Kimura to the rest of the population of Japan in terms of height you would be wrong. Even without heels, when I travel on the Tokyo Metro at rush-hour, there are very few men or women who come to anything higher than chin level on me, and when I wear heels, they are mostly staring at my arm-pits. Indeed it is one of the most remarkable things about using the public transport system, compared to London; suddenly I am head and shoulders above almost everyone in the train. And I am only 5’7” tall.

So if you had met Saori and you went around telling everyone that the Japanese were very tall people you would be either lying or stupid.

Yet this is what Julie Bindel has been doing for a long time when it comes to trans people. On her Facebook page she refers to a blog in which an unknown women’s group is taken over by a small number on unknown transwomen, who, because of their supposedly louder voices and more aggressive nature, come to dominate and eventually exclude the other women. The implication from this is that all transwomen who join women’s-only spaces will dominate them and take over.

Julie is a unfortunately a serial offender when it comes to doing this; she finds one example of a trans person behaving in a way she disapproves and then appears to generalise it to the entire population of trans people. The problem is that, in the case of Saori Kimura it is very easy to show that anyone saying “because Saori is tall all Japanese people are tall”. You don’t have to travel very far from Narita Airport to realise that. When Julie Bindel stereotypes transwomen in this way; “All transwomen are more aggressive and take over women’s-only spaces.” It is much harder to prove her wrong.

As such the onus should be on her to provide accurate and reliable data on the extent of what she is implying happens. Of course she has not done this because the plural of anecdote is not data. You will always be able to find one or two examples of what you want to prove, whether it is tall Japanese women or short Kenyans. But generalising from a very small number of examples is either dishonest or stupid.

Coalition takes aim at Trans People

2011-04-04T19:39:00.005+02:00

Christine Burns’ excellent blog post about the Equality Act demonstrated how the government is systematically undermining most aspects of it. Christine is an expert on equality legislation and has a particularly good understanding of how it relates to what actually goes on in the public sector – the NHS, schools, universities, etc. She quite clearly explains how the Tories and the Lib Dems are undermining it with a combination of different measures; reducing the ability of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and individuals (through a reduction in Legal Aid) to enforce the law, and reducing public sector bodies’ duty to tell the public what they are doing to reduce inequality.

Rather than come out honestly and openly and say that they disagree with equality for minorities such as black people, trans people, Muslims, women, gay men and lesbians, Theresa May, Lynne Featherstone and the rest of the government seem to have decided to make it appear that they agree with the Equality Act on the surface, whilst behind our backs they are chipping away making it an ineffective piece of legislation. This truly is a government which will say one thing and do the opposite.

However this matters much, much more for trans people than for other minorities. Trans people are one of the smallest minorities in the country. However we are also one of the least understood and most misrepresented. The fact that Trans Media Watch has had to work so hard to come up with its Memorandum of Understanding with Channel 4 and other progressive media is clear evidence of this. Do groups representing women, ethnic minorities, LGB people, Muslims and others have to agree MOUs with the media? The fact that Comic Relief can use a transphobic comedian to raise money for charity suggests that trans people have a very long way to go in the UK compared to other groups.

The experiences of trans children and their treatment in many schools, especially the lack of support they receive from school staff demonstrates the distance trans people still have to go to achieve the acceptance that, for example, ethnic minorities have. In most schools, incidents of racial bullying are dealt with firmly, logged, recorded and patterns analysed to see if there is anything the school can do. In short schools are pro-active when it comes to racism. Transphobic bullying is not taken seriously at all by all accounts.

The Equality Act would have placed a duty on all public bodies to actively plan to ensure that all minority groups are able to access their services. This is called the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) and it means that, all public bodies, especially schools, have to be pro-active and ensure their procedures, policies and activities mean that they consider the impact of everything they do on minority groups.

This is important because many organisations in the public sector already do this to ensure that members of ethnic minority groups are not disadvantaged. However, this does not happen for trans people in very many cases. In fact trans people are not often included in diversity policies for many public sector organisations, especially schools, where incidentally, diversity policies from an LGB perspective are also often lacking.

Relatively small adjustments could lead to substantial improvements in the quality of life and educational outcomes for trans children. Additionally, since trans children do not usually make themselves known to adults at all, schools need to take special measures to educate children that it is OK to be trans, even if they do not know if there are any trans children in the school. With 1% of the population being trans and the modal average age of children becoming aware of their gender variance at only 5 years old, the chances are that a school of 500 children has 5 transgender children. Teachers are told to have a dyslexia-friendly classroom even if they do not know whether or not they have any dyslexic children, the same needs to be the case for trans children.

The fact is that the sort of pro-active measures essential if we are to see trans people treated equitably by public services and public bodies are not going to happen unless public sector bodies are forced to be pro-active. The problem is that, for most other minority groups their needs and problems have at least been acknowledged and actions taken which enable them to access the services provided by public bodies. As such, although the Equality Act is far from perfect from the point of view of trans people, trans people probably stood to gain most from it, and have most to lose from its undermining by the government.
Of course this now raises questions as to the position of Lynne Featherstone, Equalities minister in the current regime. She has been an outspoken and welcome supporter of trans people, however her silent acquiescence over the dilution of the Equality act suggests that she is either a willing collaborator or a pawn who is manipulated by a government that uses her as a cover for illiberal and oppressive policies. Time for her to show whose side she is really on.

Finally, one of the reasons for having a Public sector Equality Duty is because we are all taxpayers (OK except the very rich), and if we are paying our taxes we should expect that we are recieving service which is appropriate for our needs. Most services are appropriate for cisgender people by default. If however, public services are not catering to our needs, why should we pay our taxes?

Why Polly Toynbee is wrong.

2011-04-02T11:46:00.006+02:00

As much as I enjoyed reading Polly Toynbee's article; "If the Facts Change - it's OK to Change your Mind." in the Guardian yesterday, I have to disagree with the implications behind it.

In this article she suggested that 'chancellor' George Osborne should change course in his economic policy because the economy is clearly tanking and his current economic policy is clearly not working. She suggested that there is nothing wrong with changing your mind and that Osborne needs to think seriously about doing this in order to save the economy from a deep recession.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with the basis upon which she makes this assumption. In my opinion Osborne is not at all concerned with maintaining economic performance and capability in the British economy, or avoiding economic catastrophe. He is concerned with destroying as much public provision. He wants to close as many libraries, as many Sure Start centres, universities, schools, hospitals, citizens advice bureaux, etc as he can possibly get away with. The economic crisis is just an excuse.

I have always maintained that the Tories don't have policies, they have excuses. Cameron has ruthlessly used the economic crisis manufactured by his friends in the City of London to force policies on the British people that they would not otherwise countenance. Their entire manifesto has been designed around cuts and it is the excuse for the systematic reduction in opportunities for the young with the removal of EMAs, the slashing of funds for schools, the £9000 a year barrier to higher education for students. They want to destroy the NHS and the destruction of public services and the removal of opportunities for those who are not wealthy is the main aim of Tory policy. It is what they want, that is their raison d'etre.

However, they know that they would never be able to implement policies like these unless they have an excuse to do so. This is clear from the farce over student fees for universities; the introduction of fees of £27000 for a degree will actualy mean a cost to the taxpayer of £1billion before the next election. Given that the Tory-led government has said it wants to "cut the deficit" by half before then, it is clear that their cuts to universities will not save any money, they will just result in the reduction of educational opportunities for ordinary people and further economic damage to the country.

So, to admit that the current economic policy isn't working and to change course would mean abandoning the central aim of the most important (for them) element of policy. I suspect that they would rather see mass unemployment, bankruptcies and people being made homeless in their hundreds of thousands than stop their take-down of public services. There is a reason they will not change course, and that is that they would effectively be abandoning any hope of having any, even slightly credible excuse to slash and burn public services, privatise to death the NHS and schools, and impose their narrow ideological doctrines of selfishness and bleak unrestrained capitalist dystopia.

Whose balance? GRS: There is an opposite of “regretter."

2011-03-27T22:07:00.006+02:00

Balance is not a one-dimensional, black-and-white issue, it is complex and requires a good deal more thought by broadcasters, especially when dealing with marginalised groups such as trans people.

One of the issues raised over Channel 4’s inclusion of trans people in its 4thought slot was the decision to include a “regretter” (someone who regrets their Gender Reassignment Surgery, or GRS) in the line up, as their commitment to “balance” in reporting. Yet including someone who regrets his gender reassignment surgery in this context does not achieve balance. As Christine Burns quite rightly suggested in her blog recently, the idea of balance in reporting appears to have been considered a simplistic and unproblematic area from the point of view of those commissioning and creating television programmes and urgently needs rethinking.

Less than 1% of people who have had gender reassignment surgery have ever regretted it, a proportion which has declined significantly in recent years. So to include a regretter in this series feels very much like “balance” gone mad. This is akin to having a homophobic right-wing Christian to give “balance” in a programme about gays and lesbians. Should a programme about ethnic minorities need to include a racist in order to achieve balance? Should Songs of Praise also include input from the atheists? So why should an evangelical Christian have their say about trans people when we don’t routinely ask the BNP for their opinion on ethic minority issues? Why should one particular group be singled out for “balance” when other groups do not have representatives of people who question their very existence included?

When including someone who has regretted his gender reassignment surgery, in this series Channel 4 have failed to consider the implications for balance in more than one dimension, and as a result have revealed the shallowness of their thinking about balance which led to inclusion of Charles Kane. Balance is not a black-and-white issue, it is one which can be multi-dimensional and including a regretter raises many more complicated issues to do with balance.

A recent, unfortunately as yet unpublished, study in Holland is actually suggesting that the balance between the need to prevent people who will regret having GRS from obtaining surgery needs to be carefully struck, since there is an opposite of “regretter." One of the individuals in the study, who was refused GRS, committed suicide as a result. There are also reports of individuals who have self-harmed and become victims of substance abuse. In this study, the individual who killed herself would account, on her own, for well over double the proportion of regretters in the UK. If you also include in this proportion those whose lives have been rendered almost unliveable by this refusal there appears to be a greater danger from refusing people GRS than permitting GRS when one is not sure. Of course the difference is that those who commit suicide because they have been unable to access GRS are not around calling for changes, whereas Charles Kane is.

So, in my opinion, we should stop being so defensive in the face of people like Charles Kane who, as Christine rightly pointed out, arranged his own GRS privately. There is highly likely to be a consequence if Charles Kane, the religious right or anyone else makes it harder to obtain GRS; that consequence is likely to be a far greater number of suicides and troubled lives amongst those refused treatment. Let us be clear, refusing GRS where GRS is needed can, and does, kill. In one case; that of Cameron McWilliams, who committed suicide aged 10, it is possible that this resulted from the perception that changing gender was not possible. Let’s remember that whenever anyone publicises regretters, they are potentially harming “refusees”.

As such, next time a TV station includes Mr Kane in any of its programmes, balance can only be achieved if a relative or close friend of someone who has committed suicide as a result of being unable to obtain GRS, or someone who has self-harmed or abused drugs or alcohol, is also permitted to put the case against any further restrictions in the availability of GRS. In addition, the entire issue of “balance” needs to be reconsidered by broadcasters. In practical, semantic, philosophical, political and social terms “balance” is highly complex and not a one-size-fits-all issue that can be applied in the same way in every instance.

Comic Relief: Unfunny, uncharitable and unacceptable.

2011-03-22T19:19:00.007+01:00

When Comic Relief’s fundraising efforts undermine the very people it says it wants to help, it is time for it to re-examine the way it does what it does.

After a very long battle Melissa was allowed to go to school as a girl just in time for her class Christmas party. Assigned male gender at birth she has always insisted she was a girl. Her parents supported her and eventually, her school allowed her to be herself. Her class teacher has stopped calling her Jack and allowed her friends and classmates to call her Melissa, which is what they had been doing all along.

But this didn’t stop older boys in the school from bullying her and persistently attacking her in the playground, assaults about which the school did nothing, despite multiple complaints from her parents. After witnessing their daughter’s constant suffering and seeing what used to be a bubbly, happy child becoming increasingly depressed and moody, her parents have reluctantly taken her out of school and started educating her at home.
Melissa is just 7 years old.

Serena was also assigned male gender at birth but has always felt like a girl. She was 13 when she abandoned school. She had been persistently bullied since she was nine years old to the extent that she was being punched or kicked in school almost every day. On one occasion she was hit in the head with a cricket bat, and on another her clothes were set alight. Once again the school did nothing. She self-harmed and began substance and alcohol abuse. She became depressed and suicidal, sending her distraught mother suicide notes; she frequently went missing and got involved in petty crime. Eventually, with the determined support of her mother, she was able to take her GCSEs with the help of a home tutor.

In order to combat the negative portrayal of trans people in the media which is the root cause of Melissa and Serena’s* problems, this week a Memorandum of Understanding was launched with Trans Media Watch and some responsible media organisations to promote fair and accurate portrayal of trans people in the media. Their aims are simple “accuracy, dignity, respect.”

However Comic Relief and ITV are apparently not interested in accuracy, dignity or respect when it comes to trans people. Comic Relief says it raises money for charities that, amongst others, help young people with mental health issues, young people who abuse alcohol, young people sexually exploited and trafficked, and people who suffer domestic and sexual abuse. Young trans people are represented disproportionately in these groups, and many of those needing the services of charities that help these people, as a result of the treatment they have received throughout their short lives, will be transgender. Yet Comic Relief have decided to use “comedian” Peter Kay to raise money for charity through a music video, which, typically, ridicules transwomen. Worse still Kay is to feature on ITV’s Loose Women show this week as their first “transsexual” panellist, to promote the video. It is these kinds of stereotypical depictions of trans people many “comedians” of his ilk rely on, that represents one of the main sources of transphobia in the media today.

So why does this matter? This kind of “humour” helps generate a climate in which it is acceptable to ridicule, exclude, assault and otherwise harm trans people, to bully us because we are Not Really Human. These “comics” make us targets for the hatred of the bigoted and the ignorant. But the damage they create goes well beyond that. If they are constantly ridiculed on TV why should trans children be taken seriously by staff when they are being bullied in school? And what if you are a trans child, fearfully hiding your secret longing to be who you really are, terrified that someone might find out? Only despair and self-hatred lie down that lonely road. Yet what other roads are open to a child who sees people like him or her belittled and mocked not just for entertainment, but in the name of charity?

So how can Comic Relief and ITV possibly justify using comedians whose stock-in-trade involves contempt for and derision of transgender people? In my opinion, ITV’s use of Kay in Loose Women is akin to inviting a member of the Black-and-White Minstrel Show onto the programme. Media organisations like The Guardian and Channel 4 have shown they can represent trans people with the “accuracy, dignity and respect” that Trans Media Watch advocates so why can’t Comic Relief and ITV?

Why is this charity happy to use comedians whose output helps contribute to the very social problems it says it wants to ameliorate? Maybe it is because Comic Relief has simply become a vehicle for the second-rate to self-congratulate or salvage terminal careers. Maybe they operate a kind of macabre cost-benefit analysis; “If we raise enough money to sort out loads of other people what does it matter if a few trannies top themselves?” Although life will get better, Melissa and Serena, wonderfully tough cookies though they are, will still have a lot of hard times to come. It is about time Comic Relief stopped making them unnecessarily harder.

*These are not their real names, but they are real kids and these are their real experiences.

Power cuts in Northern Japan Demonstrate the idiocy of deregulated privatisation

2011-03-13T13:10:00.001+01:00

From tomorrow there will be planned three-hour power outages in Tokyo and other areas of Northern Japan such as Chiba, Yokohama, Aomori, Sapporo and Niigata. This is partly because of the additional power needed to support rescue efforts in and around Sendai, but also because of the reduced power output from power stations now that the Fukushima nuclear reactors are offline.

Yet these power outages are actually entirely unnecessary. Japan has enough electricity generating capacity, except the south-west of the country, including in and around the major cities of Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Hiroshima, Nagoya, Kagoshima and Hakata. However, this works on a different frequency. The north of the country’s power system, supplied by Tepco, runs on a frequency of 50 Hertz, the rest of the country, south of Yokohama, runs on a 60 hertz system. As such sharing power from the south to the north of the country is extrememely difficult, even at the best of times, which this is not.

Of course engineers may be able to set something up given time which will enable power from the south to be diverted north, but with the bulk of the country’s power engineers working to restore power to tsunami-sticken areas, there are few such engineers available. As such it is likely that power cuts, especially in the Tokyo area, will continue for some time unnecessarily.

Of course the privatisation-mad David Cameron, Nick Clegg and right-wing media in the UK is likely to want to keep things like this quiet. but it is yet another nail in the coffin of arguments for deregulation and privatisation. But I doubt that it will stop the privatisation-mad idiots now in charge of our political establishment.

Cameron's Falklands

2011-03-06T15:15:00.002+01:00

David Cameron’s failed military intervention in Libya is selfish, overtly political, and will hinder those who are trying to overthrow brutal dictatorships in the Middle East.

News is coming in that a British crack SAS unit has been “detained” by rebels in Libya, and some reports suggest that the “rebels” in question were actually a couple of goatherds with Kalashnikovs.

The extent to which UK forces are becoming involved in the Libyan uprising is of deep concern, not merely because the news that Western forces are supporting the rebels is likely to cause deep harm to the rebel cause itself, but also because it is likely to undermine rebels in other countries. Dictators all over the Middle East will now be able to present any potential uprising against them as a “Judeo-Christian plot” either against them or against Islam. The last resort of these scoundrels being to wrap themselves in their flag, and possibly in the crescent moon as well.

On the subject of scoundrels desperate to wrap themselves in the flag, it appears quite clear than David Cameron has decided that the Libyan people’s uprising represents an opportunity for him. His Falklands. Even the most ostrich-headed members of the Tory-led coalition government realise that the next election is likely to be a bloodbath despite their blatant attempts at gerrymandering constituency boundaries. Cameron’s coalition partners have already been reduced to a zombie party, the walking dead. His damaging cuts to the NHS, the imminent steep rise in unemployment, the incoherent melee which will soon replace the education system and the million-plus young people wasting their lives neither in work nor in education or training, will take his government well beyond the point of no return.

So he realises that he desperately needs a Falklands; a jingoistic military adventure abroad which would mask the destruction his policies are causing to the infrastructure and economy of the country and revive his electoral prospects. The problem is that Cameron’s desperation to revive his government’s electoral hopes appears to be leading to a huge military failure, almost on a par with the one that brought down President Jimmy Carter in Iran. Worse than that however, his selfish desire to continue in office and to impose more suffering on the British people, is likely to result in lasting damage to the ability of Arab people to rise up an overthrow their governments.

Maybe this is what he wants, things are starting to look far too uncomfortable for him at home as people here take heart and inspiration from the events in Egypt and Tunisia…

UKuncut: big business begins the fightback.

2011-03-03T22:06:00.005+01:00

When the Spanish conquistadores defeated the Mayan civilization, they wiped out their whole society in just one day. They simply struck at its centre and, because it was a very highly centralised, hierarchical nation it meant that attacking the top of this hierarchy, “decapitation” in today’s military language, brought the entire Maya nation to its knees overnight.
Yet the same conquistadores fought the Apaches for 300 years and failed to defeat them.

The reason for this is that the Apache nation had a very flat, egalitarian social structure; there was no centralised leadership to decapitate. Each tribe or village was mobile, agile and could react autonomously to any attack. If anyone developed in a leadership role and was killed, another person emerged instantly and took his or her place.

This is the same situation big business finds itself in when facing UKuncut. UKuncut is flat, non-hierarchical organisation; there is no leadership to decapitate, no person to smear, to bribe, to threaten or to undermine. If they stop one lot of protests from happening, another autonomous group will start other actions. It would be like trying to catch a whole shoal of fish with one hand.

So the large multinational companies which have been targeted by UKuncut have, desperately decided to employ PR agents to undermine UKuncut. There is clearly a great deal of money to be made, and prestige to be gained by the PR companies that can do the impossible and stop UKuncut. There are only three known ways to stop the shoal of fish of UKuncut and those are;

Extreme violence. In this case not an option because the reaction is likely to be counterproductive in the extreme. Would work in China or Iran but not here.

Working to change the UKuncut organisation from a horizontal one to a hierarchical one. Again pretty much impossible because everyone involved is very wary of anyone being turned into a leader, and such a move would also be highly counterproductive.

So the only way left for these the PR agents to stop this shoal of fish getting bigger and landing hits on both big business and the government they have hired is to “poison the water they swim in”.

What we saw on ITV1’s “Tonight” programme this evening was the first phase of this. Very subtly, the arguments of the big corporations were put across (with words fading in and out on screen to help persuade), in simple terms by people specially employed to put the case for the rich not to pay their fair share of tax.

In contrast the arguments of the expert were put across as complex and the UKuncut protestors talked mainly about practical issues and described what they were doing in their actions but their arguments about why these companies should be held to account were not properly put forward, at least not in a coherent way (and not with subtle words fading in and out as professional PR people cleverly and concisely put their arguments that black is white). Round two to Big Business.
The water that UKuncut swims in is public anger at the scale of tax avoidance in relation to the huge cuts in public services which are affecting everything from the NHS to education. This water was gently poisoned tonight. Not enough, but seeds of doubt were planted, this will be just the beginning, these arguments will be repeated relentlessly over the coming months – Gobbels style – in the knowledge that if you repeat a lie often enough, eventually people will think it is true. Their fightback, organised by shady characters operating behind everyone’s back, through ‘contacts’, clandestine phone calls and closed meetings, has begun in earnest.

So what can UKuncut do about this? My suggestion is that we play to our strengths. We need good arguments, good counter-arguments and easily-understood ways of communicating with everyone through traditional media as well as social media. Yet we don’t need highly-paid, shady PR men to develop and hone our ideas into concise arguments, we have our own people, a resource of thousands. I would propose crowdsourcing our ideas and arguments, inviting the public to find effective and creative ways of presenting our case and communicating our rebuttals of the propaganda now seeping out of the darkest shadows of the business machine.

Let’s put our heads together, let’s get good honest arguments marshalled and distributed to all who are involved in actions in banks, mobile companies, fashion stores and other places, let’s get our collective intelligence to work on counter arguments to the nasty right-wing glibness which will subtly start creeping its way into the national consciousness through the mainstream media. If they try to poison our water we need to purify it, or slowly our movement will die.

David Cameron is not the Prime Minister

2011-02-27T12:45:00.002+01:00

Using language designed to portray him as Robin Hood, David Cameron is just a cleverly disguised Sheriff of Nottingham. Only the Sheriff of Nottingham never had what he has; a massive media machine to cover up his thieving.

When Jean Baudrillard wrote his provocative but insightful essay “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” after the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam’s forces, he did not mean that there had been no war, just that the events taking place there were not what they were presented as. One war later and we are just starting to find out what he meant.

Yet the ever-widening chasm between reality and our media-managed perceptions is no more graphically illustrated than in the persona of David Cameron, the PR man who likes to call himself Prime Minister. I have often wondered why, whenever I see him on the news, or at the despatch box, I simply do not get the feeling that he is actually the leader of this country. I don’t mean that he does not hold the official office of Prime Minister and occupy 10 Downing Street, but that he has never been, and never will be Prime Minister.

In contrast I didn’t feel the same even when Margaret Thatcher was in power. Destructive, disingenuous, dishonest and dangerous though her regime was (sort of Cameron-lite) one still always got the impression that she was trying, although quite obviously failing, to govern for the country. I have never felt this of David Cameron. David Cameron has never appeared to me as anything other than a gauleiter.

A gauleiter, the ruling figurehead of an occupying force. In this case the occupying force is

• the very wealthy upper classes,

• the large multinational conglomerations, casino banks and

• the manipulative, dishonest popular media, owned by right-wing billionaires.

Ruling in the interests of this narrow and increasingly powerful, self-appointed self-select few, David Cameron is the Quisling in their pay.

Using the language of all that this occupying force despises; freedom, equality and self-determination, he justifies policies which enforce servitude, privilege and domination. The Sheriff of Nottingham dressed in Lincoln green tights and carrying a bow and arrow. There can be no clearer illustration of this than the news that teachers’ and nurses’ pensions are to be cut to pay for huge and totally undeserved bonuses for bankers who are paid extra simply for failing slightly less badly than before. Given that, at least until last year, the education system and the NHS had both improved their performance substantially year-on-year, why are nurses and teachers not due a bonus? Because they are not part of the occupying force, of course.

Yet the only thing one cannot say about David Cameron is that he has “betrayed” the British people. Betrayal implies that he is, or was once, one of us. One of us he has never been, he has always been nothing more than the manifestation of an increasingly thin veneer of attempted legitimacy for his hyper-rich paymasters to hide behind whilst plundering all that is good in the UK.

The PR Prime Minister, providing PR for the hatchet-men and asset-strippers while they make their get-away with our money.
The Tories have always argued that “greed is good.” But the obscene levels of greed exhibited by the new Sheriffs of Nottingham as they appropriate the assets of the UK and are concentrating even greater wealth into an even smaller number of hands and hiding their plunder along with that of the drug cartels in offshore tax havens. As such the ordinary British people will be exploited, ripped-off and taken for a ride in the name of a manufactured economic crisis, a manufactured deficit, and told that everything they consider important, from the NHS to their children’s education must be sold off to pay the rich for the money they lost gambling to increase their indecent levels of opulence. The bankers will retire to yachts and Caribbean islands, teachers and nurses to poverty and unheated homes. Even now, as doctors, nurses, classroom assistants, teachers, lecturers and police officers lose their jobs, those who caused the problem are using our money to cause another silent genocide in the third world. Their engineered food price spike will take the food out of the bellies of already starving children in the teeming cities of Africa and South Asia and turn it into a fat profit for the merchant bankers.

This is the occupying force that David Cameron represents; they are his paymasters, his friends and his partners in crime. Just like the Gulf wars, David Cameron is not all he seems. He is the simulated Prime Minister, the political cover for the bandits in Armani suits. He may occupy Downing Street, but he will never be the leader of this country.

Lea T: You are NOT Mentally Ill!

2011-02-23T22:53:00.001+01:00

It was with mixed emotions that I watched the video of trans supermodel Lea T on Oprah last week. What was most positive is that she is able to be an openly trans model and make her way in her chosen career without the discrimination from which most other trans people suffer at work. She will hopefully be an example to young trans people all over the world that there are other people like them, they are not the only one and they can change their lives. They will not always have to live in fear.

But what made me, and indeed many other trans people around the world feel uncomfortable, was how she appeared, prompted by Oprah Winfrey, to define being transgender as a ‘pathology’. This is something many trans people are currently fighting against and passionately disagree with. Indeed it is something trans people of all types around the world increasingly agree about, there is now an increasingly vocal worldwide campaign to stop trans pathologization.

The problem is that, when someone like Lea T becomes famous, she is suddenly everywhere in the media and her view of herself, that she is suffering from some kind of illness, is likely to become widespread amongst the millions of people who have never knowingly met a trans person.

Yet is it important to recognise where her view of herself comes from. Like most trans people she has probably grown up in a world in which she has been told, or has felt, from a very young age, that her perceptions of herself as female rather than male, are abnormal, and constitute a problem. From the video it would appear that she influenced by the, now outdated psychiatric definition Gender Identity Disorder, a diagnosis which is often required to obtain the kind of surgery she needs to align her body with her own gender identity.

Yet the idea that trans people are mentally ill is increasingly being challenged. It is important to remember that homosexuality was considered a mental illness by the psychiatric profession until the 1980s. Now, only the fruitcake far right think it is.
Joan Roughgarden, professor of Biology at Stanford University has shown that transgender behaviour and physical manifestation in common in nature, identifying huge numbers of species which change sex and species in which cross-gender behaviour is common. In fact, it may well turn out that, once most animal species have been investigated for their social interactions that the heterosexual, cisgender, nuclear family made up of an alpha male and a coy but choosy female which is culturally dominant in human society is very much in a minority in nature.

The main sources of the problem of transgender pathologization are social and cultural. As Prof. Milton Diamond so concisely put it; “Nature loves diversity, society hates it.” There is a tendency for society to blame the individual when they don’t fit in when it is actually society, which needs to change to accommodate the range of individual diversity. The problem in Western society has been the over dominance of materialism. You are considered to be a woman if you have a vagina and a man if you have a penis. Other, less materially-obsessed societies have been able to recognise that a person’s gender is more to do with their spirit than with the material manifestation of their body.

Given the diversity of gender expression, even just among cisgender people from different societies around the world, it becomes clear that in essence gender is simply a culture (usually with an accompanying caste system) taught from a very young age to the extent that it appears to be natural. Yet it is no more natural for girls to like pink and boys to like blue than it is for the English to like cricket and Americans to like baseball. We have to come to understand that there is a greater diversity amongst the human race than our narrow view of gender would have us believe, and that the culturally-imposed gender norms of male and female based solely on material criteria have never been adequate.

As such the fact that Lea T feels that there is something mentally wrong with her is understandable. She has been brought up to believe that there are only two immutable genders. She appears to have taken to heart the view of society that it is she who is the problem not the cultural system which has brought her up to believe she is wrong. This needs to change.

David Cameron: A liar, a cheat and a threat to democracy

2011-02-21T02:34:00.003+01:00

Just over a year ago I blogged about how David Cameron was “the most dishonest politician”. I did not realise my words would be so graphically illustrated in the form of Cameron’s policy directive in the Daily Torygraph today. His latest decree is that all services should be privatised unless they are the armed forces or the security services. Like his policy on the NHS, this was not in the Tory Manifesto.

Why is this? The only answer can possibly be that David Cameron is a liar. He really is the most dishonest politician. The complete privatisation of all state functions is a huge and fundamental policy for any government to impose. The fact that it was not in the Tory Manifesto means that Cameron is effectively unconcerned with democracy as we know it. He is prepared to implement a change to which the majority of the public are opposed. If he is so confident that this policy is the right one, why did he not tell us that this was his policy before the election?

The answer is, of course, that he would never have been “elected” if he had done so. David Cameron is a dictator; cheat, a liar and a threat to democracy and the fabric of British society. It is the responsibility of the British people to remove him. Like we did in 1944.

Man United v Crawley Town every week: or the big corporations v the taxpayer

2011-02-19T15:44:00.001+01:00

#ukuncut

Those who oppose the UKuncut actions against Barclays and other corporate targets really have misunderstood the situation quite badly. Some have even proposed that the protest should be targeted at the Tax offices which appear to be unable to enforce payment of tax by these corporations.

Yet there is a REASON why the tax offices are under-resourced and unable to make these companies pay their faor share of tax. These companies use their considerable wealth to obtain political influence, especially with the Conservative Party. The donations they make (probably out of the billions they save from not paying tax) ensure that these offices are always unable to make large multinationals pay their fair share of tax. They ensure that the wages paid to staff there are considerably less than the wages available to corporate tax accountants who ensure that these corporations avoid the tax, thus ensuring that the best accountants are on the side of the companies. It is a bit like Manchester United playing Crawley Town every week.

These corporate donations also buy politicians’ inaction on closing the loopholes that enable their accountants to hide their profits in places like the Cayman Islands. Or indeed they buy politicians’ action on creating such loopholes.
So it is rather like Man Utd Playing Crawley Town every week but also supplying the ref, the linesmen and on a pitch which is sloping towards the Crawley Town goal and having their goal on wheels and a zip-wire so that it can be moved backwards and forwards very quickly along the goal-line.

This is what those who argue against the targetting of the banks by UKuncut have forgotten. The people involved in chasing these corporations are mostly players from the Vauxhall Conference and the people working for the companies are the Wayne Rooneys. These companies have huge political influence, most of it behind the scenes, which allows them to distort the tax regime and means of collection in their favour.

As such the people mostv responsible for creating corporate tax regimes which favour large corporations like Barclays, are the very multibillion pound congliomerates which benefit from the lax tax regime and the loopholes they provide.
Understanding this is crucial to understanding the way the new politico-business establishment functions in modern society.

Toby Young, idiocy and selling one's soul to the devil.

2011-02-13T14:46:00.002+01:00

Just when I thought my opinion of that inane right-wing “journalist” Toby Young couldn’t sink any lower, he confounds me with possibly the most ridiculous “article” ever written in a UK Newspaper; ‘Why the Super-rich deserve their tax holiday’ which is garbage even in relation to the low standards of the Daily Mail. This really is nothing more than blatant propaganda for the bloated mega-rich. Dr Goebbels move over.
His main argument, that companies will move their operations elsewhere if they are charged high tax rates in the UK, is like a sieve with a large hole in the bottom. Vodafone is welcome to move its entire operation to Liechtenstein and dominate the mobile phone market there, but it would be the equivalent to dominating the mobile phone market of the small market town of East Dereham in Norfolk. I doubt they would make any profit at all, let alone the billions they make from mobile users in the UK, even if they did pay no tax.
The same is true of Arcadia, the compamy which owns Topshop and other fashion retail outlets. Philip Green is welcome to move every branch of Topshop, MIss Selfridge, Dotty Perks and Burton to Monaco where his company would pay no tax. But I doubt that he would make anything other than a bankruptcy-inducing loss.
Ditto Boots and many other companies.
The truth is that Vodafone, Topshop, Boots and others can only make their profits by trading in the UK, they are in every high street, they sell to the British people, that is how they make their money. To allow them to move their money to ‘offshore’ tax havens so that they avoid paying tax in the UK is simply allowing them to steal money owed to the British people in their tax. Toby Young cannot argue that, if tax rates are too high in the UK, they will go elsewhere. This will never happen. they can only make their money by trading in the UK.
For Toby Young to argue thay they “deserve” not to pay the same level of tax as the rest of us is stupid. These companies can only make money by trading the the UK market with its 60 million (and counting) consumers. They should be forced to pay tax here like everyone else.
If these companies paid their fair share of tax we wouldn’t need to cut
EMA,
Universities,
school buildings,
Sure Start,
classroom assistants,
benefits for the sick and disabled,
the NHS, the police,
etc, etc, etc.
I suspect that this is why the Tory-led government is permitting them to avoid paying tax in the UK, because they want to cut these things anyway…

Genocide in Honduras

2011-01-25T19:43:00.003+01:00

Time to ask questions about the organisations complicit in exporting hate-crime and murder to the third world.

Honduras Nov 29 2010 - 18 Jan 2011

• Dania Roberta Sevilla Raudales (November 29, 2010. Beaten and burned to death age 58)
• Luisa Alex Alvarado Hernandez (December 22, 2010. Died from stoning and being set alight aged 23)
• Oscar Martínez Salgado (December 20, 2010. Stabbed and set on fire in her home aged 45)
• Reana Bustamante (December 29, 2010. Stabbed repeatedly)
• ‘Cheo’ ( January 2, 2011. Stabbed to death on a street in Tegucigalpa age unknown but from the picture I have seen she looks around 20)
• Génesis Briget Makaligton (January 7, 2011. Strangled)
• Fergie Alice Ferg (January 7, 2011 strangled age 25)
• Unknown transgender person (10 January 2011, no further details)

The seven names above are all transgender people. By the time you read this there may be more. They were all murdered in Honduras between the 29 Nov 2010 and 18 Jan 2010; seven murders in the space of just 48 days. They need to be added to the gruesome tally of at least 171 LGBT people murdered in Honduras in the lat five years. As things stand, a transgender person is being murdered in Honduras every week.

To put this is context, if trans people make up around 1% of the population, as current estimates suggest, this would be equivalent to 700 cisgender (non-transgender) people being murdered in less than two months. If people were being slaughtered at this rate anywhere in the world it would be in all the papers, but because the victims are transgender, and in a far-off third-world country we hear nothing. In fact, for a country with the population similar to that of London, there are vastly more trans people murdered there per head of population than anywhere else in the world. If a transgender person in London were being brutally murdered every week it would be world news.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has issued this statement condemning the killings. Despite the statement's cautious language it uses the word "impunity", strongly suggesting that this is happening with the connivance of the government of Honduras. If those who engage in hate-crime of this sort see that they can freely kill members a certain group of people in the knowledge that they will not be pursued, is there any wonder that transgender people in Honduras are being meticulously wiped out? Effectively the Honduran government is complicit in the deliberate and systematic extermination of its transgender citizens. But not just the government…

What is apparent from the list above is that these people have been murdered in a particularly frenzied, brutal and vicious way, stabbed multiple times, burned, beaten and stoned. The manner of their deaths, in particular the stoning, particularly barbaric crime, something normally used exclusively by religious maniacs, is probably the clue as to the source of this hatred. The excessive violence with which all these people have been murdered strongly suggests the influence of this kind of irrational hatred.

In fact, murders of transgender people in Honduras started to increase in October 2008, coinciding with an apparent increase in hate-speech apparently from the growing number of Christian evangelists and even the Catholic church, against transgender people as well as gays and lesbians, who are also being targeted.

It is time LGBT people and supporters of human rights around the world put pressure on the Honduran government to investigate these murders fully, to catch and punish the perpetrators and ensure that its transgender citizens can go about their lives without fear of a violent and horrific death. We also need public pressure on governments around the world to give refugee status to all LGBT people arriving from Honduras as a matter of course. Not only that, but Catholics and other Christians need to apply pressure on the Pope and leaders of evangelical churches to stop this incitement to genocide. These religious organisations cannot continue to operate in Honduras without significant financial help from people attending fundamentalist churches in Europe and North America whose donations are supporting these crimes.

Indeed these murders throw up the issue of the activities of fundamentalist Christian groups in third-world countries. The proposal to introduce the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda has been blamed by many on the influence of these organisations. It would seem that, given their inability to successfully incite the wide-scale murder of LGBT people in Western Europe and North America they have decided to pick on people even less able to defend themselves. The leaders of these groups raise money from unwitting churchgoers in the UK, the US and elsewhere to fund those encouraging this violence in the full knowledge of its consequences. Much as I would like to see these criminals posing as religious leaders brought to account for their crimes, I suspect the law is not capable of doing so. But public pressure can be applied to these religious extremists. Bullies prefer shadows; it is time to turn the full glare of the spotlight on them. Time for those who donate to fund “ministries” abroad to ask rather more probing questions about what their money is being used for.

Genocide is a strong word to use, but in the case of transgender people in Honduras I can find no other. It is clear to me that the government of Honduras and a number of supposedly Christian organizations have blood on their hands. And, unless those who contribute to the coffers of these groups start to take responsibility for finding out what is being done in their name and with their money, so will they.

Police Violence - Targetting Women

2010-12-12T10:55:00.025+01:00

As readers of UnCommon Sense will know, it is not uncommon for me to disagree with Julie Bindel. However on this occasion my slight disagreement with Julie is of a slightly different nature and probably not something she would disagree with herself. Julie, reporting from Parliament Square tweeted this and a few similar tweets;

"Support the students and hate the gov but a minority of nasty violent macho tossers down here, and not just the police for once".

Her take on the demo being that it was about macho twats on both sides of the police lines, intent on letting their testosterone take over. I can see her point, I haven't been to a demonstration yet where someone hasn't had testosterone problems, but I think it actually represents something rather more sinister than that; targetted violence against women.

OK so I have to admit that I arrived a bit late at the demo (because I couldn't get out of work that day), and my take on it as such may be a bit different. As I arrived, I noticed that the majority of people walking away from it with bloody heads were women and girls. This video, posted to show that the police officer fell off his horse rather than was dragged off it (as Cameron wanted us to think) actually shows, in the background, two women being beaten over the head by a policeman with a truncheon. These women were obviously not threatening anyone, yet they were targetted by a burly male police officer. This report from a girl from Barnsley clearly shows that police officers were engaged in deliberate targetting of women demonstrators, despite them being no threat to the officers involved in committing these crimes. The excellent reports from Laurie Penny have also shown how women and girls are deliberately targetted in unprovoked attacks;

"Fighting for breath, I am shoved roughly through the line by two police officers; twisting my neck, I see a young woman in a white bobble hat pinned between the shields and the crowd, screaming as the batons come down on her head once, twice, and her spectacles are wrenched from her face" (New Statesman 10 Dec 2010).

In the previous demonstration it is clear that Tahameena Bax was targetted by police and injured as policemen hit her over the head with battons. Tahameena is still nowhere near a full recovery. I could continue with many other reports of police violence against women.

What seems to be happening here is a deliberate policy (on the part of the Met - probably from the government) to target women in order to discourage women from coming along to these demonstrations and as such to reduce their numbers and eventually make them appear to be just the work of a small minority of hard-core anarchists and the moronic and macho Socialist Wankers Party.

There needs to be a full enquiry into the violence of male police officers attacking women and girls in these demonstrations, on top of the deliberately political police tactics of kettling demonstrators unnecessarily for very long periods after a demo has finished. Everyone has the right, and indeed the duty, to demonstrate. If the government is using the police to deliberately target female demonstrators in order to discourage them from demonstrating then they are actively discriminating against one group of people.

In my opinion there is clearly a deliberate targetting of girls and women by the police (obviously not to the exclusion of men and boys). There have been too many examples and reports for this pattern to be ignored. Whether it is the result of a deliberate policy of trying to discourage anyone female from protesting, or the result of something more sinister; a group of male police officers who are out of control and wish to indulge their dark, psychiatric fanatsies of misogynistic violence against women is a matter of debate. So whilst Julie may have a point, to an extent, that there was a lot of macho posturing there, it seems to me that there is more to it than that.

I suspect that not only will Lynne Featherstone not be interested in this aspect of equal opportunities but that the tactic of targetted violence will backfire and women and girls will be more determined to demonstrate to get rid of this appalling government. If the Met/Cameron thinks this sort of thing is going to make women cowed and frightened and stay at home, I believe they/he is very mistaken.

The T-word, contested meanings and cultural imperialism

2010-11-24T23:57:00.001+01:00

The erzatz furore over the use of the word “Tranny” by a well-known transwoman has been erupted in an unacceptable way, to my mind. Considering the rather dubious basis for some of the accusations and assertions it is worth considering some of the things those who criticise first and think later (or not at all) didn’t think about.

A hundred years ago, Ferdinand de Saussure made the, actually rather sensible and now apparently quite obvious observation that in language, the relationship between signifier and signified is purely arbitrary. In other words there is no link between the word itself and the object or concept which it represents. There is nothing in the word “tree” which can tell you that it signifies something brownish with a trunk, branches and leaves. The only reason that it does signify a tree is because enough people (ie. those who speak English) agree that it does.

In other words, language and words have meanings which are negotiated and contingent. Of course some words are more negotiated than others but all are contingent to some extent on the way people agree to use them. Of course not all people agree all the time about every word.

Pierre Bourdieu however noted how some language is more privileged than others, and how the power structures and hegemonies of society are brought to bear through language. Language does not inherently have any power, we cannot ascribe agency to something inanimate such as language. Power is exercised by people, through language and it is also the sublties such as tone of voice and body language which affect its meaning. This fits in with Saussure’s view of language and suggests that society exerts power through privileging certain forms of language over others. “He” for example is normally privileged over “she” reflecting the sexist and misogynistic power structures within society.

Gunther Kress however, went a stage further in his analysis of language and noted how linguistic communication is in fact entirely social, and is contingent on a complex relationship between the subject matter, the speaker (or writer), the listener (or reader), and the context. In other words, you cannot separate any utterance from the relationship between the signifier, signified, the communicator, communicatee and the context in which this is all happening. When other variables are factored in, such as the degree of disagreement about the word or words in question, it becomes clear that there are going to be no hard-and-fast rules about the use of any particular element of language which are not contingent on the person communicating, the people being addressed, the situation in which the communication is taking place and indeed the media in which it is being expressed.

As such the use of a word such as “tranny”, the meaning and usage of which is still highly contested, will be difficult to predict in terms of making judgements about its appropriateness or otherwise. Of course in the case of a word like “he”, which is almost completely uncontested in terms of its meaning and usage, it will be much easier to predict and make judgements about the appropriateness of its usage.

To illustrate this, transgender people consider the usage of the word “Tranny” inappropriate in cisgender media. However even here there are going to be exceptions when cisgender media are discussing the appropriateness of its usage, when they are quoting from transphobic hate-criminals or when reporting hate crime or examples of transphobic discrimination. However as a recent survey has shown, there is no evidence whatsoever of any feeling in the trans community that it is wrong for trans people to use this word. As such there is no problem, for most trans people, for a transwoman performing drag calling herself “Tranny”. In the case of Mzz Kimberley’s performances at Transgender Days of Remembrance in London, the additional contextual locating of the performance, that of lifting the mood after a particularly difficult reading of the names of 179 trans people who had been murdered during the year, meant her performance enabled the participants to get over the depressing and sad mood, to help people to regain some kind of optimism to enable them to face the future. As such it was particularly appropriate. Of course one participant (out of about 100) disagreed and made an accusation of transphobia about this, although this is all the more puzzling considering the fact that she didn’t complain a year ago, when the same song was performed for TDoR.

In contrast the use of “he” by Planet Transgender to describe Mzz Kimberly, who clearly identifies as female in her everyday life as well as her performances, is easy to come to a judgement on. It is clearly unacceptable and represents deliberate transphobia. One doesn’t need a survey to know that misgendering is one of the areas in which transgender people and their supporters almost unanimously agree is unacceptable whether it is done by cisgender media or by trans people.

The fact is that, like most words in the English language, or indeed any language, the meaning, implicit or explicit, and connotations of the word “tranny” is always going to vary according to context, subject and person using the word. If I say, “There’s going to be a war” and David Cameron says “There’s going to be a war” the meaning will be completely different. If David Cameron said it in the context of a drink with his friends down the pub or on the steps of 10 Downing Street, it would also have different meanings. To ignore these multiple textual, contextual and social elements to any utterance is to ignore the most important elements of that utterance in terms of its meaning, relevance and importance.

One of the contextual and social elements which people use to judge the importance of any particular utterance on the internet, and especially in the blogosphere, is the extent to which a blogger is willing to permit people to respond and contribute to the discussion and ideas raised in the blog itself. Obviously bloggers who disable comments or who “moderate” large numbers of comments such that many do not appear, should be taken far less seriously than those who are prepared to permit others to respond. Indeed bloggers who do so devalue their ideas by about 99%. By doing so these people are effectively communicating to us that they are not confident enough of what they say to be able to argue it with others. Indeed so many people I know tried to respond to Planet Transgender’s blog that I got several people actually complain to me about it down the pub…

Another variable in this situation is of course, culture. Most people seem to make the mistake of assuming that British and American cultures are very similar because we speak the same language. This is well wide of the mark. British culture has much more in common with those of our north-west European neighbours than it does with that of the United States. One of the features of this is humour and lightening the mood. The best way to illustrate this is ITMA. ITMA, or “It’s That Man Again” was one of the most famous radio programmes of all time, although it is little heard of today. During the dark days of the blitz in 1940-41, when London effectively suffered a 9/11 every day for 9 months, people all over Europe risked their lives to tune in to the BBC to hear news from the free world. Most were surprised, if they tuned in when ITMA was being broadcast, to hear laughter, lots of laughter. In the face of the most brutal and destructive attack on our country in history people were listening to comedy on the radio and laughing.

Different peoples deal with death and horror in different ways. In Britain we tend towards feeling intense pain but then lightening the mood so that we can get on with everything and fight to live another day. TDoR could easily make some people depressed and inaction and resignation can often come from this. Mzz Kimberly’s performance, in the context of our national cultural heritage, was not merely appropriate, it was magical.

At London TDoR I was honoured by being invited to be one of the five people to speak the names of our fallen brothers and sisters. Despite reading out the names and ages of two 16-year-olds and a 16 month old, I pretty much held my British stiff upper lip and did so without too many tears. I allowed myself to weep quietly in my seat afterwards while CN Lester amazingly performed the unenviable task of following the silence with a piece on the piano. While he was doing this I had time, through my tears, to reflect on the list which I still held in my hand. I realised that there were a lot of places where there were no names of dead trans people. The whole of Africa, Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Mongolia. Apart from Turkey and Pakistan there were none from the middle East.

I refuse to believe for one moment that there were no murders of trans people in Damascus, Baghdad, Novosibirsk, Ulan Bator, Guangzhou, Lagos, Volgograd, Harare, Riga, Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca or any of the smaller towns an villages in isolated places in these teeming and highly populated nations. The names we read out on the TDoR were clearly just the tip of the iceberg. The real number of trans people who have been murdered last year is probably many times the 179 we read out. In many cases their deaths will never be recorded because they were carried out either by or with the connivance of the states they lived in, or by oppressive religious authorities. This is the real issue, there could be as many as 1,000 of us murdered every year, with countless more driven to suicide. This is what should be uniting us in a determination to fight, rather than throwing stones at others in our community and then running away…

Faceless money-men in Stockholm

2010-11-05T00:13:00.002+01:00

The government has been keen to portray local education authorities as monolithic bureauracies which are remote from the communities they serve, when in actual fact they are elected by the local communities they serve and have offices usually only a few miles from the schools they run.

So how does it feel that your local school, say one in Hampton, for example, is no longer run by a locally elected bureaucracy in Kingston, down the road, but from Stockholm? That's right, some schools in South-West London will soon be run from Stockholm, and by unelected faceless money-men whose main motivation for being in education is to make money. The government's so-called "free" schools programme, will now force schools, even those schools that are deemed satisfactory, to be converted to academies which will be run by large multinational corporations, one of which will be Kunskapsskolan, based in Sweden.

The last Tory government started off the 'academies' programme with highly undemocratic "one-way street" elections, in which parents of children at the school could vote to take their school out of local democratic control. The take-up of this was very small and few opted out of local democratic control. The academies programme has since become less and less democratic. Presumably this is because the local parents have refused to vite in the right way. Now there is no vote, now schools can be forced to bcome academies by diktat from the education secretary Michael Gove. No consultation will be required. Effectively Gove can privatise any school against the wishes of the parents and the local community. Power will be taken away and placed in the hands of the money men of Stockholm.

Obviously this is just an excuse for the government to centralise control of all schools in the hands of a small number of unelected private-sector companies, many of whom are based in other countries.

So much for the Tories' claim to be giving power back to the people. The Tories education policies represent the imposition of centrally-determined policies on each school, in this case from another country. This monolithic, one-size-fits-all regimented approach which is part and parcel of these large multinational companies' educational business will make every school the same, every school operating with the same policies as the one down the road, or in Sweden. The regimenting tendencies of unrestrained capitalism are being unleashed on our children. Lots of square pegs will be forced into round holes.

Who will run your local school?

2010-11-05T00:13:00.000+01:00

How the budget discriminates against young trans people.

2010-10-20T23:05:00.005+02:00

Sometimes measures which are applied to everyone in the same way have a disproportionate affect on some groups of people. The new rule that all single people under 35 will not get housing benefit for a flat of their own looks as though it is equitable because it will affect everyone under 35 in the same way.

Not so. What if you are a trans person under 35 who is questioning their gender, who is unsure of their gender identity or knows they are trans but can't come out for fear of repercussions at work or with their parents? What if you are forced to share accommodation with other people? Suddenly that difficult process of coming out and figuring out your gender identity becomes much more fraught. suddenly you may find that the bullying and harrassment you get in the street, at college or at work comes home and you get hassle there as well. Effectively it forces you to come out to people who are essentially not your own group of friends.

This is goiung to hit transgender and gender variant young people very hard, to the extent that many will either continue to conceal their gender identities or be forced out of their homes by transphobic bullying. Young trans people are already a group with a high risk of poverty, unemployment and homelessness, this is just going to exacerbate the situation. This is one of the horrible measures which Cameron has announced, that will hit trans people hardest.

so what can people do? The first thing is to write to your MP. The second thing is to put a comment on Lynne Featherstone's blog about trans equality. Lynne Featherstone is Lib Dem minister for equality and a keen supporter of trans issues. Now is the time to ask her to put her money where her mouth is. We need to ask her, for the sake of all minority groups, to campaign against this measure in government, and if that fails at least to permit transgender people under 35 to obtain housing benefit for small flats on their own. To do otherwise is going to hit these people very hard and possibly even lead to more deaths from suicide. This is something there is already too much of.

Women in government - so what about transmen/women?

2010-10-08T20:25:00.016+02:00

Harriet Harman is widely credited with the success of getting 8 women into the shadow cabinet and this is considered a major achievement, despite the fact that there are now fewer women MPs in parliament, because Labour women MPs were repleced by Tory "Cameron Clone" males at the last election. Not mine, incidentally, just 42 votes kept Glenda Jackson as MP instead of some George Osborne (ie. posh but dim) lookalike.

The government in Spain is the first one to have more women in the cabinet than men. Hilary Clinton represents a very powerful women as US foreign secretary. Iceland, Germany and many other countries have women leaders. The UK, Israel, Pakistan, Oz, Bangladesh, and many other countries have had women leaders in the past.

So far so much progress for gender equality in some (but not all) parts of the world.

So how come this gender equality has not extended to people who do not fit easily into the categories "male" and "female"? Where are our transgender politicians?

OK so Italy had a transgender MP for a while; the wonderful Valdimir Luxuria, as did the Kiwis, and there are elected transgender politicians in Hawaii and New Zealand. But that total does not represent very many compared to the numbers of transgender people there are on this planet. The UK actually elected its first transgender politician back in May; Sarah Brown was elected as a Lib Dem councilor in Cambridge. (The former mayor of Cambridge was also a transwoman but she was not known as a transwoman before she was elected, only choosing to out herself after the threat of being outed by the gutter press).

If we accept one of the lowest estimates of the number of transgender people in the UK at 1% and if there are 600+ MPs and 785 MEPs in the EU as a whole, there should be at least 6 transgender MPs and 8 transgender MEPs. Instead we have to settle for one Lib Dem councillor.

As is often the case, "diversity and equality" are simply never applied to transgender people. Even Sarah's heartfelt speech about transgender marriage equality at Lib Dem conference this Autumn was not broadcast, I suspect because they did not want to portray themselves as a party of "freaks" which might put off "mainstream" voters. Well it is about time parties started to be more inclusive. If "mainstream" voters are put off by the sight of transgender people standing for election, then it is up to the parties to educate the public and argue against the insidious propaganda of the Daily Mail and associated hate-mongers.

I have always believed in transgender people speaking for themselves as trans people. That is the ultimate performative act of being transgender. Yet unless those who purport to support our existence as human beings of transgender experience in their parties need to show that support by permitting transgender people to stand as candidates for the major political parties in elections where they have more power at national and European level.

No Safe Spaces for Transgender People

2010-10-04T12:55:00.007+02:00

Those who think that transgender people have, at least in Western Europe, are safe from transphobic hate-crime, need to rethink their view of the world. Even those places which one would consider most safe are not necessarily as safe as we may have thought. From the ignorant feminist minority insisting that we be "mandated out of existence" to religious zealots and fascists, the presence and expression of these objectionable idologies clearly results in increased hate crime...

The third Transgender Europe (TGEU) Conference in Malmo, Sweden, was a resounding success and enabled transgender activists and campaigners from around Europe and beyond to share ideas and campaign strategies to help make their campaigning more effective and better coordinated. It was, however, not without incident. One of the reasons the conference had been convened in Malmo (other than because of the excellent local knowledge of Maria Sundin which enabled TGEU to use the conference facilities of the University and to have a civic reception in the city hall), was the feeling that Sweden is a civilised and safe place for transgender people.

This turned out possibly to be a false assumption to make.

At least one of the two transphobic (and possibly also racist) attacks on two Turkish delegates outside a restaurant in Bergsgatan was premeditated. After shouting insults at these two transwomen as they went in, the group of 6-7 male attackers were waiting for them when they came out. They were violently assaulted and pelted with eggs. During the attack the women called out to a male passer-by to call the police, he refused to do so. Eventually two young women called the police, who arrived 30 minutes later. The women were treated in hospital and released. However this was far from the end of their ordeal.

When questioned by the police about the incident they were subjected to a host of degrading and embarrassing questions, including questions about what they were wearing and questions in which they were deliberately misgendered. They were also, rather threateningly, asked questions about their visa status. Questions which would not have been asked to a white victim.

This was relevant to what happened to these two women next. The following day, a Friday, they were enjoying themselves in The Crown nightclub in Amiralsgatan, the entry fee to which they had paid. At one point a male clubber slapped one of the women in the face. Rather than retaliate, these women complained to the staff, expecting, as would you or I, that the assailant would at very least be cautioned or ejected. Instead, astonishingly, the two women were thrown out!

Of course, following their previous ordeal with the police they did not want to report this, and so left feeling extremely unhappy. Of course TGEU has protested very strongly and the equality ombudsman, who was at the conference became involved, and another national equality and diversity worker came straight to Malmo from Stockholm to investigate the incident, even though it was the weekend. TGEU has rightly demanded a full investigation into these incidents and that the transphobic/racist police officers be at least disciplined. The leader of Malmo City Council has personally apologised for these outrages, despite the fact that he does not have any control over the police, saying that all peoples deserve respect as a minimum.

The vast majority of us were treated with that respect by everyone we encountered in Malmo although there were incidents of transphobic abuse suffered by some other, delegates. This contrasted with the particularly courteous treatment I received at a transgender conference in November 2009 in the small industrial town of Linkoping, about 70 miles out of Stockholm. Here, there were no transphobic incidents at all and one got the feeling that Sweden really did live up to its billing of being a tolerant and accepting liberal country.

So what has changed? The location? Obviously the City of Malmo is not like the town of Linkoping, but seems to be a much more sophisticated place with its own queer subculture. So I would discount the effect of differing geographical location as the main factor in the different experiences of transgender people, although others may argue that it is a factor.

No, the main other reason for the difference between our two experiences was time. The conference in Malmo happened after the election of a number of Nazi MPs in the Swedish general election a few weeks ago. The Nazi Party, calling itself the SD, is an openly racist party. And we all know that, where racism exists so do other forms of bigotry.

In my opinion the atmosphere in Sweden had changed tangibly since the last Autumn. It felt as if, now that representatives of a hate-party had been elected, those who would otherwise have thought twice about expressing antisocial opinions, now felt free to do so. The restrictions of social convention and the fear of criticism for being a bigot/Nazi/total wanker had been lifted. The haters seem to feel that they could come out of the woodwork, the social atmosphere has changed and they feel able to express the pathetic, immature hatred in their selfish, evil and ignorant hearts as though it were socially acceptable.

Their perception that the election of fascist MPs renders socially acceptable the emptiness and ignorant egotism of the arrogant, confused and childish chaos which represents the personalities of these sad people. This is what happens when far-right parties get votes.

The reaction from the queer community in Malmo was swift however and the evening after the incident in the Crown, 200 people demonstrated outside the club at the time when most of their customers would have been going in. The nightclub would have lost a substantial proportion of its revenue for that evening and they received a good deal of publicity for their attitude in the local newspaper.

This is a reality check for people who think that everything is hunky-dory and that trans people no longer suffer from discrimination, as has been shown again recently; transgender people are still being murdered at an alarming rate. It would appear that one of the factors affecting whether or not transphobia raises its ugly head is likely to be the presence of political or religious or other organisations which serve to legitimize the kind of across-the-board bigoted attitudes against anyone who is different. It is the presence of Nazis in the shape of the SD which has made at least some people feel that it is now socially acceptable to indulge in bigoted behaviour and hate-crime. As such countering these peddlers of hate, wherever and however they manifest themselves, is an essential precondition for improving conditions of transgender people.

Cisgender male PANIC!

2010-09-30T10:50:00.005+02:00

The arrest and imprisonment of apparent transman Lee Brooks in Scotland represents a desperate panic situation for cisgender males. The crisis goes right to the heart of cis male identity and threatens to undermine their worldviews, their own perceptions of manhood and selfhood. Lee Brooks is in jail because what Lee has done represents such a profound threat to the very core of cisgender males' identities as men, that, despite the fact that it appears that Lee has almost certainly done nothing wrong or harmed anyone, this person will be severely punished for threatening to undermine male selfhood in such a profound way.

It is alleged that Lee lied to a number of women to the effect that they believed they were going to have sex with a man. The panic for men's very self image comes from the fact that at least one of these women must have been quite satisfied with this sex, since she was in a relationship with Lee for six years. The threat to men comes from the fact that a man without a penis can satisfy a woman, that a self-defining heterosexual woman can be happy in a relationship with such a person. Of course this is nothing new, musician Billy Tipton lived his life as a man, including being married to an apparently heterosexual woman. It was only discovered that he had been assigned female gender at birth when he died. He died of a very curable illness, because he was afraid to go to a doctor because he was terrified that he would be jailed if it was discovered that he did not have a penis. People have often reacted to this to the effect that it is almost unbelievable that he might think this, and that nowadays this would not be a problem. Maybe the case in Scotland demonstrates that he was right.

The important implication to draw from the cases of Billy Tipton and Lee Brooks, is that a man does not have to have a penis in order to maintain an extended sexual relationship with a women. Yet this is the one possibility which the male hegemonic culture must, from its own point of view, suppress at all costs. Men's identities are totally bound up with the fact that they posess a penis. The Freudian assumptions in this regard have become part of masculine culture to the extent that the phallus has become the core of male identity such that that male selfhood is almost entirely dependent on this. The idea that such an appendage can be irrelevant to maintaining a heterosexual relatinship with a woman is almost certainly privately terrifying to many people born with penises. This is why Carrie Paechter observed, in relation to transgender people, that the masculine gender is more heavily policed than the feminine gender. Men have much more to fear, and much more to loose, and their identities are much more fragile and more easily undermined.

However this also represents a potential cultural (as opposed to sexual or psychological) identities of the women who sleep with these transmen. This is almost certainly the reason why there has been a complaint made to the police after such a long time in a relationship. The Foucauldian idea of different sexual orientations developing into personal identities through the establishment of the categories of 'homosexual' and 'lesbian' means that women who percieve themselves as heterosexual and engage in this type of relationship are likely to feel the need to disown their involvement with someone like Lee because they do not want to be seen socially as lesbians. Indeed this entire trial and the reason why Lee is in jail now may well not be because of any wrongdoing but because of the crisis of identity of these women. It is likely that these women have gone to the law in order to establish their own identities as heterosexual women rather than because of any damage their involvement with Lee has caused them.

Of course there could be other sides to this story, we still have very little information however it seems that sam is likely to be severely punished, not for any sexual wrongdoing but because of the threat Lee represents to heterosexual, cisgender identities, particularly heterosexual cisgender male identities. Cis-masculine identities are too fragile to allow this challenge to go unpunished.

The Tory version of the past and its threat to our children’s future

2010-09-27T00:58:00.002+02:00

History should no longer involve the robotic learning of facts and propaganda, the crucial 21^st century skills of critical analysis and evaluation of information have made it far too important for that.

As one of their priorities for education, the government has appointed a right-wing historian to impose its new History curriculum. This comes hard on the heels of the biggest centralisation of the education system since Margaret Thatcher ordered the original monolithic National Curriculum, SATs and Ofsted system back in the 1980s. However this new curriculum for History is all the more worrying, not merely because it gives lie to the Tories headline claim to be a party dedicated to reducing state dominance, but because it seriously threatens the present and the future of our children.

One of the most crucial 21^st century skills, identified by many think-tanks, business and employers’ organisations, as well as universities, is the ability to search for, critically analyse, evaluate, and process information. Indeed this is probably the most vital generic skills children will need after literacy and numeracy. The relationship between information and the individual has changed entirely since 1990. The spread of the internet, the creation of Web 2.0 and information tagging has resulted in so much information becoming available to everyone in such an unstructured way that the skills of finding precisely what you need have now become much more complex than when most of us were at school. Not only that, but the levels of usefulness, trustworthiness, bias and reliability of the information available online is extremely varied, ranging from the genuinely enlightening and useful to the wildly inaccurate and dangerous. Since anyone can publish anything online the need today is for children to become their own editors-in-chief.

Children need not only to develop skills in locating information but also in assessing its relevance and bias and evaluating its reliability. These skills are the skills which will make a huge and tangible difference to most children’s lives in the 21st century, not only making them safer online while they are young but enabling them to become more effective in their adult working and social lives. It will be vital to provide them with the skills to be adaptable and flexible lifelong learners as the single, predictable, linear career for life becomes a thing of the past.

Yet studies of children’s information-seeking skills show that little has changed since the before the internet. Study after study has shown that children do not possess basic skills in finding, evaluating and using information whatever its source. For instance a study in 1991 demonstrated this by analysing high-school pupils’ interactions with historical evidence. Not only did they rate information as either biased or not biased, but they couldn’t identify sources as a means of assessing the nature of the information and then failed to make meaningful use of it. Further studies since then have shown that little has changed in this area despite the spread of the internet.

However, there is one subject on the curriculum that can prepare children for the information environment of the present and the future. Paradoxically that subject is History. Teaching children to find, evaluate, question and use historical sources, especially primary sources; the core skills of the historian, are the same skills children will need when locating, assessing and querying information online. Indeed, History presents teachers with a safe offline way to teach these skills.

Which is why the prospect of a right-wing historian dictating what children should and should not learn in History is against the interests of our children. By selecting such a figure to prescribe the curriculum, the government apparently wants History lessons to become some sort of stale exercise in rote-learning their version of the past rather than an active and engaging exercise, as it truly should be, in critical analysis and argument.

The coming of the internet has meant that History needs to take on a level of importance way beyond what it used to have 20 years ago. The skills of locating, critically evaluating and using information will be crucial for the future business, educational and social life of the generation currently in our schools. Of course, a party relying for its power on a selective and biased media which, for example, wants people to believe it will decentralise power, increase democratic participation and strengthen individual freedoms will not want a population able to engage in critical analysis and evaluation of what they are told. Despite it becoming an increasingly important skill in the globalised internet age, the last thing the Tories want your kids to be able to do is think for themselves.

Cameron. In the Shit. Already.

2010-09-26T17:13:00.008+02:00

The sight of the Daily Mail already having a go at Ed Miliband's family (less that 12 hours after he was elected leader of the Labour party) suggests that the apparently serene blank windows of the right-wing establishment hide a greater insecurity than at any time since it became clear that Cameron was not going to win the general election. Yes, if you listen carefully outside Conservative Central Office and the citadels of the gutter press, you can hear the sound of soft furnishings being munched already. Apart from the boost this is going to give to Allied Carpets and other such retailers the reaction of this hard rightwing government to Miliband's election is already to be the passing of enough substantial turds to be used to fix the housing crisis.

Miliband's initial task will be to dispel the expected wave of crap from the Tory establishment that he is (yawn) "in the pocket of the unions", "Red Ed" and all those things. I suspect however that he also needs to come up with a decent left-of-centre narrative which is not just like what Laurie Penny described in her excellent article about the anti-Pope demo, an anti-everything movement which is also being drawn into the Tory discourse about cuts. Whilst he clearly realises that he cannot credibly position himself as being in opposition to all cuts, he needs to move more solidly towards a position in which investment and growth take the place of cuts.

This should not be difficult. The contrast between Ireland, which has already disastrously put in place the sort of cuts that Cameron is intending, and Spain, where public investment has already halved their deficit without creating large-scale unemployment, could not be more marked. Of course the Tory-controlled media and the sycophantic BBC have conveniently ignored these examples of the two divergent policies offered by the Tories and Labour. If anyone ever needed any more evidence that the Tory establishment's cuts were ideological rather than necessary this is it. One economist even stated yesterday that these represent almost laboratory-condition examples of how to get out of a recession and how not to get out of a recession.

In truth the Tories' lies and duplicity are already being exposed and when their cuts start to bite, throwing millions out of work or unnecessarily into poverty, they now know that there is an effective opposition ready to point the finger of blame and make them suffer electorally. Up to now Cameron has had it easy. Gordon Brown's inability to communicate was all his Christmasses come at once, and the opportunity to hide behind a man with a yellow tie (what was his name again?) as he makes the cuts enabled him to turn electoral defeat into a victory of sorts for his loony rightwing economic agenda. Since the election, the only hits Labour has landed on the Tories have been Ed Ball's attacks on Michael Gove's insane education policies which, of course represent a sitting duck for any politician worth their salary. Now the game has changed; Ed Miliband is the sort of politician with the media communicative ability to make Cameron's stage-managed informality look like the fake, insincere PR veneer that it is. The Labour leadership has also realised that there is no point in going for the LibDems, they are already a spent force that is likely to descend into infighting and disarray as their support collapses. No. Just as the solids of Tory economic incompetence hit the airconditioning, just as everyone (except the very rich) becomes less secure, less prosperous and less likely to continue to support Cameron's Cuts, Labour finds its voice again. Building a coherent alternative to the government's economic madness shouldn't be too difficult, and attacking their "achievements" will get easier by the day.

Time to look forward with some optimism. We just have to hope that we are not all too far up shit creek without a paddle by the time a sensible government can be elected.

Redrawing the Boundaries of the State

2010-09-02T10:40:00.009+02:00

A number of things have happened recently which make it clear that "The State" is not what some people would like it to be. The most important of these is the New York Times revelations about the Prime Minister David Cameron's Media Advisor, Andy Coulson's alleged lawbreaking in respect of breaching the civil liberties of a large number of people. The NY Times allegations are serious and the UK public needs to know about them. Alas, unless they read the Guardian, they are extremely unlikely to find out about them.

Strangely though, on the day this story broke in New York a scandal about another minister in the government broke. He was accused of doing something neither unlawful nor immoral; being gay. Whether he is or not does not actually matter, the fact is that this story was very conveniently planted just at the right time to cover and distract from any possible whiff of a much more serious scandal, which does involve not merely doing something illegal and immoral, but something, namely breaching people's civil liberties and human rights, which the alleged perpetrator's employer, the Prime Minister used as a campaign tool during the general election.

Yet the silence from the media has been deafening. The allegation that someone this close to the government has been illegally tapping people's phones, something that even the security services can only do with difficulty and legal constraints, is not considered newsworthy by;

The BBC
ITN
Channel 4 News
The Independent
The Murdoch Press
Sky News
The Right-wing press incl. the Daily Mail and similar
Most political bloggers, including Guido Fawkes
The Daily Torygraph

OK so the fact that the right-wing press and the Murdoch press has censored this story is not surprising, but the fact that the others have also, especially the BBC, is worrying.

It is this censorship which gives greatest rise to concern. This is the sort of thing which should happen only in dictatorships. Stories about the government which are inconvenient for it are regularly censored in places like North Korea, Burma and China. So this begs the question about the mechanism behind how this functions in the UK. The only answer can be, is that since these media organisations now fulfil the same role which they do in these dictatorships, it too has to be considered an arm of the state.

Actually it has always seemed obvious to me that teachers, doctors, nurses, lecturers, librarians, home helps, classroom assistants etc. despite being paid from the public purse, are not arms of the state. They do not represent the state or the government while doing their jobs, in the way civil servants, the army or the police do. However it is clear that the censorship of this important story reveals how the majority of the media have effectively become part of the state apparatus in the UK even to the extent of pushing a cover-up distraction non-story (William Hague) to help bury it.

The normal distinction between state and non-state has, in the past been too simplistic anyway; "If you are paid by the public purse you are part of the state apparatus, if not you are not." Rubbish. The truth is that the private sector has, for a very long time, been taking on functions of the state, particularly the media. Perhaps it is better to use the word 'establishment'. The Establishment in the UK has always been those organisations in whom power is vested. This clearly includes the City, large private sector companies, the media and some very rich individuals. When the government is Conservative, the rest of the establishment works with it, when the government is Labour the rest of the establishment works against it.

It is time we regard this establishment as effectively representing arms of the real state. These are the sites of real power, these are the organisations which make the decisions that affect everyone's lives. This power base is all the more powerful because it is able to portray itself as seperate from the state and not part of it when it really is. It also has the power to position others who exercise no state power functions as being part of "the state".

However, this censorship of the Coulson scandal is appalling and, even more than the alleged act of phone-tapping, is something people should be much more concerned about. That the media is controlled to such an extent by rightwing billionnaires is the greatest threat to our freedom, civil and human rights.

The Toilet Debate - a historical deconstruction

2010-08-29T13:09:00.005+02:00

It is funny how the issue of toilets rears its ugly head from time to time, especially when cisgender males are concerned, and especially with reference to transgender women using the ladies. This seems to be something which worries them overwhelmingly, yet it appears to be much less of an issue for cisgender women. Speculating as to the reason for this one could potentially think of;

envy, these guys would like to get into the ladies themselves.
Carrie Paechter's concept of the masculine gender being policed more strictly (both going in and going out) than the feminine one.
The old-fashioned sexist idea that these guys have to be protective of "their" women against people they perceive as men.

However I believe the reason is much more simple than that and is related to power. If you take a walk through St Ann's Square in Manchester there is an interesting historical relic which gives us a clue. A very old, early Victorian, public toilet. It is now disused and they have put an electric substation down there or something like that. But notice how I said 'toilet' in the singular. There was only one of them. For men. You can see this repeated if you go into some very old pubs like The Ship in Wardour Street London; there was originally only space for one toilet and they have had to make space for two giving the back of the pub a rather cramped feel.

During much of the Victorian period public toilets existed only for men and there was a reason for this; to control women. Public toilets allow people to stay out, away from their home, for long periods. This meant that men were able to travel, to work, to do business, to engage in political and civil activity in ways which women were not. Women were effectively only able to do the shopping and go home again, they could not spend long periods away from the home. Indeed not having women's public conveniences became so 'normal' that women attending Ladies Day at Royal Ascot would not wear any underwear because they would need to 'go' in a corner of a field behind a hedge.

This represents the situation today for transgender people; not being able to use a public toilet represents a restriction on one's civil liberties. The fact that men are the ones most concerned about this issue strongly suggests that it is a power issue rather than an issue of public safety for women; men, most of whom are termed 'gender defenders' by Kate Bornstein, would like to see transgender people's restrictions on taking part in civil and public life restricted by subtle means since they cannot argue for restrictions on transgender people's civil rights in other ways.

Toilets may seem a relatively trivial issue, but it is an important issue of civil liberty and human rights; the right to take part in civil and economic life depends on being able to spend long periods of time away from home during the day which in turn depends on easy access to public conveniences in the same way that cisgender people have.

Despite transgender people's run-ins with some feminists in the past, I believe trans people have a lot to learn from feminism, in particular that pretty much anything gendered has a power element to it as well and that male hegemony wants to force its way into the most unlikely places, including, in this case, the ladies.

What causes trans people?

2010-08-27T00:17:00.009+02:00

Silly question I hear you say. "Sexual intercourse between your mum and your dad of course!" comes the reply. OK but why are some people trans and some not? There have been all sorts of theories including something in our childhood, too much estrogen/testosterone in your mum's tummy, environmental pollution etc...

There are even scientists beavering away trying to solve such problems; coming up with ideas such as androgen receptors, brain stems, even DNA. The trouble is, what is known as "publication bias"; the fact that if a study produces no link between something and being trans then it is unlikely to be published, makes the small number of studies which are published (and usually subesquently discredited) seem less noteworthy.

However, there is a much more plausible and simpler explanation for the existence of transgender people, and it comes form the work of the Professor of Biology at Stanford University, Joan Rougharden. Her detailed analysis of nature and the way most of the animal kingdom and almost all of the plant life on this planet do not fit the pattern of fixed, stable sex categories or gender identities suggests that our view of the world is not what it ought to be. In fact Roughgarden is seriously critical of biolgists from Darwin onwards, for the way they have presented social, sexual and gendered life within the animal kingdom. It is not by chance that animal social and gendered behaviour, if you look at Origin of Species, resembles that of middle-class southern England in the 1850s. The animal kingdom has been viewed through the lens of existing social expectations of gendered behaviour by biologists and zoologists for at least 150 years. It is this bias which has done such harm to our perceptions of ourselves as a species. The bigoted, the narrow-minded and the outright vicious have used biology to argue that cisgendered heterosexual monogamy is natural and as such should be considered 'normal' and anyone whose life does not fit this must be at best deviant, at worst criminal or evil.

The fact that these justifications for bigotry and hatred were based on a fiction is only now beginning to come out. Strangely, whenever a natural history programme, or school textbook wants to talk about our nearest relatives on the evolutionary chain, they refer to chimpanzees. The social life of chimpanzees is conveniently close to that which the rich and powerful in capitalist society would like our society to be. They are fiercely competitive to the point of being violent towards each other, very territorial, heterosexual and selfish, the perfect image for human societies such as the laissez-faire, 'liberal' unregulated capitalist ones would like to project as natural, and without alternative.

The problem is that, of course, chimpanzees are not solely our closest relatives, they are jointly closest along with the bonobos. You don't hear so much about bonobos do you? There's a reason for that: Bonobos live in sharing, cooperative, collaborative and peaceful communities, and not only that, they enjoy intense and varied sex lives, all of them being bisexual. This image does not suit the controllers of our society and as such we hear very little of them.

Similarly we hear very little about animals whose gender structures that differ from ours. The image of the coy female attracted to the biggest and most aggressive alpha male is a myth not borne out by reality. In some species there are multiple genders - such as one type of salmon which has three male genders and two female genders, and in some species the female in not coy she is aggressive, and in some she isn't interested in having a strong, handsome male as the father of her offspring, she wants a male who will help her care for them. In some species the male and female enjoy a family life lasting only 10 minutes, spending the rest of the time either in single-sex company or alone. The cis-het nuclear family suddenly doesn't appear so natural any more.

So what does all this have to do with gender identity? Well the answer is that what humans perceive as the binary gender system, has nothing to do with what is natural. The binary gender system is a social construct, like nationality or class. In fact humanity is naturally a very diverse species. In fact it would be bizzarre to assume that we were not much more diverse in every way compared to all other species on this Earth, after all, we posess larger brains than any other animal with the possible exception of dolphins, who of course do not posess the ability to communicate or create and use technology in the same way we do. As such it would be unreasonable to expect humans not to be extremely diverse, given that the animal kingdom is very diverse, especially from the point of view of gender identity and expression.

So, from my point of view, transgender people are not to be explained by theories of social depravation as young children, or by pre-natal occurences or hormone imbalences or other physical damage. We are transgender because being transgender is a natural element of humanity. There is no explanation for our existence which is not the same as any explanation for the existence of any other human being. We exist because the human race naturally has transgender people in it. There is nothing unnatural about being transgender, trans people, in that respect, are no different from anyone else.

What is unnatural however, is the gender binary system which most societies live by and which most of us expect to fit into, and which expects all 6 billion people on this planet to fit neatly into its two categories. It is this which is unnatural not us. It is time people woke up and realised this. Transgender is natural. Binary gender is not.

Citizen Gove

2010-07-30T00:12:00.004+02:00

Recently there have been some reruns on TV of an old 1970s sitcom called "Citizen Smith". In it a deluded left-wing politico, leader of the "Tooting Popular Front" believes that the country (or at least Tooting) is waiting desperately to be led into a revolutionary left wing government. Of course the reverse happens and shortly after this the country, in its wisdom, elected a particularly nasty Tory government in the shape of Margaret Thatcher.

The ultimate deludinoid Citizen Smith has now been surpassed in the delusion stakes by Citizen Gove. The new Tory education secretary has become the most deluded man in history, comfortably surpassing Wolfie Smith in the delusion stakes.

That he has achieved this within only a couple of months (yes it has only been a couple of months!) of being in government, demonstrates quite how spectacularly out-of-touch this man is with reality. Out of 25,000 schools in the UK just 153 have actually applied for his "academy" status, the Tories' flagship education policy. That is well under 1% of schools.

Citizen Gove, almost certainly aided by his chums in the Daily Fail, The Torygraph, the Scum and the Daily Excess believed the propaganda they built up over years, indeed probably decades, by the right-wing media. This created an unquestioned consensus in the media that there were all these schools, teachers, heads, pupils and parents just waiting to have their local schools set free from the Kremlin-like control of the local councils which were deliberately ruining educational opportunities for children by...well...er...running the local schools...er... democratically.

This iron-fisted grip of...er...democratically elected...councils imposed their will...er...on schools on whose governing bodies the parents had a majority...

Parents were crying out, looking for leadership and turning towards the shining light of Michael Gove, the education secretary who would set them free, the exalted hero who would replace these ...er...democratically elected councils... and ...er... democtratically elected boards of governors with what the parents really want; the freedom for schools to go-it-alone, and do away with all this democratic hinderance as they are taken over by large private companies, religious zealots or run centrally by Government diktat. This is what parents wanted, this was the media consensus, this is what all right-minded people (especially journalists who tended to regurgitate official pronouncements on education without questioning their contents or wisdom) believed. More meddling in structures, freeing schools from local control and accountability and runnig them directly from Whitehall would herald a new dawn for education in which all children would learn their 3R's and every school would be special.

Into more than 20 years of constant restructuring and 'freeing' schools from local control jumped Citizen Gove. The man who would save the schools of this country from the their own locally elected representatives, and the yoke of accountability to the parents of the children they teach. Here he was, this was the man, his time had come! With one bound Michael Gove was going to be the man to set them all free, to give them all exactly what they had wanted.

Except it turned out that, exactly what they all wanted, was to have nothing to do with Citizen Gove's hair-brained ideas. Despite the fact that Gove had used emergency legislation to rush through his Bill to enable these schools to start up as soon as possible, despite the fact that even his own Tory MPs had described his actions as undemocratic, the future of the country was at stake and he needed to act fast to save the children from their own parents and their parents' locally elected representatives.

Predictably he has made a complete and utter fool of himself. Unforced error after unforced error, he could be an England goalkeeper.

The thing about Gove is that he is the same as all other education secretaries only more so. He has been to school so he knows all there is to know about education. Education secretaries have, for as long as I can remember, taken this attitude. An I-know-better-than-teachers-heads-parents-educationists-advisors-inspectors etc... It is like appointing someone with no knowledge of economics to be chancellor (OK so Osborne has no meaningful knowledge of economics but at least learning about economics is fairly easy compared to understanding how children learn). Education secretaries have all actually not really had a clue about learning, much less about teaching. So what have they done? Pretend they are doing something. Tinker with the superficial structures of schools rather than listen to teachers and education experts about how to improve teaching. It's not as if there are no models of excellent education systems in other countries to get ideas from; for example Finland's concentration on quality teaching with high quality teacher training and more professional freedom and respect for individual classroom teachers. This is in contrast with the top-down management structures of the UK, where decisions, which should be taken at classroom level, are too often taken at management or national level.

The problem is that Gove, and the rest of the Tories don't want to look at the successful countries like Finland. Because they know they will not like what they see. So they carry in making arses of themselves instead and fiddle while Rome burns.

Reclaiming "Transgender" and speaking for ourselves

2010-06-18T13:01:00.012+02:00

This post is about the dangers in allowing non-transgender people to define and speak for transgender people. This is something which is becoming more common and which is likely to become increasingly so as trans people become more visible and political progress towards greater trans liberation is made. The conspicuous absence of trans people at David Cameron's LGBT reception in Downing Street suggests that the trans community has to consider who represents it and misrepresents it to the rest of the world.

The word "transgender" has become a phenominal success. Indeed it is one of the linguistic and political success stories of the last 20 years. Yet, in its current usage it is only 18 years old. In fact "transgender" was originally coined by Virginia Prince back in the 1970s to describe people (like myself) who were somewhere between "cross-dresser" and "transsexual". However it was used by Leslie Feinberg in a publication entitled "Transgender Liberation: A movement whose Time has Come" in 1992.

This was a call to arms and, in this case the word "transgender" was used as an umbrella term for all the various different transgender people who could come together to achieve political advancement of trans people. This is the current main usage of the word. As a Foucauldian political rallying-point it has been astonishingly successful and the last 18 years has seen transgender people emerge and become much more publicly visible and politically active, engaging in campaigning to achieve liberation for all trans people everywhere.

Although there is still a great deal to do there have been advances in terms of legal protections for transgender people such as legal gender changes on official documentation and protections against discrimination in areas such as the provision of goods and services and employment. The academic discipline of Transgender Studies has established itself as a bona fide academic field of study, and transgender people have been elected to important positions such as the state governor of Hawaii and MPs in Italy and New Zealand. Two transgender people have been appointed to work in senior positions in President Obama's administration. Even the normally conservative Royal Air Force has accepted the first transsexual pilot almost without batting an eyelid. Sass Rogando Sasot and Justus Eisfeld became the first transpeople to speak at the UN General Assembly last year. The depathologisation of transgender people is gathering pace with, so far, France and Cuba removing transgender people from the list of people with mental health issues. Holland, Spain and Scandinavia and other many countries are expected to follow soon.

Astonishingly, all this was achieved after what Susan Stryker described as the two "dead" decades for transgender people. The 1970s and 1980s represented a 20-year period when it became acceptable to bully, misrepresent, pathologise, demonise and ridicule transgender people. Malicous and ignorant "academics" such as Janice Raymond called for our extinction by public pressure from non-transpeople. "Mandated out of existence" was the phrase she used, a thinly veiled esprit fasciste inviting discrimination, pathologisation, cultural non-acceptance, media mistreatment and social bullying of transgender people who, remaining subalterns who cannot speak, were unable to defend themselves. Her call for non-transgender people to act against transgender people was as clear, her intention to mobilise the masses against a minority group reminiscent of the Nazi history she attempts, through dissemblement and innuendo to attach to trans people. The" Transsexual Empire" remains a dire warning of the need for transgender people to remain eternally vigilant against this sort of incitement to hate-crimes.

The success of "transgender" in bringing the trans community together has been documented by David Valentine, in his excellent study, 'Imagining Transgender'. However, he raises some issues about definitions and inclusion within the the group 'transgender' which, even in the last few years of the last century, were becoming problematic. Some people who were born male but lived as women did not see themselves as "transgender", especially those from ethnic minorities in the US, and some trans people who were born female may not include themselves in the category. Some, such as gay male drag queens, also did not include themselves under the umbrella term "transgender", although here the politics of gay liberation intervenes as gay men have sought to throw off stereotypes of effeminacy. The emergence of "transgender" as a category distinct from "gay" has been helpful to their cause from this point of view. Incidentally, the group within the transgender umbrella which has probably gained most politically in the last two decades has been transsexuals. Some view this being because they remain within the gender binary. However this is a rather simplistic view; Tam Sanger's research has shown that many transsexuals simply feel that changing their physical sex enables them to feel much happier and spiritually whole in a body which better approximates their identity rather than actually being a 'man trapped in a woman's body' or vice versa.

However we are now however seeing other people, who are not transgender, or organisations which do not have adequate knowledge of transgender people starting to define, to the perception of the public at large, what "transgender" means. Although Sefton's Transgender Work Volunteer Scheme is to be thoroughly approved as an example of how affirmative action can be taken to help transgender people in an area of high unemployment, and represents a fantastic piece of inclusive thinking, it still equates "transgender" with "transsexual". Yet people who are not transsexual may well be deterred from applying for this if they do not meet this criteria. Even two academics, Rebecca Dittman and Pam Meecham, who should know better, have written a scholarly article about transgender children where "transgender" appears to be interchangeable with "transsexual". Given that we know that not all transgender children become transgender adults, and not all those who do will want to have sex reassignment surgery, this is not merely a case of negligence but could be downright dangerous.

A more recent academic article by Richard Elkins and Dave King now seeks to identify two 'new' transgender identities; "Autogynephilic transsexuals" and "Adult male sissies". This is where I start to have problems with the concept of "identities". From my point of view these represent sexual practices rather than any particular type of identity. Autogynephilia has been the subject of much conflict between transgender people and that small group of psychiatrists who continue to try and pathologise us. Indeed, there appears no reason for this definition of a particular group to exist at all, other than to provide the likes of Blanchard with regular and substantial income. Elkins and King fail to enter into any discussion of this other than describing it as 'unwelcome', a description they also attach to "adult male sissies". In my opinion, these do not represent "Gender Identities" nor should they be lumped together under the "transgender" umbrella.

The reasons for this are not simply because, I believe, these activities should be categorised as sexual activities rather than gender identities, but because of the origins and purpose for the adoption of the term "transgender" by trans people. "Transgender" should be seen as first and formost a political term, and one which covers a range of different people from cross-dressers, genderqueers and drag kings to transsexuals and many others in between. It is not an academic category. That is not to say that academics should not study transgender people nor consider the study of transgender people to be an academic discipline; "Transgender Studies". This is not a problem. The word "transgender", and what is included in it is first and formost a political matter and a political matter for transgender people. Attempts by Elkins and King and others to 'discover' new transgender identities should as such be viewed as political rather than academic acts. As transgender people we should therefore be careful as to whether we accept the inclusion of these 'categories' and the political effects of that inclusion. It should not be up to cisgender academics to decide who should and should not be considered transgender. As Donna Haraway argues in The Cyborg Manifesto "Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousnes". The matter of who is involved in the construction of this consciousness is vital to it's effective functioning as a political concept.

I am not saying that transgender people should have the absolute right to veto who is and who is not transgender (not that we would all agree on everything anyway) but it is probable that the inclusion of such groups would not only cause division within the transgender community but also result in a loss of credibility from a political point of view whilst at the same timehaving no potential to achieve tangible political gains. The tiny number of Autogynephillic transsexuals (if indeed they do exist) are not going to benefit, in terms of their political or civil rights from being considered a seperate category from other transsexuals. As such we should ask what the political purpose of including "Adult male sissies" and "Autogynephilic transsexuals" as distinct categories within the transgender umbrella. Transsexuals are of course fully paid up members of the trans community (although some post-operative transsexuals would disagree with me there) what transsexuals' sexual preferences are is no concern of anyone else in the same way that cisgendered people's sexual preferences are not a determinant of their gender identities. Likewise with adult male sissies; it is probable that not all of these people would view themselves as transgender anyway, much less feel that their gender identity is dependent upon something they do in private at home. If the variety of sexual practices engaged in by cisgendered people are not used to define them as cisgendered, or to categorise them as a seperate category within cisgendered men and women, why should these practices apply to transgender people?

Whilst this post is ont intended to discourage our cisgender friends and supporters, it is clear that cisgendered people who are involved with the trans community need to be careful, as most of them already are, to respect the wishes and opinions of the transgender community.

We need constantly to remind ourselves that transgender is first and formost a political concept, and a particularly successful one at that. As such it is the more the property of transgender people than anyone else and who is included as transgender, or as seperate identities within that umbrella, should be a matter for us all, not academics. The consequences of weakening the transgender movement and a return to the days when "academics" such as Janice Raymond can openly call for others to engage in hate-crimes against us will not be borne by cisgender academics but by ordinary transgender people in their everyday lives, workplaces, schools, streets and homes.

Why Iain Dale is wrong about Parliament Square

2010-05-25T16:57:00.003+02:00

I must confess I like Iain Dale, he is one of those few Tories who is prepared to argue stuff rather than just restate things over and over again Gobbels-style like most Tories do.

So it is bearing this in mind that I have to respectfully disagree with his blog post today about the protest camp in Parliament Square. Iain argues that this is unslightly and a disgrace and that we should not allow it. Falling back for a moment into traditional Tory mode he derides those who disagree with his position as being "lefties" and associates by implication those who occupy this space as scroungers and the like. Strangely he also argues that the camp is effectively denying others the right to use the square, although quite what anyone else would want to do in the middle of a roundabout that is busy 24/7 is beyond me.

However his view on this is taken from a typically Tory POV; Tories have never had to struggle to get their message heard by large numbers of people, if not by everyone in the UK. The protesters in Parliament Square have never had that luxury. They do not have right-wing billionnaires who own national newspapers trumpeting every inch of their cause; The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, The Daily Express, the Times, the Evening Standard, Sky News, etc, etc, etc...

Those who wish to have issues raised which the super-rich owners of these papers do not want to have discussed find themselves effectively censored, their arguments not publicised their activities unknown to huge swathes of the population. Let me give you an example of this censorship.

A week or so before polling day this year, a friend of mine felt compelled to go public about one of the Tory candidates, one Philippa Stroud, the Tory candidate for Sutton & Cheam and now one of Theresa May's special "advisers" (and I thought the government was supposed to have been cutting out such 'consultants'). She related how Stroud had funded a church in which gay and trans people could be taken for strange voodoo-like religious rituals to "cure" them of their homsexuality or to "fix" their gender identity "problems". She felt compelled to do this because David Cameron had been at pains to tell everyone how much the Tories had changed and were no longer the homophobic bigots many of them quite clearly are.

Stroud was living proof that the Tories' "liberal" approach to human rights was neither as firm nor as embedded as Cameron would have liked us to believe. This information being made public just before an election could have deterred a lot of people from voting Tory on the mistaken premise that the hateful bigots were no longer part of modern "progressive" Conservatism; that interesting and ultimately meaningless contradiction in terms. Apart from the Observer this story was reported nowhere, with the notable exception of the Telegraph (which prides itself on the quality of news, even news which sometimes undermines its own editorial positions). Nobody ran it. It was effectively censored.

Just to compare, so that the argument cannot be made that it was not important enough, the story about a no-hope, maverick Labour candidate in an unwinnable constituency, who had been disowned not only by his local party but by his own mother, criticising Gordon Brown made headlines everywhere at the same time.

So people who espouse causes which do not fit into the manufactured news agenda of the wealthy far-right supporters of the Tory party are familiar with the concept of the artificial invisibility of some information, stories and arguments. As such the only means they have at their disposal to publicise them is to use tactics such as occupying prominent places, so this is very much a free speech issue. Free speech, is only an academic right, if no-one else can hear you. It becomes a huge issue when certain information is deliberately and systematically censored by self-appointed private-sector censors; "Banned in Boston" still lives on today in the UK media. Until the media in the UK becomes less one-sided, more democratic and stops resorting to censoring information it doesn't like, the existence of the demonstration in Parliament Square will be as justified as the existence of Iain Dale's blog.

The Time for Action for Labour is NOW!

2010-05-09T23:33:00.003+02:00

The leadership and membership of the Labour Party need to wake up and get their act together extremely quickly. There is a political disaster for the people of this country about to happen and only swift, intelligent and careful action by the Labour leadership (together with the Lib Dem leadership) can prevent it from happening.

The Threat

People seem almost oblivious to the real threat to the prosperity and wellbeing of the people of this country. It is not the economic crisis or even an Icelandic volcano. It is the Tory proposals on constituency reform. Their proposals would result in a system with an inbuilt Tory majority which would be impossible to defeat. We are looking at perpetual Tory government with Labour, or indeed, any other party would never be able to break down.

The Tory Plan

The Tories will never concede electoral reform in a pact with the Lib Dems. As such it has to be expected that there will be no coalition with them and the Lib Dems will be forced to try a coalition with Labour and other smaller parties. It is at this point when the Tories and their friends in the media start to rock the boat in every direction possible. The statesmanlike pose that Cameron displays will disappear into a kind of aloof sniping, with the press barons hacking away at the Rainbow coalition as hard as they can. In other words any coalition will need to be rock solid if it is to resist the Tory Political Establishment’s drive for another election as early as possible, in the knowledge that they have loads of money and the other two parties are broke.

Resistance and cooperation is the only solution

A Rainbow coalition would need to work and work quickly and it would need to get electoral reform on the statute books as fast as possible, with or without a referendum and in the face of enormous bully-boy tactics of the multibillionaire media barons who support the Tories. For this to happen the Labour Party needs to do the following;

1. An urgent leadership contest while Brown serves as caretaker leader.
2. Adoption of Proportional Representation as a matter of party policy
3. Ditching some of the most unpopular policies such as ID cards
4. To be ready to form an electoral pact with the Lib Dems

The reasons for this are as follows;

Brown is too easy a target for the media. Someone new with a good media manner who can deal with the media onslaught and be listened to by the public and who can be ready to fight any subsequent election at very short notice.

PR is going to be the only way ahead for the UK, the old system cannot cope any more, failure to adopt it will eventually result in the Tories gerrymandering their own system which will result in 15 or 20 years of unchallenged Tory rule. Everything labour has fought for, all the positive changes we have introduced, will amount to nothing.

With both parties out of funds the only way we would be able to fight a short-notice election this year would be to adopt an electoral pact which would mean that, in some constituencies Labour candidates would not stand in order for the Lib Dem candidate to be given a clear run at the Tories and vice versa in seats where Labour was the main challenger. Some sort of local or regional twinning might be necessary. This would obviously put some noses out of joint but would stop the Tories in their tracks.

Let me also put it another way; if we don’t do it now we will have to do it in five, ten or fifteen years’ time. Only then we will have had five, ten or fifteen years of Tory cuts, crime and economic misrule. Collaboration will have to be the norm from now on unless Labour wants to leave the population of the country to the mercy of a particularly nasty right wing political-media establishment which will tear the fabric of our society apart, and which will be impossible to dislodge.

This is the time when politicians can really show their mettle, this is the time for great deeds, sacrifice and fortitude. The alternative does not bear thinking about.

“A Small, Closed and Restricted Offer”, and other Excuses

2010-05-08T11:06:00.003+02:00

There is no sense in dealing with the Tories; they have form for lying and will stab Clegg in the back over PR. A much better deal with Labour could be worked out...

As Nick Clegg talks to Cameron about his inappropriately described “big open and comprehensive offer” he would do well to take the utmost care. Unless he comes away with the promise of an immediate binding referendum on electoral reform, as a bare minimum, he might just as well not have campaigned in the election. Anything less will cost him votes and his reduced number of seats will further dwindle, he will end up the worst loser.

I say ‘immediate’ because agreement on a referendum a couple of years or even months down the line would give the Tories the chance to stab him in the back and call another election whenever they can find an excuse to do so. Let’s face it, the very last thing the Tories want, is any change to the voting system. Indeed their only policy on this issue proposes to make the iniquities of the first past the post system even worse, to the extent that many observers believe it would have the effect of building in a Tory majority which would make it virtually impossible to elect anyone else.

This Tory policy of rigging all subsequent elections should represent a dire warning to Clegg that the Tories cannot be trusted. Cameron has used the expenses scandal as an excuse to try and make parliament even more unrepresentative. Indeed this is one of the main characteristics of Tory politics: the excuse. The Tories have a core political philosophy which is rarely expressed. It includes the clear determination to reduce enfranchisement, obtain and centralise power vesting it in unelected, often private sector organisations, at almost any cost and to use that power for the benefit of the few rather than the many. As such their main modus operandi revolves around the excuse. Any excuse. Their policies are based on searching for the excuse to get away with whatever they can get away with. The economic crisis caused by their friends in the City is the perfect excuse to slash and burn public services way above what is absolutely necessary. The concept of the so-called ‘big Society’, a vague and malleable enough concept to be used as an excuse to cut police and social services. Their policy on free schools, now being abandoned as a failure in Sweden from whence they got the idea, is an excuse to create greater inequality in the education system...

In other words they have form, their principles are flexible to the extent that they will find any kind of excuse to justify any policies which suit them in their all-embracing quest for power at any cost. The main basis of this power is the first-past-the-post system, a system which skews the election results meaning that they get access to unrestrained power on a regular basis. To abandon it would effectively mean that they will never be able to achieve the same level of power in the future. First Past the Post is as such the main basis for their power. Proportional representation is something they will do anything to avoid. ‘Anything’ in this case would include finding any excuse to prevent this from happening. As such precipitating another general election would be something they would be very keen on doing to prevent a referendum from taking place or to prevents the results of a referendum from being enacted. Of course Cameron’s promise of an all-party commission to look into the issue of electoral reform is one of the most obvious way of achieving this. Kick the issue into touch, get into power and call a general election before the issue is resolved…

Fortunately Nick Clegg has to obtain a deal which he can sell to his party. The chances of doing that without an immediate, binding referendum on electoral reform are slim. However he would be ill-advised even to consider wasting his time on negotiations without this crucial part of any deal. He needs to secure agreement on this before discussing anything else. He needs to remember however, that a Tory-Lib Dem pact would be the biggest political gift to Labour in history. With a new leader and ditching some of its policy baggage associated with the Blair-Brown era, Labour would be able to Hoover up a fair proportion of Lib Dem votes along with the inevitable dissatisfied Tory ones.

Let us be realistic; A Tory-led government would become extremely unpopular very quickly. In fact it would have one of the distinctions of being already unpopular even before it takes office. Clegg would, without doubt, suffer by association from this and with the combined exodus of progressives to a Labour Party headed by one of the Milibands, and with people who leave in revulsion at the unnecessarily swinging cuts, their vote would be the gift that Labour has always wanted. Assuming that no proportional representation system has been agreed with the Tories, we would be looking at a landslide for Mr Miliband or Mr Miliband whenever the next election took place.

It is clear that Clegg feels he would be in trouble if he went into coalition with Labour and might lose any referendum on electoral reform (although I am not convinced any referendum would be necessary), because of “public” revulsion (as one paper put it); a euphemism for “Tory media media outrage” at him being seen to prop up a labour prime minister who is unpopular. Obviously his stated demand that Brown goes would be fairly easily met by the Labour Party but having Harriet Harman as caretaker PM for a few months until a new leader can be re-elected would also not go down well.

So I would like to propose a solution which might trump all this threatened media backlash; arrange a referendum in late September or early October and install Nick Clegg as Prime Minister until that time. This would enable Labour to sort itself out with a new leader and give the Lib Dems the best platform from which to argue the case for electoral reform in that referendum. The media would find it much harder to attack a Lib-Lab pact headed by a Lib Dem than by a Labour Prime Minister. A public agreement for the Premiership to be handed back to Labour for the rest of the parliament after the referendum would ensure that Labour get their turn in the time needed to set up the new voting system. Once that has happened, the Lib Dems would probably no longer find it in their interests to continue in a coalition government and an election would be inevitable.

A progressive coalition (which don’t forget would have to include some of the smaller parties such as the Nationalists, Northern Irish parties and the Green MP) would actually represent more than 60% of the electorate, and could be repeatedly justified in such terms. I cannot see any other way that proportional representation can be achieved, other than by such a large coalition.

The Tories don't have policies, they have excuses...

2010-05-05T10:11:00.003+02:00

The Tories main excuse is the excuse to reduce public spending. The economic problems caused by their friends the bankers have given them the perfect excuse to slash and burn the public sector. An excuse to reduce spending on the NHS and increase waiting times once more, an excuse to cut the pay of hospital staff, an excuse to put up prescription charges.

Their excuse to give more money to rich middle-class parents is that they want those parents to set up their own "free schools". This is an excuse the Tories have taken from Sweden, where they introduced free schools. This was so successful that they are now closing them all down because of the damage they do, taking resources away from everyone else and increasing inequality in education.

The excuse they will use to cut money to the poorest people is that they need "incentives to work". I always thought the best way to motivate someone to do a job was to pay them a living wage. At the same time the excuse that they will use to justify tax cuts for the richest 3000 people is that they need incentives to work...

But their biggest excuse is the reform of the voting system, and by this I do not mean proportional representation, I mean their new "super-first-past-the-post" system. Reducing the number of MPs to 500 constituencies will get bigger and parliament will become even more unrepresentative. The new system will make it much more difficult not to elect a Tory government, a system in which probably 250 of these constituencies are Tory safe seats with half a dozen LibDems and the rest split between Labour and the minor parties. An inbuilt Tory majority for ever. The excuse will be to reform parliament, an excuse he will use to make it almost impossible to elect anyone else. Proportional non-representation.

Whatever happens this excuse for a party should not be put in the position where it can use these excuses to pander to its own dysfunctional prejudices. We need a government which acts based on what is best for the country, not one which is there simply as an excuse to make the rich and powerful richer and more powerful based on excuses rather than coherent policies.

Volcanic Dust - The Dangers to us all.

2010-04-20T11:19:00.001+02:00

The subject matter of this bog is normally to deal with matters of transgender politics and the core deceit at the heart of the Conservative Party and the dangers of Tory governments. However today I am going to break with tradition because of the serious situation which has arisen from the volcano in Iceland which has produced a cloud of volcanic dust now hanging over northern Europe. Apologies to my usual readers, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Warnings of the dangers of the volcanic dust cloud have so far been limited, at least in the case of the media, to the flying ban and the obvious dangers of engine damage, which has been documented by the RAF in particular. However, what goes up must come down and as the particles descend to ground level little consideration seems to be given to the actual health risks, other than some vague warning from the medical profession about people with respiratory problems.

However, communicating with a relative in Japan who grew up in an area prone to regular volcanic eruptions suggests that health problems are not going to be limited to asthmatics and the like and will affect us all. Indeed this is something which we all need to be aware of, particularly children.

The danger is to our eyes.

Microscopic particles of volcanic dust in the atmosphere after a volcanic eruption are usually very hard pieces of volcanic rock with hard edges and sharp sides. These get into our eyes throughout the day. In areas such as Kagoshima on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu where volcanoes are common, the locals know of the dangers...

When you get these microscopic particles in your eyes through the course of the day, the natural reaction is to rub your eyes, to relieve the feeling of hard dryness. This is however the worst possible thing you can do. This will result in the surface of your eyes becoming scratched, and the under-surface of your eyelids also. This obviously represents the potential to seriously damage your sight.

The solution? Simple; rinse your eyes out gently with water, but do not rub. It is also advisable to wear sunglasses as much as possible while outside, the big women's-style sunglasses are best, ones which provide real protection for your whole eye. Men's sunglasses are better than nothing but rather pathetic in comparison with women's ones.

However the people most at risk are once again, children. They generally do not wear sunglasses and it is very difficult to stop them from rubbing their eyes. Parents need to protect them with sunglasses which properly cover their eyes and teachers need to be aware of this and stop kids from subbing their eyes. Schools should ideally organise mass eyewashing sessions at the end of any period when children are outside, especially after lunch or games/PE sessions when children are likely to have been outside for an hour or so.

There are other things which the inhabitants of areas such as Kagoshima take care over, which people need to be advised about, but are not so important, like taking great care when cleaning specs/sunglasses and to rinse your car thoroughly with water before trying to clean it. but these all pale into insignificance when compared with protecting our children's eyes.

I am giving this post a Creative Commons (cc) licence which means that it may be reproduced without ammendment and with attribution (ie let them know who originally wrote it) as often as anyone likes as long as it is not for commercial, profit-making purposes. as soon as that happens normal rules of copyright apply.

Natacha Kennedy 20 April 2010

Natacha's submission to the APA about GID in children and the DSM-V

2010-04-13T23:54:00.000+02:00

This is thoroughly unacceptable as a diagnosis category. As a researcher who is specialising in transgender children, and who has many years experience of teaching transgender children, I am totally opposed to this. Pathologizing transgender children and young adults will only make their conditions worse. Transgender children are simply presenting themselves in a natural way, which happens not to fit with the gender norms of society as a whole. Retaining GID for children, as for adults, risks perpetuating the traumas which these children face from social exclusion and bullying at school and home. The arguments for retaining GID in children include references to the fact that they suffer mentally as a result of social exclusion. However the APA risks perpetuating this exclusion and mental trauma by retaining this diagnosis. Withdrawing it will send a powerful signal to society that these children should be accepted for who they are.

There is no evidence (Minter 1999, Gottschalk 2005)that any psychiatric treatments work in changing either the gender identities or sexual orientation of transgender children. Current good practice in primary schools is to accept these children for who they are and allow them to express themselves in whatever way they choose. Schools have started to protect children from transphobic bullying and removing GID in children would encourage more schools to do so.

The evidence (Matzner 2001, Ghasemi 1999) is that the only way to help transgender children feel comfortable and untraumatised is to change the immediate and general social environment to one in which they are more or less accepted. In other words this is a phenomenon which is outside the remit of psychiatry, with the exception of the signal that the APA should send to society that being a transgender child is not a problem and should not be treated as a mental illness.

There will no doubt be plenty of work for child psychiatrists in dealing with the effects of social exclusion and bullying of transgender children, however to maintain GID in children as a mental disorder means that the APA leaves itself open to the charge that it is deliberately making transgender children traumatised by the very fact that it retains this classification. The only course of action which the APA can ethically take on this issue, is to support the insight of Thomas & Thomas (1928) that “If men [and women] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” and not to stand in the way of those who wish to change the definition of the existing binary gender system as the only way of perceiving gender. To do anything else seems to me to be a serious breach of your professional responsibility, in a the widest sense, to transgender children. To retain this classification will mean that the APA will no longer be the solution to these children's problems, but will have become part of the problem.

Given the chequered history of the DSM and some diagnoses in the past which, in retrospect can be seen to be quite clearly based on the prejudice and bias of some psychiatrists (eg Rekers 1992), the APA risks substantially losing credibility if it fails to remove this diagnosis.

Ghasemi, Z (1999) A Transsexual in Teheran. In Boenke, M (ed) Trans Forming Families: Real Stories about Transgender Loved ones. Walter Trook. California pp21-25

Gottschalk, L (2005) Response to Zucker Commentary on Gottschalk’s (2003) ‘Same-sex Sexuaity and Childhood Gender Non-conformity: A Spurious Connection. Journal of Gender Studies, 14.2 153-158

Matzner, A (2001) O Au No Keia: Voices from Hawaii’s Mahu and Transgender Communities. Xlibris. Philadelphia

Minter, S (1999) Diagnosis and Treatment of Gender Identity Disorder in Children. In Rottnek, M (ed) (1999) Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood. New York University Press. New York

Rekers, G (1982a) Growing up Straight: What every family should know about homosexuality. Inadequate Sex Role Differentiation in Childhood: The Family and Gender Identity Disorders. Journal of Family and Culture. 2(7): 8-37

Thomas, W & Thomas, D (1928) The Child in America. Alfred A Knopf. New York.

Trans Children - Challenging the Myths

2010-04-11T16:18:00.000+02:00

This post is a summary of findings from my recent research into the lives of transgender children which came from a survey of trans people carried out in October 2009. The results of this have challenged some of the myths about transgender people, in particular the age at which gender variance is realised by transgender people.

- The mean average age at which trans people realise they are trans is 7.9 years. The modal average is 5 years.

- Around 80% of trans people knew they were trans before leaving primary school. (this contrasts with around 2% of gay, lesbian and bisexual people).

- Less than 4% of participants came to the realisation that they were trans after the age of 18.

- Although the average age of realisation is 7.9 years, the average age at which trans people learned any words about being trans, was 15.5 years. In other words, on average trans people know there is something different about their gender identity for seven and a half years before they learn any vocabulary about it.

- There appears to be a great deal of shared experience of childhood for trans people, especially MTFs. Initially they blame "God" for getting it wrong, and pray that they will wake up as a girl. Then they realise how different they are from other kids, than they realise how important it is to conceal this. This concealment often results in feeling guilty and isolated. Indeed, because trans kids do not have any vocabulary about it, one of the most common reactions is to feel that they are the only one, that they are a freak. Trans children then most often suppress their gender identity until they are well into adulthood. The result of this is usually low self-esteem leading to underperformance in school and in early adulthood. In some cases attempts at suicide and self-harm result from this.

As a result of this study I identified two types of transgender children; "apparent" and "non-apparent". and it is particularly important to distinguish between the two.

Apparent = children whose parents or other adults, including teachers, know to be transgender.

Non-apparent = children that no-one else knows to be transgender

It seems that there are probably only 60-70 new apparent transgender children in the UK every year. The other 99%+ are non-apparent. This is hugely important for policymakers and educationalists, because so far the only guidance for schools to deal with trans children only refers to apparent trans children. There is nothing for non-apparent trans children. Yet it is arguable that these children need more support.

- Only around 30% of trans children tell anyone they are trans. This occurs mostly only in late teens. Those told tend to be a sister or a, possibly, gay friend. Telling parents in particular seems to be a mostly negative experience.

- 55% of trans kids are bullied by other kids in primary school. 64% in secondary school.

- around 20% of trans children were bullied by teachers or other school staff in primary and secondary schools.

- 7% of trans kids were bullied by other children’s parents in primary school, 6% in secondary school.

- There were no instances of bullying of trans children dealt with effectively by any school.

If anyone is interested, I will be expanding on this in a bit more detail when I present my research to colleagues and anyone else interested

on the Top Floor of the Educational Studies Building
at Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London.
on Wed 19th May at 4.00pm. Everyone welcome.
Trains/overground; New Cross or New Cross Gate.

I will also be giving a short summary at the Transgender Community Conference at the Central School of Speech and Drama on Friday 16th July.

“Radical” journalism and repression of marginalised peoples

2010-03-28T13:25:00.000+02:00

One of the things journalists frequently claim a right to do is to challenge people and express opinions which “offend” people. From Jan Moir to Rod Liddle to Julie Bindel and Bea Campbell, journalists regularly claim their right to offend. It is strange however, that this “right to offend” is almost never exercised by journalists representing a marginalised or relatively powerless group “offending” a group of interests in a position of relative power to them.

The problem is that articles by those journalists who claim the right to offend are all too often articles by someone from a group whose power and status is much greater than those they are trying to offend. In this sense this type of journalism takes advantage of the principle of freedom of expression to employ it as a tool of repression. So journalists, who are in positions of power anyway, who then write articles about groups of people who are in positions of powerlessness relative to the group to which they belong are engaged in an exercise of repressive power over a more marginalised group. They do this as journalists as well as members of a more powerful group.

This “right to offend” as such becomes little more than the exploitation of freedom of expression as a tool of repression. Now, of course I am not in any way advocating that freedom of expression is curtailed to prevent this sort of repression from happening, this is not something I would ever advocate, as it would surely become used to prevent the most powerless from speaking. However I think that it is time we became clear in ourselves and indeed acknowledged in our culture, that there is a difference between, for example, a cisgender journalist, Julie Bindel writing an offensive article about transgender people or indeed a straight, cisgender journalist writing an offensive piece about gay people, and someone like Thierry Schaffhauser writing an article about sex workers from the point of view of one of this most oppressed groups of people.

So, “Right to Offend” articles generally come in two types; those which are an exercise of repressive power on behalf of a more powerful group, examples being Julie Bindel’s articles about trans people or Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately, and articles which represent a challenge to current social and culturally accepted thinking. Thierry Schaffhauser’s articles about sex workers are a good example of this as is Natasha Curson’s article about the problems faced by transgender people who are not transsexual. As such we have repressive and liberation journalism.

What is important to remember is that, whilst both these types claim to be “radical” the former is little more than an act of repression by those in positions of power, whilst the latter is truly radical.

Of course one of the tools those who write repressive articles employ is to claim “victim” status. These horrible trans people are hounding me and trying to censor me and prevent me from exercising my right to free speech! As far as I know trans people have not hacked into the Guardian website or the Standpoint Magazine website to try and prevent her articles from being published. The response to this has to be that those who use the right to free speech as a repressive tool, cannot complain when those in positions of relative powerlessness oppose the repression being meted out from on high. Supporters of Jan Moir, astonishingly accused the 22,000 people who complained about her homophobic article about Stephen Gately via Twitter, of censorship! It would appear that those in these positions of power as journalists seem to think that freedom of speech is a one-way-street.

So, whilst repressive journalism will always be legally justified, it should never be morally acceptable. It should be viewed as a means of misrepresenting those in positions of marginality, misrepresenting their interests, misrepresenting their actions, misrepresenting their actions and building public support for measures which are counter to the interests of these people. Liberation journalism on the other hand, whilst much rarer than the repressive type, will always be the most interesting, valuable, challenging and valid form of expression in the media, seeking to remove repressive measures against marginal groups. It is this type of journalism which the principle of freedom of expression was created to protect. In repressive regimes the repressive type of journalism, such as Julie Bindel’s articles about trans people, intensify. In repressive regimes liberation journalism disappears, although it does not die, instead people risk their lives to create and distribute it.

We need to start developing a culture, essential for a free society, or at least a society which values freedom of speech, that distinguishes those repressive articles written by Moir, Bindel and others and the, often courageous articles, which are a genuine challenge to accepted thinking, which are iconoclastic, which seek to undermine repressive power structures and which permit those who are usually misrepresented through the exercise of power by repressive journalists like Bindel, to begin to speak for themselves.

Natacha Kennedy 26 march 2010

The consequences of QQT

2010-01-30T12:08:00.000+01:00

As the dust settles from Julie Bindel's latest foray into Queer/trans friendly territory, we can see what a malign influence she is. Reports are still coming out from those who were inside the RVT, and no doubt recordings will be made available which underline what a mistake it was to invite someone like her to any kind of open public discussion. People like her provoke very strong reactions, which they then stir up and use for their own purposes. We must make the point, as loudly as we can, that the demo outside was peaceful and that we were not involved in any of the nastiness.

Doubtless Bindel will use this in another article in the Guardian or Standpoint to crap on trans people (even though it was not only trans people who have a problem with her). This is her stock-in-trade, she cannot win the argument so she provokes... classic tactics used by the morally dubious, from Goebbells to Palin, claiming to be the victim of bullying when she is the one with access to national media.

So what happens next? Let us be clear, we are at war. This is not just about an evil individual using her power over one of the most disenfranchised and downtrodden communities, in an attempt to define us in the way she would like to. It goes a whole lot further than that. Last night I spoke to one of the representatives of the sex worker community and he described how she had been instrumental in having the law changed to make life more difficult for sex workers. Life for these people is now apparently measurably worse.

This is about Julie Bindel's campaign to have Gender Reassignment Surgery removed from NHS funding. This was the purpose of the incredibly badly written and distorted article in Standpoint Magazine, a hard-right wing organ apparently established to influence an incoming Tory government, which, despite the veneer and airbrushing, is going to be as nasty and right-wing as Thatcher's. This article was clearly intended to establish her credentials as an anti-trans journalist, who would be able to assist the Tories with making "cost savings" to the NHS budget by getting rid of GRS. It is worth noting that the Taxpayers Alliance, the Tory Party's alter ego, has been publishing costs of GRS in various NHS areas around the country.

Cometh the hour cometh the Bindel. Assisting the Tories to achieve these cost savings (at the cost of lives) will be just the boost her career needs. This woman clearly has ambitions along the lines of Melanie Phillips, yet she has one attribute which Mel P does not; she is a lesbian and as such will be seen as someone who can write about us with credibility. The value to the Tories of Julie Bindel in this situation will be immense. Trying to remove GRS from the NHS will generate a lot of negative publicity and some Tory MPs will come under pressure from constituents affected by the changes. Being able to find someone who, however dubiously, can give them some kind of justification for doing this will be God's gift to Cameron.

Julie Bindel's next career move is planned, her positioning ready to take advantage of a Tory government, the sky is the limit, she will achieve greatness over the dead bodies of transgender people.

Our reaction? This is something which needs to be set in train very quickly. We need a united national organisation which can speak for all, or pretty much all, transgender people, and their supporters. PfC has been very successful up to now in improving things for trans people, but they have achieved this success with a Labour government not a reactionary Tory one. What is required now is not a fight for more but a defence of what we have and that is going to be achieved not merely through rational considered argument and political lobbying, which PfC and others have done very well, we need a bigger voice, we need to be able to shout as loud as Bindel, so that when her campaign (no doubt coordinated with the Taxpayers Alliance and Central Office) to have GRS removed from the NHS starts in earnest we can make our voices heard.

We need a national organisation not merely because then we will have much better opportunities to get our voices heard in the media, but also will be able to show unity in the face of the inevitable provocation which Bindel will engage in. As a community we will need to be disciplined and well organised.

Back in November, I was at a conference in Sweden about trans issues and there I met a group of people from Ireland who had formed a national trans organisation there. In a country with a much greater degree of hostility to us than the UK they have been able to achieve much greater progress for trans people than anyone could have expected. A national trans organisation has also resulted in them being able to bid for funds from the EU which has helped their cause immensely and resulted in a greater unity amongst all trans people in Ireland. It is time we did the same. We need to establish a similar organisation in the UK, bid for funds and start to employ people to deal with the media and to put our points across more forcefully, countering Bindel's lies, provocations and disingenuous distortions. We will need a properly established constitution and democratic elections to an executive, but there are constitutions of other national organisations which we can borrow and adapt. We have people in our community who have experience in running trans organisations on a smaller scale, we need their expertise and experience to turn to something larger.

If the opinion polls are correct we could be operating in a much more hostile political environment soon, the brick wall we hit with the Equality Bill is just a small foretaste of what is to come. Make no mistake, over the next few years trans people will be under attack from all sides. Now is the time to get organised and make a fight of it.

The Pied Piper of Male Domination

2010-01-27T00:01:00.000+01:00

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” asked Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak. Are those in the lowest and most oppressed positions permitted any kind of true expression of their true feelings? The media by which all of us express ourselves in the era of mass communication remains in the hands of those for whom the preservation of the existing hegemonic order has always been the priority. I hear you cry, there are plenty of underclass who speak out, who make us aware of the plight of subalterns of every kind; women, black people, Asians, Muslims, lesbians, disabled people…!

So let us examine someone who speaks for two of these groups; a lesbian feminist.

“There is a false power which masculine society offers to a few women who “think like men” on condition that they use it to maintain things as they are. This is the meaning of female tokenism: that power withheld from the vast majority of women is offered to a few…”

...said Adrienne Rich in 1979. She might have been describing the sad life story of the Lesbian Feminist Separatist of the 21st century, reduced to the status of hired assasin. With calculated duplicity, she decides that being able to bring to the attention of broadsheet-readers the problems of rape and domestic violence is worth the sacrifice of the lives of transgender people. Access to the media, to write about the ultimate act of violent masculine hegemony, the violation of women’s bodies, is worth the sacrifice of the lives of transgender people. If I join with the oppressors, show my colours, demonstrate to them that I am one of them, that I am willing to exercise the same power of hegemony as a cisgendered member of the gender binary, they will permit me to write about those within their ranks who take male hegemony a step too far (and in doing so undermine the cause of male dominance).

It was her decision, yet it was not a decision which was hers to make.

She will make a healthy career from pretending to speak for the subaltern, but they can be sure she is one of them, as Margaret Thatcher would say. In the final analysis she will maintain the order of things, their order. She will shit on those below her just as they shit on her, and this can be used against her, if she ever tries to cross the line, to really challenge their dominance, just as the dictator forces those around him to commit crimes from which there is no way back. As Spivak said;

“The putative center welcomes selective inhabitants of the margin in order better to exclude the margin.”

The real enemy are those who would threaten the very atoms of male domination by removing its foundations at a molecular level, if men can become women and women men and other genders, our naturally assumed power is but a chimera, a trick of history. But who can take on this threat, who can rid us of these troublesome trannies? By criticising them we become open to easy accusations of gayness, which would never do!

Up to the mark steps The Lesbian Feminist Separatist. The doer of men’s dirty work. The men watch silently and smile, the foundations of their castle safe from disintegration, the power of the Phallic maintained and defended at two removes, they don’t even need to fire a shot.

But what will this Pied Piper of masculine domination want in return? The rapists, the pervs, the scumbags they would rather do without anyway, throw to the lions this sacrifice, a punishment for humiliating us by raping our sisters, wives, daughters or mothers. Payback time.

The calculation by her? Much simpler. I hate rapists. If I do your dirty work and take on the trannies, will you let me crush the rapists, pervs and associated male scumbags? After all these trannies’ lives must be so miserable that they are happier dead anyway…

Deal, a calculated betrayal, an esprit fasciste and a token woman and lesbian is admitted to the inner circle at once defending it and legitimising it. A win-win situation. For some.

But who pays and who wins? The transgendered pay, the male hegemonists win, and they don’t even have to play. Feminism’s soul is sold and it becomes protector of that which it once sought to change. As the trans people seek to explain their apparently complex lives to those who take rigid gender assignations as given as gravity or the air that we breathe, the defender of the status quo, the protector of the hegemony drowns out their voices with loud, shrill, distorted one liners and externally imposed misdescriptions of who we are, located in Daily Mail “commonsense” and expounded Jan Moir style with innuendo in place of fact and insinuation in place of understanding. She does her duty well.

To explain oneself is to exist, to be-in-the-world, to deny a people the possibility of explaining themselves is to deny their existence, to nullify and vaporise, a cultural genocide which threatens to become a real genocide.

The Most Dishonest Politician

2010-01-09T13:40:00.000+01:00

To be given the title "Most Dishonest Politician" is quite a feat these days; there is a lot of serious competition out there, however sometimes a particular politician rises to the occasion with levels of dishonesty which would shame Geoffrey Archer.

The posters sealed it for him; an airbrushed David Cameron, Photoshopped to look younger, slimmer, more athletic and less dodgy. However, this is only the tip of an iceberg of dishonesty which forms the basis of his own personal, and his party's fundamental existence.

Apart from the obvious visual dishonesty, Cameron's less than candid approach to his own financial situation was revealed in his interview during the Tory Party conference in the Autumn. When asked about his fortune, he was evasive, and claimed that he was unable to tell exactly. Pressed several times on this, he has never given a correct answer. This is perhaps understandable since he is reported to be worth something like £30 million pounds, most of which was unearned. This attempt to conceal his riches, subject to zero scrutiny by a supine and Tory-supporting media, stands in stark contrast to the way he presented himself as the politician who would 'clean up' politics. Perhaps his desire to conceal his wealth stems from the mortgage he is getting the taxpayer (us) to pay on his house in his constituency. Why does a man with 30 million pounds need to get the taxpayer to fund a huge mortgage on a house for him in Oxfordshire?

Using the opportunity, during the MP's expenses row, as cover for a not-so-subtle attempt to rig the voting system for the election after next (if he is elected), his "proposal" to reduce the number of MPs to 500, disguised as a "cleaning up" of politics is actually nothing to do with honesty and everything to do with disingenuous lies. His new system would simply deliver a built-in Tory majority, so that he could win any subsequent election with fewer votes than Labour. This is not a new broom, as he falsely trumpets, this is dirty, dishonest, underhand politics as usual.

Europe is where the Tories are the weakest and Cameron's "Cast Iron Guarantee" to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty has turned out to be forged from paper-mache; his consorting with racists and homophobes in Eastern Europe who celebrate atrocities committed by their own Quisling collaborators with the Nazis during world war two are an insult to people such as my grandfather, who fought and died fighting the Nazis. To claim that this bunch of fascists will help Cameron achieve any kind of influence in the EU is akin to claiming that black is white. The dishonesty goes on.

Cameron's "apology" to the LGBT community for his party's promoting of the notoriously homophobic "Section 28" needs to be seen in this light, consorting with homophobes behind our backs while telling the gay community that their votes are safe with them...

The dishonesty reached its zenith in recent months when Cameron deliberately tried to talk down the country's economic prospects. Although the UK is in no danger whatsoever of losing its AAA credit rating, Cameron has done all he can to try and give that impression. If anyone with any sense had believed him this could have seriously damaged the recovery the country is now experiencing. He is prepared to damage the UK's interests, such is his desperation to become Prime Minister. However it goes deeper than this; he is still perpetuating the lie to use as an excuse to slash public spending if he is elected. In fact his party is ideologically opposed to public spending (except defence) and this is just being used as a pretext to cut the police, schools, hospitals, universities, welfare, pensions and anything which helps the poor. The dishonesty runs deep in the Conservative Party. It is part of its DNA.

Of course no analysis of dishonesty in the Conservative Party would be complete without mention of their claims to represent newness, freshness and "change". In contrast to these claims, frequently made, and frequently glossed over by his friends in the media, any examination of their policies, especially their economic ones, shows that they are little more than recycled Thatcherism; a return to the policies which caused our social services to be run down, which resulted in mass unemployment, poverty wages and a very high crime rate. If the Tories get in this is what the next decade will have in store for the United Kingdom, a re-run of the 1980s. For David Cameron to claim that his policies represent a new start when one of his main ones is to repeal the ban on bloodsports beggars belief.

This list of his dishonesty is in fact too long to detail here but include the way he publicised the death of his son (note how Gordon Brown sought no publicity over his similar misfortune; this speaks volumes about the relative morals of these two people). Suffice to say that, in a field of intense competition, David Cameron, the politician with no principles, no substance and lots of PR wins by a furlong. Maybe the only thing worse than the dishonesty manifest by David Cameron is the free ride he has been given by the media. One expects the sycophantic treatment of him by the Daily Mail (although this is still not justified and effectively amounts to propaganda) but the lack of scrutiny given to him by the TV stations, most notably the BBC, amounts to collusion in his deception. God help us if he becomes Prime Minister.

Transphobia in the (Tory)Taxpayer's Alliance

2009-12-05T23:43:00.000+01:00

The "Taxpayers Alliance", or should I say the "Torypayers Alliance" is made up of very rich people who pay a lower proportion of their incomes in tax than I do and in some cases no tax at all in the UK, but who donate a large proportion of their surplus cash to the Tory party.

Fiona McEvoy, of the West Midlands Taxpayers Alliance, has been complaining about the use of £1,000 of taxpayers' money to fund a training day for civil servants in Wolverhampton about transsexuals, as part of diversity training. I very much doubt that she would have complained if taxpayers money had been spent on diversity training for civil servants in dealing with black people, Asians or gay and lesbian people. So why is she getting her knickers in a twist about trans people?

I am a taxpayer, most of you are taxpayers. Including indirect taxation I probably pay over £10,000 a year in tax. Someone on average earnings will pay around £6,000 a year in direct and indirect taxes, depending on how much they drink, whether they smoke, if they drive a gas-guzzler, etc.

So the £30,000 transsexuals in the country should be paying around £180 million in tax every year. Include the non-transsexual trans people and you probably have a couple of Billion at least being contributed to the exchequer in tax by transgender people in the UK.

And the Torypayers Alliance is worried about £1000. I suspect that there is more to it than this and the Torypayers Alliance is deeply transphobic. I also suspect that they are campaigning to have Gender Reassignment Surgery removed from NHS funding since they seem to be digging up figures about the cost of GRS all over the place. If the Tories get in expect to have no access to GRS if you are poor...

However, Press For Change have done their maths for them. The cost of GRS to the NHS is, on average £9600. Sounds a lot but I pay for that every year (and, although I am not intending to have any surgery myeslf, I am happy to contribute to the funding of others' surgery). Once again, if you add up the £6,000 the average trans person is going to contribute to the exchequer over a 40-year working lifespan, you have nearly a quarter of a million pounds, more if they buy a house and pay stamp duty for example. Since a substantial proportion of transsexuals who are refused surgery either bcommitt suicide or are too traumatised to live useful working lives and as such become a greater burden on the NHS/social services, the £9600 suddenly looks like a really good investment. Just 2.5% of transsexuals' taxes will cover the cost of all GRS operations on the NHS.

The Torypayers Alliance will make a big deal of this, or their puppets in the Tory Party will, if the Tories are elected in May. The trans community needs to be ready to fight their transphobic hatred, bigotry and desire to rid this country of the diversity which we represent. These people are narrow-minded, bigoted bean-counters who hate people like us.

You have been warned.

Either the Torypayers Alliance is innumerate or they are a bunch of transphobic bigots who will use any excuse to attack trans people.

Out and About

2009-12-01T19:34:00.000+01:00

The great thing about being trans is that fairly ordinary things can become a little more adventurous when you are dressed. The recent open house evening at the V&A was a good example of how going girlie makes the evening just that little bit more interesting, and it also gets people talking to you in a way which wouldn't happen if you were going in drab.

However my recent sojourn to a small town in Sweden for a conference was definitely a little more adventurous. Linkoping is a small town about 70 miles south-west of Stockholm and it is where they make Saabs. Small provincial industrial town, kinda like Derby...

Fashion note; For the outward journey I wore a denim mini skirt, blue T-shirt and a dark grey angora jumper over the top with 3" heeled boots and black tights. Pretty passable until you got very close.

I flew there on Ryanair to Stockholm Skavsta airport, and decided that, since the conference was about trans issues I would go as Natacha all the way there and back. It didn't start well, Ryanair at Stansted were chaotic and I barely made the check-in time, then I forgot to take off my bangles when going through the metal detector and had to be searched. But by who?! The female searcher was coming towards me and I didn't want any trouble so I decided, on the spur of the moment to turn to the male one instead. A little surprised, he realised I was trans when I got close and searched me, taking my bangles from me and giving the once-over with his magic detector wand thingy. After that however, everything went swimmingly. The flight was comfortable and arrived on time. I spent about an hour of it talking to a lovely young Swedish girl in the seat next to me. She came from the north of Sweden and wasn't looking forward to the 8-hour bus journey ahead of her.

When I got to Skavsta (which is actually a hut with a runway) getting through customs/immigration was achieved with a smile and a "Welcome to Sweden". I had brought a big puffy jacket with me in the expectation that it was going to be cold there but it was no different from London, quite warm for November. The bus ride to Linkoping was about an hour and a half and very pleasant, but it dumped me at the Fjarrbusterminal, the long-distance bus terminal, which entailed walking through a small industrial estate to get to the town centre. I thought this must be a bit scary but it wasn't as there were plenty of other airport bus passengers walking through it as well. I found my hotel easily; a lively traditional Swedish house painted...wait for it...bright pink!

The owner was there and was happy to speak to me in Swedish, which I urgently needed to practice, but eventually I ended up needing to ask for stuff I didn't know the word for such as an iron and the wifi code. His English was excellent of course and he was very helpful and welcoming, as was everyone that I met there.

The people I met in the conference were fantastic and it was great to be able to discuss trans issues in a context with others who were interested in trans issues. Loads of people were interested in the paper I presented about transgender children. There were some very interesting people there, including Stephen Whittle, Maria Sundin, a Lawyer called Lukas Romson, a transman from Denmark called Tobias, Del LaGrace Volcano and many more, Del gave an amazing presentation about intersex people. Linkoping was a great place, the university was wonderful and the conference has set up a new network of people interested in gender issues and I am looking forward to collaborating with people from all over Europe on research in trans issues.

Again, there were no probs on the way back despite the fact that I had been up all day and was coming back late, so my make-up wasn't as fresh as it might have been. The only downside was that I heard an English woman saying, as I passed, "Look at that..." If I hadn't been in a departure lounge, she would have got a very large dose of pure unadulterated vitriol. The whole time I spent in Linkoping, a provincial town in Sweden, near Stockholm, I had no hassle or harrassment at all. A couple of days ago I was hassled by some religious nutter here on the tube in London, he followed me all the way from West Hampstead to Green Park muttering some religious mumbo-jumbo, and came close to getting a stiletto in the face (in the end I ignored him so much that it really pissed him off).

Just goes to show what an inclusive, tolerant society we have here.

Surreal but predictable; trans people excluded again.

2009-11-30T23:38:00.000+01:00

It was almost surreal; at a meeting of the "Cutting Edge Consortium" in the house of Commons on Tuesday night, Andrew Copston, representing the Humanist Society, right at the end of the meeting when there was no opportunity for us to argue back, suggested that it wouldn't matter if there were no transgender comissioners on the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) because other commissioners could just as well do the work of a trans commissioner if they have good enough knowledge of trans issues.

And whaddaya know but the next day the EHRC announces new commissioners, and guess what...? Yup you got it in one, there are no trans commissioners. Guess what II... the other commissioners are not people with any understanding of trans issues.

Predictable as this is likely to sound to transgendered people, it is not something which should go without either comment or protest. This is a deliberate snub to the trans community, make no mistake. It is like saying that we don't count, or that our problems with equal rights do not have to be taken seriously. Despite all its warm and supportive words, when it comes down to it the EHRC is all mouth and no trousers. This is not the first time either, when words have flowed freely but action has been conspicuous by its absence. The Moving Wallpaper affair earlier this year, demonstrated how it is unwilling to take any action on any trans issues. No wonder the Equality Bill is such a big step backwards for transgender people, it will mean that they will legally be able to ignore us in favour of less underpriviledged groups, encompassing larger numbers of people.

So let's call a spade a spade shall we? This is all about numbers. Transgender people in the UK make up such a small proportion of the population that we do not merit the attention of the EHRC. After all race and sex discrimination can potentially affect everyone in the country, whereas transphobic discrimination affects maybe only 1% of the population. We are too small a minority to merit inclusion in the hierarchy of discrimination, the bottom rung is still to be kept out of reach as everyone else pulls up the drawbridge.

Of course there are other reasons for our exclusion; it would not do to shake the cosy worldviews of Daily Mail reading 'normal', Barratt Homes, Mondeo Man with 2.35 chilren... they might start to question other aspects of their lives if the most basic concepts of 'male' and 'female' are suddenly revealed to be not the only options. My goodness, the thought that the lovely, pretty, blonde-haired daughter they assiduously cultivated with pink t-shirts and Barbie dolls might grow up into a MAN! Or worse, a genderqueer butch dyke with attitude and a pair of DMs...

Of course there is hypocrisy by the truckload, and of course trans people are used to that as well, indeed we start to get nervous at its absence such is the regularity with which we have had to deal with double standards being applied to us. One of the biggest voices against the full inclusion of trans people in the Equality Bill came from religious groups. (Incidentally 99.9% of their responses which call for our exclusion did not refer to religious grounds or religious texts in support of their 'arguments' but that is another story.) Leaving asside the obvious question as to why transgender people do not get consulted about issues involving religious freedom this makes manfest one of the most spectacular and monumental instances of hypocrisy and double standards of modern times. This is Hypocrisy of planet sized proportions...

One of the main arguments which the Equalities Office deployed to justify excluding the majority of transgender people from the scope of the bill was that people who are transgender but not transsexual represent a "Lifestyle Choice". The fact that this is clearly complete nonsense is neither here nor there. The same people, including those on the EHRC, argue for religious discrimination to be a protected characteristic in the Equality Bill, so that people cannot be discriminated on the grounds of religious belief. Yet what is religion? One is not born a Muslim, a Catholic or a Protestant, therefore religion is a Lifestyle Choice.

The irony is of course that people who argue that they should not be discriminated against because of a lifestyle choice then turn round and argue that the majority of the transgender community should be unprotected from discrimination because they represent a "Lifestyle Choice".

The reality is, of course, that being transgendered, whether transsexual or not, is something you are born with and nothing to do with any choices you might make. My own research has shown that around 80% of transgender people realise that their gender identity is different before they leave primary school. with only around 3% becoming aware they are trans after their 18th birthday. With a mean average age of realisation at around 7-8 years old, and a modal average age at only 5 years old, the suggestion that any trans person is trans out of a lifestyle choice is quite clearly ridiculous.

The Copyright Extremists take over the Asylum

2009-11-29T16:12:00.000+01:00

The news that a pub has been fined £8000 because a customer used their wifi access to illegally download a piece of music will send shockwaves through the internet community as well as the licensed trade. Pubs have, for a while, been struggling to compete with cheap beer in cans and the attraction of the internet, which entices punters to stay at home. Provision of free wifi internet access in pubs was meant to change that, drawing people out of their homes into the more socialble environment of the local. Where I live, it is not just the pubs which have wifi, but most of the cafes as well.

However few, if any pub managers are going to risk being fined £8000 or more as a result of a customer downloading a piece of music. The poor pub manager in this situation has not broken any laws, has done nothing morally wrong, and certainly has not breached anyone's copyright. Still the copyright extremists have persued and punished him despite his innocence. Just when you thought that you had the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt, you discover you are wrong.

The more scary element of this however, is how this could affect ordinary home users of the internet. It is not difficult to piggy-back onto someone's wifi connection, where I live I can pick up about 20 different wifi connections in addition to my own, most of which come through as "very good" or "excellent". If I try sitting in my car outside in the street I can get even more and with stronger signals. I can even get the wifi of the pub round the corner. So it is not going to be long before large numbers of people are going to be prosecuted and fined (or even imprisoned or bankrupted) for copyright infringement even though they are completely innocent and have committed no crime, and certainly no infringement of copyright.

Copyright was originally started (as the Statute of Anne) in order to protect the work of creative people such as writers and artists, to give them the incentive to be creative and produce creative work. Copyright protected this and meant that they could make a living out of being creative without being ripped off by people who might copy their work. The term of copyright was originally 14 years. Today it is around 75 years. In other words what you write, compose, paint, film, etc will not enter the public domain free of copyright, until 75 years after it was created. This represents one of the problems of copyright. It would perhaps be tolerable if the current draconian copyright laws expired for most things after 14 years since it could be argued that, if the creator had not made enough money by then they were unlikely to make anything worth justifying the blanket copyright protection.

But it looks like that isn't going to happen. In fact the 'creative' industries are rapidly becoming the 'copyright' industries and the business leaders focus more on this than fostering new talent. It is a bad deal from the point of view of the creators as well. These people actually make such a small percentage from royalties from their work that, for all but a very lucky few, it does not pay a living wage. So let's be straight about who benefits most from the current copyright laws; the large multinational companies which own, and sit on most of the copyrighted material which is of commercial value. They are not just worried about illegal downloads of music, they are probably more concerned that, in future, musicians will be able to communicate directly with their fans and sell them the music directly online without any intermediaries. Worse still for these wealthy dinosaurs, relics of the 20th century, many of these musicians distribute recordings of their work for free, making their money out of live performances and associated merchandising operations.

The fact is that copyright laws as they stand (and as they are currently proposed) are an anachronism. They will have no appreciable effect on the tide of file sharing and downloading. They will actually be counterproductive from the point of view of the copyright industry; it will not be long before the weight of injustices and infringements of liberty of innocent people begins to make itself felt. Every innocent person prosecuted, every publican, every 9-year-old child, every silver-haired old lady, every unwitting parent, every poor sod whose home wifi gets hacked into will become another chip in the Berlin Wall of copyright. Sooner or later, either public opinion or a determined individual will bring down these laws, probably in the European Court. They will then find that what little protection they have against copyright infringers is worth nothing.

The tide of technology is against them, if they want to continue in these industries they need to come up with a new business model; as Don Tapscott suggests, considering music as a service rather than a product would be a good place to start, then people would be able to pay a subscription, say £5 a month for unlimited access to as much music as they can listen to online. This would stem the tide of illegal downloads very quickly, by charging a reasonable sum for a service.

As things stand the music industry spends so much money on advertising, videos, publicity, etc. (with usually much more money and effort going into creating the video than recording the song) for a relatively small number of "artists". They are still trying to milk the public with the old 20th century model of a small number of superstars which the music industry invests heavily in to create demand for their music. This is already beginning to break down with 'new' artists like Lady GaGa already looking like lame ducks to the extent that her record company has to milk her fame as quickly as possible before the next big thing takes over. The commercial life of a popstar today is measured in months rather than years. Pretty soon the period in the spotlight will become so short that the income from sales will not justify the expenditure on publicity.

It will be the death of the music industry but the rebirth of music.