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.
Sunday, 12 December 2010
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
The T-word, contested meanings and cultural imperialism
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…
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…
Friday, 5 November 2010
Faceless money-men in Stockholm
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.
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.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
How the budget discriminates against young trans people.
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.
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.
Friday, 8 October 2010
Women in government - so what about transmen/women?
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.
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.
Monday, 4 October 2010
No Safe Spaces for Transgender People
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
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
The vast majority of us were treated with that respect by everyone we encountered in
So what has changed? The location? Obviously the City of
No, the main other reason for the difference between our two experiences was time. The conference in
In my opinion the atmosphere in
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
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.
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