Why Richard O'Brien reminds me of men I used to meet at parties.

My opinion about Richard O'Brien's opinion of me.

One of the few advantages of being a trans  woman is that, at a party, you find out who the assholes are before everyone else. As far back as the early 1990s I can remember (almost invariably white, cishet, male) partygoers coming up to me before they even had the excuse that they were pissed and asking me about my genitals.

By a few seconds this question usually preceded its asker learning some new items of vocabulary, vocabulary which left them in no doubt as to

a) what I thought of their question,

b) what I thought of them, and

c) that they needed to ensure they did not avail themselves of my company at any time in the future for any reason.

So it was with a sense of deja-vu that I read about Richard O'Brien's pronouncement on trans women. As someone who does not identify as a trans woman himself he is clearly profoundly underqualified to talk about trans women, something which tends to be a common factor in those arrogant enough to make such pronouncements. What are the reasons he gives for making this judgement...? Errrrr... absolutely none whatsoever. Not that he is any different in this respect from the other people making similar pronouncements, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer have presented nothing by way of evidence to support their assertions whilst at the same time lacking any experiential qualification for what they have said.

The counter-arguments of course have actual scientific evidence to back them up; trans people are who we say we are. The TERF essentialising arguments, profoundly anti-feminist as they are, simply fall apart even on cursory inspection. Of course O'Brien doesn't have to worry about such niceties, but then, let's face it neither, it seems, do the essentialising TERFs.

While a number of my friends are now mourning yet another lost hero, forever lost to assholeness, I am lucky; I never liked the Crystal Maze and one of the reasons for that was its vainglorious and narcissistic presenter who reminded me so much of the privileged and ignorant assholes I used to introduce to new items of lexicon in the early stages of parties. 

One of the ways most people judge an idea is the people who advocate it, which probably explains why the "out" campaign has lost ground since Michael Gove joined it.  O'Brien joins the likes of Greer, Humphries, a ragbag of privileged libertarian/neoliberal right-wingers and assorted abusive  and ignorant TERFs many of whom have increasingly resorted to spreading deliberate disinformation about trans people because they have no serious arguments to make.

Quite what qualifies him to think he can make the pronouncement he has done is very unclear, apparently nothing, so the question remains; why has he deliberately made an idiot of himself by doing this? The reason is probably the same reason as Greer's, or indeed Burchill's; he desperately desires to hold on to whatever fading limelight he can. Some may call him a 'has-been". I would beg to differ; a "hasn't-been" is probably more appropriate.

Making ignorant and puerile statements about trans people seems to be the way hasn't-beens attempt to regain whatever crumbs of long-lost media attention they can. Best ignore such foolishness, put them out of their misery, it is kinder that way.

Lies, harm and death

Transphobes in the media: It's not about "offence".

It is becoming clear that the battle for trans rights in the UK is being won, although we are, of course nowhere near finished. There are still plenty of areas where change is needed and where discrimination still occurs; the rights of children, non-binary people, disabled trans people and BAME trans people and prison policy to name but a few. However trans people in the UK are in a better position with regard to having some kind of voice, with being able to express ourselves and counter the lies and deliberate misinformation put about by those who oppose us. 

It cannot be stressed how important this is. Some of us can remember a time when trans people had no voice, no ability to challenge what was said about us. The harm caused by this state of affairs resulted in deaths by suicide (including, almost, my own, after I read The Transsexual Empire, the only book I could find about transsexual people in the 1980s, before the internet) as a result of the social exclusion generated by negative stereotyping of trans people in the media. These texts were produced by people like Janice Raymond, Sheila Jeffreys, Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel. During the last 40 years up to around 2008 the dominant public image of the average trans person was determined by these people's discourse; their narrative was not seriously challenged in the media to the extent that Julie Bindel could get away with stereotyping us this badly in the Guardian in 2004;

"...those who "transition" seem to become stereotypical in their appearance - fuck-me shoes and birds'-nest hair for the boys; beards, muscles and tattoos for the girls. Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease."

While Germaine Greer has recently demonstrated that this sort of nonsense has not gone away, it has to a large extent been replaced by more subtle mendacities, disinformations and outright lies from such people. However, trans people are now better organised and better able to challenge such narratives in the media, which brings me to the first important point I would like to make here: opposing people like Greer, Bindel, Raymond etc, is not about us being offended, it is about the harmful effects of the lies they peddle. When a TERF or other transphobe makes an appearance in the media, the content of what they say may be mildly offensive to trans people but to be honest most of us hear worse on the bus every now and then. No the problem with the material they are pushing in the media is that it usually contains quite profound untruths and disinformation about trans people. Indeed this is pretty much the norm in terms of TERF output in the media these days. Gone is the deliberate stereotyping; these days there are enough of us around so that most people know we don't look like john Travolta or Olivia Newton-John, today their weapon if choice is the lie.

The problem is that those who oppose the no-platforming policies of students, those who argue, as Julie Bindel did so disingenuously in the guardian recently, are presenting our opposition to their media output, speaking sessions in universities as based on "offence". 

It is not.

Let me be clear about this; I am not opposed to Julie Bindel, Germaine Greer, Milo Yiannopoulos or anyone else speaking about trans issues on the grounds of "offence". These people may be offensive but that is not the reason why I believe they have no place speaking in our universities or in the media. The reason I oppose them speaking is because they use every opportunity they get, to spread deliberate lies about trans people which cause actual harm to trans people.

These lies include;

• trans children mostly do not grow up to be trans adults
• trans children have a medical transition forced upon them at too early a stage
• trans women use women's toilets, not to pee but to attack women
• trans women are men
• trans people are mentally ill
• trans children are diagnosed too early and don't have time to develop
• trans people are enemies of feminism
• trans people reinforce gender stereotypes and the oppression of women

This is why I believe trans activists now need to ensure that these people are not given undeserved airtime to spread these lies and to sharpen our response to them when they do, exposing their lies and being clear that no-platforming is about opposing their practice of spreading harmful disinformation about us, rather than "offence". 

Indeed so many commenters who supported Germaine Greer's "Freezepeach" cited "offence" as our supposed opposition to transphobes in the media and at universities that it is clear the cis journalists and editors have got this entire issue badly wrong, and are misrepresenting trans people quite badly in this respect. I believe one of the main focusses of our interactions with the media should be this disinformation campaign by transphobes, and we should not avoid any opportunity to reinforce the idea that our main objection to transphobes being given a platform is not 'offence'.

The next point I would like to make in relation to this is with regard to places like Russia. Today it was announced that trans people, along with gay men, lesbians and child-abusers, were to be "treated" in new psychiatric hospitals. Let us be under no illusions that these "treatments" are going to include Reparative Therapy of the kind that killed Leelah Alcorn.

Two years ago I was invited by Amnesty International to speak about the problems faced by trans people in Russia. Since I knew very little about the situation and what they would like me to say I consulted with some Russian trans people, difficult, but I got in touch with as many as I could communicate with. Their main message was very clear; they are suffering because of TERF cultural imperialism. The transphobic hate published by the likes of Raymond and Greer under the guise of "feminism" is having an effect in Russia. The problem is that TERFs in Russia have a much louder voice than trans people, indeed trans people there are pretty much in the same position we were here in the early 1980s. In other words TERF disinformation and misinformation about trans people can be spread there with little or no opposition. The result of this, is institutionalised Reparative Therapy and trans people being treated alongside pedophiles. I am in no doubt that trans people will die, and indeed are probably dying already in Russia as a result of TERF cultural imperialism.

So whilst we need to be on our guard in the UK, we need to develop ways of supporting trans people in Russia. That was the very clear message I received from them about what they would like us in the West, to do to support them. They didn't need anything else, they were clear they could fight their own battles, what we need to do is prevent our TERFs from targeting them, because they are not yet in a position to fight back (the choice of battleground by TERFs is always one in which their opponents cannot fight back and where others do their dirty work for them).

The truth is that TERFism kills, that TERFism is predominantly about spreading false information about trans people. This is not a "free speech" issue or an "offence" issue it is about harm, in that sense it is not unlike the free speech implications of shouting "fire" in a crowded cinema.

Schools and creative thinking: The failure of neoliberal education policies.

Today a marketing company advertised for an employee saying only dyslexics need apply. This is a new departure in advertising for employees. Although some people have suggested but it might be illegal, this kind of positive discrimination is in fact perfectly legitimate and within the law. However many people seem to be missing the most important issue here. The reason for their seeking a dyslexic employee. 

The advertising company needed to recruit not specifically a dyslexic person, but a person who is able to think creatively. In in their advert they talked about Richard Branson and Steve jobs as examples of the kind of people they would like to employ. In fact, you don't have to be dyslexic to be creative and to be a creative thinker. The implications of this advert are far more wide ranging and profound. It represents concrete evidence of the failure of our education system, in particular our school system.

The Education Reform Act 1988 began a process of turning our schools into the exam factories that they are today. The first OFSTED inspections and the introduction of league tables, ever more meaningless SAT tests and exams, with teachers and headteachers increasingly held responsible personally for forcing children through these meaningless hoops. Now, academisation has turned our schools even more into exam factories, depriving our children of the skills and attitudes need to survive in real life as these mincing machines spew out identikit children able only to memorise large quantities of random facts for very short periods of time, as Mary Bousted showed with the new key stage two tests in grammar,  punctuation and spelling. The likes of Gove, Baker and Blunkett have combined over the years to produce a neoliberal dystopia in our education system which is now harming children, not merely in terms of their mental health but also now in terms of their employment prospects.

We have now arrived at the ridiculous situation where the creative thinking vital to most businesses and industry has been knocked out of children by this increasingly centralised, authoritarian system. The damage caused not just to our children and young people but also to our economy, is potentially incalculable. Michael Gove’s and Nick Gibb’s fantasies of all children learning grammar by rote (as though in some mythical 1950s grammar school) materialised in the form of these dreadful tests for primary schoolchildren; at the same time destroying children's motivation to learn, turning them off school and distracting from the real qualities needed to survive, thrive, prosper and enjoy life in the 21st-century.

Industry now has so little faith in our education system that it has to go to these more extreme lengths to ensure that they get creative thinkers, problem solvers and people who can look at things in different ways. This can only be regarded as a profound indictment of the neoliberal education policies which have caused so much damage in the last 25 years. It is of course very positive that neurodiversity is being recognised positively by employers at last, but the assumption that the majority of pupils coming through our education system will not be able to think creatively demonstrates the failure over education policy in the last quarter of a century more graphically than anything.

Proportional Representation, Labour and the Tories.

The new electoral boundary changes being foisted on the UK by the Tories are designed, by the Tories, to ensure that Labour can never win an overall majority in the House of Commons again. Combined with other, seemingly unrelated and piecemeal changes, such as voter deregistration, they are working hard, but quietly, to ensure they will have an overall majority in 2020 and beyond regardless of how unpopular they become. Bit like North Korea...

The prospects of Labour forming a majority government are, of course greatly reduced by a deeply unpopular leader who refuses to discuss the issues that voters care about, preferring to play to his gallery which consists of that roughly 0.5% of the electorate that has selected him. However he has started to that think about forming an alliance with other parties, like the Lib Dems, the Greens and the SNP to produce electoral reform resulting in Proportional Representation (PR), a group of left-of-centre parties joining together to beat the Tories at the ballot box and then change the voting system from the current increasingly unfair one, to a fair and proportional one.

It has to be recognised that, with him at the helm, even obtaining this will be difficult as Labour heads for sub 25% territory in the polls. However it is the first sensible thing he has done since becoming leader and as such it should be supported. Interestingly the other major proponent of PR in the Labour Party is Chukka Ummuna. Proportional Representation would be good for the country because, at least in the medium term, it would reverse the situation intended by the Tories. Instead of locking Labour out of power for a generation it would lock the Tories out of power for a generation, as they struggle to form alliances with the UKiPs and the SNP. This is to the good. Imagine if the country had been a Tory-free zone since 1979 instead of being dominated by hard-right Thatcher and Cameron governments. The country would be in a far better condition; we would not have had Gove's disastrous education reforms, rail privatisation, NHS privatisation, cuts to social security and public services on the swinging scale they have been, high levels of unemployment and low pay, increasing child poverty, Section 28... the list is long and painful. The country would be immeasurably better off now if it had not had these Tory governments.

So Labour must start making moves to change the electoral system. A government made up of a group of parties that commands a majority of voters in the UK and which have committed to PR in their manifestos, would be free to implement such a system without a referendum and could then proceed to govern by consensus and persuasion rather than by imposition and fiat. It would be free to undo all the damage that successive Conservative governments have wrought on our social system.

The irony is that, if the Tories hadn't decided to implement their distorted new electoral system designed to keep them in power come what may, then Labour would probably never have started considering PR. This means that ultimately a policy designed to keep them in power could result in them being excluded from power fro a very long time.

Bring it on!

Cologne, Greer, Bea Campbell, free speech and "neo-masculinism".

The so-called "neo-masculinist" groups of "men"; poor dears who are now too scared to hold their meetings have been the subject of much outrage and ridicule. This group of wannabe rapists have finally discovered that the "pick-up artist", Pulling-By-Numbers systems being peddled by creepy wide boys doesn't work on real women. Rather than reconsider their attitudes to women and start to treat us as human beings this group of "men" has decided that it is easier to go the other way and attempt to make their sick fantasies of raping women come true.

However this episode has revealed some glaring hypocrisies. To start with many of the people who were so vociferous about the Cologne incident seem to have been deafeningly silent about these, mostly white, proto-rapists. Yes the outcry over these attitudes is considerably louder when the men exhibiting them have brown skins than when they have white skins. Not all that different from the way white men who murder indiscriminately are described as "loners" whereas a Muslim boy with a clock is treated as a terrorist. 

Not only that but these two occurrences together have  also exposed transphobia. There has been barely a peep out of the media about the way people have tried to prevent the supporters of Roosh V from meeting. This is censorship par excellence yet the likes of Bea Campbell, Richard Dawkins and a host of supporters of Germaine Greer's "right" to hate-speech have been utterly silent about his supporters right to speak. No protests whatever about those opposing their rights to hate-speak. Interesting...

Of course it is right to oppose this vileness. Even just advocating rape actively harms women and contributes to the rape culture so prevalent in our society. In the same way transphobia contributes to actual harm caused to trans people, especially trans children. Like most trans people I oppose both these types of hate-speech. Those who have opposed only one, citing "free speech" for transphobes by not misogynists have exposed themselves to the charge of profound hypocrisy. Or maybe the issue of "free speech" is only relevant to transphobes...?

Trust and Trans People

The following represents my opinion of the Gender Identity Clinic run by Dr Zucker in Toronto based on the findings of the Zinck and Pignatiello report.


The Report

The report by Suzanne Zinck and Antonio Pignatiello published on the 26th November is damning of the Gender Identity clinic run by Dr Kenneth Zucker. There is no other way of describing it. There are plenty of elements which are worse than that; they are shocking, no child should ever be subjected to this sort of treatment;

It is indicative of the attitude towards trans children that this kind of thing has happened. This does not occur when staff are respectful towards trans children and should be regarded as very serious indeed. As a professional who has worked with children, if anything like this had happened with any member of staff for whom I was responsible, their career would have ended very abruptly.

But cutting straight to the chase, probably the most damning part of the report is this;

This is what trans people have been saying all along; for example a number of demonstrators including Sarah Brown and myself handed out these leaflets (created by Sarah) at a conference in London where Zucker was speaking. That was nearly 10 years ago. This means that the medical establishment internationally and in Canada has been ignoring trans people on this issue for a very long time; indeed trans people have been telling anyone who will listen most of the findings of this report, for decades. It must be remembered that Leelah Alcorn was a victim of Reparative Therapy a year ago

Pathologisation of young trans people and trans children. In plain English that means telling the children that they are the problem, rather than the attitude of people around them. Not only is it a lie but it is consistent with the Reparative Therapy approach which trans people have consistently accused the clinic of engaging in. 

In my view this represents bullying. Bullying of children who are not in a position to resist or respond, the damage caused by this treatment is incalculable and the numbers of children who have been harmed by this clinic must be counted in the hundreds at least, since trans people have been protesting about it.

So why has it taken such a long time for the international medical community to take notice and listen to trans people? That is a question only they can answer, but it is one which will be asked, repeatedly, by trans people from now on.

Ethics

From Janice Raymond to J Michael Bailey and now to Toronto, it appears that ethics are deemed not to apply when trans people are involved. Clearly the defendants at Nuremburg were researching human beings whereas those researching trans people do not consider themselves to be doing so;

Trans people have disproportionately been victims of ethical breaches in research and in clinical and practical terms, given the small number of trans people who have been researched, it is disturbing how many ethical problems there have been. It is clearly no coincidence that the prevailing view of trans people among researchers who breach ethical standards is that we are "the problem" rather than them.

It is this fundamental dehumanisation of trans people that is at the root of the issue, the problem is society's non-acceptance of trans people; as Sass Rogando Sasot put it;

"I am not trapped by my body, I am trapped by your beliefs."

In this instance the Toronto Gender Identity Clinic for children was, rather than trying to alleviate the underlying problems suffered by trans people, making them worse.

Implications

There will be plenty of implications resulting from this publication; the most immediate will be "trust trans people". We are who we say we are; we are the experts on being trans, treating us as anything less than human beings is unacceptable, harmful, abusive and makes those who do so part of the problem.

Why, after decades of protest by trans people has this action to shut Zucker down, only happened now? Why were the protections normally applied to organisations dealing with cisgender children not applied to Toronto? It isn't Rocket Science to listen to trans people and to treat them as the clients rather than their parents - something which is also, in my view, highly unethical.

It also puts a huge question mark around the multiple publications by staff at the Toronto clinic which argue that most trans children do not grow up to become trans adults. This research must now be regarded as highly problematic and unreliable. This is research which has been cited by many anti-trans activists including TERFs, right-wing "Christian" fundamentalists, libertarian trans haters and the assorted rag-bag of dodgy journalists and fanatical academics who spread misinformation and disinformation about trans people under the guise of "free speech". One more element of their weaponised arsenal of deliberately misleading rhetoric is put beyond use. At some point someone will probably carry out a larger-scale study which will be regarded as more reliable, and doubtless it will demonstrate a much lower rate of trans children not growing up trans.

Make no mistake, this report marks another part of the Transgender Tipping Point; being anti-trans is no longer respectable, there is no theoretical, scientific, psychological, sociological, medical, or ideological basis for the hatred of trans people. This is a big domino as almost the last of the big transphobic institutions whose employees give respectability to hate groups has fallen. People who are in effect advocating crimes against trans adults and trans children are no longer respectable. 

Time to listen to trans people not trans haters.

Raymond