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 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!

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.