We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals- working men's clubs have a particular responsibility to resist this kind of bullying

There is a worrying pattern of failure to respect some of the older and greater comedians on the working men's club circuit. When Bluey Drongo ("an eff, a blind, a merry quip") appeared at the Cambridge Bittern Stuffers' club recently, a rival event took place for those folk who object to Bluey's often-stated belief that people who've retrained during their careers can never be true working men; you're born a working man, he says, and that is that; these newcomers don't know what it smells like when you've lined the pockets of the rich with the sweat of your brow, and it ain't roses, he says, let me tell ya. Strewth. Obviously, the fate of this minority isn't important or relevant to the rest of us true working men, so it is ungrateful of them to make a fuss when they could be enjoying Bluey's off-colour anecdotes instead.

It's also troubling that Bernard Waning has not been getting any bookings lately. Bernard's been touring with his one joke ("hear the one about the Englishman, the Irishman and the transsexual Scot?") for over ten years now, but what the heck, it's an important joke, and it is shameful that he should be denied the platform to tell it. Yet again. Some jokes just improve with the retelling, after all. If things carry on like this he won't even get a chance to publish his joke in the Guardian one more time, and then where will we be?

a piece on censorship in the Guardian

...and a response from Sarah Brown

a failure to care

It's been quite a week for trans news. On 6th January, David Batty wrote in the Guardian about the GMC's investigation of Dr Richard Curtis, whose  Trans Health Clinic provides a private alternative to the sometimes problematic access to medical services for trans* people under the NHS. It is alleged that Dr Curtis made errors in prescribing hormones in some cases. As David Batty says,

The case seems likely to revive the furore over the treatment of gender dysphoria in the UK triggered by the GMC inquiry against Dr Russell Reid, a psychiatrist who provided private treatment for transsexualism. Reid was found guilty of serious professional misconduct in 2007 for breaking international guidance between 1988 and 2003.

 It's possible, of course. I do remember that case very well; I was a patient of Dr Reid's, back in 2002, and thought him a very good, understanding and professional man; I was alarmed to find that he was subjected to this treatment by the GMC, and was not alone in thinking that the case smacked of territorialism on the part of the three senior consultants at Charing Cross GIC, who brought the case.

As for reviving a furore, though, that seems to be more David Batty's intention than the GMC's. The juicy element  in both stories, from a sensationalist perspective, is the presence of someone who transitioned and then regretted it and blamed the medical practitioner who helped them. In the case of Dr Reid, it was Charles Kane / Sam Hashimi. In the present case, it is an unnamed patient who underwent a double mastectomy.

These are the stories the tabloids love, and apparently David Batty loves too. Part of the spin-off from the Reid case was the BBC Hecklers programme in which Julie Bindel argued that 'sex change is unneccessary mutilation'. Julie's opposition to transsexualism is ideologically-driven, and for several years she seemed to make it her mission to Stamp It Out. I recall the debate between Susan Stryker and Julie Bindel at Manchester Metropolitan University in December 2008, in which Julie again displayed what I concluded must be a wilful ignorance of the facts. I wrote at the time

The general gist of the event was that Bindel accepted that on all the points raised, she was less informed than other people present at the debate. And those better-informed people refuted all her points. Giving chapter and verse. Bindel continued to maintain that there is a substantial and presently-organising caucus of what she termed "survivors" of the "sex-change industry". This is news to me, but then, what would I know?

Yes, there are people who regret transitioning or surgical reassignment. There may be all sorts of reasons for that; gender transitioning is not a panacea; it may solve a fundamental problem for the person who does it, but it can create all sorts of other problems too- the result of prejudice on the part of other people, mostly, of course. Even so, I contend that the number of people who can say "No, I made a mistake, my true sex is congruent with that which I was assigned at birth" is extremely small.

Which does not stop the newspapers from trying to hunt them down. Sarah Brown put out some bait for them on Twitter, saying that she, a trans woman, had undergone surgery following a misdiagnosis. Five minutes later, the press were phoning her up wanting the story. Sadly for them, the surgery in question involved Sarah's hand. This was not deemed newsworthy, and off they slunk.

The next day, Sarah began the Twitter hashtag #TransDocFail, which quickly became a catalogue of instances of bad practice in healthcare:

 ...people being called “abominations” by their doctors, people bleeding to death being refused treatment by A&E departments, vast numbers of GPs telling people to pull themselves together, or “sacking” them as patients, sexual assault by unnecessary and repeated genital examinations, and so on.

This material should be the stuff for campaigning journalists, not stories of individual doctors who are criticised for giving people what they want.

Fortunately, times are changing. At the time of the Russell Reid inquiry, trans people were a group that was talked about by other people. Nowadays, we have got our own voices, thank you very much.

noise annoys

Julie Bindel speaks to the nation....

While I (and no doubt you) would just as soon hear nothing more about Julie Bindel, she's still out there and she's still sounding off. About transsexuals. And, as has so often the case in her writing on this subject, it's been characterised by ignorance and untruth. She's been twisting things around a bit. Well, OK, a lot.

So, as long as she's spreading disinformation, I suppose that I have a moral imperative to refute her.

OK, so she gets columns in the Guardian, I have my blog, but we do what we can do, I guess.

Now, where were we? -When I last mentioned her, a protest was being organised outside Stonewall's champagne bash at the V&A, where Julie Bindel had been nominated for the award of "journalist of the year". This protest was because of the views espoused by Bindel about transsexuals, which I have already described in earlier posts and so shan't go through again. It was pointed out to Ben Summerskill, Chief Stuffed Shirt at Stonewall, that Bindel's views on transsexuals were not a million miles away from the opinions held by Iris Robinson, the DUP type who was awarded Stonewall's 'bigot of the year' title for opining that homosexuality could and should be cured by psychiatry... Ben's response was something along the lines of "We've already sent the invitations out, and anyway we're all right Jack so get lost".

So the protest took place. About 150 people, all told, and a cheerful and well-conducted bunch of people they were too. Here are some of them...

IMG_2255, originally uploaded by onequeerone.

...and there was a counter demo. As you can see, Julie has many friends...

IMG_2087, originally uploaded by onequeerone.

...though they seemed a bit lost, especially when the actual reasons for the anti-Stonewall demo had been gently explained to them, and they sort of shuffled off early...

Julie didn't get the award, of course; that went to Miriam Stoppard...


Anyhow, next thing you know, Julie's written a piece for the Guardian's Comment Is Free. It's quite a remarkable piece of writing, even by her standards. She seems to lump transsexuals in with people-who-screw-cats as odd folk who want to join in the Stonewall "equality for nice middle class gays" party. Wrong in so many ways, Julie!

Julie Bindel:

"I for one do not wish to be lumped in with an ever-increasing list of folk defined by "odd" sexual habits or characteristics..."

..."I vont to be left alone", says Julie. Sadly, that is not a courtesy she extends to trans folk. She was at it again last week, in a magazine called G3 (you will find her piece on P 98). I'd never heard of the magazine before. It's a glossy lesbian job. Not quite an intellectual heavyweight, if you see what I mean. Julie gives her side of the business which began with the 2004 Guardian piece yet again, and says how some nasty trans folk have said bad things about her. The magazine's editorial agreed with Julie. After all, she's a Stonewall Journalist Of The Year nominee, and the biggest lesbian on the block. How can she be wrong? What's journalistic integrity anyway?

It is true that some people have said harsh things about Bindel, of course. Maybe even more people than there are fingers on one hand .....without wanting to go too far into the tit for tat stuff here, though, I would point out that there are any number of loose screws or cannons out there in cyberspace. Here is one person giving us their opinion about the Bindel business...

trans communities/forums/chats far and wide are literally losing their minds (or whats left of their minds after being drugged) over Julie's nomination. This has even cropped up in multiple so-called "trans-feminism" communities, due in part because the disordered men occupying these communities obviously remain male despite the cosmetics, and in part because they remain faithful to their conditioned patriarchal male privileges that nary a one has ever given up...

and then someone called mAndrea is the first to comment on this blog on the f word for the Transgender Day Of Remembrance, when we remember trans people who have been murdered.

Normally, we consider people who use their emotions in place of reason to be utter fucking morons.

The basic premise of transgender ideology is that girl and boy brains exist, and are different from each other. Girl brains luv pink, and are rilly soft and gentle. Boy brains luv blue, and are rilly hard and aggressive.

The basic premise of feminist ideology is that no such difference exists. Oops, we have a discreptancy!

Since some women are quite the aggressive fuck, they must be a boy. Therefore, they are transgendered. Amazingly enough, wanting a penis is not required for women to be an aggressive fuck, so something is quite illogical regarding your theory.

Perhaps insanity is the answer.

It makes interesting, if distasteful reading. But let's not get too distracted by this guff. It would be stupid to extrapolate from this and think that these semi-literate, possibly semi-sane voices are representative voices of feminism. Wouldn't it? If Julie, on the other hand, wants to demonise the trans 'community' because of a few individuals' intemperate expressions of anger.... well, she would, wouldn't she? The important thing is that the anti-Stonewall demo was discussed, organised and executed in an open and intelligent way, despite the occasional trolling of the Facebook site by Bindel and others.

And so we come to yesterday. A debate was hosted at Manchester Metropolitan University between Bindel and Susan Stryker. It was described as "A Feminist Perspective on the Transsexual Debate". Way to go. The dynamics of that title are quite telling, aren't they? Who decided that transsexuality was up for debate? Is there a 'lesbian debate'? -a.... oh, fill in the blanks yourelf. Is not Bindel's arrogation to herself of the right to 'debate' the very existence of a group of people indicative of an assumption of privilege on her part? -anyway; I watched the webcast. It made interesting viewing. Susan Stryker is very intelligent. Susan began with a slightly magisterial expression of surprise that Julie should still be bogged down in this stagnant backwater, when there is so much more useful and constructive stuff to be getting on with. Julie declared her wish to abolish gender; Susan described gender as "a medium we swim in". Julie stated that her own feminism began and ended with fighting violence against women, and she had seen no evidence that transsexual women had worked towards the ending of violence against women. She was directly given examples from the personal experience of Susan and several other women present.

Hmm, anyway. The general gist of the event was that Bindel accepted that on all the points raised, she was less informed than other people present at the debate. And those better-informed people refuted all her points. Giving chapter and verse. Maybe I'll expand on this later, but for the moment we'll leave it at that. Bindel continued to maintain that there is a substantial and presently-organising caucus of what she termed "survivors" of the "sex-change industry". This is news to me, but then, what would I know?

This is what I do know. That I, and many others, have been thoroughly angered by Bindel's interference in trans matters. She has either not researched properly or she has ignored the facts, because the existence and experience of transsexuality is incompatible with her ideological theory of gender. Her opinions are published in a national paper. There is the risk that she can influence policy which directly affects us. She has been trying to mess with my life, and she has been dishonest in the attempted furtherance of her ideology.

It would be really good if Bindel would finally just shut up about transsexuality. Her case against it just doesn't hold up. She's been sucking the air out of the room for too long. Go and do something useful instead, Julie. Please.

Stonewall again

Julie XIV

More on Stonewall's Bindelgate.

As the night of Stonewall's 'champagne gay' beanfeast at the V&A approaches, preparations continue for the protest against the nomination of Julie Bindel (whose opinions on transsexuality continue to be at variance with transsexual people and, apparently, anyone else who knows much, or indeed anything, about the subject), for their 'prestigious' Journalist of the Year award.

Over on Facebook, the group formed to discuss the protest has been periodically visited by Julie, who threw around a few accusations of anti-feminism and anti-lesbianism, her reasoning presumably being that she is the living embodiment of these qualities, a bit like Louis XIV, who may (and may not) have pronounced "L'État, c'est moi!"

But as she hasn't said anything either new or interesting, we shall pass on to Roz Kaveney's response to her recent statement, because that is worth reading.

And now let's ignore Julie, as the main interest here is the indifference of Stonewall, a supposed equalities group, to equality for transsexual people. Some, evidently, are more equal than others.

nowhere to run to

I said in my previous post that I wanted to look more deeply at the Vancouver Rape Relief centre business. I'll flag a few points and then move on to my own experiences and opinions.

Kimberley Nixon, a transsexual woman, challenged the centre over its refusal to accept her for training as a counsellor. Here's the chronology as stated by the VRR themselves...

...and, from a write-up about the court case,

"Vancouver Rape Relief Society v. Nixon et al., 2003, Ms. Cormier listed the collective political beliefs that the Society requires its volunteers not to disagree with:

1. Violence is never a woman’s fault,

2. Women have the right to choose to have an abortion,

3. Women have a right to choose who their sexual partners are, and

4. Volunteers agree to work on an on-going basis on their existing prejudices, including racism.

The requirement that a woman be a woman from birth was stated to be complementary to the tenets to which all volunteers and members of the Society must subscribe in the Court of Appeal case. "

First, what Julie Bindel said in 2004, and what she stands by still:

The arrogance is staggering: having not experienced life as a "woman" until middle age, Nixon assumed "she" would be suitable to counsel women who have chosen to access a service that offers support from women who have suffered similar experiences, not from a man in a dress! The Rape Relief sisters, who do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman, successfully challenged the ruling and, for now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.


A few pointers:

Kimberley Nixon had herself been sexually assaulted. She had received support from another women's organisation at that time. Had she attempted to access the VRR, she would have been excluded for the same reason that they wished to exclude her as a counsellor. She had begun training as a counsellor with this other organisation, and was described as "exceptionally gifted". (reference here)

More widely, from my own experience and that of my friends:

• Men can be violent to women
  
• Women can be violent to women
• Women can be violent to men
• Counselling can be a pretty intense experience. You can either work well with a counsellor, or not. And there can be any number of reasons for that. And there are always other counsellors.
• There are transsexual women, both 'out' and 'stealth', who work and have worked in women's refuges
  

O heck, that's enough of that. There's plenty of info out there, and any amount of noise and clutter, and slinging of terms like "male privilege", "cisgender privilege", "transphobia" and even "lesbophobia". You pays your money, you takes your choice. Do you suppose that Julie Bindel had taken the trouble to acquaint herself thoroughly with the facts (which, presumably, one would expect her to, given that she is supposed to be writing about them) when she described Kimberley as "staggeringly arrogant"?

Thank goodness, I've never been sexually assaulted. I've had verbal and physical abuse, and vividly remember the wholly world-turned-upside-down experience, after I was assaulted, not only of no action being taken, but of being myself blamed and told I'd been 'asking for it'. Not a unique experience, of course, but bear with me; it's never easy, I'm sure.

Sorry I keep coming back to the P&O business lately; it affected me deeply, and this present silliness is bringing it back.

After it was all over, I joined the Gender Trust because I wanted to be able to help other people who may be going through similar difficulties to myself. Maybe it's fairly normal; after the trauma and healing, an ardent desire to go out and make the world a better place. It didn't work out with me and the GT, as it happens; I guess I'm just not suited to committees and politicking. Anyway...

...I am very careful about entering women's space, personally, although in practice I haven't really had occasion to, beyond changing rooms and loos, of course. But that's my own life path. Fairly late transitioning, with a few indicators of my male history about me, in my features and my voice. I recognise that for some people I may be "something rich and strange". It can be a nuisance: at a local photographers' meet, there was a woman whose work I admire, and I was looking forward to meeting her.

As it happened, I couldn't get a word in edgeways.

She mailed me the next day and apologised, because, she said, she had been nervous and afraid that she might inadvertently offend me. I told her that being open about things was the best way to not be offensive...

...as for my female friends, I think that for some I was or am on probation. Still wearing the L plates, as it were. Fair enough. It's a hearts and minds thing.

Mostly, I get treated as, er, myself. The 'man in a dress' thing? I've had that from a few males cited in the harassment case. And, evidently, that's what Julie Bindel thinks too.

It's a shame that there's so much shoutiness and divisiveness going on out there. While a major architect of it keeps quiet.

Stonewall and Julie Bindel

So I wrote to Ben Summerskill at Stonewall this morning, adding my voice to the protests against Julie Bindel's nomination for the Journalist of the Year award. Text as follows:

Dear Mr Summerskill,

You’re probably sick to death of the finer points of this business by now, but I would like to add my voice to the protests at the Bindel nomination.

I believe that, by Stonewall’s own definition, Julie Bindel is transphobic. Nothing she has said since the notorious Guardian piece in 2004 has indicated that she has changed her opinion that transwomen are really men.

I understand that you are an LGB organisation rather than LGBT. But as a transwoman and a lesbian, I feel betrayed by this nomination. I urge you to withdraw it, however late the stage in the proceedings.

Yours faithfully,

....and then we had a chat on the phone. He said that, as the nomination had been made by Stonewall supporters, it would be impossible for the organisation itself to withdraw it. I suggested that Stonewall make some form of statement deprecating Julie Bindel's stated position on transsexuals, which ticks several of the boxes on Stonewall's own checklist of "what is transphobia?". Which includes these items:

• the belief that trans women are not “real women” because they have been raised and socialised as men
• the belief that trans men are not “real men” because they do not have, or were not born with a penis
• the belief that transsexual people are actually gay people in denial
• the assumption that transgender people are “sick” or that they are psychologically unstable
• when a transgender person is excluded from services, activities, discussions or decisions because it is felt that that person doesn’t “fit in”
• the refusal to recognise or acknowledge the true gender of a trans person and the continual insistence to refer to them by their former name


Meanwhile, Christine Burns, formerly of Press For Change, had lunch with Bindel and recorded the conversation. Some key points:

Julie acknowledged that "some of the things I said in the 2004 column were hateful and offensive and could actually incite offensive behaviour towards transsexual people"

(no fooling; I've been at the receiving end of precisely that sort of behaviour. The language used by Bindel in this article could just as easily have come from the hairy-arsed seafarers I was getting grief from at the same time... )

However, she said "I absolutely stand by the core premise which was my anger at a particular member of the community who almost brought a rape crisis centre to its knees; I have not changed my position on that case at all".

(...she refers to the refusal of Vancouver Rape Relief to employ Kimberley Nixon, a transsexual woman who had herself been the victim of domestic violence, as a counsellor. I want to examine this business at greater length. Later)

When Christine asked, "Am I a woman, for instance?" she replied "You have a right to self-determination. ....what do you mean by that? What makes you a woman? ...and part of that has to be the socialisation that we experience when we grow up ...as girls in girls' bodies as they're growing up."

So that's 'no' ,then.

On what Julie characterises as the "sex change industry" "....traditional psychiatrists and medical practitioners see men and women as odd or suffering from a syndrome if they behave outside their gender norms, and I do think that practice continues in diagnosing people as transsexual", Christine quoted Stuart Lorimer, consultant shrink at Charing Cross, who said that, on this matter, Julie was "spectacularly ill-informed".

"There's a difference between being spectacularly ill-informed and having a different opinion", said Julie.

Now, I've been to Charing Cross. I've seen several shrinks there, including Stuart Lorimer. I agree with him, and not because I've got Stockholm Syndrome but because he is intelligent and questioning and knowledgeable. Julie is consistently missing the point about transsexuals: it's not about gender roles, it's about being the sex we identify as. She misrepresents what actually happens in gender clinics. Given that this is supposedly her specialist subject, in my book I'd call that pretty spectacularly ill-informed.

Julie says she wants to "continue a debate about the so-called condition and about surgery as a solution to the diagnosis of transsexualism".

Well, yes, of course she does, because it's column inches for her, but why indulge her? -and is it a debate anyway? In these four years, she hasn't really changed her position, which is based on ideology, always a bad starting point for a discussion on medical matters. Why should we be constantly expected to explain ourselves to her, when she doesn't actually listen? -why does she want to explain us to ourselves or to deny us treatment (beyond 'talking therapies'), when she doesn't have the courtesy either to study the subject properly or to think outside her own box?

Hopefully, Julie and her moth-eaten and simplistic theories will slide into the dustbin of history. Along, perhaps, with Stonewall, who don't seem to want to or be able to shift on this one.

the emperor's new sock puppet

Peggy (an artist's impression)

Back to the Bindel story. Now, a few years ago, in the aftermath of her Gender Benders Beware piece in the Guardian, there was a lively discussion going on about it on Technodyke, an internet forum which does what it says on the tin. Or did; it no longer exists in quite the same form, alas. Anyway, a newbie, Peggy by name, weighed in in support of Julie Bindel, and said nice things about her and snarky things about the trans women on Technodyke. Only it turned out that it wasn't Peggy but Julie, using an assumed identity. Peggy/Julie was thrown off Technodyke by the site owner, who deprecated her narrow-minded divisiveness. Life went on.

Apparently this practice of using an assumed online identity to promote one's own cause or, heck, create mayhem or whatever, is called sockpuppeting. This word makes me happy, and here in the Schloss we adopted it for a while as a gentle term of abuse.

OK, here's what's been happening over the last few days.

Stonewall and the Gender Trust have had a little chat, which went something along the lines of:

Gender Trust: We are unhappy that you have nominated a transphobic woman for your journalist of the year award

Stonewall: We understand that you are unhappy, but there aren't that many journalists on the national papers who identify as lesbian, and she hasn't written anything particularly transphobic in this last year, has she?

Gender Trust: Oh all right then, let's do lunch sometime. What're you drinking?

This didn't go down too well with the hoi polloi. There have been resignations from the GT. Other people, including myself, would have resigned if they hadn't already resigned for.... other reasons.

Plenty of seething grassroots activity going on . There is going to be a protest outside the V&A on the night of the Stonewall beanfeast. Julie has told Sarah, one of the more articulate objectors, that she has shown her stuff to a libel lawyer. It's nice to be appreciated, Sarah...

...and a Facebook group has formed to muster support for Julie, proposing a counter-demonstration in favour of her. It will be interesting to see how many of this group owe their origin to the hosiery section at Marks and Spencer.

If you would like to sign the petition deploring Stonewall's invitation to Julie Bindel, then here it is

...there is change in the air, I feel. This may be only a small pond, but it's the one I'm swimming in. Bear with me.

o look a dinosaur

Way back in January 2004 I sailed off to Falmouth on the Pride of Bilbao, for its annual refit in the shipyard there. I was a bit concerned about my personal safety; a few months earlier, the storekeeper (and RMT representative) had shouted at me, in front of the engine room crew, that I was "going to get done.... not if, but when", after I'd ripped up a pornographic calendar which had been graffitied with an obscene reference to me. Since that time, I'd always watched my back. But shipyards can be dangerous places in the dark. So I was worried.

Fortunately (and I use the word carefully) this fellow had been involved in a car accident, and had gone on what proved to be a protracted sick leave. So that was one thing less to worry about.

Eventually, of course, I was actually assaulted by someone else, and that brought to an end my time working for P&O. Not the end of my experiences with the company, though; I prosecuted a case for harassment against them, of course. It was funny, in a not-very-funny sort of way, hearing the stuff about me that the engine room troglodytes came up with during the case in an attempt to exculpate their behaviour. It was as though they were talking about a different person. Which they were. There were two versions of me; the actual me, and the one that the trogs described, which had no basis in reality, but was cobbled together from a ragged fabric of prejudice and bigotry. Very odd experience, let me tell you, encountering a bunch of people who look at you and perhaps even talk to you but don't hear you and don't see you but see something else entirely. But that's another story. Sort of.

Anyway, back in Falmouth. I bought a copy of the Guardian, and found an article by Julie Bindel called Gender Benders Beware, in which she exulted in a court ruling in Canada which vindicated the refusal of Vancouver Rape Relief to employ Kimberley Nixon, a transsexual woman who had herself been the victim of domestic violence, as a counsellor.

The arrogance is staggering: having not experienced life as a "woman" until middle age, Nixon assumed "she" would be suitable to counsel women who have chosen to access a service that offers support from women who have suffered similar experiences, not from a man in a dress! The Rape Relief sisters, who do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman, successfully challenged the ruling and, for now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.

A pretty odious article all round, really, and a bit of a surprise; I knew that opinions like that espoused by Bindel had been around in the 70s and even 80s, but had naïvely assumed that they'd gone the way of the dinosaurs. Apparently not.

"...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."

Bindel does pop up now and then, repeating her party line that gender is a social construct (and so is sexuality, apparently). Maybe she thinks that if she shouts the same thing over and over again it makes her an expert on the subject. Sadly, she gets platforms for her views. She was doing it again on the BBC last year, when she proposed the motion, on the programme Hecklers, that "gender reassignment surgery is unnecessary mutilation". I think that it works something like this: as I am a gay man, I wanted surgery so that I could have relationships with men in a socially normative way. Whereas what I really should have done was challenge stereotyping and be myself. A gay man, out and proud, presumably.

Unfortunately, from that perspective, I fail on two counts. IDing not as male but as female, for one thing, and not being attracted to men but to women, for another. Which makes me a lesbian, in my book, and therefore one of those letters in the LGB, but not the same as the one Ms Bindel wants to assign me, which is at least disrespectful of her. And another thing. My personal experience, and that of many people I know personally, runs directly counter to the view expressed by Julie Bindel here, in the Guardian again:

"Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?"

O well. It's a living, I suppose. As it happens, I think that 'gender rules and regulations' are silly and limiting, and adhered to by boring people. But I do wish she wouldn't take it upon herself to keep telling me what I am, or am not, with ideas based upon a flawed ideological approach rather than the inconvenient observable facts. Because there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave. As any fule kno.

I only bring the subject up again because I learned today that Stonewall, who describe themselves as an LGB campaigning organisation, have shortlisted Julie Bindel for their award of Journalist of the Year.

Maybe I shouldn't get worked up about it; at £150 a ticket for the event at the V&A, it's a bit of a champagne gay event, and I'm far too busy getting on with life, fixing engines, cooking, cleaning (well, sometimes), drawing, and being a single parent, thank you very much. But I am a bit disappointed in them. I know that Bindel has written on other topics too. But I suppose it's as if the RMT had shortlisted Mussolini for the "getting the trains to run on time" achievement award at their annual bash. Perhaps I shouldn't take it personally, but I do.