lobstergate explained

It's hard to keep pace with events, as the Observer removes Julie Burchill's post (not a move welcomed by any trans people that I know, as it should be available so that people know what we're up against). Then the Telegraph posts it up instead. And various reactionaries talk about censorship and freedom of speech....  the orcs are gathering in the forest.

So here's the business expressed as a Venn diagram. Just to keep things in proportion.


oh, the lobster reference? -from Julie's piece, describing her meeting Suzanne Moore: 

"I’ve got an entertaining budget of £12.50!" she said proudly. "Sod that, we’re having lobster and champagne at Frederick’s, and I’m paying," I told her. Half a bottle of Bolly later, she looked at me with faraway eyes: "Ooo, I could get to like this…’ And so she did.

Spark interview

A while ago, I was interviewed by Fiona McClymont from The Spark, Bristol's 'alternative' magazine and one that we in Bristol are very fortunate to get free, four times a year. Fiona was most concerned that we should get it right, and I am very happy with the finished article. Thanks, Fiona! The interview appears as one of their 'Changemakers' pieces. You can read it here, hopefully. I'm on P 47

Open publication - Free publishing - More activism

...I do feel ambivalent about doing this sort of thing,  because there is an inherent contradiction in appearing in a magazine precisely because I have a trans history, and the central message of the piece which is that 'there's more to me, and more to life, than being trans, so let's get on with it'. Still, as long as trans people are exoticised and treated as caricatures, then it remains a message that needs telling, and the only way of telling it is to be 'out'.

I have had quite a bit of positive response to the article. I also just found this message to me, which, as it represents a point of view very much at variance with my own, I add here.

 Hi Dru

Yesterday I had the unfortunate and unwanted task of dealing with your irresponsible article. In fact I've only just finished crying. By your and others necessity to continue to label themselves as "trans" has made my life more difficult and its only when I explain to people that I don't associate with the Trans term and that I'm a women do I get treated as a women. So thank you for that.

a place for everyone who identifies as transgendered, in whatever way

I'm in the last few months of supported Wpath NHS transition which is a wholly medical process known to those that dish it out as Transsexualism. I am a women, always was and will be. The idea that people with gender dysphoria and gender identity issues are labelled Transgender is all well and good, but I don't suffer from gender dysphoria or gender identity issues so this umbrella term no longer applies. Your use of trans as a pronoun or adjective is most unfortunate as all you are saying is that you are an "illustrator that used to have a penis". This off course is totally open for all to make unwanted associations; as you allude to. Which is why I'm upset and baffled as to why you want to continue to label yourself as such. My understanding is that you are a women, but how you want to call yourself is up to you off course, but if any body calls or labels me "a trans person" then I'm disgusted and angry as any woman would be. How dare you suggest that I'm ugly or look like a man. Unfortunately a whole swath of people that have entered the GICs in this country are now throwing the Trans word around as though they own it or define it. Those people are pushing and hurting those like myself that remain quietly going about our business. For me and many others there is no third gender. All we ever wanted was to appear as how we felt. Now even that is being spoilt by articles such as yours.

Basically you're trying to make people associate me with being a tranny, a cross-dresser, a transvestite, a drag queen or gender queer; which usually comes with a gay man somewhere in there. This is the most saddest and most destructive and dangerous part of my life. I have to avoid the associations that articles, such as yours, and practices, such as those I've -already mentioned, that can put me directly into a frightening, unwanted and dangerous situations. I am a normal women that doesn't have any interest in cross-dressing, transvestites or any such stuff. You've just put that straight into peoples head. Thanks again.

Any hows, I've had to cut out and delete most of what I originally wrote as it probably was too upsetting or strong. But really thanks for putting yet another downer on the whole affair.

TransBristol meet-up

I cycled down to the city centre on Friday evening, and exchanged a lovely warm spring evening for the inside of a rather dark and shiny night club.

Some of the people from My Transsexual Summer were appearing at OMG that evening, and Daryn from the LGBT Forum had suggested that people from TransBristol might like to come along and meet up, at the same time. Seemed like a good idea...

And it was. I was able to meet in person some nice folk I'd only met online; and say hello to some friends, including a couple of surprise visitors; Stephanie, for instance,  had come down from the Marches for the evening. We'd corresponded after she'd read Becoming Drusilla and written a kind review of it on Amazon. That's us, in the picture up there.

Mary Milton wandered by with a big recording thing slung over her shoulder, accompanied by Natalie, whose interview with Sarah and Karen from MTS will be appearing on Shout Out before too long...

...I took the camera along, but this was the only pic I took as it was quite dark in there, and I was reticent about taking pics after my experience at a TransLondon event a few years ago, when I'd blithely taken pics and learned later that some attendees (or possibly it was one attendee) very much objected to being photographed in a trans* group....

....and then the music got louder, and it was time for me to slip away and go home to a mug of cocoa.

Felt ambivalent about the evening; it is good to meet up, but I really don't like night clubs, especially when they turn the music up. I remember when I first ventured out in 2001, going to a club in Old Market that I had heard was trans-friendly (it was) and looking around and thinking, oh dear, do I really have to become someone who has to go to night clubs? (I didn't).

Maybe we can just sit under a tree next time....

How not to have a conversation (while wandering around saying hello to people I had not met before):

Her: So, ...are you transitioning?
Me: mmm.... I suppose so...
Her: Are you going to Charing Cross?
Me: I used to, yes
Her: Oh! -Are you post-op, then?

Summerskill, and the living is easy

Mr Summerskill finds his place in history

Upside Down In Cloud has been an occasional chronicler of the Gays In Ties phenomenon, and has watched the rise and apotheosis of Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, with the appalled fascination with which you might observe your neighbour's lurcher doing something you think it probably shouldn't and you didn't quite think possible anyway.

There was a bit of a hoo-ha two years back, when his tame organisation nominated Julie Bindel for their Journalist of the Year award, despite the rather unsavoury and somewhat partial nature of her writings about transsexual people. After all, as Ben takes pains to point out, Stonewall doesn't have anything to do with transsexual people.

Which didn't stop them, apparently, from consulting recently with government ministers on the matter of trans people, marriage, and GRCs. Fair enough, you might think. After all, I understand that they may have seen some trans people once. Standing outside the V&A in the rain, or something. So they know what they're talking about, I guess.

Latest wheeze in the 'let's piss off the trannies' game is one of this year's nominations for that prestigious Stonewall Journalist of the Year award. It's Bill Leckie, whose work has been cited by Stonewall Scotland (no relation- they embrace diversity up in Scotland, apparently) as an example of negative media portrayals. Here's an example of his work, from the Sun

EIGHT o’clock on Wednesday and an army of frighteningly ugly women are pouring into a boozer called Prism for bingo night. Or at least from a distance they LOOK like women. But then you see the poster on the door.
And you realise that this isn’t just any bingo night. It’s Drag Queen bingo night.
Now, I can’t pretend that my devotion to this column is such that I wiggled along to see how it went. Not when I got there and saw someone going in with the same frock.
However, my sources tell me it went a little bit like: “Two fat ladyboys… 88. Unlucky for some … unprotected sex. Five and two… Danny La Rue.” And someone shouted: “Really nicely-decorated house!

-hmmm. It's almost certainly a Good Thing that gay men are now far more socially acceptable than they used to be, at least in some quarters. But I sometimes get the feeling that some of them want to pull the drawbridge up after them. And in at least some cases, they remind me of the dominant pigs of Animal Farm, at the end of the story...

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Thanks to Zoe O'Connell for alerting me to this in her blog

Twinkle the hamster

...ok, it's not a hamster. Or Ben Miller.

Here in Schloss Marland, we're an easy-going and democratic crowd. We discuss things and occasionally bicker about them before resolving what to do about them.

Opposite the cooker in our really-quite-spacious kitchen is where Twinkle the hamster lives. Sometimes she runs around in her wheel, sometimes she gratefully accepts root vegetables and carries them away to her little cardboard box. Sometimes we put her in her hamster ball, and she rumbles around the flat, bumping into things while we sluice out the wee and poo in the bottom of her cage.

She's a nice hamster, but we do not generally consult her when there are decisions to be made. We'd probably feel something was not quite right if something big happened in our lives and she called a press conference.

Still, she's a nice hamster, and we like watching her.

In this Age of the Sleb, we have got used to people who are on the telly thinking that, because they are on the telly, their thoughts are worth listening to. Thus Ben Miller, who performed in the episode of Moving Wallpaper described here, has spoken out against the sort of people who disapproved of its portrayal of a transsexual character and her treatment on the show. Just to remind you, the episode functioned simply as a platform for the airing of 'jokes' at the expense of the transsexual character, without any sense of authorial voice suggesting that this sort of thing is not on.

As you will see from the link, Ben's analysis of the situation is not done well; but perhaps we may be surprised to find it done at all...

He says,

"While on the one hand I would hate to feel that people were offended by comedy, I also think we have to realise when we are offended by something that other people are not necessarily offended in the same way, or that that doesn't necessarily mean that that material shouldn't be shown.

"It simply means that we have found it offensive and quite often that is simply a necessary function of comedy."

Funny, I though there was more to comedy than that.

I like that phrase "we have to realise...". We? Somehow, I don't think that white, middle-class, male Ben Miller has been at the receiving end of much, if any, of the sort of offensiveness that he's defending.

Just to make it clear, as one who has looked closely at the way these things work: if you find something offensive, it is because you find it offensive. So far, so good. But it is not the place of the person who perpetrated the offence to tell you that you are wrong to find it offensive.

But then, I do find Ben's analysis more than a bit shaky; Moving Wallpaper, on the evidence of this episode and despite what Ben appears to suggest, is emphatically not cutting edge comedy. Sub-Benny-Hill sniggering, perhaps. Not cutting edge. Not comedy. Sorry, Ben, you were just caught out doing something shoddy. To own up and apologise properly would be the decent thing to do now. But that is perhaps too much to hope for? Though I don't imagine there will be any further series of this lamentable stuff. Which is a result of a sort.

Anyway, we've heard from the one of the monkeys. I wonder what the organ grinder is going to say?