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

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.

Snog, Marry, Avoid

Here's something jolly from the BBC. The programme is about correcting people's fashion mistakes, apparently. In this excerpt, this dialogue takes place

P: Who are you?
R; I'm Rachel
P: Are you sure it's not Richard?
R: (laughs in surprise) Why?
P: Pod computes that with those eyebrows, eyelashes and ridiculously big hair you look like a transsexual.
R: (looks mortified)

Thanks, BBC, for adding to the constant drip, drip, drip of casual prejudice.

I was looking at some photos yesterday, on Facebook. There in the pictures were the people I once called my family, celebrating my brother's wedding. I hadn't been invited, of course. You wouldn't want someone like me at a wedding, would you?

Over on Twitter, Paris Lees started a hashtag directed to @SnogMarryAvoid, called #WhatTranssexualsLookLike. I contributed this photo. Loads of other people joined in too. Mostly to say "Here we are, just getting on with things. Get over it."

same old same old

Apparently the Nationwide Building Society claims that it is "proud to be different".

You'd never guess it from this tired old nonsense.




Just in case you're interested, here's the Advertising Standards Authority's 'how to make a complaint' page

and here is someone high up the heap at Nationwide:

Graham Beale, Chief Executive, Nationwide Building Society, Head Office, Nationwide House, Pipers Way, Swindon SN38 1NW.

(thanks, Jo)

edited to add...

My letter to Graham Beale

Dear Mr Beale,

I wish to register my dismay over the broadcasting of the new Nationwide television ads, featuring David Walliams and Matt Lucas, and particularly their portrayal of ‘Emily’ and ‘Florence’, presumably transvestites, attempting to open an account for ‘ladies’ at a branch of Nationwide.

I am a woman with a transsexual history. It might rightly be said that I have nothing in common with the absurd characters portrayed by Walliams and Lucas; that has not, however, stopped people from linking me with those characters in the past. Here, for instance, is a report concerning me in the Daily Star

(edited to remove the Daily Star article, as the other person cited in it still finds it upsetting)

This is not the only example I could cite, but it is hopefully enough to give you an idea of what people write and think.

The reason that I was at an employment tribunal was that I had experienced harassment, intimidation and violence in the workplace. And I believe that in large part, my colleagues behaved the way that they did towards me because they were too ready to see a caricature rather than a real human being. And when people treat other people as caricatures, they open the way to abuse. And people rarely knowingly encounter transsexual people in their everyday lives. So that the way we are portrayed in the media colours their opinions and prejudices.

Apparently Nationwide Building Society claims that it is ‘proud to be different’. On the evidence of this commercial, you are not different. You are part of the problem.

Yours sincerely,

Dru Marland

why there was nothing 'natural' about Jan Moir's death

...or at least the death of her scribbling career.

(Well, if only...)

There was something cosy and reassuring about Jan Moir's writing. It was like a nice mug of Ovaltine, spreading the warm glow of self-righteousness and quietly homo-, xeno-, trans-, wotever-phobic smugness among people who don't like to think very hard. You know, the target audience of the Daily Mail.

come out of there, Jan!

Her latest column is a case in point. We get:

A criticism of women in the workplace having too many rights, which describes the Equalities office as a 'citadel of gender gelding'

A celebration of muffins, which nostalgically looks back to Jan's days of drunken sexual predation (alarm bells there, but don't worry; it was chilled white wine that got 'em loaded, and it was Jan and her girlfriends doing the predation. For men, so that's OK too. Posh and heterosexual. Phew).

A bit of tosh about autumn ('the season we Brits do best' -rah, the Brits!):

This is the season for freshly cracked-open books, rough-skinned English apples and woodsmoke; for piles of russet leaves and the smack of your big soled boots on a city pavement.

'Tis the time for a shot of whisky in a sparkling glass, the blip of venison stew on a low flame and cold, fresh air pouring through the bedroom window at midnight.

(I try to keep the cold,fresh air out of my bedroom at midnight, but then I don't have central heating....)

The Nolan Sisters, who, we learn, are a bit tubby and don't have much dress sense (thin ice there, Jan!)

A comparison of Tara Palmer Tomkinson's dress sense with that of a 'tranny' (unkind to trannies, Jan!)

-oh, and the piece that insinuated, without any evidence, that Stephen Gately died of immorality. Because he was gay.

This has become a bit of an overnight sensation. Charlie Brooker very quickly wrote a very good piece in the Guardian, and no doubt you can find plenty more if you look.

And, what with Twitter and Facebook spreading the word, the PCC internet portal crashed under the weight of complaints, and the companies whose ads were being run on the same page as the story pulled them off in protest.

Jan's response was to complain that she had been subjected to an 'orchestrated campaign', by people who hadn't read her column properly.

Now, in my book, an orchestra is a bunch of people who get paid to play the same tune, with minor variations. You know, like Daily Mail journalists. Their victims are, or should be, the disempowered and voiceless.

Which is why Jan's nemesis is so unnatural. In the natural order of things, the Daily Mail makes nasty snidey comments, and if someone complains then the Press Complaints Commission, a bunch of poachers judging a fellow poacher, look at the complaint and usually say "We can't see anything wrong with this" and go back to sleep. Like they did with me, once. Blogged here, PCC response here.

Oh well, that was yesterday. Business as usual at the Mail today; a story from their website this morning asserts that a woman murdered in Brighton had a transsexual history. Which, if true, is irrelevant to the story, and its revelation, should she have a GRC, an offence. And in the comments below the story, under the bit that says The comments below have been moderated in advance, we find

One of her flock, no doubt. Perverts are like irrepairably broken machines. Can't be fixed. Should be disposed of. Rid the world of their defective genome.

- Ray, Liverpool, 17/10/2009 18:19

dumb fucks

an evening in front of the telly

Every now and then in this blog I refer to stuff that happened to me when I worked for P&O, and when I took them to an Employment Tribunal. I try not to do it too much; it would be nice to put that sort of thing in the past, and move on.

Sadly, That Sort Of Thing is, it turns out, always with us. The war against stupidity is never-ending. We just have to keep fighting it, don't we? It kind of reminds me of the Anglo-Saxon attitude to life, where they thought that Fate would get the best of us in the end, and what counted most was how well you fought against it, making an ending worthy of a song.

I don't have a telly, though I know that there are lots and lots of channels out there, and presumably whatever talent there may be is spread bit thinly across the airwaves.

There's something on ITV called Moving Wallpaper, a title presumably intended as an ironic reference to the way that some people will make, and other people will watch, any old crap. The other week, there was an episode which centred around a transsexual character, Georgina. You can still watch it, if that kind of thing floats your boat, here.

The show is centred around a group of hack writers for a TV soap. The odious manager employs a new writer, who turns out to be a transsexual woman. The other writers go on strike. After a while, when odious manager and rest of the cast have got bored of making offensive comments about Georgina, she is sacked and roars away on a large motorbike. Everyone else goes back to work together. End of episode.

So what is the point of this episode? Apparently, it is no more than an opportunity for the cast to say things like this about the trans character:

"Mister No-dangles"
"It"
"He/she"
"A walking GM crop"
"Never work with children, animals or trannies"
"You're about as good a producer as George is a woman"

...er, and so on and on...

Presumably we are intended to laugh at this stuff. That first one on the list, for instance. They start off with the name of a song called "Mister Bojangles". Perhaps you know the song, in which case you can appreciate how smart they are with what they do here. They change it to "Mister No-dangles", which cleverly suggests (smirk smirk) that the trans character has had her male genitalia removed, but is still really a man, hence the "Mister" bit. And he goes and gets his tackle cut off!

What a laugh! It must be funny, as someone wrote it down intending it to be laughed at, and then someone else read it and agreed that it was funny, and then an actor learned the line and spoke it to the camera, and I guess they thought it was funny too.

Funny old world.

Scarily, though, it did ring quite true. The attitudes expressed by these people were really very similar to those I encountered among some of the crew of the Pride of Bilbao. The Neanderthal part of the crew, to be fair, but Neanderthals are people too. Sort of. Indeed, the 'funny' things the Moving Wallpaper crowd said about and to Georgina were very similar to what some of P&O's employees said to me; had there been a camera on board recording them, they could have blended effortlessly into the show. For instance, one humourist came up with this little gem about me: "When God made man it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve". That is easily as witty and funny as that Mister No-dangles malarkey. The Daily Mail evidently thought so too, as they adapted it as a headline. And the Daily Mail knows a thing or two about what's right, what's wrong, and what's funny, doesn't it? The idea is that somehow the trans character is not real, and so it's OK to say and do what you like to them. Where the show strays from reality is in its version of a happy ending; everyone's had a bit of a laugh, and so Georgina is conveniently sacked. Disappears. End of Georgina. End of story.

Out there in the real world, this is often the desired outcome for people who don't like trans people. You have your joke at their expense, then you get rid of them. You can't laugh at lepers or black people or women any more, at least not openly, but at least you can Mock The Tranny. Can't you?

Didn't work in my case, of course. It ended in legal action, which I won. Because you should not treat people like that. And fortunately, the law, at least, recognises that. It may come as a surprise that some people actually need educating in the idea that you should treat other people decently, but evidently they do.

I watched this episode online. I had to sit through a few adverts. Let's see; there was one for a plug-in air freshener, one which had a bunch of lads sitting on a couch and engaging in extravagant displays of male bonding while watching football on the telly. Not sure what that was advertising - beer or something? And a trailer for a new James Bond movie. So the targeted demographic for this show is presumably closeted blokes who like their homes to smell like lavatories rather than each others' BO, and who have secret agent fantasies.

A bunch of dumb fucks, then.

Quite appropriate, I guess. And if you wish to infer that everyone involved in the commissioning, writing, approving and making of this episode is a bit of a dumb fuck too, then who am I to disagree?

-I've tagged this post with the terms "bigotry" and "transphobia", though I actually think that they're rather bigger words than the Moving Wallpaper team deserve. This little episode is just symptomatic of some mediocre attempt at cheap laughs. So I've added "dumbfuckery" to the tags. If it turns out to be a neologism, then you heard it here first. Thanks, Moving Wallpaper. Inspirational.

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.