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

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