Here's a very good deconstruction of the TERF myth that when trans people talk about the 'cotton ceiling' it's because we're rapists.

It's a fine analysis, but I think the author ignores one thing: the role of projection, in a psychoanalytic sense, in TERF discourse on this issue.

See, the TERF idea that there's something rapey about the cotton ceiling depends on the idea that us trans girls try to bully people into having sex with us by claiming that, essentially, if they say they don't want to it's because they're transphobic. It's an odd notion: who wants to have sex with an unwilling partner who's been browbeaten into it? Not me, that's for damn sure. Where would TERFs get that idea?

Here's my theory: a lot of TERFs are veterans of 80s radical feminism, which introduced us all to a cute concept called 'political lesbianism'. This idea held that ALL women should be lesbians, whether they fancied other women or not, and anyway if they said they didn't want to shag women it was probably because they'd been brainwashed by patriarchy. In other words, IF YOU DIDN'T SLEEP WITH (CIS) LESBIANS YOU WERE A HOMOPHOBE.

No wonder they can only see the cotton ceiling as similar sexual bullying: browbeating other women into submission is probably the only way some TERFs can get laid.

And, on the eve of the Tory Party conference, a reminder that the 'caring Conservatives' are scum too.

Eric Pickles thinks telling an abuse survivor to 'adjust your medication' is just 'a blunt piece of advice'. I have some blunt advice for him: get some damn MANNERS before you next show your ugly, bigoted, Dickensian face in public again, you miserable little man.

Your regular reminder that the Daily Mail are scum.

Poetry? Please.

I get the Guardian every Saturday  (unless the fuckers have ran something particularly transphobic during the week). The main reason l like buying it is the Review section. But every now and again even the books pages manage to do something to annoy me, and they managed it today with Tim Dee's dismissal of 'angry performance poets' in an otherwise polite little article about Radio Four institution Poetry Please.

Creating a false division beween 'performance' and 'literary' poets? Assuming that all us performance types do is 'shouty rhymes'? Characterising us as being so arrogant we think we're better than Donne? Wow. I really would like to think we're past that. Then again, perhaps Dee feels he needs to get his retaliation in first, given that, as he admits, he's shilling for a poetry programme on which 'the most recently published poet...is Dylan Thomas'.

Way to make poetry seem alive, dude. It's almost enough to move one to angry shouting.

The Ballad of Private Manning (video)

I said I intended to update this blog more frequently - and I meant it! Here's a clip of me performing 'The Ballad of Private Manning' at Scratch Tyne in Newcastle!

Changes

So, yeah, the layout here at Wrestling Emily has changed just a tad. That's not all that's gonna change.

When I started writing this blog, I tended to write my posts as long, essay-style pieces. That was fine and dandy when I wasn't winning slams, making films and, as this week, performing four straight days in a row; but now that I am, I sometimes don't have the time to sit down and write a long, organised think-piece. And yet I do have reasons to need a blog: I have gigs coming up, like the Superheroes of Slam final in Manchester, or Forked in Plymouth in November (not September, as it says on the Apples & Snakes site); I have a book to promote; and I have random opiniated stuff to say which, as one or two people have pointed out, I ought not to just be confining to my Facebook page.

All of which is a fairly long-winded way of saying that, as much as Jonathan Franzen might shake his head and call me a symptom of everything that's wrong with the modern world, the age of the long essay, on this blog at least, is over. Expect to see shorter updates here, but more of them. Maybe they'll be rants, maybe they'll be clips of me performing, maybe they'll be travelogues, maybe they'll be snarky comments attached to a link; who knows, maybe even something longer now and again. But whatever it is, there'll be more of it - hence the new layout. Stay tuned.