Hello, you! Let's talk about privilege, shall we?

It seems, from reading my blog stats and other news that's came to my attention, as if this blog may recently have enjoyed something of an increase in reader numbers. Of course, in the great ocean of blogging these are little more than tiny droplets, but it's still nice to know how many of you lovely people are out there reading. Still, an increase in readers brings with it the responsibility of bringing said readers up to speed on what's going down.

It occurred to me that it might be worth doing a few introductory posts to allow these fresh and fragrant darlings the chance to understand exactly why I do go on so about the things I talk about herein. So settle in new readers, because today we're going to talk about the big one, the issue without which Wrestling Emily would be nothing more than a chronicle of the adventures of a slightly socially inept poet with a fondness for mascara and the films of Patrick Keiller. I speak, of course, of that most important issue in modern activism, privilege.

Privilege is one of those words which often gets misunderstood by the average, non-ofay cat when one describes another person - or even said cat themselves - as 'privileged', because the average person assumes that when I say 'person x is privileged' what I mean is 'person x lives in a giant castle made of Aztec gold and commands an army of zombie servants who constantly do their bidding.' This is, of course, a category error. Being wealthy is a form of privilege - and certainly, in a society as economically unequal as ours, an important one - but it isn't the only form of privilege by a long shot.

Privilege literally translates as 'private law' (you see, new readers? Not only do you get the ranting of a marginalised person, you get fascinating Latin trivia too! I'm too good to you, really I am.). A privileged group is a group which operates by a different set of laws to the rest of society - a law that exists for their benefit and to others' disadvantage. Of course, as a supposedly democratic society we theoretically no longer have laws which operate to advantage one group over another - though if you actually believe that, dear reader, I suggest that you pay a visit to an impoverished, largely black inner city area of London and ask some of the young men how they feel when they see a policeman. You may well be astonished to find that, unlike you, they do not immediately wonder whether they should ask him the time.

The fact is that there are shedloads of privileges which make it easier for some groups in our society to succeed than others. The classic work on privilege is 'Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack' by Peggy Mcintosh, which explores White Privilege - the vast and invisible network of privileges which accrue to caucasian people purely by virtue of our pallid complexion. And I say 'our' because I will willingly cop to the fact that I have caucasian privilege. I may lose out on the axes in a lot of other areas, but I do have the Great White Advantage. This even modifies how badly I feel the effects of other areas in which I'm not privileged: as a nonbinary trans person, I lose out in a lot of ways - but as a Caucasian trans person rather than a trans woman of colour, I have a much lower risk of being murdered or being forced to engage in survival sex work. White Privilege is one of the reasons I get really annoyed when white people accuse people from other races of 'playing the race card' - because white people, without realising it, play the race card every single day and get away with it.

Are you white, new readers? My sympathies. I am too. And I know how hard it can be to acknowledge the privilege you get just because you have a lack of melanin pigmentation. Deal with it. I do. Robert Jensen did too. Let his example school you.

We touched above on another form of privilege - cis privilege. Sorry. Am I going too fast for you? I forget how hard it can be to come to grips with all these strange new words. Of course that itself is another aspect of many forms of privilege - you assume you already know everything and thus resent it when marginalised people start talking about things about which you have never heard. But anyway: cis is essentially the opposite of trans, when it comes to gender. A cis person is someone whose gender identity is in accordance with the gender assigned to them at birth. And while it may not be immediately obvious to you - it often isn't - the fact is that being comfortable in your assigned gender identity brings with it a whole load of privileges. Check them out.

Hopefully you're getting the point at this stage. There are, as the Native American character in Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josie Wales might put it, 'all kindsa privileges' (and if you're a quick study you'll have twigged that there's a problem with the Native American character in that film, in that he is the creation of a writer with white privilege - the character is never given an inner life, he only exists to explain the mystical significance of Eastwood's character to Sondra Locke. And if you're a really, really quick study you'll also realise that the fact that a Mystical Native American is required to explained the mysteries of Outlaw Manhood to Sondra is an equally problematic example of male privilege - this is called mansplaining, and is a topic to which we shall return in later blogs which cater to you, the new reader).

White people have privilege over black people, men have privilege over women, straight people have privilege over gay people, cis people have privilege over trans people, abled people have privilege over disabled people - there are, indeed, many kinds of privilege and they all intersect. The new reader may at this point be suspicious that this blog is moving in the direction of political correctness - and I would not disabuse said reader of this opinion, because I don't think there is anything wrong with political correctness. As Stewart Lee has pointed out, all political correctness consists of is 'treating people fairly'. What a sickening idea.

The vast and interlocking tapestry of privilege is called the Kyriarchy by those of us who strive to dismantle it and create a world in which its toxic effects will not ruin life for generations the way it has so far. Kyriarchy is a word invented by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, who realised that the traditional feminist characterisation of society as a patriarchy simplified things too much by reducing things to a (cis) male/female binary.

You should care about kyriarchy because it's a web in which all of us are caught. Unless I've badly misjudged my new readers and this blog is now being followed by Donald Trump, I'm going to assume that you, like me, benefit from some axes of privilege while losing out on others. So what's the right thing to do about this kind of tapestry of evil?

That depends. It depends on whether all you care about is your own advancement or you genuinely want to make a fairer world. If all you're interested in is advancing your own shallow interests, then you'd follow the 'kiss up, kick down' strategy: kowtow to people above you in the kyriarchal pyramid, while ruthlessly suppressing those below you to curry favour with your superiors and show off your aggressive, dominant kyrio-cojones. But that way doesn't work in the long run.  The annals of Greek tragedy and the crime columns of tabloid newspapers are full of people who have licked the ass above and kicked the ass below until they reached some supposedly comfortable point in the hierarchy, only to have it brutally taken out from under them by someone who lacked their advantages. Remember the end of Carlito's Way, where Al Pacino survives the climactic shootout only to be murdered out of the blue by John Leguizamo's character?  That's the logical end-point of that strategy. But there is another way.

The path to making a fairer world is no less risky and a lot less comfortable than the path of mud-wrestling the marginalised for relative advantage. You'll face bigger obstacles, greater hardship, more humiliating losses and ultimately run a greater risk of dying early than the kiss-up, kick-down scum. But you have one advantage. And that is that, because you yourself are opposing the web in which everyone else is trapped, you show that, in the ancient activist proverb, another world is possible. You show that we don't have to buy in to a never-ending battle royale in which no-one ever ultimately wins. You show that it's possible to imagine a world where, pace Marcus Aurelius, life is more like dancing than wrestling. And, even if the worst happens, if you lose out on your position in a hierarchy - if you die - then you don't lose or die like Al P in Carlito's Way; you lose or die like Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: if your enemies kill you, they make you more powerful than they can possibly imagine; because the fact they've had to kill you shows that the one thing they fear more than anything else is someone who doesn't fit into their sad little world. And that example, and that reminder of what they truly fear, serves as an inspiration to the rebels who'll come after you; and eventually, through your taking a stand, a better world might be created and, in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, something like heaven might dawn.

It's up to you really, readers. Maybe, as my analytics tell me, you googled this site using the disturbing phrase 'women pee after wrestling' and stuck around because you were trying to work out if I could possibly be for real; maybe you saw me at a gig, explaining why I apparently switch genders in poems describing my adolescent years, and were intrigued enough to look me up; maybe you encountered me in some other, more everyday context, and something about me intrigued you enough that you decided to go looking for my online presence. Who knows? All I know is you're reading this, you haven't been here since the get-go and, like those who have, it's time for you to make the choice. Do you want your actions to drive the world further to the brink; or do you want to join me in trying, in our fumbling and ineffective way, to make a better world?

The choice is yours. I hope you make the right one.

Bisexuality for Colonels: a Telegraph Guide

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I have a low opinion of the alleged British 'newspaper' The Daily Telegraph. Aside from a peculiar blip when it, inexplicably, was the paper which broke the MPs' expenses scandal early in 2009, the 'Torygraph', as people call it, is usually derided as 'the paper for retired Colonels', constantly serving up a diet of misinformation and right-wing vitriol.

When we last encountered the Torygraph in this blog, they were engaged in whipping up ill-informed hatred against the Trade Unions, with a biased report on the cost of 'facility time' which  just happened to coincide with David Cameron announcing plans to cut the public sector. This week, as Cameron plans to fill Margaret Thatcher's shoes and excite certain old guard Tories by 'getting tough with Europe', his loyal supporters at the upper-class chip-wrapper of choice have clearly decided they need a good old 'Brussells gravy train' story to get their teeth into, to show how Those Bureaucrats At The EU are Wasting Your Hard-Earned Tax Money.

And what are they wasting it on? Those damned queers, of course! You can practically hear the Colonels spluttering into their kedgeree (got a taste for it in India, don'tchaknow, last days of the Raj, MEEEEEEHHHH) at the thought that the European Commission has spent a whopping one-hundred-and-twenty-four thousand pounds on a 'gay activists conference'. How dare they! Did we fight Hitler so that gay people could live their lives free of hatred and intolerance? The very idea!

Like all the best right-wing scare stories, this one starts unravelling almost from the first paragraph. First of all, as we learn early in the article, this is not just a 'gay activists conference', it's for bisexual, trans and intersex activists too. This is important because the Telegraph has already shown its hand, and the degree to which it is ignorant of LGBTIQ communities, by subsuming all these disparate identities under the 'gay' label.

Recently at work I took a survey which had the usual 'diversity' section tagged on the end. This section didn't have a category for gender identity, but instead stuck 'transgender' in as a single option tacked onto the end of a question about...sexual orientation. This pretty much gave the game away about the surveyors' real commitment to diversity: they were sort of aware that trans people existed, and they had an idea that they would have to include a trans box for people to tick...but they hadn't gone to the trouble of educating themselves - because if they had, I dunno, looked for five minutes at the wikipedia article on trans gender identities, they would have seen in the second paragraph that trans is not a discrete sexual orientation of its own, but that trans people can be gay, straight, poly, pan, bi or asexual. But they couldn't be bothered to educate themselves. 'Stick a 'transgender' box on the end of the question about poofters, Ron,' says the lazy survey maker, 'I know we're both normal an' that, but we gotta do stuff like this to keep the bloody politically correct brigade happy.'

It's the same deal with the Torygraph and their headline writers. If you've been following the recent furore over Stonewall, you'll be aware that the LGBTIQ community is one in which there are divisions and issues of controversy. But none of this matters to the Torygraph. They subsume the entire range of LGBTIQ identities into the catch-all 'gay' category. Remember: these are people who call themselves journalists. Their job is to convey information about the world to their reading public. So when they indulge themselves in a little sloppy thinking about LGBTIQ people, that ignorance and arrogance gets passed on to their readership. But the Telegraph isn't really that bothered about this, because the Telegraph doesn't really care about gay, bi or trans people. It just wants to use them as cannon fodder in its assault on the EU.

If they don't care a lot about gay, bi or trans people, they care about intersex people even less. You can tell that by their disgusting use of scare quotes around the word 'intersex' itself. With those deceitful little punctuation marks, the Telegraph is telling its readers that all this 'intersex' business is just made-up nonsense. A little over a year after intersex issues exploded into the mainstream media because of the IOC's disgraceful treatment of Caster Semenya, the Telegraph is implying to its readers that intersex people don't exist. I can't imagine how it must feel to be an intersex person reading a paragraph like that. Not only do you have to deal with being marginalised since birth, now a major UK newspaper is denying the validity of your experiences - of your existence - and saying that a conference that attempts to deal with your experience (along with those of other marginalised groups) is a waste of money on 'politically correct twaddle'.

It isn't the paper saying this, you understand: they're just summarising the words of critics like Philip Davies MP. Who he, you ask, dear reader? Well, from what I can gather, Philip Davies is a time-wasting little creep who, rather than representing his constituents in Shipley, prefers to spend his time harassing Trevor Philips with meaningless letters,  telling Muslims to 'fuck off', and acting as a rent-a-gob for a whole host of right-wing pressure groups like the Taxpayers Aliance, and the Campaign Against Political Correctness. Wee Phil - a man so odious that fellow Tory John Bercow referred to him as a 'troglodyte' over his opposition to equality legislation, and who also allegedly likes to let rich men steal food from the mouths of babies in the third world - turns out to be the son of Peter Davies, who gave us all so much amusement when he was comprehensively schooled by a local radio DJ about how ill-thought-out his plans to shut down Doncaster Pride were. Clearly, all Davies fils yearns to do with his right-wing demagoguery is impress daddy dearest. How pathetic.

And how much more pathetic of the Torygraph to wheel out this kind of rent-a-quote to comment on this story in the first place. Again, their reliance on him as a source shows their intent to distort the story from the start. By flagging up Davies' position as an MP - and not informing the reader of his past ridiculous, obsessive behaviour - they present him as a figure of authority expressing a view, rather than the odd and rather odious little man he is.

Perhaps the biggest sign of how biased and twisted the article is, however, is its pearl-clutching horror at the lavishness of spending a whopping £124k on a conference. £124,000! What an unthinkable figure! Except it's not, really. From speaking to people I know involved with Trade Unions, and contacts on Twitter, the general feeling is that paying only £124k to organise a conference actually represents tremendous value - especially given that 200 delegates will be attending, and it lasts five days. Despite what the Torygraph are trying to imply, this is a lot more than just a big nosh-up and a few workshops.I talked to someone attending a one-day conference for a local organisation where hotel costs alone will come to £15000 in total for a hundred delegates. Multiply that by five days and the cost becomes £75000. Double that to allow for 200 delegates and you get £150K - which is £26,000 more than the ILGA conference, and remember this is just for accommodation - the real costs would be far higher. Frankly, £124k for a conference is a bargain. But again, the Torygraph don't want to set the costs in context - they want to scare their readers with a big, huge, expensive-sounding number which is being wasted, frittered away I tell you, on a conference for a bunch of pinko commie sexual deviants.

Now, £124k is a big number. But I'm pretty sure - and I can't be sure of this, I only got a B at GCSE maths - that SIX BILLION POUNDS is a much bigger number. This number, of course, was the amount of the tax bill that HMRC recently let mobile phone company Vodafone off without paying, leading to protests around the UK yesterday. Protests which - along with the original story - I can find no mention of on the Telegraph website. Funny that.

So the Torygraph is ignoring a real story about broad-based opposition to the unfairness of Coalition cuts, and instead trying to foment manufactured anger about a conference in Europe which actually won't cost a great deal of money in order to placate the Europhobic wing of the Conservative party. But that isn't all they're doing. The effect of their article is to reinforce the bigotry and prejudice which says that LGBTIQ people don't deserve even this relatively small sum of money to be spent on our concerns. That we shouldn't have our voices heard, or our views taken into account. That we don't matter - and, in the case of intersex people, don't exist.

This is a vile, inhuman, twisted piece of propaganda which doesn't deserve to be dignified with the label of journalism. To my mind, it isn't far removed from hate-speech. The Telegraph should be ashamed of themselves for printing it - but I doubt they will be. Privilege, after all, means never having to say you're sorry - even when you bloody well should be.

Politics Is Not Actually Wrestling...

...despite the silliness in my previous posts. A point which many might not think worth making, but which seems to have been lost on the crowd of Tea Party supporters who, in this video, decide to express their commitment to the ideals of America's Founding Fathers by beating up an innocent young woman.

This, it need hardly be said, is the action of a pack of scum. What makes it worse is that it turns out one of the people involved is a co-ordinator for Tea Party candidate Rand Paul's campaign. And it turns out this piece of across-the-pondlife was following the examples of some primate higher up the chain of command who jokes about liberals getting 'curb-stomped' (and I have to say, I always thought the word was 'kerb'...then again, these right-wing arseholes have never been great at the spelling).

The most worrying thing about this is that there are scum in this country who are trying to export this kind of politics to the UK. Today we've seen reports of US-style 'Christians' intimidating vulnerable women at abortion clinics; and, surprise, surprise, the nearest thing Britain has to a Tea Party Candidate, self-confessed liar Nadine Dorries, has written clagged together a simpering blogpost in support of these creeps.

I don't like the Tories, as anyone who's read this blog for any length of time will attest. But compared to Dorries, even someone like Michael Gove or George Osborne comes off well. The Tories may be lying about the justification for their cuts, but at least they don't lie about their lying by saying that when they were lying they were lying about lying in a forum which is only about 70% true anyway...and then expect you to take their views about a woman's bodily autonomy any more seriously than a man in a psychedelic kilt farting the national anthem through a kazoo.

What I'm saying is, most of the Tories respect us enough to try and run at least a half-decent con on us. Dorries genuinely believes we're naive enough that we'll fall for anything she says - and also believes that ignoring her critics proves that she's won the argument. Or, hey, if that doesn't work, she can always accuse people of stalking her.

I will cheerfully admit that every time I hear Margaret Thatcher has been admitted to hospital, I make a mental note to run out, get some champagne, and put it on ice; but Dorries and her ilk are a more virulent contagion than Thatcher ever was. And whatever side of the issues you come down on, it's a contagion we have to stop in its tracks. Because as much as we might sometimes want to knock our opponents' heads together none of us wants to knock their heads into the kerb. And that's the way it ought to stay.

Planet of the Arseholes (Part the Second)

One of the classic defences used by privileged people when called out on the ways they abuse that privilege is the 'reverse prejudice' move. This basically attempts to argue that, by criticising a privileged group, you are actually discriminating against that privileged group. Criticise white people and you'll find yourself accused of reverse racism; criticise men and you'll get accused of reverse sexism - and so on and so on, world without end, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. You're doing nothing of the kind, of course: racism and sexism are large-scale structural systems which privilege one gender or race over all others, and as such cannot be 'reversed' in any meaningful way. But this doesn't stop people in privileged groups from inventing new ways in which they're discriminated against.

I've seen some Christians - who are, as any fule kno, the real victims - claim, with their bare faces hanging out, that they are the victims of 'Christophobia', presumably because they're jealous that those naughty Islamics get to have a special word, and they want to muscle in on the action. Of course, any intelligent examination of the evidence reveals that this 'Christophobia' stuff is nonsense: in Britain, Christianity is the state religion, and the only religion whose Bishops get to vote in the House of Lords; in America, these supposedly-persecuted Christians have wealthy mega-churches and a vast, active and millitant political lobby; and the Vatican, which increasingly loves to pose as the victim of gangs of anti-Catholic bullies, is usually on the receiving end of criticism not for its belief in the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the miracle of transsubstantiation, but for its policies on birth control in the developing world, and the footling matter of covering up an institutionalised culture of child-rape for half a century.

Recently, m'colleague Helen from Bird of Paradox had a bit of trouble over her (entirely justified) response to having her identity erased in an article about the death of American trans woman Stacy Blahnik Lee. The upshot of all this was that despite protesting about something which she had every right to be angry about, she was accused of, and I quote 'spread[ing] cisphobia in trans spaces'.

Because yes, that's right: now there's apparently a thing called cisphobia! And all us naughty, naughty activists who remember what the 'T' in LGBT stands for are apparently to blame for spreading this nasty contagion. Oh, who will defend them, these poor cis people? Who will stand up and protect these disadvantaged, embattled, beleaguered mites who make up a mere ninety-odd percent of the population?

As you can probably tell, I think 'cisphobia', as a concept, is as nonsensical as 'Christophobia', 'reverse racism' and all the other 'you're just as bad in the other direction!' bollocks which the perennial 'real victims' are forever trotting out. Speaking as a genderqueer person I have to say that I don't hate cis people - and even Helen, who, God knows, has reason enough to do so, doesn't either (she says she doesn't trust cis people - but it's worth remembering that, when trusting cis people can, and often does, get trans people killed, this is a healthy and realistic attitude, not a product of bigotry).

If I hated every cis person I met because they were cis, I would be dead by now, because my blood pressure would have gone through the roof from the rage a long, long time ago. For any trans person, cis people will be the vast majority of the people you deal with all day, every day. There will be some you will hate, yes; but most of those people you will feel at best indifferent about; perhaps a few of them, you'll even like. The idea that trans people feel prejudiced toward and discriminate against cis people is laughable, and is a complete failure to understand the issues confronting trans people who, too often, have to deal with a world full of people who at best ignore us, and at worst feel they have a right to kill us just for existing.

In her fine book Whipping Girl, Julia Serrano repeats the point made by bell hooks that privileged people only truly understand what it's like to be privileged, and can't understand the world of a marginalised person; whereas people on the margins understand both what it means to be marginalised and what it means to be privileged, because every day they see the ways in which the lives of the privileged are safer, more accepted and better off than their own. And there is no more telling illustration of the difference between the privileged and the marginalised than the insulting attempt,  by those who have privilege, to claim that having their failings pointed out from time to time is exactly the same as the prejudice marginalised people face all their lives.

Transphobia means that, if you're a trans person, you have a higher risk of unemployment, a higher risk of being homeless, a higher risk of being subject to domestic abuse, sexual assault and murder.

Cisphobia? 'Cisphobia' means that if you're cis you might be made to feel a little bit bad about all the privileges you enjoy for having an experiential gender identity which matches the gender you were assigned at birth.

Exactly the same. Obviously.

(Edit, 20/10/10: Blog corrected to remove a couple of ableist words/phrases that had slipped past my internal quality control process [curtsy to Lilith von Fraumench for that] and also to correct Stacy Blahnik Lee's name, the third part of which - along with the rest of her identity - seems to have been lost in the MSM reports of her death [and thanks to @metalmujer on Twitter for alerting me to this error]. My excuse for the name thing, crappy as it is, is that I don't check out TransGriot, whose author was the only person who did get the name right, as often as I should because the browser on my mobile phone tends to mangle the crap out of it in a way that makes it unreadable, and so I missed the post giving Stacy's full name (hey, I did say it was a rubbish excuse). My excuse for the original ableism in this piece is simpler: I didn't consider the words in question to be ableist, as a result of my own abled privilege, and so I'm glad Lilith pointed them out. Although in doing so, I am sure I am giving in, in my cowardly liberal way, to reverse ableism, because of course it's the abled people who are the real victims, innit, guv?)

Charlie and the Big Bad Book-burning Bigot

So today's big question is: will he or won't he? I'm talking, of course, about 'Pastor' Terry Jones and his ridiculuous and inflammatory plan to burn copies of the Qu'ran on a shitty plot of land owned by one of the ill-educated weirdos from his micro-church.

Whether or not this Terry Jones - who, as someone on Twitter pointed out, is very much a naughty boy rather than the Messiah - succeeds in carrying out his little auto da fe,  there can be little doubt that he's already succeeded in getting his ugly face, 'cockduster' moustache and all, all over the media.

What are we to make of Pastor Jones? What opinion of him should we form? Talking heads have thrashed it out for most of the week, but it occurred to me that no-one had thought to ask the ultimate arbiters of morality, the oompah-loompahs from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the Gene Wilder version, obviously).

So I did. And so it is with great pleasure that this blog is able to host the Pastor Terry Jones oompah-loompah song. Take it away little fellas...

'Oompah-loompah doompaty-do,
I've got another puzzle for you:
about an insignificant speck,
who spends his time watching too much Glenn Beck:

what are we to make of this sad little man,
who tells everyone that he'll burn the Qu'ran?
Is he the start of a new right-wing trend,
or is he just a chuffing bell-end?'

Chorus: 'He's a chuffing bell-end, he's a chuffing bell-end...'

'Oompah-loompah doompaty-spank,
burning Qu'rans is a right load of wank!'

So there you are. They seem a bit more foul-mouthed than normal these days, I have to say. I think they're still kind of bitter about Deep Roy getting their gig in the remake. Still, their hearts are in the right place.

(Curtsy to @vivmondo over on Twitter for the picture of Pastor Jones' startling chimp-related confession.)

There is, actually, some good news

I spend a lot of time on this blog bemoaning the generally sorry state of affairs in this fucked-up, kyriarchically-dominated world. But today, a good thing happened. Today, a piece of barely-human scum who thought he could murder a woman and get away with it because nobody cared about that woman was sent to prison for twenty-two years.

Of course, it's not enough time, and with time off for good behaviour, Neil McMillan could be out in eleven years. Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, the bastard can rot until the end of fucking time. But read the summing up from Michael Lawson QC. That guy is in no doubt about what kind of scum McMillan was:

'What you did that night brought to an end a life which in many views was one of relentless difficulty faced with extreme courage.

The person you killed was a person who always sought to overcome difficulties.


On the other hand, faced with a difficulty in that flat, whatever that was, you chose to take it out on her.

There was the distinction between you and her.'

Note two things here, and note them well. One: Michael Lawson QC refers to Andrea as 'her'. No pronoun confusion from him. But also note that he underlines, in no uncertain terms, what a weak, pathetic, cowardly piece of shit Neil McMillan was. McMillan killed a trans woman, one who worked in the sex industry, too, and thought he could get away with it because, hey, who cares about women on the margins of society? McMillan killed Andrea Waddell and smirked to himself as he left her apartment because he figured the police wouldn't devote a lot of effort to investigating the death of a murdered trans woman sex worker. But, fortunately for us and sadly for Neil McMillan and his evil little excuse for a heart, Brighton police cared enough to carry out a thorough investigation of the case, leaving little doubt that McMillan was the man responsible; the jury cared enough to find him guilty; and the judge cared enough to heavy into him verbally and ram home how vile his act was.

Of course, none of this corrects the fundamental injustice of this situation, which is that a talented, intelligent and courageous woman like Andrea should never have been in a position where someone like McMillan could kill her in the first place. But the conviction of Neil McMillan sends a message: in the eyes of the law, trans lives are every bit as important as cis ones. In the eyes of the law, when it works properly - as, I admit, it rarely does, and I can't help wondering what sort of prejudices might have been in play if Andrea hadn't been middle-class, well-educated, and caucasian - in the eyes of the law when it works as it should, everyone matters.

As we enter a period under the sway of a government which, in many peoples' eyes, does not believe all people are equal, a judgement like this is a shot in the arm and an encouragement to hope that, one day, if we all stand up to the kind of prejudices which lead someone like Neil McMillan to think they can get away with murder, the world might really be a fine place, and worth fighting for. Until that day we can at best hope, like Morgan Freeman in Se7en, that the latter part is true; but it's days like this that bring us closer.

(Days like this, and people like Helen at Bird of Paradox, who has dilligently followed and reported on each twist and turn of this story. If you want to acquaint yourself with the full facts in the case of Andrea Waddell, and a lot more besides, you could do worse than visit her blog.)

In what is perhaps my finest hour, I hate on a paralyzed man

I was for a couple of years a very good fan of the moderate left-wing historian Tony Judt. His collection of essays, Reappraisals, came along just at the time that I developed a serious essay-fetish. Better still, unlike the other major essayist I got into, Clive 'never knowingly unannoying' James, he followed a broadly social-democratic line and wasn't given to (a) showing off his multilingualism in an extremely de haut en bas fashion, (b) going on and on about the bloody tango, or (c)breaking off in the middle of an otherwise decent article to go off on another rant about how Marxism was inevitably doomed and Margaret Thatcher is a modern-day Joan of Arc. I would keep an eye out for anything in a magazine at the bookshop that contained one of Judt's pieces, and was particularly pleased, in a bittersweet sort of a way, when the New York Review began publishing a regular series of memoirs by Judt, reflecting on his long career in the humanities.

It was bittersweet because in the first of these articles, Night, Judt wrote, heartbreakingly, about the motor neurone disease that had left him bedridden and with no other intellectual stimulation than to make voyages into his own remembered past. Night was one of those things that you read which, when you finish it, mean you have to walk around the house for a bit (if you're lucky enough to be able to), not exactly thinking and not exactly upset and not exactly angry but sort of stressed and restless, battling a vague sense of the unfairness of the universe.

So when, last week, I was browsing the magazine stand in Fenwicks during a rare day to myself during the recent worry of Michelle's breast cancer, and I saw a copy of the New York Review with Judt's byline on the cover, I picked it up immediately.

I'm a busy person, especially so of late, so I didn't get around to reading Judt's article until today. And I kind of wish I hadn't, because if I'd never read it I could have carried on thinking of Judt as an essentially noble, freethinking genius, tragically struck down by a cruel degenerative disease in the twilight of his years. Instead of, as it turns out, an insufferable, arrogant prick who embodies everything distasteful about male and cis privilege (because of which, a trigger warning is in effect for the next link if you, like me, find those things distressing).

Tony has been thinking about girls while he's in bed, you see. He's been thinking in particular about how feminism and what he calls 'sexual correctness' ruined things for crazy, fun-loving '60s types' like himself. 'History,' Judt writes, sounding like no-one so much as dandified right-wing rent-a-gob David Starkey, 'was a fast-feminizing profession, with a graduate community primed for signs of discrimination - or worse.' Clearly, this 'rabble of womankind' caused Judt some bother. 'Physical contact constituted a presumption of malevolent intention; a closed door was proof positive.'

So basically, Judt was upset that he couldn't (a) touch his female students up and (b) couldn't have the door to his office closed when one of them was in there with him. Oh, the humanity! It's poliddikul corregdness gawn maaaaaaahhhhhhd, that's what it is. Except it's fucking not. These are students we're talking about: why would he need to physically touch them? I don't recall any of my lecturers having to personhandle me during my student days (as much as I may have wanted some of them to), and as for the closed door, well, so what? So he had to leave his door open, it's NYU, not the school in Dangerous Minds. I'm pretty sure he wasn't bothered by many kids staging impromptu breakdance contests outside of his study.

Fantastically it gets better, as Judt rapidly transmogrifies into a modern-day Humbert Humbert and tells us about his own dinner dates with an attractive young student (don't worry ladies; we're given to understand Judt only loves her for her mind, and if you believe that I have a face-cream enriched with pro-retinol to sell you), and whines about how it's such a shame that 'Americans assiduously avoid anything that might smack of harassment, even at the risk of forgoing promising friendships and the joys of flirtation.'

Bitch, please. First of all, if you can't flirt without inviting accusations of sexual harassment, you are no fucking good at flirting and would be advised to give it the fuck up. Secondly, sorry chum, but I have lots of female friends and at no point have I thought, shit, I better stop being friends with these girls in case I leave myself open to a charge of sexual harassment because, guess the fuck what, I'm not a total fucking prick.

But then Judt really goes all-in when he cries havoc and unleashes the dogs of victim-blaming and cisfail. First of all, he introduces us to the case of 'a promising young professor' who 'was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department.' Judt takes at face value the confession from his golden boy that he 'followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings.' Judt then says there was 'no question of intimidation', apparently not being smart enough, despite his Cambridge education, to grasp the fact that a woman might feel somewhat threatened when followed into a confined space by a man who then confesses his sexual desire for her. Fortunately, female students at Judt's school weren't quite so unwise in the ways of the world - they refused to take his classes, which eventually led to Judt's acolyte being denied tenure. Judt, predictably, is full of sorrow for the privileged professor - 'his career was ruined' - and full of bile for the woman he picked on: 'Meanwhile, his "victim" was offered the usual counseling (sic).' You stay classy there, Mr Judt.

Fortunately, the honourable Judt got his revenge, and he wastes no time in telling us, gloatingly, about how he did so:

'Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: "she" is really a "he" and is suing the university for failing to take seriously "her" needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.'

Oh, how very fucking big of you, Mr Judt! Words fail me here but, let's face it, they fail Judt too...the humanities scholar is unable to tell the difference between a trans woman and a 'transvestite', and can't resist those Bindel-like scare quotes around all the pronouns in his paragraph. Unfortunately his linguistic gifts didn't desert him in the courtroom. He can barely conceal his grin when telling us of his cute turn of phrase when asked 'were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?' (which phrase itself reads to me like Judt's mind playing Proustian perceptual tricks on him - 'identity preference' is the way someone like Judt would categorise gender identity as a matter of choice). What did Judt say on the stand? 'I don't see how I could have been...I thought she was a woman - isn't that what she wanted me to think?'

I can just picture Judt smirking, sneering, as he sits in a courtroom and trots out this wheedling little sophistry. Needless to say, in a court of the privileged, the university won the case - but Judt says it anyway, because he wants to underline how he - backed with nothing more than the entire financial and legal might of a prestigious university - managed to beat down a sneaky little trans woman.

There's a lot more in Judt's article - he has the front, in trying to justify his behaviour, to make a ridiculous case that demanding safety and respect for women - trans or cis - is apparently on the same moral level as 'Bill Clinton's self-destructive transgressions or Tony Blair's insistence that he was right to lie his way into a war' - but it's Friday night and I don't want to spend the rest of my evening fighting back an urge to vomit. Here's the bottom line:

Tony Judt makes excuses for a man who sexually harrassed a trans woman. He blames the victim of this harassment for what the harasser did. He then defended the university when this woman was brave enough to take them to court for mistreating her. Tony Judt, a man who in his career has written much about the injustice of oppression, sees nothing wrong at all with what he did.

From where I'm sitting, it looks nothing but wrong. It looks like another old cis white guy picking on those who lack his privilege to make himself feel better about his own peccadiloes. It looks like the old boys club getting together to cover up their crimes and keep the girls out of the clubhouse unless they're being wheeled in in cakes. It looks shameful, and pathetic, and sad.

I liked Tony Judt's books because I thought he was a historian who believed in justice. But it turns out he isn't. He's just another in a long line of privileged bastards who make the world worse.

Tonight, I go to sleep, knowing I've lost a hero. Tony Judt tries to sleep, knowing pain and discomfort, but knowing also that his discomfort is relative: he has nurses, a restful bed, and constant supervision. But tonight many trans women go to sleep knowing they're left out - not just of Judt's privileged little boys' club but also the world of employment, of housing, of the privileges of normal life which only seem 'normal' to those who never realise what a privilege they are.

High rates of homelessness. High rates of unemployment. High rates of harassment and discrimination. A shockingly high chance of being murdered. Tony Judt has done his bit to keep those statistics high. And, if he wasn't sick, he'd have no problem sleeping.

FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME

I've given it a good hour and the rage has yet to subside. They did it. The Lib Dems have sold out to the Tories, and now we have to look forward to David Cameron as Chief Shitbag for...well, realistically another six months. But six minutes with that prick in charge is too fucking long.

There are crumbs of comfort. Stroud didn't get in; but the Darth Sidious to her pious little Anakin, Iain Duncan Smith, will get a place in the Cabinet, it seems. As will Michael Howard, architect of the fascist Criminal Justice Act and a vile piece of political scum I will hate with every fibre of my being until the day I die or he does. And William 'One Shandy' Hague, the bumptious, cringeworthy overgrown child. Scum. Beasts. Monsters. Bastards, every last filth-sucking one of them.

A bigger crumb is that the North pretty much categorically rejected the Tories, with the exception of a weird enclave in Carlisle who must surely, even now, be looking around them like those truck drivers who stopped during the LA Riots and thinking shitshitshitshit... Well done, the North. Especially Tynemouth. If there was one place I thought would go Tory, it was you. But you didn't. You kept the faith. Well done. I rag on the North East harder than pretty much anyone writing up here (and don't think I'm going to let up out of solidarity during the Cameron junta - if you bastards fuck up I will still call you on it), but it's only because I fucking love the place, and one of the things that makes me love it is that, despite all the propaganda in the Mail and the Sun, the people up here still have the good goddam sense to stick two fingers up to the Tories, and, while they're at it, to tell the BNP to fuck right off as well. Hats off to the Geordies - they are black and white, but they don't fight, except after ten pints on a Saturday night...*and while we're at it the Mackems, the Smoggies, the Monkey-hangers, Sand-dancers and everyone else. We'll keep the Red Flag flying here if we have to impale the fucking Tories on it.

And the biggest crumb is that with the Lib Dems surely not all intent on falling into line behind Clegg, and a tiny majority otherwise, and the Tory backbenches sure to rise up and fuck Cameron mightily where even Murdoch's Sun can't shine, and Europe looming to split the Tories as per, Cameron's leadership is going to be Hell for the Old Etonian scumbag. And that's before we even get to the fact that I and a lot of other people will be fighting him and his ilk every damn step of the way. He'll be out in six months and, far from being the 'heir to Blair' he'll be remembered as a worse PM than Major.

Welcome, David Cameron. Welcome to Hell. I only hope for your sake that it's a worse Hell for you than it is for the rest of us.

The rage continues.

* and caps doffed to Bill Bailey's 'Hats off to the Badgers' song, lovingly ripped off in the sentence preceding this footnote.

Attack of the Big-nosed Sex-Fascists

To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, if the Tories are elected, I warn you not to be gay, not to be lesbian, bi, or a trans person. I warn you not to be polyamorous. I warn you not be kinky. I warn you, in fact, not to be at all sex-positive in any way whatsoever. In fact, I strongly advise you not to be anything but a rosary-clutching Christian librarian who self-flagellates after wiping their bum because they've 'defiled' themselves.

Why am I in such a doom-saying mood? Because of a woman. This woman, in fact:

This woman, readers - though she may appear to be a cruel photoshop mock-up of Jennifer Aniston's hair and Ricky Hatton's nose - is in fact the very real Philippa Stroud, head of the Centre for Social Justice, the thinktank founded by Ian 'the quiet man is turning up the volume' Duncan Smith. These assclowns are the people who gave you the frankly pointless married person's tax credit - you know, the idea that battered women and closet-case husbands will immediately eschew the freedom of divorce when offered a measly £150 bribe. I can see that working. I can picture myself now, in an abusive relationship, flinching as my face is backhanded so hard my neck nearly snaps and punch after punch is driven into my stomach*, thinking to myself that if I just stand and take it I'll be sitting pretty on top of one-hundred-and-fifty extra pounds a year! Such wonder.

(Wheezes like this always strike me as weird coming from the right wing, as well. They constantly go on about how Labour has destroyed us all in the 'social experiment' of multiculturalism, but then what do they propose? A social experiment in seeing whether you can bribe people to stay married. Where's your faith in the free market, cretins? Well, alive and well if the client lists of London's top escort agencies are anything to go by, I reckon, but I digress...)

The fact is, though, we may all be looking back on the heady days of the marriage-bribe carrot as the golden age for our asses, because it seems the exorcism-stick is waiting 'round the corner. See, there's a lot more to Pippa Stroud than a good hairdresser, a set of Palin-lite policies, and a mediocre prizefighter's honker - she's also, according to reports in today's Observer, a crusader 'gainst the forces of Satan himself:

'A high-flying prospective Conservative MP, credited with shaping many of the party's social policies, founded a church that tried to "cure" homosexuals by driving out their "demons" through prayer.' 

And it isn't just the homos. You won't be surprised to hear that Stroud's Terminators - er, I mean Ministers - also saw fit to try to pray the queer out of 'Abi, a teenage girl with transsexual issues'. Given the high rate of suicide among trans people, and the fact that many have severe problems with their self-esteem to begin with (this writer, for one, has been known to suffer severe ego-drops at the mere sight of hir five o-clock shadow), I have to question whether telling someone they're demonically posessed is the most useful form of intervention. Admittedly, someone telling the teenage me I was in league with Satan would have been greeted with a loud 'fuck YEAH!' and a \m/metal salute\m/, but there again I wasn't surrounded by evangelical Christians during my adolescence (I was instead surrounded by Catholics who, whatever the priesthood gets up to, tend to be more pragmatic about a teenage interest in the music of Guns 'n' Roses). 

Still, Abi's suicide probably wouldn't be any skin off Stroud's brobdingnagian bogey-chute, given that she shrugged off the death of an alcoholic resident in a hostel she ran by saying ' we wondered whether God knew that she hadn't the will to stick with it and was calling her home.' Imagine how you'd feel if some holier-than-thou prick said that about your daughter.

These people are not the aberrations in Cameron's 'New Conservatives'. They're the norm. The party that gave you Section 28 and Operation Spanner is still as bigoted, homophobic, and generally fucked-up about sex as ever, and anyone whose sexuality isn't exactly in accord with that of Philippa Stroud and her hateful ilk has a duty to vote on May 6th to stop them gaining power, and to keep her mammoth nose out of our business**.

* Admittedly I would be more likely to pay £150 for this kind of treatment, but let's leave that out of it, shall we?
** You may accuse me of dwelling a little too much on Stroud's nose, but, let's face it, it's big enough that I actually could dwell on it, literally, and raise a small herd of goats fed on her nasal hair into the bargain. So why not? ***
*** Also, I have to wonder what would happen if we got Philippa Stroud's nose and John Hatzistergos' chin into a room together. Would they breed and produce a race of giant-faced bigots, like an army of Easter Island statues giving Hitler salutes and burning crosses made of their own snot? I think this theory needs to be tested. Right fucking now.

Bigotgate and the REAL 'political correctness' destroying Britain

So it seems they were right all along, those knuckle-dragging, phlegm-spitting, Littlejohn-regurgitating pricks at the end of the bar with bad hair and worse skin: there are things you can't say in Britain, because they won't let you. Who'da thunk it, eh?

Well, probably not the burps-n-BNP-bollocks tendency, because it actually turns out the things you can't say, and the people who won't let you, aren't the forces of 'political correctness' trying to stop us saying bad things about minorities. In fact it seems the one thing you can't say without people jumpin' dahn yer frote is that someone who, how to put this, comes across as a bit of a frickin' bigot is, well, a frickin' bigot.

Is she right? Is she wrong? Should he have left his chest-mike on? Who gives a rat's haemorrhoid? What is important about this affair is the way the right-wing media have jumped all over this. They're acting as if Brown roared like an enraged bull, pulled a steel folding chair out of his limo and dropped Gillian Duffy onto it with a tombstone pilderiver in his own personal tribute to veteran WWE Legend Mark 'The Undertaker' Calloway. In fact, Brown privately discussed strategy with his aide in a car, under the belief that his mike wasn't still on.

Do Sky News seriously expect us to believe Cameron doesn't come out with even worse when he thinks he's off the mike? I, for one, would be willing to bet that whenever he's finished bleating 'blah blah change rhubarb rhubarb big society blah fishcakes' and pressing the flesh after another meet-and-greet with the public, Cameron climbs into the back of his car and mewls like a newborn baby until his 109-year-old nanny can be persuaded to slip her nipple into his mouth for a calming spot of 'bitty' while the car speeds off to a top-secret biohazard shower in which Our Future Leader can be scrubbed raw until he 'gets their stench off him.'

Allegedly.

But even if Cameron were filmed tomorrow morning roasting children on an open fire while enjoying a hand-job from Robert Mugabe, you'd be hard-pressed to find mention of it in the media. It's already been well-documented that Cameron runs a party full of homophobes, backed by Christian fundamentalists who'd make Mary Whitehouse flinch, but the mainstream media don't concentrate on this because it doesn't fit their agenda.

And what is that agenda? It's one of dehumanising asylum seekers, spreading fear of anyone different, and propagating the lie that 'we can't have an honest discussion on immigration' because of the 'politically correct brigade'. I'm not going to give you chapter and verse here by way of example: rather, I'd point you in the direction of three excellent blogs: Tabloid Watch, Five Chinese Crackers, and Angry Mob, all of which do an amazing job ripping apart the daily diet of racist lies the tabs try to shove down our throats. But what I do want to talk about is the 'chilling effect' this constant repetition of racist crap has on discussion of immigration in this country. The whole reason Gordon Brown refused to call Gillian Duffy a bigot in public is because politicians are afraid to say anything that the Mail or the Sun could portray as being 'soft on immigration' or 'out of touch' with a bullshit 'national mood' that's entirely the creation of the tabloids and their constant lies.

And now, Gordon Brown's unguarded words in what he thought was his own private space and time are being used to further contribute to this climate of prejudice and misinformation, and the relentless, infantile, gossipy anti-Brown reporting is being deployed to try and ensure that Murdoch and Dacre's blue-eyed boy Cameron slimes his way into Downing Street.

Once there, Cameron will no longer have to worry about convincing us that he's an agent of change who really cares about us, and he can get on with turning Britain into a paradise for the kind of corporate 'leaders' who rallied to his side in the bold cause of rich people paying less tax, and Hell on Earth for ordinary British people: the very people the right-wing tabloids claim to be defending. People like you, people like me, people like Gillian Duffy.

Well, maybe not people like Gillian Duffy, who has, according to reports, been paid £50,000 for her story. Well, fair play to her. If she invests that carefully, she'll be able to enjoy a comfortable old age; maybe she can even pay some East Europeans to clean up after her. God knows, she'll need some home comforts after Cameron and his cronies have dismantled the welfare state.

Vote Cameron, Get Torquemada

So we've all seen this, haven't we?

As I pointed out here recently, any idea that David Cameron has brought real change to the Tory party is wishful thinking. Cameron says 'change' every chance he gets because he feels such contempt for the electorate he thinks they'll look at him, hear the c-word and immediately be convinced that a pudgy-faced, badly-shaved toff is in fact Barack Obama, but the fact is the Tories are every bit as hateful and bigoted as they were when they introduced Section 28 in the 80s. Oh, sure: they suspended Philip Lardner, but only because he got caught. In the background, the same dark forces that drove Thatcher's government - one of the most homophobic, racist, misogynist and authoritarian governments in UK history - are awaiting their chance to come back.

In my first anti-Cameron post I invoked the work of Pat Mills and compared the Tories to the Fomorians, the villains in Mills' 'thinking man's Conan' series, Slaine. But I now think a more apt comparison to Cameron's supposedly 'changed' Tory party would be Torquemada, the right-wing, alien-hating religious fanatic from Mills' sci-fi series Nemesis the Warlock:

If, like me, you're far from pure, then you'd be advised to be vigilant about David Cameron and his allies. And if they do win on May 7th, this deviant certainly plans to misbehave.

Kiss My Pencil

Pat Mills. Genius. Responsible for some of the greatest strips in the history of British comics (and Sex Warrior too), and also a guy with spot-on political views. Never better than in his landmark series Slaine, (basically a smarter version of the Conan meme)* in which the Pagans were the good guys, God was a woman, and - best of all - the baddies came from Tory Island. No accident, that: Slaine, like most of the other 2000AD classics, was written during the last period when this country was unfortunate enough to be saddled with a Conservative government. Mills was doing his patriotic duty to turn the geeks of the nation against the party then in government by linking them with a race of demons who oppressed the Celtic people and drank the tears of women. Some people might refer to this as allegory, but, as someone who grew up under the handbag of Thatcherite domination I feel it incumbent on me to remind younger folks reading this blog that this portrayal was in fact a matter of stark factual truth.

Winston Churchill famously said that if a man isn't a liberal before the age of thirty he had no heart, but that if he wasn't a conservative after the age of thirty he had no head. Sherry-sodden old buggers with a Churchill-fetish are fond of quoting that line, though they leave out the fact that Winston was probably all fucked-up on drugs when he said it. But like a lot of cliches it contains a kernel of truth: becoming a Tory is - unless you're some kind of freakish mutant - something that happens to you when you reach a certain age. It might not be thirty. It might not be forty. It might not even be fifty or sixty. But there comes a point in your life when it can happen. It doesn't mean that you've morphed from being a naieve innocent to being a hard-headed political realist, though. It means you've given up.

It's hard work, being good. It takes effort to commit yourself to trying to be a better person, not abusing your privilege and putting in the hours and time to defend the disadvantaged and create a world in which people are treated with equal respect regardless of skin colour, religion, sexuality, gender identity, or disability. Sometimes you want to give in to the hatred, to the fear, to the moral cowardice that tells you it's their fault: the asylum seekers, the Muslims, the gays. That it's people like you; normal people, not freaks, who are the real victims, and that it's about time you stopped fannying around with diversity initiatives and equality legislation and got down to the business of taking care of your own and fuck you, buddy. Sometimes you see the front cover of the Daily Mail and its icy talons of fear reach deep into your heart and you don't have the will to keep fighting it. You give in. And that's when you turn Tory.

The mainstream media are almost falling over themselves to tell us the Tories have changed, that it's all compassionate Conservatism and time for change and Dave's about to have a baby and SamCam - isn't she lovely? But this past week we've seen signs that the Tories aren't actualy as nice as all that. There's Chris Grayling, the Tory Shadow Home Secretary who chased the dragon of Mail-reader votes by supporting homophobic B&B owners. Here's Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, the lesbian former Tory activist so disgusted by the party's homophobia she's telling the media she now plans to vote Labour. Who's this? It's Wirral Tory councillor Denis Knowles, who made comments on his Facebook page about 'limp-wristed' Labour activists (and, for a bonus point, also described them as 'definitely not local' - regional xenophobia and anti-gay bigotry in one tight little package? You stay classy, Councillor Knowles.)

Here's another Tory councillor, Eddie Wake, who reckons rape prevention campaigns are something to joke about - even if his 'jokes' leave a woman in tears. And here's Michael Kaminski, Call-me-Dave's ally in the European Reformists and Conservatives group in the European Parliament - a man who refuses to apologise for an anti-Semitic pogrom, uses slogans like 'Poland for the Poles', tells foreign workers to go home and calls his opponents 'faggots.' Lest you think that Mr Kaminski is one bad apple spoiling an otherwise respectable coalition, vada Valdemar Tomasevski, another 'Reformist Conservative' who voted for a homophobic hate law in Lithuania. Here's the evidence that a vote for the Conservatives is a vote against a woman's right to choose.

I could go on, but by now you get the point. Forget all the crap about the superfecundity of Samantha, or how Dave is so much more presentable than dour old Gordon. Forget all the business leaders supporting Tory economic plans - those businessmen are backing Dave because they know he's their gateway to a golden age of ripping off the little guy. If David Cameron announced plans to lower the age of consent to three, paedophiles would write letters to papers supporting him. If you're a captain of industry, a Russian oligarch or a member of the landed aristocracy, David Cameron's tax plans will benefit you. But few of us are. Lots of us are gay, though. Lots of us are members of ethnic minorities. Lots of us are disabled, and a hell of a lot of us are women. And even if you aren't, I'm pretty sure you know people who are. Your mum, for a start.

David Cameron: the man who hates your mum. Keep that in mind, when you go into the voting booth on May 6th. And count yourself lucky. Slaine had to swing a massive great axe to get rid of the misogynist slimebags from Tory Island: all you have to wield is a stubby little pencil. Use it wisely.

* Admittedly, Slaine did occassionally get a bit 'never again the BURNING TIMES!' on occassion, but it was still great and chock full of fantastic sword-wielding muscle-chicks so it still rules, okay?

Think you're a Big Man, Littlejohn? Suck on this:

*trigger warning: the following contains foul imaginings involving the sexual activities of a vile right-wing journalist. Fair warning*

So, if you watched Question Time last night, you no doubt saw the moment when that jowly fuck Littlejohn laid into some poor young fellow who had the temerity to come out with what he calls 'the lie' that he's 'the BNP's favourite columnist'.

I saw that moment after I'd had a long, relaxing bath with a Honey Bee bath bomb from Lush, then spent the better part of an hour rubbing Lemony Flutter into the rougher bits of my skin, attending to my regular facial skincare routine and doing my nails, and I'm glad I did, because this level of papmpering had fortunately left me relaxed enough that when I witnessed this outrage I merely went purple and spent the next ten minutes showering invective on Littlejohn, Dimbleby, the BBC, television in general and the astonishing number of foul racist pricks who apparently make up the politically-engaged population of Stevenage. If I was in a less relaxed state it's entirely possible that I would have exploded, and the morning's news reports would centre on how Washington had been destroyed by a teraton of thermonuclear rage.

Leaving aside the fact that it's a bit rich for Richard fucking Littlejohn to call other people liars, given that his entire ouevre consists of lie upon lie upon lie, what annoyed me was that I could predict, based on this little interaction, exactly what Littlejohn would do when he got back to his hotel room later. He would take off his ill-fitting suit and have a shower, then, without even properly towel-drying his lank, thinning hair, would throw himself down on his anonymous bed and set about wanking his tiny, shrivelling infra-cock into a froth of onanistic self-congratulation, endlessly frotting away at a mental image of himself as some kind of Chuck Norris-style hardman, a veritable rightwing cockney Terminator, all because he was rude to a callow youth. Big fucking man, Littlejohn. You're so fucking hard, you've got me quaking in my Airwalks. You're like Batman, baby.

Well, actually he's more like that scene in V for Vendetta where Roger Allam feels himself up in his wet room while looking at videos of his own Glenn Beck-style rants, except that Roger Allam has an odd sort of sexy old guy appeal while Littlejohn oozes all the raw sexuality of a festering dog turd. But, because I like playing Codename V to the Lewis Protheros of this world, and because I figure Littlejohn is such an egomaniac he probably spends hours sat in his Florida mansion googling his own name, so there's at least a chance he'll see this, I feel it's incumbent on me to sour Littlejohn's little victory-shuffle by reminding him of two people who threw him to the floor and made him their bitch.

First, Johann Hari: yes, he spends far too much of his time sticking up for his pal Julie Bindel out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, but you have to give him props for pwning Littletool all over the shop in the lions' den that is Sky News , to the extent, in fact, that Littleman felt the aerated husks of his testes withdrawing so far into his scrotal cavity he lost the ability to speak and had to cut to viewers' emails.

But the daddy of Littlejohn-pwnership is and always will be esteemed fabulist Mr William Self, who famously swashbuckled Littleprick into such a rhetorical corner he wound up declaring himself better than Tolstoy.

That sound you hear? That low, whipped-dog whimper you detect emanating from somewhere near the Florida Keys? That's Littlejohn, keening at the funeral of his hard-on. He could take to the streets of Miami and find a seventeen-year-old American boy to act the arse with, but, y'know, they carry guns and besides, he doesn't have an audience of idiots brainwashed by his right-wing bullshit who can back him up if things turn ugly. No, for Littlejohn it's another lonely night in his ex-pat mansion, blowing his nose into fistfuls of dishonestly-earned cash as he weeps for the fact that whenever he appears on TV and goes up against a grown-up, he ends up with his pants 'round his ankles and a bouquet of marigolds shoved up his arse.

Good night, Richard. Sleep well. Don't have nightmares.

*Edited: How could I forget Stewart Lee's awesome piss-take of Littlejohn and all the crap he stands for? Well, I did, but I've fixed it now. *

Why must we be surrounded by frickin' morons?

So you'll recall I was very pleased with this story, right? Particularly because it suggested that, in a world filled with idiots like Blanchard and Bindel, it showed that some people were behaving like decent humans and accepting the fact that we live in the future?

Well, fucking guess what.

Legally recognising that someone can have a gender outside the limited binary male/female division imperialist culture recognises would seem to be too hard for some people in Australia. Evidently it makes them choke on their Vegemite sarnies. How nice of John Hatzistergos  and his ridiculous chin to make sure Norrie May Welby doesn't have the freedom to go about interfering with these people and their dull suburban lives drinking XXXX, watching Aussie Rules Football and quietly wishing for an end to the slow, lingering, inceremental brain-death which is all they've known since birth. What a fine use of his public office. It isn't as if his time could be better used prosecuting, say, actual criminals. Yes, John, you and your chin spend your time going after gender outlaws instead, it's easier than taking on cases which might get you shot. You big-chinned prick.

The future is coming. There is no point standing in the way of a world of greater freedom and diversity for the sake of a few votes from the kind of rat-faced, barely-literate scum who can't count beyond the number two or think beyond the notion of 'us and them.' Some day, politicians will realise that, and we will all be able to breathe a deep sigh of relief. Until then, we just have to keep doing what we can in our own small way to widen peoples' understanding of issues like this, even in the face of obstacles like Kevin Rudd's uniformly appalling taste in ties, or John Hatzistergos's walking solar eclipse of a jawbone.

The Week in FAIL

Maybe it's something in the stars. Maybe the turn of the seasons, and the first signs of proper spring weather have made people friskier than usual. Maybe there's something in the water. Or maybe years of exposure to bad media have finally, irrevocably cracked the collective global brain. But if this week was marked out by any one thing, it was by masses, absolute steaming shitheaps, of FAIL. FAIL everywhere you look: here a FAIL, there a FAIL, everywhere a FAIL-FAIL. Want examples?

Well, for starters, there was the UK Government report which decided that it's apparently alright for teachers to be members of the fash. What a load of cock. The BNP are scum, usually with lists of criminal convictions as long as your arm, and they operate a policy of trying to intimidate people out of opposing them. I don't have kids; but if I did, I wouldn't want BNP members anywhere near them. Schools have a duty to help kids develop a sense of citizenship as members of a multicultural society, and the BNP are actively against that. As well as being actively against trans people, gay people, disabled people, and the existence of rape as a concept. If you hold views like that, you shouldn't be in schools. In fact, you shouldn't be in society. You should be in the woods, dangling from a tree with your own shit running down your legs while birds piss in your eyeballs. And that's what I think when I'm in a forgiving mood.

What else happened in the world of FAIL this week? Well, Lady Gaga finally put the kibosh on the rumours that she's (yawn) 'actually a man', and, ironically enough, did so in a manner which completely sucks up to THE man. It's okay, everyone! She doesn't have a dick after all! Lad-mag readers: you may now masturbate yourself safely into scrotal oblivion untroubled by complex thoughts about gender and sexuality! Rejoice! Let joy be unconfined! Whatever. I still like the tunes, but as far as the really cool kids are concerned, the Gaga moment is now over. She belongs to the people who drink in Wetherspoons now. She's dead to us.

(Oddly enough it was something of a week for the intersection between trans issues and annoying little pop-waifs. An entity that calls herself Kesha has been sharing her 'appreciation' of trans women with media outlets for...well, some reason or other. It's unfortunate  that she seems to have confused trans women with drag queens in her description, but I suppose her heart is sort of in the right place and it's nice to see someone in the media saying something positive. Still, though. Category error is a form of FAIL.)

But the top FAIL of this week has to be the ludicrously disproportionate response of some big beasts of UK poetry  to Todd Swift's complaints regarding the editorial selections for Roddy Lumsden's poetry anthology Identity Parade. I'm not entirely sure I agree with Swift regarding Lumsden's decisions, but I can respect the fact that, unlike some toilers in the poetic vineyard, he isn't afraid to put his career on the line by fronting up to the big boys. Said big boys did not exactly cover themselves in glory with their responses: Lumsden felt so confident in his selection that he called in a pal to deep-six Swift's impending review of the anthology, and Bloodaxe head honcho Neil Astley took to ripping the piss out of Swift on his Facebook page like a fourteen-year-old girl making an especially inept attempt at cyberbullying. Nice work, fellas. You've really countered the view of the UK poetry scene as cliquey, tribalist and backstabbing. FAIL.

And that was the week in FAIL. Now, here's Bill with the weather...

'The sniper's bullet is an extension of his eye: he kills with injurious vision.'

As a genderqueer person it always annoys me when some cis gay men engage in transmisogynistic (and indeed just plain old misogynistic) behaviour in a pathetic attempt to shore up their own self-esteem by kicking down at another marginalised group. Prolonged observation of one such specimen in the field led to the writing of this poem. I'm honestly not usually this vicious (I'm actually quite the sensitive little flower), but if I catch you doing something ignorant, bigoted and just plain wrong, then I will watch everything you do, note it down, and then create a portrait which shows your ugly side in such detail that it will ruin you. Or to put it another way: do not fuck with the bard.

Where's Darth Vader when you need him?

I've written before on this blog about how the nearest thing I have to an actual religion is a kind of half-arsed  relationship with the deities of the santeria pantheon, and I realise my sad devotion to this ancient religion does me no credit (though who got a phone call saying he had a new job after burning a candle in front of a statue of Eleggua? That'd be moi), but, like a not inconsiderable number of people oop North, I was raised Catholic. Went to church every sunday, did the John Paul II 'go-for-the-burn' aerobic workout of stand-up, sit-down, kneel-down, stand-up, watched a bloke in a fabulous frock prance about with a goblet of wine on stage, did the weird collective foot-worship thing on Good Friday (and seriously, what is that about? Jesus is humble. He doesn't want you all coming up and slobbering on his feet like he's some kind of sadistic toe queen. Even Mary Magdalen didn't go that far.), the whole shebang.

And the odd thing is, although I disagree with the Church a lot on doctrine, and especially, in those days, on the specific doctrine that said I had to get up early on a Sunday morning to freeze my arse off on a cold pew listening to St Paul's umpteenth letter to the Galaxians, I love the theatre of the church. I love the candles and the incense and the ridiculously camp clothes and the cathedrals and the carvings and the misericords (god damn do I love misericords, there's one in, I think, Salisbury Cathedral that's like a weird sci-fi wasp). It's so OTT, it's so gothic, it's so...well, let's be honest, so unnatural. I mean, even in the context of religious practice, which is not known for being massively logical, Catholicism (and High Church Anglicanism, its closeted younger sister) really is the high water-mark for religious silly behaviour. Whenenever I hear someone go on about Scientology, and how apparently Tom Cruise thinks we were actually all made by Q out of StarTrek or whatever, I just think: that's nothing, mate. I used to belong to a religion that believes a man can turn a piece of bread into a piece of human flesh because he has a magic cock. Beat that!

It makes perfect sense to me that someone like Oscar Wilde would have been drawn to Catholicism in the last days of his life, and not just because by that point, after the trial, imprisonment and scandal, he was a broken man, dying and looking for any desperate way to be rehabilitated. Wilde's whole aesthetic was based on artifice and paradox, on the rejection of any notion of a 'natural' order in favour of a carefully cultivated mystique. The Catholic church has that in spades. Gold spades, in fact, with ruby-encrusted handles, each containing a fragment of the True Cross and the cock-bone of Saint Nicodemus the Priapic.

Which is why I find it absolutely hilarious when people like the Holy See's current incumbent, Papa Benny, start going on about 'natural law', as he has been lately. And which 'natural law' is it he's keen to defend? Is it the 'natural law' of science which says you can't turn bread into flesh and wine into blood no matter how many times you wave your hands about and shout the Latin equivalent of 'izzy-wizzy-let's-get-busy'? Is it the 'natural law' of politics which rubs its chin pointedly and goes 'come off it, mate' when told that God hirself just happened to choose exactly the Papal candidate the last Pope was keen should succeed? Is it the 'natural law' of character, which says no man is infallible, no matter how fantastic his robe looks in a certain light? Or maybe it's the natural law of morality, which might say, hmm, I dunno, that if you fucking colluded in the systematic cover-up of ongoing child abuse, you ought to hang your head in shame and not open your liar's mouth to join in when decent people start discussing ethical issues?

Of course not, silly! What the erstwhile Hitler Youth member is actually speaking out to defend as 'natural law' is the church's right to discriminate against people on the grounds that they're gay or trans. That's right - Papa Ratso heads up an organisation which protected paedophiles for years, but he's verdammt if he's going to have any gays or trans people in his church. Nein!

Here are three excellent pieces on the frock-wearing fundamentalist's weird obsession with keeping LGBT people from taking part in the fun, from Cheryl Morgan, Anton Vowl and Helen at Bird of Paradox. I'd also recommend reading the previous post at BoP, because it shows that Il Papa isn't just running his mouth off about this, but the Vatican are still up to their old tricks of trying to tell secular nations what to do on the basis of their bizarro dogma.

Fortunately, as Cheryl points out, there are a lot of religious folk who aren't as bigoted as Benny the Bastard, thank god. But if you do find yourself on the receiving end of any intolerance from members of the priesthood in the coming week, do what I do: give them a good long look, raise an eyebrow, and say 'I'm not natural? You worship a zombie, wear an outfit that Liberace would reject as 'a bit much, to be honest', hang around exclusively with a bunch of other guys and call an old ex-Nazi 'daddy', and I'm the one who's not natural? I'm not really 100% sure you can claim the moral high ground on this one, love.'

Just don't be a dick, Stephen

I did something today which makes me a little bit more like a Mail reader. I complained about a programme on the BBC. Seriously, I went on their complaints page and filled out the form and everything.

What stops me transforming into the kind of person who sticks pins in a doll of Jonathan Ross and compulsively writes 'Harperson' in the mistaken belief that it's a genuinely hilarious pop at polidigob corridigibob gawn maaaaaaaad, rat-fans, was the fact that I was complaining about this.

I'm ashamed to say that I held off on complaining for a couple of days, rather than getting after it straight away like I did with Brooklyn's champion gurner Letterman, because I actually quite like the BBC, I'm aware it's under threat from the Mail-reading brigade and the Murdoch family and their mates in the Tory party...but feck it: they fucked up, big-time, and they aired a segment which reinforced the bullshit 'trans panic' defence and made fun of one of the most marginalised groups in society. That's a major, major fail, and the fact that it comes from an organisation I generally, genuinely, trust, love and respect is no excuse to go easy on them. If anything it's a reason to be more strict with them because we know that the BBC can be, and has been, held to account, so we can actually make a difference, rather than the fart-in-a-force-10 which complaining about the Daily Mail is, given that it's editor is the chair of the Press Complaints Commission.

So here's that complaints page link again. Please do contact the BBC, tell them they've fucked up, tell them why. And with any luck - while we've still got a national public service broadcaster which does pay genuine attention to us - there's a chance that the BBC's insensitivity in this case might lead to an apology which becomes a teachable moment in letting the vast audience QI enjoys know that mocking peoples' gender identity and reinforcing prejudice which harms the most vulnerable people in society for cheap, schoolboyish 'humour' is not OK, no matter who you are.

Just don't be a dick, David.

I'm back, and unfortunately people continue to act like pricks and show no sense of maturity, intelligence or social awareness, thus requiring me to dress them down via the puny medium of my pathetic little poetry blog.

The latest candidate for my gnat-sized attack is concertina-faced woman-exploiter David 'people still watch me' Letterman, who decided this week that Barack Obama's historic decision to appoint a trans woman to a position of office was a suitable subject for a cheap laugh.

This 'joke' is pretty unfunny when you consider that trans women are one of the most vulnerable sectors of the US population, and that people who murder trans women often invoke the bullshit trans panic defense and by making a joke like this, Letterman helps to create an environment in which freaking out over the fact that a woman is trans is acceptable.

Fortunately, CBS have a feedback page where you can complain about the negative effects of the fast-fading funnyman's failure to understand how proper jokes work. I've done it, and I urge you to do so too. As the pathetic Sachsgate affair in the UK proved, TV companies do have to listen to complaints: and I'd argue that helping to create a climate which normalises violence against marginalised people is a more serious crime than taking the piss out of Manuel from Fawlty Towers.