'Goodnight silver star, goodnight angel eyes...'

I always feel a little ambiguous about taking the 'what I did yesterday' approach to blogging. For one thing, it seems to me that it intrudes a bit too obviously into the kind of territory better covered by Twitter; for another, I think it incumbent on bloggers to give a certain amount of bang for their (metaphorical) buck. True, I follow quite a few blogs by established writers which do simply give the reader an insight into the mundane details of their lives; but the reason for that is those writers are already people whose work I follow in other fields. Finding out what a novelist or poet I like is up to when they're not writing the books I buy is an easter egg, not the main point of my following them. I'm under no illusion that this blog is in a similarly comfortable position: anyone reading these words is presumably here because they like the blog itself, so I feel honour-bound to give them something more than an update on my activities when they come here.

Having said all that, I'm going through one of those phases in my writing life when my urge to stay in and write long complex posts, or labour away at poems for hours, goes into abeyance, and I instead revel in the opportunity to get out of the house and either perform myself or watch other people. My writing always seems to function in this in-out cycle: stay at home, internalise, brood, produce; then get out, talk, mingle, share. Of course, because I am actually going out more, and spending less time brooding, this means, I suppose, that the kind of lengthy, impassioned rants which readers are used to tend not to get written. On the other hand, given the all-encompassing nature of the kyriarchy, it's inevitably the case that if I myself can't get it together to skewer the injustices, I'll always be able to point you in the direction of people who can. Time, then, for another edition of that perenially popular feature, The Week in FAIL.

The biggest and most noteworthy FAIL of the week came from Sunday Times columnist and occassional baboon-murderer AA Gill, who demonstrated his trademark wit and savoir-faire by referring to horse-racing pundit and lesbian Clare Balding as a 'dyke on a bike.' Balding, not unreasonably, took offence at this legitimisation of a rather hateful slur, and complained: whereupon she received a staggeringly ill-mannered and boorish reply from Sunday Times editor John Witherow saying, essentially, that because Balding hadn't been lucky enough to have been born straight, she should basically shut up and take her lumps. At which point Balding decided to go public and allow everyone to see the hatefulness of Witheredcock's response for themselves (I'm sure Witherow won't mind my little jape with his surname. What with him having such a bang-on sense of humour and all. Oh, and having a penis so tiny and shrivelled it looks like a sun-dried tomato that's been left to go off on the windowsill of a house by the sewage works over the course of a particularly torrid summer. Still, serve him right for not having a privileged status, eh?)

Witherow's defence of Gill's unthinking homophobia suggests to me that, whatever David Cameron might say in his foreword to the Independent on Sunday's new Pink List (of which more in a coming post), there are sections of the right in this country who feel empowered, now that an essentially Tory government is in charge again, to behave towards those who lack their privileges with a staggering lack of basic decency and cloak it as a bold stand in defence of the misunderstood white male and Jeremy Clarkson's god-given right to wear badly-fitting trousers and have shit hair. One swallow doesn't make a summer, it's true; but then, as the Tabloid Watch blog points out, Gill's gaffe forms part of an ongoing trend of legitimising name-calling towards LGBTQ people in the media.

Despite what people like Witherednob might say, this is not about political correctness. It is not just an academic matter, and it is not about creating 'non-jobs' in council diversity departments. This stuff matters because it affects people at street level, and makes their lives a misery. The most moving thing I read this weekend was this blog from Helen at Bird of Paradox, about the suffering caused by being referred to as a 'tranny' and dehumanised as an 'it' rather than a real person, by a couple of people who probably eagerly lap up the Sun's homophobic headlines. If I had the power to do so I'd like to get those fuckwits, and the pricks who come up with headlines like 'Bender it like Beckham' and think calling Louie Spence 'Louise' is the height of sophisticated wit, into a very small room and bang their heads repeatedly against a stone slab engraved with Helen's words:

'It’s happened to me so often that it’s gone beyond being just upsetting. It fucking hurts. It hurts like hell. It makes me want to lock myself in the house and never leave it again. It makes me wish I lived somewhere I never had to interact with another cis person ever again. Increasingly it feeds my gathering depression and yes, I’ll say it: it makes me wish I was dead.'

There you have it, laid out in black and white. I doubt if Jeremy Clarkson goes home after yet another joke about his bad fashion choices and feels like locking himself in one of his big shiny penis substitutes, running a plastic pipe from the injection-moulded exhaust, turning on the powerful V6 engine and going from consciousness to cadaverdom in less than sixty seconds. But that's precisely because at the end of the day Clarkson can go home to a big house full of ridiculous overgrown boys' toys, to a relationship that is accepted by society, and to a world where he is the majority, and where any abuse he receives in the streets is hardly going to make a dent. But for those who lack Clarkson's privileged status, every slur is like a bullet, a reminder that you do not belong, that you are not in the majority, that there will always be people who hold you to a misogynistic ideal of femininity or a heteronormative form of masculinity; that there are people out there who will try to kill you because you don't conform; that, worse, there are people who won't give a shit; and, worst of all, there are people who will defend the people who make you feel this way because it's just a joke, innit?

My primary school teacher used to say that it isn't a joke if you're the only one who's laughing. It used to amaze me that an awful lot of people in the media still don't understand that. These days, it only disappoints me. And it makes me think that maybe, just maybe, the death of the English newspaper and the kind of professional scum who make a living writing for it might not be such an awful thing.

Betrayed

The new series of Graham Linehan's The It Crowd starts this Friday. But even though I've loved Linehan's work since Father Ted, I won't be watching. (Trigger warning: article discusses transmisogyny and implicit support of 'trans panic' violence)

Graham Linehan is one of the most gifted sitcom writers in British TV history. As the writer of Father Ted and Black Books, he created the in-jokes of my generation of young British comedy-geeks. Mention My Lovely Horse, Dougal's diagram, or Bernard Black's 'lolly' made of frozen wine to anyone around my age and you'll get a wry smile or a laugh of recognition. I say all this at the beginning of this piece not because I do not come to bury Linehan, but because I want it to be understood that what I'm going to say later comes from a sense of deep disappointment and betrayal.

Recently, having been introduced to it by some very good friends of mine, I got into Linehan's next series, The IT Crowd. This series is best described as Black Books with computers. It has the same main three characters, described by one of the other cast members as 'a nerd, a woman, and a man from Ireland,' all of whom are isolated from the 'normal' world by a particular location (a bookshop in one series, a basement IT department in the other). And the first two series, and the first few episodes of season three, are brilliant. One of the season three episodes, 'Are We Not Men?' was one of my favourite pieces of TV in years. In the episode, lovable geeks Moss and Roy learn how to speak 'like real men' from a website, become friends with a bunch of football-loving cockney geezers, witness a robbery and have to flee for their lives. To a person like me, who has always struggled to speak the Tongue of Bloke, this episode was fantastic. I loved it both for its humour and its insightful take on gender stereotyping.

Then I watched episode four, 'The Speech', and any admiration for Linehan's humour and nuanced view of gender politics went out the window. 'The Speech', you see, has a long subplot featuring one of the other characters in the show, sleazy boss Douglas Denholm (played to perfection by master of the ridiculous, booming overstatement, Matt Berry). In this story, Douglas romances Emma, a business journalist sent to report on him, and in the course of the episode he discovers she's a trans woman. Douglas at first seems bothered not a jot by her telling him she 'used to be a man' (would a trans woman actually say it that way? I doubt it) and they form a close relationship, conveyed by a 'hilarious' montage of both Douglas and Emma watching the darts, gorging on pizza, drinking pints and so on...because you see, she's really a man! Ah, hilarious. Did we not just have an entire episode devoted to debunking lazy gender stereotyping?

But it gets worse. Douglas reveals en passant that he thought Emma said she 'came from Iran'. When Emma reveals what she actually said, Douglas visibly shivers and goes into a long drawn-out 'trans panic' response, which ends with a scene in which Douglas (who, it has been established early in the series, is actually a rather weak, craven person) beats Emma unconscious. A scene which ends with a long, lingering shot of Emma's unconscious body. And a scene which plays the whole beating for laughs.

Recently, in this blog, I wrote about the case of Andrea Waddell, a trans woman killed by a cis man in circumstances rather like those of Douglas and Emma, but whose fate was far from funny. What happened to Andrea is far from an isolated case. Trans people are often marginalised by a society which treats them as, at best, the butt of a joke (see my recent post on 'light-hearted' cissexist slurs) and at worst as freaks or gender criminals out to deceive 'normal' cis gender men and women. The reason an event like the Trans Day of Remembrance exists is because trans people are at a much higher risk of violence, and a terrifyingly higher risk of murder, than cis people. In these circumstances, I find it hard to laugh at a wacky slapstick scene which shows the brutal beating of a trans woman.

Actually, I'd find it hard to laugh if it was a cis woman too...but of course, Linehan wouldn't dare have a scene where Douglas assaults a cis woman for TEH LULZ. You have to wonder: is his making a joke out of a trans woman being beaten (a) a sign he hates trans people, (b) a sign he just doesn't really care about them or (c) a sign that he secretly wanted to just do a scene where a girl got the shit kicked out of her, and making her a trans girl gave him the perfect excuse? Either way, it shines a disturbing light on the real Graham Linehan. And that's why I can't watch the new series of The IT Crowd, or any of the other episodes now; it's why I'm thinking of getting rid of my Black Books DVDS, and taking the complete Father Ted box set off my Amazon wishlist. Because Graham Linehan, who I genuinely thought of as a comedy genius, turns out to be the kind of immature wanker who giggles over 'women who used to be men' and thinks beating up women is funny. I've seen people like that. I've met people like that. And they're always the enemy, however many jokes they can come out with.

Late-breaking FAIL: webcomic creator in cissupremacist quiz error

I decided recently that I should apply for membership of the British Psychological Society. I have a valid degree to apply for graduate membership, and the recent business at the APA  over the DSM-V categorisation of Gender Incongruence shows that psychology, as a science, needs people who can think beyond the binary. Ironically, one of my favourite webcomics has recently provided an indication of why this is the case.

XKCD is a webcomic produced by Randall Munroe. Munroe comes from a scientific background, having worked as a contractor for NASA, and often includes geeky, science-based humour in the strip. He's also currently conducting some kind of research into colour blindness, and has included a survey on colour-blindness on his site.

If you've been following this blog awhile, you'll have worked out what's annoyed me. It's this question:

Do you have a Y chromosome?
If unsure, select "Yes" if you are physically male and "No" if you are physically female. If you have had SRS, please respond for your sex at birth. This question is relevant to the genetics of colorblindness.
 
What's particularly annoying about this is the fact that Munroe is clearly trying to be gender-inclusive, bless him. And I can sort of see why you might want to know the birth gender of people who are colour-blind, if you're studying the genetics of the condition. But...the fail. It burns.
 
It burns for a lot of reasons. Mainly because it's more complicated than that. Munroe doesn't allow for intersex people: by reducing 'physical maleness' to the matter of having a Y-chromosome, he excludes men with Klinefelter's syndrome (on which note check out Helen from Bird of Paradox's post about KS Awareness Week), who have a Y chromosome, it's true, but also have an extra X chromosome, and are less 'physically male' than the generic-model XY-guy. He excludes those people with tetragametic chimerism who can have XX and XY chromosome structures in different parts of their bodies. And he is of course tremendously hurtful to trans people by reducing the issue of their gender to what chromosomes they were born with.
 
I don't think that this was deliberate on Munroe's part. He's mentioned people who've had SRS, he's tried to frame the question not as 'are you male or female?' but 'do you have a Y-chromosome?' He's tried. This isn't the kind of Cisfail the Guardian, say, engage in when they run columns about trans people and queerness by folk like Julie Bindel or Bea Campbell. But he's got the whole thing bloody wrong. Not just ethically, in fact, but methodologically.
 
Because the thing is, doing a survey on the internet, in which anyone can take part, is a lousy way to carry out research. You'll get lots of responses, but how do you know those responses are the same people? How do you know which participants make up your sample? The data at the start of the survey are meaningless because - and I'm gonna rock you in your socks here, people - the internet lies. Anyone (i.e. me) could go on Munroe's survey, and claim to be, say, a colourblind Frenchwoman in possession of a genuine Y-chromosome, and then proceed to answer the survey by, say, giving the colours increasingly ridiculous names. This happens when you do research. One of my old psych lecturers said that psychology experiments are tainted, for the most part, because the samples they usually use are made up of psychology students, and usually most of those students will either (a) be nice students trying to 'help' you get the result you 'want' or (b) evil little feckers (i.e. me, again) deliberately trying to give answers which will give you the result you don't 'want.' So, y'know, doing a survey on the internet in which anyone can participate is methodologically unsound from the get-go. So why ask an offensive question in the first place?
 
It'll get lots more responses, that's certain. But a more tightly controlled research project carried out among a smaller participant population would yield better quality data from participants who could be much better described. As it is, Munroe's survey is basically an open invitation to people to lie about their gender, about whether or not they're colourblind, about what country they're from (and we've noticed the annoying 'Tell us your native language, but answer questions in English' question, haven't we?) and so on, and then to 'answer' the survey by calling the colours things like 'Jan Vermeer's Pannetone Cyclotron', 'Grrr-nommy-nomminy' and 'the mongspoddler'. Not that I would endorse such behaviour (which may or may not have been carried out by me).
 
The fact is that, frankly, trans people, as much as we might wish it otherwise,  are such a statistically small section of the population (yes, even on the internet) that, unless you're actually doing research on the trans community (and research in such a sensitive area should come with very specialised ethical requirements), it isn't worth controlling for the possibility of trans men and women answering your survey. Munroe could easily get away with asking the question 'Are you male or female?' safe in the knowledge that most of his results will come from cis people, and that any statistical patterns relating to biological gender will be easily apparent in the data. To get into discussion of chromosomes, to talk of being 'physically male' or 'physically female' and to ask trans people to give their birth gender (therefore reminding them of their status in some bigots' eyes as not real women or men, with all the traumatic memories that will trigger) is both unnecessary and irresponsible. It's bad science, in both senses of the word. And, coming from the creator of a strip who's so often found humour in mocking other peoples' scientific errors, it's a depressing thing to see.
 
As any scientist will tell you, the biggest part of the job is asking the right questions. Munroe has tried to ask the right question in his survey, but he's tried too hard: and when he finds himself toiling through page after page of deliberately buggered-up results, he'll only have himself to blame.