Is....*crackle* is...is this thing on?

Forgive my absence, darlings, but some kind of internet outage has left Stately Fish Manor without broadband for the past couple of days. To compound the problem, yesterday night my Blackberry died and for the past eighteen hours I have been forced to use the browser on my Kindle, which may be a great device for reading (and purchasing [and driving yourself deeper into penury each day by purchasing]) e-books, but which felt marginally worse for browsing Twitter and Gmail than it would have been were I to try and browse those same social networking sites by using the green screen PCs I first learned to use e-mail on at Northumbria Uni in 1996.The Kindle browser sucks, basically, and frankly I deserve counselling or medication or a massage for having had to suffer through using it. Jeff Bezos can lick my bits.

Anyway. The bitch is back. And the bitch will be reading at Newcastle's glamorous Centurion Bar on the 6th of December at the launch for By Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept, the new anthology of poems inspired by the writing of Elizabeth Smart which is being published by Red Squirrel Press. My poem 'The Smiling Animal at His Appointed Hour', which is about the murder of Andrea Waddell, will appear in the anthology. A small press poetry anthology isn't exactly the cenotaph, but I feel proud to have gotten a small acknowledgement of the injustice of Andrea's murder down for posterity, especially this close to the Transgender Day of Remembrance. It isn't much. It isn't enough. But it's something.

We're Number One, So Why Try Harder?

It would seem that I myself am greatly privileged in a way I did not expect, because apparently, according to the kind of bullshit survey that occassionally makes the local papers, the place where I work is the best place to work in my entire region.

Hmmm. Well, I suppose these things are a matter of opinion, and I suppose for the (privileged) majority, a workplace like mine is pretty good; but personally, there are a lot of aspects of the place that make me, personally, more than a little uncomfortable. But I have my generous hat on right now, and I'm going to assume these things are more a result of the bullshit work culture that currently prevails in this country, rather than failings specific to my place of work.

Who knows? Your workplace may well have won some award or other in its own region. Hell, it at least has to have Investors in People status, right? Although, in my experience, any company that doesn't actively dismember its employees can get that one, and even if dismembering did occur they could probably scrape through as long as they only did it to a certain percentage of staff and made sure it was done in a caring way. Put it this way: I've worked in some shitholes, and they all had Investors in People status. Go figure.

Whatever awards your place of incarceration  work has under its belt, you can bet it touts them proudly, because endless self-cheerleading is one of the more nauseating features of the modern business culture, from the executives repeating their affirmations to each other as they brush their teeth in the morning to the press releases explaining breathlessly how Fuckthepoor.com (a division of PlanetRape Incorporated) is proud to give something back to the community by sponsoring the First Annual Bjorn Lomborg Greenwashing Prize. If you want a thorough overview of how this relentless positivity has fucked everything up, I can't recommend the sobering wisdom of Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die enough.

But if you want a quicker, more bracing hit of cynicism to go with your morning cornflakes before you head off to the salt mines of late capitalism, you could always check out the new entry on my Write Out Loud blog.

'Between violence and silently seething, between my fist and my Polyanna flower...'

First things first. Check out the magnificent Laurie Penny's newest blog over at the equally magisterial New Statesman website.

Next, familiarise yourself with the points about status made in this Wired Article about the effects of stress on the human immune system and life expectancy (curtsy in the direction of Lilith von Fraumench, who first brought said story to my attention on Twitter.

Next, equip yourself with a copy of Mind Bombs by Garrick Alder, a book I heartily recommend for a variety of reasons, one of which is this gem of a fact based on a survey by Mary Shaw of Bristol University:

'The suicide rate is higher in deprived areas than in prosperous ones. For some inexplicable reason, the poor seem to suffer from fatal depression...Herefordshire reported only four suicides between 1991 and 1996, compared to 208 in Manchester during the same period.' 

The facts are in and the facts are these: kyriarchy kills. Wherever there are disparities in status, those inequalities make the people on the receiving end sicker, weaker, and fatally miserable.  They shorten lives either through the slow attrition of stress effects on the nervous and immune systems, or by making it more likely that someone will be pushed to the point where they see no other option but to kill themselves.

Conversely, more equal societies save lives - a fact amply demonstrated by The Spirit Level, a book which, by an astonishing coincidence, has came under sustained attack by right-wing demagogues just at the precise moment when a government that seems hell-bent on increasing inequality to Victorian levels is fucking the country without benefit of butter.

I'm going to say this: the only reason you could possibly have for opposing greater equality (and here I'm not talking merely about equality between economic classes but between abled and disabled people, people of different ethnicities, people of differing gender identities, sexualities, etc etc), given the fatal consequences of an unequal system, is that you're doing alright from it. Other people may be dying but hey, you're alright, Jack (a phrase which was often used by right-wing moralists to bash union members in the fifties - how bitterly amusing that modern exponents of the attitude are exactly the type who huffed and puffed when it was poorer people who were doing okay). And if that's your attitude, then I find you morally and, frankly, physically repugnant.

And I'm brutally aware that I do okay from this system. I'm white, I'm reasonably able-bodied (though mentally often crippled by low self-esteem, depression, social phobia, and a history of self-harm and eating disorders), and, while I might occassionally court harassment for my genderqueer antics, I run nothing like the kind of horiffic risks faced by trans women, or a lot of cis women for that matter. But I am trying, in my own way, to make a more equal system; and I'm not engaged in defending the tapestry of fuckery just because, from where I'm standing, it looks kinda pretty.

The kyriarchy kills. If you defend it, you have blood on your hands. And more and more people are realising that, and getting sick of suffering at your bloodstained fingers.

You know what happens next.

I Blame Glee

I blame Glee. I do. It's the only explanation that makes sense. Really, it's absolutely the only thing that can possibly explain the latest ruse on the part of Itawamba School District in their ongoing battle against both lesbian student Constance Mcmillen and the notion of basic human decency. Someone at the District has been watching too much Glee, probably at the same time as their weekly Oxycontin binge, and so, during the latest meeting of the Emergency Keep Out The Gays Committee, this member of staff, high on a cocktail of power ballads and hillbilly heroin, pipes up with:

'Like, why don't we just hold a fake prom?'

Because that's what they actually did. Held a fake prom to which Constance and her friends were invited, while the rest of the students partied the night away elsewhere. Like I say, I can only blame Glee - except that wouldn't really cut it, because even Sue Sylvester would regard this plan as somewhat outlandish. In fact, frankly, a Scooby Doo villain would take one look at this 'fake prom' idea and say 'for fuck's sake, you're not serious, are you? I mean, pretending to be a headless horseman haunting the school grounds might just about work with a decent special effects budget, but expecting to be able to hold an entire other prom without one person in the whole town blowing the gaff, pfffft, yeah right, don't even bother putting petrol in the Mystery Machine because Scrappy Doo could solve this fucker. You pesky meddling twats.'

And yet that's what Fulton High School and the Itawamba School District have been reduced to. And because of that, every single member of staff at that school, and every single member of that school district, should be fired immediately without pay, and be disbarred from having anything to do with education for the rest of their lives. This kind of excuse is not the kind of thing sane, rational adults do. This is the kind of thing the dumb husband does in a stupid American sitcom when he realises he's forgotten his wife's birthday. But real life isn't like that. Forget your wife's birthday and it doesn't matter how much shenanigating you engage in putting clocks back, gluing calendar pages back on and replacing every single copy of the local newspaper with yesterday's edition, you've dug your way into a vast pit of humiliation so deep that any attempt you make to dig yourself out short of the most grovelling, self-abasing, Maoist-self-criticism level of apology will merely strip you of what little dignity you have left.

This is the level of behaviour to which Fulton and Itawamba have been reduced. If this were a sitcom or a straight-to-DVD comedy movie they'd be played by Kevin James, and the closing scene would feature them frantically running around the party trying to convince Constance and her mates that what appears to be a teenage high school prom is in fact the annual meeting of the National Arab-American Proctologists Association (because Rob Schneider needs a chance to play more racist stereotypes), and it would all end with a ridiculous moment where Rob Schneider, dressed in a Saudi Prince's outfit, dry-humps James on a bucking bronco in a pool full of jello, and James would say something like 'I really made myself look like an ass this time!' and it would all be hilarious. And, you know, that's what it is. Hilarious.

Until you remember that these people are meant to be adults, they are meant to be teachers, and their bigotry and their intolerance and their craven refusal to act like grown-ups and admit they were wrong have ruined the biggest night of a young woman's life. That's when it stops looking hilarious and starts looking, frankly, pathetic.

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...

'It's not Number One who will come out alive: it's the freak in the corner with his eyes on fire.'

The ever-reliable Charlie Brooker speaks some Strong Truth in his TV review for today's Grauniad: 'One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people.' (emphasis mine)

A sore tragedy indeed, and one to which I've been giving a lot of thought in the past few weeks. Having found myself unemployed at the end of last year, then making the rounds of job interviews at various places, before securing a job in my current workplace and trying to fit in (and then deciding not to bother trying to fit in) with a new bunch of people, I've been thinking about that elusive beast we call 'confidence' or 'self-esteem' or 'self-worth', or whatever. You know the kind of thing I mean: the can-do, go-getting, utterly sickening attitude of the kinds of prick (and very often the kind of person displaying this behaviour is in possession of a prick, and disgustingly comfortable being so) who truly, honestly believe there's nothing they can't do. The kind of scumbag who winds up on the Apprentice or the other tawdry 'reality' programmes in which gangs of gurning halfwits are pressed into performing moronic tasks for the amusement of Space Raider-chomping never-weres. Those feckers.

The weird thing I've noticed is that, whether on reality TV or in the global marketplace (remember all those smug assurances that the credit bubble wouldn't burst for another billion years?), the confident bastards always fail. This shouldn't be that surprising, psychologically speaking. And it hasn't been surprising for over twenty years. In 1989, Cornell University psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning conducted research which proves, essentially, that the more confident you are of being able to perform a task effectively, the more likely you are to fail. Conversely, truly effective people usually underestimate their performance. Other research has found that trying to boost peoples' self-esteem has no effect on academic improvement, and that employing people with high self-esteem can often be a risky decision because, when their ego is threatened, they usually fuck up. The evidence is there, and has been there for two decades, that recruiting and promoting people on the basis of their being super-mega-confident is an incredibly stupid thing to do. And yet, we continue to live in a world that, as I said yesterday, rewards confidence over actual achievement. Why?

Well, one reason is probably that people in the business world have a very poor understanding of genuine psychology. It amused the hell out of me, during training at my new place, to have to answer yet another bloody VAK questionnaire based on the now mostly discredited pseudo-science of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, but the lack of willingness on the part of business to use genuine personality measures in categorising their staff is a pretty serious matter. If you can't classify staff properly you risk recruiting the wrong people, deploying those people to the wrong areas and, ultimately failing spectacularly, dragging your profits, and maybe even your company, down in flames. But valid and reliable personality measures are difficult to administer. You need qualified technicians to administer and interpret them. They take a while to complete. You need to pay for the tests, and you need to pay the technicians for their hard work as well. This is discouraging to many businesses, but the bald fact is that you get what you pay for. Most personality measures used by companies today are basically no more valid or reliable than a Cosmo questionnaire. If you answered mostly As, Bs or Cs, you're an idiot and your company is fucked.

There is, of course, another reason why people in privileged positions continue to reward confidence, though, and that reason is privilege itself. Basically, the more privileged you are, the more confident you are likely to feel. Remember that privilege can take many forms. Men have privilege over women; cis people have privilege over trans people; whites have privilege over people from other races; able-bodied people have privilege over disabled people, and so on. These oppressions can and do intersect, and people who lack privilege in one way may still have privilege over other groups, and may still abuse it (a good example of this would be the way a lot of cis gay people, who lack hetero privilege, are perfectly happy to exert privilege over trans people, often in hateful and exclusionary ways).

When you look at people in the top positions in industry, you see that, despite decades of equality activism, they still tend to be able-bodied, cis gender, heterosexual caucasian males. Despite the bleatings of the Daily Mail tendency, the archetypal black lesbian in a wheelchair decidedly does not get it all her own way (though if I worked in recruitment I'd hire a black lesbian in a wheelchair in a heartbeat. Imagine having to contend with racism and homophobia and ableism on a daily basis. She'd be hard as fucking nails.). And the reason for this is that we recruit, especially for higher-level positions, on the basis of confidence. And not just confidence in job interviews, but in the business environment. In the office. At the social events. At the squash club. Down the pub. We hire and promote people who exude confidence, who seem like 'good blokes' and walk with a swagger (though we only reward swaggering in people who are like us. Swagger as a member of a minority group and just wait to be accused of being 'uppity'. It won't take long.).

And by rewarding confidence, we reward privilege. People who lack privilege, people who are marginalised by society, have to contend with being reminded of their lack of privilege on a daily basis. (Don't believe me? Think I'm being needlessly 'politically correct'? Read The Invisible Knapsack, or one of its many variants unpacking heterosexual, cis or other forms of privilege.) You are constantly told, in ways both subtle and unsubtle, that you don't belong. That you aren't worthy. This is bound to make it harder to feel confident in yourself. Conversely, if you are privileged, the world goes out of its way to reinforce your confidence. Most of the rich, famous, celebrated people look like you. You can drink where you want, you can sit anywhere you want on the bus, you have no problem flagging down a cab. This is bound to make you feel more confident in yourself.

To put it bluntly, then: rewarding confidence is a way in which privileged people can reward and promote each other on the basis of privilege, without seeming to. They themselves may not even be conscious that they're doing it. But it's discrimination all the same. It's also actively harmful to businesses, because confident people are more likely to fuck up; and, because people with lower self-esteem actually seem to do better in challenging situations, it actually leads to us ignoring a vast wealth of ability, skills and experience which could help pull us out of the economic hellhole smug, confident, privileged people have dragged us all into. It needs to stop.

I'm not holding my breath, though. And, before I go, one final word on self-esteem. There is a way in which those of us who lack privilege can make our self-esteem stronger than that of the privileged. Most privileged people derive their self-esteem from their position in the hierarchy, from being 'top of the heap.' This is not a very strong basis on which to build your self-esteem, and that's why, as in the Baumeister paper I linked to above, it basically crumbles and leads to EPIC FAIL when it encounters an ego threat. If you lack privilege on one axis of the kyriarchy but have it on another, you could follow the 'kiss up, kick down' strategy of picking on groups below you, but this still leads to the same weakness: as soon as you encounter ego threat, you'll fuck up. Or, you could do the smart thing, and base your self-esteem not on your hierarchical position, but on your achievements. Doing this means you have a firmer, more realistic basis on which to build your self-confidence, which gives you a better chance of handling ego-threat scenarios. Privileged people don't like to do this because it's hard work and, hey, why bother when you can just sneer at the outcasts? But it pays dividends when the chips are down. And it's one way in which people who lack privilege have a head-start, because if you base your self-esteem on achievements rather than position, by negotiating the daily challenges of a world which tries to disadvantage you in a million different ways, you've already achieved something great.

And, in facing a world which rewards privilege and marginalises those who lack it, it's important to keep your self-confidence up as an act of resistance to the kyriarchy. And if you are privileged, then you could maybe stop repeating your affirmations into the mirror and listen to the quiet, freakish people in the corner of the office for a change. They might have some ideas of a little more relevance to your business than what England need to do to win the world cup, or what you'd like to do to Cheryl Cole now she's single again. To sum it up: for the marginalised, self-esteem management is self-defence; for the privileged, self-aggrandisation is self-abuse. And we all know what happens when you do too much of that.

Another Invented Disease

'Girls can cut their hair short...wear shirts and things...because it's okay to look like a boy. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think being a girl is degrading.' - Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden (by way, I freely admit, of Madonna's 'What It Feels Like For a Girl')

We haven't talked about Psychology on here in a while; I mean Psychology as a science, rather than the areas in which other posts might trespass on ideas from the discipline. Which is something I really ought to rectify, because all the big beasts of the Psych world are currently getting together, emitting a series of low bass rumbles and high-pitched yammers at each other, and in the process secreting a new edition of the Psychologists' 'Bible', the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, 5th Edition  or, to give it it's catchy and ever so slightly fetishy acronym, DSM-V.

I have a copy of DSM-IV on my bookshelf at home, acquired when I was studying Psychology at Sunderland University. It's an interesting book. It has a chequered history. For a long time, Psychologists listed 'homosexuality' as a disease in previous editions of the Manual - DSM-IV is, I think, the first edition which didn't, after a long and protracted campaign. Shamefully, one of the people involved in that campaign was Ron Gold, who, though he did good work on that issue, later ossified into yet another trans-hating cisgay man, spewing crap about how trans people don't really exist on sites like the Bilerico project (I'm not linking to Gold; hateful, cowardly betrayers of liberty will get no through-traffic from this site. Instead, because ze's sound, intelligent, thoughtful and, let's face it, quite the looker, have a gander at Tobi Hill-Meyer's Bilerico columns instead).

DSM-IV also, of course, includes the controversial condition 'Gender Identity Disorder'. Controversial not only because pricks like Gold think it doesn't exist (and even bigger oxygen-thieves like Julie Bindel apparently genuinely believe it was invented as a conspiracy by evil Psychlons to try and trap us all in some Mad Men 50s fantasy world), but also because many trans people resent the idea that they have a 'disorder'. In that respect some good work is being done in the new DSM, in that GID will be replaced with the much more open category of 'Gender Incongruence' which will, quite importantly, be regarded as a curable condition: people who suffer gender incongruence will be considered cured when they have SRS to realign their physical gender with their felt gender. Fair enough.

Of course, as the saying goes, nothing truly brilliant was ever designed by committee and so, of course, the inevitable academic horse-trading on these things means that, in order to satisfy crawling half-humans like Ray Blanchard, - a man so fucking anal that he decided the condition of wanting to have sex with adult humans needed to be technically codified in the same way as a paraphilia, for Satan's sake - we're also getting some rather hateful new syndromes tagged in on the back of Gender Incongruence, specifically 'Transvestic Fetishism' and 'Autogynephilia'. Here's Cheryl Morgan with more on this ugly little bit of theorizing.

There is an awful lot about all this that really incenses me. One thing is the way in which, as a discursive psychologist, I find it repugnant for privileged cis males to define psychological categories which write marginalised people out of their own narratives. But one of the other really annoying things is that, as Morgan points out, 'Transvestic Fetishism' and 'Autogynephilia' are parsed as applying only to 'men' who wear 'women's' clothing or 'imagine' themselves to be women.

Because, of course, it's obvious that girls would want to dress up like boys because, you know, when you're a boy, you'll get your favourite things, other boys check you out etc etc (of course, under Blanchard's categories, Bowie would probably be considered mentally ill for dressing up as a girl in the video for 'Boys Keep Swinging', which shows how medieval Blanchard's thinking really is - it being a truth universally acknowledged that if you think Bowie's wrong, you fail at life), whereas being a boy and wanting to be an icky, yucky, girl is, as any fule kno, clearly a sign of mental illness.

Well, I'm sorry, but if that's the case, then hullo clouds, hullo sky, and colour me fucking crazy. Because if Ray Blanchard is what passes for a supposedly sane human being these days, you can book me a one-way ticket to Arkham Asylum and throw away the key. But then again, it's worth remembering that one of the most disturbed villains in the Batman canon, Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow was...a psychiatrist.

It's a good thing the Scarecrow's fictional, really. If he existed, they'd probably get him in to chair the DSM-V subgroup on costumed vigilantes.

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.'

Up the Workers

I always hate the way the mainstream media reports on strikes. Particularly the TV. They always start with the negative effects: 'Thousands of commuters were left stranded today...' 'Holidaymakers were trapped in airports all over Europe this morning...' 'Today, hundreds of irritating children were forced to spend an entire day in the company of the soul-dead, middle-class meatsacks who spawned them as teachers went on strike...' etc etc.

I know I run the risk of being called a conspiracy theorist here, but I honestly believe they do this to try and convince you that the unions are your enemy. That it's the RMT who are fucking the shit out of you on a daily basis, rather than the barely mammalian scum who run the rail companies. If you thought about it, of course, you'd realise that the train drivers are as screwed over as you are, maybe more so: you only have to get on the train twice a day, they're there the whole bloody time. And they have to deal with potential derangements, suicides or idiots getting onto the track, and probably a whole load of bullshit targets about arriving at 80% of all main interchanges within a 2-minute margin of error of the 'on-time' time on at least 60% of all 'peak-time' journeys, 'peak-time' being defined as any time when the railway is operating at 72% or more of total passenger capacity...All you have to do is avoid making eye contact with the obvious psychos and try not to breathe in too much BO from the person you're jammed in right next to.

Same with any strike. The workers are the ones making things hard for you. If they just did what the bosses told them, your life would be much better. Only it won't.

Take teaching. Lots of teachers have struck in Durham recently over plans to create so-called 'academy' schools (declaration of interest here: my soon-to-be-ex-wife is one of those teachers). They aren't doing this just because they want to make mischief. They're doing it because they genuinely believe, and most of the facts seem to support them on this, that academies are not great (or even safe) learning environments for many children. They're anti-democratic, and make a mockery of our national education system. The teachers, being committed to that system, object to this, and choose to do so with the most powerful weapon in a worker's arsenal: the withdrawal of their labour. Hearteningly, many of the local parents in Durham agree with the teachers on this - Durham was hit harder than many places by MagThatch's war on the coal miners, and sympathy for the unions, and distrust of privatising authority remains strong. This has annoyed some in the mainstream media, because they haven't been able to get their 'unions vs. the people' narrative off the ground.

They're having more luck with the imminent postal strike. Again and again we hear about small businesses which won't be able to deliver goods, christmas cards arriving late, and a whole host of reasons to play the world's smallest violin on behalf of the consumer. What we don't hear about is how the consumer is actually being screwed by the people in charge of the Royal Mail, and even more by the people in those private companies which parasitize on it.

You won't find that on the evening news, in the red-tops or the Daily Mail. To find out about that side of the story, you need to read this article from the London Review of Books. 'Granny Smith', by the way, is the affectionate name the posties have for their average end-consumer i.e. you:

'We were told that the emphasis these days should be on the corporate customer. It was what the corporations wanted that mattered. We were effectively being told that quality of service to the average customer was less important than satisfying the requirements of the big businesses.
Someone piped up in the middle of it. "What about Granny Smith?" he said. He’s an old-fashioned sort of postman, the kind who cares about these things.
"Granny Smith is not important,"was the reply. "Granny Smith doesn’t matter any more."'

You're not important. You don't matter anymore. Not to the unions, but to the people who want to carve up the Royal Mail and sell it off. They're the ones who want to shaft you. They're the ones who are going to make it harder for you to get your post, in the long-run. And what's more, they don't care. To them, you're collateral damage: an acceptable loss in the quest for higher corporate profits.

Think about that the next time you see some talking head on the news bleating about Christmas cards.

I Love It Here

And one of the reasons I love my job is that every now and then someone comes along looking for something that isn't shit. Yesterday I had a guy buying a couple of good books on US history. I had a guy who wanted me to find the new Arthur Ransome biography for his wife. I had a young guy come in wanting a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and a couple buying a shedload of heavyweight literary fiction. I even had a guy buying both the Guardian and the Mail who laughed when I made a joke about the inevitable cognitive dissonance that would result.

These are the good guys. They're the people who haven't yet let their brains atrophy, the people who still believe in good writing, good art and good culture instead of unit-shifting celebrity bullshit. These are the people who help those of us in the book trade who also believe these things to keep the faith. And if you're reading this, then you're one of those people. And I'd like you to do something for me.

Tomorrow is payday for most of us. The day we get our hard-earned money. And what I'd like you to do is take some of that money and go to your local bookshop. Could be an independent, could be a Borders, could be a branch of the W; could be a Barnes and Noble if you're in the US. Hell, if you're in the UK, it might even be a branch of WH Smith *shudder*.

Go to your local bookshop, and buy something good. Doesn't matter what genre. You like biography, buy a decent biography. You like sci-fi, buy some good sci-fi. You like crime, buy some good crime. Whatever. Buy something that rocks. Something where you know the guy writing it played from his fucking heart, in the words of the late Bill Hicks, instead of just advancing a career or servicing a demographic. Buy something that you know the writer burned to fucking write. Buy something that you burn to fucking read. Buy that book you always said you'd get around to. Buy some Nabokov, some Proust. But buy something good. Something written by a writer, not a celebrity.

Because if you do this, you'll make the person behind the counter feel, just for a second, that we are out there. We haven't stopped resisting. That the world of literature is indeed a fine place, and is indeed worth fighting for.

Because, dear reader, there are people out there who don't actually care. People who think that unit-shifting's the whole of the game, that books are the same as bananas and lager, a commodity that should be sold for maximum profit and no more. And these people need to be reminded that, while they want to impose a moronic monoculture on us all in the endless quest for profit, some have different dreams. And, in the days of shame that are coming, in the nights of wild distress, those of us who share those dreams of a vibrant, smart and genuinely beautiful culture are going to have to stand up for them.

So let's stand up together, tomorrow. Because after all, it's not too late to make a better world.

Adam Fish battles the Christ-bots

So I'm busy today, copying files over to my new laptop from the one my wife and I used to share. I'm doing this because we're getting divorced. It's all very amicable but it's still kind of depressing. I'm copying over our photos: JPEG after JPEG charting the path by which it's came to this. Photos on our honeymoon, in which my wife is smiling, happy and full of love; photos from our last holiday together, when the love was still there, but visibly fighting on her face with a strong sense of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The unhappiness of someone who knows what she'll have to say; but can't bring herself to say it just quite yet.

There's a knock at the door.

Probably the kids from down the street: they'll have lost their football in our garden again. This wouldn't happen if they played on the huge field behind the estate; but obviously this would entail them going beyond the tiny radius their parents have designated as a safe zone. I hope it's them anyway; rather have to kick a ball back over the wall, even with a knackered ankle, than explain to my neighbours that no, I'm not lending them any more money until they bloody pay me back...

But it's neither the kids nor the neighbours. It's a pair of women, smartly-dressed, carrying a leaflet. Religious nuts.

'Hello,' says one of them. 'Do you ever think about people who've lost loved ones?'

Does no-one ever ask if you want to talk about Jesus anymore? Obviously experience has led them to the conclusion that the trick is to approach the problem obliquely. Well, bollocks to that.



'I'm an atheist,' I tell them. I'm not actually, but I want to close down this discussion quick.



'That's alright, people have all kinds of beliefs,' the other woman says, in a patronising tone of voice, before the other one breaks in. 'But if you think about people who've lost loved ones...'



'What I think, ma'am, is that trying to foist your unsupportable beliefs on people by using their genuine grief over their lost loved ones is both intellectually dishonest and morally cowardly.'

Silence. These people hate it when you tell them off in an articulate manner, instead of just telling them to fuck off. But then...

'Alright, but when you think about people who've lost - '

What a feckin' cheek! I've just accused this woman of intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice and she still keeps up her bloody spiel!

'Look,' I say, 'I'd like you to go away now, please.' And then, before they could respond, I, for the first time in my life, had to actually slam a door in someone's face.

Bloody religious nuts.