'There's so much projection it's in cinemascope...'

Still alive. No thanks to the Scum publishing transphobic crap about trans people being treated with respect in prison. But in a way I should thank Britain's favourite semi-pornographic chip-wrapper, because thinking about the ridiculous, chip-on-the-shoulder way this story has been reported threw something into relief for me about privilege, and how easy it is to tell what the privileged secretly think about themselves.

To sum the story up: new prison search guidelines mean that trans women - like cis women - will now be exempt from humiliating 'squat' searches, and trans men and women will have the right to request a search be carried out by a warden of their experiential gender, rather than that assigned to them at birth. Sensible, fair, and wholly in line with the progressive view of trans equality: treat trans people as members of the gender they feel themselves to be. Not a big ask, not a hard position to live up to. You'd think.

So what the hell are the Sun getting at with this attack? I was musing on this this morning, half-awake and without the benefit of my first coffee, and somehow the whole issue got mixed-up in my head with the general tone of reporting on prison issues - something much in the press lately, as one of the few Tories I like, beer-drinking jazz-afficionado Ken Clarke, has dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, locking up increasing swathes of our population might not be the way to go. And something about the way the right-wing press report on prisons occurred to me: they always, always, go on about how 'soft' and 'easy' it is in prison. Endless articles, editorials and columns sermonize on what a cushy life lags have inside, how they get Nintendo consoles and food and colour TV in their cells etc, and how prisons are like holiday camps these days and what's the deterrent eh, I ask you...

But it seems perfectly obvious to me what the deterrent is. The deterrent is being in prison. Being deprived of liberty. Anyone with a modicum of nous can get this. Look: I'm sitting at a computer right now typing this blog. But, if I wished, right now, I could leave the table, switch off the computer (and the radio on the sideboard), and go haring off to the local pub, where I could sit skolling back neat bourbon until my fucking face fell off. I'm not going to, but I could.

Whereas if I were in prison, I couldn't do this. I probably couldn't even type this right now - access to computers is restricted in prisons. Sure, maybe I would have a Wii in my cell, but if I'm cooped up in that cell twenty-something hours a day, that doesn't look like as much of a home comfort (though on the plus side I could probably get enough practice in that I might finally be able to beat that ginger bitch Kathryn who keeps whupping my ass at Wii Boxing. But I digress).

Prison sucks because you lose your freedom, and no amount of trinkets can make up for that. Now multiply that suckage by being trans, and you can see how horrific being trans and in prison could be. Imagine you're a cis woman and the law says you have to squat down and submit to being searched, humiliatingly, by a man. Now imagine you're a trans woman in the same situation. There's no difference - except that as a trans woman you have to deal with this crap on top of all the other prejudice and systemic failure you deal with every day. Insults. Violence. Threatened or actual sexual assault. And on top of this the systemically sanctioned violation of being examined by someone not of your gender. It's a horrific situation, and fair play to the prison authorities for recognising that in at least this small way.

The Sun doesn't see it like that, though. Because to the Sun, the trans women are getting away with something. They're getting special treatment.

We see this a lot in right-wing scare stories, don't we? This idea that minorities receive 'special treatment'. It lies behind the never-ending 'Winterval' bollocks, clinicaly dissected by Kevin Arscott, that Christmas is being 'banned' because it offends Muslims - who get special treatment because we don't try to ban their festivals, do we? It's the idea behind the war on benefit claimants - disabled people get special treatment because they don't have to work (even though many can't), single mothers get special treatment because they get housing (when what would we rather do? Throw women with children on the street?). And it's the idea behind the similar war on trans people - the idea that being able to use a shower or washroom that minimises your chance of being raped or beaten is somehow a special privilege.

In reality the only special privileges are those of the white, able-bodied, cis majority. But the mindset of the privileged can never accept that this is privilege, and bought unfairly. So any attempt to put things right - affirmative action programmes, diversity policies, new search guidelines - is sneered at as being an attempt to grant privileges to groups rather than an attempt to redress the effects of an already-extant privilege which disadvantages said groups. And the reason for this is that the privileged person knows on some level that they are privileged, and they fear the removal of this privilege. So they project it onto the Other. The Others are the privileged ones. And us? We're the real victims mate, yerrr, victims of all this 'politically correct' bollocks, innit...

In Freudian psychology (which is mostly just a load of old shite but did bequeath one or two useful ideas) this is called projection. You dissociate from something distasteful about yourself and project it onto someone else. They're doing it. Not you. Them.

You see this with a lot of other things privileged people say about marginalised folks too.

To hear many able-bodied people say it, you'd think disabled people are dishonest and lazy. But what's lazier - battling every day against a condition which makes it near-impossible to function, or not bothering to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people because you can't be arsed? What's more dishonest - hoping that you'll look disabled enough to convince some ignorant, vile little ATOS inquisitor that you deserve the benefits that keep you alive, or deliberately lying about how disabled someone is to get them off benefits and into low-paid 'workfare' schemes which deprive genuinely able-bodied people of minimum-wage employment?

To hear many cis people say it, trans people are 'confused' or 'dishonest' about their gender. But what's more confused - knowing that you're a girl, and dressing, looking and acting in a way that fits with that identity - or releasing ridiculous 'surveys' which equate 'manliness' with the consumption of grilled-cheese snackage  (trigger warning: I think Mark Simpson's article, linked to there, veers dangerously close to body-policing at points, but I still think he makes an excellent general observation that manliness has became equated too much with consumption in our society)? What's more dishonest - accepting who you are in spite of pain and prejudice, or creating a bully culture in which young men (and women) learn to repress their emotions and any expression of gender-variance is policed with violence, because you don't feel comfortable with who you are?

And of course, to hear a lot of white people say it, black people are criminals - but what's a bigger crime, possession of marijuana or...well, you could take your pick, really. Slave trade? Imperialist colonisation of indigenous peoples throughout the world? The British 'famine relief' camps in India which served a smaller calorific ration to inmates than Dachau? Or my personal favourite, the absolutely criminal punishment which Haiti has had to suffer - and continues to suffer - for being the only country to demonstrate what Noam Chomsky calls 'successful defiance' against the European (and later American) colonising powers through history's most successful slave revolt?

It's all projection, pure and simple. The next time you hear some privileged person telling you exactly what's wrong with 'scroungers', 'muzzies', 'trannies', 'queers', 'darkies', or whatever, take a moment - before you rip their face off and shove it down their arrogant throats - to listen between the lines of what they say. They aren't telling you what other people are like. They're telling you their deepest darkest secrets. They're telling you what keeps them awake, sweating with guilt, through the night.

They're telling you about themselves.

I watched the news today, oh boy...

...and I saw a lot of nonsense about how two streets in London have been closed to traffic the better to facilitate the annual orgy of rampant consumerism with which we traditionally celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. All this on Buy Nothing Day too. Who says the arse-licking corporate media don't have a sense of irony?

Curious by its absence from the media, however, has been news of the ongoing student occupations of many major universities in protest at the coalition's assault on the right to higher education and their wider cuts agenda. The suppression of free speech can take many forms - one of them is ignorance and concentration on the trivial.

So against the silence of the media - who, as we've seen elsewhere on this blog, can be bothered to take an interest in the affairs of marginalised people when it suits them - I figured I might use this blog to link to all the occupations currently going on. Universities currently occupied are:

Newcastle

The University of West England, Bristol

Manchester Metropolitan University

The School of Oriental and African Studies

Edinburgh University

Sheffield University

Many other universities have been occupied, but students have either been evicted by riot police or forced out using siege tactics like denying them access to toilet facilities. A good list of all places where occupations have been in effect is the Solidaritree graphic on the Occupied Oxford site, and there's also a good list down the side of the Newcastle blog. And the UCL occupation, which is in many ways the flagship occupation now, goes from strength to strength, attracting messages and gestures of support from figures like Billy Bragg, Richard Herring and the mighty Noam Chomsky.

All these protests are peaceful, all these protests are ongoing and all are being carried out not by mobs but by students concerned about a government that is actively trying to destroy their future and that of their relatives. They are protesting against a society where corporations like Vodafone can get away with having their tax bills declared null and void, where the bankers who caused the crisis carry on paying each other massive bonuses with no reprisals from the government, where the young are invoked as a reason why 'we need to tackle the deficit now' - and are then made to pay for the deficit anyway as the government removes their right to education.

But because no-one has smashed a window, dropped a fire extinguisher or attacked a suspiciously-positioned police van, the media have refused to cover these ongoing gestures of resistance to kyriarchy. The revolution may well not be televised. But with Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, it almost doesn't matter. The mainstream media refusing to cover a story isn't the kiss of death anymore. In a variation of the Streisand Effect, even suppression by ignorance doesn't make the story go away. All it does is make it more transparent whose interests the media really serves, hastening the media and the kyriarchal regime's decline into irrelevance.

The truth will out, always. And truth will be spoken to power, no matter how much those in power hate it. Power may try to suppress; power may try to ignore; power may try to punish, with riot police and other kinds of sanction: it doesn't matter. As I put it in my poem Class? War?, published in the Emergency Verse anthology - and which I used to finish my recent, well-received set at the inaugural WordJazz event - 'what we deserve, we will demand; you won't deny us.'

I finished that gig on Thursday by saying 'fight the power', which sounded a little odd in my girly little voice (I'm not exactly Zack de la Rocha, after all), but seemed like the only suitable way to finish in these turbulent times. A strange, jarring way for a poet who looks like a Primark Antony Hegarty , and identifies most strongly as a writer with an ancient Amherst poetess with one of history's most famous cases of the vapours, to end a set, but then, I suppose, these are strange times.

So...y'know, fight the power, yeah?

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.

The Politics of the Heel Turn: or, Nasty Nick and the Kayfabe Coalition

2010 has been a strange year for British politics. Perhaps the biggest shock of all is the speed with which Nick Clegg went from being the British Obama to being, essentially, a stooge for a government which, as we learned from the Spending Review this week, wants to cut housing benefit for the under-35s, throw people off disability benefit left, right and centre, make life harder for women and old people, condemn young trans people to even more years in the closet than they put up with at the moment, deprive people in care homes of mobility aids, kick thousands of public sector workers out of their jobs and generally reduce Britain to a condition of neo-Dickensian misery (I suppose we should be thankful that Henry Mayhew's guide to the kind of world in which we'll all soon live has been reissued).

Many people were shocked by this change in Clegg's persona - none more so, I imagine, than the quartet of bright, breezy, cheerful young Lib Dem girls who I saw perform an impromptu 'I agree with Nick!' song and dance routine at Newcastle's Greys Monument in the week after the first televised election debate. I have to admit that I was less shocked than many people were by the speed with which Clegg dropped his principles at the promise of a ministerial limo, largely because, growing up in the 1990s, I had a ready-made model which I could apply to the situation. I've written before about my affection for the garish pesudosport that is professional wrestling. And in wrestling, the transformation in Clegg's character would be what's referred to as a heel-turn.

Profesional wrestling is a narrative form with a very odd attitude to continuity. Week-to-week continuity is important, but continuity in the longer term is subject to near-Stalinist levels of revision. The longer a character has been a heel or a face, the less chance there is that their previous status will be referred to. It is simply the case that they have always been 'one of the bad guys'. Through constant repetition, a narrative is generated that the fans buy into, and booing the dastardly villain becomes as easy as it was to cheer for them six months ago, when they were the crowd-pleasing hero.

Interestingly enough, the way the coalition have approached the economy has pretty much followed the same process by which professional wrestling creates its alternate reality. In much the same way as the WWE pretends that it was never called anything else, that Madusa Miceli wasn't the same person as Alundra Blayze, or that there exists a specific place called 'Parts Unknown' (whose inhabitants have an unusual fondness for face-paint and heavy metal; if it did exist, it sounds like it would actually be kind of cool), so we've been spoon-fed a series of egregious lies by the Coalition (whose name actually even sounds like a heel wrestling stable, albeit a slightly crap one; I'd have more respect for our new overlords if they took a leaf straight out of the WWE's book and started calling themselves the Corporate Ministry).

We've been told Labour left the country with an unbelievable deficit - in fact, before the recession, we had the 2nd lowest level of debt of any of the G7 countries.

We've been told that George Osborne's savage cuts to the benefits system are needed to wipe out '£5bn of benefit fraud'. In fact, benefit fraud costs only £1bn.

We've been told that desperate measures of the kind announced by Osborne are needed to save the economy. In fact, economists all over the world believe the Coalition is on the wrong course, and statistics show that these measures will plunge us ever deeper into recession.

There are more - many more - myths about the deficit, the cuts and the economy which the Coalition want us to swallow as uncritically as the marks at a wrestling match who will chant 'U-S-A!' during a match between a Candian face and a Mexican heel, but fortunately there are sites like Liberal Conspiracy, who have posted a handy myth-busting guide to the economic arguments here, and there are a host of blogs regularly deconstructing the lies told by the Tories' friends in the media. The point I want to make is that, while I enjoy suspending my disbelief if all it involves is a bunch of people jumping around in silly spandex outfits, when it comes to politics I would rather see a little more focus on what one of George Bush's aides (disparagingly) referred to as the 'reality-based community.'

Alternatively, if we are going to live in a world where our politicians treat us like a bunch of marks, then I demand that, during the next Prime Minister's Question Time, someone runs in and hits a hurricanrana on David Cameron. We may as well get some entertainment out of this bullshit.

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.

Planet of the Arseholes (Part the First)

If you've followed this blog for a while, you'll know I have a pretty big problem with the kyriarchy. I hate pretty much anyone in a position of authority which they didn't, and don't, earn. And how do you earn a position of authority? You earn it by ensuring that you're worthy of it. You earn it by showing you deserve it. You earn it by not being an arsehole with your authority. You earn it by being a decent human being.

Of course, being a decent human being seems to be pretty damn hard for a lot of people. Especially those in positions of authority. Most people in these positions can't resist the temptation to abuse them, and in the process prove themselves unworthy of the position they're in. They enjoy the benefits of authority without doing anything to deserve it; they enjoy privilege.

The latest privileged idiot to prove himself unworthy of the authority invested in him by his money and the adulation of a society of idiots is one Duncan Bannatyne. If you live in the UK, you will have been painfully aware of this smug, ugly, pathetic, self-publicising little man for far too long. Bannatyne runs a chain of overpriced health clubs catering to pathetic narcissists, and has a second 'job' appearing on the charmless and deeply naff BBC TV programme 'Dragons' Den' in which he and a trio of similarly miserable-looking twits in suits sit in judgement on ordinary men and women who have came up with inventions for which they seek funding. It's a kind of variant of the X-Factor/Britain's Got Talent format, only the judges have even less charisma than Piers Morgan, which is some achievement. The whole programme is narrated in tones of breathless adoration for the dragons' bulging bank balances by Evan Davis, a man who used to be a serious business journalist before he became an ego-fluffer for these corporate idiots.

You can probably tell it's a show of which I'm not a fan. That's because I get sick of the pathetic, sycophantic adoration our society bestows on so-called 'entrepreneurs'. So they've made a pile of money in business? So what? We should adore them for being more successful at exploiting the labour of their staff than people who've made less? Stuff that. The usual defence offered by the grunting, forelock-tugging idiots who do adore these people is that they've 'came from nothing' and 'made something of themselves', to which I say: if you believe that, I have a lovely bridge I can sell you at an absolute song. Most 'self-made' men are anything but: they owe their positions to an invisible network of privileges which people never take into account. For one thing, they usually are men; they're always cis, they tend to be straight (and most of the few who are gay tend to be gay men); they're able-bodied and usually don't suffer mental illness (or if they do they don't talk about it); most of them are caucasian; and they all tend to have the sort of swaggering, cocksure, one-of-the-boys confidence which business culture - mistakenly, as I've pointed out before - regards as a prerequisite for success. Show me any self-made man and I'll show you a list of ways as long as your arm in which kyriarchy and privilege helped the lucky bastard get to where he is.

Now, some people in positions of authority are self-aware enough to be conscious of this on some level, are self-deprecating and even humble about it, and try to behave with a bit of class towards people who haven't had their luck. Not so Bannatyne. This Friday, a young woman made an innocent joke about Bannatyne on Twitter, and Bannatyne's reaction was to threaten to sue her, then unleash his legion of moronic fans, some of whom called her such delightful things as 'blonde slag cunt' and threatened to kill her. More details of the event can be seen here.

Bannatyne's attempts to position himself as a 'victim' of 'bullies and haters' are laughable: here is a man who has vast reserves of wealth, who is adored by millions (millions of idiots admittedly, but those idiots have disposable income), and who has a variety of media platforms in which his every brainfart is treated as if it's an outpouring of genius, threatening to use his wealth and the courts to silence someone for making a joke - then refusing to intervene when his acolytes begin a hate campaign against the woman he's persecuting? Bitch, please. The victim here is the woman who made the tweet, who has had to put up with vicious abuse and threats all weekend, while Bannatyne sheds crocodile tears about 'protecting my family' while pleasuring himself in front of the mirror with yet another ivory-handled backscratcher.

A lot of people say that deference is no longer a feature of British culture. When they say this, they're referring to the culture of deferring to authority figures from the old-fashioned upper classes who reached their simultaneous zenith and nadir with the likes of Sir Alec Douglas-Home. But many privileged people in society still expect deference as a right from those they see as 'below' them. I've seen this close-up when I've dared to criticise the transphobia of privileged cis people, and we saw exactly the same type of behaviour from Bannatyne this Friday and, indeed, over the course of the weekend. These people are happy to tell the less-privileged that they just have to buck up their ideas, knuckle down and take it - sometimes with horrific consequences, as Ian Birrell pointed out in yesterday's Guardian - but as soon as you challenge them, it suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world that they have been offended, and how dare you say such a thing to them - just as Bannatyne was blind to the offensive and intimidating way he blundered into his exchange with the woman on Twitter, and yet was hypersensitive to the offence this had caused him and which he imagined it might possibly cause his family.

This kind of behaviour, of course, creates a climate in which people feel afraid to make jokes because they are afraid it might offend people. And weirdly, Duncan Bannatyne was keen to say this was a Very Bad Thing in the context of the Equality Act (and my bringing this up should in no way be construed as support for that act - as I've pointed out before, its effect on trans people is likely to be very negative): and yet as soon as he's on the receiving end of a little light-hearted banter, he threatens to take the person responsible for court. And why? Because the Equality Act (generally) protects people who lack privilege; and in Bannatyne's moral universe it ought to be okay to joke about such people. But joking about people with privilege? In Bannatyne's universe, that's unthinkable - as Karl Webster at The Ugly Truth points out hilariously.

In summary: Duncan Bannatyne is an arsehole and has proved himself comprehensively to be an arsehole, and a load of even more pathetic arseholes who worship Bannatyne proved themselves to be arseholes as well. Fortunately, the internet makes it more and more easy to point at and mock these people for the arseholes that they are. And by crikey do they hate it. But they're just going to have to toughen up and take their lumps - because if they really earned their authority, they wouldn't be in this situation.

Bringing the war to the drawing room

I've read far too little of Alan Sillitoe's work - only really extracts from his two best-known books, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - but in an odd way the fact that I haven't read a lot of Sillitoe and yet remained aware of him, and of his impact, testifies to his success.

'Social realism' was a concept I battled with for a long time as a writer. I saw it as grubby and lacking in aspiration. I wanted to create work that was fantastic and unusual and not like the boring surroundings I grew up in. For me, escape was revolution, and I devoted my time to imagining a better, more fabulous and glamourous life that the one I was living. It's only as I've grown older, and came up against the mundane obstacles that try to stop us creating worlds fab enough to live in, that I've came to appreciate the importance of social realism as a genre, and the multiplicity intrinsic to it.

Social realism emerged as a challenge to an orthodoxy in literature which said working class lives were unimportant. Playwrights like Joe Orton were writing against the tradition of drawing-room farce, novelists like Sillitoe were competing with the work of people like Waugh and Powell, to make the point that working class lives and experience counted for more than just comic relief in stories where the main characters were always drawn from the wealthy elites. Social realism wasn't restrictive: it was about creating more space for voices which weren't heard. It's little wonder that the first such expressions were howls of rage and pain.

Drawing the attention of the privileged to the lives they overlook or mock, and writing stories which reaffirm the experiences of those lives for those who live them, is the kind of thing all writers should be doing, whether the privilege they write against is straight, cis, male, abled, rich or white. Especially given that for the first time in years here in the UK, the Tories, a party which, more than anything else, stands for keeping the plebs/queers/cripples/darkies in their place, is actually looking like a serious electoral threat. Sillitoe would hate to see David Cameron smarm his way into government, because allowing the country to once again be ruled by a bunch of braying arseholes from Eton would represent the betrayal of his writing, and the triumph of all he'd been writing against.

Except that the Tories, just like every other privileged group, can never really triumph as long as people who don't belong to their insular little circle-jerk keep writing, and fighting, and going on, whether we get our stories onto a national stage and bring the war into the drawing room, or huddle round the fire and tell our stories to our own. There will always be voices raised in opposition to the dominant narrative, and we should honour those people who stick their heads above the parapet to draw attention to the lives that it leaves out. Alan Sillitoe was one such person and, whoever wins on May 6th, there will be many, many other British writers walking down the trail he blazed.

'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.

You've Got Ray Blanchard In A Whirl...

My last post, about my dissatisfaction with the inclusion of 'Autogynephilia' as a diagnostic category in DSM-V has  caused some controversy on Twitter, which I feel I should address here. What I specifically want to address is the accusation that I don't believe Autogynephilia is 'real'.

The reality, of course, is more complex than that. The thing about psychiatric diagnoses is that they are harder to arrive at than biological ones. Klinefelter's Syndrome is comparatively easy to diagnose: either your karyotype indicates you have an extra X chromosome or it doesn't. Gender Identity Disorder - soon, gods and goddesses willing, to be reclassified as Gender Incongruence - is a more nuanced diagnosis to make, depends on a lot of factors, and can be experienced differently by different people.

The reason for this is that psychiatrists and psychologists, in classifying mental disorders, are dealing not so much with specific viruses or bacteria, but more nebulous collections of symptoms. Many of the symptoms occur together and often react well to certain forms of clinical intervention. Where this happens it is usual to apply a diagnostic label to the collection of symptoms in order to aid the treatment of individuals who present with them in the future. But the labels we apply to these collections of symptoms are always subject to change, as are the symptoms which fall under a certain label. For example, schizophrenia as we know it has developed over a curious course of diagnostic evolution from its original classification as 'dementia praecox' to the clinical definition we know today. Currently, moves are afoot to eliminate Asperger's Syndrome as a separate condition and merge it with the other Autism Spectrum Disorders, on the grounds that it fits in better on that spectrum than as a separate entity. All this is as it should be: research modifies our understanding of a condition, which in turn modifies the way we categorise it, which in turn leads to improvements in the ways we treat or help people deal with these conditions.

In a perfect world this is how it would always work, but this world is far from perfect, and, despite vast efforts to build in a system of checks, balances and controls, psychologists and psychiatrists are at least as likely as people in the general population to have prejudices and biases, and these biases can and do creep into the disciplines themselves. This is one reason why periodic revision of the DSM is a good idea: it allows for reevaluation of the previously accepted psychological norms.

'The normal' itself is, of course, one of the biggest biases that can creep into diagnosis. I mentioned in my previous piece that, for a long time, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric 'disorder' because it was regarded as 'abnormal.' Thankfully, these days it is accepted that this isn't the case. But psychiatry persists in categorising some sexualities as normal and others as not so. The device used for this purpose is the idea of 'paraphilia' or, in layman's terms, sexual fetishism.

Paraphilia, as a diagnosis, has its uses, in that it provides a useful framework for considering the sexual desires of people whose behaviour is genuinely harmful, such as paedophiles and sex murderers. You'll note that the DSM-IV definition talks of non-normative sexual behaviours which 'may cause distress or serious problems for the paraphiliac or other persons associated with him or her'. But, notice the may. Something doesn't have to be causing anyone harm to be considered a paraphilia. Your kink might be pretty innocuous - maybe you have a thing for being shagged on formica tables, or you like to masturbate while listening to Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. You're not harming anyone (unless you go to a concert hall to pleasure yourself), but it doesn't matter. You have a paraphilia. You have a disorder. You are, as they say, in the system.

Look: I've known some kinky people. Hell, I'm pretty kinky myself (you don't want to know what I want Girl Obelix to do to me), and none of the kinky people I've met seemed mentally ill. Some had other mental illnesses, such as depression, but no more than in the general population, by my reckoning. And where there did seem to be a link between their particular pastime and some level of, say, depression or alcoholism, this could always be understood as a reaction to their marginalised status, and the prejudice they suffered from people with more privileged 'normal' sexualities.

I'm coming to understand that the social construction of mental disorders, which seemed like a purely theoretical idea when I first studied psychology, is a reality. To say disorders are socially constructed does not mean they aren't 'real.' Rather, it's the case that when people fall outside social norms, the response of people in society to their behaviour actively constructs their disorder. Consider the paradigm that has recently emerged in the field of disability activism: people are not disabled in themselves, they are disabled by a society which creates obstacles to their effective functioning, to the benefit of the privileged. Without wanting to come across as entirely RD Laing, I don't think it's too much of a leap to say that many people we class as 'disordered' actually reflect the disordered state of society.

Gender Incongruence is a real thing which people experience, and which can be treated with a variety of methods, up to and including gender reassignment surgery. But it only becomes a disorder because it conflicts with the social expectations a society places on someone because of their birth gender, and failing to meet those expectations causes feelings of trauma and guilt. Most sexual fetishes only become disorders when the treatment of people who happen to enjoy such fetishes leads to their experiencing feelings of marginalisation and low self-worth.

This applies even to those disorders considered to have a strong physiological basis. Depression seems to be the result of chemical imbalances in the brain (given that it often responds to treatment using chemicals which correct said imbalances). However, depression as a disorder, rather than a normal, acceptable and managable part of human diversity, is constructed by a society which unduly rewards self-confidence and bonhomie over actual achievement (there'll be more on this in my next post, which will consider the issue of privilege and self-esteem in greater depth).

So, to return to Autogynephilia, here we have a definition of something which could easily be classed as Gender Incongruence, but isn't because some cis male psychologists have decided that the only real gender incongruence is heterosexual in nature. If you're a trans woman and you want to fuck men, Roberta's your auntie. But if you're male assigned at birth, feel gender incongruence, but want to get it on with other ladies...that's not real Gender Incongruence. That's just a paraphilia. That's just sexual deviancy (don't worry if you're a trans man who wants to fuck other fellas, though. Ray Blanchard doesn't consider gay trans men in his definition of Autogynephilia. Perhaps, like Queen Victoria on lesbians, he doesn't think they really exist).

I cannot see the logic in this distinction. As far as I can work it out, Gender Incongruence is the same regardless of who you want to bump uglies with, because, well, Gender Congruence is the same, regardless of who you want to bump uglies with. So 'Autogynephilia' can only be a socially constructed 'disorder' based on the heteronormative, cissupremacist prejudices of our society. But it isn't just a bad diagnosis. It's actively harmful.

Many transphobes today persist in regarding being trans as a 'lifestyle choice'. By creating a false division which says one type of Gender Incongruence is real, but one is just a 'perversion', the deployment of Autogynephilia as a diagnostic category legitimises this perception. It makes psychologists and psychiatrists complicit in the marginalisation of people who are already heavily marginalised by society. This is a deep betrayal of psychology's basis as a science, and psychiatry's basis as a branch of medicine. The purpose of science is to describe reality objectively, free from the biases and prejudice of phenomenologically lazier forms of discourse. The purpose of medicine is to heal those who are hurting, without harming them further.

'Autogynephilia' does not meet either of these requirements. It is scientifically unnecessary: everything it involves could easily be described in terms of Gender Incongruence. And it is medically abhorrent, as it leaves people who form a normal, healthy part of the gender spectrum with the idea that they are somehow 'wrong', with no possibility of cure, and causes them further harm by legitimising the prejudiced views that they're all just perverts.

None of this means that there are not birth-gendered men who identify as female in a primarily sexual context. For some of these people it is just a fetish, either cross-dressing or enforced feminization. That's fine. For some it goes deeper. There are also, of course, trans women who aren't very sexual. And there are trans women who are very sexual, and trans men of all kinds too. The gender spectrum is just that, a spectrum, on which there are many varieties of experience. This is a concept bourne out by the experiences of people in the trans community and their cis allies every day, but it's a concept which still meets with resistance from the more bigoted sectors of the population. The job of psychologists is to break down this bigotry by revealing the truth about the human psyche. The job of psychiatrists is to help those who are harmed by such bigotry. So the message to the people compiling the DSM-V should be clear: focus on a more inclusive, but still robust, definition of Gender Incongruence, chuck 'Autogynephilia' on the scrap heap with dementia praecox and sexual inversion, and do your bloody jobs. It's what you're there for.

'Open up...Make room for me...'

It's been an odd week, mainly spent in my new place of employment dealing with whiney, privileged arseholes who bitch about shocking stuff like having to do tests while in training and other such nonsense. There hasn't been any overt transphobia since I stomped all over one of the fuckers the other week, which is good, but damn, these people are hard work. In that spirit, allow me to point you in the direction of The Day The Immigrants Left, a fine piece of programming in which the BBC fulfilled its public service remit in stunning fashion by showing that, actually, the reason immigrants get jobs and 'indigenous' (dog-whistle racist code for 'white') Britons don't get them is because, frankly, most indigenous Brits are a bunch of goddam whiney bitches who need to be thrashed to within an inch of their lives with as many cluesticks as one can get one's hands on. I tells ya, if my employers had recruited me and a bunch of East European migrants for this job, we wouldn't still be in training: we'd be on the damn floor doing the damn job, instead of sitting around making feeble attempts at humour through the medium of fart noises. Or, in my case, being bored bloody rigid by people whose idea of humour extends no further than the fart noise. I hate whites.

One good thing about the job is that, due to my having to come up with work-arounds for the unreliability of buses during rush hour 'round these parts, I usually wind up arriving at work an hour earlier than I have to be there, during which time I've gotten into a ritual of grabbing an Americano from the canteen and sitting down to write. I produced a poem the other day which I feel is one of my best yet, particularly in terms of addressing my experience of adolescent anorexia and the underlying reasons for it. Said poem is called Criminally Fragile, and you can find it - and a bunch of other poems that have been posted on this blog at one time or another - at my Blankmedia profile. Do please have a look, and comment if you want to. Feedback helps.

And yes, the photos used as thumbnails for the poems are pictures I've taken. Some were shot near the area where I'm working at the minute, others elsewhere. I've became kind of addicted to taking quick, serendipitous shots of things since I got the Blackberry, and especially since I started doing those little poetry 'movies' for uploading here. I'm constantly looking now for little shots that could be well-used to accompany a particular line in a poem or the poem itself. At some point I suppose I should get around to uploading some of my shots to the Wikimedia Commons to pay back the number of times I've used their images to accompany my work. That'll be a nice weekend project sometime, I think. In the meantime, as a bonus for blog readers, here's one of the shots from where I am at the moment. I work on a business park and, what with us being in a recession and all, there are lots of empty units, which are fascinating in a JG Ballard/Iain Sinclair ruins-of-late-capitalism way. I got this shot taken from underneath a spiral staircase while creeping about by one of these vacant shells.

Weeks like these will happen to you (1)

Crazy times. For one thing, I seem, largely as a result of my goddam insomnia, which kept me up way past any normal person's idea of bedtime, involved in the efforts on Twitter to draw attention to the Haitian earthquake, the ways that people can donate, and the reasons why rich, privileged, white people like us should donate as a result of the horrible history of colonial interference in that country's history. Haiti is the one country in the world which had a successful slave revolt, and, as Noam Chomsky points out, colonizers have to punish successful dissent pour discourager les autres. So, despite the failure of a variety of European powers, including both Britain and Napoleonic France, to conquer the Haitians, they were eventually starved out and forced to submit anew to our dominion, and - in one of the most twisted moves in the sordid history of colonialism - made to pay reparations to the French for the 'crime' of daring to revolt against slavery.

During the twentieth century, as a country in 'America's backyard', Haiti was a battleground in the Cold War, and the US, pursuing its interests, supported the monstrous regimes of 'Papa Doc' and 'Baby Doc' Duvalier , and undermined more democratic governments. The constant interference, terrorism, and atmosphere of coup and counter-coup destabilised an already-weakened country, and created the conditions which have made it hard for the country to deal with this disaster.

Haiti is our problem. The wealth that we, in our privileged nations, enjoy, is based in part on the fruits of colonization, slavery, and the economic terrorism leveraged against the Haitian people. That's why I've been telling people as often as I can, via Twitter, to donate using sites like the British Red Cross site here. There are other places to give. Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti Foundation and Medecins sans Frontieres are doing good work too - I gave to the British Red Cross because I know they have people on the ground there, and I could donate in pounds. But please, whatever you do, visit one of the sites, or some other, and give what you can. I gave, and I'm poor and unemployed (though that's 'poor' in the sense of 'spent stupid money on skincare stuff today' and 'unemployed' in the sense of 'had two interviews this week', so...).

I don't want to go all 'white man's burden' here. But I don't think that's what I'm doing. We created this problem. We are complicit in a system which keeps countries like Haiti poor, and badly-placed to weather disasters like this. It's not paternalism. It's not white guys knowing best. It's privileged people making up for the shit they created.

In fact, y'know what? It's not even that. It's being a good person. It's not passing by on the other side. It's doing what we can 'cause, really, but for an accident of birth, we could be sleeping outside tonight, surrounded by the wreckage of our country, wondering if tomorrow we'll see the corpses of people we know piled up by the Canape Vert road for identification. It, like everything I pull people up for not doing on this blog, is being a good human being.

So...if you've been good already, then thank you. If you haven't, yet, then go be good. You don't have to give money, if you can't afford it. Just tell people there are ways they can give. Throw your weight behind ideas like granting Haitian refugees temporary protected status, or cancelling Haiti's debts (the modern-day equivalent of those reparations). Just keep going on about it - that's all I'm doing here, really. Keep it trending, keep it in the media, keep it before the eyes of the powerful and the privileged. Keep it going.

And...I'm done. I had intended to talk about other stuff in this post. I finished the manuscript for what might be the most important book of poems I've ever written yesterday. Today I had a fun day in Morpeth attending an interview and doing a lot of other stuff. But this isn't the time for that. I will talk about that, but not now. Not today.

Today is the day that we think about Haiti.