Whose agenda, Mr Dacre?

By now you'll have heard the news that trans teacher Lucy Meadows has died after harassment and 'monstering' at the hands of the kind of scum who make up what passes for the Fourth Estate in this country: you know, 'proper' journalists. The kind who sneer down their noses at bloggers because they think making an innocent woman afraid to leave her house by the front door is more morally serious work.

It's not entirely clear, at this point, that Lucy Meadows killed herself. Emails Lucy sent to a friend indicate that she was not in a good place, psychologically. Harassment of the kind she suffered was bound to take a toll. My initial thought on the case, as I scrolled through tweets on my mobile phone on Thursday night, was that it seemed like a suicide to me. That may be hard to prove: a completely separate article in the Guardian mentions, in passing, the significant change in the balance of proof needed for UK coroners to return a verdict of suicide that slipped through in the 1980s. But whether Lucy killed herself or not, and whether or not that is proved in a court of law, the fact remains that the final years of a woman's life were turned into a living hell by the kind of people whose venality has been so thoroughly exposed by the Leveson Inquiry. Not surprisingly, the majority of people - who are decent, and who don't like to see a person hounded to their death - are angry. Two petitions have been started calling on the Daily Mail to fire its top troll, Richard Littlejohn, a man responsible for one of the most vituperative denunciations of Lucy Meadows, and whose utter moral decrepitude is summed up succintly by Angry Mob here, and more humorously by Stewart Lee here (from about the five minute mark). Although the harassment that Lucy complained about concerns journalists other than the man Viz magazine mocks from time to time as 'Littledick', (because the chequebook-waving assemblages of ambulatory faecal matter who descended on Accrington are at least engaged in more legwork than the ridiculously-remunerated 'columnist' who files his unfunny and hateful screeds from his no-doubt impeccably neoclassical faux-mansion in Florida without deigning to set foot on British soil), the author of the Tolstoyan epic 'Hell in a Handcart' has became a kind of lightning rod for public anger over the affair. In some ways this is fitting. Those who make a living by fomenting rage among the populace can hardly complain when they themselves become the object of such rage.

That's not how the Mail sees it, though. Just as they did when decent people expressed rage at the way one of their lesser columnists, Jan Moir, used the death of Stephen Gately's partner to engage in sneering homophobic innuendo, the Mail claim to be the victims of 'an orchestrated twitterstorm'. Cynically, they use the intervention  of 'former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell' as a way of implying that those outraged by the vile behaviour of the Mail and its operatives 'have agendas to pursue'.

But who is really engaged in an 'orchestrated' campaign? Who really has an 'agenda' to pursue? Here are a few suggestive facts.

First, the Daily Mail publishes vastly more stories about trans people than any other newspaper. Twice as many as the Guardian. For a paper which claims merely to be reporting the news, that's a suggestive statistic. Newspapers usually converge in what they consider newsworthy: when they don't it's usually because the paper has a particular axe they want to grind. Could the Daily Mail, which claims only its critics 'have agendas to pursue', be pursuing an agenda of its own with regard to trans people?

Second, here's a picture of the way that the Metro (a free tabloid paper usually read by commuters, published by the same stable that produces the Mail) reported Lucy's death. Notice anything?

Yep. The death of a woman is relegated to a side column. The main story on that page is sensationalist nonsense about a 'girl posing as a boy' to get sex - a story which fits in with the pernicious narrative that trans people are 'deceptive'. For good measure, we also have a story near the bottom of the page which downplays the fact that a boy whose genitals were set on fire was gay, making his killing a homophobic attack. The two stories with LGBT people as victims are made much smaller, much less prominent, than the story which allows the paper to present LGBT people as dangerous predators.

One might, perhaps, see in this signs of something resembling a...what's the word? Ah, yes. An agenda. 

But then, you don't have to take my word for it. You can take the word of Paul Dacre, the current editor of the Daily Mail. Here's a telling detail from the transcript of Dacre's being questioned at the Leveson Inquiry. The questions, (Q) are being put by Robert Jay, Q.C. The answer (A) comes from Dacre himself. It's one word. It's not the word of which Dacre is so fond that Private Eye magazine gleefully note his employers refer to his speeches as 'the vagina monologues', but it's a telling word nevertheless.

Q. Some would say that the Daily Mail's world view, or at least part of it, propounds the virtues of family life, of traditional matrimony and traditional values.  (a) Is that fair, and (b), if it is, if someone's morality doesn't fit into that pattern, is it something which youwould feel free to comment on and, if necessary,criticise?

A.  Yes.

And there you have it. The editor of the Daily Mail admitting, under oath, that it is his paper - and not his critics - that has an agenda. An agenda to defend 'traditional matrimony and traditional values'. An agenda that led to the monstering of Lucy Meadows, that led to her vilification in the press and which, this week, at the very least contributed to her final days being miserable in ways that the pampered Messrs Dacre and Littlejohn can barely imagine, and, at worst, was a contributing factor in her death. 

There is a discussion to be had about the role of the media in Lucy Meadows' demise. There is a debate to be had about the treatment of trans people by the media. It would be nice if Mr Dacre were to join that debate. But so far he, and his acolytes, refuse to do so. Instead, they prefer to bleat that their critics 'have an agenda'. Don't be so coy, Mr Dacre.

This one of your critics, at least, has no agenda. I'm just trying to survive.

The only agenda in play here, Mr Dacre, is your own. 

Outside the Walls

Another cafe where all seems to be at peace,
the civilised side of the shield of Achilles,
where frothy, caramel-flavoured confections are served
to folk who, nodding, read the words
of one who'd happily see me dead.
They read, they nod and then, well-fed
they trundle off to buy more stuff.
That two boys knife a third? That's tough.

Outside this wall we only skulk in tents,
all of us, not just one. The foe's defense
impregnable. They sit content,
drink cocktails, weave and keep mute score.
What can we do? We never chose the war.
They wage it on us just for who we are.

It always comes back to bloody Troy. And Auden. I've been reading Daniel Mendelsohn's Waiting for the Barbarians this week, and one of his essays, about a new translation of the Iliad, dwells on the fact that, far from having essentially taken place over one wild, out-of-control weekend, as in Wolfgang Petersen's film, the siege of Ilium actually lasted a good ten years, during which the Greeks became progressively more and more disheartened by the lack of the comforts they'd enjoyed before the war, while the Trojans, behind their strong walls, were safer and more comfortable. This idea, of an embattled force fighting an insuperable opponent has been much in my mind both because of that article and because every intervention against the transphobia of Moore et al just seems to have brought even more transphobia from commentariat types who genuinely think making one of their own feel bad is a greater crime than engaging in hate-speech. It's easy to feel as if we're trapped outside a city of people who sit at their ease, safe behind high, strong walls that we will never, ever manage to break down, while we lose our strength and tear ourselves apart. 

Except...every comment I've seen about Burchill's hate-speech on Twitter or Facebook, with the exception of bile from the usual radfem suspects, has been negative. I have never seen as many people talking about not buying the Guardian ever again, or as many people who identify as leftists hosting the post on their own sites to deny the Grauniad - the house newssheet of the British Left - pageviews for its trolling. We used to only do that for articles from the Mail, for goodness' sake.

There are now almost 3,000 signatures on a petition demanding an apology from the Guardian Media Group on its first day of being up. Ninety per cent of those who've voted on a poll hosted by the Independent newspaper's website say that Burchill 'went too far' in her comments. The Observer Readers' Editor - who you can email here - has already said he will look into the issue after the sheer volume of complaints received today. One of the unexpected consequences of this explosion of hate from La Burchill has been the fact that most people have responded by saying, loudly, that Burchill does not speak for them. A trans man I follow on Twitter even said that his parents, who insist on telling him he's 'just a lesbian actually' contacted him to tell him how appalled and disgusted they were by the article. Hell, even this blog's habitual betes noires at the Torygraph have criticised Moore and Burchill for, inter alia, 'refusing to show any grace to a minority that, by all standards, has it pretty rough.' 

Far from demonstrating how powerless we are, how alone we are, and how hopeless our struggle is, the reaction to Burchill and Moore's hate-speech has shown that we are listened to, that we have support from many people outside the trans community, and that, most vitally of all, we have hope. The model for our experience in light of Moore and Burchill isn't Achilles or Odysseus, but Pandora. 

The devils have all been unleashed; hope remains. 

You must be certain of the devil: on anger, art, and supermassive sense-of-humour shutdowns

I said to myself, last night, that I wasn't going to write about the Suzanne Moore thing. Partly it's because Stavvers at Another Angry Woman has written about it much better elsewhere. Partly it's because the whole thing has just upset me to the point where I genuinely feel unable to trust the leftwing press even a tiny little bit: not only was it the New Statesman, a magazine I've loved since I bought their issue about the 1992 Clinton election victory in a flush of teenage lefty pride, that initially gave Moore her platform; not only did the Guardian, the paper I've read the Saturday edition of every damn day since I was old enough to hold a broadsheet - every day except today - give Moore even more column inches in which to keep digging; but I woke up this morning to find Glen Newey, on the London Review of Books blog, making a vain bid for that quality much-prized among compulsive masturbators, 'edginess', by referring to a portrait of Kate Middleton as resembling 'a male-to-female transsexual'. I don't know about you, but the thought that the Holy Trinity of British Left Publishing was now effectively trolling its trans readership really put a dampener on my day. Reader, I almost bought a copy of the Independent, until I remembered it's owned by an ex-kegebishniki.

Then I looked at the copies of A Lady of a Certain Rage that arrived yesterday. And I thought about rage, and femininity, and what I thought was, really, how sad and tawdry the whole affair's been, and how much I wish Moore had had a better editor or, let's be honest about the state of publishing these days, an editor at all.

Because the fact is that if an editor - perhaps one who'd read the style guide available from Trans Media Watch - had wielded their blue pencil and changed 'transsexual' to, say 'swimwear model', I'd have been reading Moore's article and agreeing with it. I think female anger at oppression is an amazing, beautiful thing. I think all anger at oppression is an amazing and beautiful thing. There's a reason you will always find me moshing out if 'Killing in the Name Of' or 'Head Like a Hole' comes on in a club where I happen to be. And that's the same reason you'll also see me going crazy if 'Just a Girl' comes on, and that's because female anger includes me. Or it should. If you're a woman in this society, under this government, you damn well have a lot of things to be angry about. If you're trans, you have a whole lot more. Not the least of which is the idea that in order to 'pass', in order to satisfy the medical gatekeeper system - a system which, as this week's other, unfairly-neglected big trans story, pointed out, massively abuses its power - the one thing you should never, ever, ever do as a trans woman is allow them to feed you after midnight get angry.

Sod that. I'm a heavy metal kinda gal. Anger is an energy. Oi, bondage, up yours! I listen to Diamanda Galas for kicks and I'd rather have a Francis Bacon atrocity picture above my fireplace than a lovely landscape by Constable or Gainsborough or Thomas bloody Kincade. All the art and writing I admire is as angry as Hell, and that's the mode in which I choose to write, and perform, because, let's be honest, it's a messed-up world, and if you're going to do anything as an artist you may as well remind people that's what it is in the hopes that maybe, maybe, if you shout loudly enough to grab their attention, and make them laugh with you at the absurdity of it enough times then maybe people might get off their comfortable butts and change something. It's not that every single thing I write is written in anger, but I think anger deserves to be honoured. Especially in a world where so many of us are forced, day in, day out, to plaster on a Big Fake Smile and 'delight' people we've never met with our Customer Service skills in the hope that they might buy a donut/magazine/novelty Jubilee dildo.

The dark has to be honoured, too, otherwise it breaks through in weird, bad ways. A real artist accepts every side of themselves, and the world, and makes art with and about them. That's the bargain.

The problem is that this is very much a Devil's Bargain, and you have to go in it with one eye open and the fingers of one hand crossed tight behind your back. You need to keep enough distance from your anger to keep it controlled and in perspective. This is where humour comes in. Humour, and its near-neighbour in the dictionary, humility. The fatal overstretch when you make art from anger is that you identify too much with the anger itself, that you begin to take yourself too seriously. It's no accident that many times the best humour comes from the groups in society which have most reason to be angry, the people who've had horrible shit done to them. Everyone thinks humour is a survival technique, and it is, but the thing is that the humour helps you survive the anger, not just the initial bad situation. It's not so much that you have to laugh or else you'd cry, more that you have to laugh or else you'd kill a bunch of people and never stop until somebody shot you in the head.

And humility, too, because you will fuck up. That's what should have been carved over the portal of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and if they were the Stoic Mysteries instead it damn well would have been. None of us is a Paladin of Ultimate Right, none of us gets things spot-on all the damn time, none of us is perfect and we need people to point this out. That's why the Romans had a guy who whispered memento mori to the Emperor during triumphal parades, for goodness' sake.

And that's what upsets me so much about Moore's Imperial, de haut en bas reaction to criticism, as detailed  herein. It's a supermassive sense of humour failure. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Moore to admit she fucked up and try to learn and try to write better stuff. But that, she won't do. The bland, bland praise of fandom and the commentariat circle-jerk have convinced her she is above criticism. And she lacks the humility to see this is what's happened, because she's spent so much time angry, so little time leavening the anger, that righteousness has decayed into its qliphothic form, self-righteousness.

It's a cautionary tale. It's an example of why you must be certain of your rage, as you must be certain of the devil. Because none of us are as beautiful, as righteous, as terrible as angels. But some of us do burn like stars exploding, and some of us die in gutters and are buried under names we never wanted, and when you forget that those people matter every bit as much as you and maybe more, when you allow yourself to be seduced into disregarding justified criticism because you're a Big Important Writer...that's when you've lost it.

And you deserve every bit of the rage directed at you. And, as much as you might like to paint yourself as one, you are not a victim.

And that's all I have to say on the matter.

UPDATE: Actually that's not quite all. Judging from this piece by washed-up fake-punk has-been Julie Burchill, the Grauniad really is deliberately trying to troll their trans readers just to get fucking pageviews. I knew Alan Rusbridger was desperate to stop his paper collapsing, but I didn't know he was desperate enough to copy the Daily Mail's business model.

Today was the first day I didn't buy a copy of the Saturday Guardian. Last Saturday, it turns out, is the last time I ever did.

Daily Pages: Voices

(So. Er...hi. I'm back. Sort of. As some of you may know, I got a little bit sick with pneumonia earlier in the year and had a long hiatus in posting on here, made longer by the fact that as the number of days between my last post and what would be my next one increased I felt under more pressure to write something which would (a) get everyone reading up to speed on what's been going down with me over the last several months and (b) rock. I have decided that the only way to keep blogging is to abandon both these strictures: to operate on the assumption that the events of the last few months will gradually become clear to readers as they read over the new entries which will, presumably, refer back to these times, and to abandon any notion of quality control for the time being on the basis that unpoliced content is at least content. To that end, one thing I'll be doing when I don't feel up to writing about anything else is posting thoughts from my daily pages.

The daily pages - usually called morning pages but, y'know, I'm not so much a morning person - is a technique from Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. I'll be honest - I tend to give this book a little bit of the side-eye because there is a bit of guff about God in it, and I'm always wary of people trying to sneak Jehovah into things by the back door (same reason I'm suspicious of AA). But the pages are a good idea: you sit, you write three pages of whatever comes into your noggin. You don't worry about whether it's any good. You don't worry about whether you'll publish it or not. You just see what happens. Sometimes you get stuff you can mine for poems, sometimes you get memoir, sometimes you get short stories, sometimes you get gibberish and actually sometimes the gibberish is the most fun to read back later. And, sometimes, you get something like the following, which seemed so much like a blog post I figured it was pretty much crying out to be on here. So, here goes.)

Why do people say 'Oh my God'? Is it a subconscious acknowledgement of the wide and varied panoply of faiths whose adherents hum, chant and flagellate their way around the planet? I don't think so. I think the 'my' in the popular exclamation is an assertion of possession, of the speaker's right to define the views of, to speak for, their supposedly omnipotent and omniscient deity.
Consider the contexts in which the phrase is uttered: instances of shock, disbelief, disapproval. This is something God would not approve of, says the speaker, and I know because God is mine. He is my God. And he agrees with me. On everything.

What arrogance!

The things people say, and the voices they say them with, are a source of constant interest to me. Because my voice has never fit in 'round here. Because I spend so much time and effort training my voice, keeping it out of the diaphragm and letting the fluttering spirit of my words roost instead high in the eaves of my throat. And because I work hard on it when I rehearse for gigs, too, when I choose my words when writing and rewrite poems after rehearsal to make them work better with the sound of my voice when I perform them. Because of this, the voices I am surrounded by day in and day out fascinate and appal me. I wish I could give that somewhat cliched combination its usual idiomatic conclusion of 'in equal measure', but that would be a lie. The fact is I am more appalled than fascinated. Because cis people take so little care with their voices. People whose accents have always been accepted find it so easy and pleasurable to just low along with the herd. People who have never written anything more complicated than a shopping list see nothing wrong in speaking in soap-opera cliches or the nauseating therapy-speak of morning talk shows. They talk of 'wanting space' and 'needing closure' and don't notice that they have penned themselves into a metaphorical sheepfold.

It's hard for me to trust the voices of others. I hear too much barely concealed nastiness in so many. So much sneering, so much petulance, so much anger from people who have been given the world and want to complain because they'd prefer it in a different shade of blue. Or the laughter they share, the little confidences, the bonding over kids or football which remind me that the world they would prefer has no room for people like me. It's not that they hate us, exactly, though some do: it's that their ideal world would not include us so that they wouldn't have to think about us. Genocide has its roots in laziness and ignorance as much as in actual hatred. The ultimate refusal of empathy is not active vitriol or even the pathology of the autistic subject, but the erasure of those who are different because you would rather devote cognitive capacity to discussing last night's X-Factor result than to trying to imagine ways in which such difference could be included. Oh, were you watching that? I'm sorry. I didn't see you there.

The voice to which one feels inclined to listen, the voice with which one feels in harmony, is rare. When found, such voices are such a joy to hear that I often just sit back and listen to them, passively looking in on the conversation of others, smiling. But in most contexts I know that trying to find such a voice will take a long time, tiring me out with no certainty of success. So I try my best to tune out the voices around me and find pleasure in silence, or the digitally-mediated melodies of my MP3 player and headphones. I ignore the man at the stop shouting that we're all cunts until I can get on the bus and listen to Arvo Part. I turn my back to the voices in the canteen and occupy myself creating harmonies of word and image on the bounded desert of the page. Their world, their noise, their ignorance, but I can make flimsy, self-contained worlds of my own for what little time they last, to escape them. And that helps. A little. Sometimes.

Sometimes, I just want to shout will the lot of you SHUT THE FUCK UP? through the largest, loudest megaphone in the world.

The Ballad of CeCe McDonald

Trigger warning: this poem discusses a transphobic attack and its aftermath. Certain verses also refer to prison rape. If either of these things are likely to trigger you, feel free not to read.

CeCe McDonald copped a plea.

Guilty. Manslaughter. Second degree.
She had to. There’d be no fair trial.
Forty-one more months in jail

the best she could expect from them,

the white, cisgendered, Minnesota men
whose prejudice would seal her fate,
ruling ‘inadmissible’ the hate

inscribed on the so-called victim’s flesh,

but saying that her one bounced cheque
would be allowed to testify
against her virtue. Cheques don’t lie,

but swastika tattoos may prove

mere relics of a misspent youth.
That Schmitz said go back to Africa
was, the whites said, neither here nor there:

a man was stabbed, and CeCe’s race

made Freeman think he had a case.
Freeman, who’d tried anti-fascists
but let Darrell Evanovich’s

killer walk, had CeCe bound

in custody. The facial wound
that she’d received that night turned septic,
left untreated, grew and festered,

as CeCe festered in their jail,

each day eroding CeCe’s will
to fight, and making Freeman bold.
He’d show the press how he controlled

those elements – the blacks, the queers –

Tea Party voters tend to fear:
pandering to fears like these
keeps Blue Dog Freeman in his seat

and hapless CeCe in her cell,

while the Caucasian thugs who yelled
abuse and chased her through the streets
are free to party, laugh and eat,

drink beer and cheer at Vikings games

while CeCe languishes in chains
for standing ground that wasn’t hers
in the eyes of pallid jurors.

Meanwhile, Robert Zimmerman

– the dodgy judge, not Bob Dylan –
tells Fox News that his son George
had probable defensive cause

to shoot a black boy in the chest

at point-blank range, then flee arrest:
but George’s victim wasn’t white,
so George posed no risk of flight

(though he’d lain low for one whole month,

while press and police went on the hunt).
So Zimmerman was granted bail:
paid 15K and walked from jail,

where CeCe sits awaiting sentence,

hoping to serve out her penance
for the crime of keeping her friends safe
in a prison where she won’t be raped

by cis male guards and prisoners

with shivs or barks of ‘strip for search’,
a decency that isn’t certain
in the realm of men like Freeman,

governed only for some people,

who are not considered equal,
whatever patriotic lies
its blue-eyed children may imbibe

when they chant their morning pledge,

where millions teeter on the edge
of losing homes to bailed-out banks
while Mormon millionaire mountebanks

pledge to protect blastocysts

and cuff a quarter of the wrists
on Planet Earth, and shackle more:
oh, Amnesty are keeping score,

but who cares? We’re the Great Exception!

For rich white men we’ll make exemptions!
But if you’re not, well – just forget it.
Cop the plea. You’ll get no credit

from the local Fox affiliate.

Justice for all? You’re delirious!
The fact is that America
still operates a colour bar.

See CeCe, in her prison rack?
Her wrists, like most we cuff, are black.

                        *          *          *

CeCe McDonald has been sent to prison for the 'crime' of defening herself and her friends from a racist and transphobic attack. No attempt has been made to punish her attackers. Please sign the petition asking the Minnesota State Governor, Mark Dayton, to pardon her.

NaPoWriMo Poem Twenty-Three: Hey, AJ, what's up?

I sit down
and my stomach flips
the way it did
on Spuggy's Bridge
years ago
on the run
to Jarrow

breathlessness
with every step
exhausted legs
by half ten
in the morning

the boredom
of more time
than its plausible
to cope with
watching quiz shows
on the sofa
even Richard
Osman starts
to get annoying

the way once-certain dates
in diaries
sprout question marks
then crosses


       *                   *                      *

Today's poem is about, well, being ill. Just kind of popped into my head while I sit here getting my breath back for another epic attempt on the stairs before I get dressed to go to the doctors' and get my blood test results. I don't usually like the ee cummings 'I don't believe in punctuation' approach because it smacks, to me, of sixth form poets who've not got much beyond copying song lyrics onto their folders, but I've used it here because I think it gives the poem a sense of breathlessness. Ditto the short (well, for me anyway) lines.

NaPoWriMo Poem Twenty-Two: May 'n' the Abu, a Hay(na)ku

May:
I deport.
You, May? Not!

*    *    *

Look, don't judge me, I'm three poems behind here! This is inspired by the prompt from Day 21 to write a hay(na)ku, a haiku-like poem, the lines having one word in the first line, two in the second, and three in the third, and by the continual difficulty the Home Secretary seems to be having in knowing what day of the week it is.