It's one of the most boring things you'll hear if you're an X-Men fan, and you're always guaranteed to hear it. You know what I'm talking about: the political analogy. Get into a discussion about the X-Men and, eventually, at some point, someone is gonna come out with something very like the following:
'Well, of course, the thing, man, is that, like, Professor Xavier is like Martin Luther King and Magneto is, like, Malcolm X, yeah?'
What's so annoying about this? Well, two things: first, purely in comic-book terms, it ignores the more complex relationship between the characters by making them an allegory for other things. But more importantly it relies on a subtle, unstated assumption, which is this: Professor X is like MLK, and not his namesake Malcolm, because he is pacifist and tries to help humans, or in other words he rebels in an acceptable way, while Magneto is like Malcolm X because he uses violence and thus he rebels in an unacceptable way. The question is, acceptable to whom? It's significant that I've never seen a person of colour make this rather naff analogy, because it positively drips with unexamined white privilege. It assumes that definitions of acceptable and unacceptable rebellion are the preserve of the privileged, and that the opinions of the marginalised are of secondary importance; and, more important, they represent a highly distorted view of both of King and X.
The idea that Martin Luther King represents the acceptable face of the Civil Rights movement, the benign, nonviolent, reasonable pastor, while Malcolm X represents the snarling, violent firebrand, is simplistic and reductive. Malcolm X became more conciliatory in the period before he was killed, after he broke with the Nation of Islam and radically extended his political thought. He was never the cartoon terrorist he's made out to be. And King wasn't a comforting Buddha figure either. What people forget is that nonviolence is a tactic, a way of defeating a more powerful oppressing force by showing the starkness of its violent response to your protests. The idea of non-violent resistance being used by Dr King and the Civil Rights movement makes white people feel very comfortable now, but it didn't then: if you look at footage of the protests in Birmingham or Alabama you can see how angry it made the authorities. MLK knew this would happen from his study of Gandhi, but like Gandhi he would never say the possibility of real violent revolution on the part of those he advocated for was wrong or unlikely. He didn't judge it, indeed he said that if people didn't act on his nonviolent campaign then it was highly likely that there would be violence. As part of the Architects of Our Republic project I've had the opportunity to read the whole of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech, not just the peroration which everyone remembers (and which, as Gary Younge points out, wasn't even supposed to be given on the day). This speech includes references to 'the sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent' and 'the marvellous new militancy' among black people, and warns that people 'will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual'. Yes, he also talks about the importance of nonviolence but he is clear that violence is a possibility. His job is not to be peaceful and reasonable and to make his oppressors feel comfortable, it is to tell them what time it is and to tell them what will happen if they don't get their act together on equality. But people forget this uncompromising aspect of the speech because they like the pretty image of children playing together at the end.
I suppose one reason I've been thinking about this over the weekend is the storm in teacup kicked up by some pearl-clutching cis people, and, worse, some trans people too, over the use of the hashtag #fuckcispeople on twitter. Because the same simplistic dichotomy is being drawn. The same split between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' revolutionaries. The same idea that we should fight for our rights in a way that won't frighten the horses. That cis people will only accept us if we're good trans people. If we're nice. If we're unthreatening. If we try to be more like Professor X than Magneto; more like MLK than Malcolm X: and more like a comforting caricature of either than the messy, complicated reality.
I don't usually say 'fuck cis people' - many of my best friends are cis people, but something many of my best friends are not is fools, or faux-offended moralists with an agenda. They know that when I, or any other trans person, expresses outrage at 'cis people' we don't mean all cis people, any more than a black person expressing their exasperation with white people means every single white person they know, or a disabled person giving out about abled people is including all the abled people they're acquainted with in that charge.It's an expression of anger at a system that privileges one group over another, and those who do well out of that system and don't really care to do anything about it because they're alright and certainly don't want to do anything about it if it's going to mean, god forbid, making them uncomfortable. Fuck those people, is what it means. And anyone who fails to see that, or claims to see that, anyone who is shocked, gentlemen, shocked at the thought that their own comfort may be derived from the oppression of others?
Fuck those people.
Sunday, 18 August 2013
Friday, 14 June 2013
Exciting Announcements Announced Excitingly!
I've had a busy week! I was in London for most of it. The main reason I was in London is something I'll get to in a moment, but first I want to deal with a little other business.
To begin with: one of the reasons I was in London, though not the main reason, was to perform at Bar Wotever. Wotever is a great night at a great venue, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, ran by an amazing team of people and usually attracting a brilliant crowd of top humans. Rather unfortunately the event this past week also attracted a noted transphobe who, I'm given to understand, has a history of stalking and harrassing people among the Wotever regulars. This person snuck in hoping not to be noticed, got noticed, and got told to leave. Personally I was tickled pink at the thought of this person being in the audience when I did my spot, but the organisers have a pretty clear duty of care to those attending their event, and ejecting people who've made members of your audience feel unsafe definitely comes under that heading. And that's pretty much all I'm going to say on the matter. A bigoted wanker turned up to a pub and got bounced. To say anything more than that is to give that wanker entirely more attention than she deserves. End of, as I believe you young people say.
But not the end of my London adventures, as I will return to London in just over a fortnight to perform at Transpose, the phenomenal CN Lester's showcase of amazing trans art and creativity, occuring on the 28th of June as part of London Pride. CN wants everyone attending to bring a cis friend partly to raise awareness, and partly to annoy Louise Mensch, who thinks the word 'cis' is offensive, the poor dear. Coming down from Newcastle that might be logistically difficult for me, but I'll see what I can do.
One thing I do want all my cis friends to come to is this year's Newcastle Pride. Although I note that you wouldn't know it from their website (quelle surprise), this year's Newcastlebig corporate gaywash celebration of diversity will feature a Trans Zone for the first time ever. There'll be all kinds of stuff happening, but one thing of particular interest to residents of this parish will be the fact that there will be entertainment from a number of amazingly talented trans performers, including me. While obviously transphobia will not be tolerated, the Trans Zone is open to everyone who's open-minded, and I urge any of you who can make it to go, for one simple reason: if the Trans Zone is not a success this year, we won't get to have one next year, and I would really like to see it become a permanent part of Newcastle Pride. So get your ass to Exhibition Park on the 20th of July and earn your ally cookies by showing up to support the trans community in person instead of just clicking 'like' on Facebook pages. And yes, there will be ally cookies. I'm going to bake some. But that's not
the
Big
Announcement:
The Big Announcement is that I am honoured to be one of a select group of poets chosen to collaborate on Architects of Our Republic, a very special project organised by Apples and Snakes, sponsored by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights March on Washington DC and Martin Luther King's seminal 'I have a dream' speech. Us poets have been selected to write poems in response to the speech which will be turned into films by film-makers in our regions. These films will then be screened at the South Bank Centre in London on the 28th of August - the exact anniversary of the March, along with a whole host of other cool goings-on including choirs, placards, processions, music, and - oh yeah - godfathers of rap The Last Poets. As I say, I'm honoured to be included in a project like this. Writing something that won't look like total crap beside one of the greatest pieces of oratory in history is a daunting prospect, but I'm working on something. I don't want to say too much about it yet, but what I will say is that I've used one of the key metaphors in King's speech as a way into writing about a particular instance of modern injustice I've been quietly incensed about for some time now. When you see the film, and hear the final piece, you'll see that I'm now being noisily incensed about it. And hopefully, by bringing it before the South Bank Centre crowd, I can bring it to a wider audience, and - maybe, just maybe - prove Auden wrong and write some poetry which makes something happen. Maybe.
So: those are the announcements. Will the congregation please now rise for the final hymn, '(If You Don't Wanna Fuck Me, Baby) Fuck Off' by Jayne County and the Electric Chairs...
To begin with: one of the reasons I was in London, though not the main reason, was to perform at Bar Wotever. Wotever is a great night at a great venue, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, ran by an amazing team of people and usually attracting a brilliant crowd of top humans. Rather unfortunately the event this past week also attracted a noted transphobe who, I'm given to understand, has a history of stalking and harrassing people among the Wotever regulars. This person snuck in hoping not to be noticed, got noticed, and got told to leave. Personally I was tickled pink at the thought of this person being in the audience when I did my spot, but the organisers have a pretty clear duty of care to those attending their event, and ejecting people who've made members of your audience feel unsafe definitely comes under that heading. And that's pretty much all I'm going to say on the matter. A bigoted wanker turned up to a pub and got bounced. To say anything more than that is to give that wanker entirely more attention than she deserves. End of, as I believe you young people say.
But not the end of my London adventures, as I will return to London in just over a fortnight to perform at Transpose, the phenomenal CN Lester's showcase of amazing trans art and creativity, occuring on the 28th of June as part of London Pride. CN wants everyone attending to bring a cis friend partly to raise awareness, and partly to annoy Louise Mensch, who thinks the word 'cis' is offensive, the poor dear. Coming down from Newcastle that might be logistically difficult for me, but I'll see what I can do.
One thing I do want all my cis friends to come to is this year's Newcastle Pride. Although I note that you wouldn't know it from their website (quelle surprise), this year's Newcastle
the
Big
Announcement:
The Big Announcement is that I am honoured to be one of a select group of poets chosen to collaborate on Architects of Our Republic, a very special project organised by Apples and Snakes, sponsored by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights March on Washington DC and Martin Luther King's seminal 'I have a dream' speech. Us poets have been selected to write poems in response to the speech which will be turned into films by film-makers in our regions. These films will then be screened at the South Bank Centre in London on the 28th of August - the exact anniversary of the March, along with a whole host of other cool goings-on including choirs, placards, processions, music, and - oh yeah - godfathers of rap The Last Poets. As I say, I'm honoured to be included in a project like this. Writing something that won't look like total crap beside one of the greatest pieces of oratory in history is a daunting prospect, but I'm working on something. I don't want to say too much about it yet, but what I will say is that I've used one of the key metaphors in King's speech as a way into writing about a particular instance of modern injustice I've been quietly incensed about for some time now. When you see the film, and hear the final piece, you'll see that I'm now being noisily incensed about it. And hopefully, by bringing it before the South Bank Centre crowd, I can bring it to a wider audience, and - maybe, just maybe - prove Auden wrong and write some poetry which makes something happen. Maybe.
So: those are the announcements. Will the congregation please now rise for the final hymn, '(If You Don't Wanna Fuck Me, Baby) Fuck Off' by Jayne County and the Electric Chairs...
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
25/5/13 Video
So, a while ago, at a scratch performance event I go to, the facilitator set us a homework assignment: set up a youtube channel, and start recording and uploading our poems to it. I'm busy working on a lot of things at the moment, but found myself with an hour or so spare due to a miscalculation about how long the laundry would take to dry. So I looked at my smartphone, and thought 'well, why not?' 25/5/13 has been desperate to be performed since I wrote her, and - for various reasons - it looks like it'll be at least a couple of weeks before I get the chance to do that on stage. So, here she is!
This is probably a slightly quieter reading than you'll see when I do it on stage, because I didn't think doing a lot of SHOUTING when the camera was practically held against my face would be a good idea. On the other hand it's unlikely you'll be able to see those two spots at the top of my nose so well during a stage version even if they are still there by then, so, y'know, swings and roundabouts, innit?
This is probably a slightly quieter reading than you'll see when I do it on stage, because I didn't think doing a lot of SHOUTING when the camera was practically held against my face would be a good idea. On the other hand it's unlikely you'll be able to see those two spots at the top of my nose so well during a stage version even if they are still there by then, so, y'know, swings and roundabouts, innit?
Monday, 27 May 2013
25/5/13 - a response to the EDL march in Newcastle
I’m
not offended by the fact that others
aren’t
the same as me:
how
the fuck could I be?
Regularly
the
only one in the room:
can’t
recall if Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou
advises
not to be that, but I never had a choice.
Grew
up always knowing I’d not be one of the boys,
never
certain of unqualified acceptance as a girl:
there
are days I feel as if it isn’t just rooms but the world
that
there’s no-one else like me in,
and
I don’t mean I’m unique,
I
don’t mean I’m artisan, handmade, bespoke, boutique,
I
mean the world feels like a funfair
where
I’m wheeled in as the freak,
accepted
as a turn because I learned to entertain you,
a
lust-object to chasers who say girls like me are ‘angels’
when
they don’t care for our halos
but
the things between our legs,
cause
when a chick has dick plus tits who gives
a
shit about her intellect? Now,
if
I can deal with this day after day, night after night,
why
are you so angry that some people just...aren’t
white?
Because
that’s what it’s about: don’t try
to
hide behind religion, don’t say
you’re
not racist, that you just object to Islam,
because
if that’s the case then why were your mates
casing
the gurdwara?
Sikhs
aren’t Muslims. This is basic.
You
lot really should work harder
at
learning to distinguish one brown person from another
but
why try, when the one thing you’re
not
blind to is their colour?
And
just as you deny that you’ve selective colour vision,
you
lie and claim you even have an LGBT division,
when
nothing else backs those initials
but
your cynicism:
I
missed the running battle
when
you gathered in Newcastle,
because
I was lying back on
a
couch, wearing blackened tanning
goggles,
having IPL
(intensed
pulsed light beams) fired at my face
and,
yes, it hurts like hell,
but
doesn’t feel like the disgrace
I
felt when I had to cross the street
to
get away from you
the
way I’d hang out in the library
when
I was back at school
because
I knew you owned the yard
but
didn’t own the future:
sure,
you were nasty, you were hard,
and
I was just a loser
who
wanted to be Kitty Pryde
instead
of Wolverine,
but
I was going somewhere.
Never
told you about my dream
because
I knew that boys like you interpret
difference
as a weakness:
I
kept it close, I kept it secret,
but
I knew that I’d achieve this.
Still
I crossed the street when you pitched up
mob-handed
in my city,
munching
on free fry-ups
from
the welcoming committee
at
a bar which I won’t name
(but
which pretends it’s Gotham, shittily).
You
were drinking, cussing, bussed-in
from
as far away as Brighton,
all
just here for a ruck, it wasn’t just me
that
was frightened.
On
the bus back home apologists insisted
you
were peaceful:
but
you didn’t look calm, plotted up
down
there by the cathedral,
and
you didn’t look zen, shirtless,
shouting,
on the evening news:
though
that’s not surprising. Half-ten
and
already on the booze,
and
you claim that you’re defending
all
that’s good in our society?
Just
what is it you’re protesting
against
– sobriety?
There’s
nothing you can ever say that’ll enlighten me
because
you live in the dark ages,
even
dress up as crusaders,
burn
Korans while never understanding
what’s
between their pages,
the
quotes you use selected
to
prove it’s twisted –
but
I bet that you eat shellfish
and still claim to be a Christian
(Leviticus
11:10 forbids that – why not check it?).
You
won’t prove that you know the truth
by sampling riffs from holy books,
but
they say we’ll know you by your fruits
and
what you bear is rotten
before
it’s even off the tree.
Maybe
you’ve forgotten
the
story about Muhammad Ali
when
he refused the draft?
What
he said to reporters,
whenever
they would ask
why
he wouldn’t go to Vietnam,
swap
gloves for trigger fingers,
was
that no-one in the Viet Cong
had
ever called him ‘nigger’.
You’d
probably deny it,
but
I think it’s pretty classy,
and
that’s why I’ll never march beside you:
because
no Muslim called me ‘tranny’.
Saturday, 6 April 2013
On Falling Behind
Feed the beast.
That's what it said, the book that advised me to start keeping a blog, as a way to promote my poetry. 'Update every day if possible, but at minimum each week. Keep yourself in peoples' awareness. Feed the beast.'
You can see how successful I've been with that.
The truth is there was no deliberate plan to slow down the rate at which I update this blog. No calculated allocation of resources occurred. I didn't sit down and run a cost-benefit analysis of whether I should put more effort into updating this or concentrating on doing more gigs and developing my performance chops, and spending more time in irl circles where I can present as me and so develop my make-up-and-clothes-fu. Things just happened. Pneumonia. Depression. Gigs. Nascent relationships that ultimately went nowhere; a certain amount of sexual exploration and voracious socialising. Things slid, as they tend to do. And so I feel behind.
I've been thinking about falling behind today. Because the other day, while reading and sipping some coffee, a thought occurred to me. The thought that I may have been looking at one of the things I've fallen behind on from the wrong angle.
See, I've got behind on my reading. And I've been stressing about that quite a bit. It's not been the biggest stressor in my life, for obvious reasons, but it's been there, gnawing away at the back of my mind: how, and how much, I'd fallen behind.
I got the Saturday Guardian this morning (I know; I said I wouldn't buy it again, but they seem to be trying to be a bit better about trans stuff now and besides, I like Sali Hughes' beauty tips), and at the time I hadn't even finished the new London Review, or the new Kindle edition of the New Statesman - in fact, there's an edition of the NS on my Kindle which I haven't even started yet too. Also on the Kindle is James Wood's new essay collection, The Fun Stuff, which I'm only halfway through and want to finish. There's John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection too, but I went off that when I got to the essay where he hangs around a pool with reality TV stars asking if they've ever had any 'trannies' on their show. I can live without finishing that book. And I can probably live without carrying out a detailed investigation of the numerous self-published ebook-only niche porn titles I skimmed through as a kind of literature review for a poetry project I've been working on (you can take the girl out of the academy...). I really ought to get back to Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry, which 'd barely started before falling ill last year; and I'm sure there'll be a new copy of The Baffler out soon to download as well....
That's only magazines and electronic books. In terms of physical books, I still haven't quite finished off Gender Outlaws, which I bought at Gay's the Word last year; last week, at my local Waterstone's, I bought Alice Oswald's Memorial and Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap; I finished the first off while waiting to meet a friend before going to see the roller derby last Saturday, but I haven't even started the latter. And then there's Alasdair Gray's Every Short Story 1951-2012, a book bigger than the Bible, into which I have only penetrated as far as the equivalent of Genesis and Exodus, the stories making up Gray's first book, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. That will take a while, not least because the thing is in hardback and is a physical challenge to take on as well as a mental one. Perhaps I ought to buy a lectern for it.
I scored some small victories: I finally got around to reading, and very much enjoyed, Caitlin R Kiernan's The Red Tree, which had languished on my shelf since I bought it quite some time ago, not because I don't like Caitlin's writing but because I hate the horrible, mass-market American editions of her books which are the only ones UK bookstores seem to get. I also finally finished Jonathan Meades' Museum without Walls: I love Meades' television, but Meades' prose needs time to be enjoyed. I finished it during some time off work recently, along with a biography of the poet Peter Redgrove which I read as part of the same lit review as the Kindle porn.
But for some strange reason I also decided, amongst all of this, to start re-reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and got distracted around about chapter four; and I can't leave that unfinished because not finishing a book on a re-read irks me because how many times can I say I've read the book, then? Even more irksome in this regard is the most recent big Locas hardback by Jaime Hernandez: I almost finished rereading that during a long night of clarithromycin and prednisolone-induced insomnia during my first bout of pneumonitis, but didn't quite get to the end; and in the morning, distractions intervened, and now I can't remember where I left off. This is torture.
It is all torture, this constant feeling of having fallen behind, this drip-drip-drip of the thought that you will never get caught up, never clear the backlog, never win: but then, yesterday, drinking coffee and reading the LRB I suddenly thought, is it?
You see, this week I suffered a flare-up of my pneumonitis. And had to spend a mercifully short time in the short-stay ward of a local hospital, being assessed to see whether I should be admitted for a longer stay in the respiratory ward. The short-stay ward, unlike the main wards, has none of those televisions hospitals now provide for bedside viewing these days. You probably know the ones I mean: the ones on a metal arm which swing into place above your bed so you can watch Dr Who, the news, or a selection of preprogrammed movies while you recover from whatever it is you're in for. The short-stay ward in this particular hospital also has rather bad mobile internet reception.
I've been in the 'short-stay' ward for up to two days before. In those circumstances having enough to read becomes a real concern, especially if you're bedridden, as I was at some times, to the extent that staggering to the toilet across the hall leaves you gasping and practically floored. At one point I had actually read literally everything I had to hand, and got so bored I spent several hours trying - and failing - to complete the Guardian cryptic crossword.
I worried about this again when I was in the same ward on Thursday. But, fortunately, I had the LRB; I had the Kindle, with Wood and Maxwell and even the porn if it came to that. I could survive. I wouldn't be bored.
I suddenly realised that I hadn't fallen behind. I was, instead, in the thankful position of having as much to read as I could possibly require. What I believed a burden was a surfeit.
Thankfully I got out without having to be admitted for a longer stay. I came home, with even more to read if I needed to: I could get further into Gray. I could finish rereading Bechdel. I could even polish off the Locas book.
And as with that, so with the other things in my life. I have the aforementioned poetry project to reveal (yes; I finally finished it just after getting out). I have gigs to do. Events to attend. I have the self-published pamphlet to promote, and interest from publishers in another. I have a show to put together. I have to move out, and get my own place. I have my transition to continue, and I have more people to whom I have to come out about transitioning.
Seen from one angle, these are all causes of stress. They are all things on which I've fallen behind. They are burdens.
From another, they're a surfeit: a surfeit of life.
That's what it said, the book that advised me to start keeping a blog, as a way to promote my poetry. 'Update every day if possible, but at minimum each week. Keep yourself in peoples' awareness. Feed the beast.'
You can see how successful I've been with that.
The truth is there was no deliberate plan to slow down the rate at which I update this blog. No calculated allocation of resources occurred. I didn't sit down and run a cost-benefit analysis of whether I should put more effort into updating this or concentrating on doing more gigs and developing my performance chops, and spending more time in irl circles where I can present as me and so develop my make-up-and-clothes-fu. Things just happened. Pneumonia. Depression. Gigs. Nascent relationships that ultimately went nowhere; a certain amount of sexual exploration and voracious socialising. Things slid, as they tend to do. And so I feel behind.
I've been thinking about falling behind today. Because the other day, while reading and sipping some coffee, a thought occurred to me. The thought that I may have been looking at one of the things I've fallen behind on from the wrong angle.
See, I've got behind on my reading. And I've been stressing about that quite a bit. It's not been the biggest stressor in my life, for obvious reasons, but it's been there, gnawing away at the back of my mind: how, and how much, I'd fallen behind.
I got the Saturday Guardian this morning (I know; I said I wouldn't buy it again, but they seem to be trying to be a bit better about trans stuff now and besides, I like Sali Hughes' beauty tips), and at the time I hadn't even finished the new London Review, or the new Kindle edition of the New Statesman - in fact, there's an edition of the NS on my Kindle which I haven't even started yet too. Also on the Kindle is James Wood's new essay collection, The Fun Stuff, which I'm only halfway through and want to finish. There's John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection too, but I went off that when I got to the essay where he hangs around a pool with reality TV stars asking if they've ever had any 'trannies' on their show. I can live without finishing that book. And I can probably live without carrying out a detailed investigation of the numerous self-published ebook-only niche porn titles I skimmed through as a kind of literature review for a poetry project I've been working on (you can take the girl out of the academy...). I really ought to get back to Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry, which 'd barely started before falling ill last year; and I'm sure there'll be a new copy of The Baffler out soon to download as well....
That's only magazines and electronic books. In terms of physical books, I still haven't quite finished off Gender Outlaws, which I bought at Gay's the Word last year; last week, at my local Waterstone's, I bought Alice Oswald's Memorial and Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap; I finished the first off while waiting to meet a friend before going to see the roller derby last Saturday, but I haven't even started the latter. And then there's Alasdair Gray's Every Short Story 1951-2012, a book bigger than the Bible, into which I have only penetrated as far as the equivalent of Genesis and Exodus, the stories making up Gray's first book, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. That will take a while, not least because the thing is in hardback and is a physical challenge to take on as well as a mental one. Perhaps I ought to buy a lectern for it.
I scored some small victories: I finally got around to reading, and very much enjoyed, Caitlin R Kiernan's The Red Tree, which had languished on my shelf since I bought it quite some time ago, not because I don't like Caitlin's writing but because I hate the horrible, mass-market American editions of her books which are the only ones UK bookstores seem to get. I also finally finished Jonathan Meades' Museum without Walls: I love Meades' television, but Meades' prose needs time to be enjoyed. I finished it during some time off work recently, along with a biography of the poet Peter Redgrove which I read as part of the same lit review as the Kindle porn.
But for some strange reason I also decided, amongst all of this, to start re-reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and got distracted around about chapter four; and I can't leave that unfinished because not finishing a book on a re-read irks me because how many times can I say I've read the book, then? Even more irksome in this regard is the most recent big Locas hardback by Jaime Hernandez: I almost finished rereading that during a long night of clarithromycin and prednisolone-induced insomnia during my first bout of pneumonitis, but didn't quite get to the end; and in the morning, distractions intervened, and now I can't remember where I left off. This is torture.
It is all torture, this constant feeling of having fallen behind, this drip-drip-drip of the thought that you will never get caught up, never clear the backlog, never win: but then, yesterday, drinking coffee and reading the LRB I suddenly thought, is it?
You see, this week I suffered a flare-up of my pneumonitis. And had to spend a mercifully short time in the short-stay ward of a local hospital, being assessed to see whether I should be admitted for a longer stay in the respiratory ward. The short-stay ward, unlike the main wards, has none of those televisions hospitals now provide for bedside viewing these days. You probably know the ones I mean: the ones on a metal arm which swing into place above your bed so you can watch Dr Who, the news, or a selection of preprogrammed movies while you recover from whatever it is you're in for. The short-stay ward in this particular hospital also has rather bad mobile internet reception.
I've been in the 'short-stay' ward for up to two days before. In those circumstances having enough to read becomes a real concern, especially if you're bedridden, as I was at some times, to the extent that staggering to the toilet across the hall leaves you gasping and practically floored. At one point I had actually read literally everything I had to hand, and got so bored I spent several hours trying - and failing - to complete the Guardian cryptic crossword.
I worried about this again when I was in the same ward on Thursday. But, fortunately, I had the LRB; I had the Kindle, with Wood and Maxwell and even the porn if it came to that. I could survive. I wouldn't be bored.
I suddenly realised that I hadn't fallen behind. I was, instead, in the thankful position of having as much to read as I could possibly require. What I believed a burden was a surfeit.
Thankfully I got out without having to be admitted for a longer stay. I came home, with even more to read if I needed to: I could get further into Gray. I could finish rereading Bechdel. I could even polish off the Locas book.
And as with that, so with the other things in my life. I have the aforementioned poetry project to reveal (yes; I finally finished it just after getting out). I have gigs to do. Events to attend. I have the self-published pamphlet to promote, and interest from publishers in another. I have a show to put together. I have to move out, and get my own place. I have my transition to continue, and I have more people to whom I have to come out about transitioning.
Seen from one angle, these are all causes of stress. They are all things on which I've fallen behind. They are burdens.
From another, they're a surfeit: a surfeit of life.
Saturday, 23 March 2013
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.
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?
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.
Sunday, 13 January 2013
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.
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.
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