Breaking down those walls of stone

    If someone had told me I'd see over forty transgender people in a room expressing something approaching agreement, I'd never have believed it. We are by our nature a very diverse grouping, you might say a broad church. You could safely expect an argument over whether the sky is blue on a clear day.
     But yesterday it was something of a surprise to see just that. Stonewall, the national LGBT campaigning charity, were holding one of a series of consultations on a document intended to lay out their trans strategy now that they are embracing the T in LGBT.
    Stonewall, you see, are an organisation with a bit of a problematic history in these matters. In the past, they have quite happily pretended to be LGBT when in fact they were more LGB, or a bit more accurately, LG. If you're being brutally honest, LG. Even LGGGGGGGGGGG, some people will tell you, such was the attitude of the coterie of middle aged gay men that once held sway at its helm. They'd take money on an LGBT ticket and even talk to politicians on that front too, but when it came to the crunch they'd throw us under the bus every time. Thus you'd see its name sometimes written as "Sonewall", because there's no T in it, or even occasionally "Sonewa", because at times there could be precious little L either. Not an organisation that had much trust from within our community
    A couple of years ago against this backdrop along came a new Stonewall director, Ruth Hunt. She immediately set about refocusing Stonewall to be genuinely LGBT, and to facilitate this she had the organisation recruit a trans steering committee. This committee put together the draft document, and yesterday's event was one of a series in which they placed it before the trans community.
    It was a document into which a lot of effort had been put, and it shows how much they have changed. In front of us we had a well-thought-out enunciation of trans rights and experiences, both as they are and as they should be. And here we come to the agreement between the attendees, while there was plenty to tweak around the edges the tone of the document was as far as I could see universally approved.
    Since I was there wearing my trade union hat I made a few suggestions on workplace rights. I always feel as though I've said too much or even made a fool of myself at these occasions, let's hope I made a valid contribution. We'll see the completed document in the coming weeks, and then its contents will be the subject of Stonewall's campaigns on our behalf.

    A long day involving a sprint across London between connecting Tube stations to get back home for another engagement in the evening meant I couldn't afford to hang around and socialise. My fellow attendees were a diverse bunch among whom was my friend Paula, and there could have been a lot to chat about had I had the time.
    I'm still beset by the crushing onslaught of my recent GD relapse, which isn't ideal when you're in the icily polite loneliness of a packed British commuter train. A self-important middle aged lawyer kept trying to invade my space with his elbow, then fell asleep and toppled onto me. I proceeded to invade his space with my elbow, placing him upright and awake in no uncertain terms.
    Before my evening engagement, an online conference for one of my current part-time employers, I went to the toilet in their office building. In the mirror, despite all the annoying stuff, I saw an image I liked.
    Pictures of me are not common, so it was the first time I'd been tempted to take a selfie in many years. It shows how far I've come, even if in some ways I'm no further forward.

A tale of two celebrations

    A long hot day in the park on Saturday, this time promoting the Dawn Skinner Fund at Brighton Trans Pride. A small park right on the beach, and perfect weather for it. Met a lot of people, was very pleased to bump into Lucy, got our message in front of a lot of eyeballs. A successful day for the Dawn Fund.
    This was our second outing in as many weeks, having previously been up to Manchester for Sparkle and its mirror FtM event, Buff. There's an interesting comparison to be made between the two, one that tells you something about the differences in LGBT culture across the UK and the uneasy relationship our community has with its own diversity.
    Manchester is a much more in-your-face city than Brighton, and this is reflected in its gay quarter. Wandering along the main drag - is that an appropriate word in this context? - in Kemptown I had the feeling of a slightly bohemian British small town, while a walk along Canal Street in Manchester feels more in common with Las Vegas. So the cities' respective trans pride celebrations reflect these differences, Sparkle is big, brash, and colourful while Brighton Trans Pride was much more serious, political, and dare I say it, conventional. There were none of the drag queens, LGs or French Maids in Brighton that you might see at Sparkle, instead the field was full of earnest young queer activists. In that I think Brighton did much better on the diversity front, it was very encouraging to see a healthy mix of people with MtF, FtM, genderqueer and other identities together in a community that is normally so segmented.
    It's interesting to watch the reactions among the more conventional parts of the trans community when you mention you are going to Sparkle. You'll see plenty of uneasiness, and in some cases outright internalised transphobia as they struggle with the idea of proximity to the outrageously dressed wing. In some people I sense there are some uncomfortable reminders of earlier points in their gestation as a trans person, in others I'm afraid I start to see just a little bit of intolerance.
    It's a shame, I see the more out-there parts of Sparkle as a pageant, an exercise in street theatre. Sit down on the bench next to the Alan Turing statue, and enjoy the show! If you do that, you'll notice something; unseen among the actors half the crowd are very conventional. Sackville Park has become an extended closet for the day, and holds no danger of outing for anyone.
    There is plenty of room for events to cater for the different ends of our community and I'm very glad to see Brighton Pride survive to a second year. I hope the Dawn Fund will be back next year.
    I still worry slightly though that our community's Pride celebrations are at the polar opposites in style.  We may not all follow identical paths, but we travel the same road.

Gayly encouraging kids to use naughty words

    When I was at primary school in an English village sometime at the end of the 1970s, there was a term during which the entire pupil body discovered a new universal insult.

    "Flid".

    Not very nice, is it. Rather shaming, three decades later.
    I seem to remember it had an air of contagion about it in a way that only made sense to nine-year-olds: someone denounced as such could somehow pass it on to others by touching them. The horror at such a moment, the chorus of the uninfected as they scrambled to avoid contact, and the slightly bizarre imaginary disinfection ritual performed by the victim's friends for an imaginary contagion. Being nine years old was weird.
    Of course, our antics were a rather disturbing reflection of the Thalidomide scandal over a decade earlier, before we were born. We didn't know that, we didn't even know where the word came to our school from. One minute nobody had heard of it the next everyone was using it. It had no real meaning to us, an ephemeral throwaway word which would probably have dropped out of fashion as soon as one of the cooler kids decided that its use denoted that the speaker was somehow childish. A significant insult among children who all want to pretend that they er... aren't children.
    Fortunately for us our headmaster decided Something Must Be Done. At a school assembly he laid out in no uncertain terms the history of the word, and banned its use. Serious Trouble would rain down on the head of anyone caught saying it.
    Its public use stopped immediately. There were some denunciations of suspected flid-sayers, but that was it. We'd learned about the use of ableist slurs, and why they were a Bad Thing, m'kay.
    What followed was interesting. Though "flid" was no longer a part of public vocabulary its power in private vocabulary was increased exponentially. The whole school now knew this was a Bad Word with power to hurt, and the adults really disapproved of it.
    Nothing could have been more calculated to encourage its use among the immature and give it a new and much more exciting life. It did die away eventually, I guess as we all got just a little bit older. Perhaps a summer holiday rendered it outdated, last year's word.
    The summer of "flid" has been on my mind of late, as a parallel to something that has been in the news. The gay organisation Sonewall (I can't bring myself to include a T in the name of a trans-exclusive organisation named for a seminal event in transgender history) have been campaigning for an end to the use of the word "gay" in the sense the lexicographers record as "foolish, stupid, or unimpressive". It's a sense that's been in the news from time to time, for instance when a student got into hot water for calling a police horse gay, or when a Radio 1 DJ used it to describe a ringtone.
    It's a funny word, "gay". The older generation found it offensive forty or more years ago when its meaning shifted to the homosexual sense from one meaning "happy or carefree", now those who identify by the homosexual sense are finding it offensive that the word is moving away from them.
    As word senses go though this one ain't big and it ain't clever. Gay youngsters have a hard enough time without the extra burden of the identity they have to come to terms with being synonymous with everything negative in name. I wouldn't be happy to hear my kids using it, if I had any.
    I have to admit though I have some disquiet about the tone of the campaign surrounding the sense, particularly the way in which it has been labeled as universally homophobic. The rating of hate language by vocabulary alone is an extremely blunt instrument, instead it needs to be understood that the classification of hate language is as much in the context in which it is used as in the vocabulary itself. Is describing a police horse as "gay" to mean foolish or stupid really a homophobic act when the speaker is simply repeating a widely used sense and is not connecting it with the homosexual sense in the way they are using it?
    My concern is that with such a clumsy campaign the effect will be similar to that on "flid" in our little school all those years ago. A piece of throwaway language  that has well and truly escaped into the wild will gain a new level of power as its capacity to cause offence is amplified by the actions of well-meaning but boneheaded teachers. And the losers will be the gay teens who will inevitably suffer this freshly sharpened barb. At least there were no Thalidomide children to be offended in our village in the 1970s.
    So how else might you deal with it? The truth is, nobody owns language but the great body of its speakers, and those who try to impose their own rules on it are rarely successful. Better than imposing blanket bans and threats of punishment would be to encourage the users to come to their own conclusions about this sense of the word.
   Education, after all isn't that supposed to be the real job of teachers?

"I've never been a lesbian before..."

    The best way to broach a rather awkward question is to just come out with it. As I find myself sliding ever closer to the cliff edge and as my wife is now of the view that she'd rather live with an ungainly girl than a depressed bloke, I've been thinking about it. Life, that is. After.
    In my day-to-day life as I write this I am a bloke on the outside. I have always been that bloke on the outside. Like millions of other blokes I did what I was expected to. I fancy women, so as a heterosexual bloke I just fit right in. One doesn't define oneself as heterosexual, one just gets on with it.
    But what if I am swept over that cliff edge? If my wife does not find living with the ungainly girl to be too much for her, suddenly we're a same-sex couple. From being invisible, suddenly we're defined by that word. Lesbians. Putting aside for a moment my being transgender, that is. I've come to terms with redefinition, but for my wife that's likely to be rather challenging.
    Hence my asking a friend: what's it like to be lesbian? Now that's  an odd question, and one that could have many senses. In my case I was asking what it is like to be a same-sex couple, in public in the UK of 2012. Do people give you any grief, or are you part of the scenery?
    Fortunately the nature of the relationship between us is such that I can ask such a question of my friend and she knows me well enough to understand why I am doing so. And her answer was reassuring, she and her partner just get on with their lives. She described once having a yob shout "Dyke!" at her, but otherwise had few worries to report. And I thought "Dyke" was a reappropriated word, most of the lesbians I have known have enthusiastically described themselves as such.
    But there's a problem with self-definition here. On a simple level two women in a same-sex relationship  are lesbians. But on a personal level to be a lesbian you have to see yourself as such, and that's quite a leap for two people who have never been lesbians before.

Three days of peace and Sparkling

    Last weekend saw the annual Sparkle transgender celebration in Manchester. I was there as I was last year and met my sister, except that this time my wife came too and we stayed for the weekend. And as last year our time wasn't just spent in the relative closet of Sackville Gardens but in the wider world of Manchester City Centre. It's a city that has changed beyond recognition in the last couple of decades, now it has the feel of an international city but when I first encountered it back in the days of the music scene of the early 1990s it was something of a dump.

The Alan Turing memorial in Sackville Gardens

    Everyone comes to Sparkle for different reasons. Clubbing on Canal Street isn't my thing at all, but for others it's their only such outing of the entire year. It's a shame, some members of our broader community are repelled by the sight of some of the more outrageous among us, but the truth is Sparkle is what you make of it. I was there as a tourist with respect to the bad trannies in their painful heels, ill-fitting miniskirts and lank wigs, or the beautifully turned out French Maids and LGs. Their path is different to mine, so I have no discomfort at a fleeting association with them by attending the same Pride celebration as them.
    In the last year, I've come a long way. Beard lasering and a female-appropriate hairstyle have given me a much more natural female appearance, and my confidence in female presentation means that the blending I never imagined possible has at last come my way. Three days as full-time girl in a big city, in the motorway services, shops and restaurants of the wider world of muggles, albeit with an interlude at a transgender Pride, and I'm left feeling rather let down on my return to a more scruffy existence.
     I bumped into my friend A a few weeks ago, she about whom I've blogged before. She's now settled down, a very attractive girl, but firmly retreated into a closet of her own making. We went for a meal together, and she felt she had to inform me that she would have to drop me like a hot potato if I transitioned. As I suspected, and a shame because she rather evidently still has massive issues that she's failing to run away from. She looks very nice, but her voice isn't quite right and she has that cookie-cutter face you only get from FFS - both together a dead giveaway if you've ever met any trans people. Yet she's scared of her own shadow, and trying to erase her past hasn't made that any better. I wish I could help, but all I can do is be there for her should she need me.
    It is because I don't want to become like A that I like going to events like Sparkle. If I can face that and laugh and enjoy it then I'll have won, if I am constantly running to escape an unshakable shadow then I'll have comprehensively lost, because I will never be happy.

I oppress you, you oppress me, the oppressed get forgotten

    In a previous post I poked fun at the habit that radical feminists have of claiming oppression at the slightest affront. In that they are an easy target, it is difficult to have a conversation for very long at all with someone of that persuasion without the 'o' word cropping up unless perhaps your position is one of slavish capitulation.
    I feel however that I may have been slightly unfair in singling out the radfems in this matter. I realised this when I read some of the arguments between radfems and trans people over the RadFem 2012 conference in London; the word was being thrown around by all sides. Radfems, cis people and trans people all busily being oppressed by each other.
    All this does leave a distinct impression that the word is being cheapened. There is plenty of real oppression in the world, of peoples, of women, of trans people and of a myriad other groups. A clash of views between people fortunate enough to live in a rich country with laws in place to protect them from discrimination is not real oppression.
    It should not be necessary to provide examples but it seems that real oppression has been lost sight of in the melée. Women for instance are being oppressed when they are trafficked across borders for sex work against their will. They are being oppressed in some other countries where they are prevented from going to school, from accessing healthcare or from earning a living. Trans people are being oppressed when they are excluded from society, forced into sex work or harassed by authorities. Entire peoples are oppressed when they are persecuted by the regimes in the countries in which they find themselves living.
    Against that backdrop, crying oppression because you're in an acrimonious argument which you sense you might be losing starts to seem rather unpleasant. It cheapens the word in the same way that using "rape" to indicate minor hurt of feelings does, and doing it should attract the same levels of opprobrium.

    As before when I have examined aspects of language on this blog I have queried the collocates of the word, those words that most often appear alongside it. No need to remove stop words or alternative meanings here, this word is rather spectacularly unambiguous in the way it is used in the language. "Exploitation", "injustice", "discrimination", "violence", "tyranny".
    Do I need to go on? These words are pretty unambiguous and they are not the words of  a mere online disagreement, however objectionable you may find the views of those involved.
    I shouldn't have to make these points, but the following rules of thumb seem not to be self-evident enough.

    If you encounter someone with views that differ from your own, you are not being oppressed.

    You are not being oppressed if the way someone else lives their life offends you.

    Get over it.

Radical

    It has been interesting to watch the antics of a group of radical feminists over the last few days. They've organised a radfem conference in London, and in the way of such events they've issued a big list of who is and who isn't allowed to join their little party. Unsurprisingly, trans-people of all descriptions aren't welcome at all. As if most of us were planning to go! I never quite got their reasoning, but somehow we oppress them.
    Everything seems to oppress radfems, and nobody is more oppressed than they are. I wonder what a radfem would say if they were confronted with a real victim of oppression, perhaps a Syrian protester or someone. I guess they wouldn't recognise them as truly oppressed unless they were female. And then only if they were married, 'cos to associate with men is the only way to be oppressed.
    The antics in question have been prompted by a storm of criticism from both trans people and cis feminists. The latter is encouraging, my problem with feminism has always been that mainstream feminists are too reticent to call out the outrageous in their movement. The radfems have spent the past week modifying their description of who they'll let in, first born female, then women born women, now reproductively female. And they'll let in the male-born, but only boys under eleven. If it wasn't so tragic, it'd be funny.
    Other people have covered the ideology behind it all far better than me, all I can do is look at the hatred involved. I understand hatred and bigotry, there are groups my origins in a small English village could predispose me to hate. Travellers for instance, the criminal element in the travelling community has engendered a visceral hatred against their community as a whole among sections of the settled rural population. With good reason, the appearance of the wrong sort of traveller encampment in your area can be nothing short of disaster for a small rural business.
    But I learned something very important one year in my late teens when a traveller encampment set up in my village. I met some travellers face-to-face for the first time and discovered that they were local people just like me, and desperately aware of the public image of travellers as a whole. I still see their encampment from time to time on my travels over three counties.
     My point is that to discover whether you really hate something you have to get to know it. As a teenager I might have hated travellers for their popular association with crime, now I simply hate criminals, whether they or their victims live in houses or caravans.
     By an amusing coincidence, on the same day as the RadFem 2012 conference in London the Sparkle transgender pride celebration is being held in Manchester. I will be in Manchester mostly for the shopping opportunity but I'll spend some of the day in Sackville Park marvelling at the diversity of our community and enjoying the all-welcome inclusive nature of the event.
    I doubt this will have any effect, but I'd like to urge any radfems who have a real issue with trans people to come to Manchester instead and go to Sparkle. Meet some trans people for once, find out something about us. You can still hate us if you want, but at least you'd know something about us.
    Now that would be what I'd call radical!

These flowers are gay

    I am gay, it seems. Not a coming-out speech, in fact gay is something I'm completely satisfied I am not. But I'm told I'm gay, because a bunch of teenagers on bikes screamed homophobic abuse at me last night.
    My Big Gay Crime? Being a big scruffy bloke photographing a flower in the park. Yes, that's right, photographing flowers makes you gay.
    Harm done: nil. A little shaken at the time, but even homophobic teenagers can tell that someone like me could self-defend the living crap out of them.
    Would I have attracted their attention had I been presenting as female? Of course I would, had they identified me as transgender. But then again from a distance they probably wouldn't have seen anything but a woman crouching over a clump of flowers with a camera so I'd have not attracted their attention in the first place. Women are allowed to photograph flowers in homophobe-world.
    Today I will report the incident to the police. There is no chance they'll be caught, though they might be on CCTV that would be expecting too much. But hate speech is a crime in the UK and crimes are tackled on the basis of statistics here, so by reporting it I will at least ensure that the crime is taken more seriously .
     The picture shows the gay flowers in question. Not framed well and I'm not happy with the light. Being interrupted by yobs plays havoc with your photography. But I'm rather proud of it nevertheless, for what it represents.
    I will photograph flowers wherever and whenever I damn well want to.

Privileged

    It was encouraging the other day to read something from a natal female feminist outraged that her feminist group was debating whether to allow trans people to attend. Lots of talk about male privilege it seems, usual thinly disguised man-hater stuff. The group had settled on inaction, they'd cross that bridge when a trans woman came along. Presumably meaning at that point they'd decide to boot out a trans woman.  One wonders what they think a trans person looks like, and whether they understand that they could have trans women among them without their realising it. They Walk Among Us y'know!
    This touches on a difference I've observed between male culture and female culture. Women's groups are often exclusive, groups patronised by men aren't. Feminists and other womens groups exclude men without question, in four decades as a bloke I've never seen the reverse outside dinosaurs such as men-only golf clubs that I have nothing to do with anyway. In the real world the only bloke-only space I've patronised has been the men's loo. Even QwesT FtM, a support group for trans men and a very sound organisation, have FtM-only meetings. I've *never* encountered an MtF support space that has MtF-only events and would not be extremely pleased to see any FtMs who might attend so I was rather shocked to see that. Then again if exclusivity is a female thing perhaps we could learn from them...
    (Edit) Nutty radical feminists are all too ready to bang on about male privilege. My wicked sense of humour finds it funny that they do so in the same breath as voicing the self-evident right-on opinion that nobody should be targeted for abuse over anything they are born with and can't help. It is interesting though to think what it means from a detached on-the-fence insider's perspective. I can only see it from my own position after all.
    As someone who's spent decades as a scruffy bloke, I have had male privilege in bucket loads. It's true, especially as a large scruffy bloke I can swagger if I choose to. The world is my oyster. But do the man-haters honestly believe that people like me don't understand that? And that someone able to reap the apparent benefits of all that might willingly give it up? Does that not make them stop and think for a minute?
    Of course not. At the root of the man-haters hate is envy, for something they could never have.

    Shame, I'd give 'em the whole bloody lot if I could. It really ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Baptism of fire

    Yesterday was a good day. A day of firsts, for yesterday I spent the day as girl in Manchester with my sister.
    The premise for my trip was Sparkle, the UK's transgender pride celebration, but the real value of the day went far beyond that because I spent far more time in town with my sister than I did in the park holding the festivities. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty going on and I saw a load of friends, but the event made me acutely aware that Sackville Gardens and Canal Street were simply a giant safe space and the main event for me was being a girl at large, shopping with her sister in the wider city.
    An early start to catch the train north. My wife was working so I was alone. Early morning over the countryside, then the suburbia and endless industrial dereliction, the urban explorer's playground of the Black Country. Waste ground reverting to urban forest, punctuated by the waterways of the Birmingham Canal Navigation. More canals than Venice in Birmingham y'know, as they say around there. Then a progression of stops as the train passed through the Potteries and the Manchester satellite towns. One station had a sign proudly proclaiming it to be Cheshire's best kept, looking at it I shudder for Cheshire's worst kept.
    Manchester Piccadilly's airy train shed, and there's my sister waiting for me. A quick walk round the corner to meet J and her wife at their hotel, and I disappeared into the bathroom to leave the scruffy bloke behind.
    My sister had never seen me in girl mode. I don't think she was disappointed. Her first critique was of my colour choices, it seems I'd not done too badly.
    So off we went. Straight out into Manchester City Centre. Yes, a crowded city centre on a Saturday morning, a baptism of fire. Shopping in the Arndale Centre, not finding anything in the sales, lunch at Yo! Sushi. Very cosmpolitan. And very normal. Two sisters spending the day in town. Amazingly my experience in Swindon was repeated, I didn't see anyone noticing me. What's wrong people, a  nearly seven foot woman has just walked past you and you didn't notice? In all honesty though I'm sure I didn't pass unnoticed because I don't rate my passing skills highly. Where I did succeed though was not in passing but in blending. I was wearing fairly normal summer clothes for going shopping in, not wildly different from any number of other women shopping that day. If someone looked closely they could see who I was, but in the mass of people I was not remarkable enough to stand out.
    Off to Sackville Gardens, and the party was in full swing. The Equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, gave us a speech about how the government was anxious to do stuff for us, and a lone Labour heckler tried to disrupt her. Any Government politician talking to us is a good thing IMHO, I can't imagine a member of John Major's Cabinet doing the same thing.
     All of trans life was on display in front of us. Yes, all of it. With frilly bits. A load of friends to say hi to, time to sit and people-watch some of the more flamboyant people. It's like a Godwin's Law for trans people, the longer you people-watch at a trans gathering the more the probability of seeing someone in a red dress with white polka-dots approaches one. Being able to go shopping in town made me appreciate this much more, hanging out in the park was fun but being almost just another woman in town was much more feeding the beast.
    So off into town again with my sister. A stop at LTS to buy some jeans in the sale. Nowhere else does 'em in my length. Another first, first solo over-the-counter trying-on and purchase of women's clothing. Then a coffee and a long chat about family stuff, more shopping and a return to the park for a while. I experienced that female thing of being looked up and down for the first time, outfit analysis. From both trans and natal women. Wow.
    All good things come to an end. Back to J's hotel, the scruffy bloke emerges. Say goodbye to my sister and I'm on the train, back through the Midlands as the sun went down. Back home, present my wife with some of her preferred fragranced stuff from my Manchester shopping as an apology for leaving her at home, then collapse into bed, exhausted.
    All in all a good day. And a massive thank-you is in order for both J and my sister. There will be the inevitable let-down, but feeding the beast is sometimes necessary. Knowing you can do it though is a dangerous thing, it satisfies the need but that's a need that keeps coming back.
    As I've said before, it doesn't get any easier, does it.

The Cold Light of Day

    Yesterday was a day of firsts for me. It was my town's Pride day, and my wife was relaxed enough for me to go along a the girl rather than the scruffy bloke. So, first major daylight outing for me, plus first outing in my home town.
    I guess a Pride event is not quite the same as the real world. It's a giant safe space full of gay people, hardly the same as a busy city centre on a Saturday afternoon. But it was a chance to be out a lot closer to the real world than I might otherwise be, so I was very anxious to take it.
    And it proved to be rather entertaining. My confidence was high, the atmosphere was friendly and the other attendees provided plenty of entertainment. I was with a group of my local trans friends, we settled down in the crowd and had a picnic while watching the more flamboyant among the gay community.
    Some people question why we should go to Pride events. We're not gay, they say, we're not part of their scene and our mission is to be invisible. Very true, none of our party were gay and I think we'd all just like to be unremarkable women just like any natal woman. But there are times when being just slightly visible is a good idea, and in a world where we still need allies if some of us are just a little visible at a Pride event it can't do any harm.
    Yesterday morning was sunny and warm. I thus selected a floaty summery top and jeans for the afternoon, imagining a summery picnic in the park. Big mistake. Almost as we arrived at the event a wall of dark clouds rolled up along with a chilly wind. It could have been worse, but you might say I suffered for my art.
    So that was it. Jenny at large. Normal, unremarkable, enjoying herself. Another couple of barriers broken.

Which way?

    On Sunday I found myself somewhere unexpected: my local United Reformed Church LGBT service.
    Unexpected because being at a loose end with my wife being at her mother's place I'd seen myself spending an evening in front of the telly watching CSI, but I ended up giving a disabled friend a lift into town.
    There is something deliciously naughty about parking on a double yellow line, even if you have a blue disabled badge in the window. I could imagine the judge looking skeptical when told that I was running a disabled pensioner friend into her church service, but that was the truth and anyway no traffic warden wrote me a ticket.
    As I've probably mentioned before, I was raised as an Anglican in a rural community. Growing up an Anglican is easy, there's God and Jesus, then the Queen, and the vicar comes round to primary school in his Morris Minor to tell you all the bible stories and everything's so frightfully nice about it all. You sing rousing hymns about saints and seasons to the soft refrain of a church organ, you pick blackberries in the churchyard and there is always honey still for tea.
    If Jesus' message was of a higher authority than the Emperor of His day then British rural Anglicanism is there to remind you of the contrary: a cosy certainty that His message on Earth is safely coincident with being British, and that the Queen is a much more benevolent figure than Herod or the Pharaoh. Belief is optional, it's all about taking part. If you've never read the Terry Pratchett novel Small Gods, I suggest you do so, I see in it a biting satire of British Anglicanism.
    Blimey, being a five-year-old was so easy!
    Of course, when you grow up and become a rebellious depressive teenager you realise that the church is a creaky old building with holes in its roof, and that the Church it represents is run by stupid old men whose minds are in another era.
    With respect to Church attendance, I'm definitely a Harvest Festival Anglican. But I know all the moves and more importantly for last Sunday I know all the back story as told to me by our vicar back in the sunny 1970s.
    So there I was, sitting in my first Bible discussion for thirty years, and finding it interesting to look upon it with the eyes of an adult. And unexpectedly not finding it embarrassing, thank you Vicar, I know this stuff!
    Sadly for my more faith-led readers though, this was no Damascene moment. I still count myself the same small-c christian I did before and there was no blinding moment of renewed faith. I envy those with Belief, but I'm still not one of them.
    The service performs a vital role for its regulars, ministering to Christians who may have been excluded from their own congregations. The minister, a very down-to-earth American lady, was very welcoming to the extent that I almost felt guilty, as though there on false pretences. The other people present came from a variety of backgrounds within the LGBT alphabet soup, among them several transgender people, but there was one in particular who stuck in my mind. Though she was presenting female she like me spends most of her time as a bloke, but there our similarities end. She had only come out of her closet in the last few months, and just at that most vulnerable point her (AFAICT some kind of Baptist) church had ousted her and persuaded her wife to leave her. She wasn't even certain that transitioning was for her, but unlike me she'd been denied the chance to even try to hang in there for her wife.
    I'm sure her church could go on for hours and hours about the sanctity of marriage. Her minister probably has a great sermon on the subject, about sin and fornication and all sorts of other temptingly forbidden stuff. But just at the point when one of their own really needs their help and support, all that sanctity of marriage stuff goes out of the window and it's all get lost and don't come back. [Village in Austria] [village in Worcestershire]s!
    My apologies. Living in a largely secular bubble, you forget that this kind of stuff can happen here, too.
    On a lighter note, afterwards we found ourselves in one of my town's gay pubs. As a new attendee I was naturally asked a few questions. I don't think they expected a giant sized scruffy bloke to be transgender, I was asked something that made me laugh. "Which way?". I suppose I should take heart, if my questioner believed from looking at me that I might once have been female then all is not lost for me on the passing front!

Ain't never gonna be like that

    I find myself rather sad today. For once not for the girl I never had the chance to grow up as, nor the woman I might be but am not, but for the bloke I've never successfully managed to be. I thought I had the whole bloke thing sorted, but can't honestly stick to that line any more, can I.
    Yesterday in Swindon it rained. A lot. A "Free hugs" lady passed us while my wife was elsewhere and delivered on the promise on her t-shirt to my two companions, but passed me by. This amused me, for some unaccountable reason.

Bingo!

    Australian politics must be very complex and impenetrable. A sentence in a post over at the Spectrum Cafe attempts to make some sense of the situation and, 107 words later, leaves me none the wiser.

With the election between Tony Abbott who infamously said he found Gays threatening and our first Woman Prime Minister and our first openly Athiest Prime Minister who ousted the elected PM Kevin Rudd because of the increasing loss of supporters to the left Minor Party the Greens and then announced policies that were a step a little further towards the right than Kevins and with the Greens increasing popularity likely to give them a balance of power in the Senate and perhaps end the influence of Religious Right party Family First this seems like a good time for reminding our representatives of our needs and our votes.

    I think there is an admirable sentiment lurking in there somewhere, but even my professional-content-cruncher's read buffer overflowed at about the 50 word mark. I am nevertheless impressed at the audacity of the poster for producing such a lengthy punctuation free offering in the name of lucid activist mass communication.

Must be my sister or something

     I've got the stature to be a drag queen, but not the Yubaba wig. Yesterday afternoon was spent sitting in a park in my home town having a picnic with a few local t-girls and flying a very small metaphorical flag at our local LGBT Pride. A sort of LGBt, if you see what I mean. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, especially the police officers because their other choice was an animal rights demo on the other side of town.
     It was a bit too close to home for my wife's comfort zone so I was there as my day-to-day unremarkable bloke. Stubble and scruffy. Come four o'clock I made my excuses and left, I had a bit of preparation to do because yesterday evening was my local support group meeting. Attending in full-on seven foot guise thanks to the folks at Le Dame and going the distance, demonstrating standing on one leg, even toc-toc-tocing across the floor. My proving ground found at last! I have to admit though, changing into a pair of trainers afterwards was blessed relief.
     You know you've made a success of your female presentation when someone who knows you in bloke mode but has never seen you as girl genuinely doesn't realise who you are. Even when you've spent the afternoon with them and announced that you'll see them in the evening at the support group. Yes, I'm pretty sure she was genuinely surprised. Made my evening, it did.

A reply from Nationwide

    There it was when I returned home yesterday, a reply to my Little Britain letter to the Nationwide Building Society.
    As I expected, it has the feel of a boilerplate form letter. Here is the main paragraph:

I am very sorry to read that you find the television advertisements offensive. The characters in "Little Britain" are some of the most popular on British television, and using them for our new advertising campaign was not intended in any way to be discriminatory. We chose to work with David Walliams and Matt Lucas and the "Little Britain" concept because we believe that they can bring their highly successful brand to our advertising. However, we do appreciate that the advertisments are open to interpretation and personal taste, and we would like to apologise if any offence has been caused.

     I'm sure I would write something similar, were I a divisional director of corporate affairs at a building society whose profits have nosedived.
     Looking a little wider, I am disappointed to see that Dru Marland's open letter to David Walliams seems to have suddenly become significantly less visible in the search engines than other comparable posts of hers. A quick comparison: search on the open letter vs. search on another post. The former search returns only pages that link to the post, the latter returns the post itself. Such manipulation of content visibility either by practitioners of a very specialist niche within the search engine optimisation world or by direct approach via legal channels to the search engine itself is something I am not unfamiliar with by virtue of the work I do for a living. That I see it here indicates that the point being made has reached its target and steps are being taken to limit any damage to the Little Britain brand. It strikes me that any such damage is self-inflicted.

EDIT: Sometime later on Saturday 5th of June, as if by magic Dru's open letter post reappeared at the top of the search on its title (See comment below). Google searches do not rearrange themselves in this way over these timescales without editorial intervention. It would thus be tempting to claim success as a 1337 search engine h4xx0r but that might be a bit presumptuous. Google doesn't change things for simple bloggers. However it would be extremely interesting from a tech perspective to know what the story was behind the post's disappearance and subsequent revival. I guess I'll never know.

You're a Roman, Brian

   Last night we stayed in the pub until closing time. My town's long-established gay pub, very comfortable and friendly if a little loud. And a first for me, accompanied as I was by twelve other t-girls, my wife and another partner. Why a first? Gay pubs are nothing new to me, having hung out with a varied crowd when I was a student I've seen in more than one New Year in other similarly colourful surroundings for the sake of a safe space for several of our party. This was a first for me though because in the past I've only ever been to a gay pub because of who I was with, last night for the first time I was there as one of its target clientèle.
    Considering that to a casual observer I was the very large bloke stooping to avoid the low beam, hand-in-hand with the genetic girl, I must have looked anything but a gay pub customer despite the rest of my party.
    The realisation that I'd always seen the establishment as "their pub" without really considering that yes, I was one of "them" led me to consider this: if we only spend our time in safe spaces we've created for ourselves, are we really "out"? Who cares I guess, it was a thousand times more civilised than the Wetherspoons just round the corner, I know which pub I'd rather spend the evening in no matter what company I'm keeping.