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.

The things you do in a good cause

    Last year my friend R and I went off to Sackville Gardens in Manchester for the Sparkle trans pride celebration, to promote the Dawn Skinner Fund. We had a gazebo, chairs and table, and a load of leaflets and banners.

    Though a lot of people stopped by and we gained a lot of support, we didn't get much publicity.

    Sparkle you see is a bit "out there". The whole spectrum of our community is out in the sun, and some of them wear costumes that put a couple of jeans-wearing charity trustees firmly in the shade. Nobody's going to take a picture of  us when there are more interesting sights aplenty.

    Clearly a publicity stunt was called for.

    The trouble is, what? Some kind of costume, but nothing too out there. No bum cheeks on display, nothing borderline-inappropriate. Historical perhaps, Dawn was a fan of historical recreation, she used to be in the Sealed Knot. As an end-of-life organisation we briefly considered old-fashioned nurses uniforms, but given that the NHS would be there that was probably inappropriate.

    So in the end I broke out the sewing machine and put together the barmiest outfit I've ever worn, an 1860s style crinoline day dress, pagoda sleeves and all.

    It's a surprisingly easy task, making a crinoline dress. I had a bit of help from Hathaways of Haworth, but didn't follow their design exactly. Once you've found a hooped underskirt of the type sold for brides, the skirt is a simple cylinder of fabric to the outer hoop circumference, then gathered at the top round a waist band. In my case I made an 18 foot long sash, and once the skirt was attached to its centre the two trailing ends made a large bow to fasten it. The bodice was adapted from my basic shell dress pattern with a neckline copied from a contemporary photograph, and with lacing replacing the zip I'd use on a modern garment.
    The sleeves were a little more challenging. Pagoda sleeves in the 1860s style are quite short, but very wide indeed. The pattern looks something like a crescent moon with a third removed from each end, and was something I produced by careful calculation of the two radiuses followed by plotting on tracing paper.
    To be authentic I should wear it with a fully laced corset underneath. Victorian corsets were very tight indeed, I'd have no chance at all of fitting into one without the lifetime of waist training they had. I considered a modern corset but in the end decided a Manchester park in July would be too hot. Since I didn't follow Hathaways suggestion of using a corset as the base for my bodice the only shaping would come from the bodice lacing. So authenticity was sacrificed in the name of comfort. Fortunately I'm not too lardy and it didn't look too wrong.

    The handy thing about a dress with such a barmy amount of fabric is you can change into it in a Manchester park as an event sets up around you. It makes its own tent. So off on a day perambulating with a Dawn Fund placard.

    Surprisingly it was very comfortable to wear. I guess it is made exactly to my measurements, so it should. And under such a voluminous skirt there is plenty of ventilation, so it wasn't hot either. Easy to walk in, and you always have a two foot gap around you in a crowd.

    Most importantly though it did the job it was made for. Very noticeable, plenty of exposure for the Dawn Fund brand. Which while I'm on the subject is the only way you'll get to see it. Go to our Twitter feed for a few pictures, and while you're there give us a follow if you're a Twitter user.

    So now I have a crinoline in my wardrobe. As Dawn would have said: You wouldn't wear it to Tesco. What on earth am I to do with it!

Another day in the park

    Last Saturday my friend Rebecca and I went up to Manchester to launch the Dawn Skinner Fund at the Sparkle transgender celebration.
    We had a successful though tiring day, receiving many generous donations and meeting a healthy cross-section of the community. Some very good contacts were made, and our message was well received.
    Some feedback was rather unexpected. More than one person expressed a desire for end-of-life care centres specifically for transgender people, for example. Surprisingly these views were not restricted to any particular section of our community. Our line was simple, our aim is to make all end-of-life care as transgender-friendly as it can be which we feel would be a far better solution than end-of-life transgender ghettos.
    Other feedback was solid gold, we were pleased to meet more than one end-of-life care professional among our community, with whom we had some very interesting conversations.
    Sparkle is a topic that seems to raise divisions in the UK transgender community. It's attended by all sections of our diverse community so it is somewhere at which our more flamboyant and extreme subcultures are visible alongside a large number of unremarkable trans people. As a result it's not uncommon to find full-time transwomen who won't have anything to do with it because of a guilt by association with flamboyant part-timers. I understand this, but I think it's a shame as to not care too much about such things is to be truly at ease with your identity. The DQs, LGs, maids, fetishists, furries, nuns and the downright badly dressed may be on different paths from me but that is no concern of mine. Sparkle is our biggest nationally organised event so it made absolute sense for us to launch our fund there.
    It was a little different to see the event as an exhibitor. Certainly welcome to sit in the shade on a breathless hot day. With a background of doing exhibitions in the tech industry it was always my ambition to do an exhibition stand with minimum hassle and easy transport, on Saturday I achieved that aim. The whole thing packed onto one sack truck, reducing the effort enormously.
    So that's it. We're under way, now we have to get out there and do some work.

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.

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!

Reactions to Sparkle

    It's now getting on for a week since my first Sparkle. It was exactly as I expected it to be, a Pride, only one with trans people of all hues rather than the gay people I've seen in the past. It was fun, but so was going shopping in Manchester with my sister.
    I have been rather surprised to see some adverse reactions to Sparkle in other places, usually because as well as the about 50% of 'normals' among the crowd the event is known for attracting some of the more outrageous and entertainingly dressed members of our community and there are those who don't appreciate being reminded of such people. Or perhaps they are keen to demonstrate how much they've moved on from all that, which is a shame because I think they miss out on something very important: a sense of fun.
    Events like Sparkle are what you want them to be. For some they are the most important event of the year as their only chance to get out, for others they're venue for a first hesitant outing and for yet more they're an entertaining spectacle and a chance to meet friends.
    I'd advise anyone going to Sparkle to take what they want away from Sackville Gardens and to respect the other attendees for taking away what *they* want. Sure a sissy maid or an LG outfit isn't to my taste, but  as far as I could see the middle-aged t-girl maid or the LG with the surfeit of petticoats were having just as much fun as I was. By acknowledging that none of us would pretend to be on the same path.

    Besides, I don't think I'd look good in a sissy maid outfit. They always look so damn short, and when your legs are as long as mine, there's a fine line to be drawn between revealing and indecent!

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.