Trans Pride Brighton

    Last Saturday was Trans Pride Brighton, the UK's less out-there and more serious trans Pride event. The juxtaposition of Sparkle's Manchester Las Vegas with Brighton's provincial charm shows the two sides of UK LGBT culture.
    I was down there for my trade union, handing out stickers and workplace rights booklets. Somewhat medicated, I'm in the middle of an atypical facial pain episode. Met a bunch of old friends, Jane, Lucy, and Paula, had rather a good day in the sun. Appalling music but good paella, that's the way of prides, innit.
    On the way home with my two Swindon friends in the car, everything stopped working. In stationary traffic in Brighton, under the Banksy kissing policemen. It is as if the engine has seized, with a full complement of oil and no low oil pressure warning, and an intact cam belt. Something tells me this ain't going to be cheap.
    So we got to see a succession of flatbed recovery trucks on the way home. And Cobham Services on the M25 for a couple of hours, as the recovery company sent a vehicle with too few seats. All of human life passes through Cobham Services.
    My nice reliable modern just became an old car.

Life's a drag

    It's obviously the trans silly season, or something. News comes from Scotland, that Free Pride Glasgow are banning drag queens from their event. It seems that drag is deemed to be offensive to we transgender people. This follows on from a similar story a few months ago, the NUS LGBT conference voting to condemn drag and cross-dressing for the same reason.
    If that wasn't bad enough, a particularly nasty word has started creeping into the conversation. "Transface". It's meant as I understand it to evoke the word "Blackface". You know, minstrel shows, and they were bad, and we're suffering the same sort of outrageous parody, right?

    Wrong. As I have pointed out in the past, if you think it is appropriate to equate a transgender issue with one of African American history then you urgently need to learn a bit of that history, and then shut up. Start with Huckleberry Finn. You aren't helping transgender people with such comparisons, in any way, shape, or form.

    So let's take a look at drag. And let's compare and contrast a drag act with something that is genuinely offensive to transgender people.
    Drag is a very long-established part of gay culture. Long established as in the word appears in print in the 19th century, and probably in non print use long before that. Drag queens are famous for exaggerated portrayals of natal women, and for musical and comedy routines on that theme. Take a look at this video from UK TV for example: Paul O'Grady's outrageous alter ego Lilly Savage.



    The important point is that while we are not intended to be under any illusions that Savage is anything other than a gay man underneath the make-up and wig, we are also not intended to be under any illusion that as a character she is anything but a natal cis woman.
    Now, compare and contrast Lilly Savage with this portrayal from another UK TV show, Little Britain. Here we have another man wearing female clothing, but this time it's very specifically a portrayal of a transgender person.



    Straight away you can see the difference between a drag act and an offensive portrayal of a transgender person. Paul O'Grady as Lilly Savage is entertaining and non-threatening, David Walliams as Emily is deeply unpleasant.
    I've been to quite a few Prides over the years, and seen more than a few drag queens. Being significantly taller than most gay men I've seen with amusement their reaction to a trans woman who can look down on them. I've even got one or two gay friends who have been known to put on a wig and a spangly dress from time to time.
    In all that time I have never seen a drag queen come close to the performance you see in the Little Britain sketch above. Plenty of awful singing, but that's only offensive to musical purists.
    There have been times in the past when the worlds of drag and transgender have intersected. There have been times when drag queens have stood alongside us. To now go after drag in a misplaced attempt to protect us from offence is misguided in the extreme, not to mention highly offensive to the drag community.
    After all, it's hardly as if there aren't enough real instances of transphobia, is it?

Mae'n anodd

    So many things in life are difficult. Getting it right with your loved ones, turning an idea into a business, staying healthy, staying sane, staying trim, learning Morse, even as you might guess from the title, learning Welsh (The double-d is pronounced like the "th" in "heather", by the way).
    You can't succeed at everything you try. Sometimes the things you fail at are real belters, things that profoundly affect the course of your life, other times they're pretty minor, things that while disappointing aren't going to make much difference.
    So I've had a few wins over the last month or two, and this week it looks as if I'll have a fail. Not serious, at the product level rather than the enterprise level. Something I've put some effort into may well not come off. It brings to mind one of the things that differentiates Silicon Valley startup culture from UK startup culture, over there business failure is seen as valuable experience while all too often here it's seen as a stigma. This has certainly been valuable experience, and it's fortunate that it's come in a way without too much collateral damage.
    Yeah, it's difficult.

Grumbling about the weather

    I live in an oddly unprepared country. Here in the UK we have the occasional heatwave in summer, and we sometimes have cold snaps in winter. It rarely dips below -5 degrees Celcius in the winter and summer temperatures in excess of 30 degrees are considered exceptional. In other words, we have a temperate climate as befits our being surrounded by the sea. Just about right I'd say, but I would having grown up here, wouldn't I.
    We're oddly unprepared though, because for a place that gets a lot of weather it doesn't seem to take much to shut us down. Canadians laugh at us in the winter when our airports close for 10mm of snow, and I am guessing people from the Tropics do likewise when our mild heatwaves cause our railways to grind to a halt.
    So it is today, that with the mercury barely hitting 30 degrees, we're throwing in the towel. That's it, everyone's off to watch Wimbledon.
    It's good, no longer working in an office. I can put on a summer dress and sit outside in the shade of a pear tree with a laptop and a cool drink, and I'm working.

Black or white

    Things have kept me away from the news of late. One or two depressing stories including a deplorable Daily Star piece, and a lot to do in the real world.
    One story you'd have to be on Mars to miss would be that of Rachel Dolezal. An American black civil rights activist who turned out to be a white woman with a deep tan and an Afro haircut who had reinvented herself as a black woman. So many ways to put a foot in it, where do I start?
    I look at this story from an odd position. I'm white. Pasty white, the way you get with several decades of British winters behind you.
    But my ancestry? In the 1790s a woman from Jamaica appears on a marriage record in London, she's one of my ancestors. You can't tell by looking at me, but maybe you never met my grandmother.

    Well, there goes the country, doesn't it.

    It's interesting, contrasting the Received Opinion view of Black British history with my own family history. Mass immigration since the 1940s has now largely erased the pre-existing Black British communities, but there have been Black Britons since the Middle Ages and before. Received Opinion has appropriated the American story of slavery and a welter of racism, but the unexpected truth on this side of the Atlantic is that while there was institutional slavery in British colonies in the 18th century it was not legal on the British mainland. We have the case of Somerset v. Stewart to thank for that in 1772.
    So small Black British communities existed in cities across the country. Port cities, Liverpool, Cardiff, Bristol, and London, my ancestor's city. These people lived normal lives, some were poor and some were prosperous, and some of them became part of the emerging Victorian middle classes. Their experience was not necessarily the same as the greater numbers of Black Britons who came to the country in the later half of the twentieth century.
   This isn't a romnaticised view of the past, it's my family history. I have little idea what life was like for my ancestors beyond those that were known to people alive in my lifetime, but I do know where they lived and who they married so I can tell they did all right in life.
    So it's odd for me, looking at Rachel Dolezal. A white person with black ancestry, looking at a white person with no black ancestry who pretended she had some. My life experience has as little in common with my 18th century Black British ancestor as it does with their counterpart today, but despite sharing that with Dolezal I have the ancestry she evidently craved.

    It doesn't tell me why she appropriated something as little hers as it is mine, but it does tell me that ancestry alone does not give you life experience.

Tripe and onions

    It's about 18 months since my mother died. It's funny, the way sometimes you'll happen upon something she left behind and it'll be so typically her to be as though she never went away.
    My mother came from the north of England. Yorkshire. God's Own County. And in a sense she never really left it. Yorkshire people are like that, they have a lot to be proud of. She impressed Yorkshire on me and my sisters as we grew up, my sister confided in me after the memorial service that she was in her twenties before she came to terms with the fact that she was from southern England and not Yorkshire. Funnily enough I had a colleague at my previous employer with a similar story, growing up in Germany with her German dad and Sheffield-born mother.
    So we grew up with Wensleydale as the King of Cheeses, heather honey and Whitby kippers. It didn't bother me in the way it did my sister, going to university up there allowed me to be at peace with it all. I know Yorkshire from all four corners, I've walked its fells and moors, bathed in its seas, sailed its rivers and driven its roads. But I'm at home in the lower greener hills of my own county.
    My mother's Northern tastes appeared yesterday, in the form of a pack of tripe I found in the bottom of the freezer. Dated 2011, but frozen solid and still good. Another taste from childhood, tripe and onions. My dad doesn't like it, so yesterday I was alone with my tripe and onions on toast. Probably not something I'll have that often these days.
    There we are then, another little piece my mother left behind, gone. It's stupid, being sentimental about a pack of tripe, of all things.

Discharged

    Last week amid all the election excitement I took one of my periodic trips to the gender clinic in West London.

    To my surprise, I was discharged.

    This might sound like something of a disaster, but it isn't. You go there at my stage in transition for two reasons: psychological monitoring to ensure you're living in your assumed role and nothing's gone awry, and to see the endocrinologist. I get my endocrinology from a doctor at my local hospital whose experience in the field eclipses theirs so the second reason is redundant. 

    Unexpectedly then it seems my getting on with life has been such a success that I'm deemed not in need of their psychological monitoring. I must be sane, or something! As the psych said, there's no point my making the trip to London every six months just to tell them I'm OK.

    I was concerned lest I lose my place and be expected to start from scratch with them on my eventual return. It turns out that this only applies to the psychs, at the point at which I may consider surgery I have only to ask my doctor to refer me back to them and off I'll go. Let's see whether that turns out to be the truth.

    Behind the scenes I wonder whether health cuts are making them reduce their patient numbers by whatever means. It doesn't bother me as I don't feel I need their support at the moment, but I hope it'll still be there for me when I return.

    So, life. It's an important thing to recognise in this sphere, that not all your problems have their root in being transgender.

The Morning After the Night Before

    So, Britain has voted, and unexpectedly elected a Conservative government with a wafer-thin majority. The Liberal Democrats have been reduced to the point of nearly fitting in a taxi again, and Labour has been all but wiped out in Scotland by the SNP.
    I spent all Thursday night in front of the TV. Watching the results come in and seeing Liberal Democrats and Labour MPs falling like ninepins, Conservatives winning in marginal seats, sometimes to their obvious surprise. Fascinating stuff to a news junkie like me, one of the most exciting elections of my lifetime. By the time I fell into bed at about half past eight all the predictions had been confounded and David Cameron was only waiting for the last few seats to see how narrow his majority would turn out.
    In my safe seat constituency the Conservative was elected with an increased majority thanks to the Lib Dem collapse. As I have explained before I am a tactical voter with the intention of ensuring as small a majority as possible for whoever is elected so while I did my bit it is only a matter of small personal satisfaction that by voting for the nearest challenger I reduced her majority by two.
    There are understandably a lot of long faces on the left of British politics. I join them in that I don't think this is the best outcome, but I don't join them in that I think it could have been a huge amount worse. It is true that David Cameron has an outright majority, but unlike his days under the coalition he will now have to fight for every vote. John Major, who had nearly twice Cameron's majority, once described his rebellious back-benchers as "bastards" for confounding his every move, and this will be Cameron's daily reality. As the inevitable by-elections erode the Conservative majority they will find themselves with very little room for manoeuvre. There are tales of James Calaghan's administration wheeling in MPs to vote in hospital beds, we're likely to see that repeated as desperation sets in.
    So no, the Conservatives won't have the freedom to enact some of their more barmy ideology any more than they or the Lib Dems did under the coalition. I'm sure they will do things that will cause consternation on the left, but every Conservative MP whose seat is in any way precarious will now have an eye towards how his or her record will be examined at the next election.
    If this election did anything, it highlighted the unfairness inherent  in the First Past the Post election system. Under FPTP the SNP have over 50 MPs from a fraction of the popular vote that the Liberal Democrats had with 8 seats, or UKIP and the Greens had with 1 seat each. We've got a Government elected by a minority of the people, and Opposition benches filled with MPs elected by a tiny percentage of the people. We will never get proportional representation from a FPTP elected government because, well, turkeys don't vote for Christmas, but FPTP has never looked more unrepresentative.
    Of course, PR would have delivered a significant number of UKIP members from Thursday's polling, making today's government likely to be a Conservative minority government propped up by UKIP on a vote-by-vote basis. One of the nightmare scenarios bandied about before the election. But I suspect under PR the result would have been significantly different, because FPTP encourages the protest vote. People in FPTP safe seats who know their vote is meaningless vote to send a message rather than to elect someone. Under a PR system since few votes are meaningless it is probable that this lack of a protest vote would have produced a significant difference in second and third-placed parties.
    So here we are, with (thanks to David Cameron's Parliament Act) a fixed five more years of Conservative government on a wafer-thin majority. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Democracy, we trust

    It's election time again here in Blighty, and it's all looking a bit messy.

    Just for fun I took a look at my post from five years ago before the last election. Back then I took  the line of a plague on all their houses, and I can't say a lot's changed.
    So let's recap. In 2010 the election resulted in a hung parliament. The Conservatives had a few more seats than Labour, but neither party had enough to govern outright. The previous Prime Minister tried and failed to form a minority government by tempting the Liberal Democrats and a mixture of smaller parties, so our Government became David Cameron's Conservatives in coalition with Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats.
   Since then we've had a lot of economic turmoil and a lot of austerity. Savage cuts to Government services, some of which have been very unpopular. The Liberal Democrats have been blamed by everybody for the mess - from the Left for letting the Conservatives in, and from the Right by not letting them go far enough.

    Would you believe it, in a post-banking-crisis world, the above represents one of the more stable and prosperous European countries.

    So the result is that if last time was one of the most significant elections of my lifetime, this one's going to be a real nail-biter. The Conservatives are under attack on the right from a resurgent UKIP, while Labour are under attack in their Scottish heartland from a rampant SNP led by one of the UK's most capable politicians. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrat vote is set to collapse, as all their supporters vent their fury over the coalition.
    I can't say I join the chorus blaming the Liberal Democrats for the mess. They weren't in power when its seeds were sown, and as for governing with the Conservatives I think Nick Clegg had no choice but to go with the party holding the most seats. He would have been pilloried for propping up an unpopular minority Brown Labour government. To anyone blaming the Lib Dems for Tory excesses I simply say this: imagine Cameron without the Lib Dems.
   That said though, I can't say I want to choose the Lib Dems. I feel that some of their policies are dangerous and unpalatable. Take a mansion tax for example, a policy they share with Labour. Sounds wonderful, bash the rich! And it would be so, were it not that it is a wealth tax with a fixed threshold. This means that like inheritance tax which was originally introduced for the super-rich but now applies to most people whose parents own a house, they won't change that threshold and within a generation we'll all be paying it. Regressive taxes are a definite no-no when it comes to my vote.
    So, what about Labour? Yet again, that regressive tax. Sorry Ed, you just don't get it. If you want to tax the rich, close all the tax loopholes and really get tough with tax dodgers, don't just make stirring sounding speeches and sneak in taxes that'll catch everyone!
    To be fair to Ed Miliband, I have more time for him than his predecessor. He's been portrayed disgracefully by the gutter press, and I think the world wouldn't end if he gained the keys to Number Ten. I just don't think it would get much better. Behind him are still the same bunch of idiots who stood behind Tony Blair as he took us into the Iraq war and waged a devastating attack on our civil liberties. Not something I want to spend my vote on.
    As for the Conservatives under David Cameron, last time I talked about them in terms of 'them' and 'us'. The Conservatives of Margaret Thatcher and John Major were elected trying a lot harder to be about 'us' rather than 'them', in Cameron's case the priorities seem to be entirely reversed. Critics will say they've gone after the poor and needy to pay for the disastrous mistakes of the super-rich banks, and to be honest it isn't hard to agree. David Cameron isn't a Prime Minister for the likes of me, he's one for his rich mates.
    Which leaves me as an English voter with the National Health Action Party, the Greens, and UKIP. The NHA party look ever so reasonable in their leaflet, but perhaps fortunately they'll never be given the opportunity to show just how badly their plans might work in practice. The Greens meanwhile are just as nutty and dangerous as ever. Having lived in a city with Green councilors I've seen this first-hand, they are a clueless and spiteful disaster when given any power.
    So, Nigel Farage's UKIP, nestling somewhere in the mid-teens in the polls and expected to have a few MPs. Somewhere to the right of the Conservatives, having hoovered up most of the former Thatcherite wing of that party along with assorted fringe members of the political spectrum. Prone to constant gaffes as candidates reveal their racism, homophobia and ignorance, anti-EU, anti-immigration, anti-lots of things it seems. As a mild Eurosceptic I should be interested, but they're just far too nutty for my liking. Dangerous, even.
   
    All the pundits predict a parliament more hung than last time. Fewer Conservatives, the Lib Dems fitting in a minibus, and Labour decimated by losing most of its Scottish seats to the SNP. The so-called nightmare scenarios include a Conservative government propped up by UKIP and the right-wing Northern Irish parties, or Labour propped up by the SNP. Tomorrow night's going to be interesting.

    So what about me? I vote in a safe seat. So-called because in our first-past-the-post electoral system the majority of seats never change hands even if far more people vote against the sitting MP than for them because the vote against the incumbent party is split between other parties. So in effect my vote is pretty meaningless even in this closely fought poll, the best I can hope for is a significant dent in the incumbent party's majority. All I can do is vote for the party most likely to come second, for then the first-past-the-post majority is effectively reduced by two.

    Other than to say that I won't be voting Green or UKIP, it's safe to say then given the above that I'll be holding my nose as I do it.

Dah-di-dah-dit, dah-dah-di-dah

    This morning, a big brown envelope from the postman. Inside, from the UK radio regulator OFCOM, a reissue of my amateur radio licence that I let lapse in the '90s. And there I was protesting about not regressing into my childhood!

    It's interesting, coming back to something I last looked at twenty years ago. I'm doing it for very different reasons to my teenaged radio hobby, this time it's because my local hackspace has some radio amateurs and I want to join in.

    A lot has changed in the world of amateur radio since the 1990s. Gone are morse tests to use shortwave bands, and we have a whole load of new frequencies to use. My licence is now a "full" licence and my callsign is now nearly 30 years old, enough to be considered venerable.

    And I've changed too, in more ways than the obvious. I tired of old gits yakking away at each other back then, and I'm not sure I want to venture back into that particular fray. Amateur radio can have rather an old-fashioned culture at times.

    So what am I going to do with it besides talk radio with the hackspace crowd? Probably what I always wanted to do back in the day but only achieved partial success at: build my own kit. There are still corners of amateur radio where you can push at the boundaries of what is possible, it's not all a slightly rarified version of CB for older men.

    All this has got me reaching for the soldering iron, see the picture. There's another thing that has changed since the 1990s, computerised circuit design tools that are easy to use!

    Building stuff though, it's an escape. The receiver prototype in the picture may one day emerge as a more polished design, but I don't really need it as I still have my trusty 1980s-vintage communication receiver. So why bother?

    You need something to keep yourself in touch with your worth.