The Bringer of Tea

The seconds tick down until the departure of the 13:45 non-stop to London Kings Cross. I am standing with my Network Railcard held up to the glass and my credit card by the chip and PIN reader.

Me: Two off-peak day returns to London terminals please.

Him: Do you want Underground?

Me: No, just London terminals.

Him: When are you coming back?

Me: Off-peak

Him: I mean, which day?

Me: Today, off-peak.

Him: Off-peak means not today.

(Maybe in Bizarro-Universe)

Me: I mean not in the evening peak.

Him: So after seven?

Me: Yes.

Tappity tap, he issues two tickets. They say:

STD OFF-PEAK DAY R

From
CAMBRIDGE
To
LONDON TERMINALS

Which was exactly what I asked for, so WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!!

Calm... Breathe...

At present the idea that religions should be randomly exempt from laws they don't like seems to be one that's gaining ground. As someone who favours secular government I find this distressing and problematic.

Recently a story has come to light about a Sikh boy who was not allowed to carry a ceremonial knife in school. As reported the school offered a compromise to allow the boy to carry a small knife welded into a sheath, but the family refused and withdrew him.

I would side with the school on this - carrying knives is, for the most part, illegal. However, I do think that a lot of the people who will be protesting about this and saying, "laws are laws and should apply to everyone" will likely be silent on another recent news story, where a religion used its political influence to exempt itself from certain legislation, that being Christians using their influence in the house of Lords to force exemptions for themselves on employment equality legislation.

So I have just one request - if you're going to get het up about people with dark skins claiming they should be exempt from knife carrying laws, I think it's only right and proper that you get at least as het up about people with light skins actually managing to sabotage anti-homophobia legislation.

After all, you wouldn't want to be a hypocrite, would you?

I have a playlist on my iPhone which I listen to on the train from Cambridge to London. It's full of lots of stuff which just seems to make an ideal soundtrack to watching scenery fly by. Here's what's in it:

Through the Fire and Flames - Dragonforce

This is great for when the train has picked up speed (these trains cruise at 100mph), especially when there's scenery close by - the frantic guitar playing seems to work well with disparate stuff thundering past by the window.

Wild Swans - Eliza Aria - Elena Kats-Chernin

If you like in the UK you know this, even if you don't recognise the title. It's the Lloyds TSB advert music - this one:

The relevance to train travel should be pretty obvious...

Walking in the air - Nightwish's cover

This is the ultimate music for sitting by the window of a train at speed, especially when it goes into its instrumental bit. It helps if this coincides with the train hurtling into a tunnel - the music just seems to capture the raw power of hundreds of tonnes of metal consuming a sizeable fraction of a power station's output to thunder at breathtaking speed across the landscape. I need to take the Eurostar to Paris just so I can listen to this on a 180mph train!

Cliffs of Dover - Tamas Szekeres

Entirely instrumental and just seems to work really well accompanying movement.

City of New Orleans - Johnny Cash

This isn't one for a train at speed so much, but it harks back to an era when train travel was perhaps more romantic. The rhythm is evocative of the "clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack" noise that trains used to make before they switched to welded rail. Great nostalgic stuff. Perhaps best for long Intercity journeys, sitting at a table with friends playing cards and drinking beer.

Little Britain - Dreadzone

Another fast track. Almost as perfect as Nightwish's Snowman cover for accompanying the raw force of a train at speed.

Human - The Killers

Perhaps a slightly odd choice, this one. The pulsing beat and sudden changes in volume and tempo seem to work very well though.

Surfing On a Rocket - Air

Time, for flying rockets, for silver jets, for surfing bombs! This one is all about the technology and the idea that the train is whisking me away, perhaps to cooler and more interesting things.

Ride of the Valkyries - Wagner

Does this need any explanation? Works best when you're not loitering around waiting for a signal to go green, obviously!

So, any ideas for additions to the list?

The conversation continued after my last post on this, and I think it revealed something rather interesting. Rather than include more screengrabs, I'm going to copy and paste the text, formatted for readability. A screenshot of the full conversation is here, so that anyone can see I'm not misrepresenting anyone through clever editing.

Julie Bindel, 11:38, Saturday

My priority is condemning violence against women which I have been doing for 30 years

Sarah Brown, 11:39, Saturday

Simple question - because of the sort of sentiments you express in the national media, a trans woman was made to use the men's public toilets at Pride 2008 by the stewards.

She was sexually assaulted in there.

Do you condemn those who put her in that position, by forcing her to choose between the men's toilet and pissing herself in public?

Julie Bindel, 11:46, Saturday

That had nothing at all to do with me. Nothing.

Sarah Brown, 11:47, Saturday

As for any incitement, the leaflets we handed out to those going into the venue consisted largely of direct quotes from you, Julie.

If that whipped people into a frenzy of hatred ... well, go figure.

The above was something of a continuation of the earlier conversation, when she accused me of inciting those who apparently heckled her inside, but it's useful context for what follows next, and I think relevant given that she seems unwilling to admit her own complicity in inciting transphobia; "That had nothing at all to do with me. Nothing."

Julie Bindel, 11:50, Saturday

I think there might have been a bit of a 6 year nasty little campaign going on about me prior to that???????

I was interested to see that one of your male supporters posted a message on FB saying I should be "fucked up and down and in the head". Nice. You are anti-feminist bullies.

I'd like to state that I didn't know who Julie Bindel was prior to being in the audience of "Hecklers" in Summer 2007. I was shocked by what I heard there though. If there is a 6 year campaign going on about her, I am unawate of it, and am certainly not any kind of ringleader.

Sarah Brown, 11:51, Saturday

Compare and contrast:

Person unknown throws a drink at Julie. Julie says, "You are both at least partly responsible for the behaviour of the baying mob last night. You whipped up your supporters/members of your community into a state of anger, viciousness and vitriol."

Woman is sexually assaulted because of the sort of attitudes Julie expresses in the national media. Julie says, "That had nothing at all to do with me. Nothing. "

Your lack of concern for the woman involved, and lack of any condemnation of her being sexually assaulted, and of those who put her in that position in the first place says all that needs to be said.

You have a good weekend now.

Julie Bindel did not reply

Sarah Brown, 12:01, Saturday (I gave her ten minutes to respond before posting again)

"I was interested to see that one of your male supporters posted a message on FB saying I should be "fucked up and down and in the head". Nice. You are anti-feminist bullies."

I'd like to go on record and condemn violence, physical and verbal, against *all* women at LGBT events and elsewhere. I cannot and will not condone any such sentiment, and find it abhorrent.

I think it's vitally important for women to show solidarity on this issue, and invite you to rethink your previous hand-washing stance on sexual violence against trans women at LGBT events.

Julie Bindel did not reply

Did we just witness an internal conflict between principle and prejudice?

It seems this blog, at least in its LiveJournal incarnation has been linked to by this article, where I am described as a budding censor and a "transgender vigilante". Gosh! Do I get a batman costume and the cool car with the flames coming out the back now?

Apparently my "sexual semantics are interesting" because I'm apparently saying that women should "have the balls" to stop Bindel speaking. (presumably at the RVT).

I have to say that Beatrix Campbell, the author of the piece, is being a bit of a muppet here. Censoring Julie Bindel is a) not one of our aims and b) laughably beyond our political power anyway. Our protest was at the shoddy way we were being treated over this by a venue that is one of the few places trans and queer people previously felt safe socialising in London.

Secondly, I have no idea why she thinks I'm speaking to women when I say, "Might I suggest that instead of taking the easy, comfortable, no-effort intellectually lazy option which doesn't require any distasteful examining of your conscience or privilege, you have the balls to follow Ste McCabe's example, show some solidarity and grow a spine.", because the people I aimed that at were the ones I was engaged in conversation with on Facebook - mostly QQT attendees and the organisers. They were overwhelmingly men.

Perhaps this is something that both Beatrix Campbell, the author of the piece, and her colleague, Julie Bindel both struggle with, so I'll use nice big letters to make it easy for you.

Beatrix and Julie - It's not always about you

I also note with interest that when Bindel is referred to in the third person in that paragraph, she is consistently "her". I am, however, "the blogger". The reader is invited to draw their own conclusions.

I'm going to be a bit self-indulgent.
( It also got long )
That wasn't entirely easy to write.

I post the following content from Facebook, unedited save only to arrange it into chronological order. I make no comment on its content - I think it speaks for itself.

The sanitary towel jokes were getting old after about 30 seconds.

Much more amusing, to my mind, are the creative photos people are doing, claiming to be "Exclusive leaked photos of the iPad Mini!", some of which have been photoshopped, some not.

(The thing they have in common is that they're all photographs of iPhones)

Yes, it sounds like the name of a feminine hygiene product.

However, I'm slightly baffled to see the hordes of people lining up to express their view that Apple have launched a dud this time, that they've dropped the ball. "It's just a big iPod Touch/iPhone without the phone, what's the point of that? It doesn't multitask and you can't use Flash on it!" goes the cry.

And then I realised - the announcement is only a few hours old, and the vast majority of the people who even know this thing exists yet are computer geeks.

I think they've missed the point - I think this thing will utterly change what we understand by personal computers over the next five years, and I'm going to explain why I think so.

I'd like to introduce my mother. In terms of sheer weight of numbers, my mother is representative of the typical computer user. She has a computer which she uses to keep in touch with people, store her photos, and email pictures of her granddaughter to her friends.

As far as I can tell, she uses just two applications - the web browser and the photo app. She doesn't even use the mail client - it doesn't work like her web mail and would probably confuse the hell out of her.

From her point of view, all the stuff that comes with the computer - the dekstop, the various other applications which are installed, even the windowing system itself are pointless things put there to get in the way. If it weren't for the photos, I think she'd regard the web browser as being the same thing as the "operating system".

Now a full desktop operating system is a really cumbersome way to launch a web browser and photo app, and switch between them. Indeed, it's quite dreadfully suited to the task. She would most likely just feel better if she could click on the web, and it was there, and click on the photos, and they were there, and not have all the other stuff cluttering it up.

Think about that for a moment - the vast complexity of a general purpose operating system with full windowing environment and icon driven filer, and vast numbers of people like my mother use it to start a web browser, and basically nothing else. With the increasing prevalence of things like Google Docs, and ever more capable web apps, I don't see this trend doing anything other than increasing in future. The computer interface as it exists today is dreadful at meeting the needs of users like that.

There's another factor - increasingly the devices that lots and lots of people spend the most time accessing the internet on are their phones, at least if they're smart phone users. Previously the idea that someone like my mother would be a smart phone user would have been ludicrous, but I think the iPhone, and everyone else's attempt to copy it, has completely changed that. These things are mainstream now, and for lots of people they represent the way they're most familiar with for getting to twitter, facebook, their email, and so-on.

Increasingly people who used to carry their laptops everywhere with them are just carrying their smartphones instead. I see this a lot on trains - a few years ago the Cambridge<->London trains were heaving with laptops. Now everyone sits down and gets an iPhone out instead, and starts browsing the web. The number of laptops seems drastically down.

And now there's a little photo frame thingy that does "the internet" without all that superfluous nonsense of a windowing system that just seems to be there to make launching the web browser more error-prone, and the general purpose operating system, which seems to be there to accumulate viruses and malware.

And it works like their phone. Indeed, it runs exactly the same apps.

Granted, you need a computer to use it at all, because it has to sync with iTunes, but even revolutions don't change everything all at once. Eventually people who buy these are going to work out that they're only using their "main" computer to sync their iPad occasionally, and all that's really doing is backing up the stuff they buy on it.

So yes, it doesn't multitask (or rather, it doesn't allow background processing of apps, and it'll probably do that when iPhone OS 4 is released), and it doesn't do Flash, and it doesn't allow you to install software that's not come through the app store, and most of the millions of people who buy one over the next few years don't care.

Hell, I *am* a computer geek, and I'm totally getting one.

I might be about to get a bit angry. I think it's justified.

One thing that's come to light over the whole Queer Question Time/Bindel thing is that the organisers were using the word "queer" rather differently to the rather large community of people, amongst whom I count myself, who claim queer as an identity.

Apparently someone was talking with the organisers about the trans and queer community's protest outside QQT when it seems the organisers were surprised to hear that there are a large number of people who regard themselves as queer in a way that's distinct from their sexual orientation. It seems they hadn't been aware that lots of us in what's increasingly known as the LGBTQ or LGBTQI movement regard "queerness" as a conscious rejection of the constraints of hetero and cis-normativity. Paradoxically a lot of gay and lesbian people live extremely heteronormative lives, apart from the bit where they're sleeping with someone of the same sex, never really question this, and so aren't especially queer under this definition. Queer people *can* embrace the institutions of heteronormativity, but on our own terms and with the understanding that it's a choice and not a requirement.

The organisers of Queer Question Time were apparently using "queer" as a shorthand for "gay and lesbian", and they picked the name "Queer Question Time" because it sounded catchy. When queer as an identity was explained to them, a bit of a lightbulb moment was had. The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, where the event is taking place, is regarded by many queer people in London as a queer venue - their "local" if you will. One person on the Facebook discussion about the protest described the situation as follows:

It's like advertising 'Jewish Question Time' and then inviting a Holocaust-denier to be a panellist

I'm not fond of that comparison myself, for lots of reasons, not all of which involve Godwin's Law. I think I have a better one.

If the cis gay organisers of Queer Question Time might imagine, for a moment, that there's a pub which they drink in lots. It's their local, and it's gay-friendly. They feel safe and comfortable there, they know the people who frequent it.

A bunch of straight people also frequent it. They usually get on OK. One evening, some of the straight people organise a stand-up comedy night. The star of the show is someone who thinks Bernard Manning was the perfect realisation of comedic genius. It's expected that they will spend the night making jokes about "dirty bummers".

One might expect the organisers of QQT, who drink and socialise there and are used to treating it as a safe space to be a bit upset by this. Imagine how much worse they'd feel if they approached the straight people with their concerns and were brushed off with, "Oh well, you'll be allowed to boo if you want, and anyway, I believe in free speech and want to hear the gay jokes this comedian makes, and decide for myself - you can always have a gay stand up comic next month".

Perhaps now it's clearer why so many of us are utterly pissed off with them.

Which brings me to me second point, this whole, "I want to hear what she has to say and I believe in freedom of speech" line which a lot of people are using, regarding Bindel and QQT.

IF YOU ARE NOT TRANS, STOP SAYING THIS RIGHT NOW. Wanting to hear what someone who is regarded as being vocally transphobic has to say, in a nominally trans-positive space, over the protests of the actual people who are affected by the hatred she helps to stir up when you are not personally affected by transphobia is not only intellectually lazy, it's a really, really fucked-up way to behave.

It is my view that Bindel encourages the attitudes which lead to trans people getting beaten and murdered. I regard her as having the blood of trans people on her hands. I regard those who give her a column in the national press to evangelise her message of hate as having the blood of trans people on their hands.

If you "want to hear what she has to say" in a trans and queer-centric space, over the protests of the people affected by what she has to say, then you have our blood on your hands.

A cissexual gay friend of mine made the point recently that he noticed lots of trans people attending the vigil in Trafalgar Square last year, in solidarity with our cis brothers and sisters to mark the homophobic murder or Ian Baynham. He also noticed a distinct lack of cis LGB people attending the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which marks the deaths of those killed in transphobic hate crimes. We had two, Andrea Waddell and Destiny Lauren in South East England in the days leading up to both these events, and yet at the Trafalgar Square vigil barely any mention was made of transphobic hate crimes.

As my friend puts it, he sees there being "no reciprocal sense of queer solidarity" towards trans people.

Ste McCabe, who was booked as part of the entertainment for Friday's QQT is an exception to this. In a show of solidarity with trans people, he pulled out of the event. His blog post where he talks about this is here, and if you go over there to read it, please take a moment to listen to his music, because I think it's rather good.

Apparently this principled man is now experiencing a distinct lack of support amongst other cis LGB people who, it seems, don't actually give much of a shit about whether trans and queer people are subjected to more hate or not, they just value freedom of speech and want to hear what she has to say. I for one applaud him, and I fully intend to help ensure there's a collection for his loss of earnings at the demo - I wish more people had his integrity.

If you want to hear what she has to say, go and read her articles - she's been extremely consistent in what she's written over the last few years, from the "cast of Grease", wheeling out her tame regretter, Claudia, after Russell Reid's GMC hearing (an episode in the history of UK trans medicine which I don't think anyone came out of looking especially good, and which there's probably no appetite to repeat), Hecklers, her talk with Christine Burns, her debate with Susan Stryker, her "I Vant to be Alone" rant about devil worshippers and cat ... fanciers, and so on. When I set up the Facebook group I even posted links to most of these - if you want to know what she has to say, go and read her articles.

But don't just lazily say you want her to be on the panel because you value free speech, when you have no prospect of living a life under the ever present spectre of transphobia, and perhaps secretly approve of what Bindel has to say, and wish those embarrassing trannies would just go away and stop spoiling your enjoyment of the "scene" by pricking your dormant conscience. Don't you fucking dare do that.

Might I suggest that instead of taking the easy, comfortable, no-effort intellectually lazy option which doesn't require any distasteful examining of your conscience or privilege, you have the balls to follow Ste McCabe's example, show some solidarity and grow a spine.