The Bringer of Tea

This happened just now.

Phone: Ring ring! Ring ring! Ring ring!
Me: Hello?
Other party: several seconds of silence
Me: Hello?
Call centre lady: Could I speak to Mr or Mrs Brown please?
Me: Speaking.
Call centre lady: Hello. It's come up on our database that your home insurance is ready for renewal. We think we could offer you a better deal.
Me: Uh-huh.
Call centre lady: Can I ask who your current insurer is?
Me: Your database tells you that my home insurance is due for renewal, but you don't know who my current insurer is?
Call centre lady: It's, er, data protection. The system sends us details of people whose insurance is nearing renewal, but it doesn't tell us who they're with.
Me: My insurance isn't due for renewal. You're bullshitting me.
Call centre lady: Oh, OK then.
Me: Bye.

I'm very happy to be polite to people who cold call, as long as they don't start that cold call by lying to me.

I know I don't update this very much any more, but today is a special occasion, I think. Every year the Independent on Sunday newspaper produces a list of the 100 most influential lesbian gay bisexual transgendered people in the UK. I'm thrilled to be number 28 on this year's list. Apparently, this makes me the most influential "out" transgender person in the UK!

This has come about because of my position as a councillor, where I press very hard for equality issues, as a result of my ongoing transgender activism, and also because of my position on the executive of the LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, where I chair the organisation's transgender working group. Although I do not post here very much since I was elected, my activism has continued and if anything, sped up.

I feel honoured and humbled to be recognised by the Independent on Sunday in this way. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to those who nominated me. There is still a great deal of work to do to push transgender equality in the UK, and I will continue to push for rights for transgender people. I very much hope that this recognition will help in that task.

If you are reading this as a result of seeing the Pink List, please feel free to read back in this blog. It goes back as far as 2005, details most of my transition, including surgery and also includes quite a bit of activism later on.

In 2008, I happened to be walking near Cambridge railway station and encountered a van driver blocking the road, causing massive tailbacks. For those who know Cambridge, you'll realise when I say that she made the traffic back up to Hills Road that she was effectively managing to paralyse a large chunk of the city.

Anyway, at the time I videoed what was happening on my cheap and cheerful Nokia smartphone (this was before I made the jump to using iPhones) and posted it to YouTube. The video can be found here. The description text that goes with it reads:

The lady driving this van had decided to park in the middle of the road outside Cambridge station, in rush hour, blocking a bus, which in turn blocked all the traffic behind it, which in turn caused it to back up all the way to the main arterial route out of the city to the south. When I started filming, several people had come to remonstrate with her and all she did was move a couple of metres forward each time, which was no use at all. This continued for a few minutes after I stopped filming.

The video must have become associated with some other popular videos because over the years since i filmed it, over 21,000 people have seen the clip and it appears to be quite highly rated. I get a regular trickle of comments on it.

If you go to the video's page and read the comments, you won't see many of them. This is because I am forced to delete them. Despite it being obvious with a moment's glance that I, the video submitter, am female, lots of the comments I get are horrifically misogynistic, some going as far as to contain graphic descriptions of sexual and other violence. They started off as a slow trickle, but have increased over the years. Now I get one every few days, and have moved from being mildly offensive (I left some of those up) to being thoroughly nasty. They're getting worse, and a few weeks ago I left a comment myself saying that misogynistic comments will be deleted.

It didn't make any difference. The problem has continued getting worse, to the point where I am starting to think I may have to take the video down.

Here are some of the comments I have deleted.
( Don't look at these if you're likely to be triggered by casual descriptions of sexual violence - some of them are seriously nasty. )

As you can see, they're now coming in at the rate of one every couple of days, and if anything they are getting nastier.

I have heard that many women on the Internet pretend to be men. Go figure.

This is a cute idea I had after our recent trip to the dolomites - pair photography. Each pair of photographs is of me (in the orange helmet) and the_local_echo (in the blue helmet), taken by the other, at just about the same time (within a few seconds). It's more obvious to see than it is to explain - click on each photo for the full size version.

Pair 1 - 29th July 2011, Via Ferrata Delle Trincee:
We are both in fairly exposed positions here, but at least the ground under me is flat. Sylvia is pretty much hanging from her gear on the ferrata cable to take this.

Pair 2 - 29th July 2011, The bridge on Via Ferrata Delle Trincee:
This is just a few minutes along from the previous pair. I crossed first, and was able to take a picture of Sylvia as she followed me. The bridge is deliciously rickety and bounces beautifully!

Pair 3 - 31st July 2011, The ladder bridge on Via Ferrata Sandro Pertini:
VF Sandro Pertini (named after a much respected Italian statesman who rose to being president after being a resistance fighter against the Nazis in WWII) is a fairly new route, put up within the last decade. Near the top (marking the boundary between where the route is a pleasant grade 3 romp and a more strenuous and vertical grade 4 proposal) is this bridge, made from a metal ladder laying across a gap. While I am clipped to the cable, a fall would result in smashing my shins against the rungs, which would hurt a lot! For that reason, taking a photo requires a well balanced stance!

Pair 4 - 1st August 2011, Three quarters of the way up Via Ferrata Brigata Tridentina:
Brigata Tridentina is possibly the most popular route in the Dolomites, and it shows! I found it quite tame for a grade 3, and if you do an image search you will find lots of the spot where Sylvia is standing. It's possibly the best part of the route for getting a photograph of someone standing with miles of void behind them, but appearances can be deceptive. I am standing only a few metres away, and from Sylvia's perspective things seem rather less airy! Indeed, a few metres later the ferrata briefly interrupts itself to meet its upper escape route - a fairly standard hiking trail to the top of the mountain.

I'm a child of the Cold War. I grew up knowing that only a few hundred miles away, the two most fearsome armies the world had ever seen, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, were facing each other across a no-man's land that stretched from the Adriatic to the Baltic. That war could turn hot at any time. That the reason we had to do this was because we were Free and the people on the other side were Not Free; they lived in an Orwellian nightmare made real. This was what we grew up knowing, until it changed on that December day in 1989.

For my impressionable teenage self, the spirit of this was captured in film most memorably by the Clint Eastwood Cold War epic, "Firefox". In it, our hero, a US special forces veteran with who spoke Russian thanks to his grandmother, is recruited to penetrate the iron curtain and steal a web browser, er, top secret fighter jet, the eponymous Firefox. It's the ultimate air superiority weapon, a thought-controlled super fighter that could give the Soviets the crucial advantage they need to outmanoeuvre NATO.

Anyway, there's this bit where good old Clint is in Moscow, posing as an American salesman on a rare trade mission. He's in a loo in a metro station when the nightmare scenario happens - a KGB agent walks in and demands to see his papers, because that's how people live behind the Iron Curtain. Everyone knew that; they had to show their Papers all the time, to any petty official who asked, as a sort of constant low level harassment to keep them in their place. That's why the West was better.

After looking through Clint's papers, the KGB agent declares, "your papers are not in order" and goes for his gun. A fight ensues, Clint kills him and goes on to steal the plane and have gripping dogfights as he tries to fly it home over the icecap.

Some may be aware of the current furore over the new requirements to attend the Liberal Democrat party conference - we have to supply information to the police well in advance so they can perform some sort of background check (to be shared with the conference organisers) and determine if we're suitable people to be allowed in. Apparently the police insisted on this, apparently our insurance for the conference would be invalid if we declined, and it would bankrupt the party or something,. As you can imagine, many of us, who campaigned on the basis of scrapping ID cards and rolling back the security state are extremely unhappy with this, seeing it as the police restricting the right of freedom to associate for political purposes.

Many of us are also rather suspicious that the undisclosed nature of the threat this is meant to counter has less to do with preventing some sort of physical attack (the venue already has airport style security), and more to do with preventing heckling. The elderly gentleman ejected from the Labour conference under terrorism powers for heckling Tony Blair is fresh in the mind. Of course, terrorism is implicated - we live, we are told, in dangerous times (more dangerous, apparently, than when the was an active IRA bombing campaign on the British mainland). The spectre of the 1980s IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton at the Tory party conference is raised, apparently with a straight face despite the fact that the bomb in question was not planted by anyone at the conference.

I'm not going. I'd really like to go, but I object to this in principle, and also for personal reasons. Others have asked me why I don't go and campaign against it inside, but I cant do that because that requires me to submit to the vetting process and I don't want to do that. On one hand, it's a point of principle, and I wouldn't be able to live with myself. On the other, My Papers Are Not In Order.

Let me explain. My Papers are superficially valid. I'm a white, middle class, Cambridge educated, 37 year old woman with a clean criminal record, clean driving licence, good credit history. If anyone asked me that question they like to embarrass politicians with - have I ever taken illegal drugs, I can genuinely answer "no" (sorry, I know it's boring). The problem is, if you scratch the surface it becomes apparent that there is a problem. I didn't exist six years ago, and when that little bit of trivia surfaces, it leads to me being outed as trans.

Of course one might ask what the problem is, given that I am "out" anyway, but I'm in control of that. I'm out in a general sense, but not out to every supermarket cashier, every traffic warden, every policeman in the street and so on. I don't wear a metaphorical sign around my neck that says "Hi. Trans person here!"

That sign does appear, however, whenever someone looks into my background.

A few years ago I had a Criminal Records Bureau check. They outed me to the organisation requesting the check. They weren't supposed to, but they did.

Last year I bought a 3G SIM for my iPad. I needed a credit check. The was some sort of problem. I passed the check, but it involved phone calls and puzzled looks from the salesman, and took a long time.

A few weeks ago I went to the bank with Sylvia and Zoe to open a joint current account for the household expenses. This is the bank who've known me for 21 years. They're quite nice to me, I'm a good customer. Part way through the process the bank clerk noticed there was another signatory to the existing account. "Who's this person?" she asked, pointing to that name which appeared on the screen, which I'd assumed had been expunged. I was mortified.

For trans people, this can be a constant worry. Procedures set up to protect us often don't work because the organisations implementing them are institutionally incompetent. Some organisations don't even have any such procedures. Sometimes broken IT systems out us. That annoying verified by VISA thing? I can't expunge my old name from it - every time I try and buy something online it pops up. The name hasn't been on my credit cards for years.

And every time this happens the person I'm dealing with is in a position of power. In a transaction where it should be irrelevant, they are given information they could use to humiliate me if they were malicious, or possibly just tactless. I really don't like background checks.

And here they are intruding into a new part of my life, and I've had enough. Being trans isn't the only reason for someone's papers to not be in order - I imagine there are lots of minority groups to whom it happens, but I suspect something many of us have in common is the constant low level stress it causes.

This surfaced yesterday, quite unexpectedly, when I was feeling frustrated about this, and angry at colleagues who just didn't understand why I can't just go along with it this one time. Suddenly I found myself thinking about all those occasions when someone probably found out, like the SIM card, or the CRB check, or a whole host of others. I found myself thinking about those months I spent early in transition, in the so called "real life experience", which is a sort of ritual humiliation that the medical profession insist trans people go through because it's funny, or something, when I was constantly aware of being visibly gender variant. People would notice in public, laugh, stare, point, sometimes look at me with real hatred in their eyes.

The threat of having to deal with this yet again, and trying to explain to people who simply don't get it broke me. A huge mental scab was picked off and it all came flooding out. I realised as I sat there in tears that I was experiencing post traumatic stress. I expect it's there in members of lots of minority groups who are exposed to constant low level "othering" in society. Eventually it all comes flooding out.

Well I'm not doing it this time. They're not getting my details to store indefinitely, and grub around in my background, and have random conference officials who check my badge possibly find out how I got to be who I am now (one would hope the supporting IT systems aren't set up like this, but one can get nasty surprises as I found out at the bank).

My papers are not in order, and I can't steal a plane and just fly away to some magical wonderland where it doesn't matter. It's my life, forever, and I refuse to expose myself to more stress over this than I need to, because the routine administrivia of life will do enough of that all by itself.

My Papers Are Not In Order, and so I'm not going to the party conference.

So the chaser from last night seems to have found this journal (I have no idea how - maybe he was googling for some of his own choice phrases or something).

He's bad at quitting while he is behind. I almost feel bad posting this - I don't think it's as funny as yesterday's, and it's also a bit like kicking a puppy.

Ah hell, let's do it anyway.
( Click for transcript )

This one started out jumping into an IRC channel and trolling. He got banned. A few hours later he returned in private message. I should warn you - the photograph linked to in the transcript contains a graphic depiction of vaginoplasty in progress. For that reason, I haven't enabled it as a link - you'll have to copy and paste if you want to see it.

Anyway, on with the fun.
( Here be chasers )

I know in theory how to "jug up" (that is ascend) a rope, using a pair of slings rigged as prusik hitches. It's not something I have actually done in practice.

There are some nice tall trees just round the corner, where the lowest branch is far too high to climb using conventional methods. I decided it might be something to do of a Sunday to go and play with ropes on them, just in the interests of developing my rope skills and messing about.

It didn't go quite as planned - there are pictures:
( Have a look at me getting myself in a pickle - you know you want to )

During transition I had something called a Zoladex implant. This is a little pellet injected into your belly through the largest needle in the world, and it blocked your own body's sex hormone production for as long as the implant lasted, which was theoretically 12 weeks.

Now let's do a thought experiment - imagine something like Zoladex is invented, but it's permanent. Once the implant is in, you can never produce sex hormones until it's deactivated, by the injection of an antitdote. The antidote is strictly controlled so it's only possible to get it on the say so of a doctor (yes, I know, they try to do that with things like diamorphine and it hasn't been fantastically successful, but just imagine).

Now imagine a society where everyone gets one of these in childhood. In order to have it deactivated, you need to get a referral to a psychiatrist, who will only clear you to have the injection which will allow you to mature into an adult after you have spent two years proving you are able to live and function as an adult. If you fail for whatever reason, you spend your entire life with a body that is never allowed to progress beyond late childhood.

Most people would probably regard such a situation as horrific and dystopian, and would rebel against it.

But it occurs to me that if most people had to face the prospect of this sort of invasive indignity, then society might start to care rather a lot more about what the medical profession routinely does to trans people in its name.

Just a thought.

So for reasons mostly relating to irony, a bunch of us in a chatroom decided to take the ridiculous, gender stereotypical, misogynist, trans-male-erasing exercise in self-selection that is the COGIATI test.

Some of the questions I had to improvise a bit on. For "which choice most closely describes why you dress up 'en femme', as a woman" it was notable that there was no "public nudity is frowned on" option, for example.

Anyway, I scored 60, which means I am:

COGIATI classification THREE, ANDROGYNE

What this means is that the Combined Gender Identity And Transsexuality Inventory has classified your internal gender identity to be essentially androgynous, both male and female at the same time, or possibly neither. In some cultures in history, you would be considered to be a third sex, independent of the polarities of masculine or feminine. Your gender issues are intrinsic to your construction, and you will most likely find your happiness playing with expressing both genders as you feel like it.

And that

Permanent polarization in either direction might bring significant unhappiness. It is not recommended that you go through a complete transsexual transformation.

So there we are - the whole transition/hormones/sex-reassignment-surgery thing was apparently a hilarious mistake and I have only myself to blame for not being obsessively stereotypically feminine being honest with myself.

By the way, my wife, who is cis and has never shown any inclination towards any sort of gender issues scored almost exactly the same as me.

There's a serious point in all this - if you're at a stage where you are really distressed about gender issues, it can be entirely natural to seek validation, and I daresay most of us have done it, but this sort of nonsense is really no more accurate than reading fortune cookies, like the one I had yesterday that talked about the child I was going to have (hi, I'm neutered).

And by the way, if through some freak of quantum mechanics I woke up tomorrow with all my "bits" back where they started, or found out that the last 6 years had all been a dream, I would do it all again without hesitation, only quicker.