The Death of the Inclusive,Tolerant, Trans Community?

Odysseus & the Sirens

I was astonished to discover that those  social justice campaigners, Peter Tatchell and Mary Beard, amongst others, had become the latest attack of the twittering trans-sirens.

What have they done? Peter and Mary had signed a letter outlining the problems with the latest 'No-Platforming' campaigns to exclude some speakers from University Campuses. (see Twitter mob who vowed to kill me over transgenderletter have it all wrong)

Like most academics, I am pretty absolute when it comes to free speech – and I am quite clear that the 'no platforming' campaigns demean us as humans, and reduces the  nature of academic debate to mere politicking.

There is a world of difference from speech to pointing guns. Just listening is the start of many a conversation. Without conversation, then effectively, we allow those who killed the staff at Charlie Hebdo to have won.

Peter Tatchell Campaigning on the streets.

I also believe good manners, like free speech, cost us nothing - but the loss of either is an attack on civilization itself.

Peter and Mary and all the other signatories - I am really very sad and sorry that you have also become victims to trans people who have failed to properly read the letter you signed, and if that is an unwarranted assertion, certainly have forgotten their manners.

The Latest Irritations

Over the years, as a feminist (and trans) academic, at times I have felt pretty cross with the likes of academics such Sheila Jeffreys, Germaine Greer, and even Julie Bindel (whom I count as an academic colleague and friend). Julie has changed her views over the years, and no longer writes pieces attacking our community. However, if she wrote now of the development of a vicious streak amongst some in the in the trans community, I might for once, find myself agreeing with her.

I have also find myself amazed, and feeling very cantankerous about the vicious streak of nastiness coming from those 'neo-feminists' who term themselves TERFS or trans exclusionary radical feminists, and who attack the very existence of trans people, especially trans women. But they are a world away the proto-2nd wave feminism of Germaine and Julie.

And, now,  I find myself despairing about the unkindness and in some cases, brutality, coming out of those people terming themselves as the new 'trans activists'. In the early days of the internet we built a trans community and movement based upon the principles of tolerance - but it seems that some, without any sense of history, or irony, are flushing that down the toilet.

Since shortly after it's founding in 1992, Press For Change has had a rule that we work by ‘making friends and not by making enemies’ – and if trans people want true inclusion, not mere tolerance, then I am still of the view that making friends is the way forward for our community.

If we don't recognise our true or potential friends, then we might never notice our enemies.

The Twittersphere

Unfortunately, a tweet (or a Facebook note) takes little energy output - and if people are socially isolated then the computer easily becomes the venting point for their anger and disappointments. I have a certain sympathy for those who find themselves using it in that way. But for those on the receiving end, it can seem very vicious and even frightening. I try to remember that the trans people who do that are just typing their frustrations, and not pointing a gun.

I have been less visible in the trans community in recent months, primarily because of such unkindness. Twitter's 'stings and arrows' can be horribly painful, as I personally know from having been twitter trolled by a trans person last year and, despite every effort to communicate, I ended up having to ask the police to intervene. Another trans person attacked everything I wrote or said. No matter how willing I was to compromise, or to seek a conversation, I realised I was socially and physically unprepared for the sheer brutality of what she was willing to do to undermine me.

Ageing now means I struggle with the related pain and fatigue of a chronic illness. It was all becoming too tiring and preventing me from doing what I do best - teaching law, and giving legal advice to the trans community. As such, I decided to concentrate on those, rather than kill myself engaging with people who wouldn't listen, never mind hear me.

Heroes like Peter Tatchell are regularly putting their lives on the line as they steadfastly seek inclusion, provide education, campaign to reduce poverty, struggle for world peace, and seek justice – in other words, working to create what was once referred to as the 'Kingdom of Heaven  on earth'.

I pray that despite the twittering he will remain strong and stay true to himself. He is one of my heroes.

Discovering a Baby's Gender

How do we Know a Baby's Gender? 

The Wisdom of Hindsight

I am a trans man, and my wife is a trans man's wife - that gives both of us a distinct advantage when thinking about the complexities of sex and gender. My wife is also a Registered General nurse and a Registered Mental Health nurse, so she has seen many baby's being born when training in maternity care, and has nursed people with very different abilities and body shapes. 

What Happens When a Baby is Born?

When a baby is born, most parents rely on the midwife’s cursory glance to tell the baby's sex and gender – but having seen 4 babies born, I can tell you that it is a very cursory glance, and we should be careful before we trust it.

The midwife certainly does not check whether a baby has testes, or a vagina, or uterus or ovaries. They check whether there is a penis of a certain length or not, and then they say “Congratulations, you have a boy (or a girl)”. 

The Difficulty of Sex and Gender

When our children were very young, we had twin babies. My son (aged 3) asked us: 

"Mum, Dad, how do you know the babies are girls?". 

I looked at Sarah, thinking I have just been asked the most important question of my life and I don't know the answer ... but like  a knight in shining armour, Sarah rode to the rescue, and replied 

"Well ... you see we don't know whether they are girls. What we do is make a guess.

"We know that most babies born with vaginas will grow up to be girls, and most babies born with penises will grow up to be boys .... but as you know from Dad, and his friends - Christine, Jonathan etc. that isn't always the case.

"As the baby’s parents we make a guess - but it is only a guess. When the babies get older, if it turns out to be the wrong guess, and either or both of them  have grown up to be a boy, they will tell us.

"And then we can make the changes they would like us to make."

Son’s response: “OK”.

It really is that simple – we don’t know a baby’s gender. We make a guess  - and it may be the right guess or the wrong guess. We cannot decide who our children are going to be, and we are not going to discover what that is until they have grown up. 

As it happens, our female babies have grown up to have a woman's gender identity, and our son has grown up to have a man's gender identity.  

We were not so blind as to believe that either their gender or their sexual orientation was sorted out at the time of their birth.

As children we watched them begin to grow into their gender identities somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5. As teenagers we watched them  begin to grow into their sexual orientations - a process that may well take some time, and be dependant upon who they ultimately fall in love with.

Throughout the developmental periods of our children's lives, I insisted upon saying "When you have a boy friend or girl friend .... "  

One daughter  - she was 14 at the time - asked why I insisted upon doing that when she knew she was straight 

My reply:

 "As a teenager I knew I was bisexual, and was not at all sure whether I would fall in love with a man or a woman. I was lucky enough to meet a person, your mum, whom I fell in love with at first sight, and whom I am still in love with 30 years later. 

"I would like all of you to find the person you will fall madly in love with at first sight - but that is only likely to happen if you keep the whole world in your sights.

"Shut out 50% of the population and you might, sadly, miss them altogether - which would be a terrible shame?"

The Promise of Being a Parent

Being a parent  is a huge responsibility - and most of us try hard to get it right. 

But what happens if a child grows up and is not  the person a parent had either dreamed of, or thought they might become. In fact, they seem the antipathy of that.

Sarah has spoken to many parents who have been distressed because their child has turned out to have different gender identity to the one ascribed to them at birth - and this is what she says:

 "Do you remember the day that tiny baby was born, and you held them in your arms and you made a promise. 

 "A promise that you would give your life, not for them to be rich, or famous, but simply for them to be happy. 

 "Well - today is the day you have to make that promise come true. You are not being asked to give your life, but simply a smile of approval. That's all you have to do. 

"Like most parents of trans kids, three years from now, you will be telling me how you felt you had lost your daughter /son, but now you realise that whilst your child has changed on the outside, they are still the same person just so much happier than they had ever been before. 

 "So -  pull yourself together, and smile. It will be one of the best days work you have ever done in raising a happy child."

Let's be thoughtful parents and give our kids a better set of choices in life than the one we had. Like all parents, I can get irritated with each of the children. I hope to always remember the promise I made, then smile, and ask them what's up.
________________________

2014: The Transgender Warriors and Heroes I wish Leelah Alcorn had known this year.

Hayley Cropper (nee Patterson)

Laverne Cox 

Leslie Feinberg
Dr Jay Stewart MBE

Last night my daughter sat quietly reading twitter and then burst into tears. She had just read the suicide note of a young trans person from Ohio, Leelah Alcorn, whose parent’s refused to accept that she could be a girl, not a boy, even to the extent of forcing her into ‘Christian’ 'Gay Conversion' / 'Transgender reparative’ Therapy' – which clearly failed. 

For those who don’t know the story go here and here

As we comforted my daughter, she kept saying she was sorry for being silly. But, of course it is anything but silly to feel great sadness at the loss of any life, but even more so when it is a young person, and the loss is entirely avoidable.

Forty years ago when I transitioned in 1975, I frequently felt like I was the dirt that people wiped off their shoes – and I think from reading Leelah’s suicide note that she envisioned that future for herself.

I am so proud that my daughter, the daughter of a Trans man, does not shy away from that fact. Her university friends are all told the story, and when we went to see her sing in last year’s opera society’s performance, her friends lined up to shake my hand. I wish I could have told Leelah that one day she would discover how cool we now are.

Leelah Alcorn 1997-2014

Seventeen year old Leelah killed herself because her parents could not /would not accept she was trans. 


But this is 2014, well -- 2015 tomorrow. We have spent the last 25 years (or in my case 40 years) doing the social education, winning the court cases, getting the legislation passed, and working with clinicians, the Press, and politicians to create change: to make a world where it is OK to be whatever gender you really are.

And, despite Leelah's death, the evidence of that work is everywhere.

Hayley Cropper (1998 – 2014)

In January 2014, 9.7 million people stopped for a moment and wept over the death of a trans woman, albeit a fictional character; Hayley Cropper (nee Patterson), the red-anorak’ed café owner in Coronation Street, the nation’s longest running soap.

Hayley first appeared on British televisions in January 1998, and was the globe’s first transgender character in a British soap, and the first permanent trans character in any serialised TV show.

Julie Hesmondhalgh who played the character had worked with the Trans community, notably Annie Wallace from Press For Change to ensure the character and her on-screen life was realistic and plausible. Annie Wallace now plays the part of Transgender school Headmistress; Sally St. Claire in Channel 4's Hollyoaks. She has just been nominated for a BAFTA for her work in that role (October 2016). Hayley became a stalwart of the show, despite earlier opposition from some parts of the public. Julie also provided huge amounts of moral support for the work of the trans activist group; Press For Change.


And it was the public who wrote hundreds of protest letters about Hayley’s marriage, or rather her inability to be able to legally marry Roy Cropper, another of the show’s character’s. 

The protest combined with the campaigning work of Press For Change led, on April 14^th 1999,  to Jack Straw, the Home Secretary to announce the government's Interdepartmental Working Group on Transsexual People. 

The 1999 Non-Wedding

The 2010 Wedding

Ultimately the working group recommended action needed to be taken by the British Government, as the alternative was no longer acceptable. In 2005 the Gender Recognition Act 2004 came into force. Hayley, recognised as a woman for all legal purposes, finally married Roy in 2010.

The character Hayley, took her own life in January 2014, not because she was trans; but because she had terminal pancreatic cancer. Having seen my Mum die from the disease, I understand why the show’s writers chose to highlight the inadequacy of current research and treatment into this disease. Research into it receives only 1% of cancer research funding in the UK despite being the country’s fifth deadliest cancer, and by 2030 is predicted to overtake breast cancer to become the 4th largest cancer killer. Five year survival rates have not increased in the last 40 years, and remain at 4% - compared to the current breast cancer survival rate at 5 years of 87%.[1] 

During the week in which Hayley’s suicide was screened a petition to persuade the government to increase funding for research into pancreatic cancer gained a massive amount of support. With Julie's support it ultimately reached the 100,000 needed for a parliamentary debate just before the Parliamentary imposed deadline of 1 year for such petitions.

Not many actors will have had the opportunity to massively increase parliamentary and social awareness of major social problems. Julie Hesmondhalgh, playing a trans woman, has made the most of the opportunity twice in her character’s career, and she was recognised for not just her acting but also her commitment to justice for Trans people and cancer sufferers in the 2014 National Television Awards earlier this year.

If only Leelah had had the opportunity to watch Coronation Street, 3 nights a week.

Laverne Cox: 2014 - The Tipping Point

In May 2014, the actress and trans woman, Laverne Cox who is one of the stars of the Netflix hit ‘Orange is the New Black” (OITNB) set in a women’s prison, was featured on the front of Time magazine with the headline “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier”.  

On Facebook, Laverne wrote that the Time cover  published on her birthday, was a wonderful present , and

"I realize this is way bigger than me and about a tipping point in our nation's history where it is no longer acceptable for trans lives to be stigmatized, ridiculed, criminalized and disregarded."

In the series OITNB, Laverne plays a trans character in the show – finally an out trans woman playing an out trans woman. One more small victory for the many trans people who have spent, either in the past, or more recently, years of their life being an activist, campaigning for core human rights and fairness for trans people.

A Small Aside

I came to activism in 1974, when the then Manchester and Bradford Gay Liberation groups stormed a British Medical Association conference at Bradford University. We were objecting to the participation of Dr John Randell, a psychiatrist at London’s Charing Cross Hospital who specialised in ‘treating’ transsexual people. His treatment consisted primarily of insisting you take off all your clothes so he could photograph you, and then telling you that you would do what he told you to do, or you could forget having any gender reassignment treatments (he is the unseen psychiatrist here). 

Our invasion was successful – John Randell MD stormed off the stage never to be heard again at an academic conference,  Dr Rosemary King, a cross-dressing, trans-identified GP took his place, and Bradford University gave the Gay Lib groups a free hall and disco a month later to compensate for the distress they had caused.

I was fortunate not to be Dr Randell’s patient whilst starting my gender reassignment treatments. I had seen a psychiatrist in Manchester who had thrown me out, refusing to treat me, telling me that I would never live as a man. 

My GP came to my rescue and in 1975 took the extremely daring step of deciding to have a living trans patient instead of a dead one, and prescribed me testosterone.

Unfortunately, though, in 1978 I did become Dr Randell’s patient for a short time. I was taken to the Emergency Room at the hospital after collapsing during a trip to the theatre in London. Because I am trans, instead of being treated for being ill, I was admitted to John Randell’s secure, locked, psychiatric ward. This meant plastic knives and forks, and a male nurse observing me whilst showering (I was pre-op so this was incredibly humiliating).

It was during this stay, and whilst in his office, that John Randell asked me to remove all of my clothes so that he could photograph me. I refused to do so, telling him to get lost - he wasn’t my psychiatrist and there was nothing wrong with my mind, anyway. He then told me that I would stay in his ward until I was willing to be photographed. It took my Mum, Barbara Valente, a senior medical secretary, with the help of her boss, a Professor of Oncology at Christie Hospital in Manchester, ten days to get me released from the hospital. 

The experience on that ward is another story entirely, but I realised then what a megalomaniac Randell was, and how very strange was his behaviour – for a start, he used to walk around the ward muttering under his breath ‘tick tock, tick tock, tick tock’.

Several psychiatrists who trained as junior doctors under John Randell tell the same story – of how he would invite the juniors to dinner at his flat. On his arrival, he would open the door wearing a long blue evening gown and white ‘above the elbow’ long gloves which he wore throughout dinner. One told of going into a rather sleazy East End pub where women of ill repute were known to congregate to discover sat in a corner, dressed like a ‘tart’, the eminent psychiatrist who would a year later in the infamous 1971 Cossey v Cossey Court case declare that the transsexual woman April Ashley could only ever be ‘a pastiche of a woman’. 

Talk about the pot calling the kettle, though in this case it was a mucky frying pan condemning a gleaming copper bottomed kettle.

Gender is the new Black

That aside was about reflecting on how Laverne Cox said we have reached the ‘Transgender tipping point’ – in other words, what happened in the late 1970s is now ancient history.

But is it? The National Review's Kevin Williamson wrote his column with the title "Laverne Cox Is Not a Woman" and said:

"The mass delusion that we are inculcating on the question of transgendered people ... would impose on society at large an obligation — possibly a legal obligation under civil-rights law, one that already is emerging — to treat delusion as fact, or at the very least to agree to make subjective impressions superordinate to biological fact in matters both public and private."

I remember saying (c 1990) 

“I don’t care what they say behind my back, but I do care what they say and do in front of my face”. 

I may be/have been suffering  a delusion for the last 56 years - that I was much more of a boy than a girl, much more of a man than I could have ever been a woman. But the rest of my life (as a teacher, a researcher, a father, a tax payer etc.) is fine - so does my gender matter at all to anyone other than myself and those who love me. 

Of course not. What matters is that as parents we help our kids, like my daughter, and like Leelah's parents should have, grow up into being responsible, tolerant, happy, confidant world citizens acting throughout their lives as eco-warriors, gender warriors, and peace warriors . 

So do I care what Williamson wrote? Not a jot – except it is ignoramuses like him who persuade people like Leelah Alcorn’s parents to announce that their 'son' 'Joshua Alcorn died in the roadway on I-71 in Warren County, Ohio, after being struck by a tractor trailer'.

However, ultimately it is the Williamson’s of this world who have lost the war. The clock will not be turned back. We may still be fighting skirmishes, and Leelah’s death is, very sadly, one of those skirmishes. 

But, the truth is Trans is everywhere, and especially on British television. The highlight of this Christmas’s telly was an adaptation of David Walliam’s novel for children and young teens; “The Boy in the Dress” (still available to watch on BBC iPlayer here). Enough said. 

I wonder whether the people who used to wipe me off their shoes, ever thought it would come to this in 2014.

The Boy in The Dress

And, I do wish Leelah had sat in her bedroom watching Lavern Cox in 'Orange is the New Black', and this christmas, that she had sat down with her Mum and Dad to watch 'The Boy in the Dress'.

Leslie Feinberg (1949-2014)

Leslie Feinberg being hirself

November again, saw many memorial events take place for the International Transgender Day of Remembrance (TdoR 20th November each year). The TDoR came about as a result of the  “Remembering our Dead” website built by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, to remember those Trans people who were killed by actions conceived in transphobia, transgender hatred or prejudice. Read 2014's horrendous roll of 226 victims here.

Having MS and finding the cold unbearable, I have rarely attended the outdoor event that takes place here in Manchester on a late afternoon on the Sunday nearest the TDOR, in Sackville Gardens (Manchester M1 3HB). But just as we stop to remember soldiers who have died, each Armistice Day on the 11th November, a week or so earlier, on TDOR, I stop for a minute or two and remember our trans community's warriors and heroes who have been killed.

As the years pass, I find myself now, not just remembering those who have died at the hands of others, but also those trans people, trans heroes and trans friends who we as a community, are now losing to illness and old age. Death will claim us all, but when much of a person’s early life was lost to prejudice, discrimination and the hatred of others, it makes the lives of some amazing people seem to have been very short. 

In November 2014, we lost one such trans hero – the Transgender Warrior, hirself, Leslie Feinberg (partner of the poet Minnie Bruce Pratt) – who died, aged 65, from the complications of Lyme disease.

Lyme disease is a tick borne illness which if treated early with antibiotic can now be resolved quickly. It is endemic in the USA.

Unfortunately, the cause of Lyme disease was not discovered until 1982, meaning those US residents infected prior to then, at a time when accessing health care was incredibly difficult for those were poor, frequently developed consequent lifelong health problems, ranging from arthritis to heart damage.

Leslie was one of the poor - working in dead end jobs, despite being an amazing Trade Union organizer, and a several times published author. Leslie could have gone much further than ze did, despite having moved mountains in hir life, but being trans and refusing to live in only one gender, or to live in stealth, ze had little opportunity to advance hirself, either academically or financially. 
The consequences of prejudice can be very long standing.

Your History Homework

If you know little of the Trans community's history, and need to learn more, I can recommend as a must that you read two of Leslie’s books:

• Trans Liberation: BeyondPink or Blue

• TransgenderWarriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman

And for those who need to know what it actually felt like in the 1970s and 80s, or

• If you are a trans man and you want to know how it was like in those early years of trying to access treatments, or
• If you are an activist and you want to know what activism was like when all we could do was struggle to survive merely as a community of consciousness raising friends, or
• If you are anyone who wants to create change and end the ridiculous idea that you can ascribe gender to a baby,

then read Leslie’s amazing novel “Stonebutch Blues”.





What a great shame that Leelah Alcorn never managed to read Leslie Feinberg’s books.

Dr. Jay Stewart, MBE

And so to the end of 2014. If there is one person I really wish Leelah Alcorn could have met, it is trans man and (like myself) a dad of twins; Dr Jay Stewart. Co-founder and director of Gendered Intelligence, the UK’s trans youth support organization.

Jay Stewart speaking, with his partner and co-directer of Gendered Intelligence; Catherine MvNamara

This morning's news was that Jay Stewart has rightly had an honourable mention in the Queen’s 2015 New Year’s Honour’s list and he has received an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) For Services to the Transgender community. I expect he is sharing it with Catherine, as undoubtedly their life has been a real partnership of strength and love.

Isn't it amazing how things change. In 2005 I received my OBE for services to ‘Gender’, presumably as nobody dared to let the Queen know such people as us really existed. This year's New Year's Honours list, finally says it as it really is.

Here in the UK there are so many trans folk, family and friends doing all we can to prevent young people from having the same experience as Leelah. 

This year over 20 primary schools have ordered and read PFC’s Guide The Gender Variant Child’s Right To Attend School[2]. That means 20 primary school age children are able to go to school in their own gender identity – the one they know they have themselves, not the one their mum and dad tried to give them several years ago, at a time, when after all, nobody knew what they might grow up to be.

    

Leelah Acorn’s death is a terrible tragedy. If she lived in the UK, I would like to think that she would be alive today, reading this blog. Next week, Leelah would be returning to college as she prepared to take her A’Levels, before  going on the University. She would meet up, on the way, with her large gang of friends – as Leelah.

Leelah's Mum and Dad would have been in touch with Mermaids when she was much younger, and having learnt how to support their gender variant child in her developmental choices, they now would be leading members of their local PFALG UK group. 

And Leelah might well have regularly seen Hayley Cropper  on Coronation Street, sat with her Mum and Dad, after dinner. She would have certainly sat in her bedroom, with her girl friends, watching Laverne Cox in OITNB. She would have known of Leslie Feinberg, and maybe even read the one of his books by now. And she would have probably met  Jay Stewart and the amazing Gendered Intelligence team, having spent some time last summer working on one of Gendered Intelligence’s Art projects for young trans people.

2015's New Year Resolution

In 2000, after the publication of my personal commentary in 'Perfidious man' my mother told me that I was embarrassing the whole family (by going on television, the radio and speaking out in magazines and the newspapers) and would I please stop 'doing this' ... now. 
I told her that I had resolved many years earlier that I would carry on 'doing this' until no child or teenager had to go through the fear and terrors that I had gone through. 

Thankfully my Mum came round to that idea., especially when, in 2005,  she got to come, with my wife Sarah,  to the 'Palace' to watch me receive my OBE. Jay will now have that pleasure with his own family.

Sadly though, Leelah Alcorn’s death means that to carry on 'doing this', is once again my New Year’s resolution, as 2015 knocks at the door.

---

[1] - See more here

[2] Available by contacting Press For Change at office[ – at – ]pfc.org.uk (remove[ – at –] and replace with @. PDF copy free to Schools and the parents and guardians of young gender variant children. All others; £12.50 plus £2 postage and packing for a hard copy, £3.50 for a pdf copy by email. All money raised goes to Press For Change. 

Time Passes ... and do, sadly, do Friends.

  Time Passes ... and so, sadly, do Friends  . .

Saturday 20th April 2013: Lucy Meadows - her impact on the town of Accrington
Tuesday 11th June 2013: JoAnn Roberts, Cross-dressing and trans pioneer has died-------------------------------

Lucy Meadows: How a Trans Woman's Death brought Accrington into the 21st Century 

Nathan Upton, before he transitioned to become Lucy

20/06/2013: When the trans, primary school teacher Lucy Meadows committed suicide earlier this year,  after press harassment, just over a month later the folk of the small town she lived in; the parents and children from the school she worked in; and many neighbours and teaching and trade union colleagues, marched through the town centre of Accrington.

If you have read 'Oranges are not the Only Fruit' by Jeanette Winterson (and if you haven't, you should, even better watch the films) you will realise that Accrington is the town in which Winterson's evil, evangelical mother raised her, and tortured her, throughout the 1960s, because Jeanette was 'unnatural; i.e. she fell in love with other girls, she  was a lesbian.

Accrington is not far from Manchester, the big cosmopolitan University city, where I live, but it is in reality, a world away. It is a place where until Lucy Meadows' death, most  people were still living in the past. If Dr Who. had landed his Tardis in Accrington, he would have said he had landed in 1973.

Whilst Lucy Meadows has become a martyr in the Trans community's fight against transphobia, her death has reached far beyond  the trans community, out to every right thinking person in that small northern town which, until now, time had forgotten.

April 2013, Teachers and Pupils, neighbours and friends march against the transphobia that led to the   death of trans woman, and primary school teacher, Lucy Meadows.  

  

If you had told me 40 years ago, in the real 1973, when I was coming out for the first time, that one day the folk of Accrington and their children would march through their streets in the battle against transphobia, I would have responded "never in my lifetime". (see here for Manchester Evening News story)

How things have changed. And it is down to  folk like JoAnn Roberts (see below), who have made that change happen.

Graham Jones, Member of Parliament for Accrington  has said that Lucy Meadows death could be a "watershed moment" for Britain's transgender community. I sincerely hope he is correct. 
In the meantime Lucy Meadows has, in some ways, become the United Kingdom's own Brandon Teena. 

JoAnn Roberts, Cross Dressing Woman Extraordinaire, dies aged 65

11/06/13: JoAnn Roberts, Cross-dressing and trans pioneer who co-founded the Renaissance Transgender Association has died from cancer at the age of 65. Joanne unusually for the trans political community was not a transsexual woman. She was a man who enjoyed model railways, and cross dressing. And she never pretended to be anything different. 

Whenever I went to the 'States' in the 1990s, whatever the event was, JoAnn was there with a huge smile, pushing the services of CDS Publishing - her cross dressers book publishing imprint and what was effectively, a cross dressers support organisation. She always remembered names, and other aspects of one's life, and  I enjoyed her company, her laughter, and her wonderful enthusiasm, not just for life - and she really did have great enthusiasm for life - but also the 'cause'. She was an amazing, true to life, big hearted, beautiful, pioneer for the cross-dressing community.

JoAnn wrote  her first book, Art and Illusion: A Guide to Crossdressing in 1985, which eventually became a 3 volume guide, and  a dozen more books were to follow, including support for those who lived with cross dressers in Coping with Cross Dressing, (1991). At least a dozen video's were produced,  all intended to help the ordinary cross dresser to feel that they could succeed in either passing successfully enough to be able to go to the shopping mall, or to dress and do their hair and makeup in a way they that made them feel good with their personal presentation as a cross dresser. JoAnn's work was about Liberation, not dictation. She did not tell anyone how they should dress, or speak, or be - rather she told them about the options they had and the 'tricks of trade', so to speak.

In 1986 she organised her first Cross dressers weekend event, and these have continued to this day - now called "Beauty and the Beach" held at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, 2013's weekend in November would / will be the 27th such event. There is no news on the event website - I am assuming it will still go ahead, because clearly JoAnn had a community of people who loved her, and I am sure they will not wish to have her memory and what became her life's work ,vanish overnight.

In 1994, CDS went online. Along with Cindy Martin and Jamie Faye Fenton she created the still continuing Transgender Forum, a weekly e-zine and an online resource guide.

JoAnn was so much more than just a crossdresser - or as she put it 'a bit of a drag queen' , she was a political animal as well. She was Chair of the board of the American Educational Gender Information Service (AEGIS) from 1992 to 1996. She was elected to the International Foundation for Gender Education board twice last serving in 1994, and she was a co-founder of the Congress of Transgender Organizations (CTO), the Transgender Alliance for Community (TAC),GenderPAC, and lastly the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC). Joann was also one of the authors of the original Bill of Gender Rights in 1990, which was later expanded into the International Bill of Gender Rights. I remember being honoured to read out one of the Bill clauses alongside her, as attendees did, one by one, at the ICTLEP conference in Houston, Texas. Furthermore, JoAnn is credited as one of three people who coined the term 'transgender community', the other two being the trans women, Justice Phyllis Frye and Kymberleigh Richards.

There will be a large hole now where JoAnn once fitted. She will,  be very greatly missed by those who loved her. I am sure there is a real need now, for someone with high enough heels to fill her place.

I will miss knowing that JoAnn is out there, she was very much a sister in arms. She believed in being truthful. She didn't pretend to have some sort of intersex condition, or to have the brain of a woman trapped inside a man's body. Joanne, was exactly what it said on the packet. And I admired her tremendously for that.  And there I go, - using she, and her all the time.

The thing is that to me JoAnn was a woman, I only ever saw the man a couple of times, and even then I could never recognise him or get my head around the fact that this was one and the same person. JoAnn effectively, very effectively, demonstrated that gender was much more important than sex (the biological duality, that is, not the action stuff, done mostly in bed).

JoAnn was not female, she was a man who was a woman - most of the time and all of the times I saw her, even when pretending to be a man. JoAnn was clear, she wasn't a male lesbian, she wasn't an effeminate man, she was a man who was a strong woman with a good but fair business head, a caring heart, and a political will for the liberation from tyranny of all those who are not white, middle class, reactionary men. 

So how else could I describe her, except as a woman. 

I believe that at times all activists need their own political space in which to commune and raise  consciousnesses. And sometimes that means trans women's space, or trans men's space, or born bio-women's space, or Marxist space, or kids space etc.   

The Radical feminists who chant "'womyn born womyn' only" in order only to exclude trans women from their events, seem to forget what it is to be a woman. 

Being a woman means embodying  an actual physical space in which the light of day is too often blocked out. It is a space in which the fear of experiencing, and often the actual experiencing, of patriarchal, macho, masculinist institutional and structural instruments of hate, oppression and violence are the norm.

Yet it is also a space which embodies, despite that, values of care which can and do thrive. 

JoAnn embodied all of that, so in her space she was a woman. Many non-female as well as female people are women; fearfully but also politically, socially, financially, and emotionally, if not biologically. Yes, JoAnn was a man who experienced much of life as a woman - and it wasn't fake. The train set was the exception  - but we are all allowed a small peccadillo.

Now rad fems may need some space of their own sometimes - but they should say truthfully what it is they want. Their shout should be 

"rad fems only: that is women/womeyn/intersex women/intersex womyn born with vaginas/ or without vaginas or with vaginal stumps/chromosomes irrelevant, and raised as girls, but nobody born with a penis or micro penis/ and nobody born with a vagina who identifies as a man or not as a woman" only space" 

Because 'womyn born womyn' sounds that ridiculous.

If women who have not had the experience of being transgender wish to meet without transgender people, it really is easy: State the meeting is for women without the experience of being transgender.  In other words, instead of being insulting, and belittling the experience of trans women, be truthful and recognise that the only people whose lives  have less experience of oppression are your own. 
   
[Remembering some of the discussions at the 1973/4 Women's lib conference (yes, I did attend) in Edinburgh, perhaps Rad Fems could also try adding no skirts, no tights, no bras, no sons, no boyfriends, no husbands.]

"Womyn born womyn" just doesn't cut the mustard, Third Wave of Feminism has moved the rest of us on -  sometimes, it seems by light years.

The death of Joann once more reminds me, though, that age is creeping up on so many of us. 

Whilst in my head I may think I am exactly the same as I was when I was 25 - dashing, charming, handsome, slim, a really good win for anyone who manages to snap me up - in reality, like many of my friends, I now carry around a very rusty, clunky, ill fitting, cage with me wherever I go. 

And then I remember - we must not forget to write the record of the amazing events we have witnessed.

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Trans Pioneer JoAnn Roberts Dies

posted by Monica Roberts at 1:00 PM , Tuesday 11th June 2013This was originally posted on the TRansGriot website here

I was shocked and saddened to read the TG Forum and Chrysalis posts from Angela Gardner and Dallas Denny announcing the June 7 death of one of the pioneers in the trans community in JoAnn Roberts at age 65 due to lung cancer.

JoAnn Roberts was one of the five founders of the Pennsylvania based Renaissance Transgender Education Assn., the ill-fated GenderPac, and served on the boards of IFGE and AEGIS in which she was the board chair from 1992-1996.

She also was one of the persons who helped give us a major boost in the founding and formation of NTAC in 1999.

She was an early trans political activist and major leader during the renaissance of trans activism in the early 90's.  She authored the Bill of Gender Rights in December 1990 that was subsequently expanded into the International Bill of Gender Rights at the 1993 and subsequent ICTLEP conferences.

JoAnn appeared on many television shows to discuss our issues including the Donahue talk show and served as the founding owner/publisher of TGForum.

'Cousin JoAnn' as I affectionately referred to her as in addition to publishing 'Art and Illusion-A Guide To Crossdressing' also published a 'Who’s Who of the TG Community' and was the driving force for The Second International Congress on Crossdressing, Sex and Gender hosted by Renaissance in suburban Philadelphia in 1997.

I met JoAnn during the 1999 Southern Comfort Conference.  I have fond memories of sitting outside the Buckhead area hotel that used to host SCC with her, Polar, Pam Geddes and Dawn Wilson drinking a 21 year old bottle of scotch while discussing a wide range of subjects. 

Our conversation was interrupted when the chartered bus arrived from an SCC convention excursion to an Atlanta club called the Chamber. 

The persons on the bus began stumbling off of it in various stages of inebriation and hilariously and unsteadily attempted to negotiate in their 5 inch heels the distance from the spot where the bus was parked to the hotel's front door.

She had wound down her interaction with the trans community in recent years to spend more time with her family and work on her beloved model train set when she was diagnosed with cancer in February. 

She'd undergone chemotherapy treatment that appeared to successfully halt the cancer spread in her lungs and liver.  Radiation treatments were begun to deal with a tumor on her spine but were halted last week when it was determined that the tumor there had spread and she opted for hospice care where she passed away on June 7th 2013.

There is a Facebook page that has been set up to commemorate her life and in which people who knew JoAnn can pay their respects.  But I'm sad to report that one of the early leaders in the American trans community and a trans community pioneer has moved on.

Rest in peace JoAnn, you will be missed.  

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