Author Archives: elmyra

That was 2013

Leave a reply

It’s been nothing if not an interesting year. Here’s a selection from my blog over the past year to keep you entertained while you’re chilling out/avoiding your family on Boxing Day.
I did a few variations on the theme of colliding worlds – the intersection between feminism and digital rights. Ultimately, the message here is that we should all care about digital rights, and that we need a more diverse digital rights community.
When Worlds Collide: My original talk from ORGCon, aimed at the digital rights community.
Colliding Worlds: My talk at the Virtual Gender conference, aimed at a feminist audience.
I also spent a lot of time this year campaigning against internet censorship in the UK.
Porn Blocking – A Survivor’s Perspective: In which I talk about how none of David Cameron’s censorship measures would have prevented the abuse I experienced. (Trigger warning for discussion of child sexual abuse.)
Censored: In which I show how Cameron’s censorship measures would censor me speaking out against censorship.
Truthloader, where I appeared on a panel with Gail Dines, Peter Bradwell, Vivienne Pattison, Leigh Porter, and Jerry Barnett.
Open Letter to David Cameron on Web Filtering, co-signed by Brooke Magnanti, Laurie Penny, Zoe Margolis, Charles Stross, Jane Fae, Holly Combe, Jane Czyselska, and me.
I talked a lot about bisexuality, including spending a week curating the @TWkLGBTQ account on Twitter.
Index post for the @TWkLGBTQ week, which leads to posts on labels, coming out, stereotypes, bisexual role models in fiction and real life, and much more.
I also made a Biphobia Bingo card. It has generated some interesting insights in the last few months.
I was generally unimpressed with pop culture in various ways.
I wrote a series of posts introducing key feminist concepts in the context of pop culture. There is more to come in this, but for now, start here.
I got angry at Joss Whedon.
And I ventured, briefly, into writing fiction.
I talked, here an there, about immigration. Have you noticed how RomaniansandBulgarians appears to have become one word in the English language?
I explained how to talk to foreigners.
I created the Immigration Drinking Game – it comes with a serious health warning.
And I urged people to sign the Let Me Vote European Citizen’s Initiative. (Something which you still have a couple of weeks to do, incidentally.)
I wrote a few pieces for ORGZine including a review of Beeban Kidron’s documentary InRealLife, and a comment on Amazon’s latest attempt to cash in on fanfiction.
I also wrote a handy 5-step guide to being a great ally.
And last but not least, I remembered Maggie.
Here’s to 2014. May it let our voices be heard.

The Immigration Drinking Game

Leave a reply

Today is International Migrants’ Day. Not that you’d know that from the Today Programme coverage of immigration this morning. So I have decided to bring you the Immigration Drinking Game. Get a (large) bottle of your favourite liquor and settle down. (Feel free to add more items in the comments or tweet them @elmyra.)
The United Nations produces promotional material featuring only people of colour? Yes, white people are a global minority, and yes, many migrants are indeed people of colour. However not acknowledging that white people can be migrants too perpetuates racist stereotypes. It’s why I can pass as British unless I shout about being foreign, whereas people with brown skin who were born here, and whose parents were born here are constantly asked where they’re from and complimented on their English. So take a drink.
“Economic migrants” hurled as an insult. Because wanting to work and make a contribution to society is clearly somehow a bad thing. Because having the strength to do a job you are vastly overqualified for on minimum wage is somehow to be despised. Take a drink.
RomaniansandBulgarians. One word. Breathless. A prayer. An invocation. A curse. Take a drink.
Benefit tourism. Check your facts. Take a drink.
It’s all the EU’s fault. Nevermind that it is also the EU that enables you to export over a million of your retired (aka unproductive, with greater healthcare needs) citizens to Spain. Take a drink.
A drain on local community resources. Let’s do some maths. Brits in Bulgaria as percentage of population: 0.246%. Bulgarians in UK as percentage of population: 0.0743%. Bulgaria’s GDP/capita: $7k. UK GDP/capita: $38k. Most Brits in Bulgaria are retirees and thus not contributing hugely to the economy but requiring more healthcare resources than average; most Bulgarians in the UK are relatively young, healthy, evil economic migrants. Now tell me who’s a drain on whose resources. And take a drink while you’re at it.
Learn English. Integrate. We’ve cut funding for ESL classes? Take a drink.
We should welcome immigrants because they do all the jobs the feckless, undeserving, spoiled British underclass is too lazy to do. It’s fun, playing off the poor against the foreigners. They’re so busy hating each other, they won’t even notice when the Tories win the next election. Take a drink.
We should leave the EU if we can’t stop free movement of labour. By all means, cut off your nose to spite your face. Take a drink.
RomaniansandBulgarians and Roma. Would you like some racism with your racism? Take two drinks.
Racists of the world, unite! Down the fucking bottle. And another one for good measure. That’s it, you’re done.

Compare and Contrast

Leave a reply

For those of you who haven’t gone out and found the full version of that Chimamanda Adichie talk that Beyonce sampled in Flawless, here it is.

No need to thank me[1].
I watched this just now, and I was painfully reminded of Joss Whedon’s take on the subject of the word “feminist”.

(I am sorry for putting you through this again.)
Here are two storytellers, both incredibly aware of the power of stories and the power of language, taking on the same word. It is almost uncanny how much of the same ground they cover:
– that the word “feminist” comes with a lot of baggage;
– that this is an issue of equality and shared humanity;
– that it’s an issue of language and an issue of culture.
Now look at how differently they treat those points. Whedon throws the word out of the window in some misguided attempt at humour. Adichie reveals the way all that baggage has affected her, the internalised oppression she is carrying and struggling with:

“At some point, I was a happy African feminist, who does not hate men, and who likes lip gloss, and who wears high heels for herself and not for men.”

Whedon declares that “You either believe women are people, or you don’t.” Adichie examines the social structures and systems of oppression that lead to the majority of people today believing that women are not people. She tells us how we are all socialised to see girls and women as less, to assume that any money or self-worth a woman may have will have come from a man, to see women as guilty, to stifle girls’ ambition by making their first priority marriage. (And if you think that last one is an African and not a Western issue, you need to think again. But that’s another post.) She points out how men are the default – how Joss Whedon probably never had to think about what to wear to that award dinner he made his speech at, while Chimamanda Adichie has to expend energy to look less feminine in order to be taken seriously. She talks about how these assumptions are so ingrained in our society that even her progressive male friends do not see them until they are shoved right up in their face.
Whedon seems to think we have solved racism. Adichie, a black African woman, examines the interaction between different systems of oppression (racism and sexism), different types of privilege.
Whedon says if only we had a word that made it clear that believing that women aren’t human was unacceptable, the world would be a much better place. Adichie looks at practical ways in which we can initiate and sustain cultural change: raising children based on talent and interests rather than gender, being aware of the assumptions we make and the messages we send, challenging sexist behaviour when we see it. She is also keenly aware of all the ways in which discussions about gender get shut down and derailed, often deliberately, often by people like Joss Whedon. (“Why do you have to say ‘my experience as a woman’? Why can’t you say ‘my experience as a human being’?” Yeah, that does sound kinda familiar, now that you mention it.)
Joss Whedon makes a speech, throws a word out of the window, throws another one at the audience, and that’s it, job done. Chimamanda Adichie understands that it takes 100 years for killing twins to no longer be part of a culture. She tells us of the barriers she faces in accessing and shaping her own culture. She acknowledges the difficulty of changing our culture, but very clearly tells us that it is not only not impossible, but that it is vital. “Culture does not make people. People make culture.”
I am inspired by one of these two messages, one of these two people. When Joss Whedon tells me “Go forth and use ‘genderist’!” my response is a resounding “Fuck you!” When Chimamanda Adichie tells me to be a proud woman, a proud feminist, and to go and challenge our society’s myriad sexist assumptions every single day, then yes, of course I will. Because Chimamanda Adichie speaks from her experience as a woman, while Joss Whedon lacks the imagination that would allow him to conceive that women’s experiences are different.
—

[1] It needs to be acknowledged that parts of Chimamanda Adichie’s talk contain heteronormative and cissexist assumptions, and there is one piece that is problematic with regards to sex work. While in an ideal world all of us would be constantly aware of all axes of privilege and all intersections of oppression and speak and act accordingly, this is not the world we live in, and I feel Adichie’s contribution to the feminist discourse is incredibly valuable even with these flaws.

When is it appropriate to gender things?

Leave a reply

Our society genders things. It starts with pink hats and blue hats when we’re babies, continues with LEGO and LEGO Friends when we’re kids and culminates in power tools and handbags when we’re adults. It doesn’t matter how feminist we are, how aware of popular culture and its more problematic elements, it is sometimes difficult to escape internalising some of this social gendering of random objects and concepts. I rarely do a double-take when products I have no interest in (e.g. beer) are marketed in a way specifically aimed at men. I do grumble when items I am interested in are marketed this way, or when, in order to target women, manufacturers think they should make their products pink.
Occasionally, however, someone decides to gender something I never even thought of as gendered in any way before and that serves as a nice reminder of quite how ridiculous the whole concept is. Until last week the Firebox catalog landed on my desk, for instance, I had no idea that I was no longer allowed coffee and related items (filed under “Mens Gifts” – sic) due to my gender identity; also magical fixing putty Sugru; and RFID wallets, possibly because Firebox haven’t worked out that they also come in pink.
20131202_142902p
I asked whoever was on Twitter some time after midnight last Tuesday if they could think of examples of things that genuinely should be gendered. Here are some of the responses I got: French grammar, sex toys, babies’ nappies, “feminine hygiene products”, “female hormonal contraception”, safe spaces of some kinds. Let’s group these into a few categories and look at them in more detail.
French grammar: languages
Tom Scott has dealt with this beautifully. Enough said.

Sex toys, nappies, tampons, hormonal contraception: objects
More specifically, these are objects designed for specific parts of anatomy: primary and secondary sexual characteristics, body chemistry and organs associated with sex. Let’s at this point remind ourselves of some basic definitions. I’ll go with a slightly modified version of the World Health Organisation definition:

“Sex” refers to the biological and physiological characteristics (…) “Gender” refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for (different genders).

The important bit here is that sex and gender are not the same, and that when we say certain objects are only for men or only for women, we are making a statement about socially constructed roles, behaviours or activities, i.e. about gender, not biological sex. Your gender is not defined by your biological sex. If you’re lucky in our cisheteronormative society, your gender identity may match the set of physical characteristics you have, or the gender you were assigned at birth, but there are many people for whom that’s not the case, or whose physical characteristics don’t neatly fit into a binary model.
Looking therefore at things like tampons, sanitary towels and hormonal contraception, there are plenty of men out there who have use for these things. There are also agender or non-binary people who need these products. Likewise sex toys designed to stimulate a particular configuration of genitalia can still be used by people of any gender.
Therefore, stating that a product, even one specifically designed with a particular set of anatomical features in mind, is “for men” or “for women” is extremely problematic. A better approach would be to make direct reference to the anatomical features in question. Something might be for people who have a penis, or a uterus, or breasts. Let’s face it, getting less uptight about discussing bodies can only be a good thing, and shedding oppressive gender norms in the process is a nice bonus.
Safe spaces
Given the global epidemic of gender-based violence, it is understandable that many women in particular feel the need for some gender-segregated safe spaces. Refuges and meeting spaces are good examples here. Having said that, a binary approach to gender can create a whole new set of problems when it comes to safe spaces. Trans women, for instance, are often excluded from refuges or find that they have to meet certain criteria for their gender identity to be accepted. Similarly, agender and non-binary people can be excluded from some safe spaces, even if they are not the threat we need safety from or if they are also affected by the same threat. Queer people who experience domestic abuse can also find it difficult to access safe spaces because our model of domestic abuse is so gendered.
I do accept the need for some safe spaces, but I also believe we need a more nuanced approach to them. I don’t necessarily have a good solution here – and I don’t actually believe there is a one-size-fits-all solution – but here are some of the things I would consider. We need to understand what the threat model is that we are seeking safety from and define our safe spaces as much as possible based on that, rather than on proxies like sex. We particularly need to ensure that in seeking safety we are not policing others’ identities or worse, endangering others.
“But what about pink RFID wallets?” you ask.
Here’s the thing. Pink (okay, magenta) is an awesome colour. It’s bright. It’s cheerful. It goes fantastically well with purple; and black; and all sorts of other colours. If you want a pink RFID wallet, get one. But don’t do it because you’re a woman. And don’t not do it because you’re a man. If you happen to be a marketing exec stop gendering things that have no business being gendered. If your product is designed for particular anatomical features, say so, don’t use gender as a proxy. And if you’re trying to create a safe space, put some thought into it to ensure it is both safe and inclusive.
This post has been brought to you by the Fluff and Inclusion Police.

[Elsewhere] Making Cryptoparties inclusive

Leave a reply

The CryptoParty movement, kicked off by Australian activist @Asher_Wolf over a year ago, intends to help people with any level of technical knowledge acquire useful skills to protect their privacy in the digital world. The 350-page, crowd-sourced handbook includes, among others, sections on browsing the web safely, securing your email, using disk encryption and secure telephony. Explanations progress from the basic (Don’s use personal details in your passwords; make sure no one’s looking over your shoulder when you’re typing in your password) to the rather more advanced instructions for using email encryption on your phone.
Read more over on ORGZine.

[Trigger Warning: Transphobia] Transgender Day of Remembrance

Leave a reply

Let me tell you about Sasha. Sasha is 18 and goes to high school in California. When Sasha was born, other people decided Sasha was male. Some time over the last 18 years, Sasha started identifying as agender – neither male nor female. Sasha uses “they” as their gender-neutral pronoun of choice. Sasha’s gender expression varies, and over the last year or so they have occasionally worn skirts. A couple of weeks ago, on November 4th, Sasha was on a bus on their way home. They had fallen asleep. They were wearing a skirt.
Sasha’s skirt was set on fire by a 16-year-old kid. Sasha was hospitalised with second- and third-degree burns and will require several surgeries to recover.
Let me tell you about Jane. Jane Doe (anonymised for safety) is a high school student in Colorado. Jane is transgender. As a young woman, she used the girls’ changing and toilet facilities in her school. Back in October, a so-called Christian organisation claimed that there had been complaints of harassment against Jane made by other girls in her school. The story was picked up by the Daily Mail (later taken down from their website) and Fox News. It turned out that the claims were entirely made up, but not before Jane was subjected to vicious and persistent bullying.
Jane has had to be put on suicide watch as a result of this bullying.
The tragedy here is that Jane and Sasha are the lucky ones. They are not among the 238 people, predominantly non-white, whom we know to have died violent deaths since November 20th 2012 just for the crime of being transgender. Sasha and Jane’s names will – luckily – not be among those read out at gatherings around the world tomorrow commemorating the trans* community’s dead of the last 12 months. Just skimming through the causes of death on the Transgender Day of Remembrance website makes for harrowing reading.
Six gunshots.
Beaten to death with stick.
Stoning.
Multiple stab wounds, tied with a rope to a block of concrete and thrown in pond.
Blugeoned to death with a hammer.
Tied up, beaten with fists and other objects, choked with a chain, had a bag taped over his head, shot, set on fire, and discarded into a dumpster.
As for the 15th year the trans* community mourns, I hope those of us who have the privilege of an identity that matches the gender we were assigned at birth can take a moment to consider what we can do to ease the suffering and to consign to history the need for more and more names to be read out every year on Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Edited to add:
Some amazing trans* voices speaking about this on Twitter last night and today. Here are a few:

And finally, Ariel Silvera, current curator of @TwkLGBTQ, talks about privilege and remembrance:

Some people are bi. You might have to admit it.

Leave a reply

Stonewall today have launched a major campaign to combat homophobic language in schools. But with the focus on the word “gay”, it yet again leaves bisexuals on the sidelines.
In fairness to Stonewall, the original stat they shared was for LGB pupils.

Look how quickly the BBC managed to erase bisexuals:

Now, this stat is not technically incorrect. Lesbian and gay pupils are a subset of LGB pupils, and it’s safe to assume (within tolerance) that if 99% of lesbian, gay and bisexual kids hear “gay” used as an insult, then 99% of lesbian and gay kids hear “gay” used and an insult. But where did the bi kids go? Are they not worth mentioning? Or is it easier to throw them under the bus in favour of simplifying the message? After all, no one uses “That’s so bi!” as an insult.
But you know what? Hearing “That’s so bi!” used as an insult would actually be progress for us bisexuals. Because right now, most people don’t even seem to think we exist.
I continue to wait with bated breath for the day when a national self-styled LGB organisation runs a major campaign on bisexual issues. We do, after all, make up over half of the LGB community.
ETA: This post now also appears on BiBloggers.

Dear Joss

Leave a reply

Dear Joss,
In the interests of full disclosure, I am not a fan of your writing. I am, mostly, not a fan of your writing because you don’t tell the kinds of stories that I enjoy. And that’s fine – my taste is clearly different to yours, and the world is big enough and full of enough stories for both of us to live happily ever after.
Having said that, for some time now I have been concerned that feminists and queer people in particular seem to hold you and your writing up as exceptional and awesome when it comes to the treatment of female and queer characters. To me, this seems more of a reflection on the dire state of the rest of our popular culture than on your genius. But hey, if kids find in your characters role models that they lack elsewhere, who am I to judge? I misspent part of my youth reading Marion Zimmer Bradley, because she wrote the only fiction I could get my hands on that portrayed people like me.
So despite my friends’ accusations, my dislike of you was generally not ideological. Until, that is, you stood up at an Equality Now event earlier this week and declared that you “hate ‘feminist'”. Words, you said, were important (I agree, they are), and the word “feminist”, you said, was the wrong word to use in the current discourse on gender issues.
Forgive me, Joss, if I call bullshit on a straight, cisgender, white, rich, American man with a platform standing up and telling me what words I should use to describe my lived experience.
“Feminist”, you said, implied that believing that all people are people is something that we are not born with, but indoctrinated into. There was no middle ground, you said, between feminism and sexism. “You either believe women are people, or you don’t”, you said. And that, Joss, is how you betrayed your profound ignorance. I would like to break this to you gently, but I don’t think I can, so let me rip off the band-aid. A substantial proportion of human beings alive today – in fact, quite possibly the majority of human beings alive today – do not believe that women are people. Note that I say “human beings”, not men. One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that we are raising girls to believe that they are not people. The dominant narrative in our society today tells us all, constantly, that women are not people.
It starts with pink and blue Kinder Eggs, and Barbie dolls whose entire purpose in life is to be pretty. It starts with the kinds of stories we tell our kids about what boys do and what girls do. You’re a writer, you should know that stories matter. And yet, the vast majority of our current cultural output barely even recognises that women exist, let alone have feelings or agency that extend beyond finding the meaning of their lives in a man.
It ends in a concerted campaign to drive women out of public spaces and public discourse. Ask any woman whether she’s been the target of street harassment, and I am willing to bet she will say yes. Street harassment is just one way for men to make it clear that they own public spaces, and we are there for their viewing (and groping) pleasure and at their sufferance. Ask any woman who has ever dared express and opinion online how many rape threats she has received for her troubles. Because online spaces are public spaces too, and women are there at the sufferance of men. Ask a room full of women if they have experienced sexual assault, rape, stalking or domestic abuse, and in the UK nearly one in two of them will say yes. Ask the two women killed by a current or former partner every week in the UK whether “misogynist” is too strong a word to use for their deaths.
But you, Joss, dare not ask, and you dare not listen to the answers. Instead, you take to your platform and make witty comments about words, as if this discussion is entirely academic and only for your entertainment; as if we are not, quite literally, talking about women’s very lives; as if your considered opinion as a writer trumps the lived experiences of three and a half billion women. I am sorry Joss, but both your words and your actions speak for themselves. And what they tell me is that you, too, in your heart of hearts, do not quite believe that women are people.
I find it hard to blame you for this, Joss. Like me, like every other human being out there, you are the product of a society that does not believe that women are people. You are right in one thing though: words matter, and conversations with people matter. If you truly want to, in your own words, punch the world up a little, as a member of the most privileged group currently living on this earth, here is your job: learn how to be a great ally. Acknowledge your privilege. Listen, understand, ask the questions, have the conversations. Do no harm! And maybe one day, once you’ve done all of those things, once you’ve learned that women live in a different reality to you – one that is more violent, more painful, and more silenced – you can take to your platform again and use the words that women use to describe their lived experience and boost the signal. But until then, kindly shut up.

[Elsewhere] Just google it!

Leave a reply

The fact that the company name has come to mean “search on the internet” can often make us forget about the range of other services Google provides and, in particular, how they make their money. While Google may have started as a search engine – a market where it still holds a 70% global share, Google’s empire has spread well beyond that.
Read more at ORGZine.

QUILTBAG+ 201

Leave a reply

Last week, I ran a QUILTBAG+ 101 workshop at an LGBT conference. In all three groups, participants raised a number of interesting questions, some of which I’d like to explore in more detail here.
QUILTwhat? you ask…
“Alphabet soup” is a common criticism of gender and sexual minority communities’ attempts at inclusion. LGBTQIBBQWTF is a much-used spoof of the ever-expanding series of letters used to denote different parts of what is, at best, a loose community formed around shared experiences of oppression and exclusion. Hence QUILTBAG+: It is relatively inclusive, a bit twee but also easy to remember. It is far from perfect. As someone who in some contexts identifies as pansexual, the fact that there’s no P in QUILTBAG does bother me, but that’s what the “+” is for: it stands for a certain openness to identities not explicitly covered in the acronym. It is – I hope – not the acronym to end all acronyms but it’s one of the better ones we have at the moment.
For the 101 of what each letter means and some first steps you can take in being an ally to QUILTBAG+ people, go to QUILTBAG101. No, really, do. It’s an excellent crowd-sourced site with input from across the QUILTBAG+ community and it’ll take you all of 10 minutes to read. I’ll be very surprised if you don’t learn at least one new thing from it, no matter who you are.
Isn’t this an acronym too far?
It’s a common argument. LGBT is short, punchy, established, people know what it stands for. Of course, so was “gay” as an umbrella term, except it mostly meant gay men, and “lesbians and gays” works quite well, doesn’t it now, if it was’t for those pesky bisexuals. I’ve sat in enough meetings trying to decide whether a group or organisation is LGB or LGBT to last me a lifetime.
Here’s the thing: If you’ve been excluded all your life, your default assumption when approaching any new situation or group becomes exclusion. Therefore the responsibilty falls on those with, relatively speaking, more privilege to proactively reach out and include those with less. While being lesbian or gay or bi may not often feel like a privileged position, in many cases it is. It may even be easier to exclude other groups and deliberately pursue assimilationist policies, seeking entry to more privileged groups by emphasising what we have in common with them and rejecting those less privileged than us. It doesn’t take much reflection, however, to realise that this is not a game we can win. It may work out very well for a small number of fortunate individuals but the majority of us are more likely to be the ones thrown under the bus in the process than the ones doing the throwing.
Adding a letter to an acronym is the first step towards giving someone the confidence that your space, your group, your organisation is one that welcomes them. Even if you know absolutely nothing about intersex, or genderqueer, or asexual issues, and don’t know how best to support people with these identities, I would argue this is a step worth taking. People will come forward, they will tell you what their needs are, you will learn from the experience, and the community will be stronger as a result. Of course, some people or groups may not want to be associated with the wider QUILTBAG+ community. That, too, is their prerogative. My strong preference continues to be to err on the side of inclusivity – people can still exclude themselves if they want to.
But surely the issues are all different?
QUILTBAG+ encompasses identities rooted in sexuality (gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, pansexual), gender (trans*, genderqueer), and biological sex (intersex). Of course the political, legal, social and economic issues different parts of the community face vary hugely. Where, as Stonewall keep pointing out, the legal fight for equality for lesbians and gay men in the UK has been won with the passing of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, for intersex people it has barely begun, and other parts of the QUILTBAG+ community are at different stages of that legal journey.
There is, however, a very significant overlap on many issues, and we ignore that at our own peril. Let me give you some examples. Prior to the passing of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, transgender people who were married or in a civil partnership had to obtain a divorce or dissolution, respectively, before they could get legal recognition of their gender. This is because marriage and civil partnership as institutions and legal constructs were defined based on the genders of the parties involved, and one party transitioning to a gender different to the one the law recognised them as did not fit within those definitions. As civil partnerships continue to only be available to same-gender couples, this continues to be an issue for some trans* people and their families even after legal equality for cisgender people in same-gender relationships has been achieved. To make matters worse, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act introduced a spousal veto for married trans* people seeking to transition.
Another example: Germany has recently introduced a legally recognised indeterminate gender, to be used for babies born intersex. In many ways this is great progress for the intersex community who continue to struggle against medical practices seeking to assign them physical characteristics of one sex or the other at a very young age, which can lead, among other things, to sterilisation. The removal of the legal obligation to assign a sex to a newborn can relieve some of the pressure on parents to agree to such surgery. This innovation in German law, however, comes without a wider review of legislation based on sex and gender. Marriage and civil partnership in Germany continue to be defined based on the legal gender of the partners, and so the rights of people who are legally recognised as of indeterminate gender with regards to these institutions are currently unclear. Comprehensive legal reform will be required over the next few years to deal with this, and that is highly likely to have side effects – intended or otherwise – for other parts of the QUILTBAG+ community.
We need to recognise that gender, bological sex, and sexuality are firmly linked in our culture, society and politics. A lot of negative attitudes towards all parts of the QUILTBAG+ community have their roots in the gender binary, and in deep-seated beliefs about gender roles and the respective value of people of different genders. Challenging these is no easy task, and we will continue to experience backlash as we poke and prod at what it means to be male or female, at whom we can love and how. Where the interests of different parts of the QUILTBAG+ community overlap we need to speak with one, strong voice. Where they do not, we need to be aware of the unforeseen consequences we still may cause for each other, and ensure we do not, accidentally or otherwise, throw parts of the community under the bus. The only way to achieve that is by forming inclusive communities, listening to each other, and remembering that we are both all different and all human.
There are so many identities I’d never heard of before! How do I make sure I don’t get it wrong and offend people?
Listen and seek to understand. Ask questions respectfully and accept that people are under no obligation to answer. Share your experiences, your needs, and your fears. Be human. For more ideas, see QUILTBAG101 and this post I wrote a while ago on being an ally.