are we there yet?

These thoughts just running through my head. It's hard to write them down clearly so I may not do them justice. This is about those in the gender binary though is not a denial of any others on the spectrum. I'm not a journalist, just writing what I feel....no editing or blue pencil so take it as read, if you can.

People that are trans, transgender...however you wish to say it are in a place that you could almost forget still existed in our nice clean civilised society in the 'west'.

For people that transition or have transitioned if you prefer you can be yourself. Life changed, ID changed, birth certificate changed....the picture on your passport, the gender marker on your medical records, the salutation used in official letters addressed to you. You may have no past any more, friends, family your history may no longer be there for you. People have lost wives husbands siblings children to be who they are. Others have been fortunate, understanding has prevailed, bigotry and intolerance has not gained a foothold and they have the thread of their past lives to where they are now. Money and privilege may have helped, giving financial and physical independence though not always a guarantee of an easier journey.

day by day though....

There is the talk of 'passing'. Do you 'pass'? Will people detect who you once were? This gets tied up in society's pressures of how a woman and a man look and behave....for a lot of people it's just a minor issue in comparison and usually linked more to whether people will question your sexuality ....like it's any business of theirs, I might add!  Are you gay? lesbian? too effeminate for a man? too butch for a woman?

You may be fortunate. Transition young, seem to be correct in your physical features, usually meaning 'attractive' for a female, 'manly' for a man...in short 'you pass'.    Perhaps you are older, transition later, don't have the resources for the surgical procedures, therapists and other specialist services that can help. So, you don't pass.

If you do, then you may hide your past, so you may be fearful that someone will 'out' you, discover your secret and expose you for the 'fake person' you are. 'You're just a bloke in a dress!'    'How could you lie to us?'   Your honesty questioned, integrity doubted, motives put up to the light of inspection. It can be hard to stand up and say 'yes this is me, and I used to pretend to be that person but now I am me'.

But then there is the lesson to be learned from those who don't pass. Ridicule, anger hate discrimination, violence may be your daily companion. Work colleagues, neighbours strangers in the street judging you because they don't understand, are ignorant, misinformed or bigoted through cultural or religious belief.  So better to hide? Safer to be thankful that you do pass? Are not questioned? Accepted....sort of?

For people who are trans, perception of who you are ....its deeper and more stark because it is about your gender identity, who you are and were and sadly, how you will be treated as a human being. The stereotypes of who is a woman or a man are slow to evolve and are often a cage of restrictions and masks for those not strong enough to break out of it and truly be themselves.

In every day life, what a lot of people take for granted is so different for people who are trans. Apparently, you may be 'disabled' when it comes to your choice of lavatory. Your rights to be treated with dignity and respect can be a battleground in so many ways, because to treat you differently is still seen as 'being realistic', to allow discrimination is merely 'a difference of opinion', questioning your assertion of feelings of hurt despair and anger as you 'being difficult, a troublemaker', not 'willing to make a compromise'.

In the past, people who were of Afro Caribbean origin were treated like this as a matter of course ...back of the bus with you, know your place. People who were Jewish had to change their name, deny their history for fear of hate. History has shown just how wrong it can be and how far this bigotry discrimination and hatred can go, the depths it can descend to. Apparently this kind of thinking is no longer accepted...isn't  it?

In some countries now, your right to travel on an air plane can rest on whether you seem to exhibit the correct 'look' to match the gender listed on your passport. This is decided arbitrarily by an official 'just doing his job'. In the past this may have been seeing if you had curlier hair than was to be expected, say Pretoria in the 1960's or a particular shaped nose, perhaps Berlin in the 1930's?

No escape if you are a child. Now, as I write this, a 10 year old is being told to use the disabled toilets at school to change in for gym....not because the other children have a problem with her, but for fear of what the parents may say.

Who you are is more than gender, race, sexuality, physical ability, age or origin of birth but it is clear that for some, this is all they are seen as, their existence is denied, their rights denied, their lives marred, scarred and poisoned because of institutional and individual bigotry intolerance hatred and ignorance.

Be old be physically psychologically or mentally impaired be gay lesbian genderqueer intersex trans look different look foreign it's all the same but be yourself.  

It's a hard fight and it's taking too bloody long at times it seems to me but what's the alternative?

...lets hope its dominoes....

"The Bloomsbury Living Wage Campaign is calling on students, lecturers, cleaners, catering staff and other university workers to demonstrate on 1st May- international workers day- and demand the London living wage for all staff at Bloomsbury colleges.

Assemble: Midday
Location: main steps, SOAS, 10 Thornhaugh St. Central London."

This is on for Friday, see my previous blog for details...

Heard today, that the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine gave in and have agreed that the contract cleaners and domestics will get the minimum london wage :=]

"Dear Friends
We handed in our petition on the London Living Wage to the Senior Management Team meeting on Monday. We have just received a response stating that:

* Management supported the School moving to the LondonLiving Wage for contract cleaning and domestic staff - subject to approval by the Planning and Finance Committee.
* Senior management will be recommending approval to the Planning and Finance Committee.
* The Director supports the increase.
* The School will be looking for a written commitment from Ocean that the increase is passed on to staff in full.

It's welcome news.

Best
Ady Cousins
(London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine UNITE rep) "

....mind you, it is going to apparently cost them all of 90,000 quid to implement, a drop in the ocean for an organisation that turns over something like 75 million, I heard today!

I joined this particular fight very recently, and had helped just a wee bit with leafletting Senate House yesterday lunchtime, and spreading the word as much as I could. There has been a lot of hard work by a good bunch of people to get this far, and its good to see a win for once :=] Lets hope that it is fully ratified by LSHTM and that we see the other Bloomsbury area colleges fall in line also!

I'm on Denise's machine right now, as my own decided to die a sudden death. I'm recovering data on it to a replacement box while I type this...so much for back ups..*cough*

Looking forward to this bank holiday weekend, though I do have a pile of study stacking up. I'm less stressed about it though, as I checked today that I don't have to do the exams quite so soon if I want to take more time to study, which is welcome news :D

I'm doing a major spring clean of my stuff too. Previously, I had used Freecycle to get rid of a lot of my clutter, but now its down to paperwork....shredding 20 years of bank statements take a heck of lot of time to do, and I do wonder why on earth I've kept them. Still, whilst going through them I've been able to get a list of the tons of places I've lived over these years, maybe I'll get it together to put it all in a timeline just for posterity...I used to keep keys from all the places I've lived too, but most of those have gone now.

Why keep all this stuff in the first place, I hear you ask....(hearing voices in my head, ooh, spooky). Well, I've always had a terrible memory, so I've hung onto stuff to remind me of alsorts. When I did my mature student bit way back when, I had to fill in forms for grants etc and they wanted to know past addresses to prove I'd lived in the grand old london borough of Hackney for the requisite amount of time. Because Id kept all these forms, letters, dole cards etc, I was able to put it all down reasonably accurately (though whether they even checked I've no idea). I'm glad I did keep some of this tat though, as I was able to upload a bunch of old gig flyers from the 80's in a facebook group which jogged a few memories from folks.

ah well...I'm babbling again, detailing the minuteria of my days, past and present. Well, ignore this waffle if you like, no worries, but if you should feel like it, do join me on Friday for what hopefully will be a decent show of strength and commitment to improve things for a bunch of folks who often get no consideration at all.

ta ra for now :D

27 o'clock and its only midday....

...strewth...is that the time?

I should have that tattooed on my forehead these days....sit comfortably next the the "667" (yeah, never any good at maths..forgot to carry the 2)

currently studying for lemme see...1,2....7 exams I think, and it's going realy good....all I need to do now is squeeze 27 hours out of a 12 hour day.


and theres heaps of things I'd rather do right now, seriously....well, even if I didn't have the study thing...finally got round to hooking up my Xbox with DSL linux on it...*nix on the telly is odd to see, and then theres the collection of CSI episodes slowly piling up, and the Visteon is still there, but needing people on the weekends, which is when I can't go so I'll have to get some leafletting in and other peripheral stuff. Talking of which, hope to be distributing leaflets tomorrow for theBloomsbury Living Wages Coalition May Day (1st of May) demonstration. ...cue explanatory text bit.....

"May 1st -demonstrate for the living wage in all Bloomsbury Colleges

The Bloomsbury Living Wage Campaign is calling on students, lecturers, cleaners, catering staff and other university workers to demonstrate on 1st May- international workers day- and demand the London living wage for all staff at Bloomsbury colleges.

Assemble: Midday
Location: main steps, SOAS, 10 Thornhaugh St. Central London.

The London Living Wage (LLW) is a minimum wage and conditions package established by the GLA, which takes into account the area-specific costs of living in London. It has been calculated carefully to ensure the minimum conditions that allow a worker in the city to provide a decent standard of living for themselves and their family.

After much campaigning by staff and students, Birkbeck management recently agreed to pay its cleaning and catering staff the living wage rate of £7.45 an hour, following the example of SOAS. The LSE and Queen Mary have also introduced this minimum pay. But many of our universities continue to pay highly exploitative wages often as low as the minimum wage of £5.73. Many university workers are forced to work unsociable hours, beginning their shifts early in the mornings and working at weekends just to make ends meet. And even in those universities that have adopted the £7.45 an hour wage, other important aspects of the LLW package still have not been introduced (including union rights and decent sick and holiday pay.)

Those mainly-migrant workers who prepare our food and make our buildings fit for purpose are as essential in providing a high class education to students as all other staff and deserve the same rights to basic human dignity. If cleaners and caterers were employed directly, as opposed to outsourced to subcontracters, and paid even the lowest grade pay, they would be earning significantly more than the LLW minimum.

We are calling on Bloomsbury campus universities to change their employment policies immediately and treat the cleaners, caterers and security staff with the respect they deserve!

We also believe international workers day is an appropriate day to demand this, as it helps recognise the increasing contribution that migrant workers are making to the city’s economy and society.

The Bloomsbury living wage campaign is supported by activists from UCL, SOAS, Birkbeck, LSHTM, Senate House, and Institute of Education
Join us!"

...where was I? Oh yes, time.....had one of those weekends where I could have used 128 hours easily.....spent Saturday over in Docklands Light Railway territory sorting out a friends laptop, which was ok, good to spend sometime with him as he's an old friend off the Lane...only, it meant I missed the Visteon demo the same day. Then Sunday was buggered up, as I was sposed to go and help celebrate a friends 40th, and someone I've not seen in a long time, and other folks also seldom seen these past few years too, only had family stuff to handle (well, Denise's family which makes em mine, though I do pick and choose which ones I like...). So, I had to send my apologies at the last minute, hopefully be able to hook up sometime if only to give her the pressie I got.

Sunday night was stop! sit down! lets get a plan together! thing....

With some very fine tuning, and almost but not quite major habit changes here's hoping the pieces fall into place and I have a simple honest to goodness no fuss holiday....somewhere green with no mobile coverage and not toooooo much rain. It would be heaven to spend a week or two away from all this that and the other with Denise, maybe get some proper writing done the old fashioned way....pencil and paper style ....I feel some inspirationing will arrive and quietly prod my cerebelum into gear......yes, that would be nice.....