Mx-ing it up

Posted by Ganymede


A version of this post originally appeared in May 2012 at http://deconstruction-site.blogspot.com.

Mx (title, pronounced /məks/, by analogy with "Ms", or /mɪks/, as in "mix"): a handy alternative to those peskily gendered and status-specific titles "Mr", "Mrs", "Ms", "Miss". Variant form: Misc (from "miscellaneous").

I'm due to give blood again soon. So, like a good person, I went to blood.co.uk and tried to book myself an appointment via the webform. Then I remembered what the webform looks like:

Note that mandatory field right there. If you want to cut down on faff (both for you and for the blood service) when you give blood, you have to - have to - be comfortable being addressed by one of Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss or Dr.

I think I'll just drop in and hope they've got a bed free. And so, I expect, will any Professors, Reverends, Sisters or Imams who turn up.

This might sound petty or facetious. After all, not many people feel distressed to the point of self-exclusion by being forced to identify themselves as either Mr, Mrs, Ms or Miss (not even the ones who would prefer to be acknowledged as Dr). But I, as it happens, am one of them. We're a minority, but there's quite a lot of us. We even have our own national campaign.

Here's a fun fact: in the UK, your title has no basis in law. If you're male-assigned, you're not legally obliged to call yourself "Mr [Surname]"; similarly, female-assigned people can adopt the title "Mrs" even if they're not married, or use "Miss" or "Ms" even if they are. Therefore, all these thousands of organisations who have mandatory title fields on their webforms are gaining essentially zero information by it. I strongly suspect that it's only requested (or rather, demanded) so that they can painlessly auto-fill the greeting "Dear [Title] [Surname] on their automated email replies. (This can lead to hilarity when an organisation tries to be inclusive but doesn't quite think about it hard enough, and sends out messages beginning "Dear Other [Surname]"...)

Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms (etc.) are known as "courtesy titles"; that is, by saying "Dear Mrs Exampleface" instead of "Oi, Vera", correspondents (even automated ones) are supposed to be being courteous. But for many trans* people, it ends up being the other way round: we have to do the organisations the courtesy of selecting one of their woefully inadequate options. And while this is a minor annoyance on a webform, when individual correspondents know someone's trans*, the "courtesy" title can become a vicious, disgusting weapon for making their prejudices clear.

The gender-neutral title "Mx" (or "Misc") won't solve all of these problems. But the more widespread and well-known it becomes, the more it can help English-speaking society to become more inclusive. Simply including it on a webform will help gender-variant people, or cis people who are uncomfortable with being asked for unnecessary personal information, to feel more accepted. Meanwhile, those people who are blithely ignorant of gender issues are more likely to learn about them, and become more sensitive towards them, if they regularly encounter this strange new option on the drop-down menu and it piques their curiosity.

And, importantly, "Mx" doesn't have to be - shouldn't be - a title reserved only for non-binary-gendered people. It would actually be an incredibly useful resource at times when you're corresponding with a stranger and you're not sure whether ey's Mr or Ms. We've all had someone take a punt and address us as "Miss" when we're actually "Ms", or as "Mrs" when we're actually "Dr", and we smile, correct em and move on. If everyone who was unsure defaulted to "Mx" on first contact, it would work exactly the same way, but with a lower embarrassment/faff factor.

What's more, the receptionist at the medical institution who loudly calls out "Mr [Patient]?", when ey knows full well that the patient is, or might be, a trans woman, would no longer be able to innocently declare that ey "wasn't sure" or that the patient's first name "sounded like a man's name". Because in that case, ey bloody well could have, and should have, defaulted to Mx. Out of courtesy. And everyone in the waiting room, and at the institution, and who responds to formal complaints against receptionists, would know that.

But this will only happen if the gender-neutral, status-neutral, assumption-neutral title "Mx", or its variant "Misc", or both, becomes more widespread. And as a linguistics graduate, I can assure you that the way to make a new word widespread is to use it. Numerous organisations including the HMRC, the DWP and the UK Deed Poll Service have already started accepting it. The more examples we can give of it being used in official documents, like bank statements or council tax bills (I treasure mine proudly), the more leverage we have when trying to convince other organisations to include it in their databases.

I'm slowly beginning the long and irritating process of trying to get my title changed in all my records to Mx (and complaining when I can't). It's the teaspoon effect - it's a tiny action, and it's a drop in the ocean of the status quo, but every drop has ripples. If you're a binary-identified ally reading this, what are your teaspoon options? Well, since you're not legally obliged to use a title which reflects your gender, or your marital status, or anything else, you could always consider doing the same as me.

Think about it. Think hard, and fully explore the vague, irrational discomfort you feel when you imagine calling yourself Mx [Surname], and getting letters addressed to it, and and having it called out in doctors' wating rooms. Now reconsider whether I'm really being so petty.

Reactions to the same-sex marriage bill

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time





As I’m sure many of you are aware: A bill has been approved in Parliament which will legally recognise same sex marriages in England and Wales. I’ve been asking other Lashers to share their views on this issue. In this post I’ve collected their critical responses. As you might see, it is far from unanimous praise.

At this point I thought I might bring up a point of information: one issue that came about from a discussion among Lashers was the issue that this legislation applies to England and Wales and not for the whole of the United Kingdom. Scottish parliament is currently drafting similar bill with the view to holding a vote on the issue in the near future. There seems to be no plans to vote on a same sex marriage bill in Northern Ireland.

I give a personal thank you to kabarett, Isadora, Ganymede and Sasha Rocket for sharing their views. 


kabarett: I’m disappointed

I’m going to say this upfront: I’m disappointed.

I’m going to set aside the issue of whether marriage should exist as a legal institution, and focus instead on the principle that “separate but equal” isn’t, and disenfranchising (especially vulnerable) populations is a deeply unpleasant thing for any government to do.

So: way back when, a public consultation on “equal marriage” was begun. Between its name and Lynne Featherstone’s involvement, I was actually hopeful: I thought we might get marriage equality, or something approximating it, in which the only requirement was “consenting adults”.

Hahahahaha no. Trans* people are shafted, in more ways than I can briefly list: luckily, other people have been pretty comprehensive. Poly people have, naturally, been ignored. There’s not even the slightest glimmering of a hint of the existence of genderqueer people. Religious groups haven’t been given the freedom to make up their own minds. Different-sex* couples don’t get to have civil partnerships, even if they want to avoid the cultural and religious baggage associated with “marriage”.

So here’s what I think the outcome is: the general public will likely assume that “equal marriage” has been achieved, when it hasn’t. Any efforts to increase the scope of this bill once it’s passed through the Lords will face much harder struggles than they would have done if the initial draft had been passed. Cis gay people of the general Stonewall flavour, having been enfranchised, will have absolutely no incentive to campaign with anti-assimilationist queers for our equality.

I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed that as a trans* genderqueer queermo, passage of this bill is likely to make my life harder rather than easier.

So my next step? Well. Letter-writing, probably, and picking my metaphorical banner back up off the floor and heading back out onto the metaphorical streets. Be the change you wish to see, and so on, because - what else can I do?

* I use “different-sex” and “same-sex” as descriptors because (a) oppositional sexism is rubbish and (b) binarism.

Isadora: That the C of E will not be allowed to perform same-sex marriages is deeply upsetting.

This is the beginning of something I’ve wanted for a very long time, and my overriding reaction is positive and optimistic. I do however, think there are some problems with the bill as it stands. For different-sex couples to not be able to have civil partnerships makes no sense. I define as bisexual, and on a personal level I feel that there is something ludicrous about a union with any partner I might have being defined differently, as a marriage or a civil partnership, depending on that person’s sex. Whilst all my relationships have been slightly different, I don’t think the sex or gender of my partner plays a big part in that. To make marriage available to same-sex couples, but not make civil -partnership available to different-sex ones seems illogical, in addition to the implication that a civil partnership is “lesser.”

That the Church of England will not be allowed, in secular law, to perform same-sex marriages is deeply upsetting. It’s a major barrier to those of us working within the C of E to try and change attitudes and eventually, hopefully, canon law. It was already going to be a long process, but this has not only put a very solid practical barrier in place, it will also make it harder to argue the case from a “what people believe/want” perspective. I think this will increase the invisibility of the large number of Anglicans (in particular, but also other religious groups) who support either same-sex marriage or equal marriage. Those both inside and outside the Church will be less likely to listen to us, because of the impression “well, that’s not what the Church/Christians thinks/want.”

My teenage self would have wanted a church wedding, but would probably still be overjoyed at this bill. I want to briefly allow her that moment of joy that she waited so long for. Probably my younger self was quite traditional about relationships, even though it didn’t always feel like that at the time. I wanted the fairytale marriage, but with another person most likely of the same gender. My current self has bits of that. I do view both the vote and the bill as a highly significant positive step and it did give me heart-surging butterflies. But there is still more work to do.

Ganymede: do we still need to have our “legal sex” recorded at all?

I’m cautiously positive about the bill - I think it’s a great step forward, although I share kaberett’s disappointment that there are so many areas where it falls down. But I’m particularly interested by the implications it might raise for the future. Marriage is, I believe, one of the few areas where your “legal sex” actually impacts materially on your legal rights - and the passing of this bill is undermining the usefulness of the distinction between “legally female” and “legally male” still further.

It was pointed out to me recently that in centuries past, “legal sex” used to hold a lot more legislative weight. Whether you were legally classified as “female” or “male” impacted on your rights in numerous ways, mostly boiling down to whether you had the right to property, or you were property. But with every step towards gender equality, more of these legal distinctions have been eroded. And to me, the question this begs is: do we still need to have our “legal sex” recorded at all?

Imagine if every person - regardless of chromosomes, genitals, secondary sexual characteristics, sense of identity, or Gender Recognition Certificate - had an equal right to marry any other person ey chose (or become civilly partnered to em!). This bill hasn’t got us there yet, but I really hope it’s the direction we’re headed in. At that point, I’m not sure there would be any great legal distinction any more between “female” and “male”. The concepts of “female” and “male” would still have a function as social genders, and as ill-defined biological descriptors. But beyond that, surely it would only be a matter of time before their usage in law was done away with as unnecessary and outdated. No need to pick M or F for the birth certificate on the basis of a cursory glance at the genitals. No need to jump through hoops getting one’s true gender identity officially recognised. No more legal conundrums where non-binary or intersex people are concerned. And I find that thought quite exciting.

Sasha Rocket: The law’s job isn’t to change the culture, it’s to reflect it

I think the fact that same-sex couples can now get married is really awesome. Although the legal differences between a marriage and civil partnerships are tiny, I think the social statement the bill makes is a massive one, that we’ve been fighting for, for a very long time; it says that, as a society, we believe same-sex relationships are just as valid as heterosexual ones, and I think that can only be a good thing. It also says that the notion of ‘separate but equal’ isn’t equal at all. When you remember that, just 10 years ago, Section 28 was still in force, this is a remarkable step-forward. Although the bill undoubtedly has flaws and particularly lets down trans people, I hope we don’t lose sight of the massive progress we’ve made in such a short space of time.

The fact that civil partnerships aren’t being extended to all couples, as well as the fact that religious groups are not legally allowed to perform same-sex marriages, is somewhat disappointing. I think the real failing of the bill, however, is the fact that it fails to accommodate trans people, in ways that have already been explained by other Lashers. There’s still plenty of scrutiny to go though, before the bill becomes law, from both Houses, and particularly LGBTQ groups so, with enough political action, some of the failings may be remedied. I’ll wait until the whole legislative process is over before I get too hopeful but, for now, I’m cautiously optimistic.

As some other Lashers have said, a wider debate about the nature of relationships would be awesome, but I don’t think we need (or even should) be looking to parliament for that debate, particularly not currently. The law’s job isn’t to change the culture, it’s to reflect it; it’s up to us to change that culture. I think we’re slightly in danger of losing sight of the fact that lots of people have now had their relationships recognised as legitimate, and I hope that the radical change there’s been in the last decade acts to motivate us to keep at it and reminds us that we are getting somewhere.

Being In Public While Female

Posted by Ganymede


Trigger warnings for discussion of rape, sexual harassment, rape culture.

I feel as though my feminist awakening is very much still ongoing, and over the past year or so, my eyes have been opened to a lot of pretty shocking stuff about which I used to be ignorant. The big one is the concept of "rape culture" - the idea that certain commonly-held beliefs and attitudes in our society (even ones which are seemingly innocent and well-meaning) add up to make rape and sexual harassment easy to get away with. So when I heard that there was going to be a Reclaim the Night event held in Cambridge, I was determined to attend and show my solidarity.

The question was whether to attend the march itself, or the allies' solidarity demo. As a symbolic point, Reclaim the Night marches are for self-defined women only, though as someone who was raised female and is still overwhelmingly read as female, I believe I would have been welcome to attend. However, in the end, I chose to attend the demo instead - for the simple reason that I have never experienced any kind of street harassment, and could not in good faith march alongside people who had, without feeling I was appropriating their experiences.

Frequently, as a trans* person, I come up against difficulties in interpreting my gendered experiences. I was "raised female", but I often feel as though I haven't had "a woman's experience" - I've ignored a lot of the messages society gives about how women should behave, and as such I can't relate to a lot of the supposedly "universal" aspects of life as a woman. The more I hear about others' experiences of street harassment, the more I start to feel like I'm the only female-assigned person I know who hasn't experienced it.

And this is horrible, and it's shocking, and above all it's not right. But how have I managed to escape it? What's more, how have I managed to go a lifetime without even internalising the fear of harassment or gendered violence which is central to so many women's experience of rape culture - which is fed by every well-meaning piece of advice to restrict how you dress, how much you drink, where you go and with whom?

Is it because I, identifying as male, have subconsciously never thought of this advice as applying to me, therefore have behaved with the ill-founded belief that "it won't happen to me" (or that, if it did, I would be able to single-handedly fend off a would-be attacker)?

Or is it because female gender conditioning has worked on me at a more insidious level?

I was never entirely unaware of the perils of being female in public. In fact, since it thoroughly freaked me out to be thought of as female, I was more than usually aware of them. More specifically, ever since puberty, I was terrified of male-identified people coming on to me. I just wouldn't have known how to handle it. So I cut my hair short (badly), I wore baggy clothes to hide my breasts, I chose glasses with thick fuck-off-don't-look-at-me frames. In brief, I deliberately worked to make myself look "ugly". Because god only knew what would have happened to me, I thought, if I'd been "pretty".

It didn't stop there. I was aware that, having a female appearance, any "friendly" or "innocent" conversation I got into with a male-identified stranger might be taken as a sign of... interest. I've taken a lot of intercontinental night buses, and I've always been wary of the chatty-looking guy taking the seat next to me. It's a long journey, sure, and he might legitimately just want to pass the time with a bit of conversation. But hey, it's much safer just to plug yourself in to your headphones and avoid all eye contact, isn't it?

I like my headphones. I wear them when I'm out walking, which means that even if someone does verbally harass me (or, of course, try to interact with me on any more benign level), I won't hear it.

Dress dowdy. Avoid eye contact. Don't talk to strangers. In summary, don't "lead them on". All typical bits of rape-prevention "advice" that I've followed to the letter ever since I grew breasts. All symptomatic of behaviour restricted by fear, the fear of what might happen if you don't hide how you look and who you are.

Maybe I've got away with avoiding gendered harassment and violence because my short hair and featureless clothes make my gender hard to read. Or maybe, if I am read as female, it's as such an unusual (i.e. unpredictable, i.e. dangerous) variant on the theme that nobody dares try it. I went through a brief student phase of going out clubbing, in my own slightly off-centre version of "sexy girly clothes", but still with badly-cropped hair, and tending more towards unashamedly uncool flailing than dirty dancing. Not once was I sleazed upon.

Or maybe, the rape-prevention "advice" "works". Well, whoopee. I don't think it's a fair exchange: letting fear impact upon your wardrobe, your actions, your whole personality, just in the uncertain hope of retaining your physical safety. And that's said as someone who was never big on femininity in the first place.

Or, y'know what? Maybe it doesn't work. Maybe it's just sheer blind happy coincidence that I've survived in a female-coded body for this long. After all, there are plenty of masculine-presenting female-assigned people who do experience harassment of all kinds. And that's before we even get on to the fact that the overwhelming majority of rapes are not committed by strangers in dark alleys (a 2005 Home Office study estimated that only 28% of reported rapes in the UK were "stranger rapes").

And the most insidious thing about the rape prevention "advice" is that if it "works" at all, it's only on the principle that you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your friend. Me going around dressing as gender-ambiguously and behaving as introvertedly as I can isn't going to prevent rapes; if it has any effect at all, it's just going to mean that the would-be rapist goes for someone else. Someone dressed more... "provocatively". Someone whom people will be more likely to blame for the incident, rather than support and encourage to report it. Because everyone knows what you "should" do to avoid being raped. And that includes the perpetrators.

Rape-prevention "advice" isn't useful information for women. It's a handbook for rapists.

And that's why I demonstrated in solidarity with the Reclaim the Night march on Monday. By some stroke of good fortune, I don't feel that the night is mine to reclaim. But I will defend every woman's right to dress, and behave, and live as she chooses, free from fear. Rape is never going to be stopped by restricting women's freedoms; it can only be stopped by our culture sending out the message that rapists will not get away with it, no matter who they pick on, whether it's someone who was "following the advice" or not. I demonstrate to say I want to be part of creating that culture. I demonstrate to say that nobody, of any gender, should have their lives twisted and restricted by the threat of sexual violence. I'm angry enough at the way that happened to me, and I haven't even had "a woman's experience".

The self-definition problem

Posted by Ganymede


A version of this post originally appeared in two parts at http://deconstruction-site.blogspot.com.



Ganymede here, a newly-acquired apprentice Lasher, and very excited to be on board. I'm a kinky, andro-romantic, trans-masculine asexual who's thrilled to become part of such an awesome queer feminist collective...

That's a lot of labels for such a small sentence, isn't it? And if you've hung around this blog for a while, you'll have noticed that we're rather keen on matters of labelling and self-identity. In this post, I'm going to give my take on why they're so important: the problems they can cause when they don't work, and why, when they do work, they're so liberating.

Consider this interesting situation: as the notion of asexuality is gaining ground, so too is the need to find a word for people who aren't asexual. This is a controversial subject, where all of the possible candidates have unfortunate connotations (which is, of course, almost unavoidable when coining or using labels). But, whatever word we settle on, we still find ourselves with a fascinating problem: when faced with the concept that asexual people exist and therefore by process of elimination they belong to the group described as "sexual", or "consexual", or "allosexual", some people suddenly realise that they're not comfortable with the way their group - the majority group - is portrayed in the media.

Usually this only happens with minority groups; one parallel is gay men in earlier decades potentially feeling dissuaded from coming out because of media-based assumptions that all gay men are ridiculously effeminate. But... you can't not come out as experiencing sexual attraction, because the default assumption is that everyone experiences sexual attraction. And the default portrayal of, well, everyone in the media is that they're really rather obsessed with sex. And if you don't define as asexual, explicitly rejecting this portrayal, does that mean you're implicitly accepting it?

That's one reason why I'm incredibly excited to see asexuality being discussed in the mainstream media. Those who wouldn't self-define as asexual will be prompted to think more deeply about their orientation, and perhaps start to question the way sex is dealt with in the media, and perhaps feel less ashamed to speak out as "different" the next time they're stuck in a game of nervous, exaggerated, face-saving sexual one-upmanship with friends who worry that not thinking about sex every seven seconds will make them look "gay".

But for every label, there will be lots of people who feel discomfort with using it, because of the people they're then implicitly associated with. Some deal with this problem by calling themselves something new (like "equalist" instead of "feminist"), which doesn't have the baggage of the past, but will never have the weight of history. Some react by declaring themselves to be "real" or "proper" [insert label here]s, not like those other [insert label here]s who shouldn't be allowed to use the word; that never ends well. Another way of dealing with it is to sub-categorise yourself: if you're not sure you're asexual but you don't want to associate yourself with sex-obsessed media portrayals, you can co-opt a term like demisexual or grey-asexual to help you narrow down your potential network of peers even further. Or, just don't label yourself at all... which works fine, until you find yourself labelled by implication ("if you aren't asexual, you must be sexual/allosexual/consexual").

Fact #1: people will always try to label you. Fact #2: whatever label you end up with, you'll always be sharing it with a certain proportion of dickheads. In my opinion, the best thing you can do is choose your labels with care, and then BE AWESOME so loudly that you drown out the dickheads.

For every "label" you can think of, there are a million people using it who come in a million different shapes and sizes. Our society is starting to recognise inter-group variation to a much greater extent than only a few years previously (adding and accepting new labels like "asexual", "heteroromantic", "genderqueer", "neurotypical"), and this is frickin' awesome, but it's just the beginning. The much-needed next step is to come to recognise intra-group variation: whatever labels we take, we flavour them with our own uniquenesses.

But then, are labels still needed at all? A friend of mine commented that ey thought the world would be better all round if people spent less time banging on about What They Like To Do In Bed (or similar), and more time just doing it.

Ey has a point. It prompted me to wonder why so many of these self-identification labels do revolve around What People Like To Do In Bed (bisexual, asexual, pansexual, panromantic, aromantic, polyamorous, monogamous, sex-positive, kinky, vanilla, heteroromantic, gynesexual...). Why should What One Likes To Do In Bed be of anyone else's concern apart from the other person[s] in the bed?

The ones that don't (genderqueer, transmasculine, butch, femme, neuro-atypical, cisgender, feminist, neurotypical...) seem to have the broadly unifying characteristic of describing What You Are Like. Presumably, if these labels describe What One Is Like, one spends most of one's time being like that - so why should one need to wave around a label proclaiming that One Is Like That?

The answer I came up with:

Actually, the sexuality labels don't just tell you what the person likes to do in bed. They tell you how ey negotiates some of the most intense and complex relationships someone can possibly have with [an]other human being[s]. They tell you, through eir choice of label (pansexual over bisexual, gyneromantic over homoromantic), how ey views these other human beings, on what levels ey chooses to interact with them, and how ey responds to the ways eir sexuality is perceived in society at large.

In short, they tell you an awful lot about the most intimate facets of the person's character. In this way, they're just like the What You Are Like labels. If someone chooses to identify as genderqueer, ey's making clear the angle from which ey approaches interactions with other people, the way in which ey responds to the pressures and perceptions of society at large. If someone identifies (positively) as cisgender, ey's sending a message to other people that ey recognises the diversity of human experience and identity, and is willing to engage with them on a deeper level than would, say, Simon Hoggart.

It's funny that these issues of (largely) gender and sexuality are, essentially, the last great taboos - in that even in These Enlightened Times TM, the vocabulary to describe them is mushrooming year on year, as people finally find the courage to try and express who they are. And, no, they shouldn't need to, it should be obvious from "what they're like". But it's not. If people don't stand up and wave their labels around, their true personalities will be ignored, drowned out by the default white noise of Everyone Is A Monogamous Heterosexual Man/Woman Who Behaves Exactly Like This [In Bed].

Sure, it saves time and effort. You're more than welcome to go with it. But personally, I prefer my interactions with other human beings to be more intense, complex, and rewarding - cos, y'know, people are fascinating!