That was
quite the weekend! I went to see Postmodern
Jukebox - my favourite band - at Cambridge Corn Exchange on Saturday night, and
they were as amazing as they were last year when I saw them at the same venue. Think
in terms of Bad Romance (Lady Gaga), Radioactive (Imagine Dragons), Heroes
(David Bowie), All about that bass (Meghan Traynor), in swing/skiffle/jazz type
arrangements and an incredible gospel/soul version of I still haven’t found
what I’m looking for (U2). My personal
highlights of the evening were Radioactive and the incredible Demi Remick performing
several tap dance routines. It’s only
when you see her do it that you realise just how physical tap is, and how much
energy and stamina she must have. I applauded them until my hands were sore. Like everyone else I could see, I was dancing
in my seat and enjoying the sheer musicianship and the vocal virtuosity of the
different singers fronting the band during the evening.
I stayed in
Cambridge overnight, and would you believe it, the Botanic Garden was only a
few minutes away from my hotel (and from the railway station, which was also
handy). I went mainly to explore the
pinetum area, because I don’t know nearly enough about gymnosperms. I marvelled at the height of the Sequoias and
the Dawn redwood, and I had a good look at a Coastal redwood, which was a
species I’d not come across before. I
marvelled at Spring colours and wildflowers, and I was intrigued to see woad
growing for my first time ever. There
were Wollemi pine and a particular tree that beings back childhood memories for
me, a Cedar of Lebanon. I remember my
teacher pointing one out to us on a school outing in my last term of primary
school, just after we’d returned to the UK from an overseas posting. I still have far more questions than answers
about pines, cedars, cypresses, redwoods and I still need to learn to identify
very many species… but hey, that gives me many things I can enjoy learning
about! They were around millions of
years before flowering plants; the present is the key to the past, and tracing
the fossil record back tells us about how and why they evolved and what
environments they evolved in. Botany and
palaeobotany are not everyone’s cup of tea, but they are mine. I don’t get out to many geological sites now,
and I’m as fascinated by the life recorded in the rocks as I am by the rocks
themselves.
But: Less than a fortnight ago, the UK Supreme
Court issued a judgement that in the specific context of in legislation aimed
at increasing gender representation on public boards, the word ‘woman’ means ‘a
biological woman’ (registered as a girl at birth) and that it specifically does
not include transgender women who hold a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). The Gender Recognition Act (2004) paved the
way for the document in question and stated that someone holding one is
recognised as a member of their affirmed sex for all legal purposes. I wonder what happened to that?
What is
truly frightening, though, is the speed that the judgement has been seized on,
and the areas it has been deemed to cover to ban transgender people from
toilets and, potentially, from other ‘sexed’ premises: Late last Friday evening, the Equality and
Human Rights Commission (EHRC) issued interim guidance that bans transgender
people from the toilets both of our affirmed sex and, under some circumstances,
from the toilets of our birth sex as well.
Unless somewhere has gender neutral facilities, we can no longer go
there. We are supposed, now, to use the
disabled toilets (and yes, I did check the Corn Exchanges facilities on their
website before I went to the gig). Let
me ask you, have you ever seen how people are judged when other people, queuing
for gendered facilities, see them entering or leaving a disabled toilet? If they’re not in a wheelchair of using a
walker, they are judged. If transgender
people do start using them, anyone using them is likely to be though to be
transgender; in the current atmosphere, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Additionally, if someone at work suddenly
starts using a toilet on a different floor or in a different building, aren’t
they effectively being forced to ‘out’ themselves?
The EHRC
have also said that the NHS will be pursued if it does not follow new guidance
on single-sex spaces [which will e.g. exclude transgender people from hospital wards
of their affirmed sex.] So, if no single
room us available, a transgender teenaged girl will be forced to share a ward
with men, and a bearded transgender man will be foisted onto a ward full of
women… Surely there is room for common
sense and compassion?
The BBC
(British Broadcasting Corporation), our national broadcaster, have said in the
last few days that they are reviewing the policy whereby they use the
“preferred” pronouns of transgender and non-binary people. So, if anyone transgender makes the news, or
is mentioned in an article on the BBC website, they will potentially be
referred to by pronouns that no longer describe them.
I’m not
going to talk about social media. It’s a
bin fire but for some people at least it can be avoided. By the way: Bluesky and Mastodon are far more LGBT-friendly
than certain other platforms.
Transgender
people feel very strongly that we are under attack from all sides, and that a
baying society wants to exclude us from life outside our own front doors. We fear that the already horrific suicide
rate among us will increase and that society – or certain sections of it – want
us dead, detransitioned, deadnamed, out of public life and places, and
completely demoralised.
I was going to end this post by saying: “You know what, though? I’m going to carry on living my best life, the one the transphobes don’t want me to live."
I was going
to. That was until, earlier today, I was
on a call where someone tearfully shared that their good friend, a transgender
woman, has just taken her own life because of what is happening in the UK.
She. Took. Her.
Own. Life.
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