Lokifan

I found out I’m in a Pink video!!!

Wildly I didn’t post about it at the time?? oracne posted this Pink video and I watched it, and halfway through went !!! wait that’s me!!!



(Warning: the video does have some upsetting images - swastikas & the KKK etc, a gun and then kids running through a school. Briefly but I wanted to mention it!)

It has a bunch of imagery of protests, and fighting for our rights - in a delightfully intersectional way - and at 2:42 there’s an image of BWithTheT. I’m the furthest on the right, with long bi-coloured hair (pink at the top, then purple & blue) in a lilac t-shirt. You can’t tell in the video but it says SISTERS NOT CIS TERFS.

I was there with one of my best friends - sadly you can’t see her, but you can blurrily see her sign - STOP CONSULTING BIGOTS ON TRANS RIGHTS. At 2:54 I’m not there but the rest of B With The T is, including a QUEER SOLIDARITY sign <3

We were there, at the head of London’s 2019 Pride march, as part of 4 community groups to demonstrate solidarity with trans people.

( details about that time we led the London Pride march )

I was at the trans rights protest in London today, to protest the rollback of rights the government is moving forward on (despite 70% of people in their consultation saying they supported the move FORWARD that was being suggested then) and in favour of a move forward, including various policies.

The protest was very intersectional, and had some great speakers (esp Juno Dawson, a best-selling YA author in the UK, and some others whose names I didn’t catch). I met some nice people. There were great signs.

I’m just feeling rather emotionally bruised after it, and actually had a little quite a big cry just now.

The protest itself was great, I just… I mean, I’m cis, so the chants weren’t affirming for me - and I'm not there to get affirmation but to provide it - but the stories about how awful things are still got to me. And it’s not like I didn’t know, but...

One of the chants was Protect Trans Youth. And we can’t. ( cut for feelings about that )

I did really like the bit at the protest where the speaker spoke to the closeted people out there, saying everyone there was thinking of them and wishing them safe, and we all cheered and yelled maybe the loudest we did all day. And when a separate BLM protest march passed, we all cheered and screamed and did our best to loudly support them. Solidarity forever.

Literally on Tuesday night when I couldn’t sleep I wrote a post about this theory I have about Sectumsempra and Harry’s reaction to it, and then before I could post it I saw this and now I have way too much of a sour taste in my mouth.

The sexism in Labour (and the left in general) is a problem but you know what’s NOT a solution? Attacking women for being women. Refusing to hate some of the most vulnerable women around or call them “men in dresses” doesn’t make you non-feminist. That’s really the opposite of true.

To be clear: I don’t think JKR is some frothing-at-the-mouth queer-hater. I don’t really follow the JKR #discourse but I’ve never seen her do anything I’d describe as queerbaiting. I do think she’s shown time and again (the Native American stuff, the Dumbledore stuff etc) that she is basically the platonic ideal of a certain kind of middle-class white liberal - well-meaning, kind, but ignorant and unwilling to learn.

I thought she might’ve got better on trans stuff; I saw a criticism of her for having deleted old transphobic tweets, and I don’t know the story there, but my immediate assumption at the time was that she’d said transphobic stuff and learnt better. That would be a GOOD thing. Apparently not so much.

There’s been this really scary rise in transphobic stuff in the papers here in the UK, in the last couple of years, particularly in uncritical reporting of TERFs doing a publicity tour attacking trans women and the myth of kids getting gender-confirmation surgery. The Tories have tried using trans people as human shields in updating the Gender Recognition Act - basically our right-wing leading party plans to make it possible for people to legally transition without medical requirements. Which is fantastic, if probably coming out of a desire to showcase the fluffier side of a party that’s been recently investigated for human rights abuses by the UN over their cuts to disabled people’s benefits. But it’s also unleashed a tsunami of transphobia on the left, and made a bunch of TERFs way more relevant and able to get publicity.

JKR hates Corbyn but she’s absolutely a Labour voice, and a relatively prominent one. Certainly she’s a celebrity who takes a definite interest in party politics as well as more general causes. This is probably the most minor way she could indicate a side but it really, really sucks seeing her back this kind of ‘supporting trans women is misogyny’ bullshit :(

CW for discussion of suicide

I’m. Ugh. I understand they mean it helpfully, but I wish people wouldn’t say “it's not personal” when talking about bigoted views. Maybe it’s not personal for those bigots, or the people who mean that kindly but as a reason I should be calmer about it all; but IT IS FOR ME. They want me, personally, to not have full rights over my body or as a citizen; it is my actual personal friends who would lose access to protection and life-saving healthcare. IT IS PERSONAL FOR ME.

This particular example was on the subject of mental health care, and queer people, and the 48% of trans people who have attempted suicide. And me thinking about the trans people I know and love, and/or like and respect, and totting up numbers. Thinking about the people I might have known and loved if they hadn’t killed themselves before I could.

IT IS PERSONAL.

So London Pride was amaaaaazing, as ever :D I showed up at 3 to start marching at 4, because London Pride is massive and our streets are narrow so even Section C didn’t get started for a good three hours. I marched with the National Union of Teachers - I was with two of my best friends, who’re both in the NUT, and my god I’d like to be unionised. So it was me, Violet and the Dark Lady (this was their first married Pride! ♥), Miss Godfrey, and Miss Godfrey’s lovely colleague and his husband. Lovely Colleague is a newly-qualified teacher and has been told Miss Godfrey is a bad influence (their school is a HORRORSHOW to the extent that Miss Godfrey is probably about to blow the whistle on SATS-results-fiddling). His lovely Korean husband was having his FIRST PRIDE EVER and they both clearly had a blast.

( shoot me down, I won't fall )

Thought I'd post this as well since today is shaping up to be meta day. I’ve come to “who you really are, that doesn’t matter. It’s the legend. The stories, the adventures.”

Noooooooo.

The voiceover at the end gets its own post, because I’m getting into the ~thematic significance and Doctor Who comparisons and such.

( we’re all stories in the end )

I saw Cursed Child again last night ♥ ♥ ♥ It was still atmospheric and exciting and beautiful. One of the phrases I keep using to talk about Cursed Child is Epic Friendship, with those capitals. It’s a phenomenon I’ve seen before but I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms before. So to define: Epic Friendship, to me, is when the relationship itself is a grand story, given great and likely central weight in the narrative in all its nuances, strong and affirming and wonderful. And also when the friendship is central to the fight against evil.

So think of Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Giles, and them joining themselves to fight as one at the end of S4. The Doctor bringing all his companions back to help him. Everything about Steven Universe, most obviously in gem fusion (although that also has a sexual & romantic subtext, of course).

( this is where the post gets spoilery for Cursed Child and Sherlock s4 so far )

I’ve been rather disconnected this weekend -- working, and the beach, and trying to sort my sleep schedule - so I just heard about the Orlando shooting.

And after the initial wave of horror and sadness, came telling myself: well, we have gun control where I live. (And then remembering a friend’s story about guys with weapons waiting in the car park outside a gay club and the patrons sneaking out the back. This was in 2010.) Well, this is part of the anti-LGBTQ backlash happening in the States. We’re not having that here.

Which is just a horrible way to be thinking; it’s small-minded and selfish, or it feels that way, even though I’m not sure I’d think that about other people. But that’s why hate crimes are a particular threat against the social order, of course. It’s not solely a horrific act of violence against dozens of innocent people, not just a crime against everyone who loved them; it’s also a warning to queer people everywhere. Remember to feel vulnerable and know that people hate you.

(Quick fyi: am at my dad’s in Geneva with my family this weekend, so I can’t reply to comments until Tuesday. But please do leave them! Apologies.)

A little while ago I finished Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull. I feel like a bit of an idiot going all ~commentary about it but! am not at a con to have a long drunken discussion about it so this is basically that in Livejournal form. You should all read it and then come and talk to me about it :)

It’s basically a fictionalised memoir of Kaveney’s time in the trans scene in Chicago in the late 70s and it’s brilliant. The alternative title is “A Lesson In Manners” and it very much is ( a comedy of manners )

Here is the other post I mentioned. Apologies, it's not the most cogently written thing you'll ever see.

So the college had four teachers when I started, one of whom had started the week before me. She was charismatic and beautiful to an extent I found intimidating (not something that generally happens to me) so I was kind of relieved when she quit after two weeks to move to the south of France with her boyfriend.

A was hired to replace her. I instantly felt far more sympatico with her. She's a nice middle-class girl from the Home Counties who went to a Catholic girl's school and likes poetry and Victorian novels, and therefore has a potted biography that reads like a combination of mine and several of my closest friends'. I think A pretty much felt the same way about me, plus we really got on. That sense of a similar worldview based on similar experiences became sort of ironic just before Easter, when it came out that she's an evangelical Christian.

( Came Out being an ironic phrase )