That’s why Peterborough-based singer songwriter Jules Morgan is releasing two tracks this month in time for Valentine’s day. The first, “A love song” was released this weekend, and is unashamedly dedicated to Jo, with whom she has been together for nine years in total and civil spouse for four. The second – Lynton Road – is the first song she ever wrote, in 2005, and is due to be released officially for the first time on 14 February, throughout the course of Valentine’s Day.

Jules explained: “The official release date is 14 February. But the song is actually going to be released about a dozen times during the day, on local sites, as the dateline switches over from Wednesday night to Thursday morning.”

In doing this, Jules hopes that she will succeed in turning what is an essentially musical event into a political statement. She says: “I still remember what it was like coming out. Its never easy and for many young people, whether lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, it can be the loneliest time of their lives – made even more so by the fact that when they look around, nobody seems to be singing about what they are feeling.

“That’s why this is important. I’m not going to pretend that I’m up there with the superstars – but this is from the heart, in every sense of the word: and I hope that in some way, putting these songs out there will make a difference to someone.”

Jules plays her own works at open mike and local events in the East Midlands. She has previously played at Peterborough City Roots and battle of the bands for Peterborough, as well as live in London. She is hoping now to play a lot more, especially at festivals organised by and for the LGBT community.

Later in the year, she will be releasing a further song – “Out” – which focuses on coming out and the problems that gay people face in terms of being ostracised by their families.

The first of the songs above can be listened to now.

Jules may be contacted directly through julesmorgan21@hotmail.com

Oh…and here’s a tiny snippet of lyric from her first song:

…thank God for the Bill
That enabled us to
Enjoy the view
That a man and a woman
Take for granted these things
From this woman to this woman
It means everything

Contemporary? Or wot?

janexx

For further information,please contact the organisers of the demo – Protest Transphobia – directly via protest_transphobia@hotmail.co.uk

A pdf version is also available here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Protest against media attacks on the UK’s trans community moves to the Telegraph: demonstration scheduled for 26 January

Following a successful demonstration outside the offices of the Guardian newspaper on 17 January, Protest Transphobia will be holding a rally outside the offices of the Telegraph newspaper between 13.00 and 15.00 on Saturday 26 January.

Their protest marks outrage at the Telegraph’s decision to republish an article by Julie Burchill, previously withdrawn by the Observer, that attacked the transgender community in language widely regarded as abusive.

Representatives from the group will be seeking to meet with senior members of the Telegraph’s editorial staff to hand over an open letter detailing the hurt felt by the UK’s transgender community at the Telegraph’s action and to discuss the contents of that letter with them.

Accusing the Telegraph of skewing the way in which this debate has been positioned, they write:

“By framing this debate in terms of free speech and the right to offend, we believe that the Telegraph has glossed over the reasons for the anger felt towards Julie Burchill’s article and has been complicit in attempts to erase public understanding of the real life impact of transphobia upon trans people living in our society.

“If your interest is in free speech we would ask why you have not commissioned a piece from a trans commentator for your publication.”

The letter includes suggestions for ways in which the Telegraph can go some way to undoing the harm done, including a meet with representatives of the trans community to discuss the issues raised and the commission a piece from a trans journalist to balance Ms Burchill’s piece.

Trans activist, Kai Weston added: “A poll in the Independent showed 90% of respondents felt the Burchill piece went too far.

“A recent study found that trans people’s mental health appears to be significantly worsened by the transphobia they encounter, with 84% having considered suicide.

“Despite this, while defending its republication of the Burchill piece in terms of “free speech”, the Telegraph has completely failed to balance the debate with any trans voices: the Telegraph is, in fact, no different to the tabloid press in its determination to erase real trans people and their experiences from any objective reporting in the UK.”

In a previous demonstration organised by Protest Transphobia at the offices of Guardian Media Group an open letter with 290 signatures was accepted by members of that paper’s senior editorial team.

Since the demonstration, The Observer has published a full apology for publishing the Julie Burchill’s article.

Her piece is also being looked at by the Press Complaints Commission, which has taken the unusual step of investigating whether the language used by its author was discriminatory or whether it constituted “hate speech”, even though it was not directed at any specific individual, as would normally be required before an investigation could take place.

In a statement issued on 22 January, the National Union of Journalists Equality Council further condemned this piece for containing “unnecessarily provocative, gratuitously offensive and bigoted material”.

For further information, contact protest_transphobia@hotmail.co.uk

Additional information

1. The demonstration is planned to take place at the offices of the Telegraph Media Group at 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London, SW1W 0DT between 13.00 and 15.00 on Saturday 26 January, 2013.

2. The main website for the Protest Transphobia campaign can be found at http://www.protest-transphobia.org/

3. The NUJ statement on this event can be found at http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=2774

4. Information on abuse suffered and harm to trans people can be found at:

http://www.scottishtrans.org/Article.aspx?id=98

Appendix I: text of letter to be handed to Telegraph editors

To the editor:

We are writing in support of Protest Transphobia’s demonstration being held outside The Telegraph’s offices in London on 26/01/2013.

As allies and members of the trans community, we believe that the decision to republish the article “Transsexuals need to cut it out” by Julie Burchill was unfortunate and misguided. In particular the way the debate has been framed is unhelpful.

By framing this debate in terms of free speech and the right to offend, we believe that the Telegraph has glossed over the reasons for the anger felt towards Julie Burchill’s article and has been complicit in attempts to erase public understanding of the real life impact of transphobia upon trans people living in our society.

If your interest is in free speech we would ask why you have not commissioned a piece from a trans commentator for your publication.

In deciding what is, and is not newsworthy the press acts as a gatekeeper of public debate. As such it has a responsibility to ensure that all sides are heard, not just those it agrees with. It also has a responsibility to ensure public safety.

We believe that all trans people, as part of the public, should be able to live without fear of violence, harassment, or unequal treatment on the basis of their trans status, and that Julie Burchill’s article could be seen as an incitement of hatred against trans people, and in particular, towards trans women.

A study by Trans Media Watch entitled “How Transgender People Experience the Media” in 2010 looked at these issues and two things stand out:

- In total, 21.5% of respondents had experienced verbal abuse that they believed was associated
with representations of transgender people in the media on at least one occasion.

- 8% reported that they had received physical abuse that they believed was connected to an item or items in the media.

We would therefore ask that you:

- Meet with representatives of our community to discuss these issues.

- Commission a piece from a trans journalist to balance Ms Burchill’s piece.

- Review Julie Burchill’s article in the light of the editor’s code and publish the results of that review.

For both are surrounded, as standard, by their own personal phalanges of bodyguards. The Observer, too, as inanimate object feels a fair target.

Suzanne Moore, no matter your views on her “papabilità”, is not.

Forget the fine words…

Simply put, there are two reasons why this is so. First – and let’s be utterly self-interested, there is an argument beginning to build up of competing victimhoods: an oppression olympics which is tiresome in the extreme. Who bullied who first? Who has more weight, moral, numeric, philosophical on their side? Who has the greater privilege?

I don’t know. I don’t much care and it seems pretty fair conclusion that much of the general public does not either. Except that: by continually stepping back into the gutter,making this vindictive and personal and nasty (and going after an individual in public always has the possibility of being that way or turning that way, even by accident) you win no battles.

…stalking is never a feminist act

Second, and this is absolute. Let me put this politely: what the fuck is anyone with any aspiration to being feminist doing going after another woman in such a way as to make her feel physically unsafe?

Sure: Ms Moore is a public figure, in her way. But publically broadcasting her whereabouts is just creepy. It takes us right back to where i started, treating her as a target, prey.

(Yes: prey, not “pray” – we’ve dropped the papal allusion now).

Even if unintended, the mere fact of gallumphing around the web broadcasting proudly that her location has been discovered is just wrong. A sort of vengeful pack hound thing.

I can’t stop anyone from writing anything. Oh, the joy of free speech…and yes, the irony that that freedom, which the press so assiduously demands for itself, can also be so vicious. But there it is.

Sticks and stones…

I can’t stop peeps from posting this stuff. I can and do very loudly dissociate myself from it. Because while, in the web of sophistry that any and everyone can quickly conjure to explain what they said and why they said it, there’s always a reason, the bottom line is absolute: make someone feel like a target and you can call yourself a feminist – but you aren’t.

Or to put it another way, let all issue forth in the vilest of tweets: piock on the other side’s views, their shoes, their hair. Words will never harm me. Do not cross the line into real life stalking. Or even into behaviour that makes your target feel like they are the stalkee.

Ironically, i had been planning, myself, to attend the same meeting as Ms Moore tonight: I would very much have liked to hear her views on Leveson. Unfortunately, family commitments and local illness mean i won’t be there. Please, everyone who is, play nice.

Whatever your cause, do not disgrace it by behaviour that makes anyone else feel intimidated.

jane xx

For despite a number of bloggers reporting the story yesterday, the national press appeared strangely indifferent to the story. Which is odd, given just how prominently the topic of Brazilian transsexual murder has been in those same papers over the last ten days or so. You’d think, on topicality grounds alone – the way dangerous dogs are mostly not news, until a particularly gruesome story hits the headlines and then suddenly loads of identikit stories creep out of the woodwork – it would be newsworthy.

Press agenda

Hell: the unfortunate coincidence of this event with Suzanne Moore’s temporary departure from Twitter even gave it an instant hook.

But no. In the same way that a single story based on some very shaky allegations about the trans community’s favourite Doc, Richard Curtis, gets splashed all over the papers, while hundreds of allegations of medical malpractice in respect of the trans community merits barely a footnote, this story excited no reaction at all. Nothing. Nada. Not even a quiver.

Well, apart from Pink News, which to its credit DID report on the story yesterday afternoon.

But don’t worry, folks: the national press DO NOT have an agenda here. Assorted press barons have assured us this is so!

Moore tweets: myth or hit?

Meanwhile, Suzanne Moore is still adding to the mirth of the nation, with yet more Cnutish behaviour out on twitter, threatening Pink News with some sort of unspecified action for daring to link her name to the death. At 10.50pm, she wrote: “Read this piece of shit and Pink News will hear from my lawyers in the morning”.

No, no. Wash your ears out at the back! I said Cnutish and i MEANT Cnutish, in reference to anglo-Danish king, Cnut, infamous for his futile attempts to turn back the tide.

Except, of course, he didn’t. As any fule kno, nowadays: the classic version of the tale has Cnut sat on the beach somewhere, vainly commanding the sea to stop rushing to the shore. While the urban myth debunkment of same reveals that he only did it in order to prove to his courtiers that he did not have divine powers.

Cnut did not attempt to divert the tide. Nor, according to more contemporary reports, did Freddie Starr eat anyone’s hamster Alabama never legislated that pi be equal to 3: lemmings do not commit ritual suicide by leaping off cliffs every so many years.

Still, once an association is out there in the public mind, it often sticks. Short of establishing a charity for homeless Brazilian trans folk – and rolling up her sleeves and decamping, Mother Theresa like to the slums of Rio de Janeiro to dedicate the remainder of her life to that body of people she will now and forever more be associated with a degree of insensitivity to the issue of murder of trans Brazilians.

It no longer matters what she said, how she said it. Time erases detail, leaving behind only the shadow of words used.

The importance of not being earnest

Which leaves me in two minds about yesterday’s tweet. On the one hand, it feels like she really, truly, doesn’t get it.

Within minutes of her twit, the news was circulating yet again: Suzanne Moore threatens libel writs against one of the lgbt community’s few established papers – and its over THAT issue again. Surely…surely she can’t be that daft?

And you know: i don’t think she is. A subsequent tweet, just 6 minutes later, read: “no libel threats. I will just turn their balls in Tesco Value Burgers”. Eeyuw!

Suzanne, i suspect some will be telling her this morning: you can’t do this sort of thing. Or rather, since that sounds like telling her what to do: you can’t do this sort of thing and expect no consequences.

Or is she – and this was my sense last night – just playing? Doing what i do sometimes out on twitter and elsewhere, giving in to the inexorable temptation to laugh and play and dance with words…and regretting it (or not) in the morning, as she wakes/i wake to a bunch of po-faced twitterers who are definitely not amused.

I don’t know. About the only thing i do take away from this is that for good or ill, Suzanne Moore is now chained, for the rest of her literary life, to the issue of “Brazilian transsexuals”. Whenever that topic surfaces in the news, the googlists and axe-to-grinders and eventually even those who have only just been born will trot out that association.

Sisyphus had his boulder: Moore, now, has Brazilian transsexuals, for the rest of her literary life. I hope they are happy together.

jane xx

On the evening of Friday, January 11, around the time Suzanne Moore was flouncing off twitter, Cecilia Marahouse a trans performer well known in gay clubs in Ceará, Northeastern Brazil, was murdered with 6 shots near the Av José Bastos in the state capital, Fortaleza.

The state’s LGBT population were reportedly shocked by the news, with friends and fans of Cecilia going on to Facebook to pay homage and seek justice.

However, as the website that reported this incident commented: “That may never come, because as we know to the authorities unfortunately a gay, lesbian or transvestite murder is just another statistic!”

That is all.

jane

NOTE: the above report is based on direct translation of lgbt blogs from Brazil. I don’t have the resource to double-check this from here – so anyone who wishes to is welcome to follow through.

Thought i’d drop you a line because i felt slightly bad about coming down so hard on you in respect of your piece, yesterday, on the Moore-Burchill saga. I know i used the h-word, and that is probably unfair. Though i do think this entire debate is uncovering a very large hypocrisy at the centre of press thinking and if you’d like to understand better how this issue relates directly to Leveson, please read: http://sexualitymatters.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/the-hypocrisy-that-pervades-press-freedom/

Otherwise, let me take a moment to explain a little. Christine Burns (MBE) put it very well in a blog she wrote last week, urging people to cool it with Suzanne Moore. In addition to trying to soothe tensions she wrote that what many in the press seem never to ask is: why all this anger? If a bunch of people are very angry about something, is it just because they are bonkers, or is there a reason somewhere?

I’m a journalist. I occasionally get threats – mostly not ones i take seriously. I am also a woman of trans history. Pretty ordinary in my daily life. Middle-aged…not terribly pretty…not given to wearing short skirts or anything else that will draw attention. But still identifiable as trans.

Out with a friend a week or two back, in a Tesco car park, a driver i had never met in my life before tried to run me down. Slow speed. They’d “only” have bruised me if they’d hit. But still…unnerving. My friend was shocked. Shocked to see it happen. Shocked, too, that i should be so calm about it. Oh, i said: i guess i’m used to it. Not every day. Not every week. But since transitioning, my life has become infinitely more exciting…at least, if you consider random threats of assault when simply walking down the street to be “exciting”. After nearly 30 adult years of never needing to call on the police once (apart from a burglary back in 1993), i soon became bestest friends with my local constabulary.

My phone number and address are on a police watch list. If i call in with an emergency, they’ll send a car straightaway. In the last two years, the police have arrested/cautioned two individuals for threats made against me. Did i insult them? No. Did i do anything other than be me? Nope. You get used to it.

Last year i wrote the story of a Russian asylum seeker who eventually went into hiding rather than return to Russia. She was living in virtual house arrest, afraid to go on the street. Last time she ventured out, she was assaulted, stripped and pissed on before being left unconscious in a back alleyway. Report it to the police? Don’t be silly: it was the police did that to her!

Do you know about this stuff? Did you know that last year over 100 Brazilian transsexuals were murdered for being trans? Or that even in the UK, being trans singles you out as statistically more likely to be attacked on the street than almost any other status?

Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t. The reason for the anger, though, that is not organised…is, rather, just emerging organically from the trans community… is the press. You’ll happily write a number of tropes about trans folk: about regret, about us getting handouts or – horrors! – getting surgery paid for by the state. But somehow you miss that level of violence and discrimination and abuse that goes on each day, every day.

And when it comes to columnists? Oh. Its fine for them to use language that in any other context would be near as damnit unprintable…but its OK about the trans community. And then, for all the bleating about freedom of speech, extracts from that column, which the Observer, the Indie, the Telegraph considers fit to print are moderated off the comments at the end of articles on the subject.

Double standard, huh?

So, sure: i was a tad angry and i wrote in a way i don’t feel particularly proud of. But unless and until the press actually come outside and start to understand WHY that anger is there, these confrontations will just continue to happen. Sadly.

jane

P.S. I might just put this up on one of my blogs…though – cross my heart and hope to die! – will absolutely NOT publish any reply you make unless you say its fine to do so

eek! edited to add that Christine is an MBE and not OBE. Don’t ask me: i have no idea which is which!

The newspaper powers-that-be and grand panjandrums and the like. Not so much the publishing of Burchill, which in the end feels to me like little more than an aberration: a desperate circulation raising measure by an editor with few scruples and a sad belief that a tokenist apology 48 hours after the event makes it all alright.

No. The real casualty here may be the press’s somewhat dodgy claim to the moral high ground, at least as far as free speech is concerned.

First principles

Let’s begin at the beginning. Any fule kno that “regulashun of the press” is the end of the world as we know it. Afterward is nowt but evil: the triumph of the antichrist (Theresa May in her Judge Dreddfullest outfit) and the zombie resurrection of Mary Whitehouse (may she be forever blessed!). OK. I exaggerate. A little. But the core of press objection to Leveson is that pretty much any regulation is a bad thing. And that’s that.

Next base. Another bad thing – and here I absolutely agree – would be the creation of state-registered journalists. Any sort of test regarding who is, who is not a real journo is seriously dangerous and runs the risk, as we have seen in some eastern European states, of journalists who ask awkward questions having their accreditation withdrawn.

Even in the UK, mostly in the dodgier realms of corporate press offices, that culture holds sway. In my earliest days as a freelance, I would sometimes be working for a newspaper, sometimes working on spec: creating a story that I would then sell on. I am assiduous: insistent; but polite. So when I detect bullshit on the part of corporate fibbers (sorry,press officers) I have been known to call them on it.

At which point – back in those days – every now and then, someone would try and bounce me out of the game. Unless I had my press card…unless I was on assignment for a particular paper. What was interesting was how far this behaviour correlated not with my manner, so much as the awkwardness of my questions, in terms of their embarrassment potential for the firm in question.

I digress. Creating official divide lines between press and public is dangerous and risks, ultimately, some official body deciding that it possesses the power to decide which side of the line people fall. Free speech, then, divides in two: an absolute right for those peeps in the press, the NUJ,and so on. Lesser rights for those outside the press.

This, I would humbly suggest, is NOT a defence of free speech: it is a defence of very particular privilege – and is precisely what the Observer has exposed in all its glory over the last couple of days.

Two standards

For read (or rather don’t read) the ruder comments. Above the line: Burchill in all her vicious, venomous glory, pouring out an apparent stream of consciousness flow of vitriol and bad language. Below the line, it’s prissiness as usual. Say anything – I mean anything – remotely rude and you’re out.

Full marks to the moderator – obviously one with a great sense of humour – who blue-pencilled in its entirety a comment that merely cut and pasted a par of choice Burchill, substituting another minority for t’tranz. Proof, if any were needed, that there is one rule for them,another for all the rest.

Such (press) hypocrisy underlines both the double standard over freedom and the hypocrisy over use of language.

Tom Peck, in today’s Independent, plays a curious game of journalistic double bluff, using a comment about trans folk having broad shoulders in an ever-so-knowing nudge and a wink fashion: making the joke and then deconstructing it as if to say “can you see what I did there?”.

Mmmm. Would the press be anywhere like as tolerant of a piece about Jewish journalists that opened with a line about them knowing how to sniff out stories (on account of their BIG noses, doncha know?)? I hope not. I imagine not. But who knows: if this constant abuse of transness is permissible, WHY is it not allowed to take on any and every other minority that crosses the pages of our press?

Three’s a riot

Then there’s the bullying. I think this is another and difficult issue. In Index on Censorship today I write of the difficulty of policing acts that individually were not too awful, but which, when repeated by dozens of people, even inadvertently, become something else. You or I walking purposefully down a street are no more than determined passers-by. Holding hands, we might be a nuisance: and in the company of several hundred other folk all doing the same thing, we graduate proudly to demonstration status, whereupon we need the police to shepherd us.

That, then, is one aspect of online comment, tweeting, social networking – and it is what Suzanne Moore fell foul of last week. I do not under-estimate the effect on Ms Moore of the combined effect of loads of people being nasty. Yet how far is it true to say that the individuals taking part were doing anything untoward? As individuals, I suspect, their conduct wasn’t all that bad. As mob, they were probably terrifying.

Which brings us back to press bullying. According to Private Eye, the Mail , which before Leveson stood firm for free speech has been known to take legal action against the likes of twitter, demanding to know the names of those tweeters who have been “bullying” their poor ickle journalists. Well, quite.

Until you wonder whether that doesn’t, shouldn’t cut both ways. If a torrent of adverse tweeting is bullying, what do you call a steady stream of abusive press pieces by privileged and apparently uncaring columnists?

No. About the only conclusion here is that far from being principled upholder of public freedom, the press – and the press barons that many journos serve – are little more than defenders of privilege. Freedom to say what we want, when we want – for the press, not for the ordinary everywoman in the street.

Because THEY, untutored in the proper way of doing such things, might say something we don’t like. And that would never do…

jane xx

That, believe it or not, was a view expounded by an obscure islamic preacher, Hisham el-Ashry, who recently popped up on prime time Egyptian TV to share his thoughts not only on why wearing the veil should be compulsory for all women, but also on the need for a religious police, akin to that in Saudi Arabia.

Outrageous? Yes. Mainstream? Thankfully, no. Such opinions are officially rejected by Egypt’s top Islamic institutions, including al-Azhar, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, and Dar al Ifta, the central authority for issuing religious rulings.

Still, the very fact that they can be voiced publically and in all seriousness is chilling. Last year, a young man holding hands with his fiancé was murdered, while a veiled teacher cut the hair of two 12-year-old girls who were not wearing scarves.

Some commentators are concerned that rising unemployment, growing civil unrest, and a more muscular islamic politics on the street means that el-Ashry’s views are not quite as exceptional as hoped.

It is time for those who are sick of the way in which the trans community is being, has been treated by those two institutions made a mark of their own.

Take some time

Have you ever been abused, verbally or otherwise, by your GP? Mistreated? Humiliated? Embarrassed? Then take the time.. . to make it formal and put that complaint in writing – to the General Medical Council.

Do, by all means, go for it off your own bat if that is what you wish to do. Otherwise, join the campaign to give the GMC its best Valentine ever, by adding your complaint to the complaints of others arriving on 14 February 2013.

Here’s what you do.

The basic grounds for complaining are laid out helpfully on the GMC’ssite. These include:

- failure to examine a patient properly
- failure to respond reasonably to a patiet’s needs
- serious breaches of a patient’s confidentiality

You can download a complaint form.

Then either fill it in and return it directly. Or if enough folk are interested and get in touch, then we will pop round to the GMC en masse on 14 February to hand them in.

A note of caution: the focus for this action is GP’s: by all means take up specific complaints you may have about other aspects of the Gender service should you so wish. But for now, the point being underlined is in relation to how well the trans community is treated by GP’s – and how lop-sided the response of the medical establishment is to that treatment.

jane xx