Marriage, Surnames, Legitimacy & Gender

When I got married for the first time, I did not seriously consider changing my surname. My ex complained about it beforehand, but when the time came I think he congratulated himself for being so modern.  There was one person in my circle of acquaintance who had a problem with it, complained to my mother and insisted on address me as Mrs Ex's Surname from there on in. This annoyed me, but we weren't close. Meanwhile, everything was straightforward - much more straightforward than if I'd changed it. I didn't have to change my name with any companies or institutions. I sometimes didn't bother correcting strangers who addressed me as Mrs Ex's Surname but then, I didn't always bother before we were married, same as I don't bother correcting every time I'm called Miss or Mrs instead of my preferred Ms. There are only so many hours in the day.

I'm sure other people, in other communities, experience far more hassle than I did or maybe feel more offended at the misnaming. Personally, I have had far more trouble maintaining a consistent title - with one bank account, I had Ms on my debit card, Mrs on my cheque book and Miss on my bank statements!

This marriage is completely different - I feel like I need to say that a lot, not as a defense (the first one doesn't count; this is the real thing.) but because I think folk need to be aware of the fact that these things can be so completely and utterly different that it's hard to use the same words to describe them; love, romance, even marriage. Abused and otherwise miserably partnered people often feel that any given person will always have the same kind of relationships, with roughly the same dynamics, and the same kind of problems. Abused and otherwise miserably partnered people often buy into the fairly widespread cultural meme that Love Hurts and folk - especially men and women - can never have both passion and peace with one another. This is not so.

However, this has nothing to do with the fact that the surname thing is looking very different this time.  It's not because I am more in love (I am perhaps in love for the first time) or more committed (I was very committed, but this time I am certain*). It's about other things which have nothing to do with the quality or strength of this marriage, but matter a lot to us. They include:

1. It's something we're talking about together. The whole subject is completely different when two people who are getting married ask the question, "What shall we do about our names? Shall we share one? What shall we call ourselves?"  Frankly, I swung back and forth about what I should do until the conversation became about our choice. This changes everything. 
2. Stephen's family have welcomed me in and offered me all manner of unconditional things I have never had before.  I feel a tremendous closeness and affiliation with them.  There's a part of me that really likes the idea of sharing a name with them, almost like taking the name of an adopted family. 
3. At this point in my life, I am known by very many names; The Goldfish, Deborah, Deb, Ms Kelly, D H Kelly, Auntie Deborah, Agent Bum Bum, Love, Sweetheart and all manner of more personal petnames and nicknames (in English, Welsh and Latin). Changing the name I am known by in some contexts would not be the same as changing my identity. In fact, it provides the possibility of another identity.  I like being all these people.  It actually feels like an opportunity to have another name, another identity to do things with. 

(1) isn't a reason to change names, but a starting point from which everything is on the table. But see what (2) and (3) have in common? Immensely personal. To do with us, our families, where we are in life.

Here's another personal thing. I would never consider changing the name that I write under.  Even though I have little published work out there, I like being D H Kelly.  It is a good name for a book spine.  Even as a child, I wrote stories with by D H Kelly under the titles.  However, given that I am working towards a career where this name is associated with a body of work, I quite like the idea of having another name for other things I want to do in my life. Often living with two surnames in use is presented as a compromise, but I think that's only because it's something men nearly never do. Having spare names can be useful.

There are folk who think that a woman changing her name upon marriage is necessarily making an unfeminist decision (all stats US - I'm sure keeping names is both far more common and acceptable in the UK, unless I roll with an extraordinary crowd).  This really bugs me, for several reasons:

For one thing, feminism is not about individual women and the personal decisions they make - personal decisions that some women will necessarily find easier and more desirable than others.  Feminism is all about removing social and political pressure, so that women (and others) have a real choice.  Naturally, women who make certain choices set a good example to others (it is possible to do this another way, even if the world suggests otherwise), but the choices themselves are personal, complicated by personal circumstance, and so haven't got much to do with a social and political movement. Women shouldn't have to apologise to our sisters for the personal choices we make around identity - in fact, feminism is all about relieving such a burden.

Most same-gender married couples I know have a shared surname. They presumably arrived at that through mutual discussion, weighing up their options, the individual feelings and any professional factors around the names they had. This is how it should be done.  Every couple, upon marrying or having a child should have a conversation which begins "What shall we do about names?"  It could be a very short conversation, it could be an ongoing discussion over a periods of months.

But  even if we all did this, unless we do away with the custom of familial surnames altogether, around half the couples who share a surname would share a husband's surname and around half of all children would take their name from a father. Sharing a husband's name is not wrong; the problem is that women feel under pressure to do so and couples often don't consider the other options.

Meanwhile, the reasons that there isn't a completely free choice relate to two far bigger, far more problematic aspects of sexism which we need to address head-on.

The first is about legitimacy.  As demonstrated by my own experience, some relationships are stronger, more committed and generate more love, happiness and creativity than others.  Some are utterly miserable and still others are dangerously awful.  However, we cannot see into people's hearts and there are very few external signs which might indicate what kind of relationship two people might be having.

Yet in our culture, we raise romantic partnerships above all other relationships; we see lasting romantic love as something both necessary and sufficient for happiness, particularly for women.  Then we set about judging whether or not someone's relationship is legitimate according to very specific and ever-changing criteria. For some couples - for example, those where one partner is coming through the immigration process - the subjective legitimacy of their relationship is a very serious matter. For other couples, legitimacy is an on-going issue among family and friends. Some examples for criteria would include:

• Whether or not a couple live together (even when they have work in different locations). 
• Whether or not a couple are married (and when this happened, how this happened)
• Whether or not a couple have children together (especially if they have children by other people)
• Whether or not a couple consists of a man and a woman (preferably straight and cis gender)
• Whether or not a couple are monogamous (or at least seem monogamous)
• Whether or not a couple are well-suited in superficial terms (same background, culture, age, disability status, earnings bracket etc..)

And so on and so forth.  I have heard folk cast doubt on the strength and potential longevity of a second marriage because the second wife wasn't as pretty as the first.  People are odd.

For some folk, marriage itself is about making a relationship legitimate - it is about a public declaration and celebration of a commitment.  Some people choose not to marry because they feel affronted by the idea that they need to prove their love in a public way. When it comes to personal choices, we do what feels right, which is so complex and personal it could never be neatly analysed by anyone on the outside.  Some non-religious people feel the need to marry in church; this may be about their parents or community, ideas about a proper wedding from childhood or for reasons they don't fully understand. This is absolutely fine.  I would only criticise someone (e.g. the Catholic Church) who claims that marriages outside church are less legitimate**.

And this is exactly where the pressure on couples to share the husband's name comes from; it's something that, for some people, renders other people's marriages legitimate or not. I'm sure that, despite the general grooviness of our social and family circle, some people would see Stephen and I sharing a surname (mine or his) as a sign of my greater commitment to this marriage. And that's a problem. But not one we can personally solve with any choice we make.

The other issue is about gender and relationships.  As with so many more significant lifestyle choices - being partnered, getting married, having children, the distribution of domestic work and childcare - we talk about this stuff as if women are making unilateral decisions.  We talk about a woman choosing to keep her name or take that of her husband, as opposed to a couple choosing to keep their own names etc., in the same way we talk about women choosing to marry, choosing to have children, choosing to stay at home or go to work etc.. In reality, whilst individuals have a personal veto (and we're still fighting for all women to have such a veto), when it comes to relationships, reproductive choices, childcare and paid work, we're often talking about a completely free choice that nobody has.

Romantic relationships involve many factors of complex chance and at least two ready-formed people whose life circumstances will be as muddled and messy as everyone else's. Women don't just make this stuff happen. Neither do men. But we live in a culture where these subjects are spoken about in these terms;  relationships and children are women's responsibility. Women must make the right decisions. Women must look after their men and their children, whilst resisting the loss of their own identity (which to some means a professional identity, and others means a youthful, sexually available identity). When a couple takes the wife's name on marriage, I should imagine that the wife, rather that the husband is the target of any criticism - how could it have been his idea?  Whilst we expect men to pursue sex, they are treated as weirdly powerful yet passive entities in long-term romantic relationships.

The name thing is a rather small matter - not many people get to learn our surnames, let alone how we acquired them - but any argument for or against a particular course of action on the part of women plays into this model. If we want to change the historic bias towards patronymic surnames, we need to stop talking about a woman's decision at marriage and start talking about couples and the pressures they face.


* Quite honestly, when I married my ex, I didn't expect it to last. Part of my motivation to get married was to have legal protection, because he frequently threatened to leave and take everything. Yes, this was an utterly stupid reason to marry - one of many utterly stupid reasons involved. But I just wanted to make things better and failed to even entertain the (now) obvious strategy for doing so.

** One odd aspect of the Catholic Church's rules against divorce is that previous marriages outside the Catholic Church don't count - if you previously married in a registry office or a synagogue, you may have this marriage discounted and remarry in the Church (it's not as simple as that, but it is possible). It is as if nobody who didn't marry in the Catholic Church is married at all.  However, I am yet to meet a Catholic who actually sees it that way. Meanwhile, I know Catholics who were abandoned or abused by spouses who can never marry again within their faith, without a lucky lightning bolt taking out their exes. 

Dizzy

I haven't posted anything in about a month on account of being tremendously busy, travelling between three counties, conducting some Millian Experiments in Living, appealing against a benefits' decision (nothing too scary) and arranging a civil marriage. Meanwhile, I am having the worst and most prolonged spell of light-headedness, dizziness and fainting that I've had for several years. 

This is frustrating, for two reasons:

1. I can't do as much as my body says I can.  I'm used to limiting my movement according to pain, and when the pain isn't so bad, I can move around more - I feel like moving around more. Just now, I can feel like moving around more, only to find the floor jumps up and starts dancing around me when I do.
2. Because the people around me and I are using the word "dizzy" to describe how I am doing - "I am a bit less dizzy now." "Are you feeling dizzy again?" etc. - I have Tommy Roe's 1969 hit Dizzy as a more or less permanent earworm. 

Will write something properly soon.

How Not To Talk About Domestic Violence Towards Men

Content warning: As well as domestic violence, brief discussion of suicide. 

Help for men victims of domestic violence can be found at Mankind and Men's Advice Line who explicitly offer support for gay and bisexual men as well as straight men. 

Men victims of domestic abuse are almost invisible and that is a problem for everyone.

Whenever I've written about domestic abuse in the abstract, I've tried to use gender-neutral language, partly because of fairness and partly because gender is such a big problem in abuse.  Presenting victims as necessarily feminine - usually young, straight, white, non-disabled middle-class archetypes - alienates a lot of women, as well as excluding people of other genders. Presenting all perpetrators as men makes men's violence seem natural, something good men must actively resist as opposed to something anyone, of any gender, may choose to do or not.  It makes violence committed by women seem aberrant and trivial.

As I've said before, hearing stories of abuse from male friends and family was a huge help in recognising my own situation for what it was. Whenever I read or heard stories about women victims, I found reasons that I was not that kind of woman (i.e. one much more vulnerable and typically feminine than myself).  All the stories matter.  All domestic violence is connected - abuser's behaviour is often so similar, regardless of gender, sexuality, class or cultural background.  As a society, we should be ensuring that we support all victims and do what we can to prevent all kinds of domestic violence.

But whenever I read about domestic violence on-line, on newspaper sites or blogs, there's a great deal of commentary that amounts to "What about the men?"  These comments are almost always problematic. There's the standard misogynist nonsense, of course, but the comments that disturb me most are by folks - apparently men and women - who seem to genuinely care about the problems of men victims being ignored and side-lined, but seem to believe that attention on violence against women detracts from their cause.

It is because I believe that there is no way to tackle domestic violence unless we tackle all of it that I find these comments so deeply infuriating and wanted to address the ones I see time and time again:


1. It's especially hard for men who are abused because they have been taught never to hit a woman. 

I'm sure there is a particular humiliation in being beaten by someone who is smaller or physically weaker than you - or is regarded by society as gentler, softer and more physically vulnerable than you - but there is no problem in the idea that you shouldn't hit a woman.  You shouldn't hit people.  Of course, there are circumstances where I concur with the law that it is okay to hit any person, if it is necessary to prevent a rape, serious physical injury, a kidnapping or violent death. But hitting a person because they are shouting at you, or because they hit you first?  Never okay.

People who are abused by men may also consider retaliation and resist the temptation because they've been brought up not to be violent at all (as is the case with many women), or because they don't want to hurt their abuser, or because they are afraid of their own strength or capacity to inflict damage, or because they feel sure that if they hit back, they're only going to prolong the attack and get hurt all the more seriously themselves. All these things passed through my mind during abuse, but the greatest of these was quite noble; I felt it was fundamentally wrong to hurt someone - anyone - unless somebody's life depended on it.  The one time I was truly afraid for my life and tried to find a way to defend myself, the prospect of causing the necessary harm was almost as scary as what might happen to me.

Whenever the comment is made about men being taught not to hit women, it suggests that intimate violence is sometimes the answer and men victims are disadvantaged by believing otherwise.  Or maybe that a society in which women fear the violence of their partners would be a better place?  Whether it is against your nature or your conditioning to hit your loved ones, that is something which helps you not to be an abuser (and gives you the prospect of happy and healthy mutually-loving relationships).  It does not make you any more vulnerable to abuse.

I imagine that some abuse victims do sometimes hit back in circumstances that fall short of immediate self-defense, but I guarantee that this will not have made their situation any better.  Relationships where both parties are violent towards each other can only end in disaster.

On a similar theme...


2. Stories of abuse which include the sentence "I never hit her once."

I think I understand why some men say this; because they feel defensive.  Discussion of domestic violence which focuses on the dynamic where men abuse women seems to make some men feel as if they have been personally cast in the role of abuser just by being a man.  No serious or sensible person believes this to be the case.  Many women survivors of abuse by men gain a more positive attitude towards men in general after they have escaped and realised that their experiences were exceptional and abhorrent, as opposed to the way men are.

However, whenever someone says "I never hit her once" it strongly suggests that hitting one's partner would be a normal response. The idea that it would be somehow natural for men to hit women who mistreat them lies at the heart of many of our problems with domestic violence; the idea that violence is simply more difficult to resist for men and a natural consequence for women who (deliberately or not) make life difficult for them. It says men abusers can't help themselves, and the violence of other abusers must be trivial, if not entirely fabricated.

You never hit her once?  Of course you didn't.  I never hit my abuser either.  If I write about my experiences of poverty, I don't have to state that I never took money from my Granny's purse.


3. Domestic Violence is not a gender issue because men are victims too.

This is partly a linguistic problem, but one that really matters.  Gender does not mean, about women, or  the sole concern of women or indeed, something men do to women.  Men have a gender too!  There are other genders!

Gender usually plays a massive role in domestic violence.  Almost whenever men who have been abused by women tell there stories, the abuse is heavily laden with gendered language and ideas about what it is to be a man; their natural inadequacies as men or their inability to live up to some ideal of manhood.  The same applies to people abused within same-gender relationships and even non-romantic ones.  Abusive parents tell their sons to man up or their daughters to be more ladylike or else they criticise they sons as insensitive men and their daughters as over-emotional bitches.  All of that and much much more.

Domestic violence is not exclusively a women's issue (even if only women were abused, it should still concern us all).  But talking about gender in domestic abuse is not the same as saying it is all about women or that it is something that men and only men are responsible for - an accusation repeatedly made towards anyone who writes about domestic abuse, regardless of the language they have used.


4. Women abusers make false accusations and everyone believes them. 

This is a circular argument.  All abuse victims will be disbelieved by someone, either specifically or, as such comments demonstrate so well, generally.  Marginalised people are routinely disbelieved when they describe their own experiences. It's particularly offensive to see mention of false accusations under the harrowing personal accounts of abuse victims who have been brave enough to describe their experiences, as the implication seems to be that any woman who speaks up about abuse may be covering for her own abusive behaviour.  All abusers lie, but it is extraordinarily unlikely that a lie should be taken this far.

All abusers blame their victims, lie about their crimes and try to present themselves as the victim of at least something; abuse itself, other mistreatment, cheating, lies, disloyalty etc.. Women abusers are almost certainly more likely than men to threaten to make false accusations of violence, but male abusers have their own arsenal of effective dismissing and discrediting strategies.

Anyone who has children with an abuser has reason to fear a custody battle, because those people see children as a legitimate weapon, and our family courts are a bit of a mess. There is a bias towards women as primary caregivers, but mothers still sometimes lose their children to abusive men who are able to manipulate the system (especially if they are in any position of authority - a police officer or a doctor, for example).

Custody battles aside, abusers are extremely unlikely to take false accusations very far, for exactly the same reasons that victims are unlikely to talk openly about or pursue justice for the crimes against them; identifying oneself as a victim has a massive social and psychological cost.

Part of that cost is the doubt of others.  Part of that cost is paid if you ever write about or speak about your experiences of abuse in a public sphere, only to be told that people like you are motivated to lie in order to keep the house and children you never had, or to cover up the abuse that you never committed.



5. More men are killed by domestic violence if you count suicide.

This is in response to the indisputable fact that women are much more likely to be raped, hospitalised or killed by their partners or former partners - two women a week in the UK.  This doesn't mean that men cannot be raped, hopsitalised or killed by domestic violence - a man is killed by a partner or former partner once a fortnight. The naive idea that men's experiences of domestic violence is necessarily minor and cannot sharply escalate is deadly dangerous.

Domestic abuse is a common, massively underestimated cause of mental ill health. Abuse victims do sometimes kill themselves, sometimes long after the relationship has ended.  However (a) suicide is absolutely not the same as murder, (b) casual discussion of suicide as a direct consequence of certain experiences can be very dangerous for survivors of those experiences and (c) threats of suicide are common weapons abusers use, especially as control over a victim begins to slip away. We should always take care when talking about suicide.

Suicide threats* are probably extremely common during messy break-ups and terrible rows even between otherwise reasonable people, when one party feels their world is falling apart and will say anything to try to persuade the other to stay. This is always a very bad thing to do, but fortunately, it is rarely meant or taken seriously. There are significant differences for abuse victims because

• The threat may come from someone who is no stranger to violence. 
• The threat may come from someone who has made outlandish threats and carried them out in the past.
• Victims are used to being blamed and taking the blame for their abuser's unhappiness and misfortune.

My ex's declared capacity for suicide had hung over me for years, especially as I was the main cause of his depression. During the months after I left - despite removing the supposed source of his unhappiness - I genuinely expected him to kill himself.  He talked about it at great length (it's a tragic myth that talking about it means a person won't go through with it). In order to carry on with my life and proceed with the divorce, I had to accept that he could die and hold me responsible.

Honestly, with hindsight, I do not know whether the threats were all bullshit or not.  But I'm describing behaviour that took place when I was at the strongest I had been in my whole adult life, and even then, there's no way I can pretend to have been indifferent to the idea that my behaviour could be even a contributing factor in someone's violent death. I had lived through the guilt of having a close friend attempt suicide years earlier. The threats would have been quite enough to regain control over someone with only a little less going for them. (Our culture tends to romanticise scary obsessive self-destructive behaviour by rejected men.)

Threats of suicide are a major red flag in violent relationships; someone who threatens suicide as a weapon of control is more likely to take someone else's life.  Meanwhile, there are all kinds of other things we need to concentrate on if we wish to prevent suicide (like ditching this casual pop psych cause and effect model of suicide) and take care of the mental health of all people who have been abused. Using suicide to have an argument about the relative damage caused to men and women? Pointless, crass and dangerous.


6. Women receive all this support and men receive none because people keep talking about violence towards women. 

Provision for victims of domestic abuse is poor. Provision for victims who aren't women is appalling.  This is definitely not the fault of women victims. It's not the fault of people who advocate for women victims or talk about violence against women. Domestic violence is simply not spoken about enough in our culture. Anyone who speaks up about it is making the world a slightly better place.

Same with cancer. Research into various cancers gets far more funding than any other medical condition, including those which are more common, or more commonly deadly or disabling. Dementia, for example, costs the economy much more and is, often though not always, a much more unpleasant condition for both the person with it and their family.  But dementia receives a fraction of the funding and attention that cancer receives. Are people who work or raise money for cancer charities and cancer research facilities to blame for the limited research into dementia?  Would it ever be worth having an argument about which group of very sick and dying people are more deserving of attention and help?  Would it ever be less than odious to respond to an account of someone's life with cancer by saying, "It's okay for you with your fashionable disease..."?

There are loads of reasons why provision for victims who are not women are so very poor.  Some of these are to do with numbers; typically, women are more likely to be in danger of their lives and less likely to have the financial and practical means of effective escape.  Some of this is to do with accidents around how and when refuges and charities have been set up (disabled and queer women can also find themselves shut out).

However, most of this is cultural and we're all part of this culture. We have an almost adversarial model of heterosexual relationships, where men and women are having to fight or deceive one another for their mutually exclusive needs. Men and women are not supposed to get on. People ask explorers who are in love with one another how they manage to be alone together for months together without killing each other. There is more mainstream humour around violence towards men**.  My straight women friends and family are much more likely to joke about slapping or hitting their partners if they misbehave (although others do sometimes make those jokes).

But perhaps most of all, as a culture, we struggle with the idea that men can be hurt in these ways. We treat violence (along with verbal aggression and other controlling behaviour) as something that belongs to boys and men; that boys and men will both be violent and cope with violence. In movies, men are beaten, stabbed and shot and are seen to survive all manner of violence without trauma. The idea that an intimate partner can take control of a man's life through verbal aggression, humiliation, criticism and a level of violence which might not even leave a bruise, doesn't quite fit.

Anyone who talks about domestic abuse as some kind of battle of the sexes issue, where they make generalisations about men's or women's attitudes and behaviour, where they paint a picture of the world divided into warring heterosexual couples, when they suggest that members of one gender cannot be trusted on their accounts, then they're making the whole situation worse. They are perpetuating the myth of a natural conflict between men and women - a myth that is a gift to all abusers. They are silencing victims who are already taking big risks to speak out. They are shutting down these discussions.


7. It's all the fault of feminists that male victims of domestic violence are ignored.

In my corner of the world, the only people I see talking about domestic violence towards men are feminists or people who share the values of feminism.  There's no point making a blanket defense of feminism and claiming that feminists have never said or done spectacularly stupid and harmful things on this and many other issues (ha!). But people who cause a fuss about violence against women are not the enemy when it comes to tackling violence against people of other genders.

In fact, if you want to borrow my stolen Tardis and head back before Second Wave feminism, to a time where little short of murder going on within a household was a private family matter, men victims of domestic violence had even less hope of escape, support or justice. Increasing attention on and discussion of domestic violence as experienced by women - together with increasing attention on sexual abuse and violence - has made room for, rather than stifling, discussion of intimate violence experienced by people of other genders.

Yes, people still imagine a woman (a certain kind of woman) when they think of a victim of sexual or domestic violence.  But at least folks now have some consciousness that these things aren't confined to newspaper stories or soap plots, that these things happen all around us.  Feminist discussion allows us to define abuse far more broadly that physical domination through brute strength. All this benefits everyone.

More needs to be done, but it is everyone's responsibility.  It is not up to people whose focus is violence against women to shift their focus.  It is up to all of us to talk about all the problems society has and see about ways we can change it for the better.


* I hope it is very obvious, but just in case, a suicide threat is not the same thing as someone reaching out and confessing to suicidal thoughts in order to seek help, comfort and support. This doesn't mean a threat is always framed "If you do X, I will kill myself."  In my experience it is often "Fine, you do X as you want to and I will kill myself." or "Now you have done X, all that's left for me is to kill myself."

**Although when it does crop up, humour around violence towards women tends to be more serious, e.g. rape jokes, as opposed to "I'll give him a slap." jokes. Only this weekend, there's been another issue with t-shirts with "humourous" slogans about violence towards women.

Dancing on the Edge & Colourblind Jazz Fans

I greatly admire Stephen Poliakoff.  He's not perfect, although some of his television work - particularly Shooting the Past - is as very nearly.  He has a luxurious way of film-making, instilling his characters with both curiosity and his own passion for story-telling.  His films are always beautifully shot (he has an ability to make every actor look so beautiful) with a great use of music and point of view.  He's done a few I couldn't sit through again, but I can't name many directors who haven't.

Dancing on the Edge is his new BBC series charting an all black Jazz band in 1930s London. It has a few problems. It's been criticised for slow-pacing, but that's cool with me; it's all very beautiful, as usual, and the actors are flawless. There are however four glaring problems. The first two have always been there with Poliokoff but become really obvious in this miniseries, the second two are unique to Dancing on the Edge and the forth really matters:

1. Rich people spend their money on things ordinary folk can't afford. Thus rich people are treated as eccentric and fascinating, even when those characters are in no way eccentric or fascinating.
2. When something interesting or notable is happening, characters will say so, in case its not obvious. "Isn't this an amazing party?", "Isn't it fantastic that we should all be here together at this time and place, especially what with us living in a poignant historical context and all?" And perhaps worst of all, one character actually says, "Other people's private lives. One never knows what goes on!" 
3. The inexplicable compulsion on the part of all characters to say the name Stanley in an emphatic way at least once every two minutes, and every sentence if the character of Stanley is in the room.
4. Apparently, nice white jazz fans in 1930s London are magically and completely colourblind. 

Here's the deal.  In 2013 UK, there are white people, who are good people and have black friends or even family members, who love music, films and books by black people, but who sometimes say and do the wrong thing around race; they make an assumption based on stereotypes, they use clumsy language or make an unwise joke. Same with straight folk and queer folk, non-disabled and disabled folk, even - perhaps especially - men and women. Most good decent people make awkward slips. We live in a prejudiced world, we grew up here and even if we have no prejudice in our hearts, this stuff is part of our culture, so part of us we all have to keep an eye on.

In 1930s London, there were white people, who were good people who loved jazz and had black friends and lovers, who fairly often said and did the wrong thing around race. They would have been far more conscious of race, living as they did in a very racist mono-cultural world. They would have grown up with racial stereotypes being put forward to them as scientific facts.  We see it in the literature written by groovy, progressive white folk of the time (Waugh, Lawrence et al.), and forgive the language and racist humour because it is of its time. It was a very racist time. It's not like Nazism succeeded in Germany because they were the only racists in Europe - they were just the most desperate and demoralised racists around.

Poliokoff has created a world in which only negative characters ever remark upon or behave clumsily about race. White characters who love jazz are immune from racism. When racism is discussed, all the nice young white people find it utterly incomprehensible.  I have the sense that there will come a breaking point in the narrative, where the white folk may well close ranks to scapegoat their black friend, but while the going is good?  Only sinister characters and money-minded squares give so much as a raised eyebrow when the band leader forms a romantic relationship with a middle class white girl.

This is not an unusual world for television and film, where prejudice is often seen as something individual, rather than cultural, even in narratives which hinge on prejudice being a massive issue in the lives of its victims (this is particularly remarked upon in science fiction and fantasy, where writers often create a sexist or racist world, which they people entirely with egalitarians).

It's perhaps most noticeable in something like Dancing on the Edge because it is a rare British drama with people of colour at the centre of things, it's beautifully made and because it is about a historical period - would it really make the audience uncomfortable to imagine that people in the 1930s had very different, contradictory ideas about race?  If the history of 20th century music teaches us one thing, it is that it is possible for privileged white folk to dance, cry, worship and make love to the music of black folk without eliminating racism by the sixteenth bar - or the sixteenth album.

You know how I feel - art matters dreadfully!  I believe that many people will have overcome some of their own prejudice by listening to beautiful music produced by black people or gay people especially, other marginalised groups as well.  Music demonstrates that we all feel a great deal, and often some of our highest, lowest, deepest and most personal feelings are shared by song-writing strangers.

But for many people, music is a product to be consumed, its production a little like a clever trick, not the expression of something both essentially human and essentially higher than that. Racist ideas around black music were never - are still not - exclusive to people who dislike the music black folk make.

The early years of British jazz provide such a good opportunity to explore these issues, or at least demonstrate the likely reality. So far, no exploration and an . The jazz band live in a racist world with very few racists in it - and so far, no truly powerful racists (even though they met the future King Edward VIII, a vile racist and personal friend of Hitler).

Two episodes to go.

How Marriage Became More Meaningful

The Modern Man: Stephen fields calls from his investors whilst
ironing out deconstructed neckties for my wedding dress.

Equal marriage means so much to me.  Given that I'm a woman about to be married to a man, I don't think anyone realises just how much it matters.  It's so I can get married and not feel like a fraud.  It means I can have a wedding which doesn't make me feel closeted, because people like me can only marry if they happen to have partners of a certain gender. Not just yet, but soon enough, I will be able to marry whoever I like.

There's a certain type of social conservative who enthuses about marriage, but worries that it isn't what it used to be, weakened by decades of social change and legal reform.  To me, this is counter to everything I feel and observe about marriage. As an institution, I believe that marriage is getting stronger and stronger.

Things that have made marriage stronger and more meaningful include:


1. The ease of divorce means that folks are less likely to stay together in unhappy, loveless or abusive marriages because they can't get out of it.  Divorce is not easy. In court fees alone, with no legal advice, the least complicated divorce costs a little under £400 and will take about six months - marriage costs a little over £100 and can be carried out within 16 days. Divorce law is complicated, so if you're not on excellent terms, if there's money, property or children involved, the whole thing gets extremely difficult and costly. But it's doable and it's (largely) socially acceptable.

Marriage had to be far less meaningful when it was more commonplace for people who were unhappy together to be married. Where divorce was inaccessible, it wasn't uncommon for people to move on and start new relationships, have new lives and families whilst still being legally married to someone else because of the shame, cost and complication of divorce - the legalisation of divorce in the UK was brought about by a moral panic about people living in sin because they had separated from spouses, started again with new partners, but had no option to remarry.

Marriage could be made stronger by... no fault divorces.  In England and Wales, a couple may divorce on the grounds of separation after two years apart, but to get divorced any quicker, it has to be somebody's fault. I have known amicably splitting couples lie about adultery in order to speed things up. The only bar to no fault divorces is the idea that two adults, in the absence of adultery or ill treatment, might not know their own minds about the end of a relationship.

2. The social acceptability of cohabitation. The option of cohabitation means that most people know what they're getting into before they make a permanent commitment, folks can freely experiment with living arrangements and fewer people rush into marriage just because they're madly in love and need a social licence to spend all their time together for however long the passion is burning - even if it fizzles out within a few months. Meanwhile, couples who feel that marriage is not for them for whatever reason are no longer obliged to choose between biting the bullet of social convention or else meeting with stigma and discrimination.

My mother often described the anti-climax of the first months of my parents' marriage.  During those first few months - a particularly cold winter - they had to discover what it was to live independently from parents and what it was to live with one another, all of which would have been cool except that they'd had to promise forever before they got to experiment, negotiate and learn about themselves and how to get along. So they felt under tremendous pressure.

I reckon the acceptability of cohabitation has made things better even for people who don't cohabit before marriage, usually for religious reasons, because they seem to have learnt so much from the rest of us. In my parents' day, few people lived together before marriage, but there was no discussion about it either, you got married and worked it all out as you went along. These days, folks who want to jump into the deep end on their wedding day are encouraged to have thorough discussions about how they're going to organise themselves in everything from finances to sex.  And that's a good thing.

Marriage could be made stronger by... allowing some legal contract, other than marriage for people to become one another's next of kin.  This would benefit lots of people who are not married, whether they are living with a romantic partner, a friend, a sibling or if they are estranged from their official family (or don't have one) and want to nominate someone else to make decisions for them in an emergency, automatically inherit from them and so forth.


3. The (gradual) demise of the nuclear family as the ideal living arrangement.  So much focus of the resistance to marriage reform comes from the idea that the nuclear family is a great ideal. It's not. It was a short-lived middle class notion; working class people, who have nothing much to pass on and can't necessarily afford to move out of parental home or pay outsiders for childcare and other help, have always had a far more flexible attitude towards family. It's partly to do with blood, but also geography, history, circumstance, as well as love. Your uncles and aunts are not necessarily your parents' siblings. Step families prosper with less emphasis on biological relationships. Of course, poor people have poorer outcomes in education, health, employment and pretty much everything else. But they have tended to have a pragmatic attitude towards family; family are simply the people around you.

The nuclear family places the sole responsibility for children on two parents. It shuffles the rest of the family completely out of the way. If people don't marry or don't have children, they are not part of the club, a club which is isolating for those both within and without it.  It depends on everyone having enough money to live such an isolated life, which of course, fewer and fewer folk do.

I'm not about to celebrate the economic downturn or in particular, an economic shift which falls disproportionately on younger adults, who simply won't have the same opportunities as their parents. But it has forced us to be more flexible. Multi-generational households are suddenly much more common. People live in houseshares which become familial (not all are like that, but some are). Middle class people now speak of their "chosen family", which is what a lot of working class people would simply describe as "family".

All this makes marriage stronger, because it makes marriage supported and supportive to others. Couples do not need to sail out alone in the world and hope to sustain each other. When someone joins a family (formally or not), they become important to several people, not merely a partner for one individual.

I'm not sure I've explained this at all well, but never mind.

Marriage could be made stronger by... a cultural shift away from the idea that happy people come in units of two and single people are fundamentally alone in life. We drastically undervalue other relationships, friendship most of all. Romantic love is a truly wonderful thing, but it isn't radically distinct from other kinds of love, and love is what really matters. Happy people are people who have love in their lives, and that can come in many different forms.


4. Increasing Sexual Equality.

People have argued a lot about the origins of marriage in human society and what marriage is naturally about.  Clearly, nature is not a part of this; marriage is something people invented.  Fundamentally they invented it to organise and celebrate pair bonding and I'm sure in many cases, especially among ruling classes, property or children (principally, which woman bore which man's children) were a priority. But most people in the history of the world didn't have a lot of individual property and childcare tended to get shared out in the most convenient way within a community. Marriage exists because people have always partnered off - not everyone, and it's not our only sexual strategy but it is something humans do.  And since this is a fairly big deal in people's lives - like being born, becoming an adult or losing a loved one - people have tended to celebrate it and use the language of permanent change.

There are some folks who think that marriage is about men and women, because man is one kind of animal and woman is quite another and somehow, despite massive differences in comprehension, ability and desire, they somehow work well together (if they buy the right self-help books and listen to the right kind of religious leaders or relationship gurus - otherwise, the whole thing is hopeless).

But the truth is that private relationships between men and women can be condemned by a society where such expectations exist, where men and women don't have the same freedoms and opportunities. This isn't to say that there's an ideal feminist marriage in which both partners play exactly the same roles in every context which, if only we all subscribed to, we'd be sorted. But the more freedom - legal, financial and social - that both parties have, the more likely they are to negotiate and discover an arrangement that suits them. The less likely they are to believe that they can't really talk to each other about their needs, because people of their partner's gender are incapable of understanding. The less likely there is to be violence or abuse on either side.

Marriage could be made stronger by.... a cultural shift away from the idea of marriage or relationships as a goal and overarching source of fulfillment for women.  As it is, this places tremendous pressure on women to find a partner, exact commitment from them and then, single-handedly, manage the inevitably two-person job of a happy and healthy relationship. Women can stay in miserable relationships because they hold themselves responsible and fear being alone. Women can feel miserable about good relationships because their lives are unsatisfactory and they believed that marriage was supposed to fulfill them. Having a partner in life is not the same as a partner being a life.

Basically, marriage would be so much more meaningful in an egalitarian universe.  On which subject...

5. A growing acceptance of romantic and sexual diversity, Civil Partnerships and soon, coming to a wedding venue near you, Equal Marriage. 

There was time, not all that long ago, perhaps up until the mid-eighties, when it was extremely common for exclusively gay men and women to marry straight people.  Some of those marriages were mutually convenient arrangements between close friends but others, I'm sure, were absolute hell. Straight marriage got a lot more meaningful when being gay no longer necessitated complete secrecy. It got yet more meaningful when gay people began to have some options for becoming parents. These days, it is only those from extremely zealous religious backgrounds who feel the need to use straight marriage as a closet.

Equal marriage will mean that marriage is no longer even slightly about being straight. A marriage certificate will no longer be a certificate to say that your relationship is valid and superior to other relationships between people with the same strength of feeling and commitment towards one another.

If your a woman who finds a man you want to spend the rest of your life with, you climb up to the top of the nearest office block, church spire or silo and cry out "We're in love!". You don't cry, "We're so straight!" or as some Tory MPs seemed to think you might, "It would be typical for two people of our respective genders to have baby-making potential for at least the earlier portion of our adult lives, regardless of whether we're still young enough, each have the necessary equipment and chemical capacity or indeed, the slightest desire to have children! Hooray!" (People on the ground could never comprehend such a long sentence). 

Marriage could be made stronger by... ditching the gender binary in legal language around marriage (Why? Why on Earth is it still there now?) and trans folk who had their marriages dissolved as part of the gender recognition process, getting to have their marriages back (here's the tabled amendment).


My marriage will mean so much more to me because I could marry anyone.  It removes the element of straight privilege that only belongs to me by a double coincidence. It makes me part of something which is now so much more inclusive.  This is not the be all and end all of queer rights (not nearly) and marriage is by no means a perfect institution.  But in the last few weeks, the world has become a slightly better place. 

The Sessions: Discussing Disability & Sex Work

When I began reading the essay that inspired The Sessions (via @emmajtracey) by the late writer and poet Mark O'Brien, I expected to cringe in much the same way as I have cringed at all the other articles or forum posts I have read about disabled men paying for sexual services. I didn't.

I expected:

(a) Disability as an overarching explanation for sexual drought. There's nothing wrong with expressions of sexual frustration, romantic longing and loneliness (well, you know, there's a time and place), but many people experience these things for a great variety of reasons. Disability can be a massive factor, but it is also a complex and immeasurable one. O'Brien writes;

I had fallen in love with several people, female and male, and waited for them to ask me out or seduce me. Most of the disabled people I knew in Berkeley were sexually active, including disabled people as deformed as I. But nothing ever happened. Nothing was working for me in the passive way that I wanted it to, the way it works in the movies.

O'Brien acknowledges that not all disabled people have difficulties in love or sex. The isolation of having to spend most of his time in an iron lung, together with his shyness and anxiety around sex and romance are acknowledged as the main reasons for O'Brien's lack of sexual experience. He doesn't, as others have done, rail against society in general and women in particular who have "mistreated" him by not being all that interested.

As Mik Scarlet says in his post entitled Brothels for the Disabled? No Thanks!

The effect of this false belief that disabled people need the services of prostitutes more than anyone else is the second reason why I am opposed as it causes issues for the way society thinks about disability... For disabled people, it means they grow up in an atmosphere that makes them believe that they just aren't sexy or potential sexual partners and for the non-disabled community it plays a part in continuing the prejudice around disability. More than that, as all non-disabled people are just disabled people before an illness or injury, it means that if they acquire a disability part of the grieving process they will have to go through revolves around the loss of their sexual confidence.

I decided not to link to any of the uncomfortable articles I refer to, because they are by vulnerable men, usually anxious young men, who are nervous around women and have been quite brave writing about their experiences.  My input to their personal circumstances would probably not be helpful, so it would certainly not be kind.

But just now, there's a young disabled man campaigning for the British government to fund sexual services for disabled men. Apart from the what? how? and given that social care and essential benefits are currently being slashed against a backdrop of stereotypes of disabled people as entitled layabouts, why the hell now?, there's a real problem with defining what experiences are unique to a disabled person. Campaigner Christopher Fulton says

"I have been to nightclubs in Birmingham but they are no good for me. When I tried to use dating agencies as soon as they heard I was disabled they didn’t want to know."

Any other twenty-nine year old man stating this would receive shrugs, commiserations and then maybe some good advice. But because he is a disabled man, this gets in the paper like it is a special experience, extraordinary, part of the tragedy of his situation. It's not. There are aspects of Fulton's life experience which are not normal and must interfere with life significantly - like having no choice about his bedtime (the bane of disabled adults, especially night owls, who rely on state carers to put them to bed). But not getting lucky in a nightclub? Having a demoralising time with dating agencies?

Not only does this encourage the idea that disabled people are especially unattractive (which not only makes us feel less attractive, but reinforces the idea to others), this raises a really obvious ethical point around sex work.  If disabled people are inherently sexually unattractive, and nobody wants to have sexual contact with us, why would a sex worker feel differently?

After all, almost every other article I have read by a disabled man who has paid for sexual services include;


(b) Wild assumptions about the inner life of a sex worker. In regular sex work, one principle objective has to be be to make the client imagine that the sex worker is having a wonderful time, even when she is miserable - even when she is being coerced into the act. The more she pretends to enjoy it, the sooner the ordeal should be over. This doesn't mean all sex workers are miserable or coerced, but this possibility makes it extremely uncomfortable when disabled men who have used prostitutes describe these women's enthusiasm - often in terms borrowed straight from pornography - as a justification for what they have done. Which is a confusing message next to disability as a sexual deal breaker: I am completely unattractive, but I was irresistible to her, because there was money involved. 

O'Brien's physical descriptions of Cheryl, his sexual surrogate, are sparing and as for her feelings, he mostly only reports her expressions and the things she says. Cheryl explains when she doesn't like a particular activity, but that other women may do and it is always important to ask. When asked whether she has had an orgasm, Cheryl gives an honest answer. O'Brien doesn't speculate, let alone make assumptions, about why she does what she does. This makes me feel happier about the physical and psychological safety of Cheryl than any other sex worker I have read about in the third person.


(c) A sense of enormous entitlement. At no point does O'Brien claim that having sex with another person is a right, a fundamental human need or any such thing.  His priority in seeing a surrogate was to sort out some of the psychological baggage he had around his body and sexuality, not to get an orgasm.  He talks about his hopes for the future but without providing an idealised account of the kind of woman he would like to have a relationship with - in fact, he sees the matter of his future desires as very complicated. He acknowledges that he has not often found disabled women attractive without framing that possibility as "settling for second best" (which I genuinely read in one article by a disabled men who had paid for sex).

O'Brien's essay was published in 1990 and he died in 1999 (I know for sure that had he still been here, the internet would have revolutionised his social, sexual and romantic prospects). I would be the last person to suggest we need to turn back the clock on attitudes towards sex and sexuality, but there is a tone to O'Brien's essay which is seldom seen in the discussion of disabled people and sex work today. All the reasons I usually cringe and feel uncomfortable about these discussions are to do with reducing sex with another person - a very human, very organic behaviour - to a consumer right.  It is not fair that I can't have the long-legged blonde of my dreams, just because I'm in a wheelchair. It's my right.

These arguments feel as if they are borrowed partly from the disability rights movement and partly from pornography (which is, of course, a medium of fiction). O'Brien offers a reason why he is particularly disinterested in hiring prostitutes, despite having paid for sexual services from Cheryl:

Hiring a prostitute implies that I cannot be loved, body and soul, just body or soul. I would be treated as a body in need of some impersonal, professional service — which is what I’ve always gotten, though in a different form, from nurses and attendants.

I wonder if this is why some disabled men so readily and publicly enthuse about the idea of paying for sex - because they are used to having their more immediate bodily needs catered for in exchange for money?  There is even less nuance in our discussions of the highly nuanced business of personal care than in our discussions of sex. Meanwhile, disabled people's bodies are so often seen by the people around us as passive things to be fixed or taken care of, as opposed to tools we can used to express ourselves and potentially, give pleasure to others.


Usually, I leave these accounts feeling that there has been no consideration for the rights of sex-workers or women in general. A person's right not to have sex or engage in sexual behaviour, without financial, social or physical pressure, trumps any amount of sexual frustration.  It's not sexism to only be attracted to one gender and it's not racism or disablism if you prefer tall athletic able-bodied blondes (it can be, however, be a double standard and a quirk that will significantly narrow your chances of sexual fulfillment). Sex-workers are not exempt from these freedoms just because money is involved. Thus, sex with another person can never ever be a "right" and any time it is framed that way, makes me deeply uncomfortable.

But O'Brien's essay struck me as very important, and I recommend you read the whole thing. He recognises the complexity of disability as a potential obstacle to sex and love - practically, socially and psychologically - without making it any less personal or less complicated than it really is.


See also: The Undebateable Undateables

First, Believe Them

If you do just one thing in the promotion of equality and social justice, it should be this:

When someone gives an account of their own experience, believe them. 

If at some point along the way, something jars, something doesn't feel right and you begin to doubt what's being said, then by all means, doubt away. But always start off from the default position of faith in your fellow man.

One of the defining experiences of belonging to a marginalised group is to be mistrusted at every turn. You go to the doctor, they won't take your symptoms seriously. You go to the police about a crime committed against you, and justice is a pipe dream. You're treated as suspect because of who you are. You wish to marry and you're told your love isn't what it feels like. Every time you try to make your own life better - or simply more bearable - you are up against gatekeepers who don't trust your motives, who don't believe your account of things. You assert your faith or lack thereof and are told you are deluded. Then when people, whether this week's comedian or fashionable activist, say disgusting and insulting things about people like you, any argument you make will be dismissed as if you are the one throwing the shit, spoiling the fun and turning positive movements in on themselves.

I've often suspected that there's something about me which makes me particularly credible. But in common with anyone (especially a woman) who has seen enough doctors, I have been told on occasion that my perceptions of what is happening to my body (particularly gynaecological events) are wrong. Not the cause of my experience - I'm not a doctor - but the very symptoms I am experiencing.  As a bisexual person, I've been told that whatever I say about deep-seated emotional experiences, I am in fact straight.  Not that I have misunderstood what bisexuality is, but that it is impossible that I should feel what I say I feel.

Nobody has directly questioned my experiences of various forms of violence and abuse, but this is largely because I have not given them the opportunity; I certainly live in a culture which treats these experiences with scepticism and I read and hear opinions which question experiences just like mine. I read and hear questions about;

• Whether these things really happen.
• Whether these things are really all that big a deal.
• Whether in fact, both parties are equally to blame. 
• Whether victims may be motivated by the prospect of compensation, a favourable divorce settlement, a legal advantage in custody battles, malice, the need for attention or a wish to cover up their own misbehaviour.

It isn't that nobody ever lies.  People do lie and some people will tell lies in just about any context you can think of.  But most people don't lie, most of the time.  And when someone is vulnerable and needs support, medical treatment or police help, when someone comes out to you, or expresses a fear, tells you a secret or recounts the hurt they have felt, they have a particularly strong motivation to be telling the truth.  Nobody does any of these things for no reason. They have a huge cost when they go wrong - some have a huge cost whatever happens - a cost that a casual fibber is unlikely to risk.  

Meanwhile, the only way to get to the truth is by listening to all the information. The only way to do that is to start from a position of faith in what you are being told. Automatic scepticism shuts down this opportunity; you will never know whether you were being told the whole truth, a half-truth, a complicated truth or an outright lie. 

This isn't all about power, but it is power that ties all these strings together. Whilst many of us have faced this mistrust, all of us have the power to mistrust others. And folks do. In newspapers and around dinner tables, we regularly see this kind of scepticism applied to those with less power than us.

Take fat as an uncomplicated and sadly socially acceptable example. Roughly every week or so, there's a news story about the Obesity Epidemic with angst about how fat everyone is. And do you know one of the big reasons it's still acceptable to talk about fat people in derogatory and judgemental terms? Because, many believe, they tell so many pork pies. I'm afraid my family are weird and anxious about food, weight and health, so regularly have discussions where I hear that fat people;

• lie to themselves and the world about how much food they eat and how much exercise they get.
• lie to themselves about how heavy they are, and pretend they don't have a problem.
• lie to themselves about what they look like.
• lie to the world about any medical conditions, medications or other life circumstances that make weight much harder to control. 
• lie to the world if they have mobility problems; a fat person who can't walk, can't walk because they're fat.  Fat people are immune to ill health unrelated to their weight.
• lie to the world if they say that they're fit and healthy. 
• lie to the world if they say that they're happy the way they are.

(Incidently, these discussions frequently involve one or two people who would fit medical criteria for morbid obesity, but of course, aren't fat fat and anyway, in their case, it's glandular. Meanwhile, there are invariably people there who smoke or eat no fruit and vegatables or indulge in similar behaviour in breech of universal guidelines for healthy living. But exposing the lies of those others, these absent fatties who are not there to defend themselves, gives folk at the table such power.)

Less often, in my presence, these conversations are about disabled people - not me, you understand, or anyone else we know, but those others, most so-called disabled people in fact, who are just exaggerating things, or making them up entirely, and just looking for attention and money - so much money to be made by affecting a limp! I try to tell them how much - I can provide figures and stats - but they don't believe me.


I was thinking about all this in a week where the police report into Jimmy Savile's prolific abuse of women and children was published, and folk come up with all manner of explanations for how he got away with it. One big reason - not the only one, but a whopper - is that we treat young people, especially girls and young women, especially poor youngsters, especially those identified as troubled on account of their mental health or family background, as if they cannot be believed. We treat almost anybody who complains of sexual assault as someone who is probably lying, even when any reason we can dream up for such a lie is far less likely than an actual sexual assault taking place.

Also this week, following the reporting of malpractice allegations against a particular gender reassignment doctor, there's been the #Transdocfail hashtag, which has flooded my Twitterstream with tales of mistreatment, dismissal, neglect, misdiagnosis, personal insults and sexual harrassment endured by trans people seeking medical treatment. There was then an almighty row over the language used by femininist Suzanne Moore (in this piece, the non-apology, but particulary on Twitter). Moore left twitter and several prominent powerful journalists and writers spoke of her having been hounded off by a politically correct mob - folk like Paris Lees, who wrote this beautiful letter to her. There then followed the single most vile piece of hate speech I think I've ever read in a national newspaper, by Julie Burchill, which has been taken down for now and I can only conclude was a cynical move on the part of the Observer to get more website hits when everyone flipped out over it.

So trans folk are certainly a group who are not believed about their life experiences. People seem to doubt;

• Whether they are transgender in the first place (and whether that status exists). 
• That a trans person can have medical and mental health problems unrelated to gender.
• That a trans woman is a woman, like other women, who experiences sexism and other gender nonsense (let alone additional gender nonsense). 
• Ditto trans men. 
• That when a trans person says they feel hurt or upset, it is because they feel hurt or upset.  

We could add to this list that trans people are not a powerful and aggressive political lobby, braying to lynch anyone who uses out of date terminology. But I suspect people only pretend to think this when called out on their own abusive behaviour. See, as with all things, there is a time for doubt.

Trans is an area where I had a long way to travel. I used to think that, whilst magnanamously believing that the happiness of people alive now was paramount, one day we would achieve complete sexual equality and everybody would be happy in whatever bodies they'd been born into. I believed this, partly because of nonsense I had been fed (my feminism being forged in Greer) and sheer ignorance, but partly because I had gone through something of a struggle to come to terms with being a girl.  What's more, as a younger woman, I really did believe that being a decent sort, believing in equality in principle,  meant that I couldn't go far wrong.

I didn't analyse it then - the ignorant aren't all that introspective - but it must have made me feel superior. There were these people, making themselves utterly miserable, undergoing a humiliating process of psychiatric assessment, hormonal treatment and sometimes multiple surgeries in order to feel okay in their own skin and here was I, having worked it all out, feeling absolutely fine in mine.  I always had great sympathy for trans people, probably the single most discriminated group of people and one manifestly less fortunate than myself (more likely to be abused at home, more likely to be harassed and attacked in the street, more likely to be murdered, more likely to live in poverty etc.), but for some years, I went round believing that they simply hadn't figured things out as well as I had.

I'm not going to swear at my younger self and I'd rather you didn't - she's no longer here to defend herself.  She met people, she read a lot and acquired a great deal more compassion.  But it wasn't all about what she didn't know, it had to be a bit about power. After all, it is an incredible leap of faith to believe that you understand someone's profound experiences better than they do. It's not impossible - there are circumstances, with close kith and kin where we perhaps do understand a situation better than the person in the middle of it all. But these are very complex experiences effecting thousands of people.

It's not nearly such a leap of faith to take someone's account of their own life at face value. It just requires us to bite the bullet of not knowing better. I have struggled with this more than once. Other people - including people who are, as it was put the other day, "on the right side" - seem to share this difficulty.

(By the way, if someone is offended by something you've said or done, that isn't an automatic reason to stop doing it. Lots of things offend lots of people. But it is impossible to work out how best to proceed, to behave decently, if you do not believe that someone has been offended. Listen!)

I guess scepticism makes us feel clever, the opposite of gullable.  It is a bit like when you read a murder mystery and you've got your eye on the friendly tea-sipping parson for the murder, as opposed to the ill-mannered thug of a scarf salesman who was found with the body. Only, in the last book, you fancied him for the village fete poisonings when he had a rock solid alibi, and in the book before, you had him down as chief suspect for the bank robbery when he wasn't even in the country. Sooner or later, you've got to admit you've got it in for that parson or else, at the very least, you're behaving as if you do.