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.

Mary Seacole vs. Admiral Lord Nelson

When I was at school, we didn't hear about Mary Seacole.  In fairness, we missed her period, but British history, despite being a history of migration, immigration and colonisation involving, at peak, around a fifth of the world's population, was the history of white straight men.  When we came across a woman, any woman at all, I paid attention. For example, Rosa Luxemburg is a footnote to the story of post First World War Germany, where various extremist factions are squabbling over a devastated young country. But she's a woman and a Jew with one leg shorter than the other. She tried to make the world a better place, died for her trouble and had a really cool name.

Michael Gove is a strange fish, who's latest brainwave is to replace various characters in school history syllabubs with the traditional British heroes that he learnt about when he was at school in the 1900s. It's really tricky to find what he actually said at source and you'd hope that history is never taught as a series of biographies in any case, but the idea of wiping Mary Seacole from school curricula has invited particular comment. In one paper, it said they were going to swap William Wilberforce, Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole for traditional British heroes such as Lord Nelson, Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill.

I could say a lot about all those figures, but I wanted to focus on Nelson and Seacole.  They are both interesting characters - I'd invite either round for dinner - they both lived through and played a role in events that were much bigger than themselves and they were both true celebrities who captured the public imagination of the day.

It seems to me, we study history for five reasons:

1. To understand the evolution of ideas in technology, science, religion, social justice, politics, fashion design etc..
2. To understand what people can do for each other if they are good, strong and brave.
3. To understand what people can do to each other if they are bad, weak and cowardly.
4. To understand the nature of history itself, how is it is recorded, revised and understood (as well as hidden, twisted and misunderstood). 
5. To understand the series of events which lead to the state of the world in the present day.

Arguably, both Seacole and Nelson's stories touch on all these things.

Of course, different areas of history appeal to different people.  Personally, I like pretty much all of it.  I haven't yet given in to my Mum's recommendation that I visit the local Drainage Museum, but I do know that if I went there and learnt about the history of drainage, I wouldn't be bored.  Not the first time I went, anyway. 

But history is about asking questions.  Questions such as, how come a huge swathe of unfarmable, barely habitable marshland in East Anglia was drained to make up part of the bread basket of England; who did it, how did they do it and why?  I trust all these questions and more can be answered at the Drainage Museum.  And, through what little knowledge I have of the Fens, I do know that this stuff touches on important and current issues, such as immigration (it was mostly Dutch labourers - experts in drainage - who did this work for us), the environment and environmental technology. 

I didn't study Nelson at school, but I know an awful lot about him through cultural osmosis.  He's the bloke at the top of the big tall column in the most famous thoroughfare in our capital city.  How could I not know about Nelson?

Nelson became a hero in his lifetime because he was very good at his job and he was involved in crucial military campaigns - events which held back the spread of French imperialism and have influenced British political life and culture to this day. Anti-French humour still refers to the Napoleonic wars. These wars are the inescapable backdrop to all of Jane Austen's novels, as well as being used as a setting for popular literature - both adventurous and romantic - to this day (notably the Sharpe, Hornblower and Master and Commander novel series). When Harrogate were first allowed to elect a mayor, they voted in a man in a monkey suit to commemorate the poor innocent monkey that was once hanged there as a French spy. 

But Nelson's life story is not all that remarkable.  He did not rise from humble or disadvantaged origins. He was on the right side only sometimes (Trafalgar was about fending off an invasion, but that wasn't the only thing the British Navy got up to at this time).  He was good at his job at a crucial point in history, was a massive celebrity in his lifetime and died a hero's death, defending his country.  

Some Other Facts I Know About Admiral Lord Nelson.

1. About five miles up the road from where I sit, there is a sign that announces "Welcome to Norfolk: Nelson's County". Before Stephen Fry, Nelson was the only famous person ever to come from Norfolk.  Actually, no, I'd forgotten about Delia Smith! 
2. Nelson had a famous extra-marital affair with Emma Hamilton who, in terms of truly remarkable life stories which tell us much about the age they lived in, trumps Nelson's any day. The story of their love affair and its notoriety, which at one point had them living very publicly as lovers in the same house as Hamilton's husband, is remarkable and comes at a turning point in British social history. Had they lived in England at any time in the following hundred and fifty years, their romantic lives would have been a dirty little secret at best, and potentially, the end to Nelson's career. 
3. Nelson is a very famous disabled hero, with only one eye and one arm. He is quoted as saying various stoical things on the loss of his arm and almost undoubtedly returned to work within half an hour. It was, of course, extremely commonplace for sailors to be disabled at this time, whilst still being able (and expected) to continue sailing and fighting. This is an age where disability is conceived in a completely different way to the 21st century and in some respects (not all, but some) the position of disabled people was better then it would be for most of the next two centuries. But I don't think Michael Gove imagines a focus on Nelson from this point of view.
4. Similarly, the fact that his final words were a request for a kiss from his male friend.  The fact that people still argue whether he said, "Kiss me, Hardy" or "Kismet, Hardy" is both an amusing and important point about our cultural investment in history. Nelson was dying, he probably wanted comfort or else to say goodbye to his friend, at a time when there were very different social rules about physical affection between men.  According to my very brief and inadequate research, the first use of the word kismet written down in English comes forty-four years after Nelson's death.  I'd be more inclined to think his last words were, "Ouch, urgh, bugger."  
5. Nelson had a godson who married a woman of colour. Her name was Mary Seacole. 

Now, I know all this through bits and pieces I've picked up in books, TV and radio programmes, none of which were specifically about Nelson.  And some of these points raise questions about our past and present.  But when it comes to Seacole, pretty much all I have is questions.

Some Questions I Have (and Have Heard Asked) About Mary Seacole

I know much less about Seacole than Nelson.  I'm not that interested in her time and place, so I haven't read up on her, but I have heard some questions asked about her, and have others of my own. 

1.  Was Mary Seacole black?  What does that even mean?  These days, you and I would regard her as black because blackness is a political status, but the exact pigment of her skin seems to have been and remains a cause for a great deal of analysis and speculation.  Even she wrote about herself as "only a little brown."  Why would anyone care so much?  It's very like the way we talk about sexuality and disability today, struggling all the time with the non-binary nature of identity.
2. What was it about Mary Seacole's life which made it possible for her, as a fat single middle-aged woman of colour, to do all kinds of things that were unthinkable for the vast majority of women within British and Jamaican culture at that time? She traveled, she ran her own businesses and whilst not coming from quite the bottom rung of society, she rose to fame and respect which had her massaging the Prince of Wales' gammy leg. Was this something in Seacole's character? Did her marginalised identities mean that she had nobody in her life trying to control her?  
3. What on Earth is a woman from Jamaica doing risking her life to nurse wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War?  What was the Crimean War even about?  (It may be just me, but I've never grasped what any of us were doing there, apart from being killed and horribly wounded.) 
4. How could someone be so famous in their lifetime and then disappear from the history books, when the activities and events they were involved in (the nursing revolution that took place in the Crimean War) continued to be read and studied?  What is it about Florence Nightingale - a figure not without her own controversies - that means that every one of us knew who she was before we left primary school and I only heard of Mary Seacole about ten years ago?
5. Is some of Seacole's history completely made up? Apparently, she wrote an autobiography - the very first by a black woman in the UK - which some consider to be something of a fiction.  Florence Nightingale said she had an illegitimate daughter and was running a brothel on the front-line of the Crimea War.  Is Seacole overrated because we are desperate for a heroic black woman in this part of our history? Is she a politically correct construct, as the Daily Mail would have you think? 

You can never look at two characters in history and say that one is more important.  As I said, history shouldn't be all about biography anyway.  Oliver Cromwell is a terrifically important figure - probably the closest we have had to a Stalin or Hitler - but you couldn't possibly study him outside the full context of everything that was going on at the time (pretty much the most important period of our political history - everything we are comes from what happened during and directly after his lifetime). 

However, there are lives which raise more questions about our past and our lives today.  I suspect that Mary Seacole is more useful to study than Nelson - and kids will learn about Nelson anyway.  And yes, it does matter that she is a black woman.  Race and gender matter both in the context of her story and the way we tell it - or try to dismiss it - today. 

Why are women typically more religious than men?

There are some really dodgy theories about sex chromosomes and their influence on human behaviour, but this one shocked me on account of the source and context. I was listening to the Christmas Eve edition of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which was a really good episode and had three guests I'd turn on the radio for - Mark Gatiss, Richard Wiseman and Steve Jones (of the snail fame). Their other guest was Victor Stock, the former Dean of Guildford Cathedral, who was rather brilliant. 

But the great Steve Jones was talking about the evolutionary psychology of religion and came out with the following;

"Universally, worldwide, it's always been the case that those who are crippled and afflicted by having a Y chromosome - that's all of us on this platform - are less religious, and less willing to accept religion that women who don't have a Y chromosome. It's very hard not to argue that there's not some kind of biology there. We may not know exactly what it is, but biology is in there somewhere."

He then goes on to explain that people on the autistic spectrum are much less likely to be religious, which must, he feels, have a biological explanation.  I'm sure someone else can clear that one up.

Of course, the important phrase is "in there somewhere", but does it have to be?  It may be that biology does play some role in religiosity, but before the end of the programme, I had thought of a number of reasons why women may exhibit greater religiosity than men.  And I think only someone living in the West could possibly assert that biology must play a role. So...

The Possible Reasons Why Women Would Be Typically More Religious Than Men 

as came into my head in the space of five minutes - okay, it took longer to write down!

• Cis men typically possess an XY pair of sex chromosomes, cis women typically possess an XX. There may be something about the difference between these particular chromosomes which alters men and women's brains to make women more prone to religious feeling - however that may be defined - than men. 

• Globally and locally, women are more likely to live in poverty. Across the world, there is a strong inverse correlation between wealth and religiosity.  There are many exceptions and complexities, but these trends are pretty crystal; women are more likely to be poor, poor people are more likely to be religious. 

• Women are more likely to witness birth and death first-hand. Obviously, women are more likely to give birth but, although it's commonplace for fathers to be there in this country, across the world, women are more likely to attend births.  Women are more likely to care for the sick and dying, and to be with people in their last moments. Understanding, celebrating and coping with birth and death is one of the major themes of all religious and folk traditions. Religion often gives people the language to use and the stories to tell on such occasions. 

• Women are more likely to live with chronic illness. Faith can help people cope psychologically with loss, pain and other difficulties, but organised religion is also good at combating social isolation and in many cultures, providing nursing care and assistance where state help is absent.

• Women like dresses.  Although predominantly men, most religious leaders wear dresses, often with elaborate trims and accessories, depending on the occasion. Women may attend places of worship to see the dresses their leaders are wearing.

• Across the world, women are much less likely to get very much school education. Women are less likely to be literate. Women are less likely to learn about other belief systems or acquire the intellectual tools and information which allow some people to doubt the messages they've been taught all their lives.

• Women are more likely to be widowed and/ or to live alone for significant periods of their lives.  Organised religion is often excellent at combating social isolation. There ought to be, but there is no organised humanist system for holding communities together and looking out for people on their own.  

• Women are more likely to find themselves in situations of abject helplessness; rape, slavery and domestic abuse. Faith gives some folk something to hold onto when everything else is out of their control. This isn't necessary faith in God or gods, but it often is. 

• Kate Middleton got married in a really big church. All women are interested in the life of Kate Middleton and so are more likely to go to church in an attempt to emulate their idol. 

• Women are more likely to be responsible for the moral and intellectual education of their children. In many parts of the world, organised religion is at the centre of all available education - even in the UK, many better state schools are church schools.  One big reason some religious institutions spend so much energy trying to subjugate and control women is because mothers are seen as the key to their children's religiosity; control the women and you control the next generation.

• Because certain religious institutions do spend so much energy trying to control and subjugate women, that tends to keep women hooked.  You're nothing, you're a spare rib, you're weakness, you're a temptress and a slut who brings violence upon yourself, but come here every Sunday and you will be forgiven.  Men can feel tremendous religious guilt, of course, but often having less laid on their heads, it may be easier to walk away. If you have grown up believing that your very physical being is responsible for not only your sin but the sin of those around you, it's really difficult to finally stop apologising. 

• Women are less likely to have opportunities for fulfillment in paid work. Religious institutions are very good at organising and valuing unpaid volunteers who care for the sick, provide childcare and other social services, produce and distribute clothes and food for the poor, make crafts, raise-money and so forth.  

• The major religious festivals almost always involve a lot of baking (with and without yeast). Women are really good at baking. Women become involved in religion so that they can show off how good they are at baking.

I think there are probably other ways that religions allow women, who often live in circumstances of very little power, to have some power, even if they're very rarely the ones in charge.  Even in ancient Athens, which was an extraordinarily sexist place, the city cult was headed by a massively powerful priestess.

None of this means that biology has nothing to do with religiosity, but as is almost always the case with the claims of evolutionary biology around gender, there are other more obvious explanations that need exploring first.

32

Today I am thirty two, which is a happy number.  When I said last year was the happiest of my life, I meant it sincerely. And when I say that 2012 has been even better than that, it really has.

So much has happened this year that I'm in danger of sounding like one of those awful smug Round-Robin Christmas Letters (the family recently received one with the line "According to my calendar, I didn't do anything in September - but I expect I was simply too busy to write it down!"). But I am proud of what a full life I have now, and memories of arriving at so many birthdays with a sense of disappointment, shame and the desperate hope that next year would be better, make me want to celebrate the fact that I now enjoy my birthday and only hope that next year will be half as good as this one.

Of course, this year's not been plain sailing; my health is more stable than it used to be, but there have still been several periods when I've been stuck in bed all the time. Stephen's health has been up and down, there's been stress, serious illness and death in the extended family, and earlier in the year we lost a special family friend.  However, today is all about the good stuff.

My thirty-second year in bullet points (but no particular order):

Stephen, a beautiful white man with dark wavy
hair and glasses, behind a birthday cake with
number-shaped candles reading "30".

• Between us, Stephen, my sister and I organised a surprise party for my Dad's 60th birthday - which remained a surprise until about twenty minutes before the event. This was a massive undertaking, negotiating with my mother, organising food and drink and smuggling a gazebo in the boot of Dad's car under the pretense that the weight was just books and clothes. I also made a great deal of bunting in the early spring, not realising that, with the various events in the summer, I would have been able to buy bunting for a few quid a mile. 

• Stephen himself turned 30 in May. That was a fantastic day. 

• Stephen had his graduation in March. We traveled into the centre of London (the first time in seven years for me) and attended the graduation at the Barbican. 

• We made our first music video, which went viral and became the ukelele precursor to (and possibly the inspiration for) Gangnam Style.

(Click CC button for closed captions.)

• I entered a painting into the National Portrait Competition. That was exciting. I dragged Stephen and Mike to Shoreditch as a detour on our way to Stephen's graduation and about a month later, Mum went on a railway odyssey to pick it up again.  As expected, nothing came of it - the winner was very well deserved - but it was a very positive and interesting experience. 

• I didn't do a great deal of painting this year, but I did paint an A1 (about 600x800mm) portrait of Dad for his birthday. It's very tricky to paint on a canvas that size without an easel (I have a suitable easel, but I didn't have it with me). It's also fairly tricking to move such a painting and its frame around without a person you live with noticing. Fortunately, he's not very observant.

• I made cards and things as I always do, but my favourite artsy things this year was designing a plate for Alex. I bought Sophie a melamine plate with a lion on for Christmas and decided to look for something similar, but a bit more grown-up for Alex. I couldn't find anything I liked even slightly so with Stephen's help, I got a plate made from a design I had drawn on paper and coloured in on the computer.

• The plate was partly inspired by the fact that this year, one of us got the best diagnoses ever.  Find physical impairment emasculating? Fed up with bodily difference being considered a sign of weakness? Try Viking Disease! 

• Stephen's photography was featured in an exhibition at Guildford Cathedral. He exhibited two photographs and somehow managed to sell three.

• Another week of photos, and I will have completed a Project 365 (or 366 - I did get in a muddle and I do appear to have lost a day somehow).  You can tell the parts of the year when I was unwell, as I have taken one or two hundred momentously boring photos. 

• We also made an incredibly realistic alpaca puppet. Yes, that is a puppet. No, honestly - if you look really carefully, you can see the strings.

• The low point of the year was, after having had surgery to remove a tumour on his kidney, Stephen's uncle became very seriously ill. For several weeks, we were almost certain that he was going to die, with one crisis after another - internal bleeding, accumulating gasses and MRSA - until he finally turned a corner. And now, despite the fact he still has what amounts to an open wound on his belly, the uncle is fit as a fiddle and has been recently driving round France. Meanwhile, so much of the tissue of his kidney died that it seems very unlikely that the cancer will come back.  

• Stephen invented and constructed the PlyPi, Raspberry Pi Case which has been featured in all manner of geeky places.

• In July, Stephen and I got engaged. We've set a date for next summer and we've talked about it a lot, but to be perfectly honest, that's just about as far as we've got.

Sophie - A pale-skinned baby with dark eyes and a wide mouth
looks up and smiles. 

• Our niece Sophie was born. We went down to the New Forest to meet her, which was a huge day but a really special one. Sophie visited us in Surrey in November. She is an incredibly smiley baby, and my sister's family seem extremely happy.

• I didn't expect to be affected by the Jubilee in any way, shape or form. As it was, the Sunday of the Jubilee weekend with Stephen's Monarchist family was a very special day, I wore my tiara, we violently spatchcocked and barbequed a whole chicken and then had hysterics over the BBC coverage of the Jubilee Flotilla (this coverage was later criticised, but it was as if Brass Eye had done it, so it was great). We fell asleep at some point and woke up to see the chamber choir singing in the rain. Now that's what I call pluck. 

A Union Flag flies amid the greenery.

We ended up watching more sport over a two week period than I have in the last twenty years. I really enjoyed the Olympics, although I felt much less positive about the Paralympics.

• I entered my first novel into a competition to have it read over and assessed by a literary consultancy. It won the free read, and I got such a lovely flattering e-mail about the sample chapters that I printed it off and stuck it to the notice board. I received the report last week and it was really positive - there were weaknesses I knew about, and my reader pretty much spelled out what I needed to do. Enough time has passed that I'm quite looking forward to going back and polishing it up a bit. 

• Despite so much going on this year, my second novel is progressing at a pace, and it feels really good.  Of course I have massive wobbles in confidence, but other times, I think it is bloody good. I never felt that way about my first novel whilst writing it. I hope this is another sign of increased confidence, and not a tragic delusion.

• In the last few weeks, my forth wisdom tooth is on the move.  Yes, I'm still teething.

A very Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and a peaceful, relaxing few days to everyone else. I hope you all have an excellent 2013 - you all deserve it. And thank you, one and all, for your ongoing presence and support.