Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 14

Queer comics

Last night I was stoked to be on a panel discussing queer comics at Gay’s The Word bookshop in London. Dream gig or what?! I’m going to share here my answers to the questions that Dr. Christine “Xine” Yao (of PhDivas podcast) asked me and Eleanor Crewes (author of the excellent The Times I Knew I Was Gay).

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What was your relationship to comics as a child? Right now?

As a kid comics were where I escaped. I spent all my pocket money every Saturday on Beano and Topper and a bag of sherbet lemons. Later I was bought girl’s comics specifically which were full of stories of brave orphans and best friendships.  While kid’s comics all had boys as the title characters, the girls in those comics like Minnie the Minx and Beryl the Peril were at least naughty like the boys. Girls comics were basically a tutorial in normative femininity – being for others and self sacrificing if you wanted to be popular and, later, to get a boyfriend. Luckily I also got into horror comics which offered something different, with ones like Misty particularly aimed at girls.

Needless to say there were no queer or non-binary characters in those kinds of comics back then. Although check out No Straight Lines to read about the underground queer comics that were happening in the 1970s and 80s when I was sadly too young to know about them.

Now my relationship to other people’s comics is mostly re-reading my favourites when I’m looking for comfort, so I was keen to hear more about newer queer comics at the event (more on that at the end of this post).

I’m also creating comics a lot myself as a way of figuring my own stuff out and communicating ideas simply to others. For example, my experience of trans is one of plurality so I’ve created a comic zine about how people can explore that idea as well as the first of a series of comics where I imagine my team of selves helping each other where they’re stuck. It’s great to be able to create basic comics myself, and to illustrate my books with these, as well as working with a proper illustrator – Jules Scheele – on our Icon graphic guides: Queer and Gender.

Are there characters or story arcs about queer characters or issues that stand out to you? Influences on your work?

I got into more indie comics when I was at university. Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise and Tim Barela’s Leonard and Larry were important ones – dealing with lesbian, bi, and gay people respectively. I love how Bechdel’s particularly moved with the times incorporating more trans characters and other kinds of diversity as the series progressed.

Bechdel went on to focus on memoir of course with Fun Home and Are You My Mother. That’s always really spoken to me, and is the kind of comic I make myself. Most queer graphic memoirs also explore therapeutic or mental health themes – Marbles and Calling Dr Laura – are other good examples. I also love Lynda Barry who mixes graphic memoir with guides to writing comics and weaves race and class into her work more explicitly than many.

What are your thoughts about queer representation in the indie versus big comics houses like DC, Marvel?

I haven’t read the DC or Marvel comics but I watch most of the movies – which are probably behind the comics in representation I know. To be honest they’re still pretty disappointing on inclusion of women (the first female titular heroes being so recent) and really poor on queerness, race, and disability. The X Men particularly disappoints me given that the whole thing is a meditation on the civil rights and gay rights movements: violent vs peaceful protest, radical vs assimilationist approaches, etc. Mutants clearly have much in common with queers in terms of how they are treated, so why don’t the creators learn from this?

I do find X Men and superheroes and villains useful for my writing on gender though. Lately I’ve been thinking about trans and queer people as time travellers, shapeshifters and shifters of space, holding super powers which could help save the world, which is a pretty useful approach at a time when there is such a rise in queerphobia and transphobia.

I’d recommend my co-author Alex Iantaffi’s podcast Gender Stories where they interview their daughter on gender representation in superhero movies and comics.

Since comics tend to be thought of as an American form what would you want people to know about UK comics?

That they exist. Particularly that we’re maybe at the forefront in creating critical comics about sex, gender and mental health.

The non fiction stuff out of the US and other countries is often fairly accepting of normative understandings of these topics whereas many UK creators are writing on madness in ways that critique cultural messages and mental health systems, as a few of us explored in some special issues of Asylum magazine a few years back. Jules and I are trying to write in similar ways on sex and gender.

What is distinctive about the medium in portraying queerness?

There’s something about the way comics communicate feeling – in a way that words alone can struggle to convey. Reading – and creating – them can be a very embodied experience forging a sense of connection between creator and reader through the experience described. I’m thinking of Hyperbole and a Half and how well that gets across the experience of depression for example.

There’s also something about the history of humour and lightness in comics which can make them a particularly engaging way to take in information. Readers certainly comment that Queer made queer activism and theory accessible and enjoyable to people who had struggled to wrap their heads around it in the past.

What issues are raised about how queerness is made visible (limits of racial representation, femme invisibility) and how have you seen comics engage or perpetrate these issues?

I think a long running series like Dykes to Watch Out For (as with its non-comic counterpart Tales of the City) can address these kinds of issues in a way that doesn’t happen in one-off comics. It’s still wearying that mainstream comic producers baulk at altering main characters to get a better spread of representation.

With Queer and Gender Jules and I had sensitivity readers check out the books particularly for areas we had less expertise or lived experience of ourselves. I also tried to ensure that I spent some time addressing the invisibility of race and class in queer theory and feminism, and bringing in the voices of queer people of colour and women of colour specifically, as well as representing diversity in the imagined readers of the books (who we follow through each book). We were able to tackle femmephobia specifically in the content of both books, and the graphic nature of the medium helped us to visualise this in ways words alone would have struggled to capture.

What queer comics should I read now?

Like I said I haven’t been very up to date on queer graphic books of late so I treated myself to several in my favourite genres at the event, particularly those that had a more intersectional feel. I’m now working my way through and loving them. There are also good lists of new queer comics here and here.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki who I already loved for This One Summer My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Kabi Nagata The Witch Boy by Molly Knox Ostertag Moonstruck by Grace Ellis, Shae Beagle & Kate Leth GenderQueer by Maia Kobabe

I also bought Eleanor’s awesome The Times I Knew I Was Gay, and MJ Wallace’s Bi The Way (a rare bi memoir comic which was really good to see).

More on comics

You can read more of my thoughts on comics and mental health in an article here (just scroll down). I’m keynoting the Graphic Medicine conference on comics, queer and mental health soon too.

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Memorial for Gran: Does everything happen for a reason?

One of the many, many big changes that’s happened for me in the past year is that I lost my last living Grandparent. My Gran, Leslie Duffield, died shortly before what would’ve been her 100th birthday: today 26th May. Here’s an excellent picture of us both taken at my sister’s wedding a few years back.

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You can read about Gran’s very interesting life in this article from her county newspaper. Her death has got me thinking about so many things. I’ve been writing in a few books and chapters about coming from a mixed class background (another way of being non-binary), and how curious it felt going from regular weekends in a bungalow with my Dad’s parents to yearly summer trips to a mansion house with my Mum’s. Gran Leslie’s death – nearly thirty years after I lost my first Gran – Audrey – feels like an important reminder of social injustice and the way it plays out on our bodies and lives. I don’t think there was any long obituary for Granny Audrey in her county’s newspaper despite her equally interesting life.

I’m living in Sussex now, where Audrey grew up and where there is a balance for me between nature and community like Leslie had in her life. I feel very connected with both Grans and aware of the ways in which their lives – and the lives that preceded them – impacted my own.

In the rest of this post I’ll share some reflections that I also shared for Gran Leslie’s memorial service, about a few of the ways in which her life and values impacted my own. Another time I’ll return to Granny Audrey who remains one of the most important presences in my life to this day.

Nature

My earliest memories of Leslie were of visiting this magical person in this magical place – so different to the worlds I inhabited in the rest of my life. I remember exploring her huge house from basement to attic which still shows up regularly in my dreams: all vast staircases and hidden rooms. I remember playing with all the old toys my uncles and mother had played with as children, and Gran reading to me from beautiful ancient copies of Winnie-the-Pooh and Beatrix Potter – doing all the voices. I remember discovering a love of nature – like my Gran’s – in the surrounding gardens, fields, and woodlands – seeing birds of prey, bluebells, hares. One time as a small child I sat still and silent in a copse for an hour while a rabbit came close by and observed me.

Family/Community

In her house I remember Gran primarily in the kitchen, ever calm, steady and available to everyone. She taught me to cook with love and I’m so grateful for that. One of my favourite things is still to show my love for people through preparing meals for them. It seemed like most of the day with my Gran involved cooking the next meal or eating the last one: breakfast, elevensies, lunch, tea, supper. But wherever we were in the process Gran had time to talk and to listen. And I remember a big kitchen table, heaving with people all chatting and teasing each other and passing around the food. As well as many of her family remaining nearby, Gran often had friends to stay and to visit, and she housed local students in her house for many years and became a surrogate parent to them. Like the natural world around us there was a sense of rightness about that family and community where all were welcome which I’d love to emulate in my own life.

Philosophy

Finally I think a lot about Gran’s philosophy on life, which is one that I both share and don’t share. She would always say ‘everything happens for a reason’. I think this view is what enabled her to embrace all that occurred in her life – joyful and painful – with gratitude and a capacity to cope which many of us would find hard to emulate.

However much I see what that philosophy enabled for Gran, as I said to her I don’t find it possible to agree that ‘everything happens for a reason’.

First, this is because I’m agnostic, and ‘everything happens for a reason’ seems to require a belief in an external force (god or ‘the universe’ or something) which presents situations to us in some kind of conscious way. I don’t feel able to say with certainty whether such a force does or does not exist. I relate to Stephen Batchelor’s deep agnosticism which is about more than just saying ‘I don’t know’ but rather embracing not-knowing and uncertainty, recognising the limits of what we (puny humans!) can know; our tendency to grasp for answers instead of remaining open to mystery. It seems to me that such agnosticism requires us to develop an ethics, and a way of living, that isn’t there because we hope for some reward in the future but is more focused on alleviating the suffering of ourselves and others right now, whatever happens next or whatever some higher power might or might not think of us.

The other reason I’m cautious about ‘everything happens for a reason’ is that it seems an easy slip from that into the belief that those who tough things happen to – who are in poverty or abused for example – have done something to deserve it. This is the comforting Just World Hypothesis bias which many of us slide into to make us feel better about our privilege and/or more in control of our lives. But it means that we’re often hyper critical of ourselves and others, individualise what are really structural and systemic problems, and risk falling into victim blame. Telling somebody who is suffering that everything happens for a reason seems unhelpful – and potentially unkind – to me (unless what you mean by ‘reason’ is patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, et al. in which case you do have a point).

The related view that works better for me is the idea – which I get from Pema Chödrön – of seeing all obstacles in our lives as our path: to embrace them and learn from them, to stay with the feelings that they bring up, and to invite them to open us up rather than close us down. For me that doesn’t require any definite belief about why these obstacles happen, and it still requires me to fight the injustices which place so many more obstacles in some people’s ways than others.

A dream

A couple of weeks after she died I dreamt that I was at Gran’s memorial and that she was there too – as a ghost – wandering around and chatting with everyone. She seemed to take this in her stride as with everything in her life, whereas I was desperate to talk with her and find out what was going on. When I got to her I asked what was next for her – after this final chance to connect with all her people. She said she didn’t know, just as she hadn’t known that she’d get this opportunity, and she seemed to be just fine with that. Whatever my agreements and disagreements with her philosophy, it somehow enabled my Gran to be this open to whatever came her way, even when that was death.

I expect I’ll keep returning to this dialogue between her worldview and my own for the rest of my life – even now she’s no longer here to talk about it with in person – and I’m very grateful for that.

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New Book – Life Isn’t Binary – Out Today!

My new book with my co-author Alex Iantaffi – Life Isn’t Binary – is out today. Like Rewriting the Rules, Life Isn’t Binary is an idea I’d had for a long time before writing it. Like many ideas it started with a ‘what if…?’ Rewriting the Rules was ‘what if a self-help book centred wider structures, systems and cultural messages as the problem, instead of individual people?’ Life Isn’t Binary was ‘what if we took the non-binary approach that many people are now applying to sexuality and gender and applied it to everything?’

My main reason for not writing it sooner was that I knew there were knowledges, practices, and themes that a book like this would need to cover which I didn’t have enough understanding or experience of myself. Fortunately I now have my awesome co-author Alex, and we were looking for a follow-up to How to Understand Your Gender. Alex and I have pretty similar views, but we come from different backgrounds in all kinds of ways. We bring together different spiritual traditions (e.g. Pagan and Buddhist), different activisms (e.g. intersectional feminist, queer, disability, sex critical), different academic backgrounds (e.g. psychology, sociology, philosophy, literature, health), and different therapeutic approaches (e.g. existential, mindfulness, systemic, and somatic).

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Most of these areas have something useful to contribute to the idea of thinking, relating, and living non-binary. We’re aware – of course – that there are many other schools of thought and traditions that would also be valuable but which we don’t know about personally. We hope that people with those understandings (from other faiths, philosophies, cultural contexts, etc.) will be able to bring them into dialogue with the materials in the book.

The book starts by taking you through why a non-binary approach is a useful way of understanding sexuality and gender. Alex and I have a background in bi politics, and we both identify as non-binary/genderqueer these days, so we talk about our own experiences as well as expanding out beyond the gay/straight and male/female binaries. Then we explore how the non-binary approach might also be helpful in thinking about how we do our relationships, how we think to our bodies and identities, how we relate with our emotions, and how we think about life, the universe, and everything.

You can listen to Alex and me talking more about Life Isn’t Binary here.

If you want a taster of the book, here are a few of my blog posts which cover non-binary sexualities, genders, relationships, feelings, and thinking:

Bisexuality, pansexuality, and queerNon-binary genderRelationshipsFeelingsNon-binary thinking about porn and trigger warnings

If it sounds up your street please do grab a copy of Life Isn’t Binary today.

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What Gender Affirmative Therapy is and is not

Two years on from 2017 when it began, we’re still in the midst of a moral panic about trans. Daily news stories across all sections of the media continue to spread myths and misinformation about trans people. It’s hard to even imagine the extent of the damage caused to trans people living our lives in this culture of hatred and denial of our basic existence and human rights, particularly young people who are growing up in this climate.
One topic which comes round frequently in this moral panic is the help and support given to people – particularly young people – who are gender diverse, or exploring their gender. Claims are often made that people are pressured to go down particular roots, for example that anybody who questions their gender is pressured to come out at trans, or that everyone is quickly pushed down a particular pathway of medical treatment and surgeries.
I was recently asked to put together a factsheet about what Gender Affirmative Therapy – or Gender Affirmative Practice in general – actually looks like: to put the record straight about what therapists, activists, and other practitioners in this area are actually doing – and inviting others to do. Here it is. You can download the pdf, or read the whole thing below that.
Gender Affirmative Therapy
What is Gender Affirmative Therapy (GAT)?

Gender affirmative therapy (GAT) is any form of counselling or psychotherapy which seeks to help people to come to a consensual, comfortable, and self-accepting place with their gender. It is founded on the position that no gender identity, expression, or experience is any more valid, ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ than any other. In this way GAT sits in opposition to any form of conversion therapy which attempts to change a person’s gender identity or suppress their experience or expression of their gender.

Why is GAT important?

We all have a relationship to gender and these are often related to our experiences of mental health difficulties, for example:

Attempts to conform to rigid masculine gender roles – including demonstrating strength and suppressing emotion – are linked to the high suicide rates, and to addictions and violent behaviour which also impact the mental health of others
Attempts to conform to rigid feminine gender roles – including being defined by attractiveness and relationships with others – are linked to high rates of body image problems, depression, and anxiety
Cultural transphobia and assumptions that people should remain in the gender they were assigned at birth are linked to high rates of suicide attempts, self-harm, and mental health struggles among trans people via common experiences of bullying, discrimination, and family rejection
Assumptions that gender is binary, and the cultural invisibility of non-binary genders, are linked to the high rates of mental health struggles among non-binary people (those who do not experience themselves as male or female)

For these reasons it is vital that therapists and counsellors are gender-aware and gender-affirmative: able to help their clients to understand the range of options they have in relation to gender and to support them in navigating these

What are the underpinning assumptions of GAT?

GAT is based on the position that gender is diverse and that no gender identity or expression is inherently superior or more ‘natural’, ‘normal’ or valid than any other. This includes the following assumptions:

It is no more preferable to be cisgender (remaining in the gender you were assigned at birth) than it is to be trans (shifting from the gender you were assigned at birth), or vice versa. Both trans and cisgender are big umbrella terms encompassing a diverse range of experiences, expressions, and identities
It is no more preferable to identify as a woman, as a man, or as a non-binary person, or to express femininity, masculinity, or any form of androgyny or non-binary gender
Most people identify, express, and experience their genders in different ways over time as they find more comfortable and consensual relationships to their gender. This can involve: changing dress and appearance; shifting titles, names, pronouns and other identifiers; taking external hormones; undergoing surgical procedures, etc. It’s important to remember that such changes are commonplace among cisgender and trans people alike (e.g. women and non-binary people may take oestrogens and progesterones because they are menopausal, trans, seeking birth control, intersex, or experiencing endometriosis; people may have mastectomy/breast reduction because they are trans or non-binary, because they are a man with gynecomastia or pseudogynecomastia, because they are a woman who doesn’t wish to be sexualized or otherwise stereotyped on the basis of their breast size, or because they are a person who is at risk of breast cancer or migraines related to breast size)
No particular gender journey is preferable to any other. For example, it is no more preferable: to express gender in culturally normative or non-normative ways, to undergo social or physical changes or not to

What happens in GAT?

The emphasis in GAT is on supporting the client towards a gender experience, expression, and identity that feels comfortable and consensual to them.

We live in a culture which privileges being cisgender over trans, being binary over non-binary, being a man over being any other gender, and being masculine over expressing gender in other ways. Therefore GAT may well involve unpacking cultural norms around gender and how they have impacted the client
Our culture also regards some gender identities, expressions, and journeys as more acceptable or ‘normal’ than others, so GAT may involve normalising and legitimising the various options available to the client
Gender intersects in vital ways with other aspects of experience (e.g. race, class, sexuality, age, generation, mental health, disability) so GAT does not focus exclusively on gender but rather explores it in the context of the client’s background and wider world
Given that there is still a great deal of stigma and discrimination around any gender non-normative expression there may well be exploration of how clients can navigate the wider world in ways that are safe-enough, and the balance between this and expressing their gender in ways that feel comfortable and consensual to them

What doesn’t happen in GAT?

There are many myths about what happens in GAT, largely due to the current moral panic about trans. The following things would never happen in GAT:

Suggesting that a person must be trans simply because they have a gender non-normative experience or expression, many cisgender people also have these
Suggesting that a person must be cisgender because they do not seem trans and/or non-binary enough to ‘count’
Encouraging a person to take puberty blockers or hormones, or discouraging them from doing so if that feels like the best path for them
Encouraging a person to have surgical interventions, or discouraging them from doing so if that feels like the best path for them
Rushing anybody into any form of gender identity, expression, or experience
Encouraging any decision before a person is fully informed about what it would involve and what impact it would have on them physically, psychologically, and socially. Informed consent is vital

Further Resources
You can find the research this factsheet is drawn on in:

Barker, M-J. (2017). British Association of Counselling & Psychotherapy Good Practice in Action Fact Sheet 095: Gender, Sexual, and Relationship Diversity (GSRD). 
Government Equalities Office (2018). National LGBT Survey: Research Report. 

Other useful resources include:

The Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in the UK, Version 2 
Stonewall trans report
Trans panic
Iantaffi, A. and Barker, M-J. (2017). How to Understand Your Gender. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Pink Therapy

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Podcast: Life isn’t binary! How non-binary thinking can help us to understand ourselves

My fabulous co-author, Alex Iantaffi, and I have a new book out this summer called Life Isn’t Binary. It’s all about how non-binary thinking applies to way more than sexuality and gender: the two areas where we might be starting to recognise that things aren’t as binary as is often assumed.

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In the run up to publication Alex and I made this podcast about the book and why non-binary thinking is such an important theme for us.

We discussed the trans umbrella, colonial thinking, bi-gender people and plural selves, sexualities, queerphobia, Disney Pixar’s ‘Inside Out,’ binary governing of our bodies and emotions, labels, intersectional identities, hierarchies, marginalisation, policing identity boundaries, prioritisation of different relationships, growing up in Italy, Capitalism, the importance of reflection, and being kind to yourself.

Check out the podcast here.

If you like this you can also follow Alex’s awesome podcast, Gender Stories and my regular podcast on sex, and relationships with my other amazing co-creator Justin Hancock – Meg-John & Justin.

And, of course, you can pre-order the book here.

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The snowflake generation

Recently I was interviewed for an article in OUTNews about the term ‘snowflake’ and whether we are in the midst of a snowflake generation. You can read the full article here, and here’s what I had to say…

1. How would you respond to common accusations of “snowflakery” within the LGBTQ+ community?

The snowflake insult tends to conflate a few different things. If you look into the meaning it includes the idea that ‘snowflakes’ believe they are particularly unique and special (like every snowflake is different), as well as the idea of being particularly fragile – and therefore in need of protections like safer spaces.

Teasing these things apart I wouldn’t say that LGBTQ+ people are especially unique, but I do think the snowflake metaphor is useful for thinking about gender and sexual diversity. When we consider intersectionality, and how every person is positioned in relation to multiple intersecting aspects including gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, age, generation, nationality, etc. then snowflake is about right. There won’t be any two people where this constellation of aspects is identical. That helpfully draws our attention to the ways in which all of us are privileged in some ways, marginalised in others, and how we need to hold our similarities and our differences simultaneously. Snowflakes all look similar, but in fact they are unique.

Are LGBTQ+ people particularly fragile? Again it’s more complex than that. We live in a culture which is rooted in hierarchies whereby some people, bodies, and lives are regarded as – explicitly or implicitly – more normal, healthy, or highly valuable than others. All of the groups on the more marginalised end of those hierarchies have less power and privilege and face more discrimination and hatred on a daily basis. This takes a toll as we can see when looking at statistics on mental and physical health. LGBTQ+ people – like women and BAME people – have higher rates of mental health problems than average because they’re disadvantaged – and often traumatised – in a society that sees heterosexuality and cisgender as the normal, superior, way of being. This can make us more fragile. It can also make us more resilient. George Takei’s comment about snowflakes being powerful when they take the form of an avalanche captures that duality.

2. How would you respond to those who accuse, for instance, trans people requiring safe access to spaces appropriate for their gender of being “snowflakes”?

To my mind this is not about trans people saying we are particularly unique, or particularly fragile. It is more about recognising the unequal power dynamics in wider culture and trying to even the balance. If we can agree that no people, bodies, or lives are inherently more valuable or ‘normal’ than others, then everyone should have equal access – for example to bathrooms where they can pee in safety, to media which represents people like them in positive ways, and to daily interactions with others where their identity isn’t constantly called into question or they have to answer intrusive questions about their genitals or medical history. If there’s no media debate on whether cisgender people’s genders are real or whether they might be misguided in believing they are the gender that they say they are, then there shouldn’t be a media debate on that in relation to trans people. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all be having interesting conversations about how gender works and the impact it has, but don’t focus that on trans people.

3. Even some members of the LGBTQ+ community say that many of these accusations are valid, and that sometimes we try to move too fast and harm our movement in the process, for example by quickly attempting to introduce non-binary genders into common parlance. How would you respond to this?

I feel like we’re starting from the wrong place if we take for granted that there is some kind of a normal group in society that we’re gradually working to add all the marginalised or minority people into. That’s the model here. It’s like the norm could just about cope with adding in lesbian and gay people twenty years ago, but bisexual people were told they had to wait their turn because they were confusing and they muddied the water. Now there’s a sense that maybe we can begin to open to trans people, but perhaps only trans men and women because non-binary people will be too complicated for ‘normal folks’ to get their head around.

Instead we need to question this whole model of normal versus abnormal that we’ve been fed. It’s not that LGBTQ+ people – or trans and non-binary people – are snowflakes. The point is that we are all snowflakes. Everyone is diverse in terms of their gender and sexuality. There is no norm. For example, over forty percent of young people are somewhere on a spectrum between heterosexual and homosexual. Over a third of people feel that they are to some extent ‘the other gender, neither gender, or both genders’. Well over two thirds of people have some form of kinky fantasies, and a similar number are non-monogamous at some point in their life. Add all this together and the number of people who are some kind of pure heterosexual, cisgender, only into penis-in-vagina sex with a monogamous partner is actually pretty low.

So I don’t think it’s about gradually adding new identity categories to the group of people who is seen as normal or valid, with each new group having to somehow wait their turn for grudging acceptance. Rather it should be about shifting the whole understanding of gender and sexuality to one of diversity – or snowflakes – rather than a normal/abnormal binary.

4. How would you respond to the idea that those who object to things such as two men holding hands in an advert are in fact guilty of being “snowflakes” themselves?

I think it’s clever how people have turned the snowflake accusation around on the accusers. If people become so upset and offended about LGBTQ+ rights then aren’t they being just as ‘fragile’ as the people they are accusing of being too-easily upset and offended? Again though I would question an ‘us and them’ approach as any kind of long term solution to this. As long as we remain in separate camps accusing each other we won’t get very far, and a lot of people will be hurt in the process. What’s needed is an end to the attempt to categorise people into more or less normal, or more or less snowflakey, and a recognition that we’re all diverse across multiple spectrums of gender, sexuality, and much else. Then we can work to redress the balance whereby some of been valued less than others on the basis of such spurious distinctions.

Find out more

Check out my books Queer: A Graphic History, How to Understand Your Gender, The Psychology of Sex and – coming soon – Life Isn’t Binary.

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Vanilla Sex

Recently I was interviewed for an article in VICE about what vanilla sex means and whether people are having it. You can read the full article here, and here’s what I had to say…

Have activities that fall under “vanilla sex” changed over time? Is something that was once considered kinky now considered vanilla?

Absolutely there has been some changes with a couple of cultural shifts that have happened in the last few decades, often called ‘sexualisation’ and ‘subjectification’. Sexualisation means that sex has become a big story in wider culture and there’s a lot more sexual media out there, easily accessible, and including more diversity of sexual practices. Subjectification means that people are now expected to be sexual subjects or entrepreneurs: learning tools and techniques to make them good at sex, and maintaining ‘great sex’ in relationships.

The combination of these two means that the kind of sex people are expected to aspire to has a broader range, and includes some things that would previously have been thought of as kinky. For example most sex advice books include light bondage, role-play, and sensation play these days. However there is still a strong sense that these things are an add-on to sex rather than sex itself (which is still generally seen as penis-in-vagina intercourse). Also there’s a strong sense of a boundary between ‘kinky-fuckery’ (as Ana calls it in Fifty Shades of Grey) and proper BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadomasochism). Proper BDSM is still seen as deviant and people are warned against it as if it was somehow inherently abnormal, dangerous or only for broken people (it’s not!)

But from these shifts you could argue that ‘vanilla sex’ now certainly includes oral sex, anal sex (man penetrating woman), and some light kink, in addition to penis-in-vagina sex.

More on this in my book with Ros Gill and Laura Harvey, Mediated Intimacy.

Do queer and nonbinary communities use the phrase “vanilla”? Or is that kind of construct less prevalent, and if so why?

I’ve heard it mostly used in kink communities to describe non-kinky sex, and even then there is often an awareness that none of us should really be judging people negatively for their sexual desires – whether those desires are kinky or non-kinky – and there can be concern that ‘vanilla’ sounds like a derogatory term (bland or boring). Queer people can use terms like vanilla, normal, mundane or muggle to describe non-queer people. It can be a way of reframing things so that the people who are often stigmatised, marginalised and pathologised are presented as in some way better than those who often do the stigmatising, marginalising, or pathologising. But again it is usually tongue-in-cheek with an awareness that reversing a hierarchy where one sexuality is seen as superior to another is still problematic.

It’s also worth remembering how few people actually tick all the boxes of being a completely vanilla, heteronormative, person. If you count up the numbers of people who are openly or secretly non-monogamous, with the number who have kinky desires, and the number who have attraction to more than one gender, or very low or high sexual attraction, actually that leaves very few people in what we’ve been taught to believe is ‘normal’.

More on this in my book The Psychology of Sex.

How do you think tech/apps have changed the way we view what falls under “vanilla sex” and how we view sex in general?

They’ve been part of this sexualisation and subjectification that I mentioned earlier – they make us more aware of the diversity of things that people can find hot, and the sense that it’s good to be open about such desires and to be able to offer to meet them. There is a risk that we go the other way in that people feel pressure to be up for anything and to offer things on hook-up apps and the like that they’re not really into. There’s nowhere near enough cultural consideration of how we do this consensually.

This is something we talk about a lot on my podcast with Justin Hancock megjohnandjustin.com.

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The pansexual revolution?

Recently I was interviewed for an article in The Guardian about whether pansexuality and sexual fluidity are becoming mainstream. You can read the full article here, and here’s what I had to say…

1. The ONS research out this week finds a rise in people picking “other” out of a choice of straight, gay or other. Are people more willing now to embrace the idea that they might not be exclusively heterosexual? If so, what do you think is driving that?

Yes, since the famous Kinsey studies in the 1940s and 50s we’ve known that a large proportion of people experience some attraction to – and often sexual experience with – people of their own gender (either in addition to other genders, or exclusively). However, those numbers are rarely reflected in national surveys because many of those people don’t feel able to be open about this. Year on year more people say they are something other than heterosexual – probably as prevailing cultural attitudes become more open, and people see more positive role models in the media and their everyday lives.

2. If the increase is among younger people, does it reflect generational differences from growing up in a less homophobic culture?

It seems likely that it is that generational shift and change in wider culture that’s responsible, although it’s important to remember that there are still significant barriers to people saying they are anything other than heterosexual. The very fact that people need to ‘come out’ as being LGBQ+ reminds us that heterosexuality is the assumed norm, and therefore being anything else still holds the stigma of being perceived as ‘other’ than the norm. For many people identifying as LGBQ+ still carries risks including hate crime, discrimination, and loss of vital family and community.

3. Do you think it’s likely that as the years go by the number of people identifying as exclusively, never-could-be-anything-but heterosexual will continue to fall?

Certainly, especially given that in terms of attraction and experience a significant proportion of people are not heterosexual (far more than identify as LGB or ‘other’).

4. Does the question you ask about sexual identities affect the answer you get?

Yes, this is the key point really. In my book The Psychology of Sex I point out that YouGov found that 88.7% of adults identified as heterosexual, 5.5% identified as gay, and 2.1% as bisexual. However when they were asked to place themselves on the Kinsey scale in terms of attraction, 72% of all adults, and 46% of adults aged 18–24 years, put themselves at exclusively heterosexual; 4% percent of all adults, and 6% of young adults, put themselves at exclusively homosexual. That means that around quarter of all adults, and half of young adults, placed themselves somewhere between the extremes. This suggests that being attracted to more than one gender is becoming a majority, not a minority, position. But wider culture is taking a long time to catch up to that fact, still tending to assume that people are either straight or gay, and presenting non-binary attraction as confused, a phase, or somehow suspicious.

5. In the past many people have (mistakenly) assumed that bisexual necessarily meant equally attracted to men and women. Is that idea now being dispelled?

It certainly has been dispelled in the bi and queer communities! Even the Kinsey type scale from attraction to the ‘same sex’ to attraction to the ‘opposite sex’ doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. A good analogy for that is liking coffee and tea: just because you like one more doesn’t mean you necessarily like the other one less. Of course now we’re grudgingly recognising the existence of non-binary people too, any kind of binary – or spectrum – model for sexuality won’t really work. That’s why the most accepted definition of bisexuality is ‘attraction to more than one gender’.

5. Millennials seem to be using a proliferation of labels for neither-exclusively-gay-nor-exclusively-straight, e.g. pansexual, or sexually fluid as well as bisexual. Is it right to see these as subsets of bisexual identity, separate to it, or is it not that simple?

If we take bisexual to mean ‘attraction to more than one gender’ then it can be a useful umbrella term for all of those identities – especially because it is a word that the general population understands and the government uses, so it’s helpful in fighting for rights and recognition. However, millenials (and many of us who have been thinking about these things for rather longer!) are also pointing out that sexuality is about way more than gender of attraction. Just as assuming a gay/straight binary has been problematic, so the idea that sexuality is all about the gender we’re attracted to is problematic. Scientists and social scientists alike agree that there are multiple dimensions of sexuality including amount of desire, roles we enjoy taking, other features of a person we find attractive, etc. There’s a zine about this here.

6. What do you make of the argument that people’s sexual identities can change over a lifetime?

Yes the evidence is compelling that many of our sexual desires and attractions change over time: the amount of desire we have, the kinds of things we enjoy doing sexually, what we fantasise about, and the kind of people we’re attracted to. We tend to accept that for some dimensions of sexuality but strangely not for gender-of-attraction – why would that one aspect remain static while everything else changes? Lisa Diamond is the go-to researcher who has found that sexuality is fluid for many of us.

7. The idea that sexuality is not as cut and dried as we once assumed is obviously welcome, but does it have any downsides for LGBT rights?

Well it also means that straight people can change and become gayer too. But yes much gay rights has, unfortunately, had to argue for fixed identities: that people are born gay and remain gay. Part of the reason bisexuality and sexual fluidity are so erased and rejected is because they’re seen as muddying the water on that argument. But research suggests that believing that sexuality is fixed and biologically determined doesn’t actually make people less homophobic. The way forward is a model of sexual diversity that recognises that actually a majority of people are something other than heterosexual, monogamous, and into only penis-in-vagina sex, and that people have a wide range of sexualities all of which are fine so long as practised consensually.

8. Are there any lingering myths and misconceptions about bisexuality that you’d like to put to rest for good?

All of them please. Also, as Shiri Eisner argues, we need to go further and put to rest the assumptions behind the myths. For example:

Bisexuality is a phase – for many people it is a static identity – also what’s wrong with going through phases?

Bisexual people are promiscuous – no more than any other sexual identity – also we can question the sex negative assumption that it’s seen as bad to be sexually desiring (especially for women)

Find out more

Check out my books The Psychology of Sex and Queer: A Graphic History.

The post The pansexual revolution? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Happy holidays comic: Plural selves

Happy holidays from Rewriting the Rules!

I haven’t blogged as much this year as I have in the past. This is partly because it’s been a year of huge change and upheaval for me, so my writing has been focused inwards more than outwards. It’s also because the things that have been going on in the wider world – particularly #metoo and the trans moral panic – have echoed through my communities, families, close relationships, and internal world in ways that have made it difficult – often impossible – to write and speak publicly about them, even though I still have much to say on the topics of consent and gender.

What have I been up to?

I have been podcasting with the fabulous Justin Hancock all year though, so feel free to check our collaborative project out at megjohnandjustin.com, including our holiday special on giving and receiving coming out over the holidays.

I’ve also finished a couple of books that’ll be out next year: Life Isn’t Binary with Alex Iantaffi, and Gender: A Graphic Guide with Julia Scheele (our follow-up to Queer). This year The Psychology of Sex came out which I’m really pleased with, as well as Mediated Intimacy – an academic book about sex advice with Rosalind Gill and Laura Harvey. It felt wonderful to publish a book based on my research before I leave academia next summer to focus on writing full time.

The comic

For the holidays I want to share with you a comic that comes out of the more internal work that I’ve been doing. Last year for the holidays I shared with you my Plural Selves Zine – all about how we can see ourselves as multiple rather than singular, and learn to communicate better across all of our selves. This is something I’ve been delving deeper and deeper into during the year in my journaling and creative writing, as well as in my relationships. The comic is one thing that has come out of this work recently. I hope you enjoy it.

You can either download the pdf of the comic below, or read it through the pics that follow…

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Trans: Adventurers Across Time and Space

This is a piece I wrote for the Gendered Intelligence conference and to celebrate Trans Awareness Week.

Introduction

This past year it was confirmed beyond all doubt that Dr Who is trans as Jodie Whittaker began playing their latest incarnation. During the same year we’ve been in the midst of an unprecedented moral panic where trans people have been treated much like the mutant characters in the X-men, echoing similar treatment of gay people in earlier decades.

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Here I want to play with the idea that trans people can usefully be regarded as time travellers and shapeshifters – or shifters of space. Given these impressive superpowers it’s sad indeed that we tend to be regarded as threats to time and space, rather than as heroes who may be able to transform both time and space for everybody’s benefit.

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This is – for me – a reaction against the unremittingly horrible onslaught against trans people that we’re going through. It’s an onslaught that I feel the visceral impact of on a daily basis, like most trans people. It’s one which has come close to home many times over, requiring levels of heroism from myself and the people I love which has left us exhausted and shredded, retraumatised and barely able to continue.

As we head towards trans day of remembrance on November 20th we remember the lives of those – mostly trans women of colour – which have been lost to anti-trans violence: a list which this year includes Naomi Hersi who was murdered in London last Spring. Those of us in the trans community are also painfully aware of the toll that the past year of virulently anti-trans media reporting has undoubtedly had on the already high levels of distress among our trans siblings; how many young people in particular have likely been pushed over the edge by the prevailing climate and the impact it has likely had on the reactions of their family and friends. And yet we continue to be used carelessly by journalists, politicians, researchers and others who feel entitled to take our stories, to make decisions which impact our lives for their own gain, and to get money and recognition on the back of our struggles.

In the face of all this violence and suffering I wanted to write something unapologetically celebratory about trans people. I know that the picture is more complex than this. I know that the world is a bleak place to be trans right now and getting bleaker all the time with the news from the US and Brazil. I know that trans people don’t really have magical superpowers (don’t we?) But humour me: we all need a bit of gender euphoria right now.

Trans Time Travellers

Two excellent colleagues of mine, activist-academics Kat Gupta and Ruth Pearce have been exploring the concept of trans time in their work. They point out that the way trans people are treated often denies us vital experiences of time that other people can easily access and take for granted. For example, the way that the media often continue to misgender trans people when reporting about us can be seen as refusing us the possibility of a future in our gender. At the same time, popular trans narratives may mean that we feel we have to erase our pasts to be granted rights and recognition.

There is what CN Lester calls ‘cultural amnesia’ around trans past, where anything trans related is always reported as new and therefore shocking and sensational, even when it has happened many times before: like a trans man being pregnant, or recognition of genders beyond the man/woman binary for example. The strong trans movement going back decades which Christine Burns documented in Trans Britain is written out of history as trans is presented as a new and fashionable threat to young people.

Policies and practices often expect trans people to be clairvoyant: promising to remain a certain way forever if we are to access services or obtain a gender recognition certificate, for example. Finally, the lack of sufficient services for trans people means that those seeking physical transition often feel like their life is delayed – or on hold – while they wait for treatment.

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Quiet, I’m trying to think. It’s difficult. I’m not yet who I am. Brain and body still rebooting, reformatting.

Right now, I’m a stranger to myself. There’s echoes of who I was, and a sort of call towards who I am, and I have to hold my nerve and trust all these new instincts. Shape myself towards them. I’ll be fine, in the end. Hopefully.

But Ruth and Kat suggest that trans people respond to such challenges in skilful and smart ways, finding many ways to travel, trick, and transcend time. For example, trans folks often experience non-linear life-courses which include disruption, disjuncture, and discontinuity of time. We might go through more than one puberty, with the second adolescence occurring later in life, which we experience in diverse, creative ways. Many trans people also look younger than we are. Some talk of our age in terms of ‘trans years’: the number of years since we came out or transitioned. So trans people of the same chronological age who came out at different ages are likely to have vastly different trans time experiences, which belie our apparently similar ages. Like Dr Who many of us find ways to regenerate over time as we find our ways to bodies, identities and expressions which feel like a better fit.

Another common form of time travelling is that of revisiting past versions of ourselves. For example, in her anthem for trans and gender non-conforming people, Black Tie, Grace Petrie sings to the younger version of herself, letting her know that she will find her way to a version of herself that fits. At the same time there’s a sense of a future version of Grace holding out hope that we’ll get through the current tough trans times.

I’m in black tie tonight

Get a postcard to my

Year 11 self in her year 11 hell

Saying everything’s gonna be alright

No you won’t grow out of it you will find the clothes that fit



And the images that fucked ya

Were a patriarchal structure

And you never will surrender

To a narrow view of gender

And I swear there’ll come a day

When you won’t worry what they say

On the labels, on the doors

You will figure out what’s yours

Grace Petrie, Black Tie

My own experience of trans time is of returning to sides of myself that I lost – or disowned – along the way because they were deemed inappropriate or unacceptable on a body like mine. Each shift and change becomes a way to reclaim part of me that was left behind, leaving me with a sense of being many different selves, ages, and stages all at once.

Trans Shape Shifters and Space Shifters

This brings us on to being a trans shape-shifter or space-shifter.

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Again, most trans people have pretty negative experiences of space. We’re deeply unsafe in many spaces, risking discrimination, ridicule, and even violent attack if our transness is read off us. At the same time we’re called snowflakes and dismissed if we point this out or try to fight for spaces to be safer for us to occupy along with everyone else.

Cruelly, despite our own deeply unsafe experiences of public spaces – and domestic spaces – the only images we tend to see of ourselves in the media are of being a danger to other people’s safety. It is a deep irony to see the battle being fought over our assumed threat in public toilets, when most of us have experienced bullying, attacks, and violence in such toilets. We all know about the strong ‘trans bladder’ that we develop to avoid using restrooms when we’re out and about, or at school or work. We do a violence to our own bodies because such spaces are so unsafe to us.

Many of us, particularly non-binary trans people, also have the disorienting experience of moving through space and being read differently at different times: but in ways that rarely mirror the ways we experience ourselves, even when we’ve repeatedly told people what that is. The affirming experience most people take for granted of having themselves correctly reflected in the important spaces they occupy day-to-day is unavailable to many of us.

So, as with time-travelling, we find ways to shapeshift in order to survive dangerous spaces, as well as ways of shifting space itself to turn it into a better fit for us, despite all the resistance to us doing this.

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Like Mystique in the Xmen many of us learn to use our shapeshifting powers to present in ways that enable us to navigate the spaces of our lives. Perhaps on the street we learn to present as more feminine when we might be perceived as a threat to others, but more masculine when we might be at risk of harassment. Maybe we learn in which spaces it is safe to foreground our transness, and which we need to background it or pass as cis. As H Howitt points out, we may well learn, for example, that the only way to access vital gender services is to foreground certain versions of transness, and the only way to access services for our disabilities or physical/mental health conditions is to deny or downplay our transness. It is another cruelty then that these vital survival strategies are turned against us in accusations of inauthenticity and deception.

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Like Magneto in the Xmen we also find ways of shifting the space around us to make it safer for ourselves and other trans people. For example during this moral panic trans people have found creative and innovative ways of making the online and offline spaces where we support each other safe-enough to occupy in spite of the frequent attacks and trolling we receive there. We may use certain platforms rather than others, curate our friend-lists, employ transphobe blockers on Twitter, or – as @1queer1 does – use algorithms to fill transphobic hashtags with cute animal pics or similar. We organise events of all kinds where we can support each other and share our experiences, or just know that we’ll be mirrored accurately by the people around us for once. Some of us take it a step further to make our whole lives more like these spaces.

In shifting space we often create something that’s better for everyone. For example the practices developed by Open Barbers to develop a hairdressers that is safer for trans people are ones that would be useful everywhere: not gendering customers or haircuts, creating a space that is also available for the community to use in other ways, and putting accessibility and consent at the heart of the project with diverse staff, sliding scale payment, options not to talk or look in the mirror, and more.

Conclusions

Travis Alabanza’s beautiful chap book Before I Step Outside [You Love me] brings together these themes of trans time and space. Travis speaks back to the older version of themselves that they were before they stepped outside into the risky space of the street and – in so doing – speaks to all trans people – particularly femmes and trans people of colour – who have to face this fear and uncertainty every time they step outside. Through their work they offer themselves – and the reader – the love that can give them the strength to step outside and to feel as though they matter.

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Trans people are repeatedly presented as threats to time and space. In relation to time, we’re accused of taking the world back to older versions of gender that threaten equality while simultaneously being accused of taking the world forward towards new versions of gender that will hurt the next generation. We’re perceived as threats to spaces such as public toilets, refuges, prisons, and schools. We’re mutants who threaten others through gender contagion and supervillains who hold ridiculous amounts power in some mysterious trans cabal.

But maybe we shouldn’t reject this perceived power. Travis suggests that rather than being pitiable people who rely on others’ benevolent generosity, trans people should be seen as a gift to those around us. We invite our friends and family into new ways of thinking about themselves, their genders, and their relationships, which can ultimately be just as liberating for them as it is for us. Imagine if families could celebrate finding out that one of their kids was trans instead of being horrified or sad.

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How to Understand Your Gender with Alex Iantaffi was our attempt to write the book we wished we’d had when we were young. In a way it’s a love letter to our former selves and also an attempt to contribute to changing the space of gender for the benefit of everybody. Nobody is served by the current rigid gender system: not men, not women, not non-binary people, not trans people or cis people. All of us suffer from it.

The normative check-box life which is set out for people from the moment of the first scan or gender ‘reveal’ party hurts all of us, and will inevitably be painfully disrupted at some point because it’s an impossible task to follow it perfectly. Trans people remind us not to make any assumptions about how a person’s future will unfold, and to prioritise shifting spaces to enable each person to find their own ways rather than imposing any ideals or assumptions upon them.

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