Sarah, The Bringer of Tea - Of Zombie Commuters, Nice Young Policemen, Creepy Old Men, and Protests

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1st October, 2008

12:19 pm

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Of Zombie Commuters, Nice Young Policemen, Creepy Old Men, and Protests

In the days when the Sun was setting on it, British Rail extended the overhead electrification on the Kings Cross to Cambridge line north, beyond Cambridge, to the line's end at Kings Lynn, on the north Norfolk coast. In true British fashion, they did it on the cheap, and the power supply north of Cambridge would supposedly break if you try to take an 8 coach train to Kings Lynn.

This turned out to be fortuitous for me this morning, because of the 6 trains an hour between Cambridge and London, 2 of them are expresses - the xx:15 and xx:45 trains. The xx:45s don't start at Cambridge, but come form the north first, giving the intrepid fenland commuters an hourly fast service to London.

In peak periods though, 4 coaches won't cut it - they struggle to fit the rush hour load in 8, and these are some of the most overcrowded trains in the country. This means that they have 4 waiting at Cambridge and the 4 coming from Norfolk creep up behind them, before coupling onto them. This takes time.

That's why, despite running out onto the platform, breathless at 06:46 this morning, I was still able to catch the infeasibly early 06:45 departure to Kings Cross. It was full of people who sat there for the whole journey in total silence, most of us apparently resenting being there. To add insult to injury, the morning was overcast and we weren't even rewarded with a sunrise for our efforts.

The hurtle at London was otherwise uneventful, and I only had to endure a few stops of nose-to-armpit, oven-like conditions on the Victoria Line before emerging amongst the shop workers, arriving for their morning shifts, at Oxford Circus Underground station.

I made my way to the Royal Society of Medicine on Wimpole Street and found nobody there. For a few minutes I was having visions of being a one-woman protest, and looking very foolish, but others soon arrived, starting with the very pleasant

bird_of_paradox, who I'd not met before. Also on the scene were two very young male policemen, there to make sure that the demonstration we had planned went off peacefully, or whatever it is policemen at these things are supposed to do (stand there and look bored for 2 hours, it turns out, but at least they did it decoratively)

After a little while, we were all assembled, and Natacha, who had worked hard to herd everyone on Facebook and cleared everything with the police got to work setting up some placards for some of us to hold. There were three in the event, and we decided there and then what to put on them. "Don't block blockers", "Trans Children are human beings - treat them like it", and "No reparative therapy here".

For those unfamiliar with what's got transpeople so excised over a conference at the Royal Society of Medicine, I'll provide a bit of background. The conference was about the use of GnRH agonist drugs in pubescent trans people to delay their puberty and buy them time. This is a practice that is widespread in some parts of the world, but not in the UK. There's an American-Canadian psychologist called Kenneth Zucker, who was presenting the opening address to the conference, and he has achieved notoriety in the trans community for what many see as the use of aversion/reparative therapy in young children to make them conform to gender roles. Essentially, this involoves punishing the children for playing "inappropriately", until they get "programmed" to react badly to the "inappropriate" gender cues, rather like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, who finds himself feeling violently ill when exposed to Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

Some of us feel this is emotional and psychological abuse. It's bad enough when it's done to adults. Zucker says he's done it with children as young as three. This is where the "ex-gay" movement has run to after being discredited over so-called conversion programmes with homosexual adults and teenagers - it now plys its trade under the guise of "therapy" aimed at preventing children growing up with "gender-inappropriate" behaviour. The subtext is that, "if forcibly stop little Jimmy playing with Barbie, we might stop him from wanting to hug a boy in 15 years time, which he probably won't want to do anyway".

Anyway, we set up what turned out to be a terribly "nice" middle class affair, with us saying, Good morning" to people as they walked past, while offering them a copy of this leaflet. The takeup rate was pretty good, with most people meeting our cheery smiles. A small proportion of people, maybe about 10-20%, walked past us either waving dismissively, or muttering under their breath and looking at us in disgust. There was a surprising correlation between the people who did that, and the people who then went and stood right in front of the arrow in the picture, tugging at a locked door.

Perhaps, in their "not had morning coffee" state, they were thrown by the sight of a bunch of transpeople and allies, distastefully sullying the entrance to the RSM and having the nerve to try and hand out leaflets. They might be contaminated! They might catch TEH TRANZ from them! That's a rather nicer interpretation than the alternative - that a large number of the UK medical establishment's great and good can't work out how to walk through an open door, when there are signs.

But we handed out lots and lots of leaflets. So many, in fact, that by 9am our initial pile of over a hundred leaflets was looking seriously depleted. Thankfully there was a copy shop that was opening for the morning just literally across the road. I nipped in there and had another hundred made, and apparently while I was in there I missed the opportunity to hand a leaflet to Dr Curtis, my erstwhile gender specialist. Oh well.

There was person I didn't miss though, and this has to go down as the creepiest thing that's happened to me today (and something happened earlier this morning that was quite creepy to start with - someone, who I have good reason to believe may work for the Metropolitan Police, has been leaving fun little anonymous comments on my LJ over the Toiletgate incident, so it already faced stiff competition).

There were various people from, mostly non-mainstream media organisations there; I spoke on camera to a lady who was involved in making a film, about why we were protesting. I hope I didn't look like a dork, or sound too male. Anyway, while handing leaflets out, I was dimly aware of someone else hovering around the other side of the street taking photographs of us, the demonstrators, with an SLR camera.

As the time for registration approached, this chap came over and made to go in. One of my fellow demonstrators stopped him and said, "Are you with the press?"

He gave a rather abrupt, "No", and as he was doing so, I said, in the cheery manner we'd been greeting people for the last hour, "Good monring!" and held out a leaflet.

As he took it, I looked up and realised who our would be paparazzo was; I recognised him as none other than Professor Richard Green, formerly head of the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic.

And he was hanging around, taking photos of protesters outside an RSM conference on trans issues.

Right. Well that didn't at all feel like the creepy old man hanging round by the school gate, oh no.

Perhaps he has a Little Book of Uppity Trannies. A rogues' gallery of those of us who need putting in our place? I wonder if he realised that I was the same person who playfully taunted him as he left the General Medical Council with his tail between his legs after the GMC had failed to grant him and Charing Cross a virtual monopoly on treatment of transpeople in southern England last year?

If that's the case, you're out of luck, Dick. They already cut it off, dear.

It was nice to see a number of people I knew going in, some of whom stopped for a nice chat and to exchange information (got some fab stuff from the GIRES people). One attendee in particular had a special handout prepared for them - an A4 brown envelope containing 20 copies of the leaflet which they were going to strategically leave around inside.

We never saw Zucker himself, so perhaps he was ferried in a side entrance, lest the bunch of, polite middle class people with the cheery greeting decided to offer him a leaflet and wish him good morning with intent.

But all-in-all, I think the protest went very well. I'm sure plenty of the people we gave the leaflets to were there for other reasons (such as working there), but that's probably good. As with the Bitch protest in May, the effect we were hoping for was to perhaps make the RSM think twice about inviting people like Zucker next time. Perhaps they'll realise that if they rub transpeople's collective noses in it, we'll come along and perhaps cause them a bit of embarrassment in front of their target audience.

In closing, I did feel a bit sorry for the policemen, who got to stand there looking bored (and very, very young - am I really going to be 35 tomorrow?)

I did offer them a copy of the leaflet to read, in order to pass the time, after they realised that nobody had brought pitchforks and flaming torches, but they declined. They seemed like nice chaps anyway.

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Comments

From:	zoefruitcake
Date:	1st October, 2008 01:02 pm (UTC)

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Perhaps he has a Little Book of Uppity Trannies

maybe you should compile one of your own, like the old 1970s eye spy books for spotting things on long car rides. Then he could just tick you off when spotted and send it in for a badge when completed.
;0)

I agree, very creepy

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From:	auntysarah
Date:	1st October, 2008 01:12 pm (UTC)

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"My first Eye-Spy book of the ones who slipped through the net and still have some fight left in them"?

I get the feeling that, what with private specialists, Internet pharmacies, and surgeons who will accept self referrals, the fact that they can't actually stop anyone with enough money from transitioning (thus only getting to lord it over to those who aren't able to tell him where to shove it before going elsewhere) probably really pisses people like Green off.

Diddums.

Nice write-up

Re: Nice write-up