When JKP asked me to write a piece on queer joy for Pride season my immediate response was ‘you’ve got to be kidding.’ After these past two years, how can a focus on joy – or pride for that matter – be anything but a deluded kind of ‘back to normal’ dream: a dangerous denial of what we’ve been through, what we’re still going through? On reflection though I began to wonder about receiving the phrase ‘queer joy’ as an invitation. What might it mean to queer joy?

Queer umbrellas

If we take queer as a noun – an umbrella term for our LGBTQIA+ community – then it’s hard to find much joy. At a cultural level, the pandemic disproportionately impacted queer people’s mental health and queerphobic hate crime soared. The recent government U-turns on banning conversion therapy, and subsequent decision to do so only for sexual orientation, reflects the ongoing moral panic against trans folks, and how intersex and a-spectrum people are rarely included under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella in more than name, given that erasing practices for these groups are some of the most extreme and commonplace.

The impact of living through this time has been even greater for those – many of us – whose queerness intersects with other marginalisations: disabled folks who’ve seen COVID policies and practices centre abled people and treat them as disposable; those who the current economic crisis is pushing into ever-deeper levels of poverty; and people of colour – also disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, rises in hate crime, and endless cultural gaslighting of their experiences past and present.

At a community level, this has all taken a massive toll. In the last year alone, my close communities have seen six deaths, all related to mental health struggles rather than COVID itself.

While we might want to tell joyful stories of queer communities drawn closer during a time of crisis, the truth – for many of us – is the opposite. Understandably, given our experiences of both cultural trauma, and frequently the developmental trauma of not being fully accepted by our close people growing up, many of us have fallen back on our unconscious survival strategies: attacking outwards – blaming and ostracising those who seem to be hurting, abandoning or endangering us; attacking inwards against ourselves, or crossing our own – or others’ – boundaries in attempts to get our needs met; withdrawing into smaller and smaller zones of safety; and/or avoiding pain by distracting ourselves, distancing from those who’re struggling, and rushing ‘back to normal.’

These reactions have bumped up against each other painfully, often resulting in irreparable rifts and ruptures, which only exacerbate our levels of isolation and distress. It’s been hard indeed to face other’s limited capacities to hold us through this crisis, perhaps harder still to face our own tendencies to default back to habits which hurt ourselves and others.

So where is the potential for queer joy in all of this?

Queer seeing

Queer activists generally use the word queer as a verb: a doing word. The doing is a radical questioning of normative understandings of gender and sexuality, but also way more than that. Queering challenges all the interwoven axes of oppression that position one group as more valid and valuable than another, and all the culturally accepted ways in which we relate to others and ourselves.

Under this definition, we could find queer joy in a refusal to go ‘back to normal,’ recognising that normal has never worked for marginalised people like us. We could find it in insisting on being radically honest about what’s going on in the world and in our communities right now: understanding the links between our own individual trauma patterns and the traumatised and traumatising forms of relating we’re embedded in, including social and climate injustice.

We could find queer joy – and solidarity – in this kind of clear-seeing (or queer-seeing) of what we’re all up against, and in our determination to find better ways, knowing that our experiences actually make us some of the best-placed people and communities to do so.

Queer feeling

Another meaning of the verb queer is troubling the binary understandings that so much normativity is founded upon. In addition to the heteronormative binaries of straight/gay and man/woman, we could extend this to include all those binaries that render one group of people centred and another marginalised, one intelligible and another invisible, one valuable and another disposable.

From this perspective we might also question the valuing of certain emotional states over others. I read the request to write this piece as an invitation to focus on the light for a moment, because haven’t we all had enough darkness? But what if we can only have light by also embracing the darkness? Pride by acknowledging our (cultural, community, individual) shame? Joy by making room for all the feelings that are not-joy too?

There’ve been many attempts to identify the fundamental emotions. For our purposes, I’m going to say there are seven (mostly because it fits the nice queer metaphor that I’m planning to shoehorn into this section). These are joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and some kind of category for loving/peaceful/powerful feelings (opinions vary on this one).

Emotion wheels illustrate these seven feelings, and all the other feelings under each category, in rainbow colours (see where I’m going with this?) As with rainbows (the actual kind and our LGBTQIA+ kind), emotion experts from ancient Buddhists to present-day psychologists emphasise that we need all of the emotions/colours. Instead of our common cultural binary that renders some emotions ‘good’ and others ‘bad’, and tries to maximise the one and avoid the other, such approaches invite us to become intimate with all seven, and all shades within and between them, embracing them as we would dear friends. Indeed, many would argue that it’s only to the degree that we’re able to flow through all of these feelings that we can fully experience any of them. In trying to eradicate sadness, for example, we would also lose joy, as in the movie Inside Out.

Queer kindness

So bring on your queer rage, your queer terror and grief and shame. All are welcome here. It’s only through learning how to feel the full rainbow of feelings that we’ll be able to experience queer joy, and to see how we hurt ourselves – and others – when we repress these feelings, or react from them in order to get out of them as quickly as possible. Only with the full rainbow of feelings can we really understand what we – and others – are up against, and find some understanding and kindness for that.

To me that’s the message of the wonderful recent queer film Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is all about how we might stop passing trauma on from generation to generation as we’re currently doing. The tortured – and torturing – character, Jobu Tupaki, who has (queerly) seen it all, says that she was just looking for someone who could see what I see, feel what I feel. While admitting their human smallness and stupidity, the other characters find their way to give her that, if only for fleeting moments. I’ll leave it here with another quote from that movie:

“The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on.“

Find out more

More on how to feel all the feels in my zines Welcome Monster Feelings, Staying With Feelings, and blog post on Staying With The Big Feels.

The post Queer joy appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I worked at London Friend as a volunteer counsellor there for several years, and it has a very fond place in my heart, so I was glad to be chosen – along with 49 other people – to offer my words of celebration. I said…

London Friend is where I learnt most about therapy – as well as a good deal about myself – from my amazing supervisor, from the other counsellors, and from many extraordinary people I worked with, who I still remember with much fondness.

I’m sure you’ll hear this over and over again, but London Friend is deeply special for its friendliness! Every time I popped in, I was warmly greeted by staff who made it their business to learn about, and value, every single person who walked through the door. Read more…

Check out the words of all 50 London Friend-friends here, as they accumulate over the year.

You can also see me visiting London Friend and talking about it in this video by James Marcus Tucker and Michael Urwin from Peruvian Tree Productions.

Thanks again to London Friend for being such a wonderful home to me and to so many others. Do support their work, and get in touch with them if you’re an LGBTQ+ Londoner looking for support and/or somewhere to volunteer.

The post Happy birthday London Friend! appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In this post I want to share some thoughts about the learnings that I believe are important, in both directions, between mental health activism and sexuality/gender activism. I also want to explore the separation that we make between these two areas and whether that might be part of the problem.

Separating out mental health and gender/sexuality

The first thing we were asked to do on the panel was to introduce ourselves, including our own gender and sexuality – given the focus of the panel – and our lived experience of mental health struggles.

The answer I would usually give to this question nowadays – for example in the interview that I did for mental health podcast So Many Wings – would be something like this: 

‘My gender is trans, my sexuality is queer, and my mental health situation is that I’m a survivor of developmental and relational trauma who experiences themselves as plural.’

So I could be diagnosed with post traumatic stress and dissociative identity disorders if using those psychiatric categories. If you wanted to add a question in there about my spiritual/therapeutic stance then something like somatic- and social justice-informed Buddhist mindfulness might get close to that.

As I considered this answer though, I realised that a deeper truth is that it really doesn’t make much sense to me, any more, to distinguish my gender, my sexuality, my mental health status, and my spirituality in this way. The answer to all of these questions – gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality – could be trans, they could all be queer, they could all be plural, traumatised, and mindful. They are all of them.

So the main point I want to make in this piece is that I think we should question the very separation between mental health activism and LGBTQIA+ activism. The reasons for this is not just because – as Black feminists have rightly pointed out – we have to fight all forms of injustice – whether or not they impact us directly – in order to be truly free. It’s also not just because so many queers are also survivors due to the traumatising nature of marginalisation and stigmatisation. It’s because the very separation of these aspects of our experience may well be part of the problem which leads to both the oppression of queer people and to the distress of survivors. 

I’ll return to this theme in more depth shortly. First, let’s consider what each form of activism might learn from the other, if we did regard them as separable. For each I’ll make a couple of key suggestions although there are many more we could consider.

What can mental health activism learn from LGBTQIA+ activism?

My answers to this question are both things which more radical mental health activism has already learnt from queer activism, but which could definitely do with filtering through more fully to mainstream mental health activism.

First, LGBTQIA+ activism – whether the more mainstream or radical version – has generally located the problem of queer experience out there in the heteronormative, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, acephobic, etc. culture, rather than in queer people themselves. This is a shift that began a long time ago, in the moves towards decriminalisation and depathologisation of homosexuality. It has continued as each new addition to the LGBTQIA+ acronym has eventually argued that their experience should not be understood as a problem within the individual, but an issue with wider normative society. 

Within more mainstream mental health activism there is still often a sense of mental health struggles as something which are located within the individual, which require fixing, rather than as signs of a toxic culture, unjust social structures, or systemic problems within a family or workplace, for example. 

Some mental health struggles simply wouldn’t be struggles within a culture which accepted diverse experience rather than insisting that people follow certain rigid norms of behaviour and experience, and pathologised and stigmatised those who don’t. Many other struggles are the result of forms of traumatic experiences such as marginalisation and non-consensual treatment, which are individualised in the person who is struggling, rather than recognised as being structural and systemic problems. 

Survivor-led and mad pride movements have moved towards a more similar understanding to queer activism: that the problem is out there rather than in here, and that one important form of resistance is that of visibly taking pride in our difference, rather than accepting the shame and stigma of the wider world. For example we might question those who can can manage to fit into the category of ‘sane’ in such an ‘insane’ world. We might celebrate the ‘creatively maladjusted misfits and changemakers’ that we are, as So Many Wings does.

What can LGBTQIA+ activism learn from mental health activism?

My answers to this question are about what LGBTQIA+ activism could learn from the more radical and critical versions of mental health activism. I wrote more about this in this paper on why bi communities, in particular, could do with a more critical understanding of mental health.

One thing that’s always surprised me in queer communities is the way people who are very critical about normative ways of understanding gender and sexuality, often seem to accept mainstream medical models of mental health. Folks who think carefully and queerly about the labels and categories that are imposed on our genders and sexualities, where those come from and who benefits from them, often seem comfortable labelling their mental health struggles with psychiatric categories, and accepting that those make them a certain kind of – disordered – person. 

Also, many in the queer world challenge the binaries and hierarchies that are imposed on gender and sexuality, without applying this to mental health. So the main thing I’d like to see from a dialogue between queer and mental health activism, would be a more critical perspective on mental health among queers which questions binary divisions between normal and abnormal, mad and sane, functional and dysfunctional, healthy and unhealthy, rational and emotional, and so on. Just as with the binaries of man/woman, gay/straight, cis/trans, etc. we can ask who is served by such divisions, and whether they stand up to scrutiny. Alex Iantaffi and I explore these questions more in our book Life Isn’t Binary.

Secondly, mental health activism is – it seems to me – increasingly informed by somatic understandings of trauma and the way it operates in the body. Queer activism could certainly do with learning from such trauma-informed perspectives. My experience of LGBTQIA+ and sex positive spaces is that they are often unaware of this. For example, there’s often little awareness in party and con spaces of the potential triggers of trauma, how these show up in the body, how to know that you – or somebody else – is in a trauma response, and the implications of this in for our sexual practices and relationships. 

In more conscious sexuality and kink spaces, there can often be a sense that people should be pushed to their edges, or confronted with challenging activities as a form of catharsis, without an awareness of the potentially retraumatising impact of putting somebody through a similar situation to one which was traumatising in early life. Online call-out and cancel culture, which is prevalent in some queer communities, similarly lacks an awarenes of the potentially retraumatising impact of public shaming, and the traumatised places in ourselves that such impulses can come from.

Mental health activism is LGBTQIA+ activism and vice versa

When I worked as a therapist, one thing that struck me was that gender and sexuality were almost always deeply relevant to clients’ mental health struggles. This was true whether they were somebody whose gender and/or sexuality was marginalised, or somebody who was more normative in their presentation of their gender and/or sexuality. 

LGBTQIA+ people’s mental health struggles are clearly related to their experiences of marginalisation, stigma, invisibility, discrimination, bullying, and so on. For more normative folks, it is often the attempt to adhere to rigid ideals of masculinity, femininity, and heteronormativity that is the problem. 

For example, in relation to gender, we know that high rates of suicide and addiction in men is highly linked to toxic masculinity and rules against expressing vulnerability or emotion, and seeking help or support from others. We also know that high rates of depression, anxiety, and body shame in women is highly linked to the way femininity is defined in relation to others, and women’s worth is wrapped up in their relationships and desirability. 

In relation to sexuality, many people experience distress because the very limited ideas about the kind of sex that they should have, and the relationship contexts they should be having it in, bear little relation to their internal erotic landscapes. This mismatch plays out regularly in a vulnerable and embodied way during sex, which takes a great toll on mental health. It could be seen as a form of everyday non-consent enacted against the bodies of ourselves and/or of others.

So, whether we are marginalised in relation to our gender and sexuality or not, normative understandings of gender and sexuality traumatise us. For this reason, our mental health struggles, genders, and sexualities cannot easily be disentangled, in fact should be explored together.

Bringing mental health and gender/sexuality back together

It strikes me that many cultures around the world do not separate out gender, sexuality, spirituality, and mental health at all. In many places the most spiritual people have also been those who were gender creative and erotically expansive. Language has developed in such contexts which captures that whole state rather than separating out gender, sexuality, and spirituality. In many faiths and communities, experiences which we might label mental health struggles are seen as sacred experiences, or paths to enlightenment, and people going through them are honoured and supported.

The separation of gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality could be seen as a toxic aspect of racial capitalism, required to ensure docile subjects who are too busy policing themselves, and each other, around their ‘normality’ or otherwise to critically consider what is being done to them, or its impact. 

Certainly we can see the roots of the current form of the binary gender model and heteronormativity in forms of capitalism which required women to work unpaid in the home supporting and reproducing the workforce. In many ways this has ramped up under neoliberal capitalism with its pressure to present a successful, productive singular self who is performing gender, sex, and mental well-being perfectly, while paying little attention to spirituality beyond the individualised kind of care required to keep them functional and productive.

Perhaps one of the reasons we see such high rates of distress in neoliberal capitalist cultures is this very severing of gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality, within such an unjust race and class system. This could, itself, be seen as a form of historical and intergenerational trauma, as authors such as Alex Iantaffi have suggested. 

The work of Audre Lorde – and many Black feminists who’ve followed her – calls into question such separation. They suggest instead that we could understand ‘the erotic’ as a powerful resource relating to how we feel when we’re most alive and mentally well which incorporates and transcends the sexual and the spiritual. If liberated such a resource would reveal and challenge all of the destructive forces we’re operating under, and require something very different.

My trans, queer, plural, traumatised, mindful self

You might find it useful – like me – to play with whether the labels you use to describe one aspect of your experience or identity are actually helpful to apply to other aspects. Perhaps this can be helpful in breaking down the divisions between gender, sexuality, mental health status, and spirituality.

I find trans a useful word to apply to all of these areas because my experience of all of them is different to what they were assumed to be when I was born, not just my gender. Also we can understand trans as signalling transition, or change over time, and I consider all these aspects of me as in a state of becoming, rather than being fixed.

The word queer can signal being outside of normativity of all kinds, and that certainly applies to gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality for me. Queer also involves questioning binaries, and the power structures they serve, which is something I’m keen to do, whether those binaries be man/woman or cis/trans, gay/straight or sexual/non-sexual, mad/sane or normal/abnormal, spiritual/non-spiritual or Buddhist/secular.

In addition to transition, plurality is a word which captures my experience of selfhood better than most. Again this applies across all these aspects of being. My plural parts have different genders, they have different sexualities and erotic desires, they express trauma in different ways and fall into different survival strategies, and they certainly come down in different places on a spectrum from secular to spiritual, or ‘rational’ to ‘woo’.

Finally trauma and mindful are both words which are useful across all aspects of myself. I have certainly been traumatised by normative understandings of gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality which have been passed down through the generations to me. These are also all sites of trauma for me as I’ve experienced gender-related bullying and discrimination; sexual assault and harrassment; gaslighting and stigma around my mental health struggles; and traumatic experiences in spiritual and conscious sexuality communities – both personally and in relation to the wider #MeToo moments that such communities have gone through.

Somatic and social justice forms of Buddhist mindfulness have been important for me, in addressing all these forms of trauma, and in coming to understand my self (or selves, or no self) better in relation to gender, sexuality, mental health, spirituality, and the ways these are all woven together.

Further resources

• You can read a dialogue between me and Helen Spandler on what queer studies and mad studies can learn from each other here.
• This resource that I wrote for the BACP explains in more detail why gender and sexuality are themes that need to be explored with all clients in relation to their mental health struggles, along with race, class, disability and other key intersections.
• This article I wrote about mental health as depression and oppression in relation to bi communities also deals with these themes.

• You can find more of my resources about trauma on my trauma work page.
• Patreon link: If you found this useful, please feel free to support my Patreon.

The post Queer Activism and Mental Health Activism: The Need For Dialogue appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In my piece I explore how we might write in ways that resist attempts to marginalise and silence queer people, how we can capture queer identity and experiences in our writing, how we might challenge normativity and raise up voices from the margins, and how we can tell stories queerly, and apply queerness to our writing process as well as content.

To celebrate the launch of this awesome new queer writing magazine I thought I’d reflect on queerness and writing. I’ve been writing, myself, for my whole life in one way or another, but I would say that queerness has only gradually infused my writing – as it has my self – over time. Perhaps it has followed something like the journey through queerness which I’ll follow here.

In addition to writing myself, I currently mentor a number of other queer writers including Simon Forsyth, Daniel Morrison, Jeanne Devlin, David Darvasi, Stacy Bias, Katie Green, and Russ Wolf, whose work is referred to here. It’s through my dialogues with them that I’ve come to approach both the content and process of writing ever more queerly. I’m deeply grateful to them for the wisdom and learning they’ve shared, which very much inform this piece.

Jules Scheele and I started our book Queer: A Graphic History by exploring the different meanings of the word queer, and I thought that’d be a neat way to structure this piece. So let’s consider queer writing in relation to otherness, to being LGBTQIA+, to being non-normative, and to the overall project of queering everything.

Queer as in other

The original meaning of queer from the 16th century was of something strange or illegitimate. You might think of phrases like ‘nowt as queer as folks’ or ‘queer as a three dollar bill.’ From the late 19th century, this meaning became attached to same-sex attraction specifically, and queer began to be used as a term of homophobic abuse, for example in the letter from the Marquess of Queensberry which become famous through the trial of Oscar Wilde.

It’s due to this meaning of queer that a magazine like Queerlings is necessary at all. We still live with the legacy of queer people being regarded as something different, something other, something abnormal or illegitimate.

It remains rare for queer experience to be the focus of mainstream fiction or non-fiction. For years queer characters have been depicted as the bad guys, as tragic, or in tokenistic ways like the ‘gay best friend’. We still see this today, particularly in the representation of trans people, as highlighted in the recent documentary Disclosure.

Novels and memoirs centring queer experience are generally targetted specifically at queers, seen as only of relevance to us. This is unless they sensationalise queer experience in ways deemed interesting to a cishet audience, for example by depicting a promiscuous bi person or by telling a conventional narrative of a trans person ‘changing sex’ through medical procedures, with before and after photos.

While things are gradually shifting, there remains a sense – sometimes even explicitly taught in creative writing classes – that the white, cishet male protagonist is the only one that audiences can really relate to, or want to read about.

For these reasons we need magazines, bookshops, writing classes, and more which centre queer experience, and outlets which publish specifically queer stories that may well not be accepted or celebrated by mainstream publishers. Bravo Queerlings!

Being LGBTQIA+

The reclaiming of the word queer from the 1980s onwards has led to it being used as an umbrella term for gay, lesbian, and eventually also bi, trans, intersex, ace, and other groups beyond the cishet supposed-majority. This is the meaning of queer that Queerlings is using when it says it ‘seeks to publish queer works of fiction, non-fiction and reviews from LGBTQIA+ writers.’

There are many reasons to encourage and celebrate this understanding of queer in relation to writing. As I’ve said, we need people to write about queer experience, as LGBTQIA+ people, in order to get queer stories and voices out there, to counterbalance the heteronormative cisnormative nature of so much that is published, and to claim our place in writing and in the world.

Writing therapist Simon Forsyth quotes poet Ted Hughes who said ‘what’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life’. In a world where queers remain marginalised and stigmatised, where our identities are up for debate and our realities are called into question, writing ourselves as queers, and writing characters who represent us, could be seen as a vital personal and political act.

Being non-normative

Many people who use the word queer – rather than gay, lesbian or bi, for example – often mean something more than being under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, however. They’re questioning both heteronormativity and homonormativity, or normative ways of being LGBTQIA+.

The battle for gay rights was historically fought on the basis of being members of a minority group who were treated unequally in society. This battle often involved arguing for the right to do things that the normative majority got to do, such as getting married and serving in the military, and having the ‘pink pound’ recognised as a valuable target of consumer capitalism. The more revolutionary understanding of queer challenges this approach.

We might question whether the institutions that people have fought for the right to join are anything that we should support. This might involve, for example, pointing out the problematic history of marriage in relation to the ownership of women and children, taking an abolitionist stance towards policing and the military, or questioning consumer capitalism for its built in injustice and the toll it’s taking on the planet.

Such an understanding of queer often endeavours to centre the voices of the most marginalised, rather than trying to present queers in as normative ways as possible in order to gain acceptance to normativity. Core agendas may be ones like addressing trauma, poverty, homelessness, and violence, rather than relationship or occupational rights, for example. It is this understanding of queer that Queerlings are referencing when they say ‘we especially encourage submissions from BIPOC, Trans, Non-binary and other underrepresented voices in our community.’

What are the implications of this understanding of queer for queer writing? As well as centring the voices of the most marginalised, we might attend to the diversity of queerness represented in our writing. In our fiction are we including gay and lesbian characters, but not bi, trans, intersex, or ace ones? If we do include gender and sexually diverse characters are they mostly white? Middle class? Non-disabled? Do we represent queer experiences and agendas beyond the more normative ones? Of course there are important considerations here about who we can and can’t adequately represent beyond our own lived experience, and there are many good resources out there addressing these tensions and how we might navigate them.

In non-fiction we could ask which views and knowledges we’re centering. This is something that Jules and I have endeavoured to address in our graphic guide series by bringing the thoughts of activists alongside those of academics, by emphasising the voices of BIPOC, trans and non-binary scholars and activists, and by ensuring that the characters who we depict navigating the terrain of the book are diverse in age, gender, sexuality, class, disability, race, and more.

I hope that readers will see themselves represented in the books, in both the characters and the experts, and that they’ll be able to connect with what the characters are navigating. There’s still a long way to go, of course, in decolonising my own knowledge as an author with a background in white western versions of psychology and psychotherapy, and I’m constantly endeavouring to learn more from the margins.

It’s my hope that these graphic guides function as a jumping-off point for people to learn about other people’s work, so it’s important for me to think carefully about who I represent and how. It’s also important to carefully consider who I can adequately represent, and where my job should be, instead, to step back and raise up other voices. Being part of a queer writing community feels important to me for this reason, because there’s the opportunity, for example, to offer mentorship, to facilitate writing events, and to endorse other people’s work and get it out there as widely as possible.

Queering writing

The final understanding of queer that we covered in Queer: A Graphic History challenges the sense of queer as an identity at all. Queer theory and queer activism view the fixed hierarchical binary identities which people are put into  – man/woman, straight/gay, cis/trans, etc. – as part of the problem.

For a start, we might question whether queer really is a minority position. Added together, the vast majority of people tick one or more of the boxes of:

• Being attracted to more than one gender,
• Experiencing their gender beyond the rigid masculine/feminine binary,
• Being fluid in their expression of gender and/or sexuality over time,
• Enjoying kinds of sex other than penis-in-vagina (PIV) intercourse – or no sex, and
• Doing their relationships outside of normative coupledom.

Yet more people are queered off the heteronormative model of a lifecourse at some point. They don’t tick certain boxes of being a ‘successful’ self such as marriage, kids, home-ownership, career progression, etc. This may happen due to choice, disability, mental/physical health conditions, unemployment, caring for others, infertility, etc. As Jack Halberstam has suggested, we could regard such ‘failures’ as queer, because of the challenge they present to normativity.

As well as denying the reality of many people’s invisible queerness, fixed binary identities support the division of people into normal and abnormal, legitimate and other, healthy and unhealthy, and so on: all of which serve the power structures of neoliberal capitalism, encouraging people to police and monitor themselves and each other, and strive to conform to cultural ideals.

What might the implications of these kinds of understandings of queer – as challenging identities and binaries – be for queer writing? In this case queer writing might look something like what architect and writer Kyna Leski describes when she says ‘a creative process comes from displacing, disturbing, and destabilising what you (think you) know’.

Rather than focusing on which identities or experiences are represented in our writing, we might turn to explore which stories are told, and which are not, and in what ways we do or don’t tell them. For example, does our queer romance novel conform to a standard heteronormative story of falling in love, getting together, having the first kiss and first sex, moving in together, and living happily ever after? What might different queer love stories look like? Might they follow a different narrative arc, or include multiple stories, or start and end in different places, or celebrate different kinds of love – like ace or aro love for example.

A great example of queering writing in these ways are the wealth of trans memoirs which have been published in recent years. Many of these deliberately mess with – or queer – the conventions of a trans story according to the standards of a medical approach to transness and/or of what is palatable to the wider public. The conventional trans narrative is frequently an account of always having known you were ‘born in the wrong body’, having a moment of realisation, coming out, getting ‘the surgery’, and living happily ever after in a new gender.

Authors like Juliet Jacques, Travis Alabanza, Juno Roche, CN Lester, and Amrou Al-Kadhi have all queered this standard trans memoir form in interesting and important ways through their writing. For example they:

• Centre experiences other than surgery,
• Celebrate trans as a gift for others to be around rather than depicting it as a loss for others,
• Explore the ongoing experience of transness beyond key moments of transition,
• Focus in on everyday moments of transness,
• Offer multiple equally valid answers to an early sense of difference,
• Foreground who they are beyond their transness, and
• Mix up their trans stories with other people’s tales and/or with non-fiction elements.

I’m excited by the idea of queer writing as writing that tells different kinds of stories in different ways. For example, some of the queer folk I’m working with, and reading, engage in projects where they:

• Capture different aspects of themselves and their experiences in multiple characters through a book,
• Tell stories of past interwoven with stories of present, queering standard linear narratives of experience,
• Deliberately interfere with the way queer and trans people have been depicted in previous works of fiction by cishet authors, by writing alternative versions of those stories or the same stories from different character perspectives,
• Create artistic/writing pieces where ‘seen’ stories are told on one side and ‘unseen’ ones are told on the reverse, or where their own stories are interwoven with the stories that have been told about them,
• Play with incorporating elements like ‘choose your own adventure’ to offer multiple possible journeys through the same life,
• Mash up different genres and/or fiction and non fiction elements,
• Include narratives which challenge any normative sense of which aspects of our lives should be viewed as ‘success’ or ‘failure’.

Ideas I’ve played with myself include a memoir where I take all the different common stories of transness that are out there and write a chapter telling my gender story through each of these different lenses. I would present all of these approaches as offering something potentially useful, but as inevitably being only a partial story. This gets beyond binaries of right or wrongs stories to ask what different stories open up and close down. I’m also keen to write a graphic plural story of my life where multiple, differently gendered, sides of me are represented as engaging in the unfolding narrative, also challenging binaries between ‘real life’ and imagination, and plurality as a form of madness or sanity.

This connects with what author and writing teacher Anya Achtenberg says about the importance of finding a multitude of voices in our writing, as well as the writing prompts she offers such as ‘what story lies next to the one you are writing?’ It also makes me think of Juno Roche’s response when asked at an event by a cis author how he could best write a trans character. Juno responded that he should find the trans person within himself.

So writing queerly might involve thinking beyond the identities that we depict in our writing to the form, structure, and narrative arcs that we engage with. We might deliberately endeavour to queer – or trouble – standard writing formats.

I was fascinated that most people I mentor began with a more standard kind of project – a memoir or a novel for example. However during the pandemic many of them moved towards something very different. A couple of these projects question the divide between art and writing by incorporating both words and visual or three dimensional aspects. Some engage with explicitly transgressive modes of writing. Many have moved away from aiming at conventional publishing, towards alternative forms of putting words out there, via social media, zines or chapbooks for example. Some are challenging the writer/reader binary by drawing people into conversation and making that part of the work.

One person is collecting together the experiences of queers during lockdown and how they have engaged in creative processes of self-shaping through this time, which makes me wonder about seeing the creation of (queer) selves as, in itself, a creative/writing project.

Writing queerly

This leads me to my final consideration, that queerness might be a way in which we approach the process of writing as well as the content.

When I became a writing mentor, the thing that surprised me most was how much I ended up encouraging mentees – and myself – not to write. This became such a theme that I’m now considering writing a whole writing book on ‘not writing’!

My stance on this came from what I’d learnt in queer community about consent. I noticed that most of us were engaging in writing from a non-consensual place. We were trying to force ourselves to write when we didn’t want to, we were trying to undertake projects because we thought that was the kind of writing we should do, or because it seemed most likely to get published, we were aiming for a certain number of words per day and feeling bad if we didn’t manage that. All of this seemed to me very much like the heteronormative way of approaching sex: feeling that we have to do it, that it should happen a certain amount, and that it should take a certain form (PIV) and result in a certin outcome (orgasm) in order to be valid.

One thing I’ve learnt from ace community is that sex can never be truly consensual unless we know absolutely that it’s okay not to have sex right now, and indeed that it’s okay never to have sex. We need to know that we’re free and safe enough to not have sex, that we’re under no pressure to do so, and that nothing else is contingent upon it. All of this is pretty threatening to the heteronormative – and even homonormative – way of doing sex and relationships.

So I figured that writing worked in the same way. We can’t be in consent, as writers, unless we know that it’s absolutely okay not to write. What most of us, myself and my mentees, found, when we stepped away from writing in our previous way, was that we ended up engaging in different forms of creativity which were far more fulfilling to us, many of which challenged those binaries around ‘proper’ writing vs. play, art vs. writing, writing practice vs. therapeutic/spiritual practice, and creation-of-writing vs. creation-of-self.

All of this takes me to a place where I also have to question the writing/not writing binary! Going through a very personally traumatic year, during a pandemic, I’ve ended up having to tell a lot of people that I’m not writing, despite having given up the day job to ‘become a writer’ in 2019. However I then take a look over at my bookshelves and realise that I’ve probably written more words this year than ever before, it’s just all been in the format of journaling through my process. And even if I hadn’t been journaling, I’ve been working on myself more this year than ever before. Could that not be seen as an act of writing: of writing myself?

What about the stories I tell myself in the form of fantasy, to soothe myself to sleep each night or to enjoy a solosexual moment in the middle of the day. Do those only count as ‘writing’ if I physically write them down? If other people read them? And what about all the painstaking emails and messages I’ve written in the last year, as I navigate trauma, letting people know what I’m going through, expressing my needs, and setting my boundaries? I never count those as ‘writing’, but of course they are: and they are a way of writing myself and co-creating my relationships, and my not-relationships. Another not-binary for you!

Most of my mentees struggle with something that I also still struggle with, 23 books in, which is whether we get to call ourselves a writer. ‘I’m not a writer because I haven’t been doing it very long.’ ‘I’m not a writer because I haven’t published anything.’ ‘I’m not a writer because I haven’t written a full book.’ ‘I’m not a writer because I don’t write fiction, or poetry, or something proper like that.’ Imposter syndrome is incredibly high around being a writer.

But, taking a queer perspective, is it even possible to be a writer, or indeed to not be a writer? Neither of these things is a stable identity, and this binary is as questionable as any of them. So perhaps we can lift the burden of trying to determine which category we fall into. Personally I love authors on writing like Natalie Goldberg and Lynda Barry who take us back to the bare bones of writing: back to the little queer selves we all – perhaps – once were, who simply enjoyed playing with words and/or stories and/or pictures, not worrying whether we were ‘writer enough’ or ‘normal enough’, or even ‘queer enough’.

In her wonderful essay The Uses of The Erotic, Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde questions the divisions we have made around what counts as ‘sex’ and the disciplining, oppressive functions these have. She suggests expanding out our understanding of ‘the erotic’ to encompass all kinds of sensual and creative experience, including making love to a partner in a patch of sunlight, writing a poem, and constructing a bookcase.

This is perhaps why it makes so much sense to me to apply the same understandings to the writing process as I do to the process of sex. If we can expand out our understanding of queerness, and writing, and queer writing, in such ways, perhaps we can acknowledge the personal and political power of claiming all of us as writers, at least of our own stories and the stories of our (queer) communities.

“Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of… This is a grave responsibility… not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.” Audre Lorde.

Further resources

You can read writing therapist, Simon Forsyth’s piece, where I found a couple of the quotes included here at: writing.ie/resources/writing-therapy-and-the-power-of-the-pen-by-simon-forsyth

You can read about Daniel Morrison’s project on queer lockdown here: facebook.com/Queer-Spirit-in-the-Great-Pause-116361600151780

There’s some great videos about queer writing during lockdown here: newwritingsouth.com/within-the-four-walls-queer-lockdown-stories

You can read my thoughts on writing, and on queer failure, on my blog here:

• rewriting-the-rules.com/self/how-to-start-writing
• rewriting-the-rules.com/self/embracing-failure-in-work-home-and-relationships

Jules’s website is: julesscheele.com

Anya Achtenberg can be found at: thedisobedientwriter.com

Lynda Barry at: thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com

Natalie Goldberg at: nataliegoldberg.com

Audre Lorde’s essay at: uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/11881_Chapter_5.pdf

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How can straight, cis people be respectful in LGBTQ+ spaces?

This is a topic that comes up a lot around Pride season. Some of the bigger prides becomes so inundated with straight, cis people who want to enjoy the parade and festivities that it stops feeling like a proud – or safe enough – space for the LGBTQ+ people it was designed for. This also often elevates the prices making them increasingly inaccessible for more marginalised LGBTQ+ people.

Similarly LGBTQ+ friendly areas like Brighton, London Soho, or Canal Street in Manchester have become go-to places for stag-dos, hen-dos, and other straight, cis celebrations, perhaps seen as appropriate places for people to experience one final ‘walk on the wild side’ before tying the knot.

Why are queer events and spaces important?

It’s worth remembering the roots of queer venues and celebrations like Pride. Back in the late 1960s in the US gay, queer, and trans folks had to fight not to be ejected from venues like the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco, or raided by the police in pubs like the Stonewall Inn in New York. The first Pride marches had their foundations in the riots that took place to protect these queer spaces, often led by those who were also working class, sex workers, and/or people of colour.

It’s easy to imagine that things are far better now than then, but rates of homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic hate crimes and discrimination have all gone up markedly since the Brexit vote, and we’re in the midst of a huge moral panic against trans people, as well as ongoing battles around how sex, gender and sexuality are taught in schools. Globally there’s still the need for a trans day of remembrance every year to mourn the frightening numbers of trans people – mostly trans women of colour – who are murdered annually. Related to all of this, mental health and suicide rates among – particularly young – LGBTQ+ people remains a big concern.

In many places LGBTQ+ people still don’t feel safe enough to express themselves – or their relationships – openly. Even where they do the backdrop is of heteronormativity: the assumption that people are straight and cis unless they ‘come out’ otherwise, and that being LGBTQ+ means being different from the norm in ways that we need to explain and justify in some way, with pressure to prove that we’re ‘normal’ in every other respect. Many LGBTQ+ people have strained or non-existent relationships with previous friends and family, so building their own friendships, support networks, and social spaces is important.

LGBTQ+ people often become used to having to come out repeatedly, to being asked intrusive questions about their bodies and sex lives, and to being treated as an object for people (the weird one in the office, or the gay best friend, for example). They have to be part of everyday workplace and family conversations which assume that everybody wants – for example – to find a partner, get married, and have (and gender) kids, and that those things require celebrating in ways that transitioning, finding a community, or coming out, do not. It’s understandable that they might want some spaces where they don’t have to worry about that stuff or self-monitor constantly: where they can assume that everyone will ‘get it’, relax, and breathe easy.

Think about your motivations

So if you are straight and cis and thinking of attending an LGBTQ+ space or event, think about your motivations. Generally speaking it’s probably a bad idea if you’re looking for the following:

• To share your opinions about LGBTQ+ people or get into arguments or debates
• To see something strange, exotic, or titillating
• To flirt or get off with somebody LGBTQ+ because you’re curious or want to have a story to tell – this involves treating people as objects for your pleasure, not full human beings
• To have a laugh by doing something a bit crazy and out-there
• To exploit or appropriate the coolness of LGBTQ+ culture in some way

These are better reasons:

• You want to support your LGBTQ+ friends who are keen for you to go along
• It’s an event or space that’s particularly looking for allies to support it – and the people going
• You’re genuinely questioning whether you might be LGBTQ+ yourself
• It’s an educative space and you want to learn something

What not to do

• Go with your straight, cis partner and get off together very publicly in the space – remember that everyday spaces are safe for you to do that in a way they aren’t for the rest of the people there
• Go with your straight, cis mates and take up a lot of room in the venue with your bodies or your noise – many people will feel less safe if you’re doing that
• Go to places with a maximum capacity which are already pretty full – better to let LGBTQ+ people be the people who get to use the space
• Ask intrusive questions of anybody there or touch anybody without consent 
• Get super drunk or high so others have to look after you

What to do

• Check beforehand whether you will be welcome there – with staff or others attending
• Be friendly and treat people as full human beings, not just their sexuality or gender
• Do your homework if it’s an unfamiliar community for you – there are plenty of vids out there about things LGBTQ+ people are sick of hearing, or what not to ask them, as well as easy 101 introductions to language
• Be kind, consensual and unobtrusive – it’s not your space and you’re privileged to be welcomed here

And LGBTQ+ people need to remember…

Not everybody who appears to be straight and cis in an LGBTQ+ space actually will be. There are plenty of people who, for whatever reason, are not safe to be out as LGBTQ+, or don’t identify with that terminology, but are still attracted to the same gender or more than one gender, or living in a different gender to the one they were assigned at birth. There are also lots of people who don’t look like the common image of an LGBTQ+ person (which is so often white, young, slim, non-disabled, and middle class). There are many who aren’t into the LGBTQ+ ‘scene’ but are still LGBTQ+. This is often an issue particularly for bi people. Remember that just because somebody is with a different gender partner, or hooking up in that way, doesn’t mean they are straight. And even if they are straight, they may not be cis. They may be there because they are trans. Also femme women can feel very invisible in LGBTQ+ spaces.

Many people may access LGBTQ+ spaces because they’re questioning their gender and/or sexuality and that’s a really good reason. Insisting that they make definite decisions, identify or express themselves in certain ways is not okay. Also remember the + on LGBTQ+. There are good reasons to consider including asexual, intersex, kinky, and/or non-monogamous people, as well as sex workers, under the broad umbrella of people who are excluded from heteronormativity and discriminated against by virtue of their gender and/or sexuality. There are legitimate conversations to be had about who should and shouldn’t be included, and in what contexts – for example, not all intersex folk want to be added to the LGBTQ+ acronym and it’s very important to respect that – but generally it’s worth being as careful when making assumptions about somebody who doesn’t appear LGBTQ+ as we’d want people to be when coming into contact with somebody who does.

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Why is loneliness is so prevalent in LGBTQ+ communities? 

One initial reason is that LGBTQ+ people are less likely that straight and cisgender people to have the kind of ‘built in’ relationships that come from the family you grew up in, school or college friends, or even current colleagues. Of course these days many do, but still many become estranged or distant from old family and friends who struggle with their gender and sexuality. Others just don’t feel really comfortable hanging out with people whose assumptions and conversations are always focused around a heteronormative life (e.g. fancying the ‘opposite sex’, hanging out with the ‘same sex’, a social life that is linked to stereotypes of masculinity or femininity in particular ways, marrying, having children, etc.) So LGBTQ+ people are more likely to have to forge friendships in later life, which is often more challenging.

Many LGBTQ+ people who live outside of big cities are lonely because of the difficulty finding other LGBTQ+ people in their lives and locations. Within big cities, and other places where there are higher numbers of LGBTQ+ people, loneliness can still be an issue because the visible LGBTQ+ community revolves around specific kinds of socialising which don’t work for everyone, and aren’t always compatible with meeting like-minded people or forging deeper relationships: like pubs, clubs and parties, or meeting people on sex/dating apps. These can be tricky if you’re not a drinker; if noise, mobility or staying up late are difficult for you; or if you’re not looking for erotic/romantic connections. 

It’s also worth remembering that loneliness is not just a matter of being alone. Many in LGBTQ+ communities are lonely because they’re able to find people for sexual connections but not for friendship or companionship, or because they have people to socialise with, but not close friends. For some, they have straight friends and colleagues, but it is the lack of LGBTQ+ people which is the issue. For others, they have found a partner, but don’t have friendship or support outside of that person – which can put pressure on one relationship to meet too many different needs.

What toll can this, and having no queer friends, have on your mental health? 

Huge. Loneliness has been linked to worse mental and physical health in study after study. Social support and close relationships are some of the biggest buffers against both physical health problems and mental health struggles.

Why is having queer friends as well as straight friends so important? 

Queer friends are important because – as mentioned – a lot of friendship socialising, and one-to-one bonding, still tends to revolve around doing stereotypically masculine/feminine things which exclude many queer people (e.g. hen and stag dos, certain sports or drinking, spas and shopping). Also conversation is often around dating, relationships, and meeting certain points in an assumed life trajectory (marriage, kids, etc.) which don’t apply to all queer people. It takes a toll to always be the person who is not fitting, who has to choose to point out that this doesn’t apply to them, or to go along with it even though it doesn’t feel comfortable or relevant.

Another important thing for mental health is being accurately mirrored by the people around you – particularly the close people. Queer people often find that straight and cisgender friends don’t do this as well as queer ones – although, of course, some do. For example it’s important to feel that friends accurately read in your gender, get your relationships and how they work, and see beyond stereotypes of queerness. It’s vital that they’re not always asking ignorant, intrusive questions, making jokes, or using inaccurate language.

In a culture which assumes heterosexuality and cisgender-ness unless a person ‘comes out’ as otherwise, queer friendships can enable queer people to breathe easier and have a sense of just being themselves. However, of course, being inaccurately mirrored, or having assumptions made, can also happen in queer spaces or with queer friends. For example, many bi people still experience gay friends re-closeting them or pressuring them to ‘pick a side’. Most queer people of colour experience racism, ignorance, and fetishisation from white queer friends. And trans people certainly do not find all queer people friendly at the moment.

And how can you take care of yourself in this situation?

Sadly our culture doesn’t place enough value on friendship. Even in queer communities the expectation is generally that our relationship focus will be on finding a partner and/or having sexual connections. However, as we see from the sadly high levels of abusive relationships in queer community, partnership is not always a great model for combating loneliness, and can even contribute to it, especially if people fear losing their community in a break-up, or if they don’t have other close relationships to turn to when things get hard. Similarly sexual connections alone don’t provide the support and intimacy we generally need. So I’d strongly recommend intentionally cultivating some close friendships and a support network of people around you, even over-and-above finding romantic or sexual connections.

Some good pointers for doing this include finding spaces where people who are likely to share your values and interests hang out. Meet-up groups or online communities can be great for this, as can meeting the friends of existing friends if you have some already. Then approaching people one-to-one if you feel a sense of connection in these places is a good way to go: consensually checking out whether they fancy meeting up or chatting online one-to-one.

It’s a great idea to build friendships slowly so you can really get a sense of whether it’s a good fit, casting your net wide and meet many people before focusing on a few where you feel mutuality, kindness, and connection. Then it’s about ensuring that you put the time and energy into cultivating those close relationships.

Justin Hancock and I did a podcast about making and developing friendships. Our zine Make Your Own Relationship User Guide helps you think through these things for yourself. My book Rewriting the Rules also has pointers for how we might value friendship love as much as other kinds.

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Straight Pride has raised questions around ‘straight culture’ and what it is. What are your thoughts on this, and what do you think of the tongue-in-cheek examples of ‘straight culture‘ we tend to see in listicles / videos?

My unpacking of all of this would start with the way wider culture understandings sexuality and gender. The heteronormative understanding is that people can be divided into men and women (gender) and straight and gay (sexuality), with the former being historically and culturally massively privileged over the latter in each case. 

So there are two major problems with the idea of straight pride. The first – which these listicles and things like the heterosexuality questionnaire and the straight privilege checklist are pointing out – is that straightness is massively privileged culturally over gayness. The reason that LGBTQIA+ prides are needed is due to the invisibility, marginalisation, and oppression of queer people in a culture that regards straightness as natural, normal, and superior in all kinds of ways. We have to point out that we exist and that that could be something worth celebrating rather than seeing as a problem.

The second issue with the idea of straight pride – which the critiques don’t usually get into – is that the heteronormative model that it’s based on is grounded on this binary understanding which does not capture how gender or sexuality actually work, and which erases many people’s experience.

Tongue in cheek jokes about straight culture are amusing and helpful in the way they question how great the supposed natural, normal, ideal way of being is: pointing out how bland it is, or how it appropriates things from queer culture, or how aspiring to these norms doesn’t really make people very happy, for example.

However, this kind of flipping which suggests – albeit in a humorous way – that gayness is better than straightness still maintains a binary way of thinking whereby people could be divided into straight and gay. So it could be seen as shoring up one aspect of heteronormativity (the binary) even as it critiques another (the hierarchy or power imbalance inherent in it). 

J.J. Halberstam wrote about his experiences as a Gender Studies professor, in particular about his course ‘What is Heterosexuality?’ which flipped the script and examined heterosexuality in the way we normally examine queerness. How effective do you think approaches like these are, and what do you think are the core cultural tenets of heteronormativity?

The great thing about this kind of approach is that it reveals the hierarchical heteronormative model and how it operates. It’s a similar approach to the heterosexual questionnaire which asks straight people the kinds of questions that queer people are often asked, like when did you first know you were straight? might it be a phase? have you tried not being straight? what made you straight?

This last one in particular is important. Because straightness is culturally regarded as the norm, queerness is constantly called upon to explain itself – from parents asking a queer kid if it was their fault, to scientists searching for a gay gene or a physiological cause of transness. Nobody asks for explanations of why people are straight or cisgender. The only reason that people have to ‘come out’ at all is that the default assumption is that people will be straight and cis (the supposed norm).

This is all rooted in the long history of a scientific approach which divides ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ and endeavours to explain, treat, or even eradicate the ‘abnormal’. This is interwoven with the history of colonialism, ableism, and capitalism, as well as heteronormativity, as it is strongly linked to the projects of proving that certain racial groups were intellectually or morally inferior, in order to justify enslaving or colonising them, as well as eugenic projects to eradicate certain bodies, and capitalist projects of proving women inferior in order to justify their unpaid labour in the home or low paid labour in the workforce.

The project of turning the lens of study on whiteness, heterosexuality, masculinity, etc. is a vital one for revealing this historical context, and for situating the problem in the structures of power which sustain it – and in those who benefit from this.

While definitely a useful move, my issue with approaches like turning the lens on heterosexuality is that, again, they often still accept a binary understanding where people can simply be divided into straight and queer, cis and trans. It’s important to dismantle these binary understandings entirely given they are a key underpinning of heteronormativity.

You recently co-authored Life Isn’t Binary. You’re an advocate for queer thinking, and for dismantling oppositional categories. Do you think society at large is becoming more open to resisting binaries? If so, what could the long-term effects of this be on heterosexuality? 

So my approach would be to point out how binary understandings don’t work for most people.

1. Most of our genders and sexualities do not fit neatly into these binary understandings
2. Gender and sexuality is way more multifaceted than these ways of understanding it suggest
3. The binaries are bad for everyone – those who fit on the privileged and marginalised side, and those who are erased by the binary entirely.

To unpack these points:

1. Recent research suggests that nearly half of young people don’t experience themselves as exclusively gay or straight (even within a heteronormative culture). Over a third of people experience themselves as to some extent ‘the other gender, both genders, or neither gender’. 
2. Many queer theorists and scientists have pointed out that gender of attraction is only one dimension of human sexuality, with many others being equally – or more – important, such as how much attraction we experience, what kinds of people we’re attracted to, what roles we take sexually, what desires or fantasies we have, etc.
3. There is a good deal of evidence that endeavouring to fit rigidly into gender norms, and a heternormative lifecourse (dating, settling down, marriage, kids, etc.) is pretty bad for people’s mental and physical health, including high rates of depression, body dissatisfaction, and relationship problems for women, and high rates of addiction, aggressive behaviour, and suicide for men.

If we put together all of the people whose genders and sexualities are – in some way – non-normative, we actually get the vast majority of people: all those who experience little or no sexual attraction (on the asexual spectrum), all those attracted to more than one gender (bi, pan, queer) or the same gender (gay, lesbian), all those whose sexual desires are other than penis-in-vagina sex leading to orgasm (e.g. kinky desires), all those who deviate from mononormativity (e.g. people with multiple partners, open relationships, or having affairs), all those whose gender doesn’t completely fit the one they were assigned at birth (either in terms of identity, role, expression, or experience).

I think there is increasing awareness of this diversity of gender and sexuality (rather than binaries), for example in the claiming of multiple identity terms or the expansion in meaning of terms like gay and queer. This may offer an alternative model for dismantling heteronormativity (and potentially so much more), but there is also a massive backlash against it currently (which the whole straight pride story is but one tiny part of), so we will have to see

What are your thoughts on ‘ally’ as one of the As in LGBTQQIAA+?

Hm. I guess I like the additional Q for questioning because it includes those who are not clearly in any identity politics place (maybe it is more about their experience or attraction), and potentially makes that radical point that being questioning, uncertain, in a ‘phase’ or fluid about our sexuality and gender is a valid place to be (perhaps a more honest place for many people to be than ticking a box). 

Ally however is a potentially problematic term. It feels a bit like woke to me. Like anybody who claims to be an ally, or to be woke, almost certainly isn’t. Like one could be aiming at allyship and wokeness, but if you ever imagine that you’ve got there, you haven’t. It’s an identity or state that can never be achieved, and one that it might be okay for more marginalised folk to say they felt you were, but never to claim yourself. 

If you think of yourself as an ally I suspect you’re in grave danger of being in a rescuer/saviour place – that sense that you are going to help to poor, marginalised people which furthers an ‘us and them’ binary rather than recognising these structures and systems as ones that hurt us all – and working to dismantle them in sustainable ways for the benefit of all – including yourself.

Another risk with rescuers is that they are invested both in the people they are helping getting better (to prove that they have been a great rescuer) and in those people staying victims (in order that they will still have a job – as a rescuer). There’s a danger of that with allyship: allies still distancing themselves from the people they are allies to – and being invested in that group shoring them up (giving them a cookie for being so helpful) at the same time as staying marginalised (so they can keep performing great allyship).

Any more thoughts?

I think it’s a great idea to look at those issues of appropriation and assimilation too in relation to what straight culture is. However, I was amusingly dismayed that many of the music-related straight culture things on the questionnaire applied to me. Being horrifically cheesy and uncool in your musical taste should not be a marker of straightness I think!

Perhaps there is something interesting here about the conflation of queerness with youth – and perhaps being of a certain class background/education/wealth – too. I know that some queer events have had issues with being alienating to older people and more working class people – often because it’s assumed that people will be into certain music, television, movies, arts, etc.

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Three years ago 2014 was hailed ‘the transgender tipping point’. The American Psychiatric Association had just changed their category of ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ to ‘Gender Dysphoria’ removing much of the stigma of mental illness which had been attached to being trans. Trans actors finally played trans characters in popular shows like Transparent and Orange is the New Black, moving away from old tragic/evil stereotypes. Laverne Cox made the cover of Time Magazine and Janet Mock’s memoir Redefining Realness became a New York Times bestseller. The first trans pride march in Europe took place. Two major non-binary websites appeared, recognising the many trans people who don’t experience themselves as men or women. The Facebook ‘gender revolution’ offered over fifty possible gender identity categories, as well as a gender neutral ‘they’ pronoun option. Trans was becoming more visible and better understood.

If 2014 was the year of the transgender tipping point, then 2017 was surely the year of the transgender moral panic. Earlier this year each month brought a new story: we had two BBC documentaries, Trump’s attempted ban on trans people in the military, moves towards gender neutral school uniforms, bathroom bills in the US, Piers Morgan’s repeated dismissal of non-binary gender, and many more. Trans communities had only just dealt with the impact of one report when the next one hit.

However the last few months of the year made the rest of 2017 feel relatively spacious. There were trans-related headlines virtually every day, and even several days when one paper published two or three separate articles on the topic. The reports also became increasingly negative.

One reason for this media onslaught is the coming revision of the Gender Recognition Act. Currently trans people who want to be legally recognised in their gender have to pay to submit paperwork – including a medical diagnosis – to a committee who make that decision. The proposed changes – in line with several other countries – would allow people to self-determine their gender, de-medicalising the process, and hopefully making it possible for non-binary people as well as for men and women.

As a trans person myself I’ve noticed the impact of this tsunami of negative press on my own mental health, so I’m deeply concerned about the toll it’s taken on younger trans folk who already have alarmingly high levels of distress and suicidal thoughts. This moral panic will likely bolster existing high levels of trans-related bullying, which eight out of ten of young trans people experience, with one in ten receiving death threats. I also fear a background of heightened cultural transphobia as article after article across broadsheets and tabloids alike give the sense that there are sensible reasons to be concerned about trans people.

Is this a moral panic?

There are many reasons to label this current wave of trans-negative media a moral panic: a process where social concern is aroused over an issue by mass media and others. These include:

• The scattergun nature of the content. There’s no one coherent narrative here which could be sensibly discussed, but rather multiple concerns which become unhelpfully intertwined, such as the treatment of trans and gender-questioning kids, trans people as perpetrators – rather than victims – of violence, the changing nature of gendered language, access to rape and domestic violence services, and whether boys should be allowed to wear clothing currently associated with girls. When you trace back the history of the stories, several turn out to be years old rather than current ‘news’, or based on wilful misinterpretation of what somebody has said.
• The contradictory nature of the concerns. Trans people are currently being blamed both for dismantling the current gender system and for reinforcing it. Trans-related media calls for both the relaxing and tightening of gender roles for children. Trans women’s status as women is questioned due to their biology in some pieces and their socialisation in others.
• The misinformation within the reporting. One of the most concerning features of the media onslaught is the staggering lack of fact-checking that’s going on. For example, many pundits – who should know better – expressed anxiety around young people being given hormones and surgeries when even a cursory online search would inform them this never happens on the NHS. The most adolescents are given are blockers to pause puberty until they reach the age of consent, and even this is relatively rare and only done after full consideration by a multidisciplinary team. Similarly the ludicrously unsubstantiated claim that a large proportion of convicted sex offenders are trans was gleefully reported with zero critical evaluation, as are amplified statistics about people regretting surgeries.
• The similarity of the current panic to past panics. Several people have pointed out how similar this wave of reporting is to the media treatment of gay men back in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic and the introduction of Section 28 – which banned teaching about sexual diversity in schools. Gay men then, like trans people now, were branded as paedophiles, and any mention of homosexuality was regarded as having the potential to turn children gay, just as there is now a concern that young people will be ‘turned trans’ by ‘social contagion’ if they learn about gender diversity.
• The lack of positive news stories or inclusion of trans experts. There are so many positive trans-related stories we could be hearing about, and so many wise, knowledgeable, and engaging trans experts we could be hearing from, so why this huge skew to the negative and the focus on celebrities with no expertise or experience around trans issues?

Why the moral panic?

I suspect, as with anything, there are multiple complex reasons behind this moral panic. Certainly the current uncomfortable alliance between some men’s rights activists, some feminists, some religious spokespeople, and various left and right wing campaigners and journalists, suggests a plethora of motivations which could usefully be explored. For now I’ll focus on one reason which may underlie much of what’s going on.

This reason occurred to me when comparing reporting around trans and intersex issues. We hear a huge amount about the former and relatively little about the latter, despite the similar numbers of people in each group. If a major concern about trans is really that children might be subject to non-consensual irreversible surgeries, then why are the same commentators not making serious noise about the continued medical treatment of intersex children? Many intersex people are operated on as babies in ways that are medically unnecessary and frequently lead to adverse effects such as the impairment of sexual sensation in later life, not to mention the potential impact of such early trauma which is often kept a secret from the person concerned.

One reason that springs to my mind for the silence around intersex surgeries, and the deafening roar around trans surgeries, is that the concern is not about physical interventions, nor is it about irreversibility, nor is it about capacity to consent. It’s about normativity. Genital surgeries take intersex babies closer to our current gender norm of two and only two genders which remain fixed throughout life, whereas surgeries on trans people potentially take them away from it.

One key outcome of the moral panic is that it helpfully distracts our attention from this current gender system which we’re all implicated in, and which is bad for everybody whether trans or cisgender, whether intersex or not, and whether woman, man, or non-binary.

We don’t need to look far for evidence of this: it’s been all around us all year as well. The BBC documentary No More Boys and Girls demonstrated the distressing impact of rigid binary gender roles on kids. Viewers saw how seven-year-old girls virtually all aspired to grow up to be nothing but ‘pretty’. Boys lacked the capacity to express – or even find words for – emotions other than anger. All the kids agreed that boys were obviously ‘better’ than girls. When I tweeted about this show, many respondents accused it of ‘social engineering’ or ‘child abuse’ in endeavouring to shift such gender stereotypes. But how are those phrases any less applicable to the current situation of rigidly enforced gender roles?

Earlier this year Robert Webb’s memoir How Not to be a Boy helpfully drew attention to the troubling impact of norms of masculinity on the wellbeing of boys and men, a group with a frighteningly high suicide rate. The current gender system can also be implicated in continued pay inequalities between men and women. The acceptance of toxic gender roles and a ‘boys will be boys’ mentality are a huge part of the cultural normalising of sexual harassment and violence which the recent #metoo campaign so helpfully highlighted.

Shifting the conversation

The conversation I believe we need to be having about gender is one which encourages everyone – young people included – to critically engage with current cultural stereotypes and media representations. This involves opening up our understanding of gender diversity rather than closing it down.

I’m in agreement with those who argue against the replacement of one rigid gender system with another which is equally rigid: for example one in which we assume that any kid who doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes must be a trans man or woman and must therefore follow one of only two very specific pathways of hormones and surgeries. However it cannot be emphasised enough that this is not what any gender-affirmative practitioners, activists, or educators I’m aware of are trying to do. Rather we’re endeavouring to open up understandings so that everybody can find more comfortable, consensual ways to be in relation to gender.

We want girls and boys to be free to express their genders however best fits them, without bullying or coercion, and for that to be able change over time – as it inevitably does for all of us. We want the third or so of people who experience themselves as to some extent between or beyond the gender binary to be able to identify and express that in whatever way feels right. And we want those people – trans and cisgender – for whom some form of social or physical gender-related change will vastly improve their physical and/or mental health to be able to follow whichever pathway suits them in well-informed, well-supported, and consensual ways.

Let’s make 2018 a year when, instead of attacking trans and non-binary people, we listen to what they have to teach us: about the way gender works in our culture; about the diversity of possible identities, expressions and experiences; and about how shifting rigid social scripts and policies can improve things for everybody. Let’s make it a year when we return to celebrating trans voices – as we began to do in 2014 – instead of dismissing them: I’ve listed just some of the amazing people, groups, and projects we could be celebrating and learning from in below.

All the ideas in this article are explored, in more depth, in my book with Alex Iantaffi: How to Understand Your Gender (a book aimed at everybody). If you’re a practitioner of any kind, you might find my Gender, Sexual and Relationship Diversity BACP resource helpful as an overview of how gender works, and how to work with gender (and other) diverse people: GSRD resource

Find out more…

For guidance and support about covering trans in the media, check out:

• Trans Media Watch
• All About Trans

Jessica Kingsley have been publishing a range of helpful and important books on gender diversity, and continue to do so. Check these out here.

There have been many other excellent publications, performances, and events on this topic in the last year or so. Here are just a few of my favourites.

• Trans Like Me – CN Lester
• Before (I) You Step Outside. (Love) (Me) – Travis Alabanza
• Trans Britain – Christine Burns edited collection
• Brown, trans, queer, Muslim and proud – Sabah Choudrey
• Trans: A Memoir – Juliet Jacques
• Man Alive – Thomas Page McBee
• Transpose (ongoing event)
• Trans Pride
• My Genderation films
• I am They film – Fox Fisher and Owl

For more information check out these websites:

• Gendered Intelligence
• Gender construction kit
• Tranz wiki
• Beyond the Binary
• Non-Binary Inclusion Project

If you want to improve things for trans people in your workplace, then this is an excellent book:

• Transgender Employees in the Workplace – Jennie Kermode

The post 2017 Review: The Transgender Moral Panic appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

There’s also a podcast and blog post all about bi visibility over on megjohnandjustin.com.

Gay Invisibility

Imagine a world where bi people were treated like gay & lesbian people, and vice versa…

You wake up in the morning and smile, remembering it’s Pride day. You’re going to get to march with all your lesbian and gay mates. Then your heart sinks a little remembering previous Prides. You’ll probably be relegated to the back of the march again after all the hundreds of bi charities and groups and organisations. Sure some of them have finally added LG to their names these days, but BTLG is mostly about the B and everyone knows it. It’s crazy-making when we know that LG people make up around half of all LGB people. Where are they all?

You know you’ll also be lucky this afternoon if there’s even one gay or lesbian identified person up on the stage at the end of Pride. Last year one gay activist got about a minute up there before the next bi band came on. It’s like the Purple List of influential BTLG people: Published in a major national newspaper every year and almost everyone on it is bi. A small gay magazine published a ‘rainbow list’, to make the point that there are lots of influential LG people too, but people didn’t pay much attention to that. It’s so frustrating because you know for a fact that many of the famous bi actors, sportspeople, and pop stars only ever have same-sex relationships, but they still call themselves ‘bi’ because being gay is so stigmatised. When that swimmer came out a couple of years back the bi press immediately called him bi even though he deliberately only said that he was attracted to people of the same-sex. There’s so few gay role-models or gay storylines on TV programmes. It only makes lesbian and gay people more invisible.

You sigh. It’s hard being gay in a world where everyone’s divided into heterosexual or bisexual. They’ve even done research now to try to prove that same-sex-only attraction doesn’t exist: that you’re either ‘straight, bi, or lying’. People can wrap their head around attraction to the opposite gender, or to people of any gender, but not to only being attracted to the same gender only. When you try to point out that Kinsey found that sexuality was a spectrum: there were people at the far end who were just attracted to the same gender, they just dismiss you saying that research is outdated.

Over breakfast you flick through the latest report from a major BTLG mental health charity. It’s great work they’re doing and you try to support them, but the gay invisibility really gets on your nerves. Several places in the document talk about ‘biphobia and transphobia’ and don’t mention homophobia at all. You’ve brought that up with them in the past and they just claim that homophobia is a subset of biphobia. It’s the same kind of argument as people who use ‘bi’ as an umbrella term for everyone with same-sex attraction whether they’re also attracted to the opposite sex or not. You’ve tried to point out that the word ‘bisexual’ doesn’t accurately capture your sexual orientation but they just look at you like you’re making a big deal over nothing. It’s all ‘bi people’, ‘bi relationships’, ‘bi parents’, ‘the bi community’ etc. etc. etc.

The report talks about the fact that BLG people have worse mental health than straight people, but it just lumps all BLG people together. You find that annoying because you know that it’s the lesbian and gay people who actually have the highest rates of depression, self-harm and suicide. Research like this means that the money and resources go to BLG people as a whole rather than to LG people in particular. And that mostly means the big commercial ‘bi scene’ which very few LG people actually access. So the help isn’t going to the people who need it most, and the bis are the ones who get all the funding.

Again you’ve tried to point this out, but the bi activists you’ve spoken to argue that it’s important to get everyone accepting bisexuality fully as the first step to BTLG rights. Once that’s happened they can work on the more ‘complicated’ identities like gay and lesbian. That’s why so many people’s energy went into the multiple marriage campaign. Now polyamorous bisexual and straight people can marry more than one partner, or one opposite-sex partner. But there’s still no allowance for gay people – and monogamous bisexuals – who want to marry one same-sex partner only. Even during the campaign loads of people were saying that there was a danger that multiple marriage would open the floodgates to same-sex-only marriage, comparing it to incest and bestiality. They call multiple marriage ‘equal marriage’ now, but it’s not truly equal. When you point that out people just accuse you of sour grapes.

Last BTLG history month you tried to get your organisation’s BTLG group to do an exhibition of famous LG people through history, but the other people on the committee (all bi of course) said that most of the people you suggested were ‘probably bi really’. And they’re always going on about Stonewall as this big event in BT history, dismissing all the gay people who were also involved at the forefront of what happened back then. The committee ended up putting a bunch of the Stonewall posters up round the organisation: ‘Some people are bi, get over it’ and ‘One is bi. If that bothers people, our work continues.’ You pointed out that there were actually ‘gay’ posters available as well but they just gave you a look and said ‘the campaign’s about eradicating biphobia in the workplace, alright.’ You hear that Stonewall have consulted with lesbian and gay people to try to improve inclusion, but you feel so jaded after all this time that you’ll believe that when you see it.

You check your phone. Looks like a bunch of your mates are going out to a bi bar after the Pride event. You’re not tempted. Last time you did that everyone assumed you’d be attracted to multiple genders and it was really uncomfortable when you came out as gay. Like at work and with your family they also kept forgetting and assuming you were bi, so you had to come out again and again. And you’re so sick of the stereotypes. Some bi people won’t date you for fear that you’ll leave them for another gay person. Others treat you with suspicion: ‘are you sure you’re really gay?’

The double discrimination is probably the worst thing. You kind of expect homophobia from the straight world, but getting it from bi people as well is really hard. Like when you finally left the football team you were on because of the homophobic discrimination there, and joined a BTLG football team only to find that they called you ‘gold star’ like it was a big joke, and kept going on about your sexuality and how you must be ‘picky’ or ‘confused’.

You remember back to last year’s Pride. Double discrimination there too. Your group marching past a bunch of bi people and they all started singing some old Eurovision song ‘loosen you mind up’ which you know was a homophobic joke. Mostly though the crowd just went quiet when your group walked past and then started cheering for the next bi group.

When you told your bi friends about it in the pub afterwards they said you were probably just exaggerating or being over-sensitive. They think you’re crazy to be so bothered by it, but you think the world is crazy for not being able to see gay invisibility when it’s right in their face.

Maybe you’ll just stay at home.

This story is based on all based on research on bisexuality reviewed in The Bisexuality Report (with the sexualities reversed of course!)
With many thanks to Catherine Butler and colleagues for their inspiration with the Homoworld story and short film, as well as this US version.

The post Bi visibility day: Gay invisibility appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Give it a read if you fancy learning more about queer activism and queer ideas, including some of the tensions around Pride marches: Assimilationist &/or radical? Normative &/or challenging the norm? Intersectional or one-dimensional? lG(bt) &/or queer?

The post Queer: The video appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.