IPS not fit for purpose?

The Identity and Passport Service will not go ahead with the introduction of non-gendered passports, PinkNews reports. This was a proposal whereby people for whom passports tagged as 'male' or 'female' are not appropriate for one reason or another, to have another gender tag option: F, M or X.

It seems that to dodge taking any action, they've knocked up an easily-debunked security problem claim: but who would conduct intimate searches on people whose passports were marked neither M nor F?

Straight out of the Humphrey Appleby textbook.

Now, maybe the IPS honestly don't have anyone suitable on their staff roster. Though if everyone working for IPS is binary-gender identified, cis and non-intersex, then either staffing numbers are even lower than we'd been led to believe, or there is something institutionally wrong in their HR department that they seriously need to look at.

But if checking points already have at least members of the two most popular gender groupings in attendance to conduct such searches, surely we could get moving with giving anyone with an X passport rather than an F or M one the choice of either of the available search agents. Or the possibility of being detained while taken to a place where the staff roster includes someone more suitable for the, ahem, job in hand.

So this one hits the buffers. Simon Hughes MP is annoyed, and I'm disappointed that - as with the same-sex marriage bill - we are still struggling to drag our nation's bureaucracy into the 20th century when its people are living a decent chunk of the way through the 21st.

But... people from countries which do have non-binary-gender passports will continue to come and go through our borders, reflecting that the "but who will do the searches" problem is already there and something they already need to have a solution to, regardless of what options might be available to UKanian passport holders. So actually, there is no security procedure difference, and this is just an opportunity for our nanny state to treat its citizens like dirt.


If this really is what the IPS are going to report, and they intend to then just drop the whole idea and walk away, there are four magic words from the era of the last coalition government to sum it up.  Not. Fit. For. Purpose.

From Jen's Little Book Of Wisdom

Despite the over-used "twice the chance of a date on a Friday night" line*, bisexuals only get the same number of Friday nights as everyone else.




* & thank you so much Woody Allen for saving oodles of people the effort of having to think up their own witticism about the bis.

That Mrs Thatcher

As across the internet tubes we all burble about Margaret Thatcher's death, I tried coming up with the good things she did and there were three or four that immediately sprung to mind(1). Then you go on to the other column and eight or nine things rather than three or four. Mostly bad, but like everyone, and like every government, a bit of a blend.

A lot of what is being attributed to Mrs T today came in under Labour in the 70s - monetarist economics and a selfish short-termist "I'm alright jack" view of wider society. And when she left office we had a nationalised railway network and no such thing as university tuition fees: can you imagine!

But that's the trouble with what's largely social history tied up in the stories we tell ourselves: we all have some idea what Thatcherism was, whereas Callaghan...ism..? No one knows what that might have been. Eleven years of change for better and worse glows bright in the memory in the way that the previous decade of greyness, decline and stagnation - and indeed the next seven years of much the same again - cannot fire the imagination.

And so beware false tales in the mix this week: lots of people will recall that Margaret Thatcher believed that there is "no such thing as society"' - ironically this based on a deliberate malquote of her, where the full context of the phrase was a warning about extremes of selfishness and individualism. A warning that had it been borne in mind by Brown and Blair we might not be quite as deep in the financial doo-doo as we are.

 

(1) - good things like legalising sex between men in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. Bad things like legislating to make homosexuality a thought crime.  Good things like the trades union reforms in 1980, 82 and 84. Bad things like selling off the social housing stock at a knock-down price and preventing replacements being built. Good things like privatising the phone networks; bad things like privatising the water board.

Across the hills to Sheffield Zinefest

This weekend I dipped my toe in zinesterland for the first time. by going to the Sheffield Zinefest.

It's a bit weird, saying that, as I've been standing on the borders of the place for about 20 years! Whether mine or my flatmate's music zines, the trashy thing for people in my uni department that I sometimes wrote for, the amusing reputation I got in the 90s with the then writer-about-queer-zines for BCN, or a squillion bits and pieces I've written and sometimes drawn for BCN and other bi magazines... it's all been in places of, so to speak, intersectional zine culture. A place where we are all queer and here is a zine about being queer. A place where we are all feminist and here is a distro table of the fine work of grrrl zinesters. I'd never just gone to a place where people who get it about the seductive power of ink and paper congregate.

And there are two things I need to write: the day out, and trying to keep up the little fillip of ink and paper energy it's given me. There's going to be a section heading or two, you know there will... and maybe even a cut-tag. Here they come...

A splendid day out

BCN 117

Well, it's back from the print shop.... yet again they sent it to the wrong place and so it is a couple of weeks behind when it could have been going into the post. I am so not amused you can hardly imagine, but I think if it was raining today then as I walked down the street the raindrops would turn to steam as them met my head. It's almost less that they sent it to somewhere arbitrary instead of the delivery address stated, more how blase they were when challenged about it.

Four alternative print quotes sourced so far. If I can move it for anything like the same print bill, I'm moving. Most other print houses also have tracking on parcels so you can find out if things have been delivered to a randomly chosen stranger.

Future History

Too little was going on for LGBT HM, so I cracked and made a bisexual history thing. It's a twitter feed, and there'll be a page on BiMedia soon to go with it. @bisexualhistory - my aim with it is that one day I'll have a "bi thing from history" for every day of the year.

It may require me to organise the Smallest BiFest Ever one December 25th to complete the calendar...

400 to 175

The first hurdle for the same-sex marriage bill has been passed. I'm not entirely sure, but I think 400 votes in favour is the largest show of support there's been for any LGBT equality measure to date. Yes, 175 against...

I tried to juggle lots of things at once during the debate in the Commons including live-tweeting what was being said on @BiCommunityNews - some contributions good and bad will have been missed while I was on the phone to people, talking to people face-to-face, or moving from here to there, but I'll paste a little timeline below.

Watching the debate you'd've thought there was going to be a much tighter result. One after another MPs stood up to grump about the bill: the trouble for most of them being, they'd decided what they thought of it when they got to the idea "it's about the gays", but now had to concoct some bold excuse as to why they were going to vote no that sounded a bit more high principled than "gays have got cooties and if they can marry we might catch it off a registrar".

As ever, indeed from the moment I got the tip-off that this bill was going to be announced, I am a little bit like a rabbit in headlights: I grew up on 80s tabloid hatred and the coming together of Tories and Labour to foist Section 28 on us all. Somehow just two decades later I wound up living on a different planet from all that stuff, even if it is a world with a lot of confused aliens from 80s-world.

There's still a good long way to go before we can marry, though...

Bisexuals and LGBT History Month 2013

As fellow BiBloggers resident EsmeT reminds us in her recent post, it's about to be February and in the UK that's LGBT History Month.

Each year a host of events around the UK and in the media teach or remind us about our queer history, sometimes with overarching themes that have been deliberately chosen, sometimes with themes that just seem to emerge at a grassroots level. The second year of LGBT HM being marked, if I remember right, there was a groundswell of trans history events in response to the first year being rather L&G. Last year it was all about sport, on account of the Olympics, which is why this year's theme is a bit peculiar in being the 101st anniversary of Alan Turing's birth. 100 years is more usual, but apparently the Olympics just wouldn't take "next year" for an answer.

Some years LGBT HM events with a bi focus happen around the UK during the month: BiPhoria hosted a "3,000 Years Of Bisexuality" history talk about four years ago, I did a "25 Years of Bisexual Manchester" type talk in 2011, and London has had a couple of events of varying shapes.

Beyond those, though, the pickings to date are lean.

It depends on a few factors: either one or more bi folk deciding to make something happen, whether as a one-off or as a specially themed evening at an existing bi meetup group, or a more broadly focused organisation that makes contact with one of many bi projects around the UK which can help with guest speakers (Bi Community News, Bisexual Index, Bothways, BiPhoria, Bi Cymru and suchlike). 

Beside EsmeT's talk with her Church group, which I may be misreading but it sounds more like it's directed at the existing congregation rather than a 'public' audience, so far I haven't heard of any LGBT History Month events going on this year with a bi focus or substantial bi angle. 

So: is there a B in LGBT History Month this year? If so please tell me, as I'd love to know about it!