By way of celebration, some thoughts on metaphors for bisexuality.

What it means

Part of what it means to me to identify as bi is this:

If one day I feel attraction to a woman, I don’t have to think “Does this mean I’m gay?!”, or “If this carried on would it mean I was a Lesbian?!”

If one day I feel attraction to a man, I don’t have to think “Does this mean I’m not gay after all?!” or “If this carries on, at what point do I lose the right to call myself Lesbian?!”

If one day I feel attraction to someone who identifies as neither binary gender, I don’t have to think “What does this mean about me?!” (or indeed “Where does this person fit in my model?”)

None of that noise exists in my life. As far as gender-linked sexuality is concerned, there isn’t some territory over here where I’m officially supposed to walk, and some territory over there where I’m not supposed to walk. It’s all one whole, and I already live there.

This feels peaceful to me.

Questions

Of course new lovely people in my life still bring questions. “What flavour of attraction am I feeling?” “Would it be ethical to express that feeling with this person?” “How might this unfold, along this or that path?” “What kind of connection would fit into my life at the moment and be good for all concerned?”

But those questions aren’t going to change my identity as queer & bi. If the answers rock my world, it won’t be on that dimension.

Paradox

This being my experience, I find it paradoxical/ironic that so much rhetoric around bisexuality – including the origin of the name itself – is of division and/or movement.

For instance, here are some slang terms for bisexuality which express through metaphor the idea of (a) two states, and (b) switching between them:

There’s also the idea that we’re on our way to coming out “properly” – that is, as gay – a movement with one approved destination.

Some words are more usually attributed to us by others rather than ourselves: for instance “unstable”, “unreliable” (both with connotations of undesired change or movement) and “confused” (implying that things have been mixed up which ought to have remained separate).

On the other hand, from bi people feeling good about themselves, you might well hear the words “fluid” or “both”. That is, movement (or at least the potential for it), and division (albeit added together again).

My landscape

Well. I’m not saying those aren’t valid metaphors, for the people who are using them. But my landscape is different.

In this aspect of my life, I don’t feel fluid. I feel stable. I feel settled. I arrived already. I’m not going anywhere.

I don’t feel divided such as to require being added together with a “both”; I feel profoundly integrated. All of me is allowed in. “There is no fence.”²

As for the legendary “confusion”… not, shall we say, a phenomenon particularly characteristic of me :-)

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I’m one of many people across the world who, in July 2011, felt my world rock a little bit at the unexpected death of Kay Dekker.

I’d known that Kay’s health wasn’t exactly tip top, ever since his back injury some years ago. But the idea of his death had never been in my mind, except in the general sense that anyone could die any time. I think it’s beginning to sink in now, but in the last few weeks, I’ve often remembered the news with a tiny jolt, “Kay is dead”. And then, just for a moment, I’d feel “No… that can’t be”.

By way of explanation for people who didn’t know Kay, and celebration for those who did, I recommend Doug’s lovely post “Kay Dekker: an insufficient tribute“.

Thinking back

I first met Kay in 3d in 1995, at BiCon. (That was the first year I went to BiCon.) But before that, I’d already seen him around online, on soc.bi which was then in its heyday.

Last time I remember hanging out with him in 3d was on the last day of BiCon 2001 – he, I and Nat were all out on the grass by the accommodation blocks, in “last day winding-down mellowness” mode. That BiCon had included lots of discussion of androgyny and genderqueer, and I remember we were talking about the gender identity question in the BiCon survey.

There’s a sense in which, by external measures, Kay wasn’t a big part of my life and I wasn’t a big part of his. In recent years, I only saw him online, and even that had dwindled as he wasn’t posting much any more.

But my thoughts and feelings when he died were 100% “a friend has died”. Not just “someone I slightly know has died”. And I know I’m one of many people who feel the same way, even if their connections with Kay were similarly small by external measures.

Mosaic metaphor

In the few days just after Kay’s death, I was thinking a lot about who he was for the UK out-bi community, in particular his gift for connecting with people and nurturing them. I was thinking: If the community were a mosaic of different colours, then Kay wasn’t just one tile (maybe kingfisher blue with a slightly golden-green glaze), he was some of the mortar as well.

In imagining the mosaic metaphor, I also had this vague mathematical concept of Kay’s ability to be adjacent to a number of other tiles which would require four or more dimensions to be possible! a sort of fold in space-time! (I think he’d have been amused by that.)

It really struck me how much connectedness he’d created all around him. I’ve never before been in a community where so many people around me were all tipped into grief at the same time. So as well as thinking a lot of Kay’s closest people, I was thinking of the many others across the UK & across the world who would miss him.

Song

This song dates back some years now. I didn’t only just write it. But it was the thought of Kay’s friends (many of them also my friends) grieving right now that promoted it to “next up” in the song release plan.

Note: This is a sad song, hence possibly not entirely safe for work, depending on your workplace & how susceptible you are to tears.

(If no playback button appears, you can still play the song back from its Bandcamp page.)

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Went to a “Readers’ Day” on Saturday at Nottingham City Council House.

What sold me on the event originally was seeing that Armistead Maupin would be there – he of the groundbreaking and very readable Tales of the City and, my favourite of his, Maybe the Moon.

But after booking for the day, I thought in order to make the most of it, I’d go looking for some books by some of the other guest authors. That led me to David Nicholls‘ One Day, which I turned out to like as well.

So there I was in a somewhat chilly ballroom in Nottingham’s Council House on Saturday morning, after the first snowfall here of the winter.

(As an aside, I’ll add that to the best of my recollection, this is the first time I’ve ever been into the Council House, despite living in Nottingham on & off since 1982! I quite liked the architecture of it.)

Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin was interviewed by Greg Woods,

then read from his latest book Mary Ann In Autumn and took questions.

Lovely bloke and very entertaining. He describes himself as a storyteller, and it’s true. If he comes to speak anywhere near you, I’d say go if you can.

I’m not sure if he put it in exactly these words, but I had a real sense of how much his art is also activism. In answering questions, he alluded to the countless people over the years who’ve told him how his writing made a difference to them. A simple example he mentioned was of a teenager who was encouraged to come out to his parents by knowing that the parents enjoyed AM’s books. AM also mentioned that the death of Tales of the City character Jon was the first ever death from AIDS in fiction – I hadn’t known that.

I especially appreciated hearing him talk about his feisty, charismatic friend Tammy, the inspiration for Maybe The Moon. She knew he was writing it, and came to stay with him for a few days so that they could talk about her life. But she didn’t live to see the book finished.

Another bit I was pondering afterwards was when someone asked AM if he might one day write about his time in the Navy. He said that’d be unlikely, and explained how he likes to write of the present time as he lives it: expressing things he’s thinking about & feeling at that time, with his books intentionally “dated” to the era when they were written. There was a funny story about his editor warning him that a particular musician he’d named was “kind of last year” and AM replying along the lines of “Yes, that’s because the book is set last year!”

Book swopping

At lunchtime there was a “Book Swop”. I’d forgotten to bring a book for that, but discovered we’d each been given one (different ones) in the bags we were given on arrival, along with timetable and feedback form. I didn’t especially fancy my freebie, so handed that in and had a rummage.

I was just thinking maybe there wasn’t anything I wanted, when I suddenly happened upon a copy of David Almond’s Skellig. I’d heard on the grapevine recently that one of the characters in Skellig is a non-schooling young person and (amazingly enough) not a lonely deprived cliché wrapped in cotton-wool. So I’d been curious about that book and thinking I must read it soon. Could have got it from the library, but if it lives up to the description I read, it’s one I’ll be happy to have on hand for lending out. So that felt like a lucky moment.

Audiobooks

After lunch I went to the session on “Making books talk”: “Clipper Audio’s Andrew Treppass and Gordon Griffin, actor and narrator of over 500 novels, talk about the world of the spoken word and reveal how a first-class audiobook is created.”

I never usually listen to audiobooks; just occasionally I might hear part of one, if someone puts a children’s one on in their car while I’m getting a lift. Myself I love reading from real actual books, and I just don’t think audiobooks would be as good, for me. For one thing, I suspect I’d start to feel impatient at the much slower pace.

On the other hand, more and more lately I’ve been listening to podcasts and spoken word MP3s of other kinds, and thinking about perhaps at some point creating some. So I was intrigued about the mechanics and process of making audiobooks and thought I might learn something. In fact, I mostly learned that it works rather similarly to how I imagined, which was reassuring, if not exciting.

Gordon G did a few readings as part of this presentation, including a moving extract from Billy Elliott (he narrated the Dad’s chapters in the audiobook of that) which brought a tear to my eye.

And I got some mending done while listening – bonus :-)

David Nicholls

Next up was David Nicholls, confessing rather charmingly to being nervous at the large audience. Perhaps because of initial nerves, the bit he read from the book was rather on the fast side, “killing the laughs” as comedians say. But come the chat, he seemed to relax into it.

I micro-blogged about One Day already. It’s a food-for-thought-y book which anyone might appreciate, but for me what stood out about it is its depiction of a time and culture I lived through myself. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book which felt so much as if it might have been written by someone I knew. (Not at all to my surprise, it turns out DN is similar in age both to me and to his characters in the book.)

[I'll also mention here that one of my favourite bits of that book is the tiny bit about the "cigarette girl"'s life when she's not being a cigarette girl. I wouldn't say it was irrelevant to the main narrative: the reader was thereby given a telling contrast to the more major character's perception of her. But fictional women in menial &/or sexualised roles often remain clichés or tokens throughout a book however big a role they play in the plot, and her plot role was pretty tiny. So that momentary sidelight into her background (entirely believable to me) was an unexpected and pleasing extra dimension.]

DN wrote and edited screenplays before he wrote a book, and he’s written the screenplay for One Day (filmed this year, editing yet to come). He said some interesting stuff about turning books into films.

Someone asked him about the differences between books & screenplays, and he said one of them is that in a book you can just write “It was raining” and not give it another thought. If you write that in a screenplay, you have to hire a rain machine, and actual people have to stand around getting wet, and it costs twenty thousand pounds! Funny but true. He also talked about the collaborative nature of film: potentially frustrating, yet can also be enlivening and sparky if you’ve got the right people around you to bounce off. I’ve read various people on the frustrations of that situation, and an appreciation of its collaborative nature doesn’t seem to be so common.

Interestingly, DN was a bit self-deprecating about his tendency to throw in cultural references (like the Nelson Mandela postcard in the extract he read), and he said the original draft had many more of them than the final book. I think he said he thought of it as a sort of shortcut, and indicative of laziness of himself as a writer – or something like that.

I was pondering this on the way home, and wondering where he’d draw the line, and wondering whether that overlaps into the sense of time and place that was part of what I liked about the book. OK, there’s a difference between “indicating time & place by multifarious ways both subtle and obvious” and just namechecking something. And obviously some of the cultural context I enjoyed was the former and not what he was expressing doubts about. (Theatre In Education and Alternative Cabaret both feature in a small way in the plot, and for me they’re both rather “Proustian Madeleine”-esque themes* – “Hello Late 1980s!”) But namechecks do contribute to the ambiance. I wonder if DN was in the room when AM was talking about the “writing done in & of a particular era” thing? I’m intrigued by comparing the different things they said around that.

* Disclaimer: I have not read yer actual original Proust :-)

Thanks

Thanks to the contributors, and to the Nottingham library people who set up this rewarding day. It lived up to my expectations… though I may consider bringing a hot water bottle next time :-)

Here, have an index…
Top of page
Armistead Maupin
Book swopping
Audiobooks
David Nicholls
Thanks

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About 40* people gathered at the Friends’ Meeting House in Leicester on a sunny May afternoon, and half or more went on afterwards to the nearby park.

* That is, I seem to remember looking round and counting up and making it about that many. If anyone has a more accurate/official figure, then I’m happy to be corrected.

The general flavour

The general flavour was mellow and conversational. It was perhaps rather like the last day of a BiCon – lots of sitting around and sharing snack food and saying hello to different people as they wandered by.

The blurb had said

It is not a BiFest. This event is not intended to be an introduction to bisexuality. However, new people are welcome to come along.

and also suggested it was a place to

catch up with friends

I did have the sense that reconnecting with friends from across the country was a big part of what people enjoyed about the day.

I think this description was well crafted for priming people to know what to expect and to decide whether to go. Personally, I don’t think I’d have enjoyed it much if I’d gone as a newcomer, though some people might have found it OK. Depends how comfortable you are with going up to people you don’t know and introducing yourself.

And yes: events like this don’t substitute for BiFest. They are a different kind of contribution to the community – less about outreach, and more about nurturing ourselves and our friendships.

Families with children

For me a huge positive of the event was the way children were included, in an elegantly low-effort way.

By “low-effort” I don’t mean “inadequate effort”. What I mean is that the effort was primarily in family-friendly choices, and the thinking about them, rather than in additional child-specific facilities. For instance, it wasn’t in a venue with a lower age limit, such as a pub.

One child-specific resource was a fence around the garden, with a gate which toddlers couldn’t open. That’s a great help to parents of small children with a tendency to exploration. (And I know this was one of the advantages of this venue which influenced Sanji to choose it.)

Other than that, the ents/resources available were as follows:

and, most importantly

This combination worked well, I thought. And the park and garden and crafty things were enjoyable for non-parent adults too!

When I posted in 2008 about children at BiCon, some of the responses I got had a flavour rather like “But why should we have to bend our BiCon all out of shape to make it child-friendly?” Yet I had said even then: almost anything you provide with children in mind, some adults will enjoy too; a lot of it doesn’t have to be extra effort.

So a thing I really appreciated about this event was the way it demonstrated a not-all-bent-out-of-shape inclusion of families, accomplished primarily by imaginative thought, rather than by loads of extra work and/or money.

Physical access

On the day, the whole thing about using the upstairs seemed to me relatively inconsequential. As it turned out, the weather was good, and most people stayed outside on the grass for most of the time. And then there was a spacious indoor hall including the craft tables, as well as a downstairs kitchen with yummy food in it.

I literally don’t remember seeing anyone go upstairs. Maybe a few people did, and I just didn’t notice, but it was certainly unnecessary in terms of participating in the main bits of the event.

I won’t entirely categorise my reservations as a communications issue, because if it had been raining, and/or if a lot more people had come, then the uses of the indoor space would have had more effect in shaping the flow of people. But in practice, the main social space was outdoors.

Future possibilities

Speaking from a position of not having actually done either, I’d hazard a guess that it’s less work to run one of these than to run a BiFest. (Not implying that either is trivial, just saying BiFest is the more complex enterprise.) No workshops to organise, no need for official welcoming, and, because it’s optimised for people who are already part of bi friendship networks, no great need for outreach-y publicity. I suspect there may well be groups around the country who aren’t in a position to do a BiFest, but could take on organising something similar to this, if they wanted to.

So, although many of us already thanked Sanji for her work and our one enjoyable day, I’d also like to raise three cheers for her inventive powers. To my mind, this day was more than itself: it was the pioneering of a useful prototype, neatly complementing the other kinds of event in the UK bi calendar.

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A month or so ago, I posted about Big Bi Fun Day. Then I realised that in my enthusiasm, I’d clicked “publish” before discovering some access info, and hastily “edited to add”.

Two days later, Ian suggested in email I might remove that line, giving various reasons for why it was the wrong thing to say.

Well, I’m not a big fan of removing controversial words off blogs after some people have already seen them; i.m.e. it tends to leave later readers trying to piece together what happened. I suggested he make his criticism public & I’d respond to that instead. He wrote a comment similar to his email; see post linked above.

Since then, the access situation has actually changed anyway (in a good direction), so I wanted to make an update as well as some apologies.

This has taken a lot of thought to write, hence the delay in posting. I’m happy for people to argue back if they think I’ve got something wrong or missed something; and even if no-one does, I might have some other ideas later. But, at any rate, here’s a snapshot of some of my thoughts at the moment.

Update on access

BBFD is divided into four “zones”. When the event was first publicised, two of the zones were allocated to the upstairs space and two to the downstairs space.

It’s now changed. The “craft” zone has now moved downstairs, meaning that three zones are now downstairs and only one, the chatting zone, is upstairs.

I think, although I’ve not seen this spelt out, that the upgrade was the result of Sanji successfully negotiating some extra downstairs space with the venue; but in any case, yay for the improvement, and thanks to Sanji.

Of course ideally all the space would be wheelchair-accessible, but if one does have some inaccessible space along for the ride, then i.m.o. the least compromising use for it is as “overflow” of some kind.

In this case, anyone who can’t get upstairs would still be missing (as the description currently puts it) “interesting materials around the room”, as well as whatever unique vibe is created in the space. But at least chatting-in-general and cake are both pretty easily movable to where people are. So to me that’s noticeably better than having an inaccessible craft zone, with (if things go to plan) resources in it that people have brought.

It follows, I think, that my approximation “half” was arguably wrong. I meant two of four zones, which was numerically accurate – but looking at it again now, the chatting zone was somewhat less of a concern to me than the other. It may not have been “half” in terms of square footage, either. (I’ve not seen the building myself.) Sorry if I misled anyone.

The web page also spells out now that one of the toilets is a “proper” wheelchair-accessible one, which I hadn’t been sure of from the initial description.

Choice factors

The next morning after I posted, I’d also sent private email to the organisers’ address, asking was there still any chance of finding a more physically-accessible venue – in particular, wondering why they weren’t using the Leicester LGBT centre (which is). Sanji replied with a thoughtful and gracious email, explaining the factors which had gone into choosing this one.

Having seen the reasoning, I could get how it makes sense, given what kind of event it is. For myself, I’d have happily sacrificed the garden, but another reason not to use the LGBT centre was the fact that not everyone’s ready to be that “out”, and I recognise that as very important.

I offered to copy the full explanation here, but Sanji said it was headed for the public domain elsewhere and she’d rather I didn’t. (I’m happy to link to it if & when it becomes linkable.)

Lack of good venues

As it happens, I entirely agree that finding and booking an accessible venue in the UK in 2010 is a lot more difficult than it might appear to someone who hasn’t tried to do it.

Yes, there’s been some helpful legislation in recent years, ensuring that new building work meets certain standards; but that’s not at all the same thing as demanding that everywhere be immediately retrofitted. So it’s still the case that only a tiny percentage of non-enormous venues have proper wheelchair-accessible toilets. And those few generally have other limitations (e.g. lack of convenient public transport, or simply not having the size or number of rooms you need).

So it’s not necessarily the case that any particular town contains any venue whatsoever which meets all the criteria for a particular kind of event. Plus the acceptable places are often booked up months ahead for the “good” days.

The reality is that people usually have to compromise on one criterion or another, and the available wiggle room is in how the compromise is chosen and communicated.

So I understand why people may be sensitive to what could be interpreted as criticism of their inescapable compromise.

Clarification of my words

Regarding “The edge has gone off my joy”:

Despite how it evidently landed for some people, I wasn’t aiming that comment at the organiser(s), and it wasn’t intended to hold some kind of subtextual judgement of them. (As I’ve said above, I did ask in email whether it might be possible to use another venue; but that conversation was not this public statement. At the point of writing that line, it hadn’t even occurred to me that there might conceivably be a possibility of the venue changing.)

I meant it at face value: (a) there were some access limitations, and (b) I personally was therefore less unequivocally joyful about the event.

I have a vivid memory of a conversation a few years ago with someone who needs to use a wheelchair, and them explaining how they feel about only-partially-accessible events. Regardless of the reasons for compromising, it simply wasn’t and couldn’t be an emotionally neutral thing for them. It was a downer every time.

So when I read the details* and realised my error of omission, I was like: “Aaaah bugger. I’ve just done a public and unqualifiedly enthusiastic promotion of one of those same events that to at least one person I know would be a kick in the guts. That can’t be allowed to stand.”

* When I posted first, I’d only read the announcement email, not the event’s home page. I.e. one of my mistakes was the always-risky move of publicising, and linking to, a page I hadn’t yet read. That’s something I’d never normally do, and shall be doubly cautious of in future.

And even though I don’t know for sure that anyone in that situation is currently reading my blog, I certainly can’t assume that they’re not and never will.

Discovering the access limitations also called into question whether I‘d be OK with going to the event – this event which I’d just been getting so happy about. Over the last few years (since the conversation I mention above, and connected with some other thoughts about intersectionality and solidarity), I’ve become fairly reluctant to put energy into things that don’t have wheelchair access; and nor would I usually go to an event like this without making some kind of fairly substantial contribution to it. That’s half the fun!

So when I got the info, it was a bit like how I imagine it must be for someone vegan-on-principle to be told that their favourite chocolate bar now contains milk!

I didn’t want my post to cause that up-&-down for anyone else; I wanted the limitations to be up front with the good news.

If there was a subtext, it was something like “An event without full wheelchair access is not at all the same thing as one with“.

I’m not sure now where I’d have ended up with the “milk in my chocolate” dilemma had the situation not changed. I’m not saying now either that I’ll definitely come to the event.

But in any case, if I choose not to attend an event, it doesn’t necessarily mean I think it shouldn’t be happening. There are almost infinitely many places I could put my activism energy; prioritising some of them by my own criteria isn’t an insult to the others.

What I would like to do differently in future

In retrospect I see some ways I could have handled this episode better, and I’m sorry for any bad consequences which arose from my mistakes.

The root of it is this: I should never have assumed, without explicitly checking, that the event was fully wheelchair-accessible.

If I’d just managed to notice that gap in my knowledge before I posted, then I could have held off posting till I knew all the background facts. And then I could have written a more measured and balanced summary, less prone to interpretation as “advice” and less likely to result in anyone going “Aagh!”. Or I could simply have not bothered posting at all (as is the case for most events I hear of, however great they look like being).

I’m sorry too that I didn’t consider the organisers’ feelings (and possible interpretations) when I hastily wrote my “edited to add”.

I’m not saying that should have taken precedence over my responsibility to the people using wheelchairs. And I want it noted that what I actually wrote was neither “advice” to the organisers nor a “Yr doin it wrong”, but (a) a fact* about the event, and (b) a description of my own feelings, neither exaggerated nor disrespectfully put.

* Give or take the approximation “half”, as noted above.

But in an ideal world I’d have managed to write something that took everyone into account.

The hinterland

Without abdicating responsibility for what I said, I want to mention as well some of the territory into which my words arrived, which I suspect may have influenced some non-literal readings of them.

Part of this territory is of course the physical world and its lack of good venues. (That section above could have fitted equally well into this part of my article.) I’m also thinking here of the social territory and its rules and norms.

One of the dynamics I perceive in Ian’s warning to me is a protectiveness of anyone doing anything practical, connected with a fear that not enough people are interested in activism to sustain the community. (Quote, “it risks putting off there being such events at all”.)

I can see how, in that particular context, one might be tempted to assess every public statement about an event primarily or entirely on the basis of how it may affect the morale of current event organisers. (Ian’s comment does seem to me an example of this framing.) And in that context, it makes sense to construe publicly-expressed disappointment – or publicly-expressed anything-other-than-100%-gratitude – as mistaken or unacceptable.

I understand the underlying concern about activism energy supplies, though I wouldn’t have enacted it in the same way.

This all links up with some other UK-bi-activist-community norms around criticism and gratitude. I already knew I was at odds with some of those in some ways, though I hadn’t foreseen encountering them quite like this. I may return to that subject some time.

Thanks

Finally, thanks again to Ian for the heads-up about how my words landed in some quarters. As I hope is evident here, I’m not endorsing all your analysis of what’s most important and what I’m supposed to have meant; but I’m very glad you put it to me directly rather than grumbling behind my back. Feel free to dispute further :-)

Here, have an index…
Access at BBFD: update, clarification, apologies & thoughts
Update on access
Choice factors
Lack of good venues
Clarification of my words
What I would like to do differently in future
The hinterland
Thanks

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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UK elections today. A quote and some thoughts of my own.

I was amused at this article by David Mitchell in the Observer last week.

“You’re sick of the government, aren’t you? So vote for me!” is how British opposition leaders have always addressed the electorate. It’s usually enough. “Why commit to policies in advance when I can win just by not being Gordon Brown?” Cameron must have thought.

<snip>

… Cameron’s strategy, to everyone’s surprise, isn’t working.

The public’s reasoning may have gone like this: “The Tories represent change, in that electing them would result in a change of government. But somehow I’m not sure they’d be a better government, just a different one. And, in fact, there’s something eerily familiar about them. Big business seems to back them. Does that mean they’re nice? Hmm.

“Oh, it doesn’t make any difference who you vote for, does it? They all use the same platitudes. I wish they could all lose. I suppose that means I want a hung parliament? People seem to think that could happen. And everyone says Nick Clegg won the first leadership debate. I only saw a bit of it myself, but I’m quite glad – he was the underdog. Maybe I’ll vote for him? That might give the LibDems a bit more influence if there’s a hung parliament. Also, it might keep the Labour/Tory [delete as applicable] candidate out in my constituency.

“Actually, wait a minute! I feel quite good about Nick Clegg now! Nick Clegg and a hung parliament! And the LibDems want proportional representation which would mean there’d always be a hung parliament. Would that matter? It seems interesting.”

Speculation about the consequences I’ll leave to those more expert, but I do think David Mitchell’s pinpointed a certain spirit of the times. “I wish they could all lose.” I was especially tickled with that bit about celebrating the underdog – that is such absolutely classic English reasoning. Hahaha.

My thoughts

Lib Dems do strike me as possibly the least worst prospect at the moment, though that doesn’t mean I’m greatly enthusiastic about them.

I went to a local hustings to get some vibes of who’s who, and I did like most of what our local Lib Dem blokie had to say. (And I do think he’s got a chance of getting in – a lot of the “Labour majority” here last time was really an “Alan Simpson is a sound bloke” majority. A.S. was a “rebel” and outspoken against the war in Iraq, and he’s standing down at this election.)

I liked a lot of what the Labour candidate said too, and I liked the look of her background – but unfortunately she’s representing the party that’s got Ed Balls in it, and he’s determined to obliviously trample on autonomous education.

Which, OK, on the one hand, minority interest, but on the other hand, deeply indicative of New Labour’s mistrust of any human beings but their well-intentioned selves. Hence bureaucratic top-down micromanagement and clunky malfunctioning “incentives”, and little or no recognition of the intrinsic satisfaction of being able to do a good job. And that reflects, I think, a fundamental strand of New Labour culture, certainly not limited to the tiny pioneering world of uncoercive education. Yes they have done some good things (yay civil partnerships, yay money towards the poorest families), but it hurts my systems-geeky sensibilities to see how partial and short-term-thinky some of their measurements are! Come and look at how your great schemes play out on the ground, people.

Plus: war in Iraq, ID cards, ContactPoint. All huge amounts of money, all highly debatable in terms of causing long-term good results.

Plus, Digital Economy Bill boshed through with widespread complacent ignorance and feeble scrutiny. One of my thoughts about the idea of a hung parliament is that perhaps it would slow down the passing of ill-thought-through poorly-designed laws. Not sure if that would actually be true, but it’s something I’ve been wondering.

(see, I care a lot more about the laws our Parliamentarians make and the processes by which they make them than I do about e.g. the famous “expenses scandal”. Not to say I approve of the latter, but it seems to me the damage caused by it is mainly to politicians’ credibility, individually and as a class, rather than to other people’s lives.)

Pretty convinced now that the Tories wouldn’t be any better though. In some ways they’re less distrustful of human beings than New Labour is, but they’ve not got a good track record on thinking about what vulnerable people need. And I hear they’ve been allying in the European Parliament with scary homophobic people, so that’s no good.

So Lib Dems it will have to be, this time – with fingers crossed that they’re no worse than I’m imagining, and a hope that they’ll be able to do something worthwhile with that teeny tiny bit of influence that is my vote.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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So Schedule 1 is gone… for now.

The fact that it went out in the wash-up rather than being fully debated does rather give it the flavour of “Saved by the bell”. But still, at least it gives unschooling families a little bit of breathing room, in which to do yet more education on the subjects of misleading stereotypes, dubious statistics and the principles of risk management…

The “wash-up” is a phase just before an election, where there’s no time to debate properly the half-finished Bills, and so the Government and Opposition get together in private and agree which bits can just be boshed through quickly. The work of many people had ensured that the Government knew by now this wasn’t one of those bits :-)

Thanks

Among the Parliamentary people who did most to cause this commonsensical and welcome result were

Edited to add more people who helped (see comments):

Thanks all of you. Thanks for listening, and thanks for your imaginative thought about how the proposed law would play out in practice, and thanks for your willingness to question Mr Badman’s dubious stats and not take his conclusions at face value.

Thanks too to anyone else on the Parliamentary side who, unbeknown to me, contributed to this result. (Feel free to add other thanks in the comments. The list above was compiled with help from other home ed parents, but it’s not definitive. But even if we list everyone we know about, there may be people who helped without any of us knowing.)

Thanks to writers and researchers Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison for their highly relevant submission to the Select Committee.

And thanks to everyone from EHE communities who took time to do original research, crunch statistics, write, strategise, have picnics! and ultimately educate our representatives. It’s been a long hard slog to get this far and it’s not over, but hurrah for our tenacious efforts, and for how well we’ve all managed to work together despite our diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas.

Ed Balls: “we’ll be back”

So the dangerous, expensive and distressing consequences of this poorly-thought-through legislation have been staved off for a while. But according to this article in the Times, Ed Balls has already said (to Michael Gove) that Labour will resurrect it if they get back in:

It is our very clear intention to ensure that all the measures you have rejected are included in a new bill in the first session of the new Parliament.

This utter determination not to learn anything from the previous discussions unfortunately gives all unschooling families a compelling reason not to vote Labour (if there weren’t enough already…).

On the other hand, I’m wary of David Cameron too.

Slightly disconcertingly for a lifelong almost-anything-but-the-Tories voter, I’ve actually found myself agreeing with some of what he’s said (e.g. about measuring quality of life alongside GDP). And on gay rights, he’s come a long way from Mrs Thatch (though it might be a while before we hear him say “queer” or “polyamory”, and, inconsistently, he doesn’t support same-sex marriage).

But I also gather he’s super keen on building more prisons and putting people in them (though in practice they might not actually be able to afford it). I think that’s utterly wrong-headed, given how many people currently in prison should really be getting help with mental/emotional illness, and support to function in the outside world. And if he’s got that so wrong, what else has he got planned that I don’t even know about yet?

So whoever forms the next Government, I hope their majority’s going to be thin enough to make them very cautious about introducing any more half-baked schemes.

Legislate in haste, repent at leisure

However, just when we may have entertained the thought that the Labour Party was a lost cause, at least we get this stonking speech from Fiona MacTaggart MP, in the debate on the Digital Economy Bill.

Unfortunately the Digital Economy Bill did get through the washup. (Nathaniel Tapley with a writer’s perspective on why the D.E. Bill is a Bad Thing. Steve Lawson with a musician’s perspective on why the D.E. Bill is a Bad Thing. More background from Steve L.)

But F McT’s speech isn’t all about that particular Bill, anyway; it’s also about the whole process of Government.

A little extract from the Hansard transcript of it:

If we allow this Bill to go through in this way… we will demonstrate that the public are right to think that we are pretty pointless, and that we do not have the courage of our convictions.

… However important the Bill is, it will be just as easy for a new Government to say, “We will put in place these building blocks” if they are so essential. It is just not acceptable for the Opposition Front Benchers to say, “Whoops! If it doesn’t work, we’ll come back with something a month later.” They are actually saying, “We’re not prepared to do our job.”

I recommend watching the video of this speech. Even though the topic is malfunctioning processes, thus arguably not very cheery, I found it cheering and enlivening to hear sense being spoken about it, and I liked the way Ms MacT made her points. It’s just under 10 minutes long.

Badly prepared laws

That links up with this pointy article from a little while ago, based on Lord Butler’s Better Government Initiative: Ministers passing too many ‘bad’ laws, say ex mandarins. No kidding!

The report says: “There has been too much legislation in recent years, some of it has been unnecessary and too much of it has been badly prepared.”

… a higher proportion of Bills now enter Parliament incomplete, poorly explained, and requiring substantial amendment.” …

The group’s report says … governments have created “perverse incentives” and “unintended consequences of targets and performance indicators”. …

It criticises “excessive bureaucracy in prescribing new systems or procedures” and “a ‘tick-box’ culture in which complying with the rules replaces responsible judgment and individual discretion”.

Recognition of complexity

As Annette Brooke put it, in January’s debate on the Children, Schools & Families Bill:

… I understand home educators’ concerns. It is a complex topic, which needs time. We should deal with it step by step, starting with the important subjects of support and training. We should be wary of a registration scheme, which could represent the most heavy-handed approach and perhaps destroy some imaginative education.

and

… before rushing into legislating, one needs to work on the culture and training. Indeed, I cannot understand why the support that is to be introduced needs legislation.

Step by step, taking time, recognising a complex subject? That would be good.

This time… we had a lucky escape.

Index…
Top of article
Thanks
Ed Balls: “we’ll be back”
Legislate in haste, repent at leisure
Badly prepared laws
Recognition of complexity

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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It’s called “Big Bi Fun Day”.

It is a bi event suitable for families! and not even that far from me geographically!

Hurrah!

and thank you very much to the people organising this.

Edited to add: The edge has gone off my joy as on further scrutiny I realise that half the event is up stairs and there’s no proper lift, only a chair lift.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

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There’s a quote which I’ve often found myself remembering lately in connection with the Children, Schools and Families Bill. It’s from a book by Jonathon Green, and the interviewee is Marcus Riggs. The interview was from a time after the Church had done some kind of report on gay people, although I don’t remember the details of that part.

… when people are trying to explore an area of human life - for instance, if you wanted to bake bread, you’d ask a baker; if you wanted to know how to put an electrical circuit in, you’d ask an electrician - but if you want to know what the experiences of gay people are like, they’re the last ones to be asked. ‘They would say that wouldn’t they, they’re gay.’ … The assumption in that report is that if you sat and talked to me, I’d give you a biased viewpoint.

But what I’d say is, ‘I’m a Christian and I’m gay and it’s caused me a lot of heartache to work through what all this means and come to some sort of way of living my life that has personal integrity. And that also enriches my relationship with God and the people around me. That I have worked very hard on.’

Who listens to whom?

The pattern is that if you’re from an oppressed or stigmatised group, people don’t want to listen to your version of your life. They want an “expert” to speak on your behalf, and “explain you” to them.

This means that other people who aren’t from your group can make a career of being an expert on your group. And the experts talk to each other and say “what do you think, Other Expert who isn’t from this group either?”

It’s a radical thing to allow someone from within the group to be in the “Expert” position. It’s a radical thing and an essential part of activism to be within the group and claim an “Expert” position.

Parallels

I’m thinking here of how cissexual doctors and policy-makers and “experts” go to conferences and talk about transsexual people, and make up rules for who should and shouldn’t get what kind of medical assistance to change their own bodies. It’s not my field, but I’m pretty sure that even now, after many years of campaigning by trans people, listening to transsexual people’s lived experience is only a small factor in making up those rules.

People with disabilities have been pioneers in challenging “experts’” opinion about them, saying “Nothing about us without us” (a slogan which many other groups have used too).

While writing this, I also remembered some writing by Charlotte Cooper, from a story about how she and a friend/colleague went as fat people to a couple of events about obesity:

I don’t think that you have to be fat to be able to say intelligent things about fat people or fat experience, there are people within the Fat Studies community for example who are not at all fat. What they have is empathy and respect for fat people, a capacity for self-reflection, a commitment to social change. They support other fat scholars, they use their power and privilege to include us … and they are not interested in building careers that denigrate fat people.

… most obesity researchers, including those I saw speak this week, are so alien to this kind of ethical position that they don’t even recognise that they themselves are part of the problem, they truly believe that they represent the solution, that they are the good guys.

When fat people are absent from events such as Body Image: The Impact of Magazines and Size Matters, we are abstracted and made Other. No wonder Ogden referred to fat people as “those people” throughout her presentation. …

… Who on those panels would be able to listen to somebody who they have already stereotyped and dehumanised?

Similarly, from an article about an academic book on fatness:

… works like Fat Economics make fat people abstract. These are works that do not include accounts by fat people, they are not written by fat people, and fat people have absolutely no voice in these works. … Research like this contributes to the notion of fat people as passive and stupid, people whose lives need mediating and explaining by thin ‘experts’ who arrogantly eye us as interesting scum in a petri dish.

Living it

I feel that some of the CSF Bill’s supporters are relating to people from unschooling families in a way similar to what Marcus Riggs describes:

“You would say that, you’re home educators”.

Our first-hand experience is being dismissed as bias unfitting us to perceive the issues correctly.

Not like “Well, you are the people actually living this, so we should listen deeply to what you have to tell us from your rich and varied experience of how it all works.”

At the Bill Committee

Chloë Watson, 17-year-old Chair of the Home Education Youth Council, put the challenge to the Bill Committee on 19 January:

… why not listen to the people who know what they are talking about - the people who are doing the home educating, who live it, who live with the consequences of what they do?

… Why not listen to the people who are saying, “This will wreck my child’s life”? Why not take notice of that, over and above the people who think, “Oh well, maybe in a few cases something might go wrong”?

(In Gill’s commentary on the Bill Committee, she includes a clip of Chloë speaking – second clip from the bottom. It’s worth a listen; there’s a wealth of additional meaning in the off-hand tone in which Chloë does the “Oh well, maybe in a few cases…”.)

What if…?

If the DCSF had employed someone from within the EHE communities to write what became the Badman Report, that person would still have had to do research to establish the facts. It’s not that being part of a community automatically gives you all the answers.

But what would be different?

Our input is vital

We – the unschooling families, collectively – have a close-up view of both non-school education and the existing system for interfering with it. As Kipling famously put it,

The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.

That insight is vital if the Government actually wants to create a workable system.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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