My name is Amy Clare; I've written guest posts for The F Word before, and can regularly be seen on various comment threads. I'm a Northern, bisexual lass who lives with an invisible disability; I'm also an atheist, a vegan and a leftie. I've been a feminist for as long as I can remember (mainly thanks to my mum, who volunteered for Women's Aid when I was little!), and I almost always have something to say about most subjects (some might call me opinionated, I couldn't possibly comment)! I hope to write about a range of issues, and am very much looking forward to this opportunity to rant about whatever is getting my restless and somewhat overactive goat.

The BBC website has details of a rape trial at Preston Crown Court that collapsed after MSN chatlogs of the complainant's conversations showed she was "prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers" where her "morals go out of the window". The article states that the prosecutor, Michael Leeming, formally offered no evidence after reading the excerpts and that Judge Robert Brown ordered the jury to return not guilty verdicts for rape and conspiracy to rape against the five accused men. It is also reported that he said "this case depended on the complainant's credibility" and "not to put too fine a point on it, her credibility was shot to pieces".

Exactly how this woman's credibility could possibly be ruined is not made clear in the article, leaving the frightening implication that any woman who talks frankly about her fantasies on the internet is obviously going to consent to whatever sex acts might be presented to her in real life and will be viewed as guilty of lying if she says someone raped her. If so-called "credibility" can even be lost from mere talk and fantasy, we've little hope of tackling the old misogynistic idea that women who have had real-life sexual adventures are "sluts" who somehow can't be raped (i.e. a go-ahead for would-be rapists due to their victim apparently having no "credibility" anyway).

The course of events according to the BBC website was that the complainant had agreed to visit one of the men after meeting him on MSN and "alleged she wanted to just have sex with him, but was then raped by the others". It has been suggested by some comments on Reddit, that the credibility was perhaps lost due to the woman lying to the police about her talk of group sex fantasies during an online chat with one of the men.

Again, any such dishonesty is not made clear in the article but are we seriously supposed to believe that the police definitely wouldn't have made the very same judgement about credibility that the Judge in this case seems to have made on the strength of what we know in the article? Yes, such a lie would obviously raise questions about the testimony but discrediting the complainant completely and not allowing the evidence to be heard seems to indicate, at best, an unwillingness to acknowledge the kind of attitudes that make rape victims reticent about coming forward in the first place. After all, it's those attitudes that could, in theory, lead a genuine victim to feel like she couldn't be honest about a conversation that, in any case, should not have compromised her bodily autonomy and right to say no or stop sex at any point. A right that everyone -woman or man- surely has.

I've been looking for accounts that give more detail on the case than the short BBC article and all I can find in addition is an article on the Bolton News site stating that the prosecutor was "particularly concerned about one chatlog entry which referred to (the complainant) as prepared to have intercourse with six men from Ireland who wanted to travel to the woman's home" and that "in another entry, she candidly admitted she was not comfortable engaging in group sex with men she knew but was perfectly happy to indulge with strangers". I've heard similar sentiments expressed by both male and female friends. Would sharing such thoughts in a web chat mean they could be waiving their right to justice if they're ever raped? Does it mean that sex against their will can never be acknowledged as rape because they've shown they are -or might be- capable of sexual transgressions and that makes them anybody's, anytime?

Unfortunately, I suspect a typical answer to that would depend on whether the person in question is a man or a woman.

Thanks to @Sajarina for drawing our attention to this on Twitter

"However, the author of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil said Price, the glamour model otherwise known as Jordan, could be considered an "empowering" role model because she has made a lot of money.

It depends what you think the function of women is," Weldon said, in a talk at the Richmond Book Now Festival in south-west London.

"If it's to look good, then she's fine. If it's to make a lot of money, then she's fine. So I suppose she must be empowering for women because one wants them to be prosperous and they like to look good.

"She drinks too much and sleeps with two many people and talks about it too much for common decency, but who of us is perfect?"

If the headline understandably gives the impression that Weldon is making damning and antiquated judgments about Price's life, perhaps we should be noting the context of "common decency" for her remarks. Separately, I reckon anyone who would sensationally claim Weldon is upholding Price as a role model should consider her use of potentially pertinent question-raising if's in her answer to the question about empowerment. (To be fair, at least one source erring towards the second kind of spin refers to "the standards of modern society" within the piece itself.)

Don't get me wrong. I've cringed at a few of Weldon's comments in my time (for example, the ones about sex education and teenage pregnancy, as highlighted by Samara, last year). But doesn't it seem as if her words have been twisted? True, she does seem to be making somewhat of a judgement about Katie Price's apparent drinking and "sleeping with a lot of people" (and that's annoying) but I think her emphasis is more on how such behaviour doesn't fit in with convention, with the basic conclusion that "nobody's perfect" anyway. Isn't this ultimately saying Katie Price doesn't have to be "perfect" according to common standards because, really, nobody is?

It seems to me that the Telegraph is indulging in a spot of feminist baiting here. Of course, this is something Weldon is no stranger to herself (i.e. her frequent self-satisfied "one drink ahead" posturing that seems to scream "been there, done that and now I'm above it!") but I'm not sure we should be getting pissed off in the manner the Telegraph seems to be nudging us to.

But wait. Weldon also had a few things to say about feminism:

"Once it was only the men who were wage-slaves, and now it's the men and the women too. You know, I'd really rather blame capitalism... You do feel some qualms for these women who actually have to shove their children's arms into clothes at five o'clock in the morning and get them off to nursery."

Yet feminism remains the "least worst" option and has left the majority of women better off, she insisted...

"...There's never a perfect solution. There's just the least worst. And least worst is feminist society, which is more or less what we're getting now. And people on the whole are happier than they were before... although everybody's much more tired."

Okay, so these points are irritating insomuch as you can already sense them being gathered up to get pulled out of shape by anti-feminists eager to suggest feminism is a terrible thing that has made women miserable. As Anita Singh and Ceri Radford say, respectively:

Is this really the choice women are faced with: aspiration-free dullard or miserable wage-slave? Must feminism have a "downside"?

"...However imperfect the current state of affairs, it shouldn’t even need saying that a past which tended to consign half of the human race to a life of unending domestic drudgery - regardless of their talents or wishes - is worse"

Despite the potential in her words to fuel more feminist-bashing, I do think Weldon makes a really good point about how far we all have to go in terms of real freedom. After all, it's one thing to insist that one half of humanity should not be kept out of the workplace in order to make way for the other but quite another to ignore how oppressive full-time wage slavery can be in general. Should we blame capitalism? Absolutely. In another report on the festival interview, Weldon is quoted to say that she reckons about 20% of women are "worse off" after feminism and, though I wouldn't go that far, it does seem that many women are placed in a position of double jeopardy by being pushed towards either being kept by a partner or stuck in poorly paid work (and often still expected to put in the domestic shift at home in addition to that). However, rather than being some second-rate-best-of-a-bad-bunch choice that conveniently ignores the many women (and, indeed, men) who are still no better off, I'd say feminism has an important role to play in addressing such inequalities.

Members and friends who have been investigating the ways that girls and women are represented, misrepresented or under-represented in all kinds of media around us will be presenting their findings in a number of brief talks and presentations which will start at 3pm, so please arrive from 2pm to settle in, look at what’s on display, and don’t forget to bring some pennies to buy cakes and tea!

from 3pm:

• Introduction with Bristol Feminist Network and Bristol Fawcett
• Radio
• Film
• Music video
• TV
• Children's Media
• Magazines
• Black and Minority Ethnic women
• Queer representations
• Sport
• Newspapers
• News (how DV and feminists are presented forming part of this)
• Billboards and advertising
• Media workshops
• Film showing
• Discussion, facilitated by BFN and Fawcett

While researching recent posts on accessibility, we've followed up one potential lead so far and are looking to get a team together so that not all the work piles up on one person during times when several posts that day simultaneously need transcription or detailed picture descriptions.

Do you know anyone with skills or knowledge that could help us with this?

Along with this, I took part in two discussions on BBC Three Counties Radio last week. The first was on Jonathan Vernon Smith's show and was about body hair, in the light of the Daily Mail's vicious and gleeful criticism of model Danielle Bux for daring to go out with hair showing under her arms. (The topic begins from 2.01.32 and my contribution comes in at 2.43.35.) Jonathan quite rightly suggested that it didn't matter whether or not Bux's body hair was intentional or the result of her "forgetting to shave" and pointed out that, while it's true that men are generally expected to shave their faces, people don't tend to look at them and say "ugh!" the way many of them unfortunately do when talking about body hair on women. However, he also said he hadn't heard from a male caller saying it was "disgusting" and brought up the apparent tendency for women to be the ones doing the disapproving during our discussion. I'm fairy sure there actually were some male callers making negative comments during the course of the show and, in any case, hairy women is sadly something I've seen women and men reacting badly to. Indeed, during a conversation before the show, Jonathan told me that Naomi Campbell had recently admitted to Jonathan Ross that she waxes her big toe, only for him to be taken aback that she even has it there in the first place!

The second discussion I got involved in was with Katherine Boyle and Tara Gungaphul on the Nine o' Clock show. It was focused on the decision to replace Jerry Hall with the much younger Kelly Brook as the character "Celia" in a theatre production of Calendar Girls (0.04.40 and 1.05.30). Apart from naked calendars being extremely commonplace (i.e. banal rather than daring) at the moment and this not being helped by the rather obviously conventionally sexy slant being given by Brook, it also has to be said that the original plotline was about older women, so it seems decidedly suspect that a woman who is only just about to reach 30 should be in the cast. And that's just one of the issues. We didn't even get around to touching on a woman's greatest asset apparently being her looks and that the need for older women to be included in that in order to feel "fabulous", or whatever, is arguably flawed from the start...

Photo by vår resa, shared under a Creative Commons Licence.

I briefly talked about this kind of social pressure in a feature on BBC Three counties radio with Jonathan Vernon-Smith on Friday, centred on the question of whether members of the "opposite" sex can ever have a truly platonic relationship. (The bulk of the discussion kicks off from 2.01.26 and the section I took part in begins at about 2.48.00.)

There was a lot of ground that didn't get covered (for example, there was little acknowledgement of asexuality, aside from Susie King from the Platonic Partners website briefly alluding to it as one of the many possible reasons why two close friends might prefer to have a non-sexual relationship) but I still think it's worth a listen and that there's plenty to think about from a feminist perspective. Just consider the following choice quotes from the show:

A lot of guys are of the opinion, perhaps, that we have our friends and we do blokey stuff with our mates so there's almost no real need sometimes to have girls there unless it's a sexual thing or a relationship thing or... they're going to constantly be taking you down the shops, sort of thing... Sometimes we ask what's the point of having them and also I think it's very rare for one of the parties, as you were saying about your friend, not to have feelings. I just think it's very, very unlikely that one party is not going to develop something along the line (Charlie Parish from Zoo magazine).

I really don't think you can have a platonic relationship with a woman, no... Speaking as a man I'd say no, not at all, absolutely not. Not a chance. If I find a lady attractive, I become friends with her and my primeval instinct is procreation, mating... (Brian, Milton Keynes)

It's downstairs at The Comedy Pub on Oxenden Street (between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square - SW1Y 4EE), doors open at 8pm and show at half eight, though you can arrive before that and buy tickets if there are any left have a drink in the main bar any time.

The line-up is still being tweaked but I have confirmed appearances from Eve Webster (the impressionist who shredded Ann Widdicombe at the recent Abortion Rights fundraiser) and fabulous headliners Chambers and Nettleton.

There's a link to buy tickets online over at Cruella-Blog.

The OFLC cited “sexual content” as the reason. Matinée includes an erotic, explicit sex scene between the film’s two main characters, Mariah and Daniel. Matinée is the story of a reserved stage actress who decides to improvise her onstage lovescene in a bold attempt to inject creativity into the play. Their improvisation evolves into actual sex onstage in front of a live audience. Matinée’s themes involve trust, ambition, and creative risk...(Blue Artichoke Films Press Release)

The Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) are said to have opposed the ban and seriously considered defying it. They have also pointed out that the OFLC has "historically privileged violent and misogynistic representations of explicit sex over the type of unabashed female sexual pleasure shown in Matinée".

I've not seen any of Jennifer Lyon-Bell's films myself yet but I certainly like what I've read about her approach on the Blue Artichoke Films website's About page:

Jennifer’s mission to create better sex film is an integral part of her feminist sexual expression. She believes that sexual freedom is an essential component of women’s freedom. And that creating beautiful, hot films that turn women on is possible, safe, and necessary...

...Part of our appeal to modern women is that our stories and situations aren’t bound up in monogamous romance. Pop culture is rife with messages for women that sex is only awesome once they’ve found True Love. Love is lovely, but we think that hot, meaningful sex can also happen between total strangers...

...It’s of the utmost concern to us that the actors and (particularly) actresses we work with be knowledgeable, thoughtful, and enthusiastic about doing films with us. Jennifer meets personally with every actor and actress even before allowing them to audition, so that she can be sure they have like-minded motivations and understand what the risks might be. Also, everyone on the cast and crew is encouraged to ask questions. We think that’s the only way to create a safe space for people to experiment sexually."

Matinée was released May 1 and the next screening will take place at the Strasbourg International Film Festival in France in early September. Along with the MUFF award, the film has also won the CineKink/NYC film festival’s jury award for “Best Narrative Film”, an Honorable Mention at the 2009 Feminist Porn Awards and was selected for the number 4 spot in the “5 Best Sex Films For Women” in the July 2009 German edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. Jennifer Lyon Bell's letter to the OFLC and open letter to the press can be found on the Blue Artichoke Films website.

Meanwhile, The Local has news on the Swedish government helping to finance a Swedish feminist porn film. Mia Engberg's film, Dirty Diaries, shows a selection of women using mobile phones to film their faces as they masturbate. While I think this particular use of female images could possibly be critiqued, I also think the responses Engberg talks about when explaining the thinking behind the film are very telling:

The film was put onto the internet and provoked a strong reaction. A lot of the reactions were negative, with comments like: "Damn, they're ugly. Could they not at least have put on some make-up." I found the comments interesting. They showed that we're still living with the age-old belief that a woman and her sexuality should please the beholder above all else.

Photograph of scene from Matinée supplied by blueartichokefilms.com

Addendum: cross-posted at the Feminists Against Censorship blog.

Anji at Mothers for Women's Lib and Shut-up and Sit Down has more:

Katie Price may not be a saint, but women do not exist to be saints, just human beings like everybody else. Katie Price, like all mothers, has every right to enter into a new relationship when her old one ends, she has every right to go on holiday and expect that her children’s father will take responsibility for their children while she’s away, she has every right to sunbathe topless at the pool (if, of course, the pool itself allows this) and she has every right to kiss her partner in front of her children. If a man did any of these things, he wouldn’t be condemned, because that’s just normal, he’s a man as well as a father. A mother, on the other hand, has an obligation to just be a mother, to sacrifice every other aspect of her being and to never be independent or to have fun.

Like I said, I’ve never been a fan of Price. I’ve never read her books and I don’t read gossip magazines, so for the most part she flies fairly low on my radar. But having had these articles brought to my attention, and actually reading them and looking between the lines for the truth in these toilet-paper red-tops, I’ve come to the conclusion that Katie Price is the same as many mothers in her position (but lucky enough not to have it plastered all over the news). She can either be an angelic Virgin Mary, or she is a whore. She can’t simply be allowed to be human as a man in her position would be. I feel for her, and am ashamed that so many of my fellow Brits see fit to judge her based purely on what they read in the tabloids, regardless of how we all know the tabloids will twist words and outright lie to get a good story, rather than actually thinking about things for a change.

Meanwhile, it seems Peter Andre is being presented as some kind of saint. It seems to me that they're both equally guilty of sniping about each other in the press but that Jordan consistently comes across as a more forceful, dominant character and this makes her receive more criticism (or at the very least somewhat different criticism) than a dominant man would. Just check out this snippet from a letter to Heat a few months ago when the stories about the split surfaced:

There are only so many put-downs a man can take and Jordan can be extremely nasty. She's robbed Pete of his masculinty. To have the things she's said to him aired on TV must be humiliating and I think Pete finally had enough.

Excuse me but what exactly has his being "a man" got to do with it? And what does it say about how we view power relations between women and men if we say a woman being cruel to a man somehow "robs him of his masculinity"? What does this say about the function of masculinity itself? Obviously, I don't have a problem with people taking a dim view of "nasty" behaviour from anyone. However, I think a good part of the backlash against Jordan stems from a need to punish her for being -whatever else one might think of her- a strong character who didn't defer to her partner and let him take his apparent rightful role as A Man while they were together and is not fading away into obscurity like a good girl is expected to now that they've split up.

The votes will be compiled and included in the forthcoming book, the Total Politics Guide to Blogging 2009-10, which will be published in September...

The rules are simple.

1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and rank them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include ten blogs. If you include fewer than ten your vote will not count.
2. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
3. Only vote once.
4. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents are eligible or based on UK politics are eligible.
5. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name
6. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2009. Any votes received after that date will not count.

"A lot of men listening to this programme will probably be shaking their heads in disbelief that a man would kind of just give up his identity... I don't know why men would do that because that, in effect, is what men ask women to do all the time and I think it's outrageous."

Here are a few other interesting quotes from the show:

"I'd been my maiden name until the age of 27 and I woke up on the morning of my wedding... and cried my heart out. I said 'I don't feel as if I'm anybody now. I'm not yet Mrs and I've lost being Miss. I don't feel as if I have an identity'... I hated it... It took me a long time to get over it." (Judy from Leagrave)

"Oh listen to that! My name! My name! Why is it so important for them to take your name? Why don't you take their name? I'm Victoria Cook and if somebody told me they wouldn't marry me unless I took their surname, they could sling their hook!" (member of the show's team, Victoria Cook, responding to hearing another caller emphasising the importance of his wife taking his name)

"What strikes and irritates me is the men you've had phoning in saying 'well, if they want to keep their name because they're famous or a celebrity or a business woman... I suppose that's alright...' But why is it alright? If I want to keep my name, I don't need to have an excuse to keep my name. I can just keep it" (Penny Lukats)

"Why the hell, just because a woman falls in love with you... Just because a woman wants to get married to you... Why the hell should she have to give up her identity and take on yours?" (Luke Ashmead to caller, Matthew, who said it was very important for his wife and children to take his name)

You can still access the feature until 2pm tomorrow.

Photo by Cedarjunction, shared under a Creative Commons Licence.

I realise we probably shouldn't be getting too excited about these findings, owing to the fact this research was conducted by a PR company for Tesco's Baby and Toddler Club. However, with an apparent increase to 342,000, it does look like they must have used a fairly large sample and he quoted increase, from 192,000, is said to be based on a comparison with ONS Jan - March 2008 data on men looking after family/home. I'm still in the process of hunting this data down so if anyone has better luck with finding it than I have, please let us know!

Ranvir Singh was presenting.You can listen to the feature online until Sunday (scroll to 2.27.06 into the programme).

Mothers and Fathers in detention at the Yarl's Wood detention centre near Bedford have been on hunger strike for the past 2 days over health care issues and the continuing detention of children in immigration prisons in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (which the UK has recently signed after years of prevarication) and despite calls form the Children's Commissioner for England Al Aynsley-Green to outlaw the practice...

...Today whilst on the phone to the wife of one of the people named in the Daily Mail article, Solomon Ojehonmon, a migrant support worker was witness to the brutal attack by SERCO staff on Solomom and a number of others who were taking part in a peaceful sit in as part of their protests.

A solidarity protest for thestrikers outside the SERCO office tomorrow (19 June) from 12 noon to 1 pm.

Address: Serco Institute, 22 Hand Court, off High Holborn, WC1V.

More info about the hunger strike can be found at the Indymedia and London NoBorders sites.

Alan Ferguson, protection marketing and channel development director at Legal and General (you can see where this is heading) has been quoted saying "Mums often get the headlines when it comes to domestic work". Funnily enough, I didn't need to look very far to find those "headlines" because it turns out the very same research (albeit with emphasis on a different part of the results) was doing the rounds just-in-time-for-Mothers-Day back in March. I'm not going to link to a load of sites devoted to helping people spend more money but, just like the more recent articles extolling the "value of Dad", there is a major emphasis in these March articles on the calculated value of the domestic work Mums do. This, in turn, leads to heavy hints about how important it is for these unsung home heroes to purchase life insurance.

I know I shouldn't be surprised about this. I realise it's just the kind of thing one can expect from big companies busily finding new and innovative ways to get more money out of us. I just think it leaves a rather sour taste when this is a piece of research that presents itself as being about relationships between people and therefore surely leads the reader to consider its social value and take it seriously. Added later: Also, doesn't all this look like a rather cynical and patronising attempt to exploit the tawdry so-called "battle of the sexes" for financial gain? It seems Legal and General were framing March as Time for the Ladies to Realise their Worth and now, in June, have politely nudged the media to conveniently forget and hide all the data used for that angle so the guys are more likely to reach into their pockets during their "special" time.

Still, there are some interesting observations to be made when gathering together the information in the articles from June along with the ones from March. For a start, it looks like the gap between the women and men in the study, in terms of hours spent on domestic chores, closes much more when the men are compared with the full-time working women (53 hours on average compared with 55). However, there doesn't seem to be any breakdown anywhere of the men's employment status so like can be compared with like. I wonder why? Were only full-time working men included? Or, worse still, did they only bother to ask the women about their outside hours, while the men were simply assumed to be full-timers?

I also found a blog from Tom Attah, focussed on how we can come together to beat the BNP (thanks for the heads up to Laurie Penny and Helen G):

How do we take a message of understanding and inclusion - the message that I have learned and been taught for the last 36 years - to people who have forgotten it or never been taught that they belong in the world, not on an island?

But you know - it could be easier than I think. After all, everyone likes a curry and a bit of motown.

Over at Womens e-news, there are cheers of the week for a story about the launch of the world's first "natural" birth control pill, Qlaira, in the U.K and jeers for the bad news that fighting in northwest Pakistan has displaced numerous pregnant women and new mothers.

Meanwhile, Anji Capes has announced that the first carnival of feminist parenting is now up and running and Helen G has posted about an ongoing hate campaign against trans women in Turkey.

Finally, for today, Pink News has reported that there's a new look for Diva magazine and there's a piece from Dana Rudolph at the Bilerico Project about Debra Chasnoff's new film exploring how gender stereotypes and homophobia affect all teens. Along with this, we got a heads-up from Josh Neicho about an article by Jasmine Gardner in the London Evening Standard on the current trend for an apparently more fluid approach to sexuality in young women in recent times. She touches on all the usual infuriating "lipstick lesbian" fakery but also mentions the popularity of Beth Ditto as an indication that times really are changing:

Back in the staid 1990s, Peaches's dalliances would have had her labelled a LUG (Lesbian Until Graduation), the kind of girl that “serious” lesbians abhorred, who would admit to liking women only until they had to leave the safe haven of university for the real world — and have more “socially appropriate” relationships.

But now Beth Ditto, lead singer of The Gossip and the most in-your-face lesbian the music world has ever seen, has become a celebrated style icon.

As Hortense at Jezebel indicates, this is not the first time that Abercrombie and Fitch have behaved badly towards their staff or displayed questionable ethics in terms of their recruitment practices.

Hearteningly enough, the majority of the comments in the Daily Mail report of this story are supportive towards Riam and those that aren't are generally rated poorly.

The debate begins with Anneka talking about the alien culture encountered by women when they first entered the male-dominated workplace and suggesting it would be designed in a different way if we started all over again today. So far so good but, unfortunately, this point is accompanied by Can women have it all? flashing up on the screen (sigh). Then we have Anne bemoaning women who "ask for special treatment" and referring to Caroline Flint as a "nincompoop" for saying women are held back in the cabinet. This is followed by Phil and Anneka seeming, in my view, to veer alarmingly close to aren't-women-great-at-multi-tasking territory as they enthuse about the brilliance of "busy women".

Thank goodness presenter Anita Anand pointed out that, aside from the unchangeable reality that women are the ones who have to actually bear the children, there's surely an argument that if we're striving for equality, men should do more in the family realm ("or be allowed to do more or have the space to do more").

I'll leave you with Anne's comment about a "Blair Babe" who complained to her about how rude men in politics are to women:

...One of them stopped me in the corridor and she said "Anne, isn't it horrible that the men are so rude to us?" And I said "yeah, and isn't it horrible how they're so rude to each other?" And she hadn't thought of that. She'd taken it personally.

Or maybe, despite Anne's implication that this "babe" was so wrapped up in her own prissy little world that she didn't realise The Manly Ways of Politics, she was not left reeling by Anne's revelation at all. Maybe she wasn't referring to the usual jolly verbal sparring associated with politics because she was actually talking about her experience of that special kind of rudeness (a "special treatment" indeed!) often reserved for women: dismissiveness. But hey-ho. Woe betide any woman who dares to point it out when she's being treated differently because the traditionalists will let us know that she's actually complaining about being treated in the same way as the traditionally accepted men!

Here's some more info from the report:

Qualitative data from the questionnaire indicates that this abuse can be due to violent, aggressive and abusive reactions to trans identities. For some trans respondents, their families of origin rejected them because of their sexual identity or gender identity. This is an area that needs further in depth investigation and policy development in order to help tackle and prevent this form of abuse. However, these findings also contest the assumption that family violence and abuse can solely be attributed to homophobia and partnered violence attributed to other more traditional motivations. Emerging research in this area notes that trans people can experience domestic violence and abuse from a range of ‘family members’ including parents, partners, children as well as other forms of rejection and exclusion (see Whittle et al., 2007)

Unfortunately, the invisibilisation of trans people means there's a general lack of stats in this area. As Dr. Kath Browne states in the report, further research needs to be conducted into trans people’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse and, crucially, this needs to address how such abuse can be prevented and the provision of services for trans survivors:

Trans people are more likely to lack support from their families and experience domestic violence and abuse. 41% of trans respondents describe their relationship with their family of origin as poor or very poor... Services that cater for domestic violence and abuse may not always cater for trans people and should ensure that they have in place a policy for dealing with trans clients. Similarly, trans services need to be able to support trans people in dealing with such experiences

This lack of acknowledgement and brushing away from the organisations and institutions which are meant to help just serves to make trans people even more vulnerable to violence. It's easy to say that the presence of shelters, public awareness etc do not seem to act as a deterrant to those who do abuse but it must surely make some potential abusers think twice. We all know there are vile people out there who spot marginalisation and then take advantage of it so where does this leave trans people?

Why is it that violence committed by women is so often treated as somehow "special" or beyond the pale when, really, the problem is surely that some people, regardless of their genders, think it's okay to behave like that? Then there's the glory and awe often attached to being seen as "hard" that has seemed to rule both the playground and the street for as long as I can remember...

I touched on these issues during a phone-in with Shelagh Fogarty on Radio Five Live breakfast. You can still catch it until 10am tomorrow morning (scroll to 3.05.20 in the programme onward or click here to listen to part of the discussion).