Woodcraft Folk stands in solidarity with every trans child, young person and volunteer who faces exclusion from Girlguiding UK following the announcement on Trans inclusion.
We recognise that Girlguiding UK have taken this decision in the context of intense political pressure and legal uncertainty. However, this does not make the outcome acceptable.
Young people should never bear the consequences of political disputes. All children and young people deserve respect, safety and inclusion in their youth organisations.
…
Excellent statement from Woodcraft Folk.
I was saddened to hear the news that Girlguiding will no longer accept trans girls as members. It seems to me that it
would have been perfectly reasonable for them to change their articles in response to the Supreme Court silliness: instead of declaring themselves as being for the benefit
of “girls and women” they could have become for the benefit of “girls, women, trans girls, and trans women”.
Yes, obviously it’s horrible that the Supreme Court’s othering decision means that people have to spell out that “by women, we mean all women, including trans women”. But
that’s a thing that a charity can do. It’s perfectly reasonable for a charity to be for the benefit of multiple groups.
But no, they took the easy option.
So it’s great to see youth-supporting organisations like Woodcraft Folk make a statement like this that trans kids continue to be welcome with them. Okay, this was easier
for them than for Girlguiding because Woodcraft’s articles didn’t contain any gendered language in the first place. And it’s fine that Girlguiding’s does use gendered
language – it’s okay for charities to be gender-specific! – but it’s a shame that they didn’t… pardon the pun… have the balls to stand up for what’s right
for all women and girls, in spite of the UK’s growing transphobia. Ugh.
Anyway: Acai turns out to be not only a kickass Clone Hero player, but he’s also a fun and charismatic commentator to take along for the ride.
Incidentally, it was fun to see that the same level of attention to detail has been paid to the on-screen lyrics for Clone Hero as were to the subtitles on the video version of the album. For example, they’ll sometimes imply that the next line is what
you’re expecting it to be, based on a familiarity with the song, only to bait-and-switch it out for the actual lyrics at the last second. Genius.
Do I need a “spoiler warning” here? Part of what made the album wonderful for me was coming in blind and not understanding that, somehow, it was both a mashup
collection and a concept album. I’d seriously recommend listening to it yourself and making your own mind up first, before you read my or anybody else’s interpretation of
the themes of the piece.
But assuming that you already listened to it, or that you’re ignoring my suggestion, here’s sophie’s review:
… what?
I am floored. Absolutely flummoxed. This is the first album in a minute to leave me completely speechless. Trying to express how incredible what the fuck I just listened to was is
more than difficult, but I suppose I can try because this album is unbelievably underrated and deserves a million times the attention it’s currently getting. There are really two
main pillars holding this up (don’t overthink that analogy, no, a building with two pillars wouldn’t hold up but that doesn’t matter shut up), those being the execution and the
concept. On a purely technical level, this album is unbelievable. These mashups are so well-achieved, so smooth and believable and un-clunky. The execution of the record is to such
a high standard it almost tricks you, like the best mashup albums do, into believing the pieces of song were always meant to be in this iteration. Purely from a how-does-it-sound
perspective, Musical Transients is remarkable.
But the second pillar, the one that really shook me to my core, is the concept. Don’t read past this point if you don’t want it to get spoiled. Essentially, the narrator of Musical
Transients is a person who realizes he is a she. It’s a trans self-realization project, and one handled with an unbelievable amount of telling care. The mashups are placed together
in a very purposeful manner to express this story chronologically, and the result is a pretty incomparable arc and deeply involving experience. Despite not a single note being
original, you really feel the person behind the screen making it, their story. And despite the subject matter often being focused on the confusion and depression a trans person
might feel, Musical Transients feels more like a towering celebration of trans identity and existence than a depressive meditation on trans suffering. It’s a remarkable feat of
storytelling and mashup production that just works on so many different levels. To me, it has to be among the most impeccably crafted, achingly beautiful albums of the year.
Yes. Yes, this.
I absolutely agree with sophie that there are two things which would individually make this an amazing album, but taken together they elevate the work to something even
greater.
The first aspect of its greatness is the technical execution of the album. Effortless transitions1 backed by clever use of pitch and tempo shifts, wonderfully-executed breakspoints between lines,
within lines, even within words, and such carefully-engineered extraction of the parts of each of the component pieces that it’s hard to believe that
Psynwav doesn’t secretly have access to the studio master recordings of many of them2.
But the second is the story the album tells. Can you tell a story entirely through a musical mashup of other people’s words? You absolutely can, and Musical Transients
might be the single strongest example.
I was perhaps in the third or fourth track, on my first listen-through, when I started asking myself… “Wait a minute? Is this the story of a trans person’s journey of
self-discovery, identity, and coming out?” And at first I thought that I might be reading more into it than was actually there. And then it took until the tremendous,
triumphant final track before I realised “Oh shit, that’s exactly what it’s about. How is it even possible to convey that message in an album like this?”
It’s possible I’d have “got it” sooner had my first listen-through had been to the the “music video version” of the album,
which features visual clues both subtle3
and less-subtle, like… well, the colours in this blinds-transition.
This is a concept album unlike any other that I’ve ever heard. It tells a heartwarming story of trans identity and of victory in the face of adversity. You’re taken along with the
protagonist’s journey, discovering and learning as you go, with occasional hints as the the underlying meaning gradually becoming more and more central to the message. It’s as if you,
the listener, are invited along to experience the same curiosity, confusion, and compromise as the past-version of the protagonist, finding meaning as you go along, before “getting it”
and being able to celebrate in her happiness.
I wish I’d watched the music video version first. Maybe I should be recommending that to people.
And it does all of this using a surprising and entertaining medium that’s so wonderfully-executed that it can be enjoyed even without the obvious4
message that underpins it.
Okay, maybe now I can be done gushing about this album. Maybe.
2 Seriously: how do you isolate the vocals from the chorus of We Will Rock
You while cleanly discarding the guitar sounds? They’re at almost-exactly the same pitch!
3 A subtle visual affordance in the music video might the VHS lines that indicate when
we’re being told “backstory”, which unceremoniously disappear for the glorious conclusion, right after Eminem gets cut off, saying “My name is…”.
4 Yes, obvious. No, seriously; I’m not reaching here. Trans identity is a clear
and unambiguous theme, somehow, without any lyrics explicitly talking about that topic being written; just the careful re-use of the words of other. Just go listen to it and you’ll
see!
I can’t begin to fathom the courage it takes to get on-stage in front of an ultra-conservative crowd (well, barely a crowd…) in a right-leaning US state to protest their
event by singing a song about a trans boy. But that’s exactly what Hamrick did. After
catching spectators off-guard, perhaps, by taking the perhaps-“masculine-telegraphing” step of drawing attention to part of his army uniform, the singer swiftly switched outfit to show
off a “Keep Canyon County Queer” t-shirt, slip on a jacket with various Pride-related patches, and then immediately launched into Boy, a song lamenting the persecution of
a trans child by their family and community.
Needless to say, this was the first, last, and only song Daniel Hamrick got to play at Hetero Awesome Fest. But man, what a beautiful protest!
(There are other videos online that aren’t nabbed from the official event feed and so don’t cut-out abruptly.)
Representation matters. That we have a trans former-judge, somebody both well-equipped and motivated to escalate this important challenge to the ECHR, is hugely
fortunate.
We need more representation (of trans people specifically, but many other groups too, and perhaps particularly in the intersections) in positions of power, expertise, and authority. To
defend the human rights of all of us.
A straight white guy friend was complaining about not being able to find any gaming groups for WoW that weren’t full of MAGA assholes. He said he keeps joining guilds with older
(60+) casual gamers like himself because he can’t keep up with the kids, and he’ll start to make friends, but then they will reveal themselves to be Trump-lovers. He asked, “What am
I doing wrong?”
…
This was about 3 months ago. Now, he tells me he joined a guild labeled as LGBTQ-friendly and has made several new cool friends.
…
He mentioned that there are many women and PoC in the group too, and “Everyone’s so nice on dungeon runs, telling people they did a good job and being supportive, sharing loot.”
I didn’t tell him that this is what the whole world would be like without patriarchal toxic masculinity, because I think he figured it out himself.
I’ve plucked out the highlights, but the deeper moral is in the full anecdote. I especially loved “…furries are
like lichen…”. 😆
Obviously all of the 118 executive orders President Trump
signed into effect on 20 January fall somewhere on the spectrum between fucking ridiculous and tragically fascist. But there’s a moment of joy to be taken in the fact that now, by
Presidential executive order, one could argue that all Americans are legally female:
…
One of Trump’s order is titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” In the definition, the order claims,
“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” It then says, “’Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex
that produces the small reproductive cell.”
What critics point out is the crucial phrase “at conception.” According to the Associated
Press, the second “order declares that the federal government would recognize only two immutable sexes: male and female. And they’re to be defined based on whether people are
born with eggs or sperm, rather than on their chromosomes, according to details of the upcoming order.”
…
So yeah, here’s the skinny: Trump and team wanted to pass an executive order that declared that (a) there are only two genders, and (b) it’s determined biologically and can be
ascertained at birth. Obviously both of those things are categorically false, but that’s not something that’s always stopped lawmakers in the past (I’m looking at you, Indiana’s 1897 bill to declare Pi to be 3.2 exactly…).
But the executive order is not well thought-out (well duh). Firstly, it makes the unusual and somewhat-complicated choice of declaring that a person’s gender is determined by whether or
not it carries sperm or egg cells. And secondly – and this is the kicker – it insists that the point at which the final and absolute point at which gender becomes fixed is… conception
(which again, isn’t quite true, but in this particular legal definition it’s especially problematic…).
At conception, you consisted of exactly one cell. An egg cell. Therefore, under US law, all Americans ever conceived were – at the point at which their gender became
concrete – comprised only of egg cells, and thus are legally female. Every American is female. Well done, Trump.
Obviously I’m aware that this is not what Mrs. Trump intended when she signed this new law into effect. But as much as I hate her policies I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t respect her
expressed gender identity, which is both legally-enforceable and, more-importantly, self-declared. As a result, you’ll note that I’ve been using appropriate feminine pronouns for her in
this post. She’s welcome to get in touch with me if she uses different pronouns and I’ll respect those, too.
(I’m laughing on the outside, but of course I’m crying on the inside. I’m sorry for what your President is doing to you, America. It really sucks.)
Max props to my employer for providing pronoun pins not just in a diversity of options but also offering blank ones for people not represented by any of the pre-printed options.
The UK’s Conservative government, having realised that their mandate is
worthless, seems to be in a panicked rush to try to get the voters to ignore any of the real issues. Instead, they say, we should be focussed on things like ludicrously-expensive
and ineffective ways to handle asylum seekers and making life as hard as possible for their second-favourite scapegoat: trans and queer people.
By the time John Oliver’s doing a segment about you, perhaps it’s time to realise you’ve fucked up? But our main story tonight is about sex education…
The BBC has not seen the new guidelines but a government source said they included plans to ban any children being taught about gender identity.
If asked, teachers will have to be clear gender ideology is contested.
Needless to say, such guidance is not likely to be well-received by teachers:
Pepe Di’Iasio, headteacher at a school in Rotherham, told Today that he believes pupils are being used “as a political football”.
Teachers “want well informed and evidence-based decisions”, he said, and not “politicised” guidance.
I can only assume that the Tories still have a stack of this genuine 1987 billboard poster (ugh) in stock, and are hoping to save money by reusing them.
People and pupils
This shit isn’t harmless. Regardless of how strongly these kinds of regulations are enforced, they can have a devastating chilling effect in schools.
I speak from experience.
I don’t know if this is the “most-90s” photo I own of myself, but it’s gotta be close. Taken at the afterparty from a school production of South Pacific, so probably at least
a little disproportionately-queer gathering.
Most of my school years were under the shadow of Section 28. Like I predict for the new Conservative proposals, Section 28 superficially didn’t appear to have a major
impact: nobody was ever successfully prosecuted under it, for example. But examining its effects in that way completely overlooks the effect it had on how teachers felt they had to
work.
For example…
In around 1994, I witnessed a teacher turn a blind eye to homophobic bullying of a pupil by their peer, during a sex education class. Simultaneously, the teacher coolly
dismissed the slurs of the bully, saying that we weren’t “talking about that in this class” and that the boy should “save his chatter for the playground”. I didn’t know about
the regulations at the time: only in hindsight could I see that this might have been a result of Section 28. All I got to see at the time was a child who felt that his homophobic
harassment of his classmate had the tacit endorsement of the teachers, so long as it didn’t take place in the classroom.
A gay friend, who will have been present but not involved in the above event, struggled with self-identity and relationships throughout his teenage years, only “coming out” as an adult.
I’m confident that he could have found a happier, healthier life had he felt supported – or at the very least not-unwelcome – at school. I firmly believe that the long-running
third-degree side-effects of Section 28 effectively robbed him of a decade of self-actualisation about his identity.
The long tail of those 1980s rules were felt long-after they were repealed. And for a while, it felt like things were getting better. But increasingly it feels like we’re moving
backwards.
As a country and as a society, we can do better than this.
With general elections coming up later this year, it’ll soon be time to start quizzing your candidates on the issues that matter to you. Even (perhaps especially) if your favourite
isn’t the one who wins, it can be easiest to get a politicians’ ear when they and their teams are canvassing for your vote; so be sure to ask pointed questions about the things you care
about.
I hope that you’ll agree that not telling teachers to conceal from teenagers the diversity of human identity and experience is something worth caring about.
Prior to 2018, Three Rings had a relatively simple approach to how it would use pronouns when referring to volunteers.
If the volunteer’s gender was specified as a “masculine” gender (which particular options are available depends on the volunteer’s organisation, but might include “male”, “man”, “cis
man”, and “trans man”), the system would use traditional masculine pronouns like “he”, “his”, “him” etc.
If the gender was specified as a “feminine” gender (e.g .”female”, “woman”, “cis women”, “trans woman”) the system would use traditional feminine pronouns like “she”, “hers”, “her” etc.
For any other answer, no specified answer, or an organisation that doesn’t track gender, we’d use singular “they” pronouns. Simple!
This
selection was reflected throughout the system. Three Rings might say:
They have done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was hers.
Would you like to sign him up to this shift?
Unfortunately, this approach didn’t reflect the diversity of personal pronouns nor how they’re applied. It didn’t support volunteer whose gender and pronouns are not
conventionally-connected (“I am a woman and I use ‘them/they’ pronouns”), nor did it respect volunteers whose pronouns are not in one of these three sets (“I use ze/zir pronouns”)… a
position it took me an embarrassingly long time to fully comprehend.
So we took a new approach:
The New Way
From 2018 we allowed organisations to add a “Pronouns” property, allowing volunteers to select from 13 different pronoun sets. If they did so, we’d use it; failing that we’d continue to
assume based on gender if it was available, or else use the singular “they”.
The process has some further complexities to cover the fact that we say “they are” but “he is“, but this broadly covers it.
Let’s take a quick linguistics break
Three Rings‘ pronoun field always shows five personal pronouns, separated by slashes, because you can’t necessarily derive one from another. That’s one for each of
five types:
the subject, used when the person you’re talking about is primary argument to a verb (“he called”),
object, for when the person you’re talking about is the secondary argument to a transitive verb (“he called her“),
dependent possessive, for talking about a noun that belongs to a person (“this is their shift”),
independent possessive, for talking about something that belongs to a person potentially would an explicit noun (“this is theirs“), and the
reflexive (and intensive), two types which are generally the same in English, used mostly in Three Rings when a person is both the subject
and indeirect of a verb (“she signed herself up to a shift”).
Let’s see what those look like – here are the 13 pronoun sets supported by Three Rings at the time of writing:
Subject
Object
Possessive
Reflexive/intensive
Dependent
Independent
he
him
his
himself
she
her
hers
herself
they
them
their
theirs
themselves
e
em
eir
eirs
emself
ey
eirself
hou
hee
hy
hine
hyself
hu
hum
hus
humself
ne
nem
nir
nirs
nemself
per
pers
perself
thon
thons
thonself
ve
ver
vis
verself
xe
xem
xyr
xyrs
xemself
ze
zir
zirs
zemself
That’s all data-driven rather than hard-coded, by the way, so adding additional pronoun sets is very easy for our developers. In fact, it’s even possible for us to apply an additional
“override” on an individual, case-by-case basis: all we need to do is specify the five requisite personal pronouns, separated by slashes, and Three Rings understands how to use
them.
Writing code that respects pronouns
Behind the scenes, the developers use a (binary-gendered, for simplicity) convenience function to produce output, and the system corrects for the pronouns appropriate to the volunteer
in question:
<%=@volunteer.his_her.capitalize %>
account has been created for
<%=@volunteer.him_her %>
so
<%=@volunteer.he_she %>
can now log in.
The code above will, dependent on the pronouns specified for the volunteer @volunteer, output something like:
His account has been created for him so he can now log in.
Her account has been created for her so she can now log in.
Their account has been created for them so they can now log in.
Eir account has been created for em so ey can now log in.
Etc.
We’ve got extended functions to automatically detect cases where the use of second person pronouns might be required (“Your account has been created for
you so you can now log in.”) as well as to help us handle the fact that we say “they are” but
“he/she/ey/ze/etc. is“.
It’s all pretty magical and “just works” from a developer’s perspective. I’m sure most of our volunteer developers don’t think about the impact of pronouns at all when they code; they
just get on with it.
Is that a complete solution?
Does this go far enough? Possibly not. This week, one of our customers contacted us to ask:
Is there any way to give the option to input your own pronouns? I ask as some people go by she/them or he/them and this option is not included…
You can probably see what’s happened here: some organisations have taken our pronouns property – which exists primarily to teach the system itself how to talk about volunteers – and are
using it to facilitate their volunteers telling one another what their pronouns are.
What’s the difference? Well:
When a human discloses that their pronouns are “she/they” to another human, they’re saying “You can refer to me using either traditional feminine pronouns (she/her/hers etc.)
or the epicene singular ‘they’ (they/their/theirs etc.)”.
But if you told Three Rings your pronouns were “she/her/their/theirs/themselves”, it would end up using a mixture of the two, even in the same sentence! Consider:
She has done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was theirs.
That’s some pretty clunky English right there! Mixing pronoun sets for the same person within a sentence is especially ugly, but even mixing them within the same page can cause
confusion. We can’t trivially meet this customer’s request simply by adding new pronoun sets which mix things up a bit! We need to get smarter.
A Newer Way?
Ultimately, we’re probably going to need to differentiate between a more-rigid “what pronouns should Three Rings use when talking about you” and a more-flexible, perhaps
optional “what pronouns should other humans use for you”? Alternatively, maybe we could allow people to select multiple pronoun sets to display but Three Rings would
only use one of them (at least, one of them at a time!): “which of the following sets of pronouns do you use: select as many as apply”?
Even after this, there’ll always be more work to do.
For instance: I’ve met at least one person who uses no pronouns! By this, they actually
mean they use no third-person personal pronouns (if they actually used no pronouns they wouldn’t say “I”, “me”, “my”, “mine” or “myself” and wouldn’t
want others to say “you”, “your”, “yours” and “yourself” to them)! Semantics aside… for these people Three Ringsshould use the person’s name rather than a
pronoun.
Maybe we can get there one day.
Three Rings is already capable of supporting people who use no pronouns, but we don’t yet have a user interface to help them specify this! Maybe it’d look like this?
But so long as Three Rings continues to remain ahead of the curve in its respect for and understanding of pronoun use then I’ll be happy.
Our mission is to focus on volunteers and make volunteering easier. At the heart of that mission is treating volunteers with
respect. Making sure our system embraces the diversity of the 65,000+ volunteers who use it by using pronouns correctly might be a small part of that, but it’s a part of it, and I for
one am glad we make the effort.
