Mind the Gap

The No 10 Downing Street website runs a petition section where you can sign petitions you feel strongly about. Right now one of the most popular (over 8,000 signatures) petitions on the 10Downing Street site is the anti-gay petition aimed against the introduction in Northern Ireland of the Goods and Services Sexual Orientation Regulations (SOR).

Please support this petition by signing here.

You can disregard the 17th Januuary end date.

I have vented on this subject many times before, but I’m afraid I need to rant again! Because at work today I was given another one of those talks. About how I need to start planning for the future and pick a specialty…that’s good for a woman.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a newly qualified doctor. I work in mental health at the moment. Apparently this is a good specialty for me - as a woman. Lots of potential to go part time when I ‘find a husband and want to settle down and have children’. General practice is another family friendly specialty apparently. I have been given this speech so many times before. Does it ever occur to my seniors that I might not want children? That I might actually a job that I find stimulating and that I am good at, just like my male colleagues? (Incidentally I do want a career in mental health but certainly not because it is a ‘good job for a woman’)

I am not as surprised by the lack of women in government or business as I used to be. All it takes is one generation to send the ‘not women friendly’ message out, and for another generation to believe it.

What depressed me most about todays ‘limit your options talk’ was that it was from an admired, and accomplished female consultant. I hope my generation of women in medicine will be different. The thing is, I’m not entirely sure they will be.

I’m pleased to see that the Lords have rejected the new Mental Health Bill.

The bill has a strong emphasis on compulsory detention, compulsory treatment, and removes the right to advocacy. In its current form it would allow the enforced detention of people who are mentally ill, even if they have not committed any crime.

Some background from Mental Health Alliance:

“The Mental Health Bill will do little to modernise mental health law,” Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health chief executive Angela Greatley said today.

Responding to the publication of the Bill, Angela Greatley said: “Today’s proposals will disappoint service users, their families and professionals alike. They will broaden the powers of compulsion without adequate safeguards for people’s welfare. They do not address the stark race inequalities in the use of the Act and they give people no right to get treatment when they need it.

“The Mental Health Act is in clear need of reform. The Government’s own Expert Committee suggested a fair and workable way forward in 1999. Much of that is already in statute in Scotland. It is regrettable that the same framework is not planned for England and Wales.
“Being sectioned under the Mental Health Act can be a distressing event in people’s lives. It can lead to exclusion from work, from family and from a person’s community. Compulsory powers, inside or outside hospital, should only be used as a last resort and in the least restrictive way possible.

“With our partners in the Mental Health Alliance, SCMH will seek amendments to the Bill to protect those subject to supervised community treatment, to introduce advocacy for all who need it and to ensure there is a health benefit to the use of compulsory powers.”

There is more about the Bill in Policy Watch.

The government has been pushing this bill with stigmatising scare stories about the dangerous threat posed to the public by mentally ill people, citing cases where people dignosed with mental illness have committed murder. Of course this works very well to otherise mentally ill people and portray them as scary monsters roaming the streets, while distracting from the fact that most of these cases occurred as a consequence of massive failures in care.

When people are scared, they are less likely to stop and remember that any one of us could become mentally ill today and could find ourselves hospitalised. If this bill had gone through, we could have found ourselves forcibly detained, forcibly treated and denied the right to advocay.

Book Girl at Falling off my Pedestal has an amazing series of posts on disability.

The Invisible body.

The Forbidden Body.

The Marginalised Body.

The Tragic body.

Essential reading for feminists without disabilities.

Gay civil partnerships went through in the UK with barely a whimper, but it seems that the real test has come with the Goods and Services Act which is designed to prevent organisations offering public services from discriminating against anyone.

In terms of gay people, this basically means that if you’re running a hotel and you hire out double rooms to heterosexual couples, you have to hire out double rooms to gay couples as well. You will not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of your customers’ sexual orientations.

From the Guardian.

The sexual orientation regulations, which came into force in Northern Ireland on January 1 and will apply in England and Wales from April, require organisations to treat gay and lesbian people just as they would treat anyone else. Discrimination on the grounds of race, gender or religion is already disallowed, and the change in the law is a sensible recognition of a form of equality which already been accepted by parliament in everything from a single age of consent to civil partnerships.

The act has whipped up nasty homophobic backlash with the Daily Mail and various faith groups in the lead, spreading some outrageous stories about the Act’s implications.

Polly Toynbee on the homophobic panic:

Get one thing clear: this law does not stop religions from banning gays joining their congregations or becoming priests. (Though they don’t seem to be very good at it.) But it does oblige any organisation or business offering services to the public to offer them equally to all comers. Bizarre and repugnant ads in newspapers from Christian organisers have spread outright lies about what this law does. Their campaign, strongly supported by the Daily Mail, has whipped up a degree of homophobia still lurking under an apparently tolerant surface. The gay rights group Stonewall has been horrified at the resurgence of threats and obscene abuse.

To make their case, the religious have struggled to think up extreme scenarios where the law might affect them, but each has proved to be wrong, as ministers have refuted them all. They claim the law will “force all schools to actively promote homosexual civil partnerships to children (from primary-school age) to the same degree that they teach the importance of marriage”. No it won’t: the curriculum does not “actively promote” homosexuality, nor even make sex education compulsory. They claim the law will “force a printing shop run by a Christian to print fliers promoting gay sex”. No it won’t, unless the same printers promote heterosexual porn too. Or how about this one? “Force a family-run B&B to let out a double room to a transsexual couple, even if the family think it in the best interests of their children to refuse to allow such a situation in their home.” Oh no it won’t: it doesn’t even cover transsexuals - and what a daft scenario anyway. The National Secular Society has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. But on and on go the prurient situations the religious homophobes dream up. The Christian Concern for Our Nation, petitioning the Queen, claims they “love their neighbours”, but “Christians, of course, earnestly desire the repentance and salvation of homosexuals”.

Read the rest.

They had themselves a protest outside Parliament too.

I couldn’t give a shit about the feelings of people who base their homophobia on their religion. If you claim to be offering services to the public, you have to accept that the public includes a lot of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, just as I would have to accept that the public includes homophobic religious people. If you don’t want to offer services to the lesbian, gay and bisexual public then, in my humble opinion, you shouldn’t be offering services and you certainly should not be getting any public funding.

This homophobic backlash makes me even more concerned than I already was by the Government’s push to farm out more public social and educational services to faith-based organisations.

2006 could probably be dubbed year of the inter-feminist blog war. We saw battles over feminine beauty practices, a confrontation centring on blow jobs (but really about sexual practices), “Boobygate” (response to Ann Althouse criticising the appearance of Jessica from Feministing), swiftly followed by “Burqagate,” as radical WOC took on white feminists over their use of racist imagery to make political points, the Alas controversy and, most recently, a serious eruption over transphobia among feminists. In each case, the “war” did not represent a new argument, but rather a point of crisis bringing longstanding tensions to a head.

On the one hand, the struggles that followed resulted in much hurt, anger and falling out, not to mention increasing factionalism and ever more entrenched divisions between different groupings of feminists. I was particularly upset to see so much disillusionment and the shutting down of voices as various bloggers decided it really wasn’t worth the trouble. On the other hand, many of the issues raised were, and still are, crucial ones, much of the discussion was challenging, vibrant and informative, new conversations opened up, and new alliances and friendships were forged. My own feeling is that these struggles were inevitable, although I’m very sorry for the damage that has been done in the process.

Whatever the points of contention, all the arguments have been charged with uncomfortable questions for feminists who belong to the dominant groups in society:

Who gets to name feminist priorities?

Who gets to set the terms for the discussions that follow?

Who gets to say what feminists should and should not be doing?

Who is marginalised or excluded?

Who does the marginalising and excluding?

To what extent does the hierarchy within feminism replicate and perpetuate wider racial, social, sexual and class hierarchies?

This blog will continue to focus on discussion, information sharing and community building, but in 2007 one of my resolutions as a feminist blogger is to make a lot more effort to think about the way different forms of oppression intersect in people’s lives and bring them to very different perspectives on feminism. I’ve done some work on the blogroll over the holidays and I hope it’s now a bit easier to negotiate and presents a more inclusive picture of what’s going on out there.

I do think Natalie Bennett deserves a special shout, for no matter how bad things looked, the feminist carnival soldiered on, going from strength to strength, presenting us every two weeks with yet another inspiring showcase of feminist writing from around the world.

I suspect that, like a lot of other bloggers, I haven’t said anything on this yet because I’m simply flabbergasted and just don’t know where to begin.

If you don’t already know, the “Ashley treatment” refers to a North American couple’s decision to put their severely cognitively disabled daughter through radical invasive surgery and hormone treatment in order to keep her childsized and pre-pubescent.

Thankfully, Melinda at Sour Duck has spoken and gathered together some of the best posts so far.