Posted by: Anji | Friday 25th November 2011

International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

I don’t know yet if I’m doing the 16 Days Campaign where you blog about violence against women every day for sixteen days. I don’t know because I never know in advance if I’m going to have the spoons for blogging. But I can say I’ll try.

I’m angry today, wired, full of rage from an earlier argument and stoned off my nut on my max-dose codeine which works moderately well at managing my pain and very well at reducing the amount I give a fuck about my pain. But I’m feeling angry, and the fact that it’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women is making me angrier.

Not because it exists, you understand. But because it exists. I think it’s important to have days like this, though I wish the world would care every fucking day, I wish this was an important issue, I wish the newspapers covered violence against women every day it happens, which is every damn day of the year.

No, I’m angry it needs to exist. I’m angry that we’ve reached two thousand and fucking eleven and more women are dying every year from male violence than from war. That’s fucking disgusting. Even more disgusting are the intersections; that women of colour, trans women, disabled women, mentally ill women, lesbian women, poor women, are even more likely to suffer violence.

I’m angry that today will just be seen as a fringe event. I haven’t seen any major media coverage of the fact that today is such an important day. I am ashamed to admit I forgot today was today until I was reminded this afternoon on Twitter. More than half the world’s population live in constant danger of rape, violence and murder, and it’s just not important to anyone until they experience it. By which time it’s too late.

I wish the whole fucking world would wake up and listen to what we’ve been telling them for decades. Violence against women is a terrifying pandemic being ignored because it suits patriarchy to keep it alive. And that’s a horrifying reality.

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Posted in human rights, media, rage, violence, world

Posted by: Anji | Monday 10th October 2011

World Mental Health Day

Or, a brief(ish) history of my mental health, and how this relates to investing in mental health.

Today, October the tenth, is World Mental Health Day. The website there at the World Health Organisation says that the theme is “investing in mental health”. It says:

Financial and human resources allocated for mental health are inadequate especially in low resource countries. The majority of low- and middle-income countries spend less than 2% of their health budget on mental health.

Many countries have less than one mental health specialist per one million population. Even a considerable part of the limited resources is spent on large mental hospitals and not for services delivered through community and primary health care.

We need to increase investment for mental health and to shift the available resources towards more effective and more humanitarian forms of services.

Investing in mental health is so, so important – and yet so, so overlooked. Obviously my only first-hand experience of investment in mental health is here in the United Kingdom, which ostensibly invests much in mental health. We have free healthcare, affordable prescriptions (which are also free for a large minority of the population), policies in place in employment law which protect people with mental health problems. On the surface, we have it all right.

Except. Except where we don’t. I’ve been both lucky and unlucky with my experiences of the mental health services available to me here in Portsmouth. I’m going to tell you the story of my mental health. It starts back at the age of five or six according to my incredibly astute and perceptive mother, but really the story starts when I was about sixteen or seventeen, after a couple of suicide attempts, a rape, a sexual assault, self-harm and more mental distress than any teenager should have to deal with.

My first experiences were, as with most people, with general practitioners, back when it was thought that I had depression. They were, not to put too fine a point on it, about as much use as a chocolate tea pot. I had SSRI after SSRI thrown at me, despite my prolific self-harm and suicide attempts. A little later, after I had my son, I was given Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, a course of a mere ten weeks, which I did not find useful – probably because I did not believe any good could be done in ten weeks.

Fast forward to early 2009, when I had finally been referred to a psychiatrist due to my increasingly bizarre behaviour, mood swings and thought patterns. I saw that psychiatrist, who told me there was nothing wrong with me and that even my ‘depression’ was in remission. I walked out of his office and back to my house where a few hours later I went quite catastrophically mental. An episode of self-harm, a large overdose and an overnight stay in the local hospital (while they tried to figure out if I was going to die) later, and I was sent home. With a leaflet, with the local crisis team’s number on it.

I was extraordinarily lucky to have had my ex-fiancé with me at the time. Without him I would have thrown that leaflet into the nearest receptacle on my way out of the hospital, continued to go mental, would probably be dead and if not I would certainly not have my son any more. Instead, he swung into action, making phone calls and getting everything sorted so that I would have some care from the crisis team (who, I later found out, one cannot simply call as the hospital had led me to believe. You have to be referred by a GP, which he arranged).

The crisis team were tremendous in their uselessness. Two people – always two different people – would come and sit in my living room for an hour a couple of times a week while I chattered on about random nothingness, not being accustomed to talking about my deepest and darkest thoughts with strangers. Then came a breakthrough in the form of one Dr Stroma MacFarlane, a psychiatrist who came to my house. I had printed off one of my LiveJournal entries to show her. I can’t talk to strangers about my feelings but I do talk to my LiveJournal about them, and this I felt was a way to show her how I was feeling without having to tell her.

She said there and then that it was one of the most honest accounts of living with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder that she had ever read. She asked if she could keep it to give to other mental health professionals who didn’t fully understand the illness, in fact. She listened to what I had to say and she gave me a name for my experiences. She took me off the antidepressant I had been on which dulled my emotions to the point of perpetual blankness, and put me on a new one – which didn’t end up working for me in the long run, but was a welcome change.

She also put it into place that I would join something called Day Treatment, which is basically where you go into the mental hospital every day for six weeks, to keep you out of trouble and in theory to teach you coping strategies, though unfortunately my experience of Day Treatment was that there was a lot of woo and not much in the way of actual help. During my time with Day Treatment I went mental once more, and ended up spending a few nights in the hospital. I was discharged by that same Dr MacFarlane, who felt I wasn’t ill enough to be an inpatient and would be better helped mentally by being at home with my son. I had spent that morning working out the logistics of hanging myself with the curtains in my hospital bedroom.

She did, however, start me on the antipsychotic that was the foundation for the rebuilding of my mental health. Gone were the periods of destructive mania, of flying into rages and destroying household objects, of snapping at my poor, innocent son for perceived indiscretions. Olanzapine gave me back my life, despite my initial misgivings about it based on what I had read on the internet.

A while later I was sent back to the psychiatrist who started it all. No apology for dismissing my descriptions of my distress and experiences the first time around and being the tipping point for my downward spiral, he was all business. The mania, excessive rage and aggression were gone, but I still had huge problems with the depression side of things. He did one good thing for me – he switched me from the ‘new’ antidepressant, which wasn’t really working, onto another one, escitalopram. Escitalopram is an SSRI, and I had had terrible experiences of those in the past. But by gods, this one worked. Almost from the first day, it worked. I don’t know whether it was psychosomatic or whether it really did kick in that quickly, but it was blessed, welcome relief.

He also referred me for therapy. The group was called the Emotional Coping Skills Group, run by Dr Lorraine Bell, and it was heavily Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) based. I self-sabotaged on that group. It was a twenty week course and I spent the first seventeen or eighteen weeks telling myself it was never going to work, that it was all a bunch of useless woo and generally not paying attention. Then, right at the end, I realised how useful it had been and how much I had learned. I credit that therapy group with much of my current ability to adequately deal with my faulty emotional responses to external stimuli.

I didn’t see that psychiatrist again. I was moved, once again, to a new place, the place I visit now. I saw a psychiatrist there with whom I had a fairly large personality clash. He seemed to be of the opinion, as so many are, that psychiatrists are gods and gatekeepers, and we patients should be quiet and do as we are told. I like to take my treatment into my own hands, so obviously there was a conflict of interests there. By this point I had managed to extract one set of mood swings from the other; I had the rapid, day-to-day cycles of the personality disorder, but there was a larger, more predictable set of moods that overlaid them. I was fairly certain that I was suffering, on top of the personality disorder, with bipolar disorder.

When I mentioned this to the new psychiatrist, he was immediately on the defensive. Patients do not diagnose themselves, or even come up with ideas. Those are the jobs of the doctor. He totally dismissed my concerns, stating that he would not diagnose bipolar because (and I paraphrase, but this was the jist of it) “if you’re bipolar then you can not stay on your current medications, I will have to switch you to Lamotrigine, and then you will get Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (warning for photo in link) and then you will die.” He would hear no more of it.

Of course, by this point I had been around the houses a bit and knew I was entitled to a second opinion, which I requested. To his credit, he took my request professionally rather than personally, made the referral that day, and several weeks later I was sitting in the same building with Dr Kevin Ostler, the consultant psychiatrist at that facility. One or two sessions later, he stated that I was most certainly bipolar alongside the personality disorder, and that my medication cocktail shouldn’t be working but it quite clearly was, so I was to stay on those medications (though we did play with the dosages quite a lot over time).

Then, on top of it all, I developed an eating disorder which rapidly escalated as I detailed here. Dr Ostler took me seriously once again, and told me that as soon as I was ready for treatment, he would make the referral. A month or two later, when my ex-fiancé left me – in part because of my mental health issues, my eating disorder and my physical disability – I realised that I had to take control of this as I had done with my other mental health problems. So I phoned his office, and after a moderate waiting period, I was once again in his office. He referred me to the Bluebell Rooms, which is the Portsmouth Eating Disorders Service – run by the same Dr Lorraine Bell whom had orchestrated that therapy group I found so useless and then so useful.

I saw Lorraine, who diagnosed EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified). Then I saw a psychologist called Sheila, and I was put in another group therapy called the Intensive Support Programme. I go in for five hours a day, twice a week (it should be three times a week but one of the days clashed with my voluntary job). I eat, with a group and the psychologists, breakfast, snack and lunch, and participate in group therapy-style sessions where we talk and learn about relationships with food and the psychology behind disordered eating. I have only been in the group for a few weeks but I feel like it’s already helping me immensely – I think it’s just what I need to stop this before I become dangerously underweight or even more unhealthy than I have already become.

So that’s where I am right now. Nearly ten years in the mental health system, some of it good, some of it bad. The emotionally unstable personality disorder and bipolar disorder still affect me, of course – sometimes quite intensely – but with my medication and the things I learned in therapy they are mostly contained. While I am nowhere near being cured of EDNOS, I am well on the way to being in recovery. Without the National Health Service, none of these things would be true. I live on benefits, I get my prescriptions free. The therapy sessions I have attended have all been free of charge. In my darkest times, when I made attempts on my life, my loved ones never had to worry about whether I (or they) would be able to afford the subsequent hospital stays and following care.

And yet. And yet. There were so many failings in this system.

  • The doctors who failed, despite my mother taking me to see them multiple times, to accept that anything was wrong with me – both when I was a young child and when I was a teenager.
  • All the A&E psychiatrists who put my attempts on my life down to my age and attention seeking, rather than looking for the underlying problem – over and over and over again.
  • The psychiatrist who told me “I’m not going to prison for you” when I was sixteen and had overdosed and wasn’t sure if I’d do it again.
  • The fact that for so long I had antidepressants and nothing else thrown at me, almost certainly due to a lack of funds.
  • The piss-poor attempt at ‘therapy’ through CBT, which was woefully inadequate both in method and in length, but which I have been told is one of the cheapest treatments available.
  • The psychiatrist who utterly failed to listen to me when I outlined my incredibly distressing experiences, and told me there was nothing wrong with me.
  • The hospital staff who let me leave, after a major suicide attempt while my young son slept upstairs, with nothing more than a phone number as aftercare support.
  • The crisis team ‘support worker’ who told me, to my face (and with my ex-fiancé present), “I won’t lose any sleep if you kill yourself.”
  • The crisis team ‘support worker’ (a different one) who, over the telephone, told me to “just take [my] tablets and go to bed” when I called in extreme distress planning to jump off a motorway bridge. If I could have just taken my tablets and gone to bed – surely I wouldn’t have been calling the crisis team?
  • The Day Treatment programme where very little actually happened, apart from arts and crafts and other fairly useless things.
  • The psychiatric ward on which nothing happened, where patients were left to stagnate with nothing to think about other than when was the next time we’d be let out for a cigarette. I did not eat a single bite the whole time I was there (I did not have EDNOS at the time). Nobody noticed.
  • The psychiatrist who sent me home from a psychiatric hospital without enquiring as to my mental state to find out if I was fit to leave.
  • The psychiatrist who failed to listen to my concerns about my mental health and dismissed my concerns because he didn’t like me researching my own mental health and treatment options.

    • That list could go on and on, but those are the major points. I have, over the years, had some wonderful experiences with mental health services. Dr MacFarlane I credit as being the woman who saved me, who took me seriously and, despite her later failing, set me on the road to recovery. The Emotional Coping Skills Group turned out to be really useful and I still use the techniques I learned there to deal with my life today. Dr Ostler is honestly the best psychiatrist I could hope to have; he listens to me and takes me seriously and puts my treatment in my own hands. The Intensive Support Programme (for the EDNOS), so far, seems to be useful and a great learning environment.

    Sometimes I am angry, I am so angry, for the person I was. For that little girl who had no idea what was happening to her. For that teenager raging, terrified of her own thoughts, the visions, the auditory hallucinations that were dismissed as hormonal. I am angry for her, because it was not her fault that she was mental, it was not her parents’ fault, it was nobody’s fault, it just happened. It just happens. It happens to people of any age, of any background, sometimes for a reason and sometimes for no reason at all. And through my anger I recognise… I had it easy.

    I take a moment out to think about my brothers and sisters in distress, who have died – who are dying – because of inadequate mental health care, because of inadequate understanding of mental health professionals, because of inadequate funding for medications and therapies and hospital stays and everything else they needed. I could so easily be one of them, and that terrifies me. It terrifies me that people are living in the sort of distress that means they see no way other than suicide, and it could so easily be prevented, and yet it continues at such an alarming rate that it should be on the front of every newspaper in the country.

    But all those things that went wrong – for me, for all the other people suffering mental distress in this country and the world at large – they could be changed. If we invested – time, money, effort – into better training, more nurses, more doctors, more time, more public campaigns detailing mental illness and its effects and just getting it out there that help is available, that you don’t have to suffer alone. I was lucky; I’ve come out of it, if not well, then coping. I’ve come out of it alive. I can’t stress enough how easily I could be dead right now. But I was lucky to get the right help, eventually, the right medication, the right therapies, the right support, the right people. But I had to go through so much shit to get here. Many people have to go through so, so much more. Many people don’t make it.

    Investment in mental health doesn’t just mean financial. It means full, societal change. It means education, not just of the general public but of the very professionals who are supposed to help us. It means movement, revolution. I don’t know how to bring about that revolution, but I know it’s needed. Not for me, but for all those people, adults, the elderly, teenagers, children, who are so close to death and desperately need to be pulled back from the edge.

    If you’ve made it all the way through this, I commend you. It has taken me a lot of psychological and physical pain to write this, all three thousand-odd words of it. I would really appreciate discussion of the issues raised here, if you have the mental and/or physical energy. This is a topic so important to me, and I hope it’s important to you too. ‘Happy’ World Mental Health Day. I wish you, all of you, suffering with mental illness or not, peace and mental wellness for as much as is possible.

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Posted in mental health, personal

Posted by: Anji | Tuesday 28th June 2011

Take The Vow

Noha is 14. She’s about to marry a man twice her age. And she’s just one of 10 million girls who’ll be married either too young, or against their will this year – some as young as five years old. This can end their chance of going to school and shorten their lives by leaving them more vulnerable to violence, HIV and death in childbirth.

Today I received an email from a charity called Plan UK. I don’t usually like getting emails from people plugging a cause; inevitably they want me to give them money, or they’re championing a cause I just can’t get behind. But for some reason I opened this one, and read it in its entirety.

The email asked for my support in their new Because I Am A Girl campaign. So off I went to their website to find out more about the campaign, and what I read shocked me. I grew up in an all-white, British, broadly Christian household. The thought that I might be forced into a marriage I hadn’t chosen, let alone at such a young age, would never even have crossed my mind. I grew up privileged in the knowledge that if I were to get married, it would be at a time I felt I was ready, and with a person I had chosen for myself.

One girl is married off every three-and-a-half seconds worldwide. We think forcing girls to marry young is wrong. Please help put a stop to this. said the email I received. I can’t imagine what goes through the minds of girls in this situation. I simply cannot put myself in their shoes. But I can try to understand how frustrated, terrified, vulnerable and helpless they must feel. For that reason I am supporting Plan UK’s Because I Am A Girl campaign, and writing about it here to try to help raise awareness.

So I’ll quote from the email about what you can do to help:

Help us spread the word about our #TaketheVOW action on Twitter – we’re hoping you take your vow before millions of girls in the developing world are forced to take theirs.

* Take your vow at www.becauseiamagirl.org/vow
* Please use our Twibbon, Facebook and blog badges to show your support!
* Use #takethevow to tell friends about the vow and urge them to take theirs!
* You can also ‘Like’ the campaign on Facebook.

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Posted in activism, children, human rights, petition, relationships, world

Posted by: Anji | Thursday 16th June 2011

On eating disorders

Anyone can develop an eating disorder. 

That seems like such a simple statement, right? It should be a given, universally understood that eating disorders, like most illnesses, do not discriminate. They hit people of all races, backgrounds, sexualities, genders and abilities. But even though intellectually I knew this, and even though I have been mentally ill since adolescence and physically disabled for many years, I still had a certain contempt for people with eating disorders. Like many I thought them weak, obsessed with the superficial, sucked in by patriarchal beauty standards. 

Until I developed one myself. 

I’m a radical feminist. I consider myself fat positive and pro-HAES and in no way obsessed with my appearance. And I have an eating disorder. 

It all started back in December 2009 when I had weight loss surgery. I had a gastric band laparoscopically installed around my stomach, leaving me with just a satsuma-sized space for the food I ate to fill. You can draw your own conclusions as to why I had the surgery. You can believe I was lazy and couldn’t be bothered to diet and exercise. You can believe I hated being fat and did it because I thought I’d be more attractive as a thin person. You can believe I had a life threatening illness that meant I had to lose weight fast. I don’t much care what you believe; my reasons are not important here. Suffice it to say that I had the surgery, on the third of December 2009, privately because I wasn’t fat enough to get it on the NHS, and I thought I was doing the right thing for me at the time. 

So I had the surgery, and I started to lose weight. I was pleased, of course – after all, that was the result I (well, my ex-fiancé) had paid all that money for. But my relationship with food had changed forever. I don’t know what it’s like after other types of weight loss surgery, but with a gastric band eating is hard. If you eat too much, or too fast, or the wrong type of food, or you don’t chew each mouthful about a million times, you are in all sorts of trouble. The band clogs up and you physically hurt and your mouth starts watering in that oh-gods-I’m-going-to-be-sick way and if you don’t get to a toilet soon there’s going to be trouble. 

So it started out like that. I put it down to “learning the band” and figured I’d get used to the new restrictions and rules about my eating habits. But then I started to get scared of food. When you associate eating with discomfort, you stop wanting to do it. So I started restricting my food intake as much as I could. I was also throwing up after almost every meal I did eat, because inevitably I would break those new rules through hunger or forgetfulness. 

After a while I noticed two things. The first was that I was deliberately breaking the rules. When I did eat, I was eating too much or too quickly because I knew that then I’d be able to purge. The second was that my “fullness threshold” was getting lower. By this I mean that I no longer simply felt physically uncomfortable when I’d eaten more than the band would allow. I felt physically uncomfortable after a few mouthfuls. Normal fullness started feeling like over-fullness. Eventually, any amount of food in my stomach felt like too much. 

I had reached the point where I was eating as little as possible and anything I did eat I was purging straight away. It took a long time to admit to myself and my loved ones, but I had gone from a happy fat pro-FA feminist to a miserable average-sized woman with an eating disorder that had taken over my life. 

The thing that really distresses me is feeling like I am constantly battling myself. I don’t know now what is a good day and what is a bad day. The intellectual part of my brain tells me a good day is eating food and not purging. The disordered part of my brain tells me that’s a bad day, and that a good day is when I eat nothing at all. I just can’t win. No matter what I do, I’ve let myself down. If I eat ‘properly’ and don’t purge, I feel guilty. If I restrict and purge, I feel guilty. I want to get better but I don’t want to put on weight. It’s like there’s this massive food-oriented war occurring in my brain and I never know which side I’m on. 

And that’s where I am now. I wish there was a happy ending to this story. I wish I could say “And then I got better!” but I can’t. I’ve reached a BMI of 22 (from a starting BMI of 37) and it’s just not low enough. My fiancé left me, in part due to the effect my eating disorder was having on our relationship. My fibromyalgia symptoms are worsening, no doubt because my body is getting so little nutrition. My son, at the innocent age of not even six, notices Mummy’s tiny portions and wonders why I’m not eating. I hide it pretty well from him but one day he’s going to twig. 

But hopefully that day will never come. I saw my psychiatrist today, one Kevin Ostler here in Portsmouth who has been overseeing my care for my other mental illnesses for some time now, who I trust greatly and like immensely. I told him everything I’ve just said here. He listened quietly, not interrupting, saving his questions for when I had finished speaking. And he is referring me to the local eating disorders specialist team. 

I don’t know what they can do for me there. I fear they’ll look down on me because I’m not disciplined enough, because I don’t look like the stereotypical eating disorder sufferer, all underweight and jutting bones. I fear that if they help me, I might put weight on and I’m too addicted to seeing the numbers going down to be able to handle that. I want to get better but I’m scared of getting better. But I think I’m ready to try. If not for myself then for that darling son of mine, who deserves better than a mummy exhausted from lack of nutrients, who is young and impressionable and far more likely to develop his own eating disorder if I don’t get help before he notices. I want to do it for me because this internal battle is exhausting. And I want to do it for him because he deserves better. 

I don’t know how long the referral will take. But I waited months to see the psychiatrist. I can wait more weeks or months if it means there might be light at the end of the tunnel. 

Congratulations if you made it this far. I’ve typed the whole thing out on my iPhone – that’s dedication for you! I went into far more personal detail than I intended to, but I want people to understand. I want you all to realise that it’s not just teenage girls and models who develop eating disorders. It happened to me, a grown woman, mother, feminist. It can happen to anybody. If this post stops one person from feeling the way I used to about eating disorder sufferers, it will all have been worth it. Thanks for reading.

8 Comments

Posted in body image, fat phobia, health, mental health, personal

Posted by: Anji | Saturday 9th October 2010

Why cis attendees of Reclaim The Night are letting trans women down

A few years ago I attended, for two years running, London’s Reclaim The Night march, organised by London Feminist Network. It was an amazing march, full of an powerful pro-woman atmosphere. We marched through London to raise awareness of violence against women. However the year after, and each year since, I have not attended.

The reason for my non-attendance is fairly simple. Then, I knew nothing about trans people other than what the newspapers had told me. Cis privilege meant I had not considered or noticed that there were few, if any, trans women in attendance. Over the year after the second march I attended, I met several amazing trans people online, did a lot of reading of blogs by trans people and though I am far from a perfect ally, I started to try to think and speak about trans people and their place in feminism.

Feminism should, by default, include trans women. I’d go so far as to say that, as trans women are many, many times more likely to be raped, killed or discriminated against on the basis of their gender than cis women are, we cis feminists should not just be including them but making them central in our activism. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. We’ve long known that feminism as a movement is overwhelmingly white, able-bodied and middle class. It is also overwhelmingly cissexual.

While I spent that year learning, it came to my attention that the Reclaim The Night march that I had enjoyed so much, excluded trans women. If you email LFN, you will be told that of course trans women are welcome to attend. However, even after several years of repeated calls for that to be made clear and specific on the flyers and on the RTN website, no changes have been made. LFN’s repeated and continuous refusal to explicitly include trans women when they say ‘women-only’ is extremely problematic and shows a lot of cis privilege and cissexism.

I mean, it wouldn’t be hard, would it? After all these years of people talking to them about it, all they have to do is change the website so it says “cis and trans women only” or “self-identified women only”. A couple of words changing on a website, that’s all it needs. Clarification on the flyers that all women are welcome. But they steadfastly refuse to do so. The only conclusion that can be drawn from their reluctance, is that they don’t actually wish to state publicly that trans women are welcome, and the only conclusion to be drawn from that is that trans women are not in fact welcome by RTN’s organisers.

Considering that London Feminist Network spoke out and demonstrated in favour of outspoken transphobe Julie Bindel when she was given her Stonewall award, this is hardly surprising. I wonder how much that has to do with LFN’s refusal to explicitly include trans women. I also wonder how much of it has to do with the faction of transphobic “radfems” who would kick up a stink about “women only spaces” including all women, and LFN’s desire not to scare off these people.

This is where my disappointment in my fellow cis feminists comes in. Women I love, women I respect and who I consider friends, have continued to attend and will be attending this year’s Reclaim The Night in London, despite being made aware of the march’s transphobia and cissexism. I am disappointed, so disappointed, that they are still choosing to go. It seems to me to be a smack in the face to trans women. Many of the cis women I’ve spoken to who are attending, have said “But the march does so much good!” and “Well it’s important, of course it’s important… but I’d be missing out on so much if I didn’t go.”

So trans women are important to you, but not quite important enough for you to miss out on your night of female solidarity. I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough. What you’re saying is that it’s more important for you to take a walk, organised by a network who blatantly don’t care about trans women, which implicitly excludes trans women, and that you’re not willing to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak, by boycotting the march.

LFN and the other organisers of RTN are not listening. And why on earth should they, when so many cis women, by attending, are telling them “I care about trans women, but not quite enough to miss your march”? They won’t listen unless we all take a stand. Every single one of us who gives a damn about the inclusion of trans women needs to boycott this march until its numbers dwindle so much that they have no choice but to listen and make the change that is so desperately needed. I’m taking that stand. Will you?

Cross-posted at The F Word.

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Posted in activism, feminists, reclaim the night, trans*

Posted by: Anji | Sunday 27th June 2010

How do you teach a child about sex?

As a parent, sex education for children is something that’s really important to me. I want my son to grow up with a healthy view of sex and relationships. I want him, if and when he becomes sexually active, to have a good understanding of how sex works, knowledge of contraception (and a feeling of personal responsibility for using it), informed consent and the issues surrounding domestic violence.

I am aware that most schools teach sex education from a fairly young age – I believe mine started in school around year 4, so I would have been about eight years old – but I believe that the sex education children receive in schools is greatly lacking and think that the greatest responsibility for sex education lies with parents.

For me, this means sex education starts early. From the moment our children start naming body parts, sex education begins. I hate it when children learn ‘cutesy’ terms for their genitalia. We don’t use euphemisms for any other body parts, and the use of them for genitalia, in my opinion, does nothing but teach them that their ‘private parts’ are taboo, dirty or shameful. Another important reason for teaching our children the proper terms for their body parts is so that in cases of abuse children can adequately describe what has happened to them. So from a young age, I have taught my son the proper words for genitals. He knows he, like most boys and men, has a penis and testicles and that Mummy, like most women, has a vulva and ovaries.

My method of teaching a child of such a young age is to answer every question he asks fully, but not to give any more information than he asks for. By not answering any more questions than he has actually asked, I reduce the risk of over-confusing him and allow him to learn about these things at his own pace.

For example, when he asked me what his penis was for, I told him it was for urinating and sex and he accepted that as an answer with no more detail. When he asked me what sex was, I told him it was something adults do for fun and sometimes to make babies. He hadn’t asked me about the mechanics of sex, so I didn’t go any further. When he asked me where my eggs came from, I told him “from my ovaries” and when he asked to see them, I found an excellent diagram. When he asked me how he got into my uterus, I told him that Daddy helped put him there, and when he asked how, I told him “with his penis”.

As he grows older, I’m fully expecting him to ask more questions, and that’s perfectly normal. Children are naturally curious people, and considering the reproductive system is a pretty impressive ‘piece of kit’ – humans growing whole other human beings within their bodies! – it’s only natural that they will ask questions about where they came from and how it all happens. I plan to continue my method of answering frankly, with no embarrassment or shame, every question he asks. I think that “with no embarrassment or shame” part is pretty important too, because as I said, the last thing I want to do is to make him think that any part or function of the human body is embarrassing or shameful.

I plan to introduce awareness of domestic violence, and have already started that by talking with him about violence in general, how it’s not nice to hurt someone’s feelings or their body, and encouraging him to express himself in positive and constructive ways.

Another thing I think is really important, especially when raising a boy, is to raise him with a good understanding of ‘enthusiastic consent’, though I’m not sure how or when I will raise that issue with him yet. Rape culture is so prevalent that I think it’s important that boys learn “no means no”, and that the lack of a no does not automatically mean consent, and equally that girls learn they can say “no” and that they have the right to have that “no” respected.

I’m really interested in other people’s methods – including people like me with young children, and perhaps especially parents/guardians of older children, so I can garner ideas for my son’s coming years. How are you teaching your children, male or female, about their bodies and their functions?

Cross-posted at The F Word.

6 Comments

Posted in children, parenting, sexuality

Posted by: Anji | Sunday 20th June 2010

How do you raise a child in a feminist manner?

One of the things I was certain of, even throughout my pregnancy, was that I wanted to instil a sense of fairness and equality in my child. I didn’t really know how I was going to do it, but I had some basic ideas – the clothes he would wear, the toys he would play with, the way I would explain the world to him.

I planned to dress my son in gender-neutral clothing, offer him choices of trousers or dresses, that sort of thing. However, my ex-partner and I split up when my son was eight months old, and I get the feeling he’d hit the roof if he came to pick up my son dressed in a floral frock! I have to admit that part of this is also protective; I don’t want other children (or adults) to make fun of my son for what he’s wearing, so I dress him mostly in conventionally masculine clothing.

On the play issue, I’ve fared slightly better. My son loves all things wheeled; cars, trains, even bin lorries. But he also has his baby doll, Tommy, complete with pink toy pushchair, his wooden toy kitchen and tea set and the myriad cuddly toys which are slowly taking over my house and which must be looked after at all costs. I encourage him to play in the garden kicking a ball around, but also spend time with him baking cakes and letting him ‘help’ with cooking dinner.

But clothes and toys do not a future feminist make. The most important thing, to me, is the way I raise him, the conversations we have and the examples I and the other adults in his life set him regarding gender stereotypes.

One of the things I’ve noticed as he grows older is that he’s started noticing sex. Before, he knew the words ‘penis’ and ‘vulva’ and that assigned-males have one and assigned-females the other and that was the only difference he knew of between men and women. Lately – with influence no doubt from preschool friends and non-feminist family members – he has started categorising some things as specifically ‘male’ or ‘female’.

At a recent craft day at the museum he had to wear an apron. I picked up the nearest one, which happened to be pink. He screwed his face up and said “Not that one, Mummy, that’s a girls’ one!” He couldn’t articulate exactly why it was a girls’ one, but he ‘knew’ it was. He tells me “Mummies don’t go to work”. I work hard to counter these newly-formed opinions by telling him colours are for everyone, and that many Mummies do work – and many Daddies stay home! Unfortunately it seems that the ideas he’s getting from outside influences are having more of an effect on him than my counter-arguments.

My partner and I try to model an egalitarian relationship to my son. I buy him books which feature strong female characters (if you’re not a parent you might not know that those are few and far-between) and try to monitor the programmes he watches on Cbeebies because so much of it is male-centred with (white, cis, currently-abled) male protagonists. I encourage him to value things which are traditionally seen as ‘feminine’ as well as those seen as ‘masculine’ and to not think of one as inherently more worthwhile than the other.

But it’s so hard. Babies are born with no preconceptions of gender. They don’t know that their genitalia means they will be expected to look, dress, and act in a certain way. It is only what we do as role models that shapes a child’s view on sex and gender.

And no matter how hard I try, there are still so many other factors coming into play – his other family members, his friends at preschool, the characters he sees in books and films and television programmes. I am not raising my son in a void, and it’s incredibly difficult to undo what he’s been told and shown of “what boys do” and “what girls do”. I really envy the Swedish couple who are raising their child gender-neutrally; it looks like one of the only ways to ensure a child grows up with no preconceived notions of how zie should be based on zir genitals.

So that’s my attempt, still ongoing, at raising a feminist-minded boy. I’m sure I haven’t covered everything (not least because I have a word limit here!), and I’m sure there’s much more I could be doing, so I want to ask – how are you raising your children into the next generation of feminists?

Cross-posted at The F Word.

3 Comments

Posted in children, parenting, personal

Posted by: Anji | Friday 11th June 2010

Borderline Personality Disorder – a feminist critique

Among my many diagnoses, I have what is known in the UK as Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (Of The Borderline Type), known elsewhere as Borderline Personality Disorder. BPD is described by Wikipedia as “a prolonged disturbance of personality function … characterized by depth and variability of moods.” It manifests in many ways, including rapid cycling mood swings, ‘self-destructive behaviour’, black and white thinking, disassociation and extreme fear of abandonment.

BPD is a serious mental illness and is difficult to diagnose. Unfortunately it is also well-known as being used by psychiatrists and mental health professionals as a way of labelling ‘difficult’ or ‘problem’ patients – I know at least one woman who was threatened with a diagnosis of BPD by a mental health professional because she wouldn’t do as she was told.

Three-quarters of patients diagnosed with BPD are female. I’ve spent some time since my diagnosis wondering why that is, when one would expect the split to be roughly 50/50.

My first thought is that the diagnostic criteria cover much of what is considered to be “stereotypically feminine” behaviour, but to a more extreme level. For example, one of the diagnostic criteria, “Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).” – well, women are supposed to be overly emotional people anyway, right? Another of the criteria is “Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.” We’ve all heard the stereotyped stories of bunny boilers, of women who get pregnant to ‘trap their man’, of women who are controlling and possessive and who are terrified of being alone. Women are supposed to be flighty, unable to control their emotions, and to have trouble navigating their interpersonal relationships.

The second thing I’ve been thinking about is that it’s possible that women get the diagnosis of BPD because some of the diagnostic criteria include things which are considered ‘normal’ for men, but ‘abnormal’ for women. For example, if a woman behaves in an ‘unfeminine’ way, say by expressing extreme anger (another of the diagnostic criteria is “Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)”), the label of BPD is slapped on her by the psychiatrist. “Frequent displays of temper, constant anger [and] recurrent physical fights” are not seen as disordered behaviour in men, they are seen as fairly normal. But it seems that when a woman displays those tendencies she is not normal, she is personality disordered.

Another of the criteria is “Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving).” Again, some of these things seen as “potentially self-damaging” (I’m looking at ‘promiscuous sex’ and ‘reckless driving’ in particular) are seen as normal behaviours for men, but in women are considered undesirable enough to be included in the criteria for diagnosing a serious mental illness.

And lastly, I’ve been wondering whether Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental illness/personality disorder at all. Considering so many more women are diagnosed with it than men, and considering it’s thought to develop in early childhood rather than being an innate mental illness, could there be something about being raised female which increases women’s propensity towards BPD-type thinking? Could that ‘inappropriate anger’ be not a disordered way of thinking, but valid female rage against a world which devalues women and things which are thought of as ‘traditionally feminine’?

As I said at the beginning of this post, I have a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and I believe this to be accurate because my life is severely impacted by my symptoms. But I often wonder if, in a world where men and women were seen as equal, where women were valued and seen as being as worthy as men, whether this diagnosis would exist at all. Or, in an ideal world where women were not seen as ‘other’ and our natural behaviours were not seen as ‘deviant’, whether the world would be more shaped for women (and men) displaying Borderline type symptoms and thus our lives would not be so devastatingly impacted by it. One thing I do know is that as a diagnosis in the current climate, it is extremely stigmatising and for many women it seems to do more harm than good.

Cross-posted to The F Word.

14 Comments

Posted in disability, mental health

Posted by: Anji | Saturday 5th June 2010

Refugee and Migrant Justice needs your help!

Refugee and Migrant Justice is a charity who provide free legal advice and representation to asylum seekers and other vulnerable migrants in the UK, including victims of trafficking and separated children. They are, in their own words, “the largest specialist provider of advice and representation to asylum seekers and other migrants needing protection or other help to secure their human rights. As well as helping individual clients, we use our considerable expertise to campaign for positive changes.”

They are facing possible closure because of bureaucratic rules that result in the Government not paying promptly for asylum and immigration legal work. A new system of payment of legal aid means that payments are only made when stages of cases are closed. In RMJ’s case, that is on average six months after work is started and can take up to two years due to delays in the asylum system. As they say, “We are not asking for more money, just prompt payment of what we are due.”

If they close, 10,000 asylum seekers will be left without the legal advice and representation they desperately need to get a fair hearing in a system that is characterised by a culture of disbelief. They have fled torture, persecution, widespread violence, and the threat of death. 900 of them are children; many have been trafficked.

If you would like to help out, there is more information including a campaign leaflet available to download at their website, along with a letter template for you to write to the relevant ministries and your MP. You can also join the campaign on Twitter and Facebook.

Cross-posted to The F Word.

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Posted in children, human rights, immigration

Posted by: Anji | Wednesday 17th March 2010

Fifteenth Carnival of Feminists

Welcome to the fifteenth edition of the Carnival of Feminists. I’m very proud to be hosting this Carnival for a second time, so I’m not going to waffle on at you – I’m going to get straight on with the Carnival goodies!

Rape and Violence

  • Aban Mukherji writes Acid Attacks and Real Nightmares, a description of domestic violence involving an acid attack, and the author’s reactions to the story.

Reproductive Rights

  • In Women Deserve Better, Righteous Mom talks about her problem with the ‘feminists for life’ movement, explaining why she thinks the phrase “women deserve better (than abortion)” is problematic.

Language

  • In That Slight Discomfort You May Feel, Thomas gives a great explanation of why the term ‘cis’ (as in ‘cissexual’ and ‘cisgender’) is an important one for allies to understand.

People

  • Mandytoomey introduces two women of note: health researcher Linda Neuhause and Professor of Brazilian Literature Zelia Bora.

Privilege

  • Britni TheVadgeWig presents On Privilege, a response to a blog post written about privilege, denying that it exists and is an important concept.

  • Fertile Feminism presents Getting it, talking about well known feminist/Fat Acceptance blogger Kate Harding and imploring her to understand the parallels between the FA/HAES movement and that of children’s rights.
  • Hannah Mudge has a post about Equality and the privileged woman, writing about privileged women’s disapproval of feminism while simultaneously reaping its benefits.

Sex and Sexuality

  • Another one from Fbomb is Owning Up to My ‘Number’ where the author makes peace with her ‘number’ (i.e. number of sexual partners).

International Women’s Day

Sexism

  • In Let’s Kill Chivalry! Apu talks about her problems with the traditional concept of ‘chivalry’ and calls for it to be replaced with common courtesy from and to all.

News and Media

  • Skunen1 wrote a book review of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs which submitter Bryan describes as “an insightful review of an important feminist non-fiction book”.
  • Cara writes On Prison Rape and Complacency talking about the huge problem with rape in prison, from rape between inmates to rape by prison staff, quoting an article written about how to address it.

That concludes this edition of the Carnival of Feminists. Thanks to everyone who submitted articles and posts for this edition, and please don’t forget to submit your blog article to the next edition of the Carnival using the carnival submission form.

If you’d like to host, contact Lindsay or Amelia at (firstname).impersonator [at] gmail.com – I’d recommend you do, because it’s a lot of fun!

Previous editions of this Carnival can be found in the sidebar of the carnival home page.

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