Transvox - The Trans Liberation Conference

[00:00:07] Hi and welcome back to Trans and in front of me from sunny Spain I'm going to say a celebrity in our own lifetime. Hi Chris Parks is joining me today and we're going to talk all sorts of interesting bits and bobs about life, the universe and everything. And also talking about a very interesting conference which is coming up soon as part of the three conferences which we've been talking about.

[00:00:30] And as someone saunters past you, behind you with no clothes on, virtually, if I am occasionally distracted you'll know why. So Chris, first of all, how are you? I'm doing very well. As you mentioned, you've caught me on a little brief jaunt to Spain. So yeah, it's hard not to be at least a little bit good when the sun is shining and the waves are crashing and the scenery is as beautiful as it is.

[00:00:55] Yeah. And I can tell you neither, it doesn't sound like you're originally from Spain or UK. So where are you from? No, so I grew up in Canada and I came to UK. We need to stop and cheer. Hang on a second. We'll all applaud. Carry on. Yeah, Canada gets a lot of good press these days. I blame it on our tourism board. We're very good at putting a good foot forward. But no, so I grew up in Canada, in Ottawa, and then I went to university in Montreal for a few years before emigrating to the UK for even more university.

[00:01:25] I got a couple of degrees in history from the London School of Economics, including a PhD, which I've managed to parlay against all odds into a tenuously successful academic career. I'm currently a senior lecturer in history education at King's College London. So I should be a lot more respectful and call you Dr. Chris, should I? No, I prefer Chris. Those sort of honorifics, I think, just put distance between us.

[00:01:52] Although I have noticed that since transitioning, asking people to call me doctor gets around all of the issues and pronouns. Yeah. If it's Mr. or Miss, or in my case, because I'm non-binary, a mix, which can sometimes flummox people, but doctor, everybody's familiar with. And since I'm entitled to it, might as well use it. Yeah, I do the same thing. It gets me out of all sorts of holes. And it is hilarious because you probably can't see this, but everybody else can see a person walking about as a board's behind you carrying boxes.

[00:02:19] So it is. And this has to be kept as a video, whether you like it or not. This is your most. I'll have to ask his permission for that. I'm not sure. That's brother-in-law back there and he's moving stuff. I'm sorry. Really? Too late. Look, you've mentioned a couple of interesting things there. Can we dig into non-binary? Because I think we talk insufficiently about non-binary, and especially with what's happening in the world at the moment. It's almost as if the non-binary community have been vanished.

[00:02:45] But for the one person in our listenership that doesn't really understand non-binaryness, can you talk to me about it? My take on it is that people who are non-binary have moved beyond or are existing between the poles of male and female. I don't think you'd be able to find two non-binary people who would agree entirely on a single definition of it.

[00:03:10] And my take on it, just in my own life, is that when I realized that I wasn't cis, which was maybe five or six years ago, I initially understood what I wanted to do as being a process of feminizing. I was a son male at birth, and so I thought once the sort of moment came where I could embrace not being cis anymore, I thought, great, I'm going to be feminine. I'm going to be feminized. I thought I was going to be a trans woman.

[00:03:40] And after a year or so of doing that and making some pretty important steps towards it, I started to realize, much to my surprise and somewhat distress, is that I wasn't actually much better at being a woman than I had been at being a man. And that raised more questions for me. It made me wonder what all my feelings were about.

[00:04:01] But after a little bit of time and thinking through and acting through my life as someone on the journey that I was on, I came to embrace non-binary as an identity and also in some ways a goal that fit much better for the sort of way that I wanted to interact with the world, for the vision that I had of my body, for the way that I wanted to interact with other people in a familiar sense or in an intimate sense.

[00:04:25] Yeah, non-binary ended up being a zone of comfort that I was able to occupy and I think I've been able to flourish in. It was, we talk about this all the time, it's this thing about being non-binary. The terminology is so difficult because it's about what you want rather than what you are. And I always wonder if that's part of the sort of challenge with the terminology. And I don't know, maybe it's just in my own head.

[00:04:52] And it's not meant to be a criticism or anything else, just the sort of, I'm sure you'll talk to me about the history of linguistics at some stage and say why it's always been this for a thousand years and I'll stand down. But I just wonder if the terminology is useful. I think the terminology is, it can help articulate and it can help, as it did in my case, help provide the parameters for understanding ourselves a little bit better. But at the same time, the words are limited in their own way.

[00:05:21] Non-binary is itself, it's a negative, so it's not really asserting something. It's the antithesis, you could say, of two other things. I think grammatically it's a little clunky in English. But there's a wonderful song that I absolutely adore. It's called, I Don't Know If I'm a Boy by Blue Foster. So the official lyric is, I don't know if I'm a boy. I don't know if I'm a man. I know I want to be called pretty, but I don't know if I want titties.

[00:05:44] I guess I could say gender non-conforming, but I've done really well conforming and non-binary doesn't have the ring I've been looking for. And I was quoting a little later on in the song there. But the point is, this concept of non-binary is, you know, you can look at it as being something novel.

[00:06:07] The concept of non-binary is much older, but the terminology of non-binary as we understand it today is probably the result of the last 30 or 40 years. But I think it's that concept that's really the more crucial element here. There has always been a zone, if you wish to describe it that way, between the masculine and the feminine. For some people, it's a transitory zone. For some people, it's a circulatory zone.

[00:06:34] It's a place that they can come in and out of and come back to. And for other people, it's a place to set down roots. Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it? I was just wondering what the middle point of a seesaw is called. The fulcrum. Fulcrum. No, that doesn't work either, does it? No. So let's not reinvent the language now. Reinventing the wheel, reinventing the fulcrum. We're back to our basic tools here, aren't we? Yeah. Both of us on Google, we're trying to work out this mysteries of the universe.

[00:07:05] Just apropos the square root of absolutely zero, what's Spain like at the moment in terms of trans stuff? How are they hanging out? They've actually been, trans people have been more successful in Spain at retaining and even advancing their rights than trans people in the US or the UK have. The ruling government currently and a couple of previous ones were able to pass some pretty meaningful legislation recognizing trans people, non-binary people, affording them various protections.

[00:07:34] And there was a wonderful speech that was given by, I believe it was a senator in Spain, just this cri de coeur in defense of trans people. She was a trans woman herself that got a little bit of buzz on social media a couple months ago. Oh yes, I saw that. Yeah. Now she did that because Spain also has a fairly vocal, if not as successful, anti-trans contingent in its politics.

[00:08:04] That is no surprise really. Anti-trans activism is an international and a transnational phenomenon and has been becoming more. There's so much collaboration between these often right-wing anti-trans groups. So Spain has, I think overall Spain is probably a friendlier place for trans people at the moment. But as we've seen in the UK, things can turn on a dime and blindside us. Interesting.

[00:08:31] Again, universities, how are they with the trans world at the moment? Because there's a big, there's a big schism in universities about this idea between how you differentiate between free speech and hate speech. And actually, I've just come from talking to a load of staff at a university. And this is the thing that they're trying to figure out. I just wonder how KCL actually managed to square that circle, if that's a circle at all. Yeah.

[00:08:57] So if we're talking about universities in the UK, I think there's two general points that we could make. The first is that in my experience, and the experience of pretty much every other trans person I've spoken with, the rank and file staff, whether academic or administrative, and the overwhelming majority of the students are not just pro-trans, but vehemently so. They are very comfortable around trans people.

[00:09:26] There's very little of the kind of hand-wringing about sharing spaces or acknowledging pronouns or whatever else. The other generality I can say, though, is that the administrations, the sort of bureaucracies of universities in the UK do vary in terms of their treatment to trans people and how much solidarity they are prepared to show with trans people given sort of legal strictures and other pressures that may come on them.

[00:09:55] So in some ways, even though the kind of general mood music for someone working or studying at a university is fairly good, it's a postcode lottery in terms of whether your employer or your educator is going to be a robust defender of you as a trans person, being able to live and work your life, or if they're going to be a little more diffident and maybe a little more problematic. And how was it at your place? Very good.

[00:10:24] So Kings is, yeah, I've only really had very good experiences with the powers that be at Kings. We've got a very strong, organized LGBT plus society called Proudly Kings that has been quite proactive at making sure that trans people are included and advocated for. The, you know, many of the policies that exist at Kings are quite welcoming to trans people.

[00:10:49] They've been working on new policies, which are really set down and confirm trans inclusive regulations and expectations as well. And as someone who works on conceptually anyways, trans issues in their academic work, I'm a historian of LGBT history, among other things. Oh, okay. I've never had any issue exploring this or hosting events about this or including this in my research. I've never received any sort of glances askance or side eye about it.

[00:11:18] That's a great Canadian expression, isn't it? Glances askance. Interesting. But I know you're here not just to talk about yourself, fascinating as that is, but you're here to promote something. And at TransVox, we do love a bit of gratuitous promotion. And in a sense, what you're doing is part of a three-step series of conferences. The first one started with the Beyond Reflections conference in a couple of weeks. And then there's a neurodiverse conference with trans people a couple of weeks after that.

[00:11:48] And then you're in June, I believe. Tell us more. I guess we're the final installment of the trilogy. And for that reason, we're going to have to be the big finish. In June of this year, June 21st, at Bush House at King's College London, we are hosting a conference called Trans Liberation Now. I say we. It is the Feminist Gender Equality Network that is officially putting on this conference. But it's been hosted at King's.

[00:12:16] And since I'm a lecturer there coordinating between the two. So the conference was conceived of as partially an academic conference, a sort of traditional gathering together of people working in academia, working on trans issues in some capacity, and getting them together to share their ideas. But as it evolved, it became clear that circumstances for trans people in the UK are pretty dire right now.

[00:12:40] And for a conference, bringing together trans people with lots of ideas, and having it only limited to academia, felt like it was a missed opportunity. Our conference was deliberately pitched much wider than that. We asked for people from a variety of sectors, from academia, from law, medicine, media, from kind of social media, activism and engagement. And we asked, our call for papers asked for people to present,

[00:13:08] to come in with proposals for presentations on any aspect of dealing with the existence of trans people here in the UK today or historically. And the idea is to make this, use a timely reference considering what's happening in Rome, a conclave of as many of the smartest trans people or allies of trans people as we can possibly assemble, to get them all in one room for one day, and get them hearing how things are from their corner of the world,

[00:13:38] to get them talking to each other, to get them sharing contact information with each other, so we actually know who we can reach out to or who's working on what. And the idea is that if it all goes off well, that we can create a crystallizing moment out of it. We can create enough organic connections between people that it starts growing on its own, or something grows out of it in hopefully an exponential way,

[00:14:05] really gathers some momentum and helps trans people organize, helps us push back against the escalating, exacerbating oppression that we've been facing, and also just a way to get trans people together at all. The defining feature of trans communities, not just in this country, but many of them, is our dispersion. We're all spread out very thinly all over the place. So having one place for us to get all together and really hash things out, I thought that was important.

[00:14:33] Yeah, and I know the Beyond Reflections, I was going to call it something else, Beyond Reflections conference is starting as an ongoing founder members for trans research, because there's a lot of trans research which is, especially at the post-pre-doctorate level, which is where a lot of the research seems to be happening in master's levels, there's this call for data, isn't there? There's this endless hoovering and looking for data, and everyone's asking a very small community, which seems to be very over-researched.

[00:15:01] And then under-execution that comes from it. So I know that research faculty is going to get started, and I think you're going to be part of that as well. So that's exciting. Oh, that sounds fascinating. So if someone comes to the event, what would they expect to see? What sort of speakers have you got? What sort of subjects? How does that kind of pan out? We got a very good response from the call for papers. At least three or four dozen papers were submitted, and we're winnowing through them to come up with our final lineup.

[00:15:26] It's only a one-day conference, so I think we'll probably have somewhere in the vicinity of maybe 25 or 30 speakers. We're interspersed between the panels. We are going to have some keynote addresses, and I think I can say now what they're going to be because we have confirmed them. One is going to be, we've got three of them spread throughout the day. I believe the first is going to be Katie Montgomery, the excellent trans journalist and broadcaster. You may know her most from her social media accounts,

[00:15:55] but she's been on a lot of different media over the years, and she does a fantastic job. We're really looking forward to hearing from her. We're also getting Joylon Mon from the Good Law Project. Oh, great. Yeah, he's going to come and speak about the state of trans legal rights in the UK as they exist today. And then our final speaker, I can't exactly identify by name. I can just give you the gist of it. We're going to have the parents of a trans child interviewed by Dr. Natasha Kennedy,

[00:16:25] who's also one of the organizers of the conference and one of the people who runs FGEN. So it's a keynote address, kind of an interview session between Dr. Kennedy and this person, who's going to speak about the challenges of having a trans child here in the UK today. Sounds brilliant. I'll tell you what the logistics you said. How does one book? Where does find the links? How much is it going to cost? All that sort of old stuff. We will be advertising the registration for the event shortly. There is a link, and I'm sure I'll give it to you afterwards.

[00:16:55] I won't try to plumb my unreliable memory to recite it. Yeah. But I can give you a link to a site where you can express your interest. It'll put you on a mailing list. And so when the registration is opened, you'll get a prompt to be able to sign up to come. There is a registration fee, but there's a sliding scale for it. So if you're precariously employed or otherwise have difficulty paying the full fee, then you'll be able to get a discounted rate. The full fee, though, in effect, will also, if you choose to, pay for FGEN membership.

[00:17:24] And it's a great organization to join. That might be the way to go if you can afford it. I think when you're pushing, you're doing your sales pitch there, Chris, it's best not to look quite so embarrassed. You have to full throttle there. We'll have to teach you, introduce you to some Americans. Who by now will be filming at the mouth. I've never been all that inspired by the profit motive. That's probably why I'm in academia. All right. So that sounds fantastic. I've got a great sense of what that is. We've got a great sense of who you are. Is there anything else you want to say?

[00:17:53] I think if there's people listening to this podcast in May of 2025, I'd like to say to them, don't give up hope. It's dark out there. It's been dark before, but we've come through it. And if nothing else, the last few weeks have shown what a great untapped potential, what untapped energy there is in the trans community and for the trans community. What great allyship that really exists.

[00:18:21] It might not have been galvanized before. But now I think we're in a moment where things are coming together that will make other things possible that weren't before. Brilliant. And if you would need any more adjustment to come to the conference, then TransVox might be there as well. Who knows? Hey. Wonderful. So Chris, absolute joy to see you. Thanks ever so much. And this will be going live fairly soon. So very current. Hot off the press.

[00:18:49] I'm very grateful to have been invited on. Thank you very much, Gillian. And we're looking forward to seeing that man go past maybe balancing a ball on his head. Who knows? Thanks for listening to this episode of TransVox. It's been a joy to have you with us. If you want to make contact with us, you can contact us at gillian.transvox.co.uk And all of our money goes to our nominated charity.

[00:19:17] And Jen, you've chosen the charity for the next number of episodes. Which one will be chosen? Our charity is called Beyond Reflections, which is a charity that provides support and counselling to trans people, non-binary people and their friends and their families across the UK. An amazing charity doing some amazing work. Really important. So please, if you can give. Great. And if you want to go and have a look at Beyond Reflections, it's beyond-reflections.org.uk.

[00:19:45] But as I say, if you'd like to make a contribution to what we're doing, because we love to help the people who help us. Again, if you've got ideas for the show, things you'd like to ask us, questions, comments, applause or brick baths, feel free to send it all in to gillian. And if you'd like to ask us, questions, questions, comments, comments, and comments. Until the next time, goodbye. Bye-bye.