by ·4 Comments

The Pink Paper are reporting that Stonewall have “joined the fight for gay marriage equality”! Excellent news! Lets see what Stonewall have to say about it:

We seek to secure marriage for gay people as a civil vehicle on the same basis as heterosexual marriage, available in a registry office but without a mandate on religious organisations to celebrate it. We seek to retain civil partnerships for lesbian and gay people recognising their special and unique status.

Hang on, something isn’t right here. Who mentioned vehicles? A civil what? And yes, much of the LGBT population of the UK would probably describe Stonewall as “unique” in many respects…

Oh, wait, I understand: They’ve been watching Yes, Minister. “Always get rid of the tricky part in the title. It does less damage there than in the text.” So if we announce it as marriage equality, hopefully people won’t actually read what we said and might think we’re doing something, right?

While it’s possible they’ve just worded this really, really badly I’m sure you’ll forgive me for a touch of cynicism, given that Stonewall hardly have a positive track record when it comes to this sort of thing. If we take what they’ve written at face value, it seems that the only item Stonewall “seek to secure” is the ability to get hitched in a registry office and call it a marriage, with a slightly confused note tacked on at the end about the law allowing Civil Partnerships to be celebrated in churches.

Allowing churches – through their own choice – to conduct gay marriages in churches? No, doesn’t look like they’re in favour of that.

Supporting straight civil partnerships? Whoa! That would just be too radical.

P.S. As I was typing this, Stonewall posted a press release on their web site on the topic.

by ·4 Comments

Following my last post on the topic, I dropped a note to the Home Office contacts I had, such that they are, asking if what has been announced as part of the Strategic Defence and Security Review was in fact the Interception Modernisation Programme. For those who haven’t been following, that’s the innocent sounding name for the last governments plan to build a database with details of every EMail, Facebook message, Instant Message, Internet phone call and anything else they can manage.

Today I had the reply: In short, no. It’s not the IMP.

This is the sort of responsible fact checking that you’d think the Telegraph might do before running a story on the topic. Or the Independent. Even the Guardian. Twice. No, sorry, that’s three stories.

Of course, there will be more to it than that but the main message I took away from the 10 minute phone call was that what has been announced is not intended to be picking up from where they left off. Instead, it’s a new initiative with it’s own consultation.

This new initiative will last months and the fact that they apparently “understand a lot more than they did five years ago” hopefully means the questions they ask will be more informed in the first place. Cynically, I could not help but think while on the call that it also means they understand the current government isn’t going to be quite such a walkover on Civil Liberties as the last lot.

What else in scope for this consultation? Right now, it’s hard to tell. We certainly haven’t seen the last of IMP-like suggestions as I’m sure the Security Services are still going to want something but I was repeatedly assured that what is on the cards is wider in scope than before. Alongside the usual government consultation objectives such as “value for money”, we have “What is technically possible?” and “How can we make better use of existing data and powers?”

I would hope there is a chance to influence current policy to create a more liberal approach, given that the current kick-in-the-door-first, ask-questions-later policy just results in locking up teenagers who allegedly can’t remember a password after a few months. On the flip side, past dealings with the security services mean I’m far from complacent.

We shall have to wait and see.

by ·9 Comments

I’m a little tardy in this but I haven’t seen it handled elsewhere yet so it’s still worth writing about. Last week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission published their Codes of Practice for the Equality Act 2010 – one on Employment, one on Services and a final one on Equal Pay. (I’ll use paragraph numbers from the Services document here as much of the content is replicated across all three documents)

Although laid before parliament, the Codes of Practice are not law themselves but interpretations of the law. Having said that, employment lawyers have suggested that they are still influential documents in determining how judges interpret law and more critically, what happens on the ground. To my mind, that’s more important to those that are discriminated against than the outcome of an appeal on a point of law years after the event.

The Codes of Practice are somewhat of a mixed bag. There are some good bits, some bad bits and one particularly ugly bit that I suspect many people really won’t like – although I can see why it is in there from the point of view of the Commission.

We’ll start, logically, with the good. For those having problems with employers or anyone providing a service, the Codes of Practice provide one convenient document appropriate to the situation that can be printed off, rolled up (If you can figure out how to roll up documents that are nearly 300 pages long) and used to beat them over the head with. Granted, it might be more useful to actually hand them the document or point them at an online link but at least you have that option to relieve stress.

Perhaps more practically, the definition of “gender reassignment” is now interpreted as much broader than previously. (2.20-2.21) You don’t need to be seeing a doctor – perhaps of more use to trans men than women, and that is indeed the example given. However it also mentions that this may be of help to trans children, as schools can’t discriminate against trans children who might have difficulty accessing medical services.

You also don’t need to actually be transitioning to get protection, considering it or having considered it is enough. (2.22-2.24) This is interesting because the example given says that you can, for example, tell someone who wants to come crossdressed to a party “for a laugh” that they can’t because that wouldn’t be discrimination. But, as soon as you’re dealing with someone who is at all transgender identified, it gets a bit more complex. I’ve known quite a few people who were “just” crossdressers who went on to transition, so it would seem that you could make a case out here for protection of anyone with a history of transgender identification.

Remember the example of the children. you don’t need to say out loud “I’m thinking of transitioning” to get protection, as children do not have the necessary wherewithal to be able to express themselves in such a way. (I don’t believe this would extend as far as toilets or changing facilities however, due to the “someone might be offended” clauses in the act.)

Another good point is that it is explicitly stated that you should not ask for a Gender Recognition Certificate (2.27) as that’s a breach of privacy. Instead, if you are uncertain of a persons legal gender, you can ask for a birth certificate. (Although this could be problematic for anyone not born in the UK as they may not have an accurate birth certificate and only a GRC) This is slightly confusing in context, as the act does make having a GRC/updated birth certificate largely pointless except for the ability to marry, from what I can tell.

The bad is that the codes of practice do not go any way to clearing up the whole mess around rape counselling and similar services. They give a positive example of a health spa where it would be unlawful to discriminate because other users felt uncomfortable around one person but do not elaborate as much as I would have liked.

It seems this is partially because the commission itself are not quite sure what the effect of the law may be. This is particularly so on the topic of Gender Recognition Certificates apparently no longer fully protecting someone against employment discrimination.

One positive point – and it is not, sadly, in the code of practice – but I’m aware that the commission consider it would be illegal to operate a blanket ban on trans people for any service and it has to be considered for each individual case. This would mean you could not have a “women-born-women” only policy for anything, even rape counselling.

Which brings us on to the ugly (13.58) and part of the reason it seems they believe it needs to be considered case-by-case. I’m going to quote verbatim from the Code of Practice for this one:

Service providers should be aware that where a transsexual person is visually and for all practical purposes indistinguishable from a non-transseuxal person of that gender, they should normally be treated according to their acquired gender, unless there are strong reasons to the contrary.

This just makes me cringe. It’s passing privilege enshrined within official guidance, saying “If you’re lucky enough to pass or can afford facial surgery, well done! You’re protected”. However, if you’re unlucky enough not to pass and do actually need the protection? The message is “Sorry, you’re out of luck.”

Given that the gender reassignment protections work even if you are not transsexual and just look a bit like you might be, it could be said that the Equality Act specifically allows discrimination against “ugly” people.

Still, I notice the nice get-out for those of us that do pass – “strong reasons to the contrary”. Ugh.

by ·6 Comments

Featured on Liberal Democrat Voice“Will transsexuals destroy women’s sport?” is the second largest headline on the front of today’s Spectator Magazine – the largest, predictably, being in relation to the Comprehensive Spending Review. It’s not exactly a positive headline, for a start using “Transsexual” as a noun. For those unfamiliar with the territory don’t do it as it implies it is very othering – man, woman or transsexual? It also contributes to the erasure of trans-male identities in this case as the implication in the headline is that only Trans women exist.

Still, “Sure, if all the women athletes transition to become male, that could damage women’s sport” springs to mind as a humorous response to the front-page headline.

There is a copy of the copy of the Article online, but I fear you will need a paper version or subscription iPad/iPhone version to see the article in the context the editors unfortunately intended. It does improve a little on the contents as the article is billed as “Transsexuals on the track – A new divide in women’s sport”… well, it’s not new, really. Any slightly more positive spin on that page is undone by the photo of a female shot-putter with the caption “Gender games” under it. A shot-putter? Please.

Once we get free from the clutches of the magazine’s editors though, the article by Luke Coppen isn’t that bad. It’s jumping off point is the recent news about Lana Lawless, a Trans woman golfer, who has had to sue a US Golf Association over their Women-born-Women policy. It’s not too bad an article, starting off by listing the concerns of others – “enjoying the physical advantages of men” and then going on to deconstruct them.  It doesn a pretty good job of covering most of the well known (Within Trans circles) problems that the International Olympic Committee have had in trying to figure out who they should allow to compete… and the problem that as in this case, if a Trans woman does succeed, it’s clearly because she was “born male”, not actually because she’s a good athlete.

It’s shame this generally positive attitude is spoilt by one particular phrase in the last paragraph: “As long as there is a male-female division in sports, there will be people stealing across the border.” I’m not “stealing” across anyone’s border, thank you very much. And if anyone did try, I think they would be in for a rude awaking given that the penalty for transitioning when one shouldn’t is similar to not doing so when you need to – depression and suicidal thoughts.

There’s a reason for this post, other than just generally getting annoyed at the headline on the front page. Coppen’s article points out recent research shows that any advantage Trans Women have over cis-gendered wimen is lost after around a year on HRT. This is broady in line with current International Olympic Committee guideline that stipulates a 2 year gap between transition and competing in your aquired gender.

So, we return to our old friend, the Equality Act. Sadly, the sort of nonsense that’s happened in the US with this case could happen here too and it’s entirely possible someone in Lana’s position would lose the case because the act just makes vague references to “fairness” and “safety”. (If it’s not safe for someone to compete, regardless of gender, then you’re doing it wrong)

But if a random author of a magazine article can figure out that there’s no advantage to Trans Women (Where are the Trans Men?), why couldn’t the authors of the act figure out how to express it in terms that didn’t give anyone an excuse to discriminate indefinitely and justify it.

by ·14 Comments

It is in the news yesterday – courtesy of The Telegraph – that the innocent sounding “Interception Modernisation Programme” is apparently to be revived. I for one am skeptical that the revival of the programme is really happening as the source does not specifically say it is the Interception Modernisation Programme that’s back – it just nebulously mentions a “programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications“.

Certainly I hope it really is not the Orwellian IMP. This was envisaged under the last government and I sat through a Home Office presentation on the issue back in May 2009 in which we did go some way, I believe, to ensuring the IMP was shelved.

Firstly, to correct some of the reporting I’ve seen: No reliable source I have seen has suggested that the content of every mail is to be stored and certainly it did not feature in the Home Office presentation. It is only the envelope – the to, the from and the subject line – that they’re interested in. OK, so technically this doesn’t sound too hard to do and in fact I, with my ISP hat on, do this today. If a customer rings up and has a problem with sending or receiving mail, I can look at the logs and see what they have tried to send and receive for the last few days. Scaling that to a year’s worth of data just becomes a matter of adding more disk space, but these days your average home PC could store the data for a year for a good sized ISP without too much trouble.

The reality of what the Home Office intended with the IMP is far worse however. What it set out to do is record the detail of every email, every internet phone call, every Facebook message, every Twitter direct message, every Instant Message and so on so that if Law Enforcement want information on a user they can build up a pretty good picture of who someone has been talking to. Because these services are not run from the UK, the Home Office can’t make them do anything so they’re asking the Service Providers sitting in the middle to do the work instead. Only this isn’t possible in the way they think it is.

I rather suspect the Home Office have been spending too much time watching reruns of “Spooks” rather than researching the issue properly.

Before I go on, I should explain the type of people that the Home Office were presenting to back in May 2009. Typically, when government goes to talk to service providers it seems to talk to “Compliance Managers” and directors at large corporations, who are likely not interested front-line technical reality of running a Service Provider. This was not such an audience. There were probably fifty to a hundred people in that room. Without even leaving our seats, the number of people there who did not possess the very real knowledge and capability to cripple large portions of the internet in less than sixty seconds was quite possibly two. Specifically, the two people from the Home Office who stood up on the stage.

The explanation of how this would work presented by the Home Office largely boils down to handwave-handwave big magic box handwave-handwave. They didn’t really have a solution to the problem that all the data and everything else is in a proprietary format that some programmer thought was a good idea while hyped up on Mountain Dew at 3am. As long as it works for whatever application they’re developing, it’s not supposed to be easy to snoop on and they’re likely to change it at any moment. That’s before we get into the problems of all the little Facebook applications and one-off custom bulletin boards.

The Home Office think that Service Providers can do this. The question I asked them was this: Why do you think we can do this. Because, basically, we can’t. The technical Home Office presenter seemed to believe he’d seen this capability. We had a show of hands: How many people in the room – and these are the people that run the Internet, not the managers – can do this. Nobody raised their hands.

The debate elaborated on the detail of this, but boiled down to one thing: the Home Office thought that we already had the ability to get this data for “Network Planning purposes” and had seen the likes of Phorm and Cleanfeed which look vaguely similar, if you ignore all the inconvenient technical data. On the “Network Planning” front, I do need to know how much data people are using so that I can make sure the pipes are big enough. However, I don’t care if that 5 Gigabytes of data you just downloaded are the detailed technical schematics of a nuclear reactor from one Mr.B.Laden or a video of your grandkids in the back garden last summer. 5 Gigabytes is just 5 Gigabytes.

Sure, to some extent I care where it goes. UK traffic is easier (By which, of course, I mean cheaper) to handle than US traffic for example. So we’ll get really into the detail of the data and sample one packet in a thousand. Or one in ten thousand. Or one in a million – we just don’t need the ability to look at every packet to get a pretty good feed for what’s going on. As one attendee put it, if you want to know if an email was sent, you have about the same odds of catching the right packet as you do from buying a lottery ticket. And even then we just know you talked to a server that happened to be owned by Google, or by Facebook, or by Skype. It might host some dodgy terrorist bulletin board but on the same server are quite possibly knitting patterns for woollen jumpers and photos of the 19:47 Express from Dundee.

We don’t know and, frankly, with a technical hat on we Just Don’t Care.

Lets have a look at the obvious counter-arguments that suggest we can do this:

  • Cleanfeed – the system BT invented to try to filter out kiddy porn. For a start because you just need to visit an encrypted web site and it’s not filtered. It also functions by only diverting and examining traffic to addresses known to contain bad content and leaving the rest well alone so it doesn’t have to scale to every piece of data that flows across the network. And finally, it just looks at the URL you type into your browser and that’s predictable and easy to do – no digging around in the internals of the data to find out who Facebook messaged who.
  • Phorm – the user behaviour tracking and advertising system. Somewhat bigger in scale in that it attempts to intercept a bigger proportion of traffic. But you still don’t need every detail in a useful, loggable form to do this. Just the fact that the phrase “woolly jumper patterns” pops up reasonably often in the streams from a user that you did get around to sampling is enough to pop up advertisements for subscriptions to Knitting Weekly.
  • Your Employer – really, they probably can’t do most of what they claim to do as the fear of redundancy keeps most people in line. Some have the resources to do quite a bit, most notably those regulated by organisations such as the Financial Services Authority. But as well as quite a lot of money for a relatively small user base, it’s because they have one big advantage that they control your PC and can install extra software on there to allow monitoring of even encrypted web sites and they can also just block you from doing things they can’t monitor.
  • The Great Firewall of China – Huge numbers of staff involved, all sorts of legal implications if you break through it. And yet people still manage

It all starts looking a bit bleak for IMP and a few months after that meeting, it was abandoned.

If this really is the IMP resurrected, the Home Office have solved some pretty major technical hurdles and I look forward to their announcement of some magic hardware in the not too distant future. In the mean time, I suspect that the likes of Facebook will be checking out the costs of rolling out encryption hardware for anyone accessing their services from the UK.

Update: I have a couple of old addresses from the Home Office dating back to this consultation – I have dropped them an email to ask if this really is the IMP resurrected. It occurred to me as I did that the Strategic Defence and Security Review is Ministry-of-Defence driven whereas the original IMP was via the Home Office. I don’t know if there is anything in that.

by ·1 Comment

An update for anyone who doesn’t follow me on Twitter (And if you’re a Twitter user, why not? I’m @zoeimogen) or didn’t see it earlier – Stonewall have removed Bill Leckie from their list of nominees for Journalist of the Year 2010. According to the Pink Paper, Stonewall said simply it has been “withdrawn” and they’re “sorry for any offence this has caused.”

I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised by this turn of events. I’m hoping Stonewall will have an epiphany on other issues soon, such as Marriage Equality.

by ·3 Comments

Featured on Liberal Democrat VoiceIt’s been touted in a few places today that two Liberal Democrat owned domain names, www.liberaldemocrats.org.uk and co.uk have been “hacked”. Until a couple of hours ago, those sites redirected to this Tuition Fees-related video on YouTube.

A few people did a quick lookup on the “whois” database for UK domains and found it apparently registered to Liberal Democrat HQ. Cue stories of the site either being hacked or it being an “inside job” by disgruntled staff.

A little digging reveals a much longer and less nefarious story. Firstly, we can look at the Google Cache of the page, which shows a link to a YouTube video of Gordon Brown. That’s pretty odd for an official party site.

To get further back we can jump onto the rather useful “Wayback Machine” to see a history of sites at that address. There, we find random sites attacking Surrey Police, going on about legal proceedings and anti-Gordon Brown attacks.

Despite the anti-Labour sentiment, it is pretty clearly not an official Liberal Democrat site.

In fact, it looks like it dates back to squabbles in what most people would regard as the “early days” of the Internet. One keen New Statesman reader found a story on The Register from May of 2001 that mentions some domain squatting going on and one reader registering the domain names supposedly “hijacked” today in retaliation.

The whois information states the domain was registered in August 2002 so it appears the initial registrant allowed it to lapse and someone else picked it up since. As for the registration details on the domain name, supposedly fingering the party itself? You can put whoever you want as the owner of a domain name. The details given are exactly what you get if you search for “Liberal Democrats” on Companies House and I don’t believe that’s a coincidence.

There is a reason you don’t put someone else’s details on your domain name, for the same reason you don’t put someone else’s name on your car registration documents – they can do things with it. Which looks like it has happened in this case, as the YouTube video has been removed and the site now goes to a holding page.

by ·3 Comments

Stonewall tried to defend themselves against the revelations that they’ve nominated someone they themselves labelled transphobic for an award, but seem to have spectacularly failed. Given that on Twitter they have been pointing people at this Pink Paper story, it seems reasonable to say that it’s a good representation of their position.

They are pointing out that Bill Leckie, the journalist in question, has been much nicer recently and mention his positive article on Gareth Thomas last year. Of course, Gareth Thomas is gay, not Trans, so the fact that Leckie has been nice to gay people isn’t directly relevant. Bindel was nice to Lesbian and Gay people too, but the Trans community are still not particularly enamoured of her.

You think Stonewall might have learnt their lesson from Bindel, but it seems not.

Myself and a number of others responded to Stonewall on Twitter yesterday afternoon and asked them if Leckie has written anything Trans-positive since 2007 – but so far, we have not had a reply. Trans Media Watch have also publicly called on Leckie to disown his transphobic article, which may result in a positive outcome although no thanks to Stonewall.

As an interesting aside, I’ll note that the Pink Paper contribution on behalf of Stonewall UK was by Laura Doughty, the deputy Chief Executive of Stonewall, rather than Ben Summerskill. It’s possible – indeed, even likely – that Summerskill was simply busy yesterday but it may be worth keeping an eye on who is being the public face of Stonewall in case the winds of change are finally blowing through the dusty halls of Stonewall Towers.

by ·4 Comments

I thought things with Stonewall had settled down some. With just over two weeks to go until the Stonewall Awards Protests (Outside the V&A Musuem on the 4th November) it appeared as if there might be a whole week in which they did not manage to screw something up.

But no, it was not to be – on Tuesday, Stonewall announced the nominees for their 2010 awards. And one of the people nominated for Journalist of the Year is someone who Stonewall have themselves pointed out as an example of transphobic reporting.

It seems that back in 2007 a subsidiary of Stonewall, Stonewall Scotland, published a report on LGBT portrayal in the Scottish press. Stonewall Scotland do actually campaign for the full spectrum of LGBT rights, including Transgender. One of the pieces of work they highlighted in their report was an article by Bill Leckie in the Scottish edition of The Sun:

EIGHT o’clock on Wednesday and an army of frighteningly ugly women are pouring into a boozer called Prism for bingo night. Or at least from a distance they LOOK like women. But then you see the poster on the door.
And you realise that this isn’t just any bingo night. It’s Drag Queen bingo night.
Now, I can’t pretend that my devotion to this column is such that I wiggled along to see how it went. Not when I got there and saw someone going in with the same frock.
However, my sources tell me it went a little bit like: “Two fat ladyboys… 88. Unlucky for some … unprotected sex. Five and two… Danny La Rue.” And someone shouted: “Really nicely-decorated house!”

Now, guess who one of the people Stonewall nominated for Journalist of the Year this year is?

I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again: Are they actually trying to antagonise the Trans community?

by ·3 Comments

Good news: Cambridge City Council have voted on and approved a revised equalities policy saying that they will not use the various (bad) exemptions in the Equalities Act relating to those undergoing gender reassignment. I was there for the discussion last night, but Sarah asked me not to talk about it until the press release went out today.

For those who don’t know, Cambridge had the first Trans mayor in the UK (Second worldwide, I think) a few years ago and has had at least three Trans Councillors that I know of. I think it is proboably one of, if not the most progressive city in the UK in terms of Trans equality.

Hopefully this will set an example that others can follow. The full press release is below, I think it speaks for itself.

Updated: Sarah has also written in her own blog about this and goes into a little more detail.

COUNCILLOR’S VICTORY FOR TRANSGENDER EQUALITY

Cambridge City Councillor, Sarah Brown, has scored a significant victory for the city’s transgender group and given the council a leading edge in the battle for equality.

She called on the council to exceed the requirements of the Equality Act by making sure that workers applying for gender appropriate positions with the council and people using single sex facilities provided by the council were not discriminated against.

The 2010 Act allows discrimination against transgender people in these two areas.

A LGBT activitist, Cllr Brown raised the issue at the council’s Strategy and Resources Scrutiny Committee last night (Monday, October 11) and was successful in changing the council’s Equalities Policy.

She told members she was not challenging the terms of the Act but simply asking to exceed its minimum requirements as an example of best practice.

She said: “I wanted Cambridge City Council to maintain its reputation as being in the vanguard of LGBT best practice in exceeding the requirements of this Act in this area.

“It has been generally agreed throughout the transgender community that these sections of the act were unjust. The city council should be aiming to do better than the minimum standard that the Act allows.

“I am delighted that the committee gave me its backing. It is crucial that transgender workers are not treated differently from other workers and not discriminated against in any way.

“This should prove very reassuring to the transgender community and reinforce the council’s reputation as leading best practice in this area.”