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Greens call for Government to ring fence funding for women’s refuges

Green Party accuses Government of “placing women’s lives in danger” with its plans to change funding for refuges.

Amelia Womack, deputy leader of the Green Party, calls on the Government to ring-fence funding for refuges and other forms of short-term supported housing in the welfare system.

She was speaking at the Green Party Spring Conference in Bournemouth today, after first speaking out about her own experiences of domestic abuse in June last year.

In little-publicised proposals, the Conservative government plans to remove refuges and other forms of short-term supported housing from the welfare system meaning the most vulnerable women fleeing abusive partners will not be able to pay for their accommodation using housing benefit, the last guaranteed source of income available to refuges. On average, housing benefit makes up 53% of refuge funding.

Amelia Womack, told conference: “This Government claims to care about women – yet it’s placing their lives in danger with plans to remove refuges from the welfare system. Removing women’s final safety net when they are in their hour of greatest need.

“This is a matter of life and death. The Government must prove it is serious about women’s safety and ring-fence funding for refuges.”

At Autumn Conference in October last year Womack launched the Green Party’s campaign to make misogyny a hate crime, which has since gathered cross-party support.

She said: “When I shared my experience of domestic violence for the first time last year, I never imagined I’d be part of starting what quickly became such a defining and extraordinary moment in the story of women.

“From MeToo to TimesUp, it feels like we’re hitting a tipping point that none of us saw coming this time last year. I’m so proud to have played a small part in giving other women the confidence to come forward and speak out about their experiences of misogyny.

“From the sweeping red walkways of Hollywood premieres to the corridors of the House of Commons, the carpets things have been swept under are now well and truly being shaken out.”

Mayor attends launch of Switchboard’s Rainbow Café

Switchboard opens new community project – the Rainbow Café, to support LGBTQ people who live with memory loss or dementia.

With an £11,725 grant awarded by the Rainbow Fund, the Rainbow Café is a new initiative for LGBTQ people living with dementia or memory loss and their friends, families and carers. This new project also hopes to show that Switchboard is more than just a helpline as the charity continues to connect and support LGBTQ communities.

Launching the project last month to a packed crowd Switchboard’s CEO Daniel Cheesman, said: “We have had such positive feedback that we are providing this service in the City.  We know that there is a big need to provide an LGBTQ specific space for those experiencing dementia. Gay or straight, dementia doesn’t discriminate and whilst we can’t do much about the condition itself we can play our part to ensure that environments are supportive and fully inclusive.”

The Rainbow Café opened by the Mayor Councillor Mo Marsh was followed by a showing of the awarding winning play The Purple List: A Gay Dementia Venture, telling the story of a same-sex couple, whose life is interrupted with a diagnosis of dementia. The performance was followed by a Q&A session with a panel made up of City wide services supporting dementia. It was acknowledged that there is still plenty of work to do in terms of supporting LGBTQ people living with the condition and Switchboard were praised for their efforts in responding to the need.

The Rainbow Café will run monthly with the next meeting taking place 11am-1pm on Thursday, March 21 at Brooke Mead, Albion Street.

To find about more about the Rainbow Café, email: rainbow.cafe@switchboard.org.uk or call the Switchboard office on 01273 234009 for more information.


Switchboard – Rainbow Café, Brooke Mead,
Albion Street. BN2 9PY

Thursday, March 22, 11am-1pm

Thursday, April 12, 11am-1pm

Thursday, May 10, 11am-1pm

Thursday, June 14, 11am-1pm

Thursday, July 12, 11am-1pm

Switchboard – Older Persons Project, Modello Lounge,
143-145 Church Road, Hove

Wednesday, March 7, 10:30am-12noon

Wednesday, April 4, 10:30am-12noon

Wednesday, May 2, 10:30am-12noon

Wednesday, June 6, 10:30-12noon

Wednesday, July 4, 10:30-12noon

Switchboard – Older Persons Project, Emmaus Café,
Locks Hill, Portslade Village

Thursday, March 15, 11am-12:30pm

Thursday, April 19, 11am-12:30pm

Thursday, May 17, 11am-12:30pm

Thursday, June 21, 11am-12:30pm

Thursday, July 19, 11am-12:30pm

Switchboard – Older Persons Project,
The Breakfast Club, Market Street, The Lanes, Brighton

Tuesday, March 27, 10-11:30am

Tuesday, April 24, 10-11:30am

Tuesday, May 22, 10-11:30am

Tuesday, June 26, 10-11:30am

Tuesday, July 24, 10-11:30am

 

 

 

OPINION: Sam Trans Man 

Dr Samuel Hall on the gender binary and how it’s the final hurdle in the battle for equality.

I recently glimpsed the potential to educate people about trans issues via this publication and its readership through a different lens. I’ve been writing for Gscene for almost five years, and although it often seems like an indulgence to me (I really enjoy writing so it’s great to have an outlet), I’m aware that by committing myself to paper, sometimes intimately, I’ve been educating others in the LGBT community in a way that I hadn’t foreseen. Reading Sugar’s column last month struck a chord – as a trans man and a trans woman, published side by side, I saw just how important it is that we (transpeople) have a voice, and I am so grateful to the proprietor and editors for that.

Despite historical and present day differences, a lack of understanding and perhaps education; despite the fact that many people in the LGBT community have forgotten, don’t know or don’t care about us, us trans folk are central to what it means and always has meant to be queer. Trans women of colour were at the heart of the Stonewall riots, and we’ve been at the vanguard of human rights-driven activism ever since.

If you’re a white gay male, the chances are you have been living a relatively ‘easy’ life for some time, compared to your forebears and the giants upon whose shoulders you stand. But don’t forget to look back down the human ladder you’ve climbed, to see where there is still persecution, loneliness, homelessness, desperation and fear of death from disease. And if you can’t see it on your doorstep, look further afield. Look at the ladyboys, the hijra in India, the sex workers in South America, the Latino and African-American trans women all over the States who are being singled out for transphobic hate and exploitation on a relentless loop which sometimes kills them.

Ever since I emerged from the horror show of my own coming out, I’ve become more and more passionate about changing how the world sees trans people. We need to be seen for who we are, with richness and diversity that is appropriate for a global community. We are, in international terms, a massive minority. We’re being increasingly heard, all over the planet, which is exciting, but also terrifying. Just as the world is beginning to see into the ‘gay community’ and realise that it’s anything but homogenous, so the LBG part of our community is beginning to see into ’T’ and experience the huge variation in language and expression around gender and identity. We’re men, trans men, transmasculine, non-binary, drag kings and queens, transvestites, transfeminine, trans women, women, and a whole lot more. We’re battering the binary with our language assault. Society at large cannot contain us. The #GendeRevolution will happen this century. More and more people will walk away from the construct we labour under. It’s so incredibly liberating to do so. My personal sense of freedom is particularly strong at the moment. I write on the eve of phalloplasty surgery, and I feel freer than I’ve ever felt in my life.

In fact, I can’t really believe how liberated I feel. It’s as though I’m on the brink of busting out of a cage that I’ve helped to make, but no longer want to live in. A safe place that we all know about and understand. A world rigid with rules about gender. A place I’ve run back to again and again since my early teens, each time I even came close to busting out I ran back. The light was too dazzling. I couldn’t have coped with the enormity of what it means to disprove the gender binary by crossing the uncrossable divide. This chasm that we’re all so sure of, live our lives by; it doesn’t exist. Trans people, by our very existence, are the bridge over the binary. We allow the imposed halves of humanity to unite in our bodies, and force a closer look at sex, gender and identity. Through our bodies, the rest of the humanity can see itself as it is. Unique, different, and yet the same. There’s nothing which connects us more strongly than this. No skin colour, biological attribute, disability, circumstance of birth, sexual orientation or gender identity is more important than the first and only significant denominator, our common humanity. We’re all one. For some reason, the gender binary and all the oppression it brings, seems to be the final hurdle in the battle for equality.

I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, the gender binary is common to all cultures, places and times. We need male and female forms of our species in order to reproduce, and we expect and respect the differences that biology confers, including the vast number of people who are intersex. But try to pick this apart from the gender roles and expectations that we apply in modern western society to children the minute they’re born, if not before. There’s no logic what so ever in assigning a set of rules to a child based on their genitalia.

It’s very important that we in the LGBT communities remain at the forefront of this discussion. However threatening it may feel, the thinking and language around the deconstruction of gender is essential if humanity is to survive. Once we separate biological sex from gender, we see that one is real, and the other isn’t. Trans people are victims of a societal construct that enslaves them, some cope with this by finding a way to express themselves that gives a sense of freedom, others are biologically ‘miswired’ and need to change their bodies to stop them feeling suicidal, and others still are rebelling against a binary construct that they can see is destructive to all of us. Until we break the hold that the gender binary has on society, women are trapped in oppression, men are trapped in perpetrator mode, and people who are neither are totally invisible.

OPINION: Craig’s Thoughts 

Caught in the Act. Or the mirror has two faces by Craig Hanlon-Smith @craigscontinuum

Ann Widdecombe
Ann Widdecombe

In its infancy, Big Brother was billed as a social experiment, originally a fascinating and nation gripping revolution in reality television. Not entirely due to its shift onto the schedule of Richard Desmond’s Channel 5, in more recent years it has descended into a desperate opportunity to shock and outrage in increasing states of drunken undress. Big Brother contestants, and indeed winners, have in the past few series come and gone with the same attention given to yesterday’s chip wrapping paper and tomorrow’s chips. Even the celebrity edition, with the odd standout moment aside (“David’s dead!”), has struggled to make much of an impact in our popular culture psyche. Viewing figures have struggled for air between one and two million viewers depending on the night of the week and rumours of the executive axe have abounded for years. And whilst the viewing numbers have on average remained consistent if not exhilarating for the latest outing, the most recently broadcast series of Celebrity Big Brother (CBB) appeared to encourage a return to its experimental beginnings and held up an interesting social mirror to all of us. Although perhaps by accident rather than design, CBB also raised interesting questions of our own LGBT communities and a, perhaps, incorrectly assumed connection with our supposed brothers and sisters.

Shane Jenek and Courtney Act
Shane Jenek and Courtney Act

There was much debate on a variety of social media platforms of the battle between apparent good and evil in the finale showdown of former Conservative politician, Ann Widdecombe, and drag queen, Courtney Act (Shane Jenek). I myself may have tweeted something along the lines of seeing the CBB final vote as a Brexit re-run, and whilst I concede this notion to be verging on the totally ridiculous, what actually played out in that house over the last two weeks of the contest was much more serious.

This isn’t an opportunity to vent about bigotry, or to call Ann Widdecombe a range of unhelpful names. It’s also my own usual practice to hesitate in the casual overuse of the term homophobia when someone is simply being horrid or plainly mean. However, homophobia is a term totally apt when examining Ms Widdecombe’s behaviour in the CBB house; she appeared genuinely afeared. It’s not the intention to criticise Ann Widdecombe when I say that the slightest leaning towards any sexual debate or discussion caused an outward shudder of not simple disapproval, but internal trial and torment, she looked genuinely sick. This was ever more pronounced in the presence of the transgendered contestant India Willoughby. India made it openly clear that her own preferred gender description was that of woman, a concept Ms Widdecombe struggled to grasp and openly misgendered her housemate. Perhaps a simple and clumsy error to make when one is from another political and social generation entirely. And although she didn’t directly apologise, she did offer that she hadn’t intended any offence.

Her discomfort, though, grew in stature in the company of the male homosexual. She regularly covered her face in the vicinity of Courtney Act. Initially as Miss Act ‘suffered’ an apparently unexpected wardrobe malfunction, but as the series progressed, simply as Shane Jenek took a seat in the living area dressed in drag. Mr Jenek cast aside his civilian attire as Courtney Act typically made an appearance on eviction night episodes or for entertainment-related challenges, but in the last week took a decision one evening to ‘drag-up’, just because. Initially I sat amazed as Widdecombe appeared to physically recoil, then both cover and turn her face in what I initially assumed was disgust, but began to notice was a form of actual and real distress. Courtney Act, a man in drag, was a triple threat to Ann Widdecombe appearing to instil a fear that was all at once emotional, psychological and physical. It was as though watching in Widdecombe, the frightened victim of a bully; however, there was not a bully in the room except for, it could be argued, Miss Widdecombe herself. And there you have it; the fear, the homophobia and then the domineering almost bully-like responses that abound through the mouth of one we then call bigot – and many did through their social media feeds. It was a fascinating, illuminating and alarming watch through this revised social experiment of what I and many of you reading this will have experienced first-hand. That fear in Ann Widdecombe was real and Shane Jenek/Courtney Act only had to appear for the dragon of homophobia to come screeching out if its cave, breathing fire.

Courtney and Wayne Sleep
Courtney and Wayne Sleep

Of course, neither gay Shane nor Courtney were alone. There was a small community of homosexuals in the house. Wayne Sleep and Amanda Barrie spoke openly of their same-sex relationships and in Barrie’s case her Civil Partner. But Shane Jenek was very much in isolation as the contest began to heat up. An intelligent and willing participant in this experiment, at all times in his questioning of the homophobia he found himself living with, remained calm, reasonable, questioning, but polite. Who challenged his friends in the house when they used language he deemed confrontational and inappropriate, but who turned to the community members he hoped would understand. Amanda Barrie sided with her elder female compatriot, expressing anger at Jenek for his position and that she liked Ann Widdecombe “and I’m in a Civil Partnership”, a progressive legislative step Widdecombe opposed not only as an MP but often criticised whilst in the CBB house. Wayne Sleep, again openly gay on the TV show and camping it up at every wine-infused opportunity, refused to engage in any discussion with Jenek about a responsibility to the LGBT+ community and in fact seemed affronted that he might and both Barrie and Sleep nominated Jenek for eviction, for the stance he had taken. There seemed a gulf of belief between the three, which appeared to confuse them all. The elders not understanding why Jenek assumed a community relationship or connection along LGBT+ lines and Jenek genuinely surprised that they didn’t.

Craig Hanlon-Smith
Craig Hanlon-Smith

Widdecombe didn’t win the popular televoting contest, but take no comfort from that. The LGBT+ online mafia were out in force in the run up to the live TV finale, I for one voted for Courtney Act/Shane J four times in a bid to sleep that night. In a real election, we have one crack at the prize and my lasting memory of this unsettling experiment will be of the housemates uniting behind Widdecombe on account of her elder stateswoman qualities and traditional values.

You think I’m being daft? Watch this space. You were warned.

FEATURE: Phobia isn’t a Dirty Word

Miracle coach Liz Davies meets with Ray A-J to clear the stigma around phobias, and gives us some tips on how to cure them.

Liz Davies
Liz Davies

There’s a plague infecting hundreds of people around the world. An invisible parasite that’s latching onto its victims, draining them of all hope and courage. It’s everywhere. It’s dangerous… And worst of all, its carrying on unnoticed. What is this vicious sickness? One word: fear. I’m a phobia sufferer, and for most of us, finding a way out of the painful hold it has seems unreachable. It’s a difficult thing to get over. Luckily, phobia survivor Liz Davies has some solutions for getting over a phobia (and other mental illnesses).

Ray: So you help cure people of phobias, how does that work?
Liz: “I used to work in the NHS and a lot of what I did was cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) based. You previously mentioned how you combated your phobia by putting yourself in the situation that was scary, and that gradually made the fear reduce. That’s CBT. 

“It’s about retraining your thoughts to reduce the amount of fear you feel when you’re exposed to your trigger. The response. It becomes a habit and then that fear grows because your brain thinks that the trigger is definitely scary, and so you need to stay away from it. But by gradually exposing yourself to, like, pictures of your stimulus, you can reduce your response because your fight or flight will gradually stop triggering, and you can then move up to the next level.” 

Liz explains that she felt there was an easier way to treat phobias. There had to be a method that was quicker and less arduous or demanding than CBT. A little something called hypnotherapy.
Liz: “I had hypnotherapy myself. So hypnotherapy taps into the subconscious (where the root of the problem is) and takes you right back to the source memory so you can combat it. It’s almost like you’ve had a glass of wine, you’re taken back in a relaxed state to that memory. You can see it from an adult’s point of view, so it isn’t as scary as it was the first time.” 

As it turns out, Liz once suffered from a phobia too. Hers was resolved with hypnotherapy.
Liz: “I had a phobia of spiders – I didn’t realise how extreme it was. It was serious. I’d spent my whole life being terrified of them. Every room I entered, I would scan for them. I just thought it was normal – my mum and sister were scared of them too. I remember saying, to me, a spider was scarier then an axe murderer.” 

“Then I saw a hypnotherapist, after attending a talk on it (which blew me away), and he took me back to my first memory of spiders. It was vivid – I was a little girl and I had seen a spider in the bath tub. I could see it exactly how it was. I was curious about it, so I asked my mum what I was. She was terrified of them, so she screamed when she saw it. She never screamed. And that was what made me scared – my subconscious thought if my mum was scared of it, it must have been dangerous.

“That experience (hypnotherapy) changed my life really, because it taught me how easy it can be to release these fears. All you need to do is go back to it (your trigger) in a therapeutic way, to see it from an adult’s perspective and see it very differently. When I walked into rooms, I no longer scanned them. And so I too trained as a hypnotherapist. It was like learning magic; I was learning that we don’t have to have that fear or that worry.”

Liz spoke about energy and a sort of chakra system that can contribute to how we feel. She refers to Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which works on the basis that feelings can get stuck in your emotional lines, and if left unprocessed can lead to great distress – something that can fester and grow into a severe unhappiness.

Phobias can be cured via many methods such as the ones described above, and EFT (described in my Phobia column). As a miracle coach and hypnotherapist, Liz explains that she utilises these when freeing patients of their problems (whether that be a phobia, anxiety, or depression) in as little as two sessions. A patient can be of any age, and would pay £75 per session to cure their issue.

Despite all of the help available, there is still a stigma attached to the word ‘phobia’ and ‘mental health’. Perhaps with a little empathy and understanding, we can put a stop to this.

British man becomes first to ever marry at Sydney Mardi Gras

Following Australian marriage equality legislation being passed in December 2017, British man, Stuart Henshall and his Australian partner, James Brechney, yesterday became the first couple to ever legally marry at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

The pair exchanged vows surrounded by 80 of their closest friends and family, who danced behind a float, exchanging rings and saying ‘I Do’ as they passed through the iconic Taylor Square. Absolutely Fabulous, Patsy and Eddie lookalikes took on the roles of their celebrants, adding an additional theatrical air to the proceedings.

Stuart and James made global headlines in November 2017, when they got engaged after Australia’s divisive marriage equality postal survey.

The wedding float was DJ’d by TV presenter and the couple’s close friend, Danny Clayton, who kept the crowd dancing throughout the night.

The couple had campaigned for marriage equality in Australia for a number of years, with James starting the rainbow chalking movement in 2013, and co-organising the largest protest march in Australia’s history in September 2017 (40,000 people). He also sat on the board of Sydney Mardi Gras, until November last year.

Stuart said: “We’re so thrilled that LGBT couples can get married across Australia, we wanted to share our marriage with the world and where better than the 40th anniversary of Mardi Gras.

“We are so honoured to be able to do it here during this special time, we realise and acknowledge the shoulders that we stand on that has made this all possible. We did this with the blessing of some of our 78er friends, and given some of their partners passed before seeing the law change it is a very bittersweet moment.

He continued: “If one kid in rural Australia sees our wedding float and it helps them on their journey of self acceptance then it is all worth it. There is still a long way to go in Australia, and around the world, in the fight for equality and to stamp out homophobia.”

The couple hosted their reception the following day to round off the wedding weekend with 150 guests at the Kings Cross Hotel.

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