Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?

January 23, 2021January 23, 2021 / Frankie Mouche / Leave a comment

I came out as a lesbian sometime around 1999. My mother was horrified and her exact response was, “you’re not are you?” Which was delightful and made me feel amazing . 😒

(That’s me in the black System of a Down hoodie with my arms around my girlfriend in 2001.)

I grew up in a vibrant queer community. When my mother finally kicked me out at 17 (2003) I moved in with my then girlfriend and met her extended network of lesbians too. It felt really good to be around people like me, even if I was by and far the baby dyke. I hadn’t even been to a gay bar at this point because I was underage.

I renounced my lesbianism after 27 years, when I broke up with my girlfriend in 2012. It was particularly messy and traumatic, but it allowed me to discover who I was: not a woman and not attracted solely to women.

My lesbian history seems a distant memory now, but having spent such a big chunk of my life in that community, I was shocked to see The Spectator and other British media asking where all the lesbians had gone. (I’m not linking to those articles. Those papers don’t need traffic from our community.)

I put a shout out on my Facebook page and a few lesbians came forward to answer where they had been.

Kirsty Rowles

Why do you think the press don’t know where lesbians are?

It’s a little known fact that lesbians have for a long time been developing technology which means that we cannot be seen by dickheads trying to use us to excuse their transphobia. Following a successful pilot, this has now been rolled out to all non-transphobic lesbians, hence the apparently diminishing numbers.
So, where have you actually been?

I’ve been in my house, wearing a onesie and writing about fictional girls kissing, as is my lesbian birthright and based on responses on the All Lesbian WhatsApp group, this is a common experience.
How do lesbians and the trans community move forward together?

Support each other and recognise that we have more in common than different.
Do you have anything to promote?

I talk about being a gay fangirl in my zines. Check them out here: http://www.etsy.co.uk/shop/foreverincomplete

Kirsty Sarah Miller (Apparently lots of lesbians are called Kirsty! 🤣😂)

1. Why do you think the press don’t know where lesbians are?

Probably because the press are typically homophobic and don’t make it their mission to learn about the depths of lesbian culture.

2. So where have you actually been?

I have been staying at home like everyone else has since March last year. In general, I’m a performing cellist and cello teacher and I love engaging in the arty side of lesbian culture – music, literature, film etc. Incidentally in the future, I’m interested in putting on a concert of classical music written by LGBT+ composers.

3. How do lesbians and the trans community move forward together?

For me, there is no issue or clash between lesbian rights and trans rights or indeed women’s rights in general. It is heartening to personally know lots of lesbians who are fully supportive of their trans siblings, but I feel sad that some lesbians have a hostile view of trans people.

Trans people and their lesbian, gay, bi and queer siblings have always come together in the same spaces and we are better for it. I’m sure this will continue into the future.

4. Do you have anything to promote?

I’m a cellist, cello teacher and Alexander Technique teacher. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram under @kirstenmillercello. Also throughout February I’m going to be posting about classical music written by women composers.

I offer cello lesson (currently online) if anyone is interested. I can also record cello for albums, films and virtual concerts.

Sadly I have no live concerts to promote currently due to lockdown.

Molly Brereton

1. Why do you think the press don’t know where lesbians have gone?

They don’t know where lesbians are because we have been hiding from them. Most self-respecting lesbians don’t buy newspapers that have historically voted against our best interests, which is why I’m still outraged that Joan Armatrading, a black working class lesbian from Birmingham is supposedly a Conservative.

2. So, where have you actually been?

I’ve been in Pontypridd playing Dungeons and Dragons with my cats.

3) How do lesbians and the trans community move forward together?

The only way forward that I can see is mutual support, understanding that our co-existence and happiness is not a zero sum game and a genuine curiosity in what has divided us.

Worldwide we’re seeing a great shift towards far right politics and authoritarian ways of leading. Propaganda is doing a number on civility so that those of us at the bottom, i.e. normal working people, are being routinely pitted against one another, believing that one person’s gain must mean their loss. I don’t believe in such reductionist and curmudgeonly personal politic.

4) Do you have anything to promote?

My band, Trigger Warnings and the Safe Spaces. We practice rarely and have no merch. Please support us.
https://triggerwarningandthesafespaces.bandcamp.com/album/everything-is-problematic

As you can see, lesbians haven’t gone anywhere. They are here and their community is thriving. It is a wonder that institutions that have always hated the LGBT+ community are even bothering to pretend to care about lesbians, but it is their bigotry of choice at the moment to pit marginalised groups against one another.

Famous lesbian musician Grace Petrie put it perfectly:
https://twitter.com/gracepetrie/status/1343572473833533440?s=20

Worried about lesbians? Why does the Times not start a lesbian culture column? Why does JK Rowling not use her gargantuan platform to write a world best seller series about a lesbian kid? Why does your concern for lesbian visibility never involve making any lesbians visible?

In closing: long live lesbians and lesbian culture.

Labels

August 18, 2018 / Frankie Mouche / 3 Comments

Everyone’s first experience of a label is the one they are given at birth. The one about 99% of us carry with us for our entire lives: our sex and gender. Everything you do and anything you will ever be is determined by that label in a patriarchal society. Those of us who reject the label given to us at birth are shunned by society and subject to systemic discrimination, yet society at large doesn’t seem keen on labels as a whole.

10628025_10154531765240322_2428920192076815644_n

Fast forward to 1999. I’m 14 years old and I’ve just started a new school. (I had to leave/was expelled from my two previous schools due to being bullied.) I’m into heavy metal and punk, so obviously I gravitated towards that group of people. The other kids called them, “Greebos” or “Greebs” but the most popular of them decided that labels weren’t cool so we never used the term. It was the same with the widespread bisexuality. If we didn’t talk about it or label ourselves we weren’t really different. We were just the same as everyone else, but we wore black and slept with people of multiple genders. (Yes I was having sex at 14.)

This situation didn’t last long for me and I ended up hanging out with the kids in the year below. They embraced labels and were subsequently called losers by the people I used to hang out with in my year group. We were Greebos. We were lesbians, gays and bisexuals and we were proud, even if just within our friendship group. We went through the same struggles together and our bond and our labels kept us together and kept us strong. I fell in love for the first time in 2001 with one of these people. We called ourselves lesbians and that stuck with me for the next nine years, even if the Greebo label faded into metal-head as time went by.

10582830_10154529425575322_668108636016171546_o

So what are my labels now at 32 and what do they mean to me?

Autistic

I’ve been using this label since Feb 2017, when I truly accepted that this was who I was. A year later I had an official diagnosis.

I don’t say I am someone with autism. Autism is me. I am autistic.

Realising I was autistic was super validating for me. It explained a lot of my past behaviour and allowed me to find friends who were similar to me.

28059369_10160051758860322_4845520735917524427_n

Transmasculine Nonbinary

I am transgender. I lean towards masculinity. My transition involves testosterone and masculinising surgeries.

I am however not a man. I’m also not a woman. My gender identity and subsequent presentation fluctuates and sits well out of the norms for binary genders.

37570485_10160670426385322_8100686578025758720_n

Metal-head

I love all music actually but my focus is definitely focused on metal, punk and hardcore. I often dress in what can be considered as metal-head attire.

29342798_10160177600485322_7164629809123819520_n

Queer

Truly I am pansexual, but I like queer as an identity.

37609690_10160666025320322_1019345887102500864_n

Why are labels important?

My labels have brought some of the best people into my life. We have bonded over similar struggles and we have stood strong in the face of transphobia, homophobia and ableism. They give me a blanket of safety I can run and hide under when the allistic, transphobic world gets too much and they understand exactly why I need to do that.

It means when I’m out at the pub with my friends I’m not gonna get misgendered or called aggressive because of my autistic style of communicating. It means I was encouraged to be my authentic self at Trans Pride by being topless . It was the safety of having these people around me which allowed me to work up the courage to medically transition.

37766496_10160685030145322_9062101237570207744_n

We can also help other marginalised groups. They define who they are and the systemic discrimination they face. We listen to them and lend our privilege to help where it is needed. Without labels, I don’t think we would be able to do this so effectively and this leads on to my next point;

Why doesn’t society like labels as a whole?

In my experience oppressors don’t like labels because for them it means they are not the norm and when we use them, we use them to empower ourselves against their oppression.

For example cis women who reject the use of cis, even though it is literally what they are. They don’t like it because they have always just seen themselves as normal women and that trans women and femme aligned people are deviant in some way. This is often combined with TERf rhetoric. (The F is small deliberately cuz ain’t nothing feminist about their tripe.)

Another example is allistic people. This just basically means you aren’t autistic. Allistic people hate it because they see autistic people as abnormal and they are just normal people. Wrong.

So let’s embrace our labels and the labels of others, banding together to empower one another and bring down systems of oppression.

pridepuff-jpg

trans-poc

My Emerging Male Privilege

March 2, 2018March 14, 2018 / Frankie Mouche / 1 Comment

I finally admitted to myself around a year ago that I needed to medically transition. What this means for me is that I’ll be masculinising myself with the addition of testosterone and eventually having top surgery.

I’m doing this because the dysphoria of being called she/her/woman/girl everyday is destroying me. I’m not a man either and I never will be. I’m non-binary and I’m transmasculine. However in the masculinising process I expect that I’ll get misgendered from the other side with he/him/boy/man. That doesn’t hurt me nearly as much and it comes with it’s own set of privileges that people who are seen as women do not get.

27971706_10160027327685322_901296595345530676_n

So what is male privilege?

I took this straight from Wikipedia:

“Special privileges and status are granted to men in patriarchal societies. These are societies defined by male supremacy, in which males hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. With systemic subordination of other genders, men gain economic, political, social, educational, and practical advantages that are more or less unavailable to other genders. The long-standing and unquestioned nature of such patriarchal systems, reinforced over generations, tends to make privilege invisible to holders; it can lead men who benefit from such privilege to ascribe their special status to their owned individual merits and achievements, rather than to unearned advantages.”

(Obviously I edited it slightly to erase their binary nonsense, but you get the standard textbook definition.)

19059552_10158824846785322_1054962391388875836_n

What this means is that anyone who “passes” as a man in our society gets certain privileges. This includes cis men, trans men and transmasculine nonbinary folks. This manifests in the way people treat you at work, how people value your opinions, opportunities open to you, how people greet you etc etc.

(Please note that passing is cis normative term that many trans people reject and that trans folks have their own set of challenges regardless of any male privilege bestowed on them by society.)

21752172_10159321033065322_7558552095152157840_n

At this present moment before I start testosterone, I have what I call “fleeting male privilege.” It’s given to me and taken away at a rate of knots when people realise I have boobs or that my voice is too high to be considered masculine.

22195931_10159394508870322_919891210681150619_n

Until recently I’ve never had a sustained period of male privilege bestowed on me. My best friend is a nonbinary trans man and happens to do that weird thing the cis defined as “passing.” We were walking with another friend (who’s also trans) through Cardiff city centre and I guess all three of us looked like young white cis men because people got out of our way. People avoided eye contact. No one bothered us at all. This struck me because neither of them noticed and I noticed with every inch of my being. It made me really uncomfortable.

I think everyone deserves a high level of respect, dignity and opportunity but I guess that’s why I’m a feminist. I’ll be documenting my emerging male privilege as I transition.

23231657_10159571286145322_4950962580437065895_n

My thoughts on Vegan Pride.

January 9, 2018 / Frankie Mouche / 14 Comments

In June 1969 the movement for LGBTQIA+ equality and liberation began. A series of riots took place centring around the Stonewall Inn in New York. These riots were instigated by transgender women of colour and the next year, the first Pride Parade was held. (You can read more about the history of Pride HERE.)

In recent years Pride has been the victim of commercialisation, police acceptance and the perpetrator of documented trans and bisexual erasure. We are fighting a battle within our own movement to reclaim our heritage and our purpose. We forget that trans women of colour started our journey to liberation because of police aggression and centre our celebrations around cis gay men.

All is not lost however. Various Pride’s around the world now incorporate political blocs. I was part of one that was removed from Pride by the police in the summer of 2017. Those who are fed up of Pride being taken from us, have splintered and created their own after parade parties, much of them political in nature and centring around queer and trans people especially those of BAME origin.

In the world outside of Pride and our little queer families we tend to make for ourselves, the struggle for LGBTQIA+ rights continues. Transphobia and homophobia are rife in schools, workplaces and the media. There’s a moral panic about trans children in the UK media which is damaging communities already on the edge of society. We’ve already had one trans woman murdered in 2018. How many more are we going to lose?

Then there’s the intersex babies that no one talks about. The babies who’s sex and gender are decided for them at birth and surgery undertaken to change their ambiguous genitals so they match the sex the parents have decided for them. There are many documented of cases of ongoing psychological damage in intersex adults.

So with all of that to contend with, I was surprised to see an event in London calling itself, “Vegan Pride.” It takes after various events around the world, including one in Toronto which after it’s first year had to rename itself due to uproar from the LGBTQIA+ community.

So why “Vegan Pride?” Why not any other number of names it could have been that doesn’t have any LGBTQIA+ association? London Vegan Parade? March for Veganism? Vegans United Parade? Nope. They HAD to appropriate queer culture and use it for themselves.

Some people have mistaken it as a parade for LGBTQIA+ vegans, but it’s anything but. If you go onto the Facebook event you’ll see a big group of privileged cis white vegans claiming they are oppressed for an ethical choice they have chosen to make, “all lives matter” rhetoric and certain people who have known Nazi affiliations. I even saw a cis friend of mine silence queer people’s objections to them stealing our culture. I was shocked and suddenly felt really unsafe. I’ve yet to confront him about it. Maybe he’ll see this and realise what he’s done. 😦 The event organisers are banning any LGBTQIA+ people who comment objecting, thus silencing our objection.

The whole event is really off putting for vegans and non-vegans alike. It waters down everyone’s message. The message for queer liberation, the ongoing struggles of queer POC and it screams of human centricity. What about the animals?

The worst part? It clashes with one of the biggest and most prolific Pride events in theUK: Brighton Pride.

Please remember that vegans are not oppressed. Oppression needs a power structure to uphold it. Your uncle making bacon jokes or you not being able to get a decent sandwich for lunch is not oppression. It’s just difficulties from a life choice that you have made, a choice which so many other people do not have, putting you in a position of privilege not misfortune. Queer and trans people did not choose and cannot unchoose who they are, like you can with your veganism.

In closing I would like to ask you to boycott this event and tell people why you are doing it, especially if you are an ally. We need you more now than ever.

A Letter To My Friends & Family

November 26, 2017 / Frankie Mouche / 5 Comments

In June 2012, I came out to my friends and family as genderqueer. I asked everyone to use gender neutral pronouns and never refer to me as female/she/her again. I explained that this means I am not male or female and never have been.

In October 2012 I dressed up as a zombie police officer for Halloween. I gave the character a beard. In fact the beard was so affirming that I wore it the whole of the next day and really didn’t want to wash it off. I remember telling my best friend at the time that I thought I might need to transition. She was supportive, but I was too scared and buried it deep inside me like I had done my whole life.

Over time I watched my trans friends transition and I was secretly jealous of their ability to be who they were. I kept telling myself that I didn’t need to transition. That who I was, was perfectly valid. The dysphoria was eating me alive nonetheless.

Around 2014 I redefined my gender identity as nonbinary. It means basically the same thing as genderqueer and sits as an umbrella term for people for don’t conform to binary gender norms. I liked it better. Enby is also an epic colloquial term. I also decided that this identity was a transgender identity. I now told people I was trans as part of my nonbinary identity.

Frankie came to be in April 2016. I needed to move away from my overly feminine name given to me when I was born. This was tough at work and initially with my friends. My family, never really having got the hang of my gender neutral pronouns, have still not got the hang of my new name as of November 2017.

From April 2016 to April 2017 I was happy just to be Frankie. My gender identity was still nonbinary, but instead of presenting in a fluid way where I would drift between feminine and masculine, I presented as entirely masculine.

At the end of April 2017 I was drunk in Cardiff. I was sat on my own outside of Brewdog enjoying the spring sunshine and everything I had been suppressing about my gender identity came to the surface. I needed to transition. I needed to masculinise physically. I text my mum and then told Facebook.

How I identify now is Transmasculine Nonbinary and I will be beginning my physical transition in April/May 2018. Here are some things you need to know:

The NHS has made this process very difficult. They have been messing around sending me to mental health units and demeaning my experience for the past seven months, when I should have been referred to the gender clinic and been on their two year waiting list by now. I am still pursuing this route because there is no way I can afford my whole transition privately. However, I was able to afford two private consultations which will allow me to begin transitioning in Spring next year.
My transition will start with regular injections of testosterone. This will push my body into what is essentially “male” puberty. My shoulders will broaden. My muscle and fat distribution will change. My voice will deepen and hopefully I’ll get a decent amount of body hair, especially on my face. (There are other changes too but you don’t really need to know about them. :P) I will appear to society as a “man”, but I will still have boobs. They will be flattened by a binder, when I find one that doesn’t cause me sensory issues.
Somewhere down the line I will have what is know as top surgery. I will have my boobs surgically removed and replaced with pecs. My boobs are a massive source of dysphoria. If I could have them taken off first, I would. People use my boobs to gender me and I hate it.
I will not be having bottom surgery. My cunt does not cause me any dysphoria at all.
This does not mean I am a man. I will never be a man. I am nonbinary. I do not fit in any binary boxes of gender nonsense. I will continue to use gender neutral pronouns.

I need you all to know that I have gone through a lot of emotional pain to get to this point. I NEED you to respect my pronouns and my name. Making mistakes was fine to start with, but it’s been a year and a half and mistakes are starting to look more and more like they are deliberate. If you continue to dead name and misgender me, I will have to remove you from my life.

This has been your final warning.

Frankie

Trans Liberation Now

October 23, 2017 / Frankie Mouche / 1 Comment

In June 1969 the movement for LGBTQIA+ equality and liberation began. A series of riots took place centering around the Stonewall Inn in New York. These riots were instigated by transgender women of colour and the next year, the first Pride Parade was held.

Let me just say that again for the people who may have missed it:

The LGBTQIA+ rights movement was started by TRANS WOMEN OF COLOUR.

Why then for almost two generations did we refer to Pride colloquially as, “Gay Pride” and the LGBTQIA+ rights movement as the “Gay Rights Movement?”

The western world revolves around cisgender white males. It has done so for thousands of years. White cis men invented the patriarchy and white supremacy to keep the rest of us in our place and subservient to them. Don’t think we as queer or trans people are exempt from that, because we aren’t.

Every movie or documentary ever made about the Stonewall riots has been filled with cis white gay men. The most recent, “Stonewall” movie had a white gay guy throw the first brick that started the riots. Martha P Johnson will be rolling in her grave.

Even the famous UK charity Stonewall spent years fighting for the rights of lesbians, gays and bisexuals without giving a single thought about the trans women who started the whole damned thing.

The Stonewall charity are now fighting for trans rights too, but like many gay centered pages such as Pink News, they are allowing rampant transphobia to go unchecked in their comments sections.

It makes you wonder why 48 years ago trans people even bothered. Our rights have come along at a snail’s pace whilst the “gay charities” gain popular opinion, legal recognition and specifically in the UK almost entirely full equality with heterosexuals.

Are we content to be shut off like this? Well we have been I suppose. Waiting for our gay comrades to turn around and help us, the way we have helped them.

Now is our time. Lets fight for our rights and for inclusivity for the most vulnerable in our community. Lets call out the LGB bigots who make jokes about gender neutrality and dismantle the online spaces rife with transmisogyny. Lets support and help raise up our trans siblings of colour.

Fuck racism. Fuck cissexism. Fuck transmisogyny. Fuck transphobia. Fuck the LGB community out for themselves without a second thought for the TQIA.

Let’s make 2018 our year!

I can’t believe I’m writing this in 2017.

January 3, 2017January 3, 2017 / Frankie Mouche / 2 Comments

As you may have noticed, I’ve been moving away from recipes and more towards all the fucked up shit that is going on in the world. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to throw one in every now and again, but what it means is that with social media being the way it is for exposure, things have to get shared a lot or you have to pay for that exposure. Sadly my format of recipe writing just doesn’t cut it in 2017. Look at Bosh for example. They show you a whole recipe video in about 1 minute and it’s beautiful. I can’t compete with that.

https://www.facebook.com/boshtv/?fref=nf

14369914_1080041862074313_6389072929243514880_n1

Anyway what I really wanted this blog post to be about was social injustice. The more I educate myself, the more I feel like we’re drowning in some sort of discriminatory hell that half of us won’t even admit exists and the other half actively promote.

I think what has really got on my nerves this last week in the idea that reverse racism exists. I’m a white, working class queer and I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my whole life.

Let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt and explain this from the bottom up so that there is no excuse

White people for the most part, own and run the Western hemisphere of this planet and have done much of the last 500 years. Not to mention European colonialism (the expansion of empire) and the slave trade.Straight, white men in particular have created a system that protects them and their wealth. Racism is endemic in every Western nation. maxresdefault

What do I mean by racism? I mean having all of your life choices and opportunities hindered by the fact you are not white. It may not be as blatant as it once was with the abolition of slavery and segregation, but it’s still there. It’s the black guys getting shot by the police. It’s the transgender people of colour who aren’t even important enough to have their names printed in the paper when they are brutally murdered. It’s the native populations who have to protest their right not to have oil pipelines pollute their water supplies.The list is never ending.

download-1

This is why it surprises me when white people say they have been a victim of racism. The above is racism. Getting called names because you are white or not getting a job because the manager wants people of their own race to work there, is racial discrimination, but it is not reverse racism. That’s not possible. Am I making sense? Racism can ONLY be something people of colour experience because it is a system of oppression built by white people to keep them in their place: in servitude of white people.

race_relations1

I tried to explain this to a couple of my white friends lately and they lost their shit. We’ve been friends for years and yet their inability to accept that reverse racism isn’t a thing ended our friendships. I could not believe the white privilege I was seeing in them. It was making me fucking sick. I cried all night to think that I’d associated myself with people like that for so long and not once had they mentioned that they believed it to be a thing. reverse-racism

Is it racist to believe reverse racism is a thing? I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that it down plays the true racism that people of colour face every single day and that just ins’t acceptable in my book.

(I hope I’ve done this subject justice and I apologise if I’ve missed anything out or written an incorrect term. Please inform me and I’ll correct the blog.)

Deconstructed Sushi Salad

July 20, 2015 / Frankie Mouche / 1 Comment

We’ve been living in South Wales for a year now. The culinary options in the valleys aren’t exactly amazing. It’s one of the only things I miss about London really. I used to have sushi on a regular basis because I’ve always been rubbish at making it. What’s not to love about sushi? Crisp nori, salty rice and a crunch in the middle topped off with some soy sauce, ginger or wasabi. I came up with this dish to satisfy my sushi craving.

Ingredients:

Half a pomegranate (Seeds only)

1 Avocado

A large handful of kale

2 servings of sushi rice or normal white rice

A dash of mirin

A dash of soy sauce

A sheet of shredded nori

Black pepper

Method:

Cook the rice as per packet instructions. Drain and season with pepper, mirin and soy sauce.
Stir fry the kale in a hot pan for about a minute and then mix in with warm rice.
Plate up rice and kale mixture, then top with chopped avocado, nori and pomegranate.
Eat warm straight away or cold later on.
Eat with chop sticks if possible. 😉

Not only is this dish really delicious, it’s full of folate, good fats, vitamin C, iron, iodine and protein. It’s perfect for your post-workout recovery meal, especially with a hydrating green tea.

Enjoy. X

My Gender Queer Life

March 26, 2015 / Frankie Mouche / 6 Comments

I grew up in a house with two opposite sex parents. I like to state this because it is not by any means a given in life. My mother was and still is obsessed with femininity and my father has always been traditionally masculine. A pretty traditional upbringing in all senses of the word.

I was closer to my dad as a child. I don’t really know why. By the time I was 3 I could name every car on the road because he loved cars. He often took me to work with him at a car showroom and to various motor sport events which I loved.

My mum put me in dresses for a long time, but as soon as I could choose, I was in trousers and a t-shirt. They made me feel more comfortable. Not to say I didn’t enjoy spending time with my mum, because I did.

The first memory I have of knowing I was different was when I was 6 years old. My mum and my sister had taken me and my niece and nephew to an outdoor public paddling pool. It was a hot day and all the kids were running in and out of the water. My nephew threw his shirt off and ran into the pool with just shorts on. I took my shirt off and ran in after him. I was shouted at and told that girls must wear tops at all times. I protested, but I was really embarrassed. I had broken a social norm and all I ever wanted to do was please my family. It effected me so profoundly that I didn’t even consider what I felt like inside for almost 20 years.

Around the age of 14 I came out to my family as a lesbian. I had a girlfriend and it was becoming increasingly difficult to hide it. It was a relief but I suffered for it at school and in my personal life. To be honest this is quite irrelevant to my GQ story, other than a particular point I want to make:

Sexuality and gender and two different things.

Sexuality is who you are attracted to.
Gender is how you identify.

Like with the binary gender norms (male and female), sexuality is also enforced in a trinary (probably not a word.) Straight, gay or bisexual with the assumption you are straight unless you say otherwise.

As an adult I have come to realise both are on a spectrum, identifying as pansexual and GQ. (Being pansexual means you are attracted to the whole spectrum and reject the gender binary.)

Around about the age of 27 my partner of 3 years left me. We had a mortgage together, 3 cats and we had built a stable life. She left without warning and little explanation. My boss at the time was an unsympathetic homophobe who basically told me to get over it. I sat and cried at my desk everyday until HR eventually signed me off sick for a week. I drank a lot and had time to think about what she had potentially been suppressing in me. I started to explore my feelings about gender on Tumblr and Reddit. I started to connect with people who felt the same way about themselves as me. We didn’t fit in the gender binary. We didn’t identify as male or female. We were gender queer.

Now here is where it gets complicated so pay attention. There is a trans* umbrella. It encompasses lots of different identities such as gender fluid, bigender and agender as well as gender queer. I personally am fluid in my gender. Sometimes I feel more masculine or more feminine. However most of the time I’m entirely androgynous. I identify as gender queer because I don’t fit. I’m queer of the norm. If I want to actually pass as a cis male, then I will dress as one and do exactly that. I find it harder to pass as cis female for fucks sake and I have a damn vagina!

A lot of my gender queer friends have gone on to transition to become who they really are. For example having a female body and transitioning to that of a male. They are now transgendered people. Me on the other hand, I am already who I am and that is queer as bloody folk. 😉

So what is my life like on a daily basis? I get up and I think about how I’m feeling. Shall I wear tight jeans or shall I wear a baggy hoodie? Shall I leave the hairs on my lip or shall I pluck them? Suitably dressed for how I’m feeling I’ll go to the gym. Unfortunately at my local gym they do not have gender neutral changing rooms so I have to make a decision based on how I am presenting to the world. Sometimes this is made for me and I am ushered into the male changing rooms because even being androgynous means you are definitely male in the binary world. After the gym I’ll go to the supermarket to grab some shopping. I’ll need a wee because I’ll have drunk a lot post workout. Again there are no gender neutral facilities. I look at the door and the symbols don’t match who I am or how I feel. I have to yet again make a decision I’m not comfortable with. If I go into the female toilets I am often whispered about and sometimes even blatantly shouted out. If I go in the male toilets I could get beaten up. Ah I’m at home now. I’ll check Facebook and see what’s going on in the world. I’ll get misgendered as ‘she’ by strangers and even people I know when my profile clearly states my preferred pronouns are they and them. You know I’m really tired already and I haven’t even been to work yet. She this and she that all fucking night long. ARGH!!!!!!!

As you can see it’s difficult being a non-binary person in a binary world. Every action can be a stressful situation just waiting to open up and swallow you. Only around people who truly accept me can I be comfortable and sometimes even they make mistakes. It’s so hard to be unconditioned when your whole life you are told that the binary is the only thing there is.

Being gender queer certainly isn’t any form of attention seeking as I have been accused of in the past. It’s just me trying to express how I really feel inside on the outside.

I hope this little ramble has made things clearer for you. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them below.

Some things I have wanted to say for a while……

December 19, 2013December 19, 2013 / Frankie Mouche / 1 Comment

1) What made you decide to go vegan?

My first steps into exclusively plant based living was in 2003 when I was 17. I saw it as something I could do to be more extreme than my peers. At the time I was just getting into really extreme metal, oh and I still ate bee’s puke aka honey. I wasn’t vegan.

We didn’t have loads of vegan products at the time either. We had tofu and vegetables. I got bored really quickly because I couldn’t cook and just went back to being a fussy omnivore aka a vegetarian . (I’d been a vegetarian since I was 14, having seen something similar to the Meet Your Meat video in a food technology class. I wish someone had told me I could do more then, I might have listened.)

It was a few years later when I was 20 that I started to read disturbing things about the way that we use animals in society online. Before I’d just been concerned with whether an animal’s life was taken from them. Soon and after not much reading, I realised that we could not justify the use of any animal for human pleasure. That’s what eating animal products is after all, palate pleasure. I watched some videos and I read some recipes. I went vegan and have been that way ever since.

2) How do you live without cheese?

How do you live with it? It’s a great big lump of fat, blood and pus. It’s also not addictive, so stop using that excuse.

There are vegan cheeses available with some that are better than others. You However and to be honest, I very rarely buy them. When you become vegan the way you cook changes, especially if you are not eating a ton of replica meat products, which are processed to hell and everyone should keep to a minimum.

You also eat different foods. Here’s my pre-vegan diet:

Breakfast: Toast and cereal with cow’s milk and cow’s butter.

Snack: Snickers bar

Lunch: Processed meat with processed potato with spaghetti hoops.

Snack: A clementine

Snack: Ham sandwhich with cheese

Dinner: Bird’s Eye chicken lattice with new potatoes and spaghetti hoops

Supper: Sardines on toast

What I eat now:

Breakfast: Porridge with a nut and seed mix and soya milk

Snack: Banana smoothie

Snack: Apple, orange

Lunch: Three bean soup

Snack: Banana

Dinner: Kale with Eygyptian spiced leek, potato and beetroot topped with two soysages

Snack: Peanut butter on a rice cake

….and it’s different every day. I can’t stand eating the same stuff now. I remember my pre-vegan diet because it was the same, always. Everything was centred around something from an animal and now there is no centre piece. If anything the centrepiece is the flavour.

3) What does GQ actually mean?

GQ stands for Gender Queer. Wikipedia describes it quite well:

Genderqueer (GQ; alternatively non-binary) is a catch-all category for gender identities other than man and woman, thus outside of the gender binary and cisnormativity.^[1] Genderqueer people may identify as one or more of the following:

having an overlap of, or blurred lines between, gender identity and sexual and romantic orientation.^[2][3]
two or more genders (bigender, trigender, pangender);
without a gender (nongendered, genderless, agender; neutrois);
moving between genders or with a fluctuating gender identity (genderfluid);^[4]
third gender or other-gendered; includes those who do not place a name to their gender;^[5]

Some genderqueer people^[6][7] also desire physical modification or hormones to suit their preferred expression. Many genderqueer people see gender and sex as separable aspects of a person and sometimes identify as a male woman, a female man, or a male/female/intersexgenderqueer person.^[8] Gender identity is defined as one’s internal sense of being a woman, man, both, or neither, while sexual identity refers to an individual’s enduring physical, romantic, and/or emotional attraction to others.^[7] As such, genderqueer people may have a variety of sexual orientations, as with transgender and cisgender people.^[9]

In addition to being an umbrella term, genderqueer has been used as an adjective to refer to any people who transgress distinctions of gender, regardless of their self-defined gender identity, i.e. those who “queer” gender, expressing it non-normatively.^[10] Androgynous is frequently used as a descriptive term for people in this category, though genderqueer people may express a combination of masculinity and femininity, or neither, in their gender expression and not all identify as androgynous. However, the term has been applied by those describing what they see as a gender ambiguity.^[11]

Personally I really dislike being called he or she. I’m just Emz.

4) How do you fit it all in? (Training etc.)

I think if you want something bad enough, you’ll make time. It’s hectic, but it gets the job done.

5) What does Child Free really mean?

To me it means that I am choosing, purposely not to have biological children. People choose this for various reasons, but for me the main one is over population.

When my mum was born, there were less than 2.5 billion people on the entire planet. By the time I was born in 1985 (37 years later) there were 4.8 billion people on the entire planet. In forty years we more than doubled the Earth’s population. As we come into 2014, we are looking at a human population of 7.1 billion. Many scientists believe that the tipping point for resources, land, water, food etc is 9/10 billion. After that we will begin a downwards spiral of mass starvation, fresh water wars and possible extinction. Up until that point it is believed that if we reduce our population expansion, we may actually have a future. This issue is more important for our long term future on this planet than climate change.

My opinion as to why people aren’t talking about it and don’t want to change is simple:

a) People are inherently selfish and do whatever satisfys them regardless of the consequences for others.

b) Governments and religion actively encourage people to breed so that they have a larger work force, army, following and are therefore more powerful.

c) There isn’t any money to be made from a child free person.

6) Do you hate children?

No. I just think, on top of what I have said above, that we should look after the ones we have properly before we even remotely consider bringing more into the world.

7) What is your favourite animal organisation?

I don’t support animal organisations. They do not promote veganism as the end goal to ending all animal exploitation and many of them are in business partnerships with animal agribusiness. For example Peta and KFC.

8) Where do you get your protein?

Everything has protein in it, even lettuce and potatoes. I eat food so question answered.

9) How much time should we devote to reaching out to other progressive groups about veganism and what are effective ways to do that?

I think we firstly need to concentrate on getting a mass turnaround from single issue and welfarist campaigns by animal rights activists. All major change happens at the grass roots of movements. However on the otherhand, if we had more groups such as Viva, Peta and Animal Aid promoting a purely abol;itionist agenda, I think more people might start to see the light without the constant backlash upon entering discussions with them now.

This is a difficult question to answer because I’m not sure there is a right or wrong answer.

10) Do you believe in conspiracy theories?

I believe sometimes that there is more to a story than the official version tells the public. I take each individual incident as it comes. I wouldn’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist, no.

11) Why aren’t you pro-life?

By pro-life, this question means human life.

I believe that every human being should have free choice to do what they want with their lives and their bodies as long as it doesn’t hurt others. Having loads of children hurts others. Using animals as resources hurts others. (As detailed above) However removing a ball of cells from a woman’s womb does not hurt anyone. Even later abortions where the ball of cells looks like a miniature human, it has been proven time and time again, by medical science, that there is no consciousness and there is no pain, pretty much like a plant. If the ball of cells cannot survive outside of the womb, then an individual woman has every right to remove it from her body. If the ball of cells can survive outside of the womb, without massive 21^st century medical intervention, then you probably left it a bit late and I don’t agree with that.

In my opinion you shouldn’t be pregnant in the first place for reasons stated above, however if I found myself pregnant I would get an abortion without a second thought or hesitation. Mykey agrees with me wholly.

12) How do you feel about direct action?

Direct action is a single issue campaign and therefore does not coincide with abolitionist vegan methodology. (You can read more about this in my animal rights section.)

Let’s take the action of the Hunt Sabs in the recent, “Sab the Cull” campaign. I am yet to hear how that has actively created a vegan world or even a substantial move towards it. Why? Because it hasn’t! By focusing on a single issue, it has made others feel better about different types of animal use i.e that the type of animal use they are participating in is not as bad because you aren’t protesting against it. (Again this is detailed greatly in my AR section, read it.)

If an animal was in trouble for whatever reason and we were able to help her, then we would. However I wouldn’t spend my valuable time and money running around a field before light, because that is not an efficient way to create more vegans. Me talking to, cooking for, handing out leaflets to and promoting veganism to people does.

I know the mainstream animal rights movement sees the Hunt Sabs and ALF as some sort of gods, but we have to be realistic. This type of activism has been around for 40+ years in the UK and is it working? Have we seen an end to the use of animals in medical experiments or a complete ban on hunting? Have we seen a sizeable change towards veganism? No! Stop wasting your time, effort and money on things that aren’t creating a vegan world and start creating it. You owe the animals that as an absolute bare minimum!

Queer Vegan

Food, fitness and culture from a queer, vegan, metal head.

Queer