You Don't Live Like I Do

This weekend was Trans Pride Manchester. I'd been looking forward to this for a while - it's a very different occasion from the big corporate Manchester Pride, and there's something very cool about thousands of trans and nonbinary people (plus supporters like me) marching around Manchester. It's a low-budget affair, lots of home-made banners and placards. This year cosmolinguist and I were marching with Not A Phase, who organise the trans gym sessions. The idea of marching as a bloc fell apart pretty much before we left the rally area, but there were still a bunch of relevant T-shirts scattered throughout the parade. P was there with roller derby people, and I gave her a little flag I'd made at Queer Club for her to wave.

Before the march started, there were some good speeches, including from both the outgoing and new directors of Trans Pride Manchester. There's been a changing of the guard at the top, which is a good thing - the old crew did their best but were swamped by the commitment and weren't great at either seeking or accepting more volunteer help. I'm hoping that under new leadership the event will go from strength to strength (and they'll put the events on the website rather than locked behind an Instagram login, and I'll actually get chased up when I volunteer to steward the march!)

Much like last year, fascists happened to pick the same weekend to have their own little shindig in the city centre. On an organising group, somebody from the Socialist Worker's Party was claiming that Trans Pride Manchester should cancel itself and everyone should go join the SWP (Stand Up To Racism being an SWP front) protest against the fascists. And if we didn't, and went to Trans Pride instead, then we were enabling fascism which made us fascists ourselves. This is the kind of bonkers nonsense the SWP usually come out with, but I intended to go from the end of the Trans Pride march to a non-SWP counter-demo anyway. So the message on my placard was "No TERF, No fash, No SWP, Trans Rights" in coloured bubble lettering. Lots of people commented positively on my placard, particularly the "No SWP" bit. They're not actually popular among the communities they claim to represent; just well funded and obsessive.

The march itself was good fun. Positive vibes all around, friendly faces from trans gym, Queer Club, UTAW and other places. The vibes were excellent. My favourite chant was "We're here, we're mad, we're gonna trans your Dad." I'd planned to meet up with a couple of the young queerlings I know from the Internet but neither of them managed to make it and were terribly apologetic. At the end of the march we sat and chatted with friends in Vimto Park, before heading up to Piccadilly Gardens. By the time we got there, we couldn't see any fascists or counter-protesters. So instead we went for a drink with a friend at Mala in the Northern Quarter. Turns out that the fash had marched off to St Peter's Square which is why we missed them. The drink, food and associated chatter was lovely, but I was soon flagging and we had evening plans, so we headed back towards the bus stop.

On the way back through Piccadilly Gardens about half a dozen fash had returned and several of them approached me on seeing my sign, asking to interview me for their shitty fascist YouTube channels. I'm pretty good at being boring, and I didn't rise to their bait or give them any "content". Some other people had come over to make sure I was OK and they said they appreciated the way I handled the fascists. Sadly the buses were screwed up and it took us a long time to get home, and we were both too tired to go out to the trans show at Contact we'd planned. Still, it was a good day!

The next day, I saw pictures of the fascist march. A smaller group, all waving the same flags, looking miserable and practically outnumbered by their police escort. Of course they got all the press coverage again. But we had the better day, the better cause, and the better lives.

For a while now various friends have been talking about UTAW, the United Tech and Allied Workers Union. Technically it's a branch of the CWU, with a focus on the tech industry, and attempting to organise online rather than through geographical branches.

I've never been a member of a union, and slightly sceptical of them. We had a bad time when mother_bones needed employment support from her Unison branch but they were too busy running a high-profile campaign. And I saw the way some unions backed Labour over the National Identity Database when I was campaigning against it. I did look into UTAW but their campaigns seem worthy but not particularly relevant to the issues facing the UK tech industry. There's nothing there about AI/LLMs, nothing about return-to-office mandates and the associated risks of Covid and Long Covid.

But the people I know who are members are adamant that I would be pushing at an open door if I raised these issues on the UTAW members-only Discord, so today I signed up. We'll see how it goes and whether this is a useful activism outlet for me.

After my holiday to Fuerteventura with cosmolinguist, I've been feeling a bit more energised about some activist projects so I thought I'd talk about them here.

A long time ago I had the idea to build some Corsi-Rosenthal air filter boxes, which I could loan out to LGBT+ groups for their meetings to make them less risky and more accessible. I did a lot of prep work for this, including coming up with a brand name ("Breathe Out"), some talking points (us queers should be used to the Government ignoring epidemics) and so on. But as I started reaching out to groups I found that nobody was interested and got disheartened.

This weekend I went to the Onion Social Centre, a squat in a former Sure Start centre in Longsight. A couple of friends of mine are helping out there and they'd asked me and cosmolinguist for advice on Covid risk reduction. I ended up writing a reasonably long case study / briefing for them, suggesting that the best starting point is providing free masks (possibly courtesy of the local Mask Bloc) and education. Ideally they'd have C-R boxes in each room but that's a big ask as they have a lot of rooms. Natural ventilation is a bit of a non-starter - they're already struggling to keep the place warm in January, and to make sure the ventilation is effective you need moderately expensive CO2 monitors and the time to take readings.

Anyway, when I got home I took the plunge and bought a bunch of parts to make two 100W 20-inch C-R boxes. They work out at about £60 each. They should be able to filter pretty big rooms, so I'm thinking of providing one for the "main room" at the squat, and maybe another for the reception. In future I can look at smaller boxes (maybe using 8" or 12" fans instead of 20") which might be cheaper, for the smaller rooms. And hopefully I'll get them back if / when the squat folds, which means I'll have them on hand to provide to other spaces.

It's not exactly world changing, but it seems that making small corners safer for my fellow queers might be something I can actually contribute, and I'm pretty excited about that.

Last Saturday, I went to Trans Pride Manchester for the second time. With the far right protesting in the city centre, I wanted to be there to help protect my trans friends, if only by being tall and huge at potential troublemakers. So I got on the bus with cosmolinguist who was heading to the gym. A few stops later, some student-age young queers got on with their mobility aids and trans flags and we made eye contact and nodded. There were also half a dozen middle-aged ladies speaking some Southern European language too fast for me to identify it; their leader asked me in halting English if I knew how to get to Oxford Road station and I promised I'd tell them when to get off the bus.

The bus was just about level with the Manchester Aquatics Centre when the driver got a phone call and stopped the bus to take it. After a long conversation, he announced to us passengers that bus routes through the city centre had been suspended due to the presence of the fash, and we'd have to get off and walk into town. We were about a mile short of my intended stop, and between the delays and extra walking there was no way that E would make the gym, so he decided to come along with me.

The middle-aged ladies and the baby queers didn't know how to get where they were going from where they were; we were going to the same place as the latter and it took us past the former's destination, so I ended up leading an odd convoy! It turns out that the ladies were from Spain and were escaping the heatwave in Barcelona by coming to Britain; they were headed to Liverpool for the day. They asked me why the bus had stopped, and I simply replied "fascists". It's a usefully international word in that regard. When they got to the station their leader kissed me on both cheeks, wished me "Adios" and "Gracias", and they filed off up the station approach.

We escorted the baby queers to Castlefield for the start of the march. We avoided St Peter's Square where there was some kind of noisy demo, and instead took part of the march route, backwards. It was their first Pride-type event and they were excited. They found their friends, we sat on the grass in the shade and relaxed among hundreds of trans people and allies, recognising a few faces and saying our hellos here and there. We listened to speeches and poetry, fierce and angry and proud. Just as the march was starting off, we met up with some friends as planned, and the four of us walked together. The march was great - no trouble, lots of chants, good signs, seemingly lots of support from passers by and even the motorists we were holding up. The route kept us away from the city centre so there was little chance of running into the far-right. However at one point the stewards forgot the changed route and started marching towards Piccadilly Gardens, before doubling back on themselves and heading down into the Village. This was great because it meant that people on the march got to see other people on the march. And also because it happened right by a Yates pub, where a bunch of fash who couldn't get served in Piccadilly Wetherspoons had ended up, so they got to see even more of the happy, weird queers marching past them, chanting and waving banners.

We ended up walking through the Village and into Vimto Park on the old UMIST campus on Sackville Street. Originally we'd planned to picnic there but it was clearly too crowded. We ended up in the beer garden at Yes on Charles Street, a good enough place for food and drinks. We spent a few hours eating, drinking and talking nonsense with our friends, before getting the bus home, back on its normal route. On the way back to the bus we ran into one of the baby queers who'd been to the LGBT Foundation to have their deed poll witnessed by a lawyer, and they were clearly stoked by the experience.

All in all it was a very positive day - we actually outnumbered the racists in the city centre, not that we got any press coverage. There was no trouble that I saw or heard about. People were supportive. We made new queer friends and helped some foreign ladies. The only shame is that E didn't make the gym and had to walk too much on his dodgy ankle.