I use the past tense, because he lost. By 32 votes.

I initially felt a lot of guilt, as because of prior commitments, I couldn't really help with the doorknocking and the letterboxing. And I had tried to get the student union to do something about student voting. I was aware it'd give Labour a nudge, but given the problems I've had over the past couple of years, and as an active voter? Really, we need to be there doing something.

I felt a sense of absolution, though, after finding out about the actions of Mark Sewards. He's pretty much the token party hack, given closeness to the two local shadow cabinet MPs (Balls and Cooper) and former chairmanship of Leeds Labour Students. And a friend to few politically active people on campus, given the left hate him for wanting to shut down a student-run space and the Lib Dems and Tories hate him because, hey, he's Labour.

But enough about him, and more about what he did, which was frankly disgusting: he effectively used his position as outgoing Communications and Internal Affairs officer to tell people in Halls of Residences to vote for the Labour candidate. Structured so he didn't run afoul of the law, but still extremely dodgy. Then disavowed everything he said in his leaflet the next day. At the same time as using the Union to push Labour policy because it's Labour policy.

When questioned about it, he did what any politician would do, and frame any complaints as his opponents trying to score "cheap political points". But it doesn't change the fact he abused his power, and it doesn't change the fact he cost a good man his job.

One thing that really annoys me about Wikipedia is that it's really progressive about LGBT issues (thanks to the very well-organised LGBT WikiProject), except where it really matters. And where it really matters is in the case of Breanna Manning, although you probably know her better as "Bradley". Yes, I'm talking about the Wikileaks whistleblower. Her gender incongruence has been known to her counsellor and CO for at least two years, and confirmed by her defence lawyers six months ago, so why do Wikipedia still refer to her as a man?

Wikipedia's Manual of Style on identity states:

Disputes over how to refer to a person or group are addressed by policies such as Verifiability, Neutral point of view, and Article titles where the term appears in the title of an article. When there is no dispute, the term most commonly used for a person will be the one that person uses for himself or herself, and the most common terms for a group will be those that the group most commonly uses for itself. Wikipedia should use them too.

Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the gendered nouns, pronouns, and possessive adjectives that reflect that person's latest expressed gender self-identification. This applies in references to any phase of that person's life. Nevertheless, avoid confusing or seemingly logically impossible text that could result from pronoun usage (for example: instead of He gave birth to his first child, write He became a parent for the first time).

This has been generally been construed to mean "refer to people as they prefer to be referred to". So the woman born Stefani Germanotta is referred to as Lady Gaga (or simply "Gaga"), and the man born as Chastity Bono is referred to (since his transition) as Chaz. And there is no dispute that Breanna wants to be referred to as female:

i wouldn't mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn't for the possibility of having pictures of me … plastered all over the world press … as [a] boy … the CPU is not made for this motherboard …

But, time and time again, she has been misgendered as a man? Why? Because the sources say so. Source fetishism is a problem on Wikipedia, where people just blindly believe the sources without examining the context; there was a short-lived article on "female privilege" solely because someone had found the term in a few academic papers. The "common name" policy is often misused in such a way, and I have been long an opponent of its application. The talk page archive shows the latent transphobia there, that Breanna's own identification is less important than what the news says. And even worse, she's not even in the categories for  Category:Transgender and transsexual people. As the user 7daysahead says, "it is… on the verge of abusive to leave the article as it is; even if we admit uncertainty it's not worth the risk to not change things."

And really, gender pronouns are not some magical indelible unchangeable part of oneself. They're part of an identity. For example, I was born "William", but I prefer to be known as "Will". My  And so should gendered pronouns: if someone's gender identity is female, and prefers to pronoun "she", even if she presents as male, even if she wishes to remain biologically male, then people should respect that person's wishes and refer to her as such. It's not rocket science. Gender isn't inherent or clear cut. Hell, sex isn't even clear cut. But society doesn't want to recognise that yet, and insists on gender policing, when it's not moral or even necessary.

Let me tell y'all what it's like 
Being male, middle class and white 
It's a bitch, if you don't believe,
Listen up to my new cd, shamone

–Ben Folds, "Rockin' the Suburbs"

First off, I apologise to Mr. Folds for using his song about nu metal bands in a blog post about racism.

A common meme in the political systems is that "racism is over", because Barack Obama was elected in 2012. It's pretty patently bullshit, though, because Obama is subject to a lot of racist shit that Bush, Clinton, Reagan, et cetera, did not receive as President, and it's all sugar-coated in the guise of "I'm just asking questions" or "I'm just a concerned citizen". Take a look at the birth certificate conspiracy theories, for example. Where are the people demanding Romney's birth certificate? When you consider that the only other President to have received such questions was Chester A. Arthur, who was a) born close to the border and b) was Irish by descent (and therefore, presumably, Catholic, a political suicide in the 1800s), it's seen in a different light. It runs through American conservatism, where the patriarchy of straight cis white Christian men must be upheld: look at their erasure of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement as racial conflicts, which they claim was about "state's rights", when it was about keeping the black population as second class citizens.

I had an interesting discussion with several friends about the Trayvon Martin case several days after George Zimmerman was charged with second degree murder; I commented that, were Zimmerman black, they'd already be preparing the execution chamber. In apartheid-era South Africa and Nazi Germany, they had a legal system which elevated minorities to be honorary members of the ruling caste. I iterated the point that Zimmerman, like Herman Cain before him, had been given this honorary status by the American right; especially Zimmerman, despite the fact that he was a Hispanic, that's not as bad as being Black in their estimation, in the same sense of the terrace chant, "I'd rather be a Paki than a Jew".

The American justice system does disfavour ethnic minorities, the working class, and women; 39% of the prison population in America is black, for example. Whether it's a result of being poorer than average (which does increase the likelihood of crime, if purely out of desperation), or a result of being black, or both, is a matter of debate, but it is there.

Nothing could make that more obvious than the case of CeCe McDonald, a black trans woman who was charged with second degree murder for killing her attacker in self-defence. An attacker who called her a "faggot" and a "nigger", who glassed her, who had a giant fucking swastika tattooed on his chest. She took a pair of scissors out of her purse to defend herself, and her defence resulted in the death of her attacker. For that, for being a black trans woman, she was threatened with 40 years in jail. As a person, a human being, to whom transgender equality and respect matters very much, it makes me sick to read about the details of the case.

The criminal justice system wasn't kind to her either. Let's not forget that Minnesota, where she lived, is a concealed carry state. But when it came to her trial, all the evidence that made it clear it was self-defence was excluded. Gone was the fact that her attacker was a neo-Nazi. Gone was her attackers' theft convictions. Gone were the witnesses who would testify on transphobic violence. Gone were the potential LGBT jurors. And in came her conviction for cashing a bad check. In came a bloody shirt that prejudiced the jury against her. And in came the prospect of spending most of her life in a men's prison, in which she would be forced to cessate any gender therapy, would be at the mercy of the transphobic prison population, and would be put in solitary confinement for all of her incarceration, for "her own safety". I don't blame her for taking the plea bargain of three and a half years. But it's wrong that she should be incarcerated for living while trans, and living while black.

And this is just one trans person, one black person, one black trans person, for whom the criminal justice system has failed, and there are thousands of similar cases every year. Yesterday, it was reported that no criminal charges would be filed against police who shot a black Marine veteran to death because his medical bracelet went off. And consider that George Zimmerman would've escaped without charge for following a black teenager for five minutes before shooting him, were it not for international outrage.

But hey, racism is over, right?

That said, other than the lack of awareness of these issues, I'm left with a slightly higher opinion of how Leeds treats trans people. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I don't shut up about LGBT issues, and, of the people I know (although, given the circles I associate with, this may be skewed), nearly all of them are trans-positive. Especially the university's LGBT society, who are absolutely brilliant. I did go back to the GP the other day, though, and there isn't any literature I could find on gender issues, but, again, it may just be inertia. I hope that, even with the NHS changes coming through, that trans people will get better treatment (as it does needs to improved), and not worse over time. I personally think it will.

Conference started on Friday evening near Crash Accomodation up in Headingley… or it would be, had everything gone completely to plan. Due to a mix-up with the Parish Hall, a Leeds Rhinos game, and half the national executive stuck on the M1, it actually started in the pub nearby, with an address from the local MP, Greg Mulholland, who talked about the importance of getting our message out on the doorsteps, including that we're trying to temper the Tories, of the work our councillors do nationwide, and how the Bradford West by-election the previous day showed how Labour needed to realise they can't take their heartland constituencies for granted. After a minor CRB-related mix-up due to aforementioned traffic jam on the M1, we were sorted in Crash and spent the evening introducing ourselves to people who haven't met each other before.

I didn't stay in Crash, having a nice(-ish) flat to go to down in Burley, so I met up with everyone the following morning for the first of the two policy debate sessions. The motions on further education loans and marriage equality, unsurprisingly, passed unanimously, the latter including a speech by myself to make marriage-related laws gender neutral. The third debate, on remutalisation of the railways, was more contentious, with some people supporting the motion for bringing power to passengers, and some, including myself, supporting renationalisation instead. The policy debate then turned into a debate on the new constitution, where we were asked to accept or decline certain options to the new constitution, with debates on life membership, when Conference gets held, and what happens if we want to endorse candidates for elections in the party.

After lunch was a second policy session, where motions on introducing political education, regulating non-lethal weapons, and paying for internships all passed with only minor debate. Then came the more interesting stuff: Ewan Hoyle, the founder of Liberal Democrats for Drug Reform, gave a talk and Q&A session on drug policy, covering the medicinal use of drugs, addiction rates among sex workers, and decriminalisation of cannabis and, later, ecstasy.

But by far the most interesting session was led by Liam Burns, president of the NUS. In the past, I've personally been very critical of the NUS over its conduct over tuition fees, especially re: Labour's rise in 2004, and their actions in 2009-10. However, Liam made the salient point, through separating the attendees into three, that the NUS is as mis-perceived as the rest of the student political sphere. He also was forthright about the fact that, in the past, it has been a Labour talking shop (himself being a Labour supporter). However, he was very friendly about some elements of the party, including that Liberal Youth nearly always share the same opinion as the NUS on student issues, and that he could not fault the Scottish Liberal Democrats for their work for students either, and that their decimation in the Scottish Parliament elections wasn't that much deserved. The core message was that, for the Lib Dems to win back the students, they need to engage the students and try to work with the NUS: indeed, I agree that we could get a seat or two on the National Executive Committee if we ran a slate like the SWP do.

The last non-administrative session of the day was a strategy session on how to get as many people as possible to respond to the Equal Marriage consultation. The theme running through that we should engage with as many different larger groups to fill it out, including feminist, LGBT, and atheist societies on campuses, SUs and the NUS, and religious groups such as the Quakers or Unitarians. After reports from the committee, we all travelled to Crash, myself accompanying one of the younger attendees on a walk to Headingley. We arrived somewhat late, and after getting something to eat, we were the only two left in Crash while the others went to the pub (just as well, as I rarely drink alcohol), we spent the evening talking about gender and sexual politics and singing Glee Club songs. Despite a promise from one of the exec, who shall remain anonymous, of pizza, we had to go out ourselves to get some, and after that I stayed and kept an eye on the people streaming in until just before lights out.

The final day was split between leafleting and administrative business. I admit, I skipped the leafleting, and met up with everyone for the two hours split between officer motions (an automatic censure motion fell, all motions of commendation passed mostly nem. con.), by-elections (mostly uncontested, except for the election to, I believe, Policy Committee), and constitutional amendments submitted by Tom because he and Stuart weren't able to update the constitution on time; most already passed as drafting amendments and the rest mostly passed, although a clause that would have given more power to the Chair fell, as did a clause that would allow candidates for election to self-nominate in "exceptional" circumstances. Tom, as Chair, officially closed the conference, thanking everyone for attendance, as is customary. Post-closure, most people hung around for an hour, singing more songs from the Liberator songbook, and there was a short Good Omens–like conversation between myself and another attendee, as the Devil and God respectively (having previously referred to the microphones as the Voice of God). But, with people having to catch trains, we all had to leave the University, so I led a small group down to the train station, where I personally thanked them for their attendance, while they all caught the London train southwards.

So, after all the waffle which resembles a boring diary more than anything, what was the best thing about Conference? Personally, it was the networking opportunities. I met a lot of wonderful people (I count about 20) who, mostly having been to Conference before, were able to tease me into Conference culture, making me really tempted to attend conference next time I can afford it. It also restored my faith in the party, having been wavering for the past couple of months over stuff like the Health Bill and the Welfare Reform Bill (which, I'm happy to say, Greg voted against), and in the NUS, as Liam Burns gave an impassioned and convincing defence of it and proposal to work together. I'll probably start to get more involved internally — my tenure as Leeds Liberal Youth treasurer has been rather uneventful — and keep in touch with everyone. It was really that good.

Leeds Mental Health leaflet

If you haven't guessed (and come on, it's in the title of this post), the conspiciously not-present item was transgender people. It's not just that page, either: crisis centres, Childline, support for most minority groups (including LGB people, women, and ethnic minorities) are advertised on the half of the leaflet dedicated to listing support groups, but not one support group for the transgender community. It seems a strange omission, especially when considering that trans people, in part due to the social stigma of being transgender, often would need mental health services.

This would be a momentarily lapse if it were not for events at the Leeds GIC (Gender Identity Clinic): as Zoe O'Connell has covered on her blog (twice), there seems to be a bit of a gap between the medical consensus on gender identity is and how the various NHS services in Leeds practice. And the student medical practice website doesn't mention gender identity issues at all, despite the fact that, again, young adults (especially students) will start to become aware of said issues.

So the main question is: what the fuck is going on?

It's like several other communities that have demographic problems, such as the conservatives who call women "sluts" for using birth control then wonder why they turn out for Obama 70–30, or atheists who attacked Rebecca Watson for feeling creeped out when someone propositioned her in an elevator at four in the morning. Worse still, it perpetuates stereotypes about gamers and women in general, most notably, that attractive women are promiscious and can't be nerdy. Also, she's using a Xbox 360 controller to control a Nintendo game.

And the overwhelming male nature of the gaming community tends to lock out women too: there are less female developers compared to male developers than female gamers to male gamers (in the UK, the ratio among developers is 1:7, as opposed to near-parity for gamers). And when a woman appears in the news because she helps develop a game? Then she's immediately objectified: take for example, the creative consultant for the Assassins' Creed series, Jade Raymond. Before the release of the first game, a comic circulated around the internet of Raymond in a bikini performing oral sex on several male gamers. You'd bet your bottom dollar that that wouldn't happen to Valve CEO Gabe Newell.

"But the guy who drew that comic also draws rape comics!", I hear some people cry. "He's not representative of the gaming community!". Which, would've been an okay argument. Were it not for Jennifer Hepler. Ms. Hepler is a writer for BioWare, and, among other things, wrote some of the most acclaimed parts of Dragon Age: Origins. But, in the run up to BioWare's new game Mass Effect 3, some quotes from interviews and forum posts made by her started to surface. For example, she reportedly said that she'd like, in some games, to skip combat to follow the story, that in ME3, one chapter will revolve around a member of your team (which can be Shepard) coming out as homosexual and how people react to it, and that she wanted Dragon Age 2 to appeal to everyone and to be as successful as J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer. Completely reasonable, right?

Some people didn't think so. From the Guardian:

Just a few weeks ago, BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler ended up deleting her Twitter account to escape the hatred and abuse of gamers calling her an "obese cunt", a "fat bitch", a "whore", a "plague" and a "cancer", advising her to commit suicide and making harassing phone calls to her home. (Until recently, a quick Twitter search showed the full extent of this extraordinary harassment; since the closure of her account, it seems that it is no longer archived, which is good if you don't want your day ruined by reading it).

She was singled out by extremely angry people unhappy with, among other things, BioWare's inclusion of optional gay romances in Dragon Age II, the way that the developer's games are becoming more accessible, and perceived shortcomings in plot and characterisation in more recent BioWare titles that Hepler had worked on (or hadn't even worked on, in many cases).

The next-but-one paragraph says, again, that this wouldn't happen if she was male. It's basically pent up rage about the fact she's a woman who's in the gaming industry, and because she's not traditionally attractive like Ms. Raymond, then she gets insults instead of objectifying comments. It's related to, but even worse than, the madonna/whore dichtomy of old. And that "if a man did it" is not a hypothetical: when Metal Gear Solid 3 got a re-release, the European version came with a disc called Existence, which was basically the cutscenes arranged and rationalised with some linking scenes to form a three-hour movie. And it's not that bad at all. And Hideo Kojima was lauded yet again for one of the best games of the past ten years.

The funny thing is, Mass Effect is actually… pretty relatively progressive, all told. It's one of the few game series in which you can pick the gender, appearance, and sexuality of your player character for one, and for Mass Effect 3, the game comes with a reversible cover so you can choose between a Male Shepard or Female Shepard. It's far better than, say, Heavy Rain, where the female playable character Madison Paige is introduced in a nightmare in which she is almost violently sexually assaulted, and that's just the start. The fine people at The Border House have a brilliant post about why the character is problematic, so I won't go into it here.

But the solution, isn't, as some people claim, to introduce "strong female characters". The brilliant comic artist Kate Beaton has a comic on why that's a bad idea. No-one denies that Lara Croft is strong, but no-one denies that she's also basically a male fantasy made of polygons either. And an unrealistic one, not least because she was designed and marketed to make you focus on her breasts. If you're in that line of work, you'd be better off looking like Faith Connors from Mirror's Edge. It's basically another form of objectification, but instead of the weak woman who must be rescued, it's now the head strong woman who needs to be brought down.

The obsession with "strong" characters also set them up for a fall when they show a little humanity; it was extremely controversial when everyone's favourite space marine, Samus Aran, was given actual characterisation in Metroid: Other M. Because instead of the ass-kicking name-taking metroid-killing machine (or, as Bob "MovieBob" Chipman put it, "pathologically emotionless man-hating ice queen") people had become accustomed to, she was portrayed as emotionally stunted woman unable equip power-ups without permission from her commanding officer or fight Ridley, who, by that part, had traded blows with her four times in the game series alone. Ridley had also killed her parents when she was a kid. And immediately prior to the game, she had lost the only thing she considered family. When you consider that her actions fit very well to the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder, it makes the character (and the game) much much better.

Basically, the solution is human female characters. Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2 is an example of a female character done right  (and not surprising: Valve, as a whole, tends to do good characters). She can hold her own, she can fire a gun. But there's times where she shows emotion well: anxiety at the state of affairs, anger at someone betraying her father, relief that Gordon has got out of his latest predicament. She wears clothes that a normal person in her situation would wear, instead of skimpy and not-at-all-functional dresses and bikinis seen elsewhere. And she's explicitly not demoted to just a love interest: she actually shows the embarrassment every young person goes through when her father asks her when she's going to get together with Gordon, who, by that time, had spent the better part of a game and a half with her. She's treated as an equal to the player at all times, and is neither a chore nor a bore when she accompanies Gordon.

There is a sense that game creators, and gamers as a whole, are becoming more progressive: we're finally seeing LGBT (all four!), female, and ethnic minority characters that are not defined entirely by that characteristic (thanks to developers such as Atlus).  But like the film industry, it's not going to change overnight. Any change, however, to the development of realistic human characters, both male and female (as there are also games where the male characters are walking meat bags of OO-RAH!), will help to change the problems in the gaming community, much like it's done (and doing) to the film industry. Until then, happy gaming and wait for the medium to mature.

The good folks at Extra Credits, a really good web series about game development, have a few videos about the female gamers, sexual diversity, and female characters (although they disagree with me on the subject of Other M). I'd suggest that you watch all three videos, because they touch on it in a different way to what I have (although if you're here, you already have).

• Activities:As someone on a society executive, this would be the most important election for me. This is also the widest field, but also the easiest for me to vote for, because I personally know Tom Mead, and he's a decent person. I'd be fully confident voting for him. Yes, my judgement may be somewhat clouded, but still, he's my first choice. The vote match website gave me Nathan Josephs and Chris Fitzsimons, who have also run good campaigns without making vacuous promises.
• Communications and Internal Affairs: I also know Louis Gill, but… I'm honestly finding it hard to vote for him. His campaign hasn't been good enough to convince me. Michelle Mullarkey's campaign has been pretty good, though, and I find myself in agreement with her too. I'd also find it hard to vote for Mark Sewards: he's been a competent enough officer, but I can't vote for him because I find myself opposed to him more than supporting him.
• Community: this highlights the problem with Vote Match: I only have a 50% match with Ben Fisher, but honestly? I'd be confident with re-electing him. I agreed with him enough to give him my #1 vote last year. However, it's not really an election that I'm opposed or supportive of any one candidate.
• Education: I'll probably end up voting for Rhiannon Colvin, but again, it's something I'm not really enthusiastic about.
• Equality and Diversity: This is another easy choice for me: a re-election vote for Charlie Hopper. I worked with Charlie on a motion to increase accessibility on campus, and she's, well, very good at her job. Last year, she was the candidate I agreed the most on out of all candidates for all positions. Robyn Brockie will probably get the #2 vote, as she seems to be the only other candidate that knows her shit.
• Welfare: This is the one position that I've found it difficult to make a top choice for. I've flipped between Jacob and Grace several times because I know them both and I know they'd be good at the job. But at the end of the day? It'll probably be Jacob. By virtue of a flip of a coin.

Watch the below video, or get involved at AmericanCensorship.org

If you want a handy guide, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Also in the news was a dispute between University College London and their atheist society, after an image from the webcomic Jesus and Mo was used to promote one of their facebook event. Obviously, this caused Muslims on campus to complain about the offensiveness of the image. It's nothing new; Leeds Atheist Society was forced to cancel a showing and debate of the controversial film Fitna back in 2009 for the same reason.

The skeptic and atheist community is no stranger to threats to their freedom of speech: Simon Singh got sued by the British Chiropractic Association after he called their claims that chiropractic could help ill children "bogus". In 2005, the Christian Party protested BBC screenings of Jerry Springer: The Opera, people from Jyllands-Posten to South Park Studios have been censored and attacked for daring to show images of Muhammad. This extends to actual legislation: critics of Scientology and other religions have been arrested for using "insulting" language as defined in the Public Order Act 1986, which is why Peter Tatchell (one of my favourite people) and the British Humanist Association would like that provision stripped.

This is where the two are linked: UCL's student union asked the society to take it down, and refused on the grounds that it was an infringement of freedom of speech: of course, there is an Islamic prohibition on images of Muhammad, but it doesn't and shouldn't apply to non-Muslims. It's like banning people from saying "God dammit": taking the Lord's name in vain, is of course, a massive sin. They publicised this dispute and got support from Richard Dawkins and all three major secular societies in the UK (the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society, and the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies).

They also got solidarity from Morgan, who used the image as his profile picture for a week or so. He describes the intolerant behaviour he experienced on his blog, to the point that he was denounced as no better than Hitler and people threatened to burn his house down and assault him.

I was unaware of Rhys's actions until I woke up this morning and found he had tweeted that he had been called into a meeting with his head of year at his sixth form college, about the Jesus and Mo cartoon. He reports being harassed at school and being ostracized for posting the cartoon. He was later called in again to be told that they were considering expelling him if he didn't take the cartoon down.

Let that sink in for a second.

You see, in the British school system, you only really get suspended for one incident of violence if you don't get put in the hospital, like, for example, getting into a punching fight. But if you post one cartoon that some people take offence at, you run the risk of getting expelled. Yes, his school promised to take care of the threats too, but it's fucking ridiculous. Consider these two quotes from Rhys's twitter feed.

So yeah, apparently, is something is offensive to one person, a perfectly acceptable response is to beat the poster/creator up.

Basically what they're aug is I've caused so much offended I don't have the right to freedom of speech anymore.

If we abridge free speech because it might offend someone, then it becomes meaningless. We wouldn't be able to criticise Islam or Christianity over verses of their holy books. We wouldn't be able to bust the claims of alternative medicine peddlers. We wouldn't have a healthy democracy, basically. Freedom of speech is (near) absolute, and it's absolutely unconscionable to start to abridge it.