#BiStonewall 7th February 2015 Consultation Day

Natalya's Writeup of #BiStonewall 7th Feb Consultation Day

I would like to thank: The other bi people who attended, both those I knew and those I didn't - I am glad there was a mixture. The trans people who tweeted and wrote about the trans consultation process and those who fought for a similar one for bi issues. Stonewall, especially Ruth Hunt, Caroline Ellis and Ayaz Manji for making the event run so smoothly.

Sections of this writeup
Consultation Context
Structure of the day
Ruth Hunt from Stonewall explaining and apologising for past Stonewall bi-fail
Topics for discussion
Discussion of topics
Feeding back from discussions
Final session and next steps
My conclusions and next steps

Other #BiStonewall Writeups

Marcus from Bisexual Index
Nick Gomez of EQView LGBT magazine
Jacq from Bis of Colour
Elizabeth Baxter-Williams' Biscuit Magazine brief writeup

Twitter #BiStonewall

Consultation Context

In contrast to the #TransStonewall consultation(s) there wasn't any question of whether Stonewall would include bi people or not; they have already claimed the B. The question therefore was and remains: Are Stonewall willing and able to include and represent bisexual people and communities with us or without us...

I wasn't alone in my concerns. Stonewall is HUGE (in scope/reach if not pure size) and often it feels like the bi communities which I am a part of, are tiny. There are also many bi people who don't identify as such or participate in "communities" of a clearly defined sort but are still out there, needing and deserving accurate and appropriate representation.

My second thought on hearing about the trans consultation after "good for them [trans people]" had been "where's OUR consultation, damnit!" so it was a nice surprise to see Stonewall inviting bi people to book ourselves onto this one day consultation.

Places booked up quickly and I suspect Stonewall were a little surprised by the level of interest and indeed the level of unhappiness in pre-event materials submitted to them about Stonewall and bi.

Despite positive comments by those who attended, there are many bi people who remain understandably wary about all of this.

Structure of the day

In order to ensure every one of the 35+ delegates had some chance to contribute and knew that listening was going to be vital the day was facilitated by Caroline Ellis a Stonewall director. Proposed Agenda Item 1 was discussing and adapting some proposed flipcharted guidelines on how we would all agree to behave.

Caroline's firm facilitation went a long way to keeping the consultation as deaf-accessible as an event this audio-heavy could be. She wasn't afraid to call us all back to the agreed-guidelines to keep discussions fair and on track.

Attenders chose seats at semi-circle shaped tables facing the front of a bog-standard conference room. Each table sat between 5 and 7 people. I did the usual deaf-swot thing of grabbing a seat at the front which happened to be with some people I knew well, some I knew a little and one person I hadn't met before. The day was mixed between listening to Caroline or Ruth speaking from the front, small discussions in our tables and then feeding back to the whole room. I used a radio aid on conference mic mode which really helped me hear what was being said.

Stonewall bi staff attending in their own right

Stonewall invited its own bi staff to attend as bi-people in their own right. A lot of thought had clearly gone into how to disclose their presence amongst us ethically. Each of the five or so staffmembers stood up at the same time so we could see them scattered around the room. They were introduced by name, role and location and by clear pre-agreement said a few words for themselves if they wished.

It was made extremely clear to us that Stonewall bi staff were not to be held responsible in any way for past-bi-failures. This disclosure enabled us to benefit from their unique experience while knowing to be careful about how we might frame things in the context of their multiple-contexts.

Stonewall explaining context and apologising for past-bifail

Ruth Hunt, new CEO of Stonewall talked for half an hour about Stonewall's creation, history, focus and context around bisexuality.

Stonewall was set up as a lobbying organisation in the late 1980s to campaign for law change such as anti-section 28, equalisation of the age of consent, "gays" in the military and so on. Stonewall does not and has never provided services. Stonewall has tripled in size in the last few years and in many ways has been less organised than one might expect which is why Ruth as CEO is already implementing a number of internal changes around processes and structure.

I was amused to find that no one seemed to know when B was included in Stonewall's remit. This was something attenders had attempted to research. The charitable objects only refer to human rights but the activities refer to lesbian gay and bisexual. A brief discussion concluded that B probably got added during the becoming a charity process in 2003. It was commented that the B wasn't mentioned on the Stonewall Xmas card till 2008...

Bi-fail acknowledgements and explanations

Ruth Hunt outlined on behalf of Stonewall the biggest areas of I will call bi-fail and provided an explanation for each whether that included an apology and recognition of actual wrong/harm done; genuine "cockup" or what Stonewall may have decided was a reasonable justification at the time, or indeed continues to be justifiable. We delegates did not always agree with these justifications and some of us felt able to say so both in person and on twitter (#BiStonewall).

One example was whether bisexuality is too complex to include in some situations and the difficulty of saying nuanced things while under time or word-limit pressure. We disagreed quite strongly and some solutions to this including examples of simple and nuanced language were suggested. There was also some discussion around institutional biphobia where I think Ruth meant that Stonewall isn't resistant or unwilling to improve on bi inclusion, but initially misphrased it as "stonewall isn't institutionally biphobic" which is something different entirely - twitter enabled Ruth to come back to us and rephrase/frame things better. I feel these areas may be where we consultees may have already initiated a change in Stonewall's thinking and hopefully acting in the future with some input from bi experts.

Another examples of bi-fail identified an instance of publicity where the heading was bi-inclusive but the content beneath it wasn't. Original cause of the error was cockup but then the promised-to-one of us fix who had met with Stonewall about it (and other things) hadn't happened either which had further-dented bi-trust in Stonewall. The Stonewall organisers didn't deny this was fail and I hope after this mini-discussion about the impact and untrust caused will actually manage to fix the online-copy soon/nowish because this would be a small but critical step in trust-building.

Ruth was very honest that mistakes are still going to happen as no process of improvement is immediate and it is important to have realistic expectations all round. Seeing how Stonewall plan to deal with mistakes and fixes will be interesting.

Similarity of lived experiences

It was also apparent that Ruth has done her share of Aaaaaand women... and Aaaaand lesbian(s).... and knows the feeling behind the 'yet again' *sigh* and cost of sticking her neck out.

Last year Ruth wore a "some people are bi get over it" teeshirt at London Pride. I don't think this was the bi-equivalent of a fat-suit; I believe it was Ruth making a public statement that she means-it about making Stonewall becoming better at bi. In wearing this teeshirt I think Ruth expected to get some biphobic abuse, just not quite as much as she did. I felt Ruth was clear that she didn't want to appropriate bisexuality/biphobia (although biphobia by association exists) but recognising that biphobia, especially in lesbian and gay spaces/communities is a significant and nasty problem.

By working to include bi (and trans) people, some of Stonewall's traditional supporters may not be very happy and a challenge for Stonewall is to not destroy its support-base while keeping bi people and bi communities happy.

Stonewall focus: "Right to be YOU"

I especially liked Ruth's discourse around Stonewall's change of direction in campaigning to a focus of right to be you. It's clever, short, catchy and inclusive as youness includes a variety of things. Ruth linked this to the impact of not being able to experience the whole of your self-hood leading to harm, damage and illness to the individual and how Stonewall has been part of that limiting-experience of youness for bi people in the past.

Discussion topics

After a break we looked at some potential areas for discussion. Stonewall had proposed an initial 6 or so topics/areas which I think were:

• Health including mental health
  
• Employment
  
• Education
  
• Asylum and immigration
  
• Bi-visibility
  
• Biphobia
  

I immediately noticed housing and homelessness wasn't listed. My table also noticed that race and ethnicity weren't mentioned. We also discussed the idea of power, accountabilities and consequences of us vs Stonewall "Is there any point in all of us investing emotional and physical energy in this consultation process if Stonewall could just keep ignoring us?".

The tables then fed-back a number of extra items which were added to "topics for discussion" list including:

• Housing and homelessness
  
• Race and ethnicity / BME / racism
  
• Older people
  
• Younger people/youth
  
• Faith and belief (linked to BME in many ways)
  
• Media
  
• Families and children
  
• Geographic urban vs rural (there is life outside of London)
  
• Poverty and austerity & social class
  
• Power and accountability
  

This bought the total to 15+ topics - some which overlapped a bit.

I am still not sure if we tried to discuss too much or if it would have been more problematic to not discuss everything raised. We still didn't discuss everything; disability (outside of HIV/mental health) wasn't really covered; class was only touched on and I don't think we covered enough about such a huge topic as media. Bi-visibility and biphobia were discussed being more over-arching and different from the other topics.

I believe Stonewall's original intention was that "intersectionality" sort of over-arched every discussion topic. I think it was right to break intersectional-specifics out because as a group of largely privileged white, middle-class, people it is too easy for us to avoid the perceptually difficult intersections such as race and class. We need to be much more proactive in identifying that some groups are singly and multiply more disadvantaged than others and that aspects such as race or age plays an inextricable part in that.

After some discussion - each table was then given 2 topics + an overarching theme of either biphobia or bi-visibility.

Discussion framing

It was only at this point that the context in which Stonewall wanted information was made clear. We were asked to take our topics and try to answer the following questions:

1. What could/should Stonewall do?
   
2. What could be done collaboratively between bisexuals/bi community and Stonewall?
   
3. What should Stonewall not do.? (This was quickly clarified to be about "not treading on toes for" such as "Stonewall shouldn't run BiCon")
   

I feel it would have been better to have had these framing questions first and THEN identifying the topics which might have avoided some pointless tangents and confusion. I'm not sure much of what we discussed or fed back fit this structure.

Discussions

Several people on my table were struggling to hear in the main room so they persuaded me that we should decamp to the outside refreshment area - I think I had got to the stupid-stage of audio overload. Some of us also decided to take a mini break at this point even though lunch was only 25 minutes away.

My table's topics were:

• Language around gender and sexual orientations
  
• Race, ethnicity, BME, racism
  
• Biphobia
  

Unfortunately we missed the pre-lunch information as no one told our group that the discussions had stopped for lunch. We were a little hurt by that, but perhaps we should have asked Caroline explicitly to come and get us rather than assuming she noticed/knew where we had gone.

Lunch

Lunch was an hour long. The food was very good and clearly labelled for content such as dairy, gluten, meat/fish etc. There was plenty of it and the serving staff were friendly and nice. Informal plans for networking didn't work as the area announced as mingling was reserved for another organisation's event.

I chatted with some people I knew for a few mins while I ate before taking most of the lunch hour as "time out" to try and reboot my brain a bit. Annoyingly my netbook wouldn't speak to the WiFi so I spodded on the smartphone instead. I later joined a group of people chatting about the morning before the afternoon sessions restarted.

Discussions continued

One of the things we tried to do was get a coherent set of notes for whoever would feedback to the group. We had sort of gone off on tangents and some of our group had gone to wander or do other things as was perfectly permitted.

One thing I regret was that one person on my table had to mention that many of us were staring at them whenever black people or blackness was mentioned. I hadn't realised I/we were doing that until it was pointed out which is fail on my/our part. Talking afterwards with another attender they said it was helpful to see that request as they realised they had unintentionally been doing the "stare at person who raises X whenever X is mentioned" to someone on their table about a different intersectional-identity. I have made a note of it as a useful top-tip on "what not to do" in general for outlining 'safer' spaces. It is being added to my "people do this, recognise this and don't do it" collection for my 2015 BiCon how to be a bit less racist at BiCon workshop.

By the end of this session I noticed several people struggling, the emotional and physical of the day were considerable for everyone. I was grateful for the break between feeding back and the final session.

Feeding back

Each table fed back in turn about their discussion outcome. This was probably the hardest part of the day for me as hearing multiple people across a room is plain difficult. I was impressed by how people did recognise where their issue had been discussed and skipped past it. Ruth was typing away on her laptop to get the main points. It is notable feedback points didn't get tweeted in as much detail as the best real-time tweeters were also running low on spoons/energy.

I have several pages of notes but I'm not sure how much is confidential or not so I don't want to get into details. Much of it was about Stonewall not taking credit for our work (which they clearly understood); using our expertise (and paying for it sometimes!); supporting and promoting bi events (and making sure we're not asked to pay commercial rates!); representation and inclusion including designating space for under-represented groups; recognising where Stonewall may need to include people in mixed-gender relationships to be bi inclusive; awareness of specific intersectional issues such as Bi people of colour being most likely to experience housing issues and poorest health outcomes and being aware that it may take some time for bi people to feel they can trust Stonewall and some people may never be entirely comfortable so separation as well as collaboration between bi groups and Stonewall may remain essential for the foreseeable.

Someone came up with the term "mono-splaining" where people (of presumed monosexual orientation) explain to bisexual people what bisexuality is.

I don't know if the phrase "nothing about us without us" was used, but the concept came up a lot.

Final session - Next Steps

After our feedback Ruth Hunt used her superpower of taking verbiage and turning it into concise and coherent points She outlined some examples of possible collaborative options and ideas; ways which Stonewall could help bi communities and events; bi people and experts could work with Stonewall longer term and more.

The next steps from Stonewall are:

• Information from session including flipcharts, Stonewall's notes and anything else will all be collated.
  
• Draft summary report sent to event attenders only (we're asked to keep this confidential) by Easter-time with several weeks given for us to give feedback to Stonewall. (longish timescale because of Stonewall's overall workload and as of last week they hadn't finished the trans report yet).
  
• Stonewall will publish a final report in ~Septemberish including:
  
  • Acknowledgements and apologies for past bi-fail
    
  • Aims and hopes for the future for Stonewall and bi-stuff
    
  • Steps that need to be taken to achieve aims
    
  • Timescales for achieving aims
    
  • What Stonewall isn't willing or able to do

Further consultations

Stonewall are actively seeking feedback from bi people, organisations and communities by email on bi@stonewall.org.uk and at other consultation events over the coming months.

I might suggest Stonewall create a webpage outlining what they want and what they will do with info so people like myself can link to and promote the canonical source. (I haven't found one from quick n dirty Googling)

My conclusions and next steps

Even 10 days post-event as I've been working on this writeup I feel cautiously optimistic and hope that Stonewall can make-good on the small trust building steps they've committed to (I've seen evidence of at least one immediate promise being kept) as well as continuing to run this consultation as well as the trans one seems to have been. I feel they are open to negotiating a friendship with bi people and communities.

The consultation event itself wasn't as inclusive as any of us would have liked it to be. While Stonewall had tried to invite bis of colour for example, this hadn't been enough to make many bis of colour feel it would be a safe enough space. Having separate consultation groups is one way saferness might be achieved but there is some-way to go in trust building with different parts of bi communities. Just like bi communities ourselves still have a long way to go earning trust of some people of colour who we have hurt (and still continue to hurt, even inadvertently) by our fail.

My feeling from listening to Ruth throughout the day was that she engaged constructively with criticism. I could often see her thinking during discussions and responding with consideration and respect to those who raised challenges and concerns. I felt Ruth respected us and understood that this was difficult stuff for us which in turn made me respect her and Stonewall for trying so hard to do well at this process.

I plan to pick the specifics out of my notes and email them to the bi@stonewall.org.uk email address so they're definitely part of the material Stonewall can work from. I may also try and get to the bi+disabled consultation event(s) as I have a number of ideas and indeed OPINIONS about accessibility that would be REALLY easy for Stonewall to do or indeed NOT do!

I haven't yet read the Stonewall trans-report published today as I wanted to finish my bi consultation writeup first. People are saying positive things about it which is a very good sign.

I wish Stonewall all the best with their next steps in the ongoing bi consultation process - keep up the good work.