Malaga Airport, folk dance etiquette, Sidmouth Folk Festival!

[CrystalSingerFan]

Long-time lurker, I've registered just to post this. As a huge fan of Sidmouth Folk Festival, I came across these delightful and inclusive guidelines for the 2024 dance programme: sidmouthfolkfestival.co.uk/folk-dance/

"... Calling / Teaching Styles Key:

(A) indicates that an event will be called using alternative ungendered role terms (e.g., lead/follow or larks/robins).

(G) indicates that an event will be called using gendered role terms.

(P) indicates that an event will be called without using role terms: positionally emphasising patterns, flow and relationships between dancers, e.g. neighbour, opposite, people facing the window"

Love the Malaga Airport choice of codes. Any Mumsnet FWR folkies know if this is deliberate or a happy coincidence? I'm reluctant to ask the organisers...

er, right....

What's the Málaga airport thing?

There is a three letter acronym that will get your post deleted. It happens to be the same as the international code for that airport.

Hilarious!

Clever! I hope it’s a silent act of protest by someone.

I didn’t realise we weren’t allowed to refer to that condition. Why not?

G for "gender" is obvious. I wonder if A is for "alternative" and P for "positional"? That's quite a coincidence!

I thought MN were a bit more relaxed these days. Briefly, we used to be unable to use the acronym AGP, which stands for autogynephilia, and is also the Malaga Airport code, because activists think it's offensive to suggest that some (not all) people with a trans identity cross-dress and may seek body modification to look more like the opposite sex because it's a fetish. The group concerned are all, or virtually all, male because fetishes are far more common in males than females. This is an idea that used to be accepted by all the mental health professionals working in the field of gender disorders. Even now, some trans-identified males are quite open about feeling this way. However, activists correctly identified that they would make no progress asking for male fetishists to be treated as if they really were women so they could experience a sexual thrill, so they stressed the narrative instead that trans people all suffer from gender dysphoria. This is patently not true, but unfortunately lawmakers all over the world have swallowed it and we are now slowly moving back to a more considered position.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer to PP, Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g! (I've just got up.)

I was being careful with Malaga Airport. Before posting, I checked the "Mumsnet moderation principles for discussions around gender identity and sex" at www.mumsnet.com/i/trans-rights-moderation-policy.

They currently state "Will you consider deleting posts that associate transgender people with autogynephila (AGP)? This is something we'd look at on a case by case basis, though we'll definitely delete posts which generalise." Fingers crossed you and I are OK.

Although, at the risk of derailing my own thread, is there a MN Towers typo in there?

Yes! Missing i.

Probably just a coincidence. Often at social dances there tend to be more women participating than men so some get designated "men" for the dance.

That's brilliant! I so hope it was deliberate. I ldo ove a secret code, used to make up languages when I was a kid.

Yep! I couldn't agree more about the fascinating coincidence, yetanotherusernameAgain.

Although I wonder if "Larks/Robins" should be under Positional rather than Alternative. (Assuming the birds are mapped onto the Left/Right dancers in the sets.)

If there's more to assigning ceilidh dancers to specific ornithological categories, perhaps any folkies out there could let us know? 😀

😂

Many years ago I used to work at Heathrow ( LHR )
Waves at anyone who used to work for British Midland
Malaga was known as Always Groping People
No use at all @CrystalSingerFan but happy memories

Are we allowed to say 'stunning and brave' now? I know someone who lost her account for repeated use of the term.

Oh I never noticed that, Chippenham Folk Festival had the same codes used.

One caller was struggling a bit to describe the men's line and said "oh how shall i describe them" to which I said "men" which made a bloke near me laugh.

Just noticed Towersey have got a session (under comment and comedy) called Pronoun Trouble.

Zita60 and Onetransphobicmother

Thanks - it's curious, isn't it? I've been to a few ceilidhs over the years and never read any calling guidelines. We just happily accepted that not all couples were M/F and that parents would dance with kids, siblings would dance together and single sex couples meant anyone who wanted to dance could do do so with same-sex-partners partners/friends without feeling any heteronormative pressure. (Although, as an adult human female, I was fine with considering myself a man for the duration of a dance. Other folks' mileage might vary. And perhaps mine should have? Eek.)

No! Any links? Maybe I should see what Cecil Sharp house has to say.

Plus I used to go to Towersey so thanks for the happy memories.

Exactly Crystal, it used to work really easily mentally to just be the opposite sex for a dance, both men and women could dance in single sex couples with no difficulties.

I don't find any of the gender free styles anywhere near as easy to follow, much longer spent standing around while they slowly call the dances.

It's the last one this year, not quite like it used to be sadly. The original village location was definitely the best.

Woman2023

Oh no! Last Towersey? End of an era, <insert clichés here> etc. Sorry to hear it was not quite like it used to be.

We only went when it was at the original location, which was delightful. I remember risking life and limb in a close-to-collapse marquee, trying to master/(mistress?) Breton dancing. Now THAT'S tricky.

Back when they had the old wooden poles for the marquee and big Simon the sound engineer kept pushing the canvas up where water was pooling?

Good times!

Thanks. I was vaguely aware that TRAs didn't like it being mentioned, preferring the idea that trans people were all "born in the wrong body", rather than some of them having a sexual fetish.

I tend to think of Mumsnet as Terf Central, so I was a bit surprised that they might go along with that view and ban discussion of it.

Quite a few years ago the gender issue burst out of the Feminism and Women's Rights board, as it was then, and there were a lot of threads in several boards with a Spartacus theme. I can't remember all the ins and outs of it, but the idea was that loads of posters were saying 'I am Spartacus' over the idea that MN would force us to refer to transwomen with female pronouns. (Something on those lines, anyway.) I think that's the start of MN being a gathering point for women (and a few men) who are sceptical about gender ideology. It's certainly when it all kicked off for me. However, for a long time thereafter it was very difficult for posters on all sides of the debate and the MN moderators/admin to find a modus vivendi over how we could even talk about this. We've come a long way since those days. I'm grateful to MN for making discussion possible at a time when it was extremely difficult to talk about this in clear terms anywhere else on the net.

Credit where it's due, Mumsnet played a big part in getting us to where we are today.