PODCAST · society
Just Plain Sense
by Christine Burns
Equality, diversity and plain good sense for the 21st Century
Episodes
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Alice Purnell's Memoirs
Alice Purnell OBE is an important contributor to the development of the trans community in Britain. She was involved in founding the Beaumont Society in the 1960's; founded the Gender Trust in 1990; and instituted a groundbreaking series of biennial conferences bringing trans people and…
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Paris Lees - LGBT Role Model
Paris Lees appeared in an earlier edition of Just Plain Sense about the signing of a Memorandum on trans people at Channel 4. Even then she was probably not all that well known outside of a small circle, having only moved to London the previous year. These days she is rapidly emerging as a rising...
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The Sunderland, by Leslie Burns
A couple of years ago, in March 2009, I recorded a Podcast interview with my own Father, Leslie Burns. I'm glad I did so because, just ten months later, he passed away. After his death I found a neatly typed manuscript which he had hoped to get published, about a big event in his life that had...
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Bookends
In this episode I've been into the archives to retrieve two presentations by myself and the well-known US trans personality Kate Bornstein in June 2007, as we shared the stage opening the UK's first "Transfabulous" conference. You can read a report about that whole conference here Kate and I were...
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30 Years On - The Bradford Twelve
July 16th will mark the thirtieth anniversary of a campaign supporting what became known as the 'Bradford Twelve'. On that day in 1981 a dozen young Asian men from the United Black Youth League were arrested in dawn raids across the city and charged with conspiracy to make explosives and to cause...
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Trans Media Watch Memorandum of Understanding
On the evening of Monday 14th March 2011 the organisation Trans Media Watch collaborated with Channel 4 TV to launch a new Memorandum of Understanding to an audience of media people, politicians and trans people. The goal of the memorandum is to help eliminate discrimination relating to trans...
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Half an hour with Joan Roughgarden
Professor Joan Roughgarden is no ordinary biologist - and no ordinary trans woman either - though there are quite a few high academic achievers within the world wide community of gender variant, transgender and transsexual people. Joan is perhaps best known for her 2004 book “Evolution’s Rainbow”…
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Responding to Disability Hate Crime
I’ve covered a lot about crime in various forms over nearly three years of these Podcasts. A lot has been said about hatred directed towards Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans People. We’ve also covered domestic violence, which is mostly directed towards women. None of these subjects are pleasant....
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Trans people and the media
What do you think about minority groups like transgender people? Unless you actually know someone in person, have you ever questioned where your beliefs and opinions come from? Chances are, like most people, what you believe and think can be traced back to what you've gleaned from media coverage....
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The Just Plain Sense Christmas Special
It feels incredible to reflect that we are coming up to the third Christmas for the Just Plain Sense Podcast. The show has covered so much in the last 80 episodes and I hope to continue for a long time to come. Usually, as the producer and presenter of these shows, it is my job to ask the...
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The Annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance
On November 20th or 21st those who care will be coming together in dozens of cities around the world to remember transgender people who have been murdered, often brutally, just because they are different. The event is held in November each year to honour Rita Hester, whose murder on November…
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The Cuts Show - Part Two
Side two of the 1977 satirical political revue, "The Cuts Show" by CounterAct. On this side: education and housing cuts; the climate of 'divide and conquer' (my cut's worse than yours); finding scapegoats among immigrant communities; the role of the press; and the capricious nature of investors....
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The Cuts Show - Part One
This coming week, on the 20th of October, Chancellor George Osborne will be unveiling the results of the Comprehensive Spending Review, and what’s expected to be the most savage cuts ever to public services in England. In politics, however, things are seldom new. You just need a long enough…
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Manchester's LGBT Heritage Trail
If you’ve ever visited Manchester City Centre then you may have noticed some small rainbow coloured mosaics set into the pavement here and there. These pick out the landmarks in Manchester’s LGBT Heritage Trail. In this show I speak to guide Jon Atkin about the background to the trail and then we...
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Half an hour with Nadia
When Nadia Almada first teetered into Channel Four's Big Brother house on impossibly high heels, in the summer of 2004, TV viewers in Britain had probably never seen more than a few minutes of any real transsexual person on their screens before. Activists and lawyers at the time were nursing...
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The LGBT Health Summit 2010
The first LGBT Health Summit took place at Guys Hospital in London in 2005 and, since then, this major annual conference has been hosted around the country. In this fifth year the hosts were Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and the venue was the excellent conference centre at the...
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Gaydio 88.4 FM - Manchester's LGBT Radio Station
A few weeks ago, on 18th June 2010, a brand new radio station took to the air. Gaydio, based in Manchester, is an FM station aimed at and run by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans People. It's not the world's first such station. There are established FM stations in Australia and Toronto, for…
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The Diary of a Conference Campaigner (Part Two)
Part Two of this personal narration of an account written in 1995, about coming out as a campaigner to organise 'fringe' meetings at the Labour and Conservative party conferences. For more details and background please see part one.
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The Diary of a Conference Campaigner (Part One)
It’s nearly Party Conference season again. And it’s the first time with Conservatives in Government since the mid 1990's. It may surprise some listeners to know that back in those days I was a Conservative Party activist. I was the secretary of an active branch of the party in Cheshire. And a...
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An Interview with Sir Gerald Kaufman - Part 2
This is the second part of an in-depth interview with veteran Parliamentarian, Sir Gerald Kaufman MP. In this episode Gerald talks about how he came to write for the groundbreaking satirical show, "That Was The Week That Was"; about scandals such as the Profumo affair; and his thoughts on where…
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An Interview with Sir Gerald Kaufman - Part 1
It was the BBC interviewer Robin Day who once famously infuriated Tory Defence Minister John Nott by referring to him as a ‘Here today, gone tomorrow politician’. The epithet stung perhaps because Day was reflecting a truism that seems even more relevant today than in 1982. In truth, many...
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Who are you?
Regardless of the communities we may belong to, it's clear that identity plays a very big part in our lives -- whether that's the identity given to us by our place among family, or the identity we have in official records, or the one which comes from within and which we broadcast to others in the...
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Half an Hour with Tom Doughty
A lot of people fall into the trap of assuming that disabled people are defined and limited by their impairments. The social model of disability teaches us to think differently ... about the way that we limit such people by the obstacles we create. So, for instance, someone who uses a wheelchair...
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Tackling violence against women
According to the British Crime Survey there were 3.29 million reported violent assaults on women in the past 12 months. One in four women have been assaulted at some time. Much strategic attention is focussed on dealing with the outcomes of all this violence: Catching and punishing offenders;...
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Liverpool's Chinese Connection
The City of Liverpool has one of the oldest established Chinese communities in Europe. Trade between the port and China dates back 175 years – and the first Chinese immigrants settled there about thirty years later in 1866. Nowadays it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that economic...
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A statement of support
On Monday 26th October this year a large gang of youths surrounded and attacked a 22 year old gay man, James Parkes, as he left a bar in Liverpool City Centre. He was left with serious head injuries. The attack is being treated by Police as a homophobic hate crime and some arrests have already…
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Trans Kids News Update
Twelve months ago this week I reported in detail from a special conference at Imperial College in London. Clinicians from Britain, Holland and the United States came together to discuss their different views about the best way to treat adolescents with persistent gender identity issues, and a...
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Monica Ross – An Act of Memory
This year people have been celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10th December 1948. As discussed in an earlier show, lots of people have no idea what the declaration’s thirty articles...
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Half an Hour with Peter Tatchell
Peter Tatchell was once described as a “Homosexual Terrorist”. To some he has been “Public Enemy Number One”. His causes have spanned four decades and world affairs. He’s campaigned on Capital Punishment, the Vietnam war, Apartheid, Environmental issues and LGBT rights – to name just a few. He...
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Adopting - A Trans Perspective
The question of whether gay or lesbian couples should conceive or adopt children has been with us for many years. Some people think it’s wrong. There seems no justification for those reservations of course. We’re confronted all the time with examples of heterosexual men and women being bad…
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BCS Lovelace Colloquium 2009
The recent Ada Lovelace Day blogging event raised important points about the challenges of getting more young women and girls hooked on technology subjects – and dealing with the barriers which may cause some of them to fall by the wayside. For this episode I travelled to the Electrical…
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PC 'Bernie' Clifton - Talking about trans policing
Not so long ago any talk about trans people and the police would have been confined to tales about discrimination on both side of the thin blue line. There were problems for trans people wanting to pursue policing as a career. There were also sometimes problems when trans members of the public…
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Half an Hour with Dr Stuart Lorimer
Why would a young Doctor choose to specialise in Psychiatry? Why would he choose to work in a field that's frowned upon by many of his peers? To cap it all, why would he work in a clinic that had (in the past) acquired a very negative reputation among patients? Dr Stuart Lorimer works at Charing...
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Ada Lovelace Day Interview - Lynn Conway
March 24th 2009 is Ada Lovelace Day – an initiative which we talked about in a previous episode. At the time of writing around 1500 people have signed an online pledge to produce a Blog, Podcast, Video, etc... about a woman in technology whom they admire. This episode is about one such woman.…
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An Interview with my Father
My Father, Leslie Burns, was born less than four years after the end of the First World War. It was a world where women could not vote, and which was about to be hit by a terrible economic depression. Later he served in the RAF during the second world war, lived through post war austerity…
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Religion and Equality
Of all the diversity issues, religion is the most difficult. It so often involves the question of how far one can allow the rights of people to apply the doctrines they believe-in to the lives of other people. Our religion – or lack of one – is perhaps the only thing we can really choose....
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Ada Lovelace will have her day
Suw Charman-Anderson is one of many professionals concerned about the relatively low numbers of women in technology careers such as IT. She feels that one of the reasons for this is a lack of role models in the field for other women to see. To draw attention to the issue, and to stimulate...
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Fascinating Adele - Part Two
Adele Anderson is one of the mainstays of the comedy/satire trio Fascinating Aida. In the previous episode I talked to her about FA's uniqueness as three women writing and singing comic political satire for over 25 years. It's also quite widely known that Adele is a transsexual woman. Maybe…
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Fascinating Adele - Part One
They are described as Britain’s sassiest, funniest, craziest musical comediennes. Imagine “Sex and the City” with harmonies. The Mail on Sunday said, “See them before you die or your life will have been meaningless”... Fascinating Aida have been collecting ecstatic hyperbole from reviewers for a...
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Packets from Abroad - Katrina and Tracie
What springs to mind if you think of Australia? Crocodile Dundee? Neighbours? Straight talking straight men who would't give a Castlemaine XXXX ? How about serious debate on a third gender category for passports and official documents? Or inheritance rights for same sex adults regardless of…
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Packets from Abroad - Ethan StPierre
Two weeks from now the United States will witness a historic event that some of us probably doubted we would ever see. When Barack Obama is sworn in as America’s first Black President few would contest the symbolism. But how are Americans seeing it, now that the election night euphoria has died...
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Looking Forward, Looking Back
Happy New Year! The biggest thing for Equality and Diversity in 2009 is probably going to be the new Equality Bill, which was announced in last month’s Queen’s Speech. Debate on that will begin soon in Parliament and then we’ll learn the precise details of what the Government intends. During...
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Christmas on the Front
As the festive season is upon us, and 2008 draws to a close, this episode is intended as a parting thought for the year. Unless they are very lucky, most of the kinds of people we focus upon in Equality, Diversity and Human Rights will have had a close encounter of some kind with discrimination....
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Half an hour with Lorraine Gradwell
Estimates vary about the number of Britons with disabilities of various kinds. Some say it’s 1 in 7; others say 1 in 5. Either way, it’s a significant chunk of the population. Historically many disabled people have faced enormous barriers in being able to work and access facilities the rest of us...
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Fishing for Birds
I'm hoping to get one more interview online for Just Plain Sense before the holiday season is upon us. In the meantime regular listeners with a Podcast 'habit' to feed may like to know about a separate new channel which I've now opened for my poetry ... Fishing for Birds features personal…
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An Interview with Rushi Munshi
At least 11% of Britain’s population falls into the category of Black or Minority Ethnic (BME). Yet that umbrella term conceals a huge diversity in itself. Although it’s tempting to think in terms of some of the most obvious groups, such as people who’ve originated from Africa, the West Indies or...
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The Single Equality Challenge
The Queen's Speech in late autumn marks the beginning of each new Parliamentary term. It's a time when the Government reveals its' legislative plans for the coming year. This year's event is on December 3rd. However, these days, the speech seldom contains any big surprises, as so much about the...
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Sefton's Formula for Equality Partnership
The three statutory equality duties in Britain - covering Race, Disability and Gender - all demand consultation or involvement with expert community stakeholders if problem identification and action planning is ever to be more than a token affair. The problem lies with how to organise that kind…
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Lunch with Julie Bindel
She has been likened to Marmite: you either love what she writes or hate it. Outspoken Guardian columnist and radical lesbian feminist Julie Bindel is widely praised by some for the campaigning she has done on the issues of violence against women, and on the way that our legal system responds to...
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The Challenge of an Ageing Population
Falling birthrates, increased life-expectancy and the approaching retirement of the so-called "baby boom" generation mean that the population balance is altering. In 1998 just 32.4% of Britons were aged over fifty. By 2021 that proportion is expected to have burgeoned to over 40%. What effects…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Just Plain Sense have?
Just Plain Sense currently has 90 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Just Plain Sense about?
Equality, diversity and plain good sense for the 21st Century
How often does Just Plain Sense release new episodes?
Just Plain Sense has 90 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Just Plain Sense?
You can listen to Just Plain Sense on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Just Plain Sense?
Just Plain Sense is created and hosted by Christine Burns.
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