Guy Windsor

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Archives for August 2015

Swords do not discriminate. Neither should swordsmen.

August 21, 2015 By Guy Windsor 18 Comments

Are testicles really an advantage in a sword fight?
Are testicles really an advantage in a sword fight?

 

I first met the illustrious Christian Tobler in 2003. We were sat chatting about something and I casually called him “Chris”. He politely replied “it’s Christian, actually”, and with a modicum of effort, I stopped shortening his name, and have called him Christian ever since.

If he’d asked me to call him Christina, I’d have done the same.

This is basic politeness. Unless somebody asks you to call them something that puts you in an awkward position (somebody you don’t really like wanting you to call them “darling snookums”, for instance; or somebody who is not your boss demanding to be called “Boss”, for another instance), the only reasonable thing to do is respect their wishes about how they are addressed.

Y’all can call me “Jedi Master Guy the living sword god” if you want. Go on, I dare you.

We have had a small number of transgender people in one or other branches of my School over the last 15 years. In every case, School policy is absolutely clear: respect their preferences. It really doesn’t matter a damn whether the person you are training with is male, female, trans, or even (gods protect us) Swedish. It matters what their weapon is doing and why.

Likewise, within the school, our tournaments are not segregated in any way. If you are smaller or weaker, or taller, or stronger, you are expected to deal with it as best you can and learn from the experience. That’s it. Weapons do not discriminate and neither should we. In our most recent tournament, students even had a free choice of weapon (axe, spear, sword, dagger or unarmed); the best fight of the day was one student with a dagger defeating another with a pollax. You gain honour in direct proportion to the difficulty of the fight.

I understand that there is an argument made regarding high-level competition having gender categories, and a stated policy regarding what is required to gain admission to one category or the other. With millions of dollars on the line, it makes a sort of sense, I suppose. And in some arts, such as MMA or wrestling, weight categories make sense. But in combat of any kind, they just don’t strike me as martial.

This is topical because a student of mine has recently been denied entry to the women’s longsword tournament at an event in the USA. This student has gone through all sorts of difficulties to become who she is meant to be; it seems perverse to me to add to those difficulties deliberately.

This is the whole point of training swordsmanship. You start out wanting to be something that you are not (yet): A swordsman. You train, and sweat, and bleed and suffer (in my classes, anyway), and through the alchemy of practice you become the person you aspire to be. For any swordsman to fail to see the similar but vastly more difficult course that trans people go through strikes me as a pathetic failure of imagination and empathy.

Training is all about personal growth, and respecting the efforts that our fellow students make to grow, in all aspects of their lives.

Frankly, I don’t care what you think about a transperson’s gender. The only polite and decent course is to respect their choice regarding how they are identified, and to respect the courage it has taken them to live as they do in a world so sadly full of people slow to love and quick to hate.

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Filed Under: Reflections Tagged With: hema tournament, LGBTQ, sword class

Interviews, book reports, and a kick to the nuts

August 17, 2015 By Guy Windsor 1 Comment

I've been a tad busy of late (not that that is anything unusual). But the last couple of weeks have been especially interesting.

First up, PC Gamer magazine have published an article based on an interview I gave to the journalist Rick Lane; it's all about trying to make games that involve sword fights more realistic. You can read the article here.

I was also interviewed by Joanna Penn, of The Creative Penn. Joanna is a thriller writer, but more importantly from my perspective she also writes really useful books about how to make a living as an author. She is pretty damn successful at it, and her podcast is listened to by many thousands of people. You might wonder how I got onto her show; well, I followed her own instructions from How to Market a Book regarding making contact with people you admire in your field, and within a few months she had seen this blog, and invited me onto her show. Her stuff works! You can find my episode here, as podcast, video, and  transcription. I was very nervous! This was only my second ever podcast interview (the first being for Chivalry Today earlier this year), but I hope it went ok. What do you think?

Regarding books: I am late getting episode four of The Swordsman's Quick Guide out; this is due to my being not 100% satisfied with it, and not sure how to improve it. I think I've got a handle on that now, so with any luck it should be out this week… or next… In the meantime, here's a preview of the cover; once again by the most excellent Eleonora Rebecchi.

Cover for part 4 of The Swordsman's Quick Guide
Cover for part 4 of The Swordsman's Quick Guide

We had the photo shoot for my next Longsword training manual last week; I have been going through the images this morning to pick the ones that will go into the final product. It looks like this book will have about 250 images in it, so there is much to do! Jari Juslin is the photographer (the same chap who did The Medieval Longsword and The Medieval Dagger; this time he was ably assisted by Petteri Kihlberg, who provided a ton of high-quality equipment; lights like you wouldn't believe:

It's dark in here! Petteri checking the light, with Noora.
It's dark in here! Petteri checking the light, with Noora.
Jari in charge... Noora, Jari, Petteri, Satu, preparing the shoot.
Jari in charge…
Noora, Jari, Petteri, Satu, preparing the shoot.

This book is on schedule for release before Christmas this year. And as I was going through them, I found this one that I had to share:

Zoë is well known in our school for her ability to target the more vulnerable spots...
Zoë is well known in our school for her ability to target the more vulnerable spots…

I've said it before and I'll say it again; if you can't kick them in the nuts, it ain't a martial art!

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Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: dagger, medieval longsword, swords in games, writing, writing tips

Progress Report: Letters Home, Abandonment, and the Matron Effect

August 3, 2015 By Guy Windsor 3 Comments

"Oh, Matron" (in the voice of Kenneth Williams)
“Oh, Matron” (in the voice of Kenneth Williams)

This is a progress report for the “get over boarding school” project. If you’re here looking for some technical sword stuff, I suggest going here or here.

I usually edit my posts quite carefully. Not this one, because if I do, I will end up deleting the whole thing. So please bear with me.

Shortly after posting the last instalment of this boarding school crap (if you haven’t read them, this post will make much more sense after reading The Price of Privilege and Dealing With It), I went to the UK with my wife and kids for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was a lovely family event, as you may imagine. While I was there, I went looking for stuff from my boarding school years, and, in a box in the attic, I found all my old school reports, and all the letters I had sent home. The first few would make you cry. Basically, “I hate it here, please come and get me”, repeated over and over, in my 8-year-old handwriting. That was ok; my wife was worried about the effect they might have, but I could handle it, mostly because I’m out of there now and don’t ever have to go back.

But part of me is still 8 years old, and waiting for Mummy to come and get me. And I have to rescue that little boy.

(I think I’ll transcribe the whole lot and publish them in some format; it might be useful for the psychiatrists working on the boarding school problem.)

I came home to run the Fiore Extravaganza seminar; you’ve probably read my update about it here. My wife and kids stayed in the UK to see more family and friends; they get back tonight. The seminar was great; really productive, and the students and I collaborated on creating a whole new pollax form. That kept the days occupied. I spent most of the evenings hanging out with friends, sometimes talking about this stuff, sometimes not. The major work was done yesterday; I went to an old friend’s place, someone I love and trust, and talked and talked and cried and talked and listened and talked and stalled and talked and set up distractions and listened and cried and talked. I had been dreading it the whole week. My brain is very good at avoiding pain, and I knew that this was going to be really, really hard. I have rarely been so scared. The closest was when my second daughter was born (that was way worse, because she and my wife nearly died that night). But in terms of distress, this was comparable.

That’s the problem with the things that really work. They often hurt. Surgery. Training. Therapy.

And the shit just boiled out. The things I am having the hardest time coming to terms with are the abandonment, the sheer mercilessness of it, and what we might call the Matron Effect.

Let me gloss over this in bold strokes. Picture a big scary old house in the country, populated by 200 boys aged 7-13. The adults are mostly men granted the power to beat you at will, a few women teachers, and half a dozen women, mostly in their twenties, all wearing nurses’ uniforms, and all wielding absolute authority. The Matrons. It is a well established fact that boys are pretty gross. They tend to wash only when coerced into it. So showers were supervised by said matrons; 4-10 naked boys at a time, all under the watchful eye of an attractive older woman? One who could send you off to the headmaster for a beating at any time? Dear god, it’s like they were trying to raise a generation of perverts.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with adults getting up to all sorts of mischief with fellow adults, so long as it’s all informed and consensual. I really don’t care what floats your boat in that department. And I don’t suppose you care what floats mine.

But I very very strongly object to a system that punches holes in said boat while it is being built.

I think this is why the Mark Vorkosigan story arc Lois McMaster Bujold’s books Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance, and A Civil Campaign is so powerful for me. A boy was deeply fucked up by the adults in his life, and over the course of the books gets some pretty stellar revenge, and finds not only his true family, but also a girl who can handle the quirks that he’s left with.

Moving on…

One obvious consequence of all this is that I have a profound distrust of authority. I simply cannot trust anyone in authority to have my best interests at heart. One of the questions I am asked most often is why I never joined the Army. There it is. I was a) determined never to set foot in an institution again, b) I just knew that some wanker of a commander would get me killed for his own advancement. The only hierarchies I can abide are the ones I’m at the top of. Anything that even smells the tiniest bit like somebody being in charge of me: just fucking no. Except my wife, obviously 😉

I’m planning a separate post, something along the lines of “Renegotiating my Contract”, to look at how this stuff has impacted the way I have run my school, and what I’m doing about it. Why, for instance, I never wear all black these days. [Update: that post is here]

I have also figured out why I’m blogging about all this. Partly, it’s easier to go through it all if I have a means to make it useful to other people who may have had similar issues. “If Guy can do it, so can I.” But also it’s to keep me on track. It makes me accountable for progress. Because a large part of my mind wants this whole mess back under wraps where it slept for so long. My students have been keeping me honest in the salle for years. My readers here are doing the same. That’s you, recruited into Team Guy. Thanks for stepping up.

I had a bad night last night. I slept very little, and woke up still scared and tired. I cleaned the house a bit, to settle my stomach before breakfast, and while I was making coffee, suddenly doubled over like I’d been punched in the stomach and howled my eyes out.

I did it again in the middle of writing this.

I’ll keep doing it, until it’s done.

I expected this. It’s ok, it’s part of the process. All sorts of stuff will come up, and most of it will be bad enough that my mind had to hide it from me for over 20 years, until I was ready to handle it.

I’m ready now.

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: boarding school, fear, health, personal

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