Christopher Phin

I’m adding ‘Kit’ to the list of names I respond to :)

My given name is Christopher, but most people call me Chris. I have zero feelings about that, except that as a writer and producer I much prefer to be credited or bylined as ‘Christopher Phin’. That’s something of an affectation, though, since the reason is just that I think ‘Chris Phin’ typesets in a really ugly way!

I have been thinking for a few years about styling myself ‘Kit’, which is indeed an alternative diminutive of ‘Christopher’ — I like its sparkiness, I like its hard consonants, I just like its attitude, y’know? — but always vaguely thought people would Think Things about me changing my name.

Then the MP Kit Malthouse came along and was such a monumental bellend it killed the idea stone dead.

Then two things happened, basically in parallel. First, I met someone very sweet, funny, kind and smart called Kit, which acted in the background to neutralise the Malthouse stench without me really even realising it.

And then second, I was inspired by my trans friends changing their names. How dare I —  a cis-presenting white dude, who wasn’t even changing his name but just swapping to a different diminutive, and who didn’t even have to change a single scrap of paperwork — worry about what people would think, when folks switching gender have to deal with the four horsepersons of the transpocalypse: deadnaming, disgust, mockery and forms.

And so, in yet another in a long series of the advantages trans people gift even to people who aren’t trans, in their often unasked-for battle to expand our understanding of gender, today I’m just deciding, because I can:

You can call me Chris, you can call me Christopher, you can call me any time you need help… but you can also call me Kit.

I’ve just watched Philippa Perry’s episode of Victorian Sensations, and one of the thoughts in the film resonated with me in particular.

Maybe it’s not surprising that people of the age saw so many ghosts because, in a sense, spirits did haunt the Victorian home. Every Victorian innovation – from photography to motion pictures, phonographs to fantasy books – had its own supernatural genre. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, drew on his real-life experience as a ghostbuster to write his ghostly fiction.

If I’m remembering correctly, this – from the programme description – is a direct quote from the script, and as the first spoken sentence concluded, I actually thought it was going to go in a different way.

Before the technological media innovations of the Victorian era – voice recording, cinematography, photography – the only way a person could be present in our world was to be present. The phonograph and cinematograph, and even photography, however, meant that a person could appear to our senses to be present even when absent, which was surely as unsettling as it was exciting. Even realistic depictions in paint or marble couldn’t summon up a sparkling, vital presence in the same way, and so might it not be arguable that this techology-led blurring between, I guess, sinew and soul – this explicit fracturing of reality – was part of what created a chink for spiritualism and metaphysics to spread into the world?

If you have only ever experienced people as living, breathing, real things, tech that made them seem to come alive or travel in space and time must have made you question and challenge your frameworks for reality.

Maybe I’m over-egging this; shamans, drugs, magicians would have been deliberately eliding the natural and supernatural for long, long before the 19th century, and maybe I’m overplaying the penetration of these technologies. Maybe too this is a well-worn trope, which I’m just ignorant of. It’s just that a possible link between the technology which allowed people to be present while actually being absent, and the rise in spiritualism, had just never before occurred to me.