I am probably your least radical person. I am a middle of the road straightforward kind of gal who has always eschewed marches and civil actions. Not necessarily because I don’t care, but because I’m a bit cynical as to the way causes can get hijacked for other people’s agendas. So while I’m happy to sign petitions, you’re unlikely to find me on a march. And until a couple of years ago you’d find me in the main ducking out of contentious online arguments. Trying to have reasonable discussions with people during Brexit rather finished me off for online debate. However, that has all changed and today I find myself somewhat surprisingly, in the middle of one of the nastiest battlefields of the culture wars: the debates about gender and sexuality. As someone who is mainly non political it’s an odd place to find myself, but here’s how I got here.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but for the hard of hearing at the back, I am not transphobic. On the contrary, since I started thinking about such things, despite being gender conforming and straight I have always been fascinated with gender nonconformity and playing around with social role models. Perhaps because I grew up in the 80s when androgyny was playful and fun. You could like Grace Jones and Annie Lennox, as well as Debbie Harry. So Boy George wore his hair long and was lathered in make-up, hell those cute boys from Spandau Ballet wore eyeliner. It was a time when people felt free to express themselves through clothes, make-up and hair without spending hours debating what it told us about them. I don’t remember anyone taking it terribly seriously (and frankly why should they - I saw a clip of Spandau Ballet wearing tartan the other day and they looked utterly ridiculous, thought probably not to me at the time.)
Studying English at university, of course I read a lot of Shakespeare - gender bending is central to so many of his plays: from Portia fooling her lover Bassanio to dress as a male lawyer to save his best friend’s neck, to the love triangle in Twelfth Night, in which Olivia falls in love with Viola (dressed as a boy), who is in love with Orsino (unrequited as Orsino thinks she’s male) who in turn is in love with Olivia. It’s a hoot, and I’ve always got the feeling that Shakespeare loved fooling around with this stuff, particularly as the audiences in his day would have been in in the joke that the actors playing Portia and Viola would themselves both be boys playing women playing boys.
I enjoyed too, discovering Virginia Woolf’s sublime Orlando in which a noble born in Tudor times changes sex and travels through time. When I first read it, it never occurred to me to see it as being about a literal sex change - but more of a commentary about how life treats men and women so unequally. It’s funny and brilliant and I adore it still. But I don’t think it’s a trans novel. If anything it shows how life is unequal for the sexes. It’s not about how Orlando feels more of a woman than a man - because before he changes sex he doesn’t even think about how life is for women.
Back then, when I was young there was no such thing as transgender, but there were two distinct groups: transvestites, who were men who dressed up as women, and transsexuals, men who wanted to be women. I can’t remember anyone ever talking about women wanting to be men. Generally speaking, people thought a woman with short hair, wearing men’s clothing was probably a lesbian, thought it wasn’t always the case. And no one cared very much from what I remember. I always had huge sympathy with transexuals, especially those brave enough to have an operation and live as women. It seemed to me then and now, that it must a terrible thing to feel that the body you have doesn’t represent the person you truly are. That feeling hasn’t changed one iota.
What HAS changed of course is the nature of how we think about these issues.
I think I probably first became aware of how things had changed around ten years or so ago. I was in the car listening to a mum talking about her little boy who wanted to be a little girl. It was the first time I had heard anyone talk about puberty blockers, and the way she spoke about it seemed so reasonable. She pointed out that if a boy goes through puberty and then goes on cross hormones, he will have a male physique, and it will be harder for him to appear as a woman. I had never given it much thought and the whole tone of the conversation was very much about looking after the child and trying to do what was in that child’s best interest. There were a couple of kids in my childrens’ school who everyone thought were likely to be trans when they grew up, and I thought about what puberty blockers would mean for those children. I remained sympathetic, but I came to the conclusion that as a parent I would be very wary of putting my children on medication unnecessarily were I to be in that situation. (I remain extremely grateful that I never was, and that my children are now adults).
I am pretty sure the woman I was listening to was Susie Green of Mermaids’ fame. I didn’t know then, as I do know, that her husband didn’t like having an effeminate son, or that she would later take that son to Thailand to have a sex change operation. Had I done so, my sympathy towards her might have been somewhat reduced. Or maybe not. At that stage, I was still thinking along the lines of letting people get on with their own lives, and hoping that they didn’t encounter too much bigotry along the way.
I’m not quite sure when I started to change my viewpoint, but I think it might have been around the time Caitlin Jenner was declared Woman of the Year and started wittering on about make-up and heels, and people were fawning all over her telling her how wonderful she was. I don’t particularly have a beef with Caitlin Jenner, but also don’t think she deserved the Woman of the Year accolade when she’d only been one for about five minutes.
Then I noticed some conversations on Facebook about what was happening at Edinburgh University where at the time there seemed to be a lot of heated debate around the issue, and a certain lack of respect for anyone who dared to question the prevailing thinking. Around that period, I also had my first encounter with a TRA - I posted what I thought was a fairly inoffensive comment of support, but said something wrong, and was instantly blocked. Which was a bit of a WTF moment, but again, I didn’t give it too much thought apart from that. I just assumed the person in question was an intolerant young twat who would grow out of it.
How wrong I was…
It was becoming clear to me the more I read, that this was a very contentious issue, and it baffled me a bit to be honest. I genuinely don’t know anyone who cares whether someone is trans or not, any more than most people care about whether someone is gay or not. You live your life, I’ll live mine, is the motto I and most decent people tend to live by. However it was clearly causing heated debate, so when the Economist published a series of articles about both sides of the argument some years ago, I leapt on them and read them avidly. I found them both interesting and illuminating, but was struck by how much of the trans side of things seemed to be aggressive and uncompromising, while the other side seem a lot more reasonable.
Those articles led me to look up terms like the cotton ceiling and learn about the likes of Jessica Yaniv. And that’s when things started to unravel for me. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There were seriously people saying that lesbians should have sex with “women with penises”? There were people referring to themselves as “cocks with frocks”? It seemed, and still seems, to me that this was a seriously misogynistic & homophobic movement. That coupled with reading the stuff Mermaids was spouting at the time about “gendered brains”, also made me think it was deeply regressive. Why should a boy who likes pink automatically be deemed a girl and vice versa for a girl who likes blue? Weren’t we beyond all that crap? Seemingly not…
So that’s where I was around this time three years ago, and then, JK Rowling posted her #thisisnotadrill tweet, and everything fell into place for me. I had never heard of Maya Forstater. So I looked her up and was horrified to read what had happened to her. Reading Maya’s story led me to Allison Bailey. And from there to Sonia Appleby, Jean Hatchet, Jo Phoenix and many others. Everywhere I turned women were being harrassed, bullied and in worst case scenarios hounded out of their jobs for committing the crime of saying that a man could never become a woman. Apart from honourable exceptions like Graham Linehan, James Esses and James Dreyfus, I’d still say that’s the case today. It is mainly women who suffer for expressing concern, however mild, about this pernicious ideology. And it makes me mad as hell.
So here I am, three years on. I read and I listen and I learn from the many many women who have been involved in this fight far longer than I have. Like them I bear no hatred or bigotry towards trans people. Why should I? As I said at the beginning of this piece, I have always had immense sympathy for those who suffer body dysmorphia so badly they feel obliged to go through the whole shebang of hormones, operations etc. It must be horrendous.
But…what I believe is the following:
A man cannot become a woman nor a woman become a man. It isn’t physically possible, however many hormones you take/operations you have.
That it is vital that single sex spaces are kept for women. By all means have a third space where the sexes mix freely, but women need to know they are safe from men in toilets, changing rooms, hospitals, rape shelters and prisons. We all know it’s #notallmen but we don’t know who the dangerous ones are till they attack us, and that I’m afraid goes for TWs too. We know it’s #notalltranswomen, but we also know that predators have used the cover of being trans to gain access to vulnerable women in prison and in rape shelters. How are we to tell the difference?
The medical experiment that has been done on a generation of young people who should have had proper in depth therapy before ever going near a hormone, or under the knife will come to be seen as one of the great scandals of the 21st century, and generations to come will wonder how so many well meaning adults colluded with it.
There is no place for TWs in women’s sports - the advantages given them by undergoing puberty far outweigh any medication they are on. It’s hard enough for women in sport as it is. They shouldn’t have to lose spots to people with an inherent advantage.
This is a movement that is profoundly misogynistic (demanding women given up their hard fought freedoms and spaces for a small minority of men), homophobic (referring to gays and lesbians as “gender fetishists”) and racist ( claiming TWs are women in the way black women are women - as if black women are some other kind of sex class. They are not. They are women just as I am.)
So that’s my story. Despite being called a bigot by those who disagre with me, I don’t believe I am one. I want trans people to live their lives as we all should free of fear and bigotry and with dignity. But until we can have a proper nuanced conversation about these issues and resolve areas were the rights of different groups of people collide - a place I profoundly hope we can get to - I will be here, the serial non protestor, waving my banner for women and girls.
If you don't believe a man can become a woman then don't refer to Caitlyn Jenner as 'she'. He is and always will be a man.