The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

I dare to dream of a world where people can dress, speak and behave how they want, free from mockery, derision, judgement, harassment and danger. This is what I want. Who’s with me?

Remember this, whoever you are, however you are, you are equally valid, equally justified and equally beautiful.

Where we’re from, both the location and the environment we’ve stewed in, has a massive impact on the adults we become.

I sometimes wonder if people are so wary of transgender progress because we highlight how something we often consider carved in stone can be so easily manipulated.

Fame is Diet Love. It tastes like love and looks like love, but there’s zero per cent real love in it.

No panel, no scientist, no politician, not the WHO, no one can tell me – or you – how it feels to be male or female.

Trans people are a living reminder that something we steadfastly believe to be carved in stone (gender) is actually a very moveable feast.

When is it Straight Pride?’ ‘What day is International Men’s Day?’ ‘Where are our rights?’ cried people who have all the rights already.

There are no reported cases of trans women assaulting women or children in public bathrooms.

it implicitly suggests that women are at risk of harassment, rape and violence from trans women. This, quite clearly, is prejudice. Making sweeping, awful assumptions or accusations towards any minority group is prejudice.

A generation of young men who’ve always had access to high-quality streaming pornography and never had access to decent sex education at school.

Last year, Crystal Cash, a trans woman from the USA, was shot in the face by Christian extremists. She survived but is now unable to talk.

men are very much at risk of mental health issues and suicide,fn5 but I don’t think that’s the same thing as living in abject, constant fear.

They need to realise that by not actively acknowledging all women, they have themselves become oppressors.

It’s different when a woman compliments you to a man. She doesn’t want anything back from you.

none of us know how it ‘feels to be a man’ or how it ‘feels to be a woman’. We have only a unique, personalised experience of how it FEELS TO BE US.

mothers are still doing the lion’s share of parenting. There’s not a lot of good in trying to explicitly parent in a gender-neutral way when there’s nothing implicitly gender-neutral about the parenting.

study indicates that parents have different expectations for sons and daughters as early as twenty-four hours after birth.fn4

It takes a phenomenally brave child to continually defy Gender’s wishes. It also takes brave parents.

How often, when we tell children they are ‘being good’, do we mean they are blindly conforming?

Women may appear to have been ‘liberated’ from the kitchen sink fifty years ago, but we are yet to achieve anything even vaguely resembling equality.

In a world without socially defined gender rules, maybe no one would need to transition,

the World Health Organization (WHO) defines gender as ‘the result of socially constructed ideas about the behaviour, actions, and roles a particular sex performs.

Gender is not sex. Gender is something else.

people are so wary of transgender progress because we highlight how something we often consider carved in stone can be so easily manipulated

Any creative writing teacher worth their salt will tell you that a great story never starts at the beginning, it starts when something changes.

Even family favourite Lego has succumbed to Gender. In the non-pink section you can buy a Lego airport for £69. In the pink section you can buy a Lego Friends airport for £79. The only difference, you’ve guessed it, is that the Lego Friends airport is pink. IT IS AN AIRPORT.fn2 It was at that point, regrettably, I burned the store to the ground.

I think – as women – we can all agree on one thing: sometimes biology fucks us over. Those of us who can’t get pregnant – does that make a woman less of a woman? Women who choose IVF or surrogacy? Those of us who need mastectomies – less of a woman? Those of us (including me) on HRT – less womanly? I think I’m just one more woman who was royally fucked over by biology and now I’m in the process of putting that right.

So yeah, I personified Gender and made him some scary presence that lurks under every child’s bed, but actually, if you think about it, gender is no more corporeal than a bogeyman. It’s an abstract concept. If gender isn’t a real, solid thing we can reach out and touch, then why shouldn’t we be able to change it? All of us.