I was more free

Notes on gender

When I was growing up in Belfast in the 90s and 00s there were all these unspoken rules for what girls were supposed to be like. And they were so arbitrary. You weren’t supposed to be very good at subjects like physics and maths, for example. You could be pretty good. But there was a limit and you could actually attract quite a lot of aggression if you sat outside this. 

And if you were good at those things you weren’t supposed to like things like makeup and fake tan or going on nights out. That was just too many different types of person folded into one girl. It wouldn’t compute for people, for whatever reason, it made them angry. I still don’t really know why. 

You absolutely weren’t supposed to enjoy having sex, and that was very heavily policed. One of the most shameful things you could do as a girl back then was anything which proved you enjoyed having sex or were trying to solicit sex. If you sent a suggestive photo to someone or you engaged in a sex act with someone you weren’t in a relationship with, or even sometimes with someone you were, then everyone would start talking about you and you would probably be socially ostracised by the entire year group, and maybe the years above and below for good measure.    

I remember, still, reading an Alan Moore comic book, Watchmen, when I was about 14 I think. And one of the characters was a very horny teenage girl who fantasises about having sex with (I think) a blue man and I actually felt so relieved. I suppose I would now see it as “representation” (ha). At the time I was so grateful that Moore, this bearded old man, understood what it was really like, instead of just how we were supposed to be. 

There were other arbitrary rules like this too. And, like a lot of girls at that time, I felt so constrained by my environment, without even being able to put language to how I felt. Which, in hindsight, I think was further constraining still. I had that nameless sense of angst and dislocation and I had no idea what to do with it. That didn’t end so badly or anything. I found all the music that teenagers who feel like that tend to find, I found alcohol and later drugs, older men. I shoplifted. I was often deeply happy, but everything turned out fine.    

I basically went along with all the arbitrary rules. It was important to me to be desirable to the boys in my environment, even if I didn’t find them attractive, it felt important that they saw me that way. I still don’t know why. It was very important to not be weird or freakish.

Then I went to Manchester for university (maths and physics, how weird) and I found dance music and through that I guess I started spending time in more queer scenes, and more and more time in those scenes. Now most of my social life is made up of queer or trans or gender non conforming people. Suddenly I looked around and, without noticing it was happening, many of those arbitrary rules about girls and women which I had been accustomed to had fallen out of my life. I was more free. 

This was not a conscious decision but maybe I subconsciously did seek out spaces where I felt it was fine to be a bit weird. I honestly don’t know. I have noticed over the years that there are certain scenes, like art or fashion or hardcore partying which always seem to skew way more queer. I don’t know why this is actually, maybe it is simply social conditioning. There were a handful of girls on my university course and almost 300 men, I think because we had all been so conditioned to think this was not a space for women. Perhaps it is true, too, that straight men are simply conditioned to think there is no place for them in fashion. It is very hard to untangle our genuine desires from what we have been conditioned to think we should be like. These stereotypes creep in everywhere like vines, slyly tying us all down in different ways. 

This is not a story about a woman who felt out of place as a woman and then realised she felt fine being a woman. I notice terfs use stories like this sometimes to try to prove either that trans people don’t exist, or that people who think they are trans are likely to often be wrong. I thought I was a cis hetero woman and I still think that (sometimes me and my friends joke that I’m a straight woman of gay man experience). 

I felt constrained by the way I was supposed to act but I never felt that I was not a woman. I don’t know what that feels like, but I have no doubt that the feeling exists. There are so many elements of other people’s internal lives which I have no experience of myself. Likewise there is so much of myself I cannot convey to other people, only try and often fail to explain. But part of being a person is trusting that the complexity we recognise innately in ourselves has a parallel in those around us. If someone tells me she is a woman, I believe her. Afterall, don’t I expect the same grace to be extended to me, about all manner of aspects of myself? 

One of the issues with the discourse around trans people and gender in general is that we are talking about complicated elements of subjective experience, and I believe we often do not have adequate language to express the things we are talking about. In a better society I feel we would accept that we don’t actually understand gender fully, and we perhaps never will. In the one we live in we are trapped in an endless culture war full of myths and lies spread for the purpose of denying basic human rights to trans people, an already very marginalised group.  

Remember there is no societal incentive to be trans. Basically the whole world tells you not to be. But isn’t it beautiful that some people know themselves so well they do it anyway? I think that says something amazing about the human spirit. 

The failures of language are a key component of these myths too. For example, another kind of story you will often hear from terfs is one about, say, a child who simply told their parents they preferred girl toys to boy toys and then was instantly taken to a doctor to transition. This ignores the reality of the difficulty of accessing gender affirming health care in the UK, of course. But there is something else in here too. 

Parents who have a good relationship with their children have a means of communicating which can be hard to capture in language. They understand each other. We can all recognise this I think, we all have people in our lives who we connect with strongly because we know they understand us, without us having to explain ourselves precisely. If a parent who spends all their time with their child understands the child is in pain, this may not be only because of things the child has said in words.  

I thought I would write this because I have been thinking recently about how much my understanding of all of these things (gender, sexuality) has changed over the years. And because I feel like all those rules about what it means to be a woman which I have seen fall away from my life, because of the circles I inhabit, have not fallen away in the world in general. Sometimes I am reminded of this, when I experience a clash between how the world sees me and how I see myself. The main harm terfs do is to trans people of course. But I feel they are holding everyone else back too. 

I think it is important to say this because there seems to be an idea among terfs that there is a finite amount of freedom, and that if trans women get more, cis women will naturally have less. As if a kind of force field mediates this. I think it is useful to address this because people are selfish and it is simply not realistic to say to anyone “improving this group's life is going to make yours worse and you just have to put up with it” and expect that to be met with acceptance. But it’s not true that there is a finite amount of freedom. 

My experience of accepting the aspects of gender and sexuality that I don't experience for myself as a reality, and trying to understand these experiences better, is that doing so has made my own life so much bigger. It has made me happier, more free, more myself. I guess I feel like my idea of what a woman can be, what I can be, has changed in the process, and probably will keep changing.

Recently, for example, I had a conversation with a trans friend about what it feels like to have sex before and after they began taking a certain hormone supplement. I found it so interesting, I felt I understood sex and desire so much better after the conversation, what it means to men, what it means to women. It is the kind of thing I think people in general would learn a lot from knowing, but I would never expect a trans person to, say, write about this in the current climate. I think we all lose so much when any group cannot speak honestly about the reality of their lives for fear of persecution. (I’m a novelist, I really do believe in the importance of really understanding other people’s realities.)

I am very grateful for how much my life has changed over the past decade or so, and I wish everyone could have the same. Maybe we could one day we will, if we open ourselves to it. The world can become bigger instead of smaller. 

It is tricky to write about this because it is impossible to cover every aspect of this topic, I haven’t done that here. And it is hard to say anything new, I haven’t done that here either. But I had been thinking and talking about all this a lot and I feel it is useful to write things down clearly sometimes. 

Till next time xxxx