As it’s Pride month, I thought I’d finally work up the courage to post this newsletter!

Solidarity and love to the LGBTQ+ community. Trans rights are human rights.

It’s innate. For some, it’s ineffable. For others, it is easy to express. That’s the thing with gender, it is personal to you. Because it’s your identity, and yours alone.

No one else sees through your eyes. No one else can see your thoughts. No one else can experience what it feels like to be you and to live your life.

(I genuinely believe in the maxim of ‘Do not harm. Take no shit.’ I struggle to see how anyone can justify behaviour that harms another person who is just trying to live their life in peace. But that is a post for another day.)

I have never understood gender or the binary.

I am just me. I am both all and nothing.

I have tried to articulate this since I became aware of the gendered lines drawn around me.

Why are you making me sit like this? Speak like this? Behave like this?

Why is what I am doing ‘wrong’?

What is so weird about being a ‘tomboy’?

There it is, that word. Like ‘shy’, the word ‘tomboy’ followed me around wherever I went as a kid.

I climbed trees. I loved football. I dug for worms. I must be a ‘tomboy’.

The word ‘tomboy’ is supposed to describe a person assigned female at birth who demonstrates stereotypically masculine traits, behaviours and preferences. The usage of ‘tomboy’, at least in the 90s, also suggested that this person was a cis girl and she’d just grow out of it.

It’s just a phase.

My UK readers might remember a TV show in the 00s called, cringingly, ‘Ladette to Lady’. That title really encapsulates the attitude of the time - that the apex a woman should aspire to reach is femininity. Why are you being silly and acting like a man, you ladette?

‘Tomboy’ was the junior version of ‘ladette’, at least that’s how it felt to me. When someone would call me a ‘tomboy’, it would always be accompanied with a giggle, or a raised eyebrow, or some sort of micro-action that suggested ‘This kid isn’t right.’

I grew up in Northern England in the 90s. Homophobia was both overt and covert. I say homophobia, because the fear behind the ‘tomboy’ label, ultimately, was the fear that you were a lesbian (heaven forbid). Never was it a fear that you didn’t feel like you were the gender everyone said you were. That line of thinking was viewed as absurd in those days. The only people our community knew who pushed against any kind of gender norms were usually drag queens like Lily Savage. But that was on television, not real life. There were no people like that in our community, or so the community thought (and the ‘people’ in question wouldn’t have been referred to as ‘people’ but as a slur. You can guess.)

For context, I had friends growing up whose parents wouldn't allow them to watch TV programmes presented by Lily Savage, or even Paul O’Grady when he was out of drag, because drag, they thought, was ‘an abomination’.

Gender as a subject was simply never discussed, so all I had was my innate sense of who I was and no words to give it meaning. All I knew was that I wasn’t who everyone kept saying I was.

‘Tomboy’ be damned.

As a child you’re the most undiluted expression of yourself, until the expectations of those around you chip different bits of you away, carving you up like a sculptor would do to a statue. Unless you are strong enough and resilient enough to hold firm. Unless you were lucky enough to know yourself early and cling to your truth while weathering the storms of life.

Before anyone chips anything away from you, you’re the full size, technicolour, 4D version of you. However long that lasts.

I spent a really long time trying to be someone I thought I should be. To do this was to deny what I have always known myself to be.

I know, innately. I have always known.

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