The gender spectrum – a commentary

Perhaps I should start by saying this is not an authoritative piece of academic research. It’s a little bit of brought together experience and observation and learning. If the reader thinks I’m wrong, or missing the point, comments in the comments section below will be welcomed.

As a child growing up in the 60’s and 70’s I remember comedians in particular “cross dressing”, as it was called then, and seeing and hearing about (again, to use the word of the times) “transvestites”, mostly men who sometimes or always dressed as women. It wasn’t something women did. Or maybe they did, but they were just ‘invisible’. Despite the women’s emancipation (another word of the times) movement, it was still a man’s world, a patriarchal society, so of course women would want to emulate men, who were, after all, the holders of power and authority. Men, ‘real men’, couldn’t understand why any man would want to give up that power and authority to be a woman. And so transgender was largely seen by the majority as a one way traffic issue.

Homosexuality and, by extension, some form of transgenderism, has existed throughout history. From at least the Ancient Greeks, known for their homosexual practices, to what is now considered to be the myth of “Pope Joan”, elected Pope in AD.855, to the post-war women’s fashions of the 1920’s, and the expression of sexual and gender preferences through literature and arts, whether in the writings of Shakespeare (1564-1616) or children’s literature with Enid Blyton’s 1940’s Famous Five character George. The khwaja sira communities of Pakistan are a long standing community of transgender, homosexual and lesbian people rejected by their families, going back hundreds of years.

Susan Stryker in her book Transgender History (2008/2017, Seal Press, Hachette Book Group, New York) covers the development of the transgender movement, in particular from the mid 1800’s when the existence of transgender roles became much more apparent, in much more detail, albeit from a US perspective. 

One thing that is consistent across cultures is the consistency of certain social, political, industrial, medical and economical developments that have been important in the separation of understanding of homosexuality and transgender since the mid 1800’s. In particular industrialisation had brought more people together in towns and cities, away from their families and smaller communities, that allowed for more freedom of expression, just as industrialisation brought about improvements in printing, which was now easier, faster and more economical than it had been. It was now easier for people who, in their home town would be considered ‘different’, maybe even outcasts, to communicate and meet and find others they could better relate to. Better communication was already helping spread political and social change even before the internet.

Like teenagers who think they know more than their parents, it seems every generation is advancing the causes of society and civilisation, when in reality there is very little that is different today than there has been over millennia when it comes to human behaviour and relationships. Tolerance comes and goes. As do suppression and repression. Often in different places at different times. What is different in our generation is the globalisation of communication and our knowledge and understanding of what is happening not just in our small world but in the bigger world. Patterns of language change more quickly. 

Samantha Shannon, writing in the Guardian in early 2017, covers some of this in her article The literary tomboy is dead – or is she? The complexities of modern understanding of sex and gender no longer tolerate such stereotypes, or, as Shannon puts it: As language around gender has become more precise and nuanced, the tomboy seems more and more outdated. Shannon tells us: The word “tomboy” in the sense we understand it now – “girl who acts like a spirited boy” – was first used in 1592. Before that, it was a pejorative label for a “bold or immodest woman”. Earlier still, it described a “rude, boisterous boy”.

Shannon uses examples of characters from history to illustrate just how different a “tomboy” could be. Such as Enid Blyton’s character Master George featured in her Famous five books from the early 1940’s. And in 1928 Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness was published, with her female character, this time a lesbian. In the 1860’s novel Little Women the character Jo March could be described a “tomboy”, although she later married and had children. And Viola from Twelfth Night. From more modern literature Game of Thrones character Arya Stark. 

All these characters are very different, making it hard to see how one word, whether “tomboy” or transgender could cover them all. To cope with these differences the current modern transgender movement has come up with a whole new words, new descriptions, a more nuanced lexicon. 

In 1966 the medical community recognised and classified fledgling transgender identities through the sex orientation scale, before Gender Identity Disorder (later Gender Dysphoria) was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) III in 1980. (Wikipedia)

When I was a child growing up in a small town in England, it seemed that homosexuals and “transvestites” were largely seen as unusual and harmless. If we laughed at them it was because they seemed to invite us to from our television screens, with comedians such as Danny La Rue and Dick Emery, or Kenneth Williams in the blatantly ‘camp’ Carry On films. Quentin Crisp was a curious character, a man unto himself, who appeared from time to time in the news. And then glam rock filled our screens on Thursday night’s Top of the Pops, with rumours of sexual experimentation, led by stars such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Only with lyrics such as “and he was a she” in the darker hit Lola in 1970 was there a hint at a sub-culture not otherwise known out in suburbia. Transgender was not yet a ‘thing’.

But for all that there were tensions. In 1984, when one small Lesbian & Gay Rights group from London wanted to support the striking miners, they were met with fear and prejudice, but their determination to help, from one oppressed group to another, broke down barriers such that for the first time ever the powerful miners’ unions turned to support gay rights, changing political history. Their story brilliantly and heartbreakingly told in the 2014 film Pride. 

It was only in the mid to late 1980’s that transgender issues began to be included in the Lesbian & Gary Rights movement, and LGB became LGBT. Or as Susan Stryker says (presumably in the original manuscript in 2008), “Transgender is a word that has come into widespread use only in the past couple of decades, and its meaning is still under construction.” It’s not a new phenomenon, but it is still evolving.

Now, in 2023/24 it seems that transgender has in recent years moved to the forefront of the LGBTQ+ movement, that has inspired an aggressive explosion of counter-campaigning. Compassion seems to have gone out of the window. And with that a genuine understanding of what makes up this hugely complex sphere of humanity, met instead with aggressive ridicule. Ridicule of course is a fear response, but nobody seems to be saying that. As I write today it feels as if the whole debate has narrowed down to choice of pronoun, at least outside the transgender community.

The aggressive explosion of counter-campaigning is not without cause in some instances, and the transgender community is going to have to help counter those causes. Cis-gender women get worried by transgender women who behave in what appears to be an aggressively male manner in demanding women’s rights to use women only toilets. Those cis-gender women fear that these ‘men’ are seeking to gain access to what should be safe spaces for women in order to attack or rape them. Similarly, there have been cases of transgender sportswomen whose former male prowess is seen as giving them an unfair advantage in their sport, undermining the very existence of women’s sports. Whilst it might seem fairly extreme to go through changing gender identity, there are undoubtedly a small minority of people willing to take extreme measures to achieve their goals, whether that is power, wealth or fame, and the transgender community is not immune from infiltration. It may seem unlikely but it cannot be discounted. And so these are real concerns. The transgender community needs to be a part of helping the rest of society in dealing with these issues.

At this point, let me say a little about my own position. I was born a little girl, but I didn’t like girls much. They created exclusive little friendships, fell out, were nasty to each other, bullying, sending people they didn’t like to Coventry for no good reason, carried grievances and grudges and had silly little rules that made no sense. Boys just fought and got over it. I preferred boys. They made more sense. And I found boys to be nicer and more interesting people, and nicer company to be in. I would quite liked to have been a boy. My fear is that in today’s society I would have been labelled transgender and pushed down a path that would have been wrong for me. However, my experience does give me an empathy for those who are struggling with their gender identity. It also leaves me with a fear for the young people who are uncertain about their sexuality or gender. Uncertainty is a part of growing up. So too is the need to conform. And that may lead to conforming to someone else’s reality before you are fully confident of your own. It is the one point on which I support the anti-trans campaigners.

The reality is, transgender is not a modern phenomenon. It crosses millennia, race, culture and, whether some in the modern women’s movement like it or not, it is intersectional. And far from clear cut. What is modern is what appears to be an explosion of transgender identities. It is as if we can no longer live with natural human variance. The boundaries of ‘normal’ have been getting increasingly narrow. It is this apparent explosion of almost pandemic proportions in the incidences of young people identifying as transgender that I hope to explore a bit more in another blog later on.

Explanations of different gender identities can be found in numerous places. The obvious place to start is with the LGBTQ+ community, where there are numerous sites to be found and take as an example, reflecting what is still an evolving movement. Maybe not at the forefront of evolving language and terminology, medical websites such as Medical News Today, or healthline, along with that old favourite, Wikipedia, can be useful for the layperson to find lists of categories and sub-categories and related terms (such as AFAB, assigned female at birth), as long as the reader understands that no matter how long the list it cannot be definitive: the healthline description of “gender apathetic” is elsewhere called “graygender“, a term first coined in 2014. It’s an evolving language. Although it is also an evolving string of letters as the names and acronyms increase, giving rise to critics using the term ‘alphabet soup’ to further deride the movement. 

Yet to read much of our current social media, and even some of our mainstream media, it seems as if it has narrowed down to a choice of pronoun, something to be mocked. After all, if you don’t understand something, why not laugh at it. Easier than trying to understand it – easier than showing compassion and acceptance. Sexuality and gender identity are not the same.