In the beginning....

On one of the websites I’ve been reading this week the question has been raised; ‘when did you first realise you were a feminist or interested in feminist issues?’ My thoughts were too long to post, so I thought it would make a good blog. Here then, is my response to that:

One of the most seminal moments of my childhood came a few days before my seventh birthday. My parents sat me down and told me that, no, however much I nagged, this year (or any year) they weren’t prepared to buy me a sex change so I could be ‘the same’ as my brother and my best friend James. Neither were they, they insisted, prepared to call the depoll office (like I had researched) and change their daughters’ lovely and feminine hand picked name to ‘Jamie’. They were very nice about it, very reasonable. They suggested that I could have a very trendy Walkman instead, or even, (holy grail of holy grails) a tent. But a sex change? Out of the question. Anyway, why did I get these silly notions in my head? I was a girl, their little girl, and I had to get used to it. They loved me just the way I was. It was the way God had made me. Now go and play football with your brother.

It was all fairly harmless really. I don’t identify as a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body,’ or anything like that, I never desperately wanted a penis for it’s own sake or hated my physical appearance. My militant rejection of my gender was something, (as predicted by mum and dad) that I did eventually grow out of. I am not talking to you now harboring secret longings to be called Gerard with a beer gut and a big bushy beard. I am glad my parents reacted the way they did and didn’t hall me off to a psychiatrist or God forbid, the plastic surgery clinic I wanted.

But I understand gender confusion, I really do. This sex change notion was not a silly week long whim, it was part of my long term struggle to accept the fact that I was female. From being a toddler to about the age of puberty at 13 I was a diehard tomboy, complete with short hair, grazed knees and a firm anti dolls, dresses, makeup, fashion, boy bands, ponies, ballet and shopping policy (that mostly continues to this day). I refused to take part in girlie things at school; poured scorn on the daisy chain and skipping brigade and hung around mainly with the boys. I cried for days when they refused to let me, as a girl, into cub scouts with all my male friends (a policy that has rightfully been rectified). My childhood, when I wasn’t obsessively reading, consisted of endless hours of war games, cowboys and Indians, kung Fu fighting, football, water fights, den building, cops and robbers, etc. I just couldn’t identify with sitting and looking pretty or brushing your hair for fun (in fact, brushing your hair was stupid full stop). Playing ‘house’ or ‘mummies and daddies’ was equally pointless, I had a perfectly good house and a mummy and daddy. Come to think of it, they were both pretty boring. My idea of a good time was dissecting a dead frog in the road with the scalpel from my microscope set. Or playing a penalty shoot out with my two brothers until the sun went down and we all went inside to have a burger eating competition.

I was very strong willed, and wouldn’t do anything that compromised my ‘tomboy’ label, even if it meant putting up with bullying and abuse at school. Even if it meant I spent a lot of time feeling confused and alone. Aged nine I went as far as putting in a formal complaint to the school office against one of the dinnerladies who told me I was unladylike and had to wear a t shirt when playing football- it wouldn’t do to have me topless like all the boys in the summer heat. I said (in my terribly precocious manner) that it was discrimination against tomboys, and I didn’t tell her what to wear so she should ‘stuff off’. I think my punishment was being forbidden to play football for a week, topless or not. No one ever sides with the kids.

At the age of about eleven, I started to deduce that my problems with being a girl were not to do with myself. My issue was not my relationship to my newly discovered clitoris, my widening hips, budding breasts, or even my personality. Essentially it was with other people. This was a major epiphany that brought massive relief. It wasn’t, therefore, disgust at what I was but at what society expected me to be. It was (although I didn’t think of it in this precise terminology) the gender role I was so naturally horrified by, the heavy expectations put on little girls to be a certain way, to like certain things, to be quiet and pretty and demure. I don’t know whether it was nature or nurture that made me this way, but I certainly am not quiet, demure or even very pretty. As a child I was boisterous, opinionated, intelligent and passionate and didn’t see why I should strive to be someone I wasn’t just because it was the done thing. Yes, I realised, it was people’s attitudes that needed to alter, not me. A sex change was not the answer. Feminism, even though I’d never heard of it back then, certainly was.

I always instinctively identified with the suffragettes and women’s libbers I had heard about in history but I didn’t know a lot about them. I certainly didn’t know that there was a contemporary movement. Then, when I was twelve or thirteen I made the wonderful discovery that was the Independent on Sunday. From my weekly cover to cover readathons, I soon got a basic handle on this controversial movement called feminism. I found, through the printed words of feminist journalists and writers that I was far from the only one who had wrestled with gender issues; I wasn’t the first who had rebelled. I studied hard and learnt important words that tripped off my tongue like bullets; patriarchy, oppression, liberation, sisterhood. As I learnt about the issues involved and the historic depth of female suffering I sometimes sat under my favourite tree in the back garden and cried at the unfairness of it all. On other days I sometimes laughed out loud from the sheer joy of having found kindred spirits; even if I was still a freak at school, there was a sisterhood of women out there, who, like me, wouldn’t be put in a box and told to shut up. They were inspirational, radical, empowering, a godsend to my troubled mind. I don’t even really remember most of their names now even though I would keep cuttings of their articles in a special box under my bed and read them with utmost devotion. Although they are forgotten to me now, the point is that these women existed; I was not alone. I might have been the only girl at my school with short hair and a Sheffield Wednesday obsession, but there had been others before me who broke the mold.

I was, by the age of about fourteen, a committed feminist. Discovering the movement was such a relief to me, I have always been proud to identify with it and its history, even the bits that are troubling or difficult. I believe wholeheartedly in Feminism’s essential truths and I devour any information relating to it with great interest and urgency. As a writer, I have always written about feminist issues (and sometimes struggled with them at great length). I have tried to contribute to the movement in any way I can; encouraging other women to see both the wonderful things we have achieved and the massive mountain we still have to climb. Feminism, for me, was an instinctual thing. I have such a strong sense of equality, diversity and fair play, and such a healthy sense of rebellion that I could never see the world in any other way. For me, it wasn’t like I had a feminist epiphany where I read Germaine Greer and my life turned around. It was more like I would read feminists and think, ‘yeah, I think that too’. Discovering the feminist movement was like a homecoming, it gave me a supportive, nurturing space to put down roots so I could grow proudly into myself, my female self, and gradually out of Jamie.