“Awkward timing at the Woman of the Future awards with Jack Monroe surprised with a prize”, read the diary in Wednesday’s London Evening Standard. “The problem? Last week Jack came out as transgender …” But my award wasn’t just awkward for the writer. I can normally tell the trolls from the satire and the genuinely ignorant, but after scrolling through 24 hours of social media screeching about how I “stole an award from a real woman”, I’m not so sure: there seemed to be a consensus among the discontented that I shouldn’t have accepted it.
But to reject that award would have been to reject a decision made by a panel of men and women, all media savvy and informed of my decision to come out. It would have been disingenuous. I am the same person I was when Sandi Toksvig gave me a Woman of the Year award in 2014. Should I hand them all back?
I’m probably never going to get another “women’s award”. But in the same way my birth certificate says “female”, my previous awards say “woman”. That doesn’t cause me any great trauma, so why does it bother anyone else?
When the news was leaked earlier this year that Caitlyn Jenner would be sharing Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year” cover with Reese Witherspoon, the chatterati erupted. Germaine Greer defined womanhood as having a “big hairy smelly vagina”. Ladies with sparse or no pubic hair, or lacking a degree of “smelly” – get to the back of the womanhood queue: according to the great feminist icon, your genitals betray your gender.
One Twitter user told me that “you have a working reproductive system so you are a woman”. By that logic, women who cannot reproduce; who have had hysterectomies, like my mum; who have ovarian cancer, like my friend; or the many thousands in need of fertility treatment – they are somehow not considered real women because apparently real women have working reproductive systems. The arguments against self-defined gender are weak, ghastly and easy to pick apart.
According to some people on Mumsnet, I am a “traitor to my gender” and “decimating my body” by considering top surgery .They must have said the same thing to Angelina Jolie when she had a pre-emptive double mastectomy – and yes, breast cancer is rife in my family history, and part of the reason behind my decision to reduce my large and unwieldy tits. Why does making them smaller make me a traitor to women, when pumping them full of silicone wouldn’t elicit the same pearl-clutching response? I am not my bra size.
The trolls and naysayers can’t have it both ways. The bigoted arguments for denying Jenner a women’s award – namely that she was assigned male at birth – are surely the same defence of me collecting mine. But there is no real argument, other than a thin veneer of conservatism and dinosaur-matriarchy covering a hideous transphobia. The core of the “Caitlyn Jenner and Jack Monroe shouldn’t get women’s awards” arguments is that neither of us are “women”. You can’t have it both ways. Both these awards were decided by people who just maybe recognise that being a woman is more than a set of chromosomes.
So where do I fit in? Why do we segregate awards by gender anyway? Or children’s clothing? Aren’t we all a bit “non-binary” inside? In rejecting my “female” gender, I am not enforcing binary stereotypes, but asking why the hell we have them in the first place. My descriptions of my childhood experiences of pinkness and dresses making me uncomfortable may have been clunky, but they were the recollections of a child, unsettled by yet another pair of pink jelly shoes or plastic high heels, looking longingly at her brother’s Meccano set and wondering why she couldn’t have one. We are conditioned from birth to slot into a gender box. I’m trying to hurl it out of the window.
I don’t know if John Bercow has ever had dinner with a lesbian-turned-transguy before, but he applauded my speech loudly and giggled at the one-liners. Peers and MPs congratulated me for helping them understand a bit better. If that goes some tiny way to changing the way that transgender people are vilified by our current government, then that makes all the brouhaha and trolling worth it. You don’t change the world solely by changing legislation - you also put personal testimony in the firing line and open hearts and minds. For a greater understanding and to break through barriers and social constructs, it’s the only way I know.
No amount of testosterone or top surgery will erase being catcalled out of car windows while walking to school in my uniform. Being called a slut as I walked home from school. Being pinned to a sofa and repeatedly sexually assaulted in my early 20s by a man that I thought was my friend. Being uninvited from family weddings for refusing to wear a dress. Being hit across the head by a man who followed me and my friends home from Girls’ Brigade one night and sexually propositioned us.
I am not denying that I was raised a girl and then a woman. My parents always told me I could be whoever I want to be – prime minister, I used to joke. Now, I just want to be myself. Flatter-chested, a bit stronger in the arms and shoulders, and able to pass for a “young man” on public transport. I could still do that as a butch lesbian, but it doesn’t fit.
If this threatens you, go and have a long hard look at yourself and ask why my ovaries-and-testosterone combo makes you so uncomfortable, or why the contents of Caitlyn Jenner’s knickers is any of your goddamn business; and go check out Conchita Wurst’s fashion advert while you’re there. Gender constructs need to be deconstructed, for all of our sakes – that’s feminism, and I’m not waiting around for Germaine Greer to catch up with us all to do it.
