Category: Gender

Sam Smith has confused me.

After reading this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49688123 I foolishly googled gender, so it’s my own fault really. I’m not so out of touch that I wasn’t prepared to discover there are more than two – but I was still taken aback at just how many more than two there (allegedly) are.

This isn’t one of those “there were only two in the old days, modern life is silly, bloody snowflakes, etc” trips, and I’m not going all “fings ain’t what they used to be” either. But when one site is listing twenty or more genders (the BBC is citing “more than a hundred”) I’m left scratching my head in bewilderment.

Actually, though, you know what, that’s fine. It’s fine. I mean, don’t we all just want to be allowed to get on with our lives in peace? So, if Sam Smith wants to be a ‘they’ from now on, that’s fine. Up to a point.

It’s both a very easy and a very difficult move for somebody in the entertainment industry, in the public eye. I’m not saying Smith walking up the red carpet in high heels wouldn’t attract some comment, but it would be less inflammatory than some chartered accountant doing the same thing at the annual Hemel Hempstead Dinner Dance. So that’s easier.

On the other hand, given that the announcement has made the news in a way that a random tweet from an unknown home counties bean counter wouldn’t, it’s a brave move. Because if anybody now uses the wrong pronoun in respect of Sam Smith, chances are that it is deliberate rather than accidental. Meaning every time, the decision on whether or not to call people out on it. Sounds exhausting.

But…

Smith is quoted as saying, “I’m not male or female” and “I do think like a woman sometimes” but… how can Smith possibly know that? Surely we only ever feel what we feel. It’s like debating the colour of a post box – we all call it pillar box red, but we can’t ever be certain that we are all seeing the same colour. Similarly, how can anybody know that what they’re feeling is ‘different’ to feeling like a ‘normal’ male or female?

Depending on your point of view, I’m lucky or uninformed or just plain dull, in that I’m male in both anatomy and inclination and, in as far as I would ever feel the need to use this sentence (which is never so far) I identify as male. But I can’t definitively say that what I feel when I say I feel male, is what anybody else would call male if they felt it.

There’s another, niggling element to this. You can only have a vast range of genders on the spectrum IF at either extreme you have ‘full male’ and ‘full female’. We’ve spent I-don’t-know-how-many decades striving for equality, evangelising that women can go out to work and drink in pubs and that men can look after babies and cry at musicals. But you can’t agree with that AND have a strict ‘this is what it means to be male/female’ as a benchmark on the gender scale… and if you don’t have that, if being male (or female) can be anything from a boxer to a flower arranger, then you don’t need any other genders.

Once you have a hundred labels for something they start to become meaningless. Not to mention nonsensical. If I was a teenage girl with a picture of Sam Smith, the object of my teenage affection, on my bedroom wall, then this time last week I’d have been comfortable in my heterosexuality. But now, suddenly, I fancy somebody who isn’t male. Does that mean I’m now something else too…? No. Of course not. Because, sorry, but that’s clearly nonsense.

If I’m honest it makes my head spin just trying to get a handle on it all. The only real certainty is that it’s very, very complicated. So who knows, maybe the BBC is right. Maybe Sam Smith is right too.

I think they are wrong.

The story that has caused the most debate, and prompted the most questions, in our lunchtime chats at work this week has undoubtedly been the transgender man in America who has given birth.

Our initial surprise was mainly around the mechanics of it; or rather the discovery that having transitioned, the guy in question was (still) able to ovulate and conceive. Given that the object of the exercise was to become male, that doesn’t sound like it’s been entirely successful.

To be honest, the whole issue of identity confuses me and it sometimes feels, with stories such as this, that it is continually getting more and more complicated. I can grasp the concept of feeling like you are, as they used to say, a man stuck inside a woman’s body (or vice versa) but still, it’s an extraordinary degree of certainty to have, and that continues to amaze me. I don’t off the top of my head recall ever being that certain about anything – there have been so many occasions when even the things I thought I knew turned out to be incorrect that, frankly, I feel I’m only ever a heartbeat away from a QI-style ‘WRONG’ klaxon going off behind me. Maybe with identity it’s so innate, such a fundamental assurance, that it’s impossible to understand unless you’ve experienced it?

But sexual preference is where things seem to get ‘and more’ complicated. If, for example, I was born male but felt that I was (a) a woman trapped inside a man’s body; and (b) was attracted to women; and was (c) therefore a lesbian in need of a sex change operation – how would I know that, actually, I wasn’t simply (a) a man; and (b) was attracted to women; and (c) therefore heterosexual. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m sure there IS an answer – but it’s all a bit of a minefield because unfortunately we have (in a well-intentioned but short-sighted way) ended up in a place where nobody dares ask the question for fear of causing offence.

Going back to the transgender man who got pregnant though… Presumably that person prior to transition (pronouns are so difficult nowadays aren’t they – could I have said ‘she’ there, or would that be wrong?) presumably they felt certain that they ought to have been born a man. They’ve gone through what I have to assume is a painful and exhausting process, physically and mentally. And after all that, he hasn’t actually achieved what he set out to do, has he?

To be ‘a man’ may mean many, many things but it certainly doesn’t mean being able to get pregnant. And I can’t help but wonder… If he ‘enjoyed’ being pregnant so much and responded so positively to the whole experience… If he’s not actually ready to give that up, is he in fact also (or still) wanting to be a woman?

I guess only he can know that, and really it’s nobody else’s business. But there is a wider question, given that this can happen. Namely, is the next step for people to actively request it? There’s a big difference, an important difference, between a transitioned male who still retains the female organs to (from the news story) accidentally fall pregnant – and somebody wanting to transition into a male but also requesting that they retain the ability to become pregnant. That’s wanting to have your cake and eat it, plain and simple – or, less flippantly, it undermines the fundamental driving force that the person in question feels they should have been born a man rather than a woman.

These are big issues, baffling and confusing ones. They shouldn’t be scary, and they certainly shouldn’t be any reason for violence or abuse or prejudice or stigma. We have the ‘technology’ to make these changes now, to do something about what a century ago could only ever remain a feeling or an urge or a longing; but we don’t yet seem to have the language to go with our capabilities. Nor does it feel like we have the most important thing: the sense, and the freedom, to talk about it.

I’ve put a new plug on our hoover.

That maybe doesn’t sound like anything worth getting excited about, but it’s not something I do every day. This is only the third time I’ve ever done it (and one of those times was in a school science lesson entitled ‘How To Wire A Plug’ so I’m not sure that even counts).

In my defence, nothing nowadays seems to come without a plug already attached. I know that once upon a time all electrical appliances came sans plug (in much the same way that a lot of gadgets still come ‘batteries not included’) but thankfully we live in more enlightened times, meaning that when we bought it, our hoover came with a moulded plug already wired in so that we could plug and play (well, plug and hoover) as soon as we got it home.

Until I stood on it.

This isn’t the first plug I’ve stood on, I clearly remember as a child standing on the pins-upward plug of a steam iron. On that occasion the plug won, it remained fully intact while I had a bleeding foot with a flap of skin hanging off it. Four decades on, it was a very different story – our hoover plug came off a definite second, its topmost pin coming clean off, while I’m pleased to report I suffered no injury whatsoever.

Of course, it was a pyrrhic victory, because it rendered the plug, and by extension the hoover, non-functional. Which is where I came in, fitting a new plug.

I was able to find a You Tube video showing exactly how to do it, from cutting off the moulded plug and exposing the wires, through the whole fitting process. Am I the only one who never knew the third pin is largely for show? In most cases it’s not even wired in, it’s just there to fill the third hole in the socket.

I broke the hoover on Saturday, put the new plug on late on Sunday, didn’t get to test it on Monday (sorry, this seems to be turning into a Craig David song) and in fact only got to it today (Friday).  

I have, I think, a slightly superstitious relationship with electricity. Maybe it comes from those adverts I used to see as a kid, exhorting all right-minded people to not just turn off but to physically unplug their TV set each night. Whatever the reason, my instinctive response to the outlandish notion that I have fitted a new plug, is to suspect I’ve probably fitted it wrong. As such, the last thing I wanted was for my other half to try it while I wasn’t there, for fear of her going the same way as Valerie Barlow.

So, anyway, it’s done. I’ve hoovered (twice) with no ill-effect, so I’m going to tentatively call this a success.

As ever, with these traditionally-male activities (wiring plugs, fitting shelves, changing tyres, even going to the tip) I feel an awkwardness, an uncertainty, as if I ought to instinctively know what to do, how to behave. My initial reactions to breaking the plug were: one, I hope my wife doesn’t find out; and two, I suppose I’m going to have to buy a new hoover – and when I then decided to try and avoid both scenarios by repairing it, I felt an embarrassment, inadequacy even, about resorting to the internet to ask firstly ‘Can I replace a moulded plug?’ and then secondly ‘If you’re so bloody clever Google, tell me how?’

Of course the flipside of all this gender stereotype confusion is that I now feel a ludicrously disproportionate sense of pride in my accomplishment, in being able to state that I was able to switch on and use the hoover without explosion, implosion, smoke, fire, black out, or power cut. I know it’s not really a big achievement in the scheme of things, and yet… I feel that it sort of is.

Plus I suppose it proves that there are a lot of things we can do, if somebody just shows us how.