Sometimes it's hard
to talk about being a woman. But sometimes we have to.
So yes, finally, I am going to go there. I didn’t sleep very well last night knowing I was going to do this. I have never been more nervous writing about a topic. I know - particularly as a freelance - that writing something, anything, on the topic of sex and gender might lose me work and friends. But it’s time. It’s time to say where I am and where I am not. Because if I mean it about doing the hard thinking, I can’t shy away from the hard topics.
But why talk about it? All too often this is the response from Labour people who don’t want to accept that there are rights at stake and issues to be discussed. But the thing is -we don’t make these things go away by ignoring them. We just cede any and all discussion to those who would have it in the worst and most divisive way. Those who will live up to the false accusations and stereotypes that are thrown at me. Those who want to see this as a war - not a discussion. No debate hasn’t worked - it just made it so much harder for people to be fair to each other.
Some of what I write here will be deeply personal and about my own relationship with sex, gender, my body and the bodies of others. I do a lot of personal writing anyway, but the reason for this is that if we are going to talk about the pain of challenging/contested identities, it is important that people know what skin you have in the game. All too often, it is felt that anyone who isn’t trans doesn’t have any and I will try to show why I don’t think that’s true.
I must have been about seven. I was definitely in the infants’ playground so in the bottom half of primary school. It was a gloriously hot day. In those days the lunch break seemed to last for hours and my best friend and I were running around playing games. We were scorching hot and so we did what came absolutely natural to us, what we had always done, we took our tops off. We removed the coverings from our seven-year-old bodies so we could more cooly run around in our shorts feeling the breeze on our skin as we ran. Just as the boys did.
Then we were called over to the playground monitor. We were ordered to put our shirts back on. We couldn’t understand why. Our top halves looked no different from the boys yet. We were hot and we wanted to be more comfortable. The only explanation that came was that we were girls and girls weren’t allowed to take their tops off. We have to suffer a greater discomfort not because we even had breasts, but because we would have them one day.
Welcome girls to your sexed body.
I have never identified with the concept of gender. For me, it is similar to the concept of monarchy. It’s a social construct that I believe to be damaging to society in the roles it conscripts us into. However, in both regards, I am aware that I am in a minority and that vast numbers of people absolutely buy into these concepts as part of their understanding and ordering of reality.
What this position isn’t, is conservative. Wanting to abolish the constrictions and rules of gender that force too many men into toxic aggressive masculinity and too many women into passive terror is anything but conservative. So as much as those who disagree with my talking about the importance of sex would like to shut me up, they simply won’t do so by pretending that the radical faminists that fought alongside them all their lives have suddenly become deeply reactive conservatives. It won’t wash bud.
Because I do understand sex. I know that as someone born a woman, I am treated in certain ways that men are not, that my body can and can’t do things that men’s bodies can and can’t. Sometimes I have chosen to do these things - sometimes I haven’t (for example, I am childless by choice - or at least as far as I know. I have no idea if I would have been able to have children as I never attempted it). Sometimes these things are thrust upon me. I am perimenopausal at the moment, which means that when I have my periods, they are accompanied by huge surges of hormones making me spottier and more emotionally unstable than I have been since I was a teenager. It is very hard not to examine the sex-based limits put on your body when you are bleeding from your genitals while also experiencing a debilitating hot flush. It also doesn’t matter whether I am stronger or weaker than most women, whether I have or have not had children. I am treated this way because my sex is weaker and carries children. That is at the heart of the feminst analysis and I refuse to give that up.
I am a straight woman. I have occasional girl crushes - and as someone who has spent the last few years exploring sexual freedom, I have acted sexually with women as part of a group, but overall I am attracted to the male body, the masculine.
What do I mean by that though? Because my definition of that masculine is broad. It runs from Sean Bean in Sharpe to Tim Curry in a basque and heels. Both, to me, exude a masculine energy that I find sexually appealing.
I have also always been an admirer of androgynous women. Growing up I wanted to be Annie Lennox as much as I wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. But the key thing was that I wanted to be them - not sleep with them. I knew the energy of a masculine-presenting woman was different from the energy of a man and I knew to which I was sexually attracted.
My whole life I have also been a supporter of gay and lesbian equality. I grew up surrounded by gay people. So many of my parent’s friends were gay and as I grew up many of my friends also discovered their own sexual leanings. Some of us were straight, some of us were gay and some of us were bi. None of it was a big deal. Equally, none of us felt that who you fancied dictated any other parts of your life. Your music taste wasn’t run by where you wanted to put your genitals or your heart. You don’t have to like Kylie to be gay and you don’t have to be gay to like Kylie. That too is a constrictive approach that I find as wearing as expecting every woman to adhere to the gender norms of wearing makeup and every man to like football.
I also know that there have always and will always be people who are so utterly unhappy with their relationship to their body that it causes huge ongoing and insufferable distress. To anyone who believes that this post fails to show the proper empathy to such people I would like to remind you that I spent 25 years - not coincidentally from puberty to early middle age - looking like this.
I opted out of my body being sexually desirable despite it making me utterly and completely miserable that this was the case. My mental and physical examination of why I wittingly and unwittingly chose to live like this is a lifelong project. My body dysphoria meant I needed psychological support. Having had it I have come to a much better, healthier happier place. Is it then any wonder that I believe this would also be helpful for anyone else who is rejecting their body in some way? Whatever the final choices and outcomes for them.
So yes, for these reasons and more. I absolutely do not identify with the concept of gender. This does not make me agender because - and I repeat I don’t believe in gender. You can’t opt out of something that has no relevance for you. It is not a structure I am willing to put my life into. This is why I get uncomfortable about the idea of being referred to as cis or being expected to put out my pronouns as if they define me. These words ask me to take part in a structure I do not fit into any more than someone who strongly identifies with a gender that differs from that usually aligned with their sex does to the norms associated with their body at birth. If we are to respect each other’s lived realities (and God I really hope we can) then there must be as much understanding of my non-relationship to gender as there is to be your identifying with it.
For years and years, sexual politics was about accepting and celebrating our differences. Which made life fun and interesting and liberating and freer.
But over the last few years, something shifted. And from my perspective, it shifted backwards. We went from saying ‘women don’t have to be like X stereotype’ ‘Men don’t have to conform to restrictive understandings of masculinity to a different sense. A sense that if you do conform to stereotype X, then it must mean that in some in-depth way, you are in fact a woman and if you reject stereotype X you must, in some in-depth way, not be.
And instead of saying ‘be who you want to be and stop constricting who that might be depending on your sexed body’ progressive society has very quickly leaned into saying that those very stereotypes that we had spent decades working against as somehow being a deeper reality than our physical existence. And I don’t and can’t believe that. Trust me, it would make my life a lot easier if I could.
Instead of recognising our differences and forcing acceptance that different didn’t mean wrong, we are, instead, asked to say that things that are not the same are. People with penises are the same as women with vaginas, rather than people who identify with the social construct of the feminine. I don’t believe this is either a forward step or one that will help trans people who have very specific needs. If we were able to go back to saying that of course women and trans-women are different, but not unequal, we could go back to asking where they need to be treated the same and where - in healthcare, access, competition and support for example - they have very different needs, all of which should be properly, adequately and abundantly delivered for.
I don’t believe this should be a hard place for progressives to be. I don’t believe it should be a place that feels cruel either to vulnerable women or transwomen. I believe that most of the time it shouldn’t make a difference to our lives and experiences. I believe that where that is not true there could and should be a way forward that exists of understanding compromises negotiated by people of good faith.
But at the moment, just saying that my sexed body is what informs my experience of being a woman is considered to be cruel beyond the pale.
At the moment, just saying that there are obvious ways in which lowering sex-based safeguarding boundaries might endanger vulnerable women and girls is taken, completely wrongly, to mean I believe that all trans women are sexual predators.
At the moment, saying that women’s lives are all too often driven by their bodily function and experience and that policy should reflect that is seen not as ensuring the equality of women but purely through a lens of the experience of a tiny minority.
We can’t go on like this. Labour can’t go on like this.
We cannot create and enforce a system in which women always lose. Not least because if we do so, the ever increasing anger will mean that not only do women lose, but that trans women lose more. We have to be able to talk about the importance of sex-based rights while at the same time treating each other with respect and compassion.
I don’t want a culture war. I don’t want to hurt people who do identify either with the gender that matches their sex or the one that doesn’t. I will never tell you what to wear - just how good you look in it.
But I also won’t abandon the most vulnerable women in society. I will not turn my back on the incarcerated and those fleeing male violence and in depserate need of sex-segregated spaces. I will not listen to the siren voices telling me to abandon my sisters to make my life easier. However scared I am to press send on this email.
I started this Substack because I wanted to look at all policy on an issue by issue basis. Because I wanted to think beyond ‘what do my friends/faction/party think’ and think for myself. I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. I just have my truth. I think I have to be brave enough to share that. I hope I have done so in a way that others who disagree can at least understand that I don’t do so with malice, hatred or judgement.
I run a political and communications consultancy called Political Human. Please get in touch if you are looking for political or media consultancy advice, strategic communication and campaign planning, ghostwriting, copywriting, editing, training or coaching.
You can read some lovely things that some of my clients have said here.
I am also a playwright and director. Tickets for my next play, Triggered, which runs at the Lion and Unicorn in Kentish Town from June 20-22 are on sale here.
My debut piece No Cure For Love can be seen here.
What I’ve been up to
I wrote for The Times about Rishi Sunak reigniting the Tories ‘one rule for us’ problem.
I wrore for the Independent about what British progressives could learn from the Ukrainian brand of patriotism.
And I wrote for Mobius about how theatre covers real life politicians.
I saw An Evening With Lucinda Spragg which was fun.
I also saw two plays by Ryan Calais-Cameron: Human Nurture (which was good but under-developed) and For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Got Too Heavy which was one of the best things I have seen in a really long time.
What I will be up to
I will be ‘in conversation’ (unless I’m properly cancelled by this point) at Birkbeck Student Union talking about playwriting and my weird old career on the 12th May. Tickets can be purchased here.
Questions, comments and arguments are very welcome. Insults will get you summarily blocked on every platform that no longer hosts Donald Trump. I’m at emmaburnell@gmail.com or on Twitter (far too often) at @EmmaBurnell_.
Thank you for writing this. You have articulated a view that i share but not express as sensitively as this piece. I view gender as prisons from which we shpuld be liberated not forced to accept.
Congratulations Emma, a well thought through and brave piece. Thankyou.