One of my earliest memories is of being three years’ old and joyfully hurtling down a slide wearing a dress and a policeman’s helmet. I was going to have to stop that sort of thing at some stage and fortunately I did. After all, you can get into serious trouble for impersonating a police officer. Unfortunately, you can also get into serious trouble for wearing a dress, especially if you’re not female. Needless to say, I only grew out of the dress size and not the actual dress wearing.

For me, gender identity is more complicated than masculine and feminine or even transvestite and transsexual. I don’t want a gender reassignment/‘sex change’ yet at the same time my motivation to cross dress goes way too deep for an uncomplicated case of transvestism. Dressing ‘en femme’ now and again won’t satisfy me. I’d more readily describe myself as transgendered, or even third gendered - neither male nor female. Modern science may well have found physical evidence to explain why we’re like this. Meantime, we struggle under a bi-polar gender regime in which only two mutually exclusive gender options are recognized.

How does it feel to be transgendered/third gendered in an either/or society? It hurts. It’s suffocating. I’ve read pieces in which the pain of trans is described as being treated by others like a non-person, feeling invisible. Yet worse still is not merely having your identity disregarded by others but having no choice other than to endure their insistence on choosing a different one for you that they superimpose upon you without permission.

Despite the influence of feminism encouraging greater overall awareness of gender as a patriarchal construct, in mainstream society it’s still virtually impossible to avoid being categorized as either female or male. Bi-gender apartheid pervades all; manifesting itself in male or female (either/or) tick boxes on application forms, airport security queues, public lavatories (naturally), car insurance, pub quiz teams, and of course, in how we’re expected, or even told, to dress – at least for those all-important job interviews. Strictly conforming to one of the two socially, legally legitimised genders is considered a prerequisite for respectability and treating women and men differently is seen as the height of good manners. They call it chivalry; I’d call it ‘respect a gender’.

Ironically, it’s deeply frustrating to be treated as male during those everyday ‘ladies and gentlemen’ style interactions, but just how exactly are others to be aware of the turmoil I feel inside? Seemingly, my long hair and nail varnish alone isn’t enough. Expressing my gender dissent through wearing a skirt may be one obvious step.

Sadly, the very real threat of violence against transpeople makes such full personality expression an unaffordable luxury.

Furthermore, transvestite dress reform isn’t in the Sex Discrimination Act. How liberating it would be if some allowance were made for transfolk to be able to wear the clothing of the gender that they prefer to present as at their school or in the workplace. Strict dress code policies that are deliberately different for males and females are disproportionately likely to impact upon individuals with gender identity issues the hardest, yet are nevertheless judged to be perfectly compatible with equal opportunities. ‘Women. Men. Different. Equal.’ reads the motto beneath the pink and blue logo of the Equal Opportunites Commission.

Convention remains sacred and gender variant equals freak. Transphobes don’t see the gender straightjacket – just the freak. Bizarre, weirdo, pervert, ridiculous, incongruous, incredulous, Widow Twanky…Oh no I’m not!

Recently, for example, the likening of female pop singer Lily Allen to a “chick with a d***” was viewed automatically and universally, as a cruel slur, deeply offensive to her self-worth. If expressions like ‘real man’ and ‘real woman’ are now somewhat passé it still seems that most individuals strive to be regarded as ‘authentically’ male or female as possible.

Hardly surprising therefore, that finding a partner, getting married and settling down are way off the scale for me. Surely a woman who was attracted to me dressed like a woman would want the ‘real thing’? Not unless of course, there really are people out there who are attracted specifically to transpeople.

Plus there’s the likely impact on family and friends. No matter how rejecting or supportive they may be, there’s a stigma attached to having a transgender in the family or even as a friend. No wonder most gender reassignments take place beyond middle age when the children have grown up and are, for many individuals, so often preceded by failed suicide attempts. As for a transperson’s youth – it’s wasted.

Were it not for the intolerance of sexist genderland so many people’s lives would be a whole lot easier, happier and more productive. Instead transfolk seem to upset just about everybody from the dyed-in-the wool conservative to the self-proclaimed revolutionary radical.

The Hell, Fire and Brimstone brigade insist that religious scripture condemns the gender heretic as illegitimate and unnatural. Jesus said that ‘in God there is neither man nor woman.’ Omnigender is divine. But since when did religion ever have anything to do with God?

‘Man-Maid’ (?) and inherently sexist, the definition of what constitutes a socially acceptable male or female persona is rooted in male-dominated oppression but this doesn’t stop your average feminist from denouncing us trannies as cheerleaders for the patriarchy. Distrusted and despised as sinister, freakazoid space invaders muscling in on women-only groups and having the temerity to claim to ‘feel like a woman’, male-to-female transsexuals in particular are reserved a special place on 21st century feminism’s axis of evil. Damningly, our lipstick, powder and paint are bemoaned as reinforcing gender stereotypes.

I remember the first time I committed the anti-feminist crime of buying a pair of women’s shoes. It was fun. On a busy Saturday, I went unnoticed until it was my turn at the checkout and the shop assistant held out the pair of size nine courts in the air high above her head and shouted out ‘there’s no price on these!’ Of course, bucking genderism is priceless. Admittedly though, it would have been even better if the shoes had actually fit.

Moreover, deep down inside I knew it was a phyrric victory because I would never muster enough courage to publicly wear them. Common sense told me that to do so would mean meeting certain ridicule, plus a probable hostility that could result in my being beaten up, or killed even. Statistics suggest that it’s socially acceptable to hit a woman so long as she’s in a man’s body at the time. I wasn’t happy with my figure but I wasn’t ready to exchange it for a statistic.

Boy… being differently gendered can be bad for your health. Decades of our lives spent worried, tormented and confounded - in tabloid-speak going through the motions of ‘living a lie’. Is this what being transgendered at the dawn of the 21st century is all about? Forced to live in a closet?

Closets are dark places. Inhabitants of a closet don’t know how big the closet is, let alone whether there’s anybody else in there with them. One day somebody switched the light on in the closet only to discover that it was really a place called the Internet. Suddenly all these transgender pages appeared suggesting that there isn’t really a black hole between Mars and Venus after all. Surely they can’t all be websites created by the same person?

Encouraged, I decided to begin my own webpage www.morethan2genders.com/ and I’ve also just started an e-petition currently posted at petitions.pm.gov.uk/Transgender/calling on the UK government to recognize a third gender.

Yes, I think it’s time to stand up for our rights - even in these heels. As an engendered species, the only other alternative might have been to chain myself to the railings. Such a drag - especially when I want to break free.

Copyright June 2007 David Solomon
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