Eye on Gender

At birth, or when a scan peeks into the privacy of the womb, we are assigned one of the two available genders, and that’s usually it for life. As ye are born, so shall ye die, and all that guff.

It’s a girl! It’s a boy! Notice the ‘it’ – until the first gender recognition we are all ‘its’ – then we are given one of the two gender pronouns according to the midwife or doctor looking at our body. From that point on the person is a she or a he. Next comes a name, usually gender specific, then the whole mass of expectations of what one gender or the other is, and the shape of a destiny swings in, deep and strong and unnoticed. We don’t even think about it, but the expectations of the parents and the rest of the culture we live in are like a mould that shapes us, until even we think that this is what we are.

So, at first sight, there is an image in the mind of the recogniser which is matched instantaneously with what is seen; that’s how recognition works. Computers follow our ways; in the same way that they are programmed, so that a signal is recognised and a response is triggered, so our minds fall into a programme about what it means to be a girl or a boy.

This program depends on the culture, the place and time, the society into which the baby is born. The baby begins to grow into the shape of the expectations of the world around them, so a mystery child born in New York which was whisked off immediately to Afghanistan would grow into a very different person that if she was allowed to grow up in Manhattan. And the baby girl who would have grown up in a burka would be a sassy New Yorker if whisked off in a CIA plane to Manhattan moments after birth.

If this is the case, and so much of what we are, what we think we are, is made from the materials of mind imposed on us, what is real? Do we exist beneath our genders? Take away all those years of creating who we think we are out of other people’s cast offs, and what is left? Is my history, based on the original gift of gender, everything I am?

Well, this is where people like me, who have transgressed the original gender identity have something to offer. If there was nothing other than the identity which we have come to believe is what we are, the one which is founded on gender in the beginning, where would I be?

I can assure you that I exist. And that I have erased one gender role and created another to suit me better, which means that I exist beyond and behind my gender, whichever one I am living. It also demonstrates that we do have a gender identity in the heart or mind, which may or may not match with the obvious one based on body shape

It’s almost like going back to my birth, long before scans were around, and staying in the place of no gender before my body was seen and a gender assigned. The ‘it’ before the he or she.

I share this ungendered it with everyone in the world; it doesn’t go away. It is there every morning in the moments before we are born to our day, when we open our eyes and are just conscious but haven’t yet identified with a time and place and persona. Notice how peaceful it is, how silent and stress free. In this place we are just present, in the moment, alive, and in the end being here is what it is all about, the only reality which never changes.

John Berger, an art critic, published his seminal book called Ways of Seeing in 1972, and when I was into recreating myself, at least in the eyes of the world, his insights were invaluable. For a taste of it I found this on the net.

If you are into gender, illusion, how we create our worlds and so on, this is a good read. I keep lending my copy to someone or other, which means that I keep giving it away, so I had to hit amazon again to find another. If you get hold of a copy, the good stuff is in section 3. This was one source of the secrets that put me on the track to understanding how to recreate my own gender at home, to my particular taste. It's all just waterlillies on a pool; fascinating, floating on reflections of the sky.

Yesterday, a wonderful warm end of April day when for sure winter is gone and we have the days filled with light, Janie and I sat outside a café in the North Laines here in Brighton and had lunch in the sunshine. It felt like paradise.

Then the young men – student age is how I saw them - sitting on the other tables began to bellow to each other. They were jostling for airtime, and one of them, who kept sitting down when the others stood sometimes, was the leader. They had some plan, which was terribly clever, and of no interest to me, so I didn’t try to understand what it was.

At some stage a couple of young women came up and sat at the table of the leader. They showed skin where they could, and teeth when they smiled, which was all the time. Smiling, smiling is a form of supplication, but it also removes individuality in a way, to me at least. It’s a way of being attractive, looking pleasing, and men do it less. When you do see it is when two gay men meet and have something going on, and they smile smile smile while keeping eye contact. Men are attracted to what they see, which is why gay men often spend more time on their appearance, why they smile more.

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The Guardian on April 15^th had no less than four pieces which together told almost the whole of the story of gender, the lunatic tale of unquestioned perceptions, delusions and power that is the essence of gender at work in our world. 

Oops, there I go again, telling it as I see it. The Emperor has no clothes! Gender is mad. Those who created and maintain the delusions of gender unconsciousness won’t like it. Oh, well,I’ve got nothing to lose. I've already lost it, thank god.

Back to the Guardian, which I once swore I would never read again because of what they printed about my kind, and now read regularly. It’s a great paper, when it is. Last week it gave enough on my favoured subject to keep me going for a year.

First was a great piece about testosterone and making and losing money, you can read that here

Then we have the venerable Polly Toynbee despairing over the girlification of young women and the dissolution of hope, which you can read here

Followed by the matter of women in their forties losing out in comparison to their male counterparts in the money they are rewarded with, and, inherent within that measure, how they are valued less, although we don’t say that. It’s never the men I speak to, incidentally, it’s the others. Read that here

And all this awful stuff is followed by some brighter news from Spain, where Senor Zapatero, Mr Shoemaker, the premier, has created a majority of women in his cabinet. It appears that some men don’t like this. Good grief, they’ll be driving cars next. Read that one here.

The first piece is about the effect of testosterone on making, then losing money

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In the early nineties, when I was going through the major identity shift of my life and struggling to keep sane, I went back to school and began learning about horticulture, landscaping and design. It just about saved my life, put me on the ground, made me work with what is real - weather, soil, plants, water. And I discovered that I could draw, I began to be a designer.
A new life opened in front of me, a different person in a different world. One of my first commissions was for a large garden in Surrey, and the design I came up with was great. Well, it looked that way sometimes. Other times it looked mad. Who could I ask about this, who would tell me if I was on track or way off?

The answer came when I was reading a magazine in bed, which had an article on Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, who was being interviewed because he was re-publishing a book he had written some years before - Jung and the Art of Landscape, A Personal Experience. He was described as the leading landscape artist of the 20th century. Jellicoe was at that time in his nineties and was still working, which meant he'd been working at his art for more than seventy years.

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