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.

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.

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

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.

We talked of the dominance of the masculine in hierachical organisations, where competitiiveness is rewarded. When it works, that is. In other words, it works for the people who are good at competition. The mystery is that in this way of valuing people, it is assumed that the guys (and occasional woman) who can fight and win are also best at decision making, creating visions, dealing with other people and so on. Makes no sense to me. But this seems to run the world.

And then I read this in the Guardian, one snippet in a piece about a man losing his son. Feel the power of the male longing, incomprehension, loss and grief which are reflected in these words;

‘As a secondary school teacher, I witness on a daily basis the crisis of masculinity that is occurring in many of the more deprived areas, where men and boys are becoming socially, emotionally and fiscally redundant, where the state has become sole provider for a majority of those splintered under-class families, and where a liberal, mostly inferred and extremely feminine set of values has replaced the older, vigorous certainties of what men are and how they should behave.’

In this is something of manhood the dream, the ‘older vigorous certainties’ of a gender stereotype being another form of illusion, not within the men of the underclass, but within the broken middle class heart of the man who wrote the piece. And how the fault, with underlying rage, is set at the feet of the intangible, feminine values that have destroyed some illusion of certainty. Feminine power, so destructive of male certainty, of knowing and being who we are.

It was a great evening, made special by the diverse and talented group of people who turned up – one of those times in my life when I saw clearly that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As working with a group, creating a wider partnership as the force behind positive change is one of my main ambitions with this work, I couldn’t be more pleased.

The word diversity has taken on many colours, coming to mean treating people who are different from the mean with respect and recognition for who and what they are. We had diversity in strength; people from the corporate world, from public services, from consulting, marketing, design, and across a wide range of experience and age. The know-how in the room in practical terms was of great value.

I talked for a while about gender, power and intelligence – a summary with that title can be seen as an item on this journal soon - and then used what I had said as the basis for an active facilitated discussion. My underlying intention was to look into the gender issues that affect people at work from a more aware, more conscious place.

It took me years to get my head round what he meant by this, but now I feel I get it. To me it’s more about levels of consciousness, into which thinking appears, a context, like the night sky that defines stars. It's really interesting if we apply this concept to the problems that gender creates.

Here I am assuming that gender creates problems, which may well not be true for you, but, as I see it, any incompletely unexamined identity is a box, a limitation, a denial, a restriction of being, and in that a problem.

How far can we go with this concept of levels of consciousness? As far as you dare is the answer to that. How about let’s go into dreamtime, where Australian Aboriginal people find the inspiration for their art, as in the picture? See how it inspires one of us, in this exhibition we found in Switzerland? Switzerland for Aboriginal art? Who knows what is round the next corner?

Our focus and our interests imbue objects in our worlds with certain values, which then hone and shape our individual worlds. Our worlds are as we see them. But we are rarely fully conscious of how this works, so this collection of attitudes and ideas and values just keeps on creating worlds for us, as if it was just happening to us. Through this process we can be victims of ourselves.

When I shifted gender, my view of the world changed too. Despite it being the same world, I guess. But for sure, what we perceive depends on the outlook we have - the way we see creates what we see.