This Book is Gay (4 page)

Advertisers would like us to believe that being female somehow feels different to being male, but we will never really know. Culture tells our parents how to dress us as kids, and it becomes ingrained. It sometimes seems bonkers to me to think that a dude would have to be ‘trans' to put on a skirt or some heels. Who bloody says that they are ‘female attire'? Sadly, as most of the world is blind to how small-minded this is, that's the way the cookie crumbles. For now.

As we said in the last chapter, although the studies of gender and sexuality are closely linked, they are largely unrelated: a person will choose separate identities for both. For instance, I presently identify as a gay man. Tomorrow, I could identify more as female but still like men, thus making me a straight trans female. Do you see?

Let's quickly discuss the term ‘tranny'. You may have heard this word being bandied about at school or perhaps even on a show like
RuPaul's Drag Race
. Much like ‘dyke', unless you are trans, you really shouldn't use it. EVER. This is because a lot of trans people find it offensive, so why would you want to go around upsetting people? Are you a sociopath? No, so don't do it.

Rory from Brighton identifies as a trans man. He had surgery and took hormones to change gender several years ago. Here is his story:

I always liked to dress up and be the boy. At primary school, everyone knew me as ‘the girl that wanted to be a boy'. The other kids used to tease me about it in the playground, and it would make me cry, but I didn't know why I was upset by it. Maybe it was the singling out? So I'd get taken aside by my teacher. I couldn't understand what the big deal was; who wouldn't want to be a boy?

As an adult, I found a way of being a boy that was acceptable and adored. I was Rory Raven, drag king extraordinaire! For years I had been dressing up in private, wearing very masculine clothes – shirts with a tie, suits, braces, trilby hat. But I felt I had to hide, that there was something wrong with it. I'd even have to get changed back into my normal clothes just to use the bathroom in my own home, just in case my flatmates saw me. But as a drag king I would be on stage wearing the clothes publicly that I felt comfortable wearing. At the end of the performances, I'd watch my fellow drag kings remove their drag and change into their regular clothes. They'd scrub off the fake facial hair and five o'clock shadow and replace it instead with make-up. Lipstick and eyeshadow: feminine and understated. I wanted to stay in my drag and felt at a loss when the evening was over.

For my twenty-fourth birthday I was given a binder. A binder is a tight-fitting vest which is worn underneath clothes that makes the wearer look flat-chested and, therefore, male. It was tight and uncomfortable, and wearing it wasn't pleasant. Getting into it wasn't easy. Getting out was even harder. I thought I was going to accidentally suffocate myself trying to take the thing off for the first time. But wearing it gave me such liberation. I felt like I was being seen for the first time. So I kept wearing it, even when I wasn't performing.

Soon enough, I began to wonder: what's the difference between Rory onstage and Rory in real life? My friends were already calling me Rory as a nickname, and some of them were even referring to me with male pronouns.

I decided to take off the fake beard and just start living full-time as Rory (only without the ornithological surname). Work was really supportive. I know I was lucky in this regard, as I worked for a trans charity at the time. They didn't bat an eyelid.

My name change was the most important part of my transition. Choosing my name was a profound and powerful decision. It would be a mixture of who I was and who I wanted to be. The timing of my legal change was important too. It was a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday, which for me is the start of my new year, and coincidently was the beginning of the new year for several religions and cultures worldwide.

Life has paradoxically got both better and a lot harder since transition. Coming out to everyone is an ongoing process. Some friends could see it coming, so were unfazed; others took a bit longer and, sadly, I have lost contact with some people altogether. My adopted queer family have embraced me, and that has given me a lot of strength. Transition has opened doors I didn't know existed, and I have made a lot of new friends along the way.

Helping trans friends: a lot of people struggle with the pronoun game. This is understandable; after all for years and years you've used i.e. ‘he' to describe your friend and now she is asking to be called ‘she'. It can take time to adjust. However, you should always respect your friend's choice. If you think it's hard, how hard do you think it is for your friend? Get on board with a new pronoun quickly and never EVER use the word ‘it' or ‘he/she'. That is NOT COOL.

Intersex is not so much an identity, in that you can't really choose it. (Remember, you can't choose your preference, but you can choose a label or identity.) Since intersex is used as a label, by both intersex people and doctors, it's worth mentioning here. A person is born intersex if they have genitalia or sexual characteristics that do not conform to strict definitions of male and/or female. This does NOT make them transgender, as they may agree with the gender they are assigned (most intersex people, rightly or wrongly, are assigned a sex at birth).

Transgender issues are linked with intersex issues, as many intersex people grow up to disagree with the gender they were assigned and seek to change.

Cisgender is basically the opposite of transgender. It simply means when your gender identity matches the identity you were given at birth. Therefore, the majority of people will identify as ‘cis' even if they don't know it – it removes the need for anyone to say they are ‘normal', which, as we said, is a manky word. Going back to my definition above, I am actually a gay cis man.

As a final word on all these identities, gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell says he looks forward to a day when all of these labels will be redundant and we can all just be human. I think I look forward to that day too.

However you identify, be it lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, curious or carrot, we all have something in common – we are a minority, and we have made brave steps to identify as such; a refusal to hide; a declaration of who we are. So label shop, label swap or don't wear one at all. Just be comfortable with YOU and let others wear whatever labels they like.

This first step, our self-acceptance, is by FAR the hardest step of the journey. The rest, this book can help with.

If you identify as straight, you should keep reading too. Frankly, LGBT* people need all the straight allies we can get, and you too can arm yourself with knowledge.

How old were you when you realised ‘being gay' was a thing? Probably pretty young … five? Six? Seven? Now, how old were you when you asked the bigger question of WHY people are gay? There has to be a reason.

Before we examine some of the possible factors that made you who you are, I think it's important to state that IT DOESN'T MATTER. We don't need excuses for our existence, and I don't hear anyone asking heterosexual people, ‘What made you straight?'

Remember High Priestess Gaga and
Born This Way
. Your sexuality or gender is as natural as your eye colour, and you should never be ashamed of it.

So what made us same-sex inclined or transgender? Well, don't hold your breath, because I'm afraid the boffins at the RuPaul Institute of Gay Heritage Technology (RIGHT) really can't come to anything resembling a definitive answer – more a collection of half-convincing theories.

Let's take a look at the most coherent, starting with sexuality.

I like this one for no other reason than that it has a silly name. This idea states that our biology (brains, hormones, genes) predisposes us to like stuff associated with one gender more than the other. Eventually, we see those who are exotic (i.e. boys if we like girl stuff, girls if we're typically more masculine) as sexy.

I'm meant to be an impartial reporter of these theories, but this one seems like total bum. I mean, REALLY?

Clearly, there are some issues with the idea of a ‘gay gene'. Gay men and lesbians who had babies would produce gay babies, right? Wrong. Why are there so many gay people coming from straight parents?

From a Darwinian perspective, homosexuality makes no sense – if we were all gay, the human race would die out. Gay people (being less likely to now reproduce) remove themselves from the gene pool.

There have been several theories about this. One is that perhaps the gene predisposing people to homosexuality actually poses a benefit in heterosexual people (only sometimes making the person LGB*), and this is why the trait continues to be passed down through generations. Another theory is that gay uncles and aunts tend to dote more on their nieces or nephews, helping to ensure the youngsters' survival and in that way propagating their own genetic code.