Lecturing in gender studies I have spent a lot of time talking about how children are exposed to processes of gendering, how these operations are intensely social, and that learning about gender does not happen in a parent-centred vacuum. This happens immediately from birth (with the declaration “it’s a boy!” etc), and as Judith Butler (1990) usefully points out, the distinction often made between sex (the biological: including genitalia, chromosomes and other sex markers) and gender (assumed as the cultural interpretation of those markers) is blurry:
“…perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all”
This gendering can even start pre-birth, at the ultrasound, or with blood tests to determine chromosomes. Once sex is designated, an intense process is kicked into gear that involves expectations of how a child will act, what they will wear, and what their future holds (primary assumptions being, for example, that a baby designated female will be feminine, grow up to be a woman, and will one day partner with a man). As I have also discovered being pregnant, there are a whole set of gendered assumptions made between the physical experience of childbearing and the child itself – for example the idea that craving sweets means you are having a girl [*eye roll forever*]!
While I have often thought about gendering in childhood, I have attended less to how pregnancy itself is enrolled in a process of gendering adulthood. What I have experienced as a pregnant person this year has given me some insight into how intensely pregnancy is tied to the category “woman”, and in turn bound up with extremely fixed notions about biology, gender and destiny.
While I am a bisexual/queer person I am also for all intents and purposes cisgender: I am feminine presenting, use she/her pronouns, and that matches up with the expectation of being assigned female at birth (or, as I am told the pronouncement at my birth was “it’s a feminist!”…something to unpack another time). And yet, I have found the “woman culture” – or what might be more accurately termed “female culture”, emphasising biology – of pregnancy profoundly disorienting.
My first real confrontation with this (aside from the pink and blue aesthetics and white smiling women and babies of pregnancy tests and pregnancy vitamins) was at an early ultrasound. The clinic, like basically everything around pregnancy, emphasised that it was for “women” not only in its name but in every clinical detail. This included the fact I could only find a women’s bathroom there and was made to put on a smock pre-exam that was less neutral gown than actual v-neck lined puffy-sleeved purple dress. The main reception room featured a photograph of a huge pair of high heels with a caption (I’m paraphrasing here): “When the shoes didn’t fit her daughter, the mother simply reminded her she wouldn’t need toes when she was a princess”.
My partner, a man (*constantly* referred to in my pregnancy books and apps as my “husband” despite the fact we are unmarried…), was not allowed to come to the clinic with me and has not been allowed to any of my appointments so far, even with me crying and pleading on the phone about it after some complications, or when I had to go in for an emergency scan. While this has ostensibly been due to COVID-19 restrictions, it has not only intensely reinforced the sense that the responsibility of childbearing is mine alone, but that I am doing this as a (cis) WOMAN whose “body was made to do this” (a saying repeated over and over again to me). It has been distressing for both me and my partner to be separated in this process, and I can only imagine the homophobic layer that partners of the same gender would feel with one parent being constantly cast out.
I am not so disoriented by the physical transition of pregnancy when it comes to gender, despite the discomfort and pain – for me personally it is fun and interesting to have a growing belly, larger breasts, a body full of more blood, and I often think about how not everyone that wants to have this experience gets to. I feel very privileged. I just cannot stand the grate of being told this experience is about divine femininity that connects all (cis) women, that a (cis) woman’s identity is forged through the fires of childbirth, and that pregnancy and labour is some kind of secret business that only (cis) women can discuss with one another.
It reminds me of when I first got my period at 14 and I was happy to have reached the puberty milestone, but also did not think much of it. My mum got really angry at me for not taking it more seriously as the transition to “womanhood” that it represented. She wanted me to celebrate. Her approach was informed by a feminism aiming to reclaim bodily processes which had been shamed and repudiated by patriarchy for centuries. But I did not feel shame, I just wanted to get on with it, and did not want to hold a party for my “entry into womanhood”. There’s a lot of feminist emphasis these days on things like periods and pregnancy because of the stigma that has otherwise surrounded them. That is totally understandable. What is harder to compute is why this has to be enrolled into a “female culture” that emphasises one’s status as woman at every turn.
It would be so easy to use gender neutral language around pregnancy, like referring to “pregnant people” rather than “pregnant women”. It would not harm anyone, it would not “erase women”, it would simply make these spaces more inclusive, and unravel the hard knot of essentialism that pervades reproductive culture. I suspect that many cisgender women enjoy having womanhood emphasised in these spaces though precisely because the misogyny of patriarchal culture means women are rarely celebrated, and pregnancy is one of the few times where one becomes a kind of special icon (where people congratulate you, make room for you on the bus, etc). However the way to resolve this issue is not to double-down on the mother-woman-biology matrix, especially given that ever more queer, trans and non-binary people are bearing children. Given the “female culture” of pregnancy it really is no surprise that it is mother-forum sites like “mumsnet” in the UK that have become the epicentre of anti-trans discourse.
Last night my partner and I re-watched Jeanie Finlay’s (2019) documentary “Seahorse” about one trans man’s experience of pregnancy. I wanted to watch it as I been reading about labour and could not think of any other cultural representations of active labour (aka how it actually happens, not the Hollywood kind where a person gives birth lying on their back). Watching Freddie’s journey through pregnancy as a now pregnant person was so soothing to me, untethered as it was from the “female culture” that has soaked every other pregnancy text I have encountered so far. Importantly in the film Freddie emphasises that his experience is *not* the same as cisgender women, precisely because of the gender dysphoria and difficult social expectations he has to navigate as a pregnant man. There is a scene where Freddie goes through all of the documents from his midwife that emphasise “mother” and “woman” and “female”, and replaces them with words that match up to his experience. Today Freddie is still fighting in court to be recognised on his child’s birth certificate as “father” or “parent”, rather than “mother”. “Seahorse” is a reminder of the small things that we could change culturally that would make a huge difference to the myriad of people experiencing pregnancy, and to thinking about gender broadly.
For now I will keep trying to find a way to navigate this fraught terrain and trying to connect with my body while holding the intense gendering at bay. I suspect this will only become more difficult, in becoming “mother”, and all of the expectations carried with that. Thinking about how we can better support people going through the gamut of reproduction without insisting on rigid gender boxes is a must on the way to loosening the grip of gender expectations in adulthood.
I like to think in visual terms, and the diagram above (click on it to enlarge) is an attempt to sum up how we might connect structure, activism, and norms in a useful way. I’ve included a hammer here as a kind of nuanced update to that “If I had a hammer” image.
At the very base are the “structural foundations”, which accounts for the economic, colonial, and gendered power structures that are the foundation of the dominant organisation of social relations in this context. Flowing from this foundation, but also feeding back into it, are the dominant ideologies that invest in and maintain these social relations. For example, neoliberalism is an ideology that supports capitalism. Similarly White supremacy is an ideology that supports imperialism. Flowing from this, there are various forms of activism that respond to these ideologies in ways that either bolster these ideologies or reject them. The activism that bolsters these ideologies also works toward cementing what is understood as the “ideals”.
It is clear for example, that 
Perhaps this is what might mark out a new wave of (feminist and other) activism around femininity: challenging gender ideals without investing in non-ideals as the political response. From such a perspective, there is no femininity that is “empowered”. Power is exerted and ideals are enforced, but the reaction to this is to focus on the structural foundations and their ideological props rather than the individual effects alone (which might for some involve complicated attachments).
Yet, Lee Alexander McQueen’s vision of the possibilities of fashion to affect us on a profound emotional level juxtaposes such critiques. Tracking the autobiographical aspects of McQueen’s design, this documentary offers us a sense of artistry that cuts through ordinary understandings of fashion in terms of trends, mass production, and surface.
McQueen described his shows as “what’s buried in people’s psyches”. One of the things that I love most about this documentary is the use of home footage from McQueen himself, which offers us an intensely intimate glimpse of the designer. We not only get a sense of McQueen’s mind – and his obsession with death, life, and beauty – most importantly I think, we get to see the tyranny of maintaining creativity despite the stifling economics of fashion.
McQueen once said, “My sister is an amazing artist. My brother is an amazing artist. Amazing. Much better than I am. The difference is, they thought they had no chance but to do a manual job. That really upsets me”. To survive as a designer early in his career, McQueen had to live on almost nothing, and hide his fashion work from the dole office so that he could continue receiving benefits.
To quote Elizabeth Wilson again, “Out of the cracks in the pavements of cities grow the weeds that begin to rot the fabric”. In other words, while we might hold reasonable ambivalence about the nature of fashion in terms of the expectations and norms that it reproduces, fashion can also provide an experimental and resistant space for a creative reimagining of identity that “rot[s] the fabric” of these same rules.
For 
In her article, Freeman praises recent protests against the 
I was shocked that The Guardian would run this on 
Luckily, changes to the GRA would reduce the clinical barriers needed to have gender identity recognised, which would mean less stress and burden for trans people and would reduce some of the pathologising elements of the process. If gender was truly liberated, we wouldn’t need to diagnose what expressions of gender are “normal”, we would celebrate a diversity of expressions, embodiments and feelings.
As 
Freeman claims that there is a massive issue with trans feminists who critique the centring of reproductive systems. She states, “I’m trying to think of anything more patriarchal than telling women to stop fussing about vaginas at a Women’s March”. What Freeman misses is that the issue isn’t talking about bodies and the material experience of gender altogether, the problem is creating a reductive version of feminism where vagina = woman and where this is made into the central focus of collective action. This doesn’t mean we can’t talk about issues like abortion, pregnancy, or periods either (all issues which affect a range of gendered peoples), it just means that we shouldn’t make biology the basis for our collective resistance.
The claim that somehow “predatory men” will be emboldened to “come into female-only spaces unchallenged” is a transphobic furphy that’s been trotted out by right wing commentators for a long time now, and that has been 
If all of this seems pretty basic, it’s because it is. Fundamentally it doesn’t matter what the relationship between biology (“sex”) and identity (“gender”) is, what really matters is treating human beings with dignity and celebrating the possibilities of gender. Because loosening the rules of gender, understanding gender and sexism beyond biology, talking about body issues but not reducing people to bodies, and thinking about how to have solidarity around the lived experiences of gender, should be fundamental to feminism. The alternative – the world that Freeman seeks to enforce – is not only a trans-exclusionary, it works against what decades of feminists have been fighting for.
Jamila Rizvi’s recently released book 
What’s interesting here is that Rizvi and I are the same age, and we went to the same university, at the same time (and did student politics together – I was in the Labor students club that she was the leader of). Unlike Rizvi though, I came from a very poor single-parent family. Yet, we both were able to get stellar educations. Despite my low SES background, there were quite a few structural supports in place such as public housing and welfare support, as well as decent free primary and secondary schooling, that meant I could get a leg up. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that some of these structural supports 
The first is from trans-exclusionary radical feminist types, who conflate gay male culture with drag queens with transgender identity. Such perspectives see gay men, drag queens, and trans women as responsible for propping up fantasies of femininity that only serve to oppress women. Germaine Greer famously stated in The Female Eunuch 1970: “I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate”. Greer’s suggestion here is that there is some form of “natural” womanhood that can be liberated from the dictates of culture. Similarly, and more recently, Sheila Jeffreys has even argued that drag kings distort lesbian culture and the celebration of “natural” womanhood. She writes: “If the suffering and destruction of lesbians is to be halted then we must challenge the cult of masculinity that is evident in such activities as drag king shows”. These views are rife with homophobia and transphobia, as well as massive conflations and wild leaps that see men, masculinity, and femininity, as the true oppressors of women.
I don’t have much time for these views, which encourage us to believe that the biggest threats to women are trans women, drag queens, and gay men. This view distorts Marxist theory to argues that men in particular are *the* class that oppresses women, and sees the liberation that is to be won as a liberation from “gender”. Luckily the currency of radical feminism in academic spaces seems to be waning. But when overall activist struggle in society is low, it is easy for people to slip into arguing that we are each other’s problem, that if only we could free ourselves from gender we’d be truly liberated. It’s a much easier argument to make than organising to transform the fundamental economic arrangement of society, and it makes space for all kinds of class collaboration between powerful women and poor women alike (even if it means at the end of the day that power doesn’t actually shift).
So that’s why it’s kind of surprising to hear people within queer communities suggesting now that drag, in its mainstream formations, is a problem. From this perspective drag, if performed by ostensibly 
BINARYTHIS 