Gender fluidity for men is all very well, but don’t forget life as a woman in the real world is a far tougher proposition

GENDER fluid.’ It was an unfamiliar phrase to most of us until this week’s newspapers attached it to a very familiar name. The well-known RTÉ presenter Jonathan Clynch had decided to identify as ‘gender fluid’ from now on, the reports revealed, the presenter would be introduced as Jonathan Rachel Clynch. Mr/Ms Clynch will sometimes dress as a woman when he/she – which was how the reports fudged the pronoun issue – attends for work.

It was a very unusual news story. Not just for the obvious reasons but because it left me ( and I doubt I was alone) entirely flummoxed.

Most of the time, you know within a second or two how you feel about an item in the news: angered, sympathetic, exasperated, depressed, uplifted or fatigued. This one, though, took a bit more processing.

My first reaction – and again, I doubt I was unique in this – was awe and astonishment at the courage it must have taken Jonathan Rachel to make this revelation. We’ve had too many people keeping too many secrets in this country for far too long, too many people terrified to say that they were gay or that they were victims of child abuse or that they gave up unwanted babies or that they had abortions or that they were depressed or that they were lonely or that they were beaten by their partners; too many people suffering through lives that didn’t belong to them until they could endure that existence no longer.

Authentic

I’ve never come across ‘gender fluidity’ before, at least that I know of, but I’ve met and interviewed several transsexuals and they remain among the most impressive and authentic and self- aware people I’ve ever encountered. I have absolutely no doubt that consigning a man to a woman’s body, or vice versa, is just about the cruellest trick that nature can play and that it does so more frequently than we might appreciate.

Knowing who you are NOT, it seems to me, first requires you to know exactly who you are, and that’s not always a pretty or an easy journey. In fact, it’s probably a journey most of us do our best to avoid. Before you cast aside the identity that you have inhabited all of your life – and, when that identity is male, all the privileges and advantages that go with it – you need to be very certain that it never truly represented you to the world. And you need to be prepared for the disadvantages and the limitations that come with your new persona.

If you are to become a woman, that is.

And that’s central to my unease about men transitioning to or identifying or living as women – there is more to being a woman than just putting on a dress and make-up, more than just acquiring breasts and losing an appendage. And, by suggesting that the transition can be a simply cosmetic and/or surgical one, the experience of being a woman is inevitably undermined and diminished.

Male and female brains are different from birth; anybody who has watched infant boys and girls at play can see that their very distinct traits precede any exposure to pink and blue, dolls and trucks, tears and toughness. At two years of age, one of my daughters f ussed over matching her dress to her shoes and she certainly didn’t get that from me. And transsexuals will tell you that it was then, in the nursery, in the classroom, in the playground, that they first realised that they had been catastrophically misplaced.

But women and men are also shaped by their experiences in a gendered society. And the truth is that women’s experiences, compared to those of men, abso- lutely suck. And nobody who has grown up in a male body, nobody who has been treated as male by the world – whatever their internal wiring says – has a clue what actually being a woman entails.

They’ve never had their period start while they sat at a desk in the middle of a working day, they’ve never had to worry about the message that their clothing choices sent out, they’ve never been paid less or refused a job just on the basis of their gender, they’ve never had to dread unwanted pregnancies or faced life - altering consequences of a one-night stand, they’ve never felt fear when a t axi- driver’s conversation turned lecherous or had to text their friends to confirm that they got home in one piece after a night out, they’ve never known what it is to feel physically unsafe in the presence of a stronger, angrier, bigger partner. Oh, and they’ve never had to face all of that, in many cases, before they’ve left their teens.

Just this weekend, journalist Róisín Ingle and comedian and writer Tara Flynn spoke out about their abortions, secrets they had kept to themselves for years. Twelve women will leave this country today to go to abortion clinics in the UK, every one of them lying to somebody, if not everybody they know, about the true purpose of their journey and they too will keep those secrets for the rest of their lives. But for each of them there’s a man, somewhere, who has been excused any such agonising. And for each of them there are countless men who have the luxury of judging them, either harshly or kindly, because they will never, ever have to make that ultimate call themselves.

In this country, up to very recently, we ran concentration camps for women who got pregnant out of wedlock. They were often dumped there by the families who disowned them and abandoned by the men who impregnated them.

Polarised

Of the 215,000 people raising children on their own in this country right now, some 86.5 per cent are women. They’re the ones working the lower-paid jobs or the zero-hour contracts, or living on benefits because they can’t afford childcare. The truth is there’s no homogeny, no fluidity between the genders – our experiences are polarised because pretty much every society in the world that calls itself civilised still treats women as second-class human beings.

I couldn’t really join in the global admiration of Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner when she posed on the cover of Vanity Fair in a satin bustier to celebrate ‘transitioning’. Despite the pneumatic boobs, Jenner remains physically male so as, she said recently, to keep her options open as to whether she will date men or women. Fair enough, I guess that’s ‘gender fluidity’ in action. Except Jenner hasn’t chosen ‘gender fluidity’, in the more honest and ambivalent manner of Jonathan Rachel Clynch: he has chosen to be an idealised Playboy fantasy female and not the post-menopausal, sagging, stretch-marked, agespotted, wrinkled, grey-haired 65-year-old woman he claims he ought to be. Bruce Jenner was an athlete as a young man, a strapping Olympian nicknamed ‘Bruiser’ who never had to scurry down a dark street for fear of being raped. Bruce benefited from sports scholarships, and from the better pay, sponsorship and appearance money that male athletes attract at the expense of their female counterparts. Bruce never gave birth, breastfed a baby or was expected, by reason of his gender, to do the lion’s share of the childrearing and the housework. Bruce never had to take medication to regulate his fertility or his milk supply or his treacherous hormones.

Bruce enjoyed all the perks of being a man and then, at 65, quite fancied cherrypicking the few pluses that femininity sometimes brings. Caitlyn wants to be beautiful, wants to be admired, wants to be frivolous, wants to wear nail varnish, she says, until it chips right off. Because that’s all there is to being a woman, right? It’s that easy.

I truly wish Jonathan Rachel Clynch well, and admire his/her courage.

Wouldn’t it be great, though, if ‘gender fluidity’ was an option for everyone? Wouldn’t it be great if you could choose to be treated as a man when you went for a job or hired a tradesman or took your car for a service or walked home alone late at night? Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t step into a hardware shop – my own personal bugbear – and instantly become invisible while the staff served everyone possessing a penis first? Wouldn’t it be great if the world was genderblind and not hell bent on privileging one sex over the other? I’m not convinced that any man, who has lived his life in a male body, can truly ‘transition’ to being a woman because, from childhood onwards, being a woman is so much tougher than being a man.

A woman is shaped by her lifelong experiences, not by plastic surgeons and corsets and fake boobs, and to suggest otherwise is to diminish all of our humanity.