‘I may be female, but don’t treat me like a girl’
Sarah Keyworth recalls growing up confused about her gender and how at comprehensive school she was forced to conform to fit in with the rest of the ‘normal’ children
When I was born, I was the first baby girl to arrive into my family for more than 40 years.
There had been plenty of babies, but none of them female, so by the time I came along, the Keyworth family were chomping at the bit to put somebody in a tutu. Between my brother and my male cousins, I grew up surrounded by boys and yet it surprised everybody when I, eventually able to express myself, told my parents that I definitely wasn’t a tutu kind of guy.
I have never been “girly”, and I have never identified with the notions people have about what a girl is or what one should do. I didn’t understand why I had to be different from the male members of my family and it certainly didn’t make sense to me that the boys were wearing trousers whilst I was being decorated like a Victoria sponge. I never liked pink, I didn’t wear dresses, I refused to play with Barbies and as soon as my mum allowed it, at the age of five, I demanded to have the same haircut as my big brother (as short as possible, preferably with some gelled-up spikes – big up the 90s!). I made my position clear – I may be female, but don’t treat me like a girl. I wanted desperately to be treated in the same way as the boys around me.
Everything that wasn’t them was ‘girl’, and therefore ‘girl’ was everything I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be able to keep up with them, play the games that they played and look the way that they looked.
Unfortunately, when I was a child you couldn’t opt out of your gender like that. As close as I got to being one of the boys, there would be someone who would always do or say something to remind me that I was different; even if it was just a small comment or an item of clothing or a bathroom.
Most of my early years were spent battling with my poor mother, who was frequently faced with the unenviable task of getting me in a compulsory school dress or finding me a pair of shoes that weren’t embellished with even a hint of femininity. If you were ever in the children’s shoe section of John Lewis, Nottingham between the years of 1998-2003 you may have spotted my mother trying to convince me that nobody would notice the hot pink flowers on the heel of a particularly disgusting pair of Mary Janes.
If you were in any section of the shop, you would have definitely heard my passionate refusal to try even one of them on. My mum and I returned to that shop last year and I was absolutely delighted to see that they now have gender neutral school shoes, a simple act of rebranding that would have saved the pair of us from hours of tears and tantrums and would have given me a major confidence boost when heading into school.
The Western world’s relationship with gender norms is an unhealthy one. Our expectations of the male and female existence bear down on us, limiting our behaviour, manipulating our decisions and setting rules that we will never be able to adhere to. I once heard a man state that he’d never date a woman who drank beer, which is insane because surely if you were dating him you’d need a least two pints to get through breakfast.
The combination of having to wear a dress to school and also having short hair meant that at five years old I had to constantly explain that I was not a boy in a dress, that I liked having short hair and no I hadn’t accidentally bought girls’ shoes – my mum told me nobody would notice the flowers.
That was nothing compared to what was waiting for me at comprehensive school; at the age of 11, I walked into a storm of teenagers who had a whole new vocabulary and a much harsher understanding of what “gender bending” was about. In my first week I was called a manbeast, a he-she, a dyke, a tranny, a hermaphrodite, the boys warned the girls to stay away from me and the girls obeyed, not wanting to catch whatever freakish affliction was causing me to have a boy’s haircut.
Now I must stress that I am fine. I told a nice teacher who sorted it all out and I made some good friends. I also decided to conform to gender norms with the sole desire of fitting in. I grew my hair, I wore pink, I started carrying around a hairbrush and a mirror and some foul-smelling Charlie body spray and the name-calling stopped because I got in line.
Strict gender binaries made those children think it was acceptable to treat me unkindly.
They had been raised to believe that boys looked one way and girls another and anything other than that was seriously wrong. I pretty much stopped having my own personality and started concentrating on what girls were “supposed” to do, but the small voice in the back of my head that told me I would be better as a boy never properly went silent.
There was no conversation about what being transgender meant when I was going through this, as I previously mentioned “tranny” was used as a negative slur and I was absolutely terrified that I might be one of those people who is born in the wrong body. It’s so exciting to now see positive representation of transgender people.
As a child I definitely would have found comfort in knowing that there is nothing at all bad about not identifying with your biological sex. In fact, it is only in the last few years that I have come to really understand where I am on a spectrum of gender. Twenty years on from having to explain that I was not a boy in a dress I can look back and think ‘maybe I was a little bit of a boy in a dress’.
I do not identify as transgender or as nonbinary. When I have to fill out a form I tick female and sometimes I wonder if that is a hangover from my fear of being different, if I am still in some ways standing in line. I hope not.
I now wear whatever I want to wear and my hair is exactly how I want it to be, I have a girlfriend, I have a bunch of lesbian boy mates who I drink beer and play football with and if anyone ever called me a manbeast now I think I’d be quite pleased.
In my opinion, as long as I’m happy and comfortable none of those words should matter. Gendered pronouns are reductive and restrictive and loaded with so many expectations that the world would be a much easier place if we could somehow stop making assumptions of men, women or anyone in between.
“The Western world’s relationship with gender norms is an unhealthy one”