A lesson for every worried parent
For her first 13 years, Ailsa lived and dressed like a boy. In an age obsessed by gender, her touching and funny story is ...
TAKE a look at the picture of the little boy above. Sweet, isn’t he? He’s beaming with the confidence of a chap who scored the winning goal in the school’s under-11s football match, and triumphed i n cross- country the previous week.
He’s grubby, healthy and hearty. There are permanent scabs on his knees, grass stains on his elbows and mud under his bitten fingernails that no amount of scrubbing will shift. He doesn’t know when he last looked in the mirror and his mother has given up begging him to brush the twigs from his curly hair. He’s also very happy — unbelievably so.
And no wonder. He’s living the sort of Swallows And Amazons childhood that many children aren’t afforded nowadays, with acres of countryside in which he’s free to roam.
Everyone in the area knows him. Everyone looks out for him.
What you may not have realised is that the little fellow is actually me — a girl.
Until I was 13, I was an extreme tomboy. I was easily mistaken for a boy, which I took as a huge compliment every time.
While I never felt as though I was trapped in the wrong gender, to outside observers it was
easy to mistake me for someone who was. When I look back at this photo now, I am so grateful that this phase in my life was played out in the early Nineties.
for that was exactly what this was — a phase, which passed.
It’s something I look back on now, as a 28year- old, successful, stable young woman, and smile fondly. Looking at those pictures, I can summon up in an instant how loved, secure and safe I felt in my scruffy, boyish clothes and short hair, which I was allowed to wear without question throughout my childhood.
While I knew I wasn’t a boy, I certainly acted like one, and had a sneaking suspicion that life would be easier if you were one.
My favourite childhood books were full of tomboys: f rom Kitty i n Swallows And Amazons to Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird and George in the famous five. Girls who were just as strong and capable as boys, rather than (as I saw it) wimps in pink dresses. No one suggested for a minute that there was anything wrong with me. Yet I’ve seen photographs similar to my childhood snaps accompanying stories detailing the soaring demand for transgender counselling among modern children.
Pictures of wide- eyed little boys and girls, who, we are told, are trapped in the living hell of feeling that they were born i nto the ‘wrong’ body.
I’ve read about children as young as four being identified as possible sufferers of gender dysphoria — the condition where someone believes there is a mismatch between their biological sex and the gender they feel they are.
Referrals for this have risen fivefold in five years, according to NHS figures, with 700 young people currently seeking help.
I can’t help wondering whether — had I been born 20 years later and in a more progressive environment than the Scottish village where I grew up — I would have been among them. Would my boyishness have been seen as something that marked the future course of my life?
OF COURSE, gender dysphoria is a medically recognised condition which can ruin lives — and it’s a condition that must be taken seriously. There are far too many well-documented cases for anyone to dismiss it all as simply a phase that children go through.
But what I can say, with absolute authority, however, is that such phases do exist. I am living proof that what feels normal to a child at the age of five, eight or ten does not set the pattern for what comes next.
By sharing my story, I hope that I might provide some comfort for any parents who are faced with their own little boy dressing in a tutu — like Rod Stewart, who this week said his five - year- old son, Aiden, ‘likes dressing up as a lady’ — or t heir little gi r l who is determined to be the antithesis of ‘sugar and spice’.
I’d urge them to relax, sit back, take a deep breath and enjoy the show. They’ll know soon enough if it’s a serious problem.
for, more often than not, the curtain will come down and a perfectly adapted, happy and confident child will emerge from the other side, all the stronger for having been left alone to sort out their identity for themselves.
Indeed, I wonder what damage could have been inflicted on my impressionable childhood self if someone had suggested that the way I acted was in any way wrong, that it was possible that I might be in the ‘wrong body’.
for, I never felt like a mistake. I just felt like a girl who chose to do everything a boy would — f rom building a treehouse with my father to spending hours catching tadpoles in the pond.
To me, this was a wholly sensible choice seeing as boys, in my view, seemed always to be dealt the best hand in life. They had the most exciting toys and games, and I seemed to fit so much better into their world. And so I became a tomboy, cutting my hair, refusing to wear dresses or anything pink, and playing football and chase with boys in the playground, who accepted me unquestioningly into their fold.
I was helped by my natural height and strength, which made me the fastest runner as well as a skilled footballer.
While I grew used to people mistaking me for a boy, and loved it, once, aged four, after much arguing, I decided to prove to a boy whose house I was visiting that I was actually a girl — apparently, my name
Wasn’t enough to convince him. Fortunately, my nanny spotted the demonstration, and intervened to protect my modesty. Such was the force of my character, and my parents’ unquestioning acceptance of their strange, headstrong first-born child, whom they wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to change, that my boyishness was never an issue. Indeed, I suspect my f ather quite enjoyed having someone so enthusiastic to pass his Meccano set on to, not to mention help him nail together chicken houses. Dad worked from home as a writer, and looked after my sister and me, whil e our mother, a civil servant, worked long hours and was often away for long periods of time. They recall how I was born looking more than a little thuggish. Round, strong and i nsatiably greedy, I was never a child you would want to dress in pink. It was with my hair — thick, curly and prone to tangles — that I staged my first rebellion against the stereotypes of my gender.
It was a nightmare to comb, and the arguments over the hairbrush were legendary, until I begged my parents to cut it all off. I was allowed to accompany my father to the village barber, where we sat, side-byside, for short haircuts. Afterwards, I looked in the mirror and agreed it was a much better look.
The birth of my beautiful blonde sister, Isla, when I was two, seemed to enforce my feelings that I was meant to be a tomboy.
Relatives had suggested that it might be a good idea to buy me a little doll’s pram so I could ‘be like Mummy’ and adapt to my little sister’s arrival. But I wanted nothing to do with that pram.
My mother — fiercely intellectual — encouraged her daughters to follow their own paths, whatever they might be.
Isla, now a doctor, aspired to grow her hair long enough to sit on and longed for a Barbie doll (when my parents refused to buy her one, s he s aved up f or weeks and eventually bought her own). Meanwhile, I adored the Beano and climbing trees.
During the long school holidays, we led a fairly isolated, idyllic existence. With no one to compare ourselves to — we didn’t even have a television for most of our childhood — we simply slotted into our chosen roles without questioning the other.
We must have been a rare sight for anyone passing through our little world — they’d have assumed that blonde Isla and her boyish sidekick were brother and sister.
At school, my masculine alter-ego took his place, and was never questioned. In our deprived, former mining community, the teachers had far bigger problems to deal with than a little girl who chose to dress in her father’s old jumpers and had her hair cut short.
Besides, I was a popular highachiever who was frequently top of the class. I didn’t prompt any ‘concerned’ letters home, or referrals to child psychologists — my parents would have laughed had anyone tried.
YeT,
as we all know, childhood is a safe place from which we are all forced to emerge, sooner or later. Aged 12, I left the sanctuary of my primary school and headed to secondary school in edinburgh — along with 2,000 other pupils.
In identical school uniforms, there was nothing to set me apart from the other girls — apart from my hair (one teacher slipped up during one of my first assemblies, shouting ‘stand up, laddie’, only to bluster his apologies when he spotted my school kilt).
In this new, hormone- charged environment, I found the rules were changing daily, l i ke a constant shifting pool of quicksand that threatened to drag me under. Here, being the best at football was no longer enough to be popular
Why were the boys more impressed by the long, glossy-haired girls than me — who could beat most of them in an arm wrestle?
Little did I know, but hormones were taking charge of my body, and sorted out my differences in the way nature always intended — not on a psychologist’s couch, but in my bloodstream and i n the social melting pot of school.
True sufferers of gender dysmorphia cite puberty as the most difficult time of their lives, when they find themselves recoiling in horror as their body starts to turn into that of a man or woman. Many are driven to self- mutilate and retreat f rom society. Tragically, some of them take their own lives.
Thankfully, my body, and the rapidly changing ones of everyone around me, fascinated me.
I grew my hair. My father came with me when I bought my first pair of glittery jeans and my mother gave me a set of hair straighteners to tackle those unruly curls.
A year later, at 14, I had a boyfriend and my first kiss.
When I talk about those years with my parents now, it is always to thank them for letting me work things out for myself.
I am in a long-term relationship now and I feel my years spent as a tomboy have stood me in good stead. I’m never awkward around men — and they’re always amused when they see me kick a football more skilfully than them.
Maybe one day I will have children of my own. And if any of them want to sample life on the other side at any stage, then that will be absolutely fine by me.
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