Genderquake
Our daughter was born a boy
What it means to be a man or a woman has never been more confusing. And neither has the language used to discuss it.
Genderquake, a two-part Channel 4 series starting on Monday, may muddle things yet further by gathering, in a Big Brother-style house, 11 young Britons whose gender “identification” is not necessarily clear, even to them.
The housemates range across the spectrum from a straight salesman from Barnsley to a trans woman from Brighton, via those who describe themselves as “gender fluid”, “non-binary” and in one particularly perplexing instance, “70per cent female”.
“You’re just doing it to be fashionable,” two gents of mature years suggest when the group pitches up in the Sussex pub nearest to the
Genderquake house. It is a suspicion even voiced within its walls by Markus, a 32-yearold gay model: “maybe,” he muses, “this is just another hype, like if you want to be gluten-free”.
Back home in Windsor, another of the 11, Brooke Moore, confesses to being bored by all these new gender labels: “even for someone who is in the thick of it, I don’t know where to stand”.
Born a boy called Bradley, she has a rare condition that means she has an extra X chromosome and so, as a teenager “naturally transitioned” without surgery into living as a woman, and chose the name Brooke (after the 5ft 11in star of 2008 US reality TV show, Brooke Knows Best).
When pushed on how she likes to describe herself, she opts – in decidedly non-pc terms – for “a woman with a little bit extra”.
“But my mum sometimes still calls me Bradley,” she jokes. “And my nan will send me birthday cards addressed one year to Brooke and the next year to Bradley. And do you know what? I couldn’t care less. As long as my family are OK with who I am, it doesn’t matter what they call me.”
Having “come out” on her own terms, the 25-year-old earns her living by vlogging on Youtube (from the capacious dressing room her dad built to accommodate her high heels obsession), and appearing in fashion shoots with the likes of the cast from reality TV’S The Only Way is Essex and Love Island.
Brooke is the first to admit that being so relaxed about inclusive language makes her atypical of the “trans community”.
“Perhaps it is why they don’t like me very much. When I told Charlie and Campbell, two of my housemates [both trans women], about how my mum and nan slip up occasionally and call me Bradley, they both said, ‘Oh my God, I’d never speak to my mum again if she did that’.”
But being touchy about words, she argues, “simply puts up walls to being accepted. People are much more ready to mix now than they ever have been before, but they are not going to do it if they get told off by trans people because of the language they use.”
Part of the set-up of Genderquake is to allow each individual their own voice, rather than assume an LGBTQ “community” position. And so Saffron – a 21-year-old post-grad student from Wakefield with a short mop of hair, a good line in tailored suits and a “girlie” twin sister – identifies as “non-binary”, taking the opposite side in the debate from Brooke.
“I prefer to be referred to as ‘they’ and ‘them’ than ‘she’ and ‘her’. It should be about the comfort of the individual, and labels can create solidarity between people,” says Saffron. “But online, people like me are called ‘attentionseekers’ or ‘special snowflakes’. I’m told that if I can identify as ‘no gender’, then I might as well identify as a spoon or a helicopter. It is humiliating and bullying.”
The harsh reactions faced in trying to define their gender beyond what Saffron calls the “two-box rule” are what most unite the housemates.
Brooke describes the three years, from 13 to 16, that she spent at nearby Windsor Boys’ School as “horrific”, as her chromosomal disorder (part of Klinefelter Syndrome) meant that, with the arrival of puberty, she began to develop breasts.
If physically she was changing, Brooke says she had known since primary school she was different from other boys: “not because of the way I looked, because of the way I acted. I was more ‘swishy’.”
The traumatic part, she recalls, was trying to work out how she fitted in to the world around her. “I realised I liked boys, but my best friend was gay and I knew I wasn’t gay.
“He liked men and he wanted to look more like a man, get a six-pack. That wasn’t me.”
Still Bradley at this stage, she was required to wear the school uniform, but increasingly combined it with make-up, eyeliner and earrings. Here, her dad, Steve, a building contractor, chips in: “It started out with the Goth scene,” explains the 60-year-old. Brooke smiles: “Speak to anyone trans back then, and we all hid behind the Goth thing.” At weekends, she’d go out with her female friends in a bra and skirt with clip-in hair extensions (“I was a mess,” she interjects), but got changed before coming home. It was on these outings that she would bump into the boys from school who would then bully her mercilessly on Monday. The corridors, she recalls, would part when she walked down them “like the Red Sea”.
Around the family dining table, her parents look pained. “We just didn’t know the full extent,” says Julie, a stay-at-home mum (the couple have another daughter, 10 years older than Brooke).
“We knew she didn’t like school, and she often had time off,” confirms Steve, “but if I had any idea I would have paid the school a few visits.”
So why did Brooke keep the bullying to herself? “I didn’t want to bring all that into this happy positive place,” she says. “I left it at the school gates.”
Only at 17, now at sixth form college and dressing as a woman, was she ready to sit her parents down for a direct conversation.
The timing was, she recalls, pragmatic. “Everyone had started applying for their provisional driving licences because we wanted to have ID for going out clubbing at 18. I knew if mine said Mr Bradley Moore, I would face all sorts of hell at the door, because I definitely wouldn’t be looking male.”
Requesting her parents’ approval to change her name by deed poll lifted the lid on all that had so far gone unsaid.
“It wasn’t a surprise,” recalls Julie. “All I said to her,” her husband agrees, “was that she’s got a whole lot of ugly coming towards her, because of society. But as along as she was prepared to put up with that, it made no difference to me what she wanted to be.”
“What they didn’t know was that I’d already had the ugly,” says Brooke. “Changing my name was actually what saved me from more ugly.”
There have, all acknowledge, been tough times, since – when Brooke had to be admitted to a local hospital and was put on the men’s ward; or recently when she ended a four-year relationship with her boyfriend because it was heading towards marriage and, as she puts it, “I didn’t just want to settle for whatever man I could get who would accept me. I still want the fairytale, like my mum and dad.”
Dating, she acknowledges, can be tough: “I make no attempt to hide that I am trans, but timing is hard. Do you say it as soon as a man starts chatting you up? If asked, I say yes. I’m not deluded.”
But Brooke and her parents agree that – compared to some of the other stories in the Genderquake house, or from those who contact her via her vlog – their obviously close bond has seen them through circumstances that might break other families. One of Brooke’s housemates was thrown out by their parents when they mentioned transitioning.
“If I didn’t have this home life,” says Brooke. “I just don’t know what I would have done.”
Genderquake starts on Channel 4 on Monday at 9pm
‘If I didn’t have this home life, I just don’t know what I would have done’