Adrienne Nash
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

Well now Connor Kelly, as a trans person of some years and living as female for 41 of my 79, I could well take umbrage. The fact is that I agree with much of what you say. I could walk down a naturist beach and no one would know that I am not a natal woman.

I have the misfortune to be a realist. I don’t do self delusion. Like most trans people I study my target gender, in my case women, and although I behave as a woman and look like a woman, I know that biologically I am not a woman.

However, one has to realise that the most important part of any creature on this earth is not the body but the brain. When is someone declared dead if on life support and the rest of the body has closed down? When their brain ceases to function is the answer. Therefore what counts most in gender identity and how the world should treat, is the nature of a persons brain and that includes surely sexual identity. The brain is the person, the body is simply the vehicle that trundles the brain around. Oh yes, of course there is reproduction and as we know trans women can’t bear children, they don’t have a womb nor ovaries BUT for how long will that persist. Womb transplants have already been performed. In any case, not every XX chromosome person has a womb. Not every woman is XX chromsome. There is nothing binary in gender or in sex. The human animal is full of infinite variation and difference. WE are not stamped out by a machine, identical animals, either male or female, cisgender. You know that.

If a creature looks like a dog and barks like a dog, wags it’s tale and chases cats, the likelihood is, it’s one of the 400 breeds of dog. If a person looks like a woman with the physical attributes of a woman and more importantly, behaves as a woman, then surely they are women?

So while I have difficulties at times maintaining I am a ‘woman’ although I look and act as one, a lot of my difficulty was caused by my conditioning. At a boys school, a boys boarding school until age eighteen. A career abroad as a male, having failed to convince doctors in the 1950s that they should alter my gender. After returning to the UK, I fought doctors for another ten years until at last, they gave me what I wanted. Much of my life therefore, in less enlightened times than the present day, I had to live as a convincing male or be victimised, scorned, shunned. It should be easily understood therefore, that I have self doubts.

I feel Connor, that you should reconsider much of what you say. I mean, are you really a man, given the fact that you have presumably, sex with other men as a gay man? Is that the action of a man? Well I know the answer. Yes you are a man but a part of your brain has directed you to be gay.

I’m pleased that you are at least prepared to be civil, to treat us as female or male according to whether we are MtF or FtM. Perhaps all we trans should be thankful for that.

    Adrienne Nash

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