I have a colouring book in front of me. It’s called Finding Gender, and it was sent to me by an activist who knows how much I love social justice and felt-tip pens. In the book, a small child and a robot go on marvellous adventures, and children and nostalgic adults get to scribble on their clothes and costumes, their hair and toys. It’s an ordinary colouring book in every respect, apart from the fact that the child isn’t identifiably male or female. Neither is the robot. The person with the crayons gets to decide what they’re wearing, whether they’re boys or girls, or both or neither.
This is how it happens. From dinner-table conversations to children’s books, the lines of gender are being redrawn. Suddenly, transsexual and transgender people – those who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth – are everywhere in popular culture. Suddenly, people who transitioning from male to female, or from female to male, or who choose to live outside the gender binary entirely, are no longer universally portrayed as freaks to be gawped at or figures of fun, but as exactly what they have been throughout human history – real, flesh-and-breath people with feelings and dreams that matter.
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