I am myself. I am a woman. I am enough.

"Jo" she said, "Can I ask you something personal? Of course, you can tell me fuck off." 

I always judge these requests in the moment. There's no foolproof way of handling them. As a trans woman, I am used to having to do the heavy lifting to help those around me try and come to terms with who I am and with my experience, and it can be tiring. But this was a new colleague, and I hope, friend, who had been very welcoming in my new role working alongside her. We had already bonded a fair bit and she radiated lots of supportive energy. So I said. "Sure".

"When you started I was really happy that we had another woman in our group. And that's what I see you as, a woman, absolutely and completely", she said. She then reflected on my use of 'trans' and what, she wondered, it meant for me. This, she added, was particularly in the context of another friend of hers who (my guess) identified as non-binary and presented in a more gender non-conforming way.

I thanked her. I'll take that kind of inquiry any day of the week, especially these days, in this country. I explained that the inner definition that had meaning for me was woman. That knowing that I am a woman, and being in the world as a woman, I can make sense of myself and my life. I am deeply comfortable with that explanation of myself. I talked about how the term 'trans' is included within that knowledge of myself as a woman. I have told others in the past that it sits for me alongside other features like having brown eyes or dark hair.

We talked about the experiences of others. I pointed out that I can only speak for myself with any authority. I suggested that everyone is looking for their own sweet spot to help them understand their own gender - though some have to work harder to find it than others, and some (likely most) need to do very little work at all (something that can encourage the view in their minds that such work doesn't even exist - a main root of intolerance later). For a few, that place of peace may be between the terms 'man' and 'woman', or even outside the axis of these terms altogether - a zone where they can recognise themselves and find happiness. They too may use the term 'trans' - a word which can express a range of experiences amongst those who at some point and in some way come to understand that the word 'male' or 'female', written on their birth certificate (after a 3-second glance at their infant genitals as they were born), is not the whole story for them. Or indeed, any of the story. 

After our coffee together, I reflected on the feeling of affirmation and support I had experienced. The lift it had given me, in a world of barbaric Daily Telegraph or Times headlines and a Prime Minister parroting out bigot talking points, was very powerful. 

The thing is, and it really is the thing, I am a woman. I live my life as a woman, I experience it as that woman. I am treated as one, I love and am loved by others as one. This is my lived experience of the world, part of my phenomenology. I would not, could not, be any other way. I know that because I tried another way and it really didn't work out, to the point that I would rather have not even been alive if I could not become myself.  My identity is, to use an existentialist idea, situational, based on my life as it is, for me. As Sartre would have it, I have the right, in fact, the responsibility, to claim the freedom to be me. And as his sometime partner, Simone de Beauvoir saw it, womanhood is not a product of causative factors (biology amongst them), nor the result of some kind of essentialist reductionism, but forged by an inward conversation one has with oneself and the efforts one makes for inner authenticity: 'rapport à soi'.

Yet the weight of British society's prejudice - at least as represented by its morally putrid media, the small but fanatical groups of bigots who encourage it, and the country's toxically ideological government - has, I know, eaten deep into me and many others in the British trans community. At a profound level, the desperate urge to objectify - the male objectification of women and the creation of woman as 'other' in society, for example - has paradoxically leaked into the attitudes of some vicious, cisgender female, 'gender critical' voices who make common cause with the worst reactionary and conservative male energies in society, to now 'other' trans women, as they themselves have been othered by a patriarchal society. Female writers for The Guardian or Labour MPs put themselves on the same side as powerfully oppressive, anti-feminist voices in the government or in the press and the fit is bizarrely neat. In forging this relationship, real lives and the reality of trans people's lived experiences plays no role at all - the fate of one trans prisoner becomes emblematic of a terrifying, widespread societal peril. The hormone levels of a tiny number of trans sportswomen becomes a reason to blanket ban all trans women from all women's sports at all levels. The regret felt by one young person treated by the Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic is enough to stimulate a widely exploited court case that (despite an appeal court ruling against this individual) created enough outrage to eventually get the clinic shut (via a range of government and NHS actions or non-actions), depriving care to hundreds of young people who depended on it. Other issues (around toilets or changing rooms) are invented and amplified to serve the narrative, with interpretations of the law bent to suit. Stories are actively sought out to adapt to the narrative and to find ways to objectivise and create fear of trans women. And sadly, much comes from a tiny group of cisgender women (a few of whom have fought in years past against being turned into objects themselves*). They've been welcomed in from the cold by male voices (plus, sadly, some colluding right-wing female ones) who see allyship with them as an opportunity to recruit them into a patriarchal structure that oppresses all women - cis or trans. There's much talk about keeping trans women out of women's single-sex spaces. Yet it's the biggest paradox of the lot that the women who are going to get challenged most about their gender history as they try and enter a women's toilet or a women's changing room are not the trans women, of whom there are very few, but the cisgender women who don't conform to a male-created stereotype of what feminity ought to look like. Some victory for women.

As I write this I am still surprised by just how much I welcomed the affirmation from my colleague today. Actually, I can likely name maybe twenty other cisgender female friends who could have said the same thing to me, but cannot really know what it's like to live with a public discourse that relentlessly seeks to say the opposite and so probably think they don't need to. For these friends, I am self-evidently a woman (my self, if you like, is the evidence). In the same way, the remarks of my colleague today were not accompanied by preconditions. She didn't say, "I see you as a woman, pending a full physical examination, chromosomal screening, and a thorough personal and medical history, including neurological, endocrinological and gynecological review, assessing you against a set of criteria over which I alone have control".  And, to be clear, she knew I was trans - I told her in our first meeting.

My understanding of myself, my being, was all that she needed. That was enough. I was enough. 

_______

* Though it must be pointed out that this isn't true of many. For most of this small group of vocal haters, trying to ruin the lives of trans women is very much their first and only rodeo and looks like staying that way. Their prior careers as 'feminists', supporting women against oppression and discrimination or fighting for equal treatment in society have often amounted to nothing. A search through their public pronouncements on questions like Roe v Wade, the Sarah Everard case, the terrifyingly deep misogyny in the Met, appalling conviction figures for rape and sexual assault or even the ongoing fight for equal pay, for example, will often reveal...a void. For these people, the intellectual wrapping of the 'movement' with its cult-like sense of belonging and its appropriation of Suffragette rhetoric may be a simple veneer for a deeper, baser prejudice.