Dear Oscar,

At this very moment in the United Kingdom there is much debate about the Gender Recognition Act – and I know, Dear Oscar, that such a thing would be inconceivable in your time.  I know that your age was wrestling with the implications of the ‘Woman Question’, but let me tell you things have moved on apace since then.  We do now have the legal recognition of women, their rights, their position in society, and we do now strive for some level of equality between the sexes as they have been defined (there are many who would scoff at that, both in terms of its appropriateness and its efficacy!).  But now – and it is most exciting – has emerged the idea that gender does not have to be fixed, in fact never really was, that it is all just a convenient construct for categorising people, and that it can be subverted and even overthrown.  

I tell you, the most exciting people are living right now!

Female to male, male to female people now exist;  those who do not align with any particular gender also;  and those who nominate as ‘genderqueer’, who exist outside of the established order, and who use the pronoun ‘they’, rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’.  Oscar, you would love it, stirring the pot to such a degree that swathes of the population are starting to react, with earnest debate in parliament, with screaming attacks and defences in the media, and, sadly, actual bodily harm, even murder of particular subjects in particular places.  In the United States of America (which I know you visited. dear Oscar), transsexuals, as the gender warriors are increasingly coming to be known, can be hounded and killed!

It is truly a social revolution.

At the heart of the debate is the central question:  am I to be defined by the state around me, or am I able to define myself?  Can I live my life openly and unhindered in whatever way I choose, in gendered terms, or do I have to be labelled and categorised and positioned by the societies that surround me?  Do I have to be a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’, or can I simply insist upon being ‘myself’.  I know you would be right there in the thick of it.  It tears asunder all of our assumptions and presumptions about how we think we have to be, what we think we have to do, and how we feel we need to organise our lives and our worlds – and in those respects offers an unlimited freedom of being.

Of course it does get terribly muddied conceptually by the actual world in which it is evolving, with headlines and doggerel mocking and deriding ‘men in dresses’ (priests and bishops, one has to counter), ‘bearded ladies’ (don’t all humans sprout hair?), wavering sexualities and unfixed unions, but I cannot help feeling that we are living through something enorme, my dear, simply enorme.

After all, when you were last with us women did not have the right to vote in public elections – and now they most certainly do, with all that has come with it.  You would not recognise the society in which we are living, although I suspect that you would still be endlessly amused.  I am, Oscar.  Both amused and terrified and worried for my dear people who want to break the boundaries, stand outside of the fence, be who they want to be! The repetition of form, the desperate attempts to cling to certitude – when everything changes, constantly, whether we like it or nor! This is the battleground!

Your friend, and mine,

Algernon B. Duffoure.