Gender

The incident I am about to recount I make no judgment about, other than that I believe it tells us where we are in the cycle of civilisation and that it is helping me orientate myself. A friend of mine was walking her dogs at the same beauty spot I walk my spaniels, when a car screeched into the car park sending children scurrying for their lives. My friend ran up and knocked on the window and the window was wound down to reveal a man in a dress and blond wig. My friend said, ‘What are you doing? You could have killed a child. Slow down!’ And the man replied, ‘But I’m a transvestite.’ My friend tried to pursue the issue, pointing out that, be that as it may, he couldn’t speed or run over children.

My old college, formerly known as New Hall, is women-only for its undergraduates. But now the term is expanding, as so often these days, to include anyone who, at the time of application, 'identifies as female', as well as the non-binary, those who really can’t make up their minds. During my time in college, I shared a room with another girl; quite what it would have been like to share with someone aspiring to being a woman I don’t know…presumably entirely non-threatening but a bit odd. The point about this women-only college is that it was meant to provide a bit of gender balance to the male majority in the overall university population – which must by now be getting near parity.

The Daily Telegraph dubbed it an 'admirable move' when it shared the news on Facebook that John Lewis has decided to scrap labelling children's clothes according to gender and has opted instead to make them all unisex. I wonder if John Lewis will be extending this wisdom to the adults' clothes department too, including swimwear? To borrow a question from the vital campaign group Let Clothes Be Clothes; why not #makeitunisex? In a way it is comforting that we live in a society where lobbying over gender specific clothes is a big deal rather than worrying that you'll be stoned to death for premarital sex or killed for attending Midnight Mass. But at the same time, the weight we attribute to the moral and political pronouncements of retail giants is strange.

Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out ‘gender stereotyping’ in TV ads. I’m already looking forward to it because the ASA’s first thoughts on the matter, published in July, were fascinating. An ad for baby milk which showed a girl growing up to be a ballerina was deemed quite unacceptable; KFC got flack for featuring one man teasing another for not being manly enough. Stereotypes on TV contribute to ‘unequal outcomes’ in reality, explained ASA’s chief exec. Of course no one wants boys and girls to feel forced to conform — some boys are feminine, some girls boyish — but that wasn’t the issue here.

God, she’s on a bit of a run, Justine Greening, isn’t she? A day after it turns out she wants to let people change gender merely on their say so, without regard to their possession of wombs or gonads or XX chromosomes, she’s set her sights on the CofE and its retrograde attitude to gender – actually, come to think of it, she’s probably got the entire Christian communion in her sights. All in her capacity of Education Secretary and Women and Equalities Minister. She observed in an interview on Sky: 'I think it is important that the church in a way keeps up and is part of a modern country. I wouldn’t prescribe to them how they should deal with that.

Once upon a time, ‘binary’ was a mathematical term. Now it is an insult on a par with ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobic’, to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars. The enemy on this particular battleground is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental. This ‘binary’ distinction is accepted as a given by the vast majority of the human race. No matter. It is now being categorised as a form of bigotry. Utterly bizarre? Scoff at your peril. It’s fast becoming an enforceable orthodoxy, with children and young people particularly in the frame for attitude reassignment.

We all know that advertising is the work of the devil – creating entirely spurious wants, including in small children – but making it gender neutral doesn’t help. The Advertising Standards Authority is extending its brief to ensure that advertising does not confirm unhelpful sex stereotypes. That is to say, it is going to ban advertisements suggesting that little girls want to be ballerinas (Aptamil) or showing Lynda Bellingham at the stove (Bisto). Guy Parker of the ASA says, 'advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole'; the ASA will make sure it does by stigmatising the offenders.

The most open of folk, who spill saucy secrets about themselves, clam up when asked how much they earn. Revealing your salary, especially to colleagues, is taboo. Conventional wisdom says that knowing fellow workers’ salaries sows discord. I know first-hand how explosive it can be to learn what people you work with get paid. I’d been promoted to a senior management role where I needed to know everyone’s pay. On my first morning my new boss entered my office with an armful of employee files and told me to read them. Closing my door, he said he would return to take me to lunch with a bottle of red wine, which he added, I might need. The files made hard reading.

For a body supposedly committed to eliminating inequality between the sexes, the Women and Equalities Select Committee don’t exactly lead from the front. Only three of the 11 members are men. To some, this will be a welcome corrective to the still male-dominated House of Commons. To others (such as Philip Davies, one of the three male members), it is a sign of how, in Westminster, the cause of equality is narrowly focused on the interests of white professional women. There is not a single ethnic minority representative on the committee. This week, committee chair Maria Miller announced her ‘deep disappointment’ that the government has not adopted their proposals on closing the gender pay gap.

‘Never give up your career for a man.’ These words of my mother’s rang in my ears throughout girlhood, adolescence and young womanhood, until, about a decade into my marriage, she finally accepted I wasn’t going to. The very opposite of an Austen-esque Mrs Bennet, desperate to engineer a good marriage for her daughter, my mother’s belief was that any woman in possession of a brain must be in want of a job. A room of one’s own? Certainly. And a bank account, a pension and some shares. Although I have on occasion mused about how lovely it must be to be supported by a doting husband, my mother, as always, is right. In the past, an advantageous marriage might have been one route for women to live in financial comfort.

Novelists can’t merely tell cracking tales. We’re supposed to save the world. At the University of Kent, a student implored me to inscribe The Mandibles with instructions for ‘how to keep this from happening’ — for the feverish young man now vowed to devote his life to preventing my new novel’s debt-fuelled near-future financial collapse. And I thought I was just doing a book signing. I wrote, ‘To keep this from happening, pay your bills. To cash in on this happening, get as deeply into debt as possible.’ The next student proffered a tiny spiral notebook, in which I was to jot ‘three things that are really important’.