Thoughts after Middle Sex

Dear Channel 4,

My wife and I sat down last night to watch "Middlesex" last night expecting an informative documentary about the former English county.

Imagine our surprise when we were presented with over an hour of homosexualists, shameless benders of gender, and effete Indian rentboy-wallahs having their John Thomases lobbed off!

I don't know if you're planning to do any future documentaries in this series, but suffice it to say if I see "Rutland" advertised in the Radio Times I shall not be watching!

Yours outraged,

Brigadier P. Slade (Mrs.)

Actually, Middle Sex on Channel 4 last night was very good. It argued that the idea of their being only 2 sexes, "male and female", and only two sexualities "gay and straight", was fundamentally flawed. That things were far more complicated that that, and even labels like "transvestite" and "transsexual" are too limiting.

Of course, myself and any other right-thinking t*person have espoused this theory for years. Spend any time on the tranny "scene" and you come to realise that trannies are like snowflakes, they're very pretty, they melt in hot weather, and each one is completely and utterly unique. (I sat back with a very self-satisfied look on my face when I came up with that analogy.)

No two of us made the exactly same journey to get where we are, no two of us are doing what we do for exactly the same reason, and no two of us are going to take exactly the same path from now on.

Things aren't black and white, and they're not shades of gray, there just aren't enough graduations. The word "spectrum" is often used to represent the myriad vibrant shades of human existence, but even spectrum implies a one-dimensional range of levels.

I suggest we need a whole new "colour-space" to describe every possible human gender and sexuality. Colour theorists use the L*a*b system, which defines any colour visible to the human eye in 3 discrete dimensions. I think I'll invent something similar for human sexuality and gender identity. If I organise it myself I can make sure that I get to be bright pink.

I'm not arguing for an end to labels like "transvestite". Humans need labels. The ability to catagorise and name things is what makes us intelligent creatures. Prehistoric man wouldn't have come down from the trees if there weren't words to distinguish between things like "food" and "not food". But equally everyone understands that "food" represents a huge range of items, in varying levels of palatability to different people. No-one's ever suggested that there should be only one food that everyone should eat. Well, except maybe for MacDonalds.

But for some reason a lot of people seem to thing there's only one thing that a transvestite can be, and it annoys and confuses them when you say "ah yes I am a transvestite but I don't dress up very often, and I'm not really turned on just by dressing anymore". It doesn't fit exactly into the little box in their brain that they've put aside for transvesites, right next to the little box for "transsexuals that all look like Terence Stamp in Pricilla Queen of the Desert".

T*girls are just as guilty as "regular folks" for this, I've found. A lot of them seem desperate to gain that sense of belonging that comes from being in a group of like-minded people, and they tend to transfer their own transgendered identity onto the other trannies they meet. When I first joined online tranny groups I got in contact with lots of people who wanted to know what hormones I was taking, what kind of panties I wore under my clothes to work, etc. I don't do either of those things, but for a while I tried to measure up to other's expectations of what a tranny should be, because I too wanted that sense of belonging. I wanted to be a part of the tranny tribe, different from the mainstream but homogenized into it's own orthodoxy.

Now I'm happy to just be me. I'm a tranny, if you need a label, but that's just a broad-brush term. There's a word for the exact type of tranny I am, it's "Becky".