To be, or not to be

I originally wrote this in 2019. Today I attended a pro-choice solidarity rally. Fortunately, our abortion laws in Aotearoa have been updated since I wrote this. However, the USA has regressed and the constitutional right to abortion healthcare has been revoked. This leaves individual states to make the choice, and some have immediately outlawed abortion under any circumstances. We marched to the US Consulate to send a message of solidarity to our American friends. And we were reminded to be on guard in this country as nothing is ever guaranteed and right wing politicians are already making unpleasant noises.

I also want to note that whilst I have referred to women in this post, I acknowledge that the right to access to abortion healthcare is relevant to people of all genders. 

At the moment, women in New Zealand are looking on as states in the USA enact the most restrictive laws against terminating a pregnancy we have ever seen.

What we fail to remember is that New Zealand's laws are not that liberal, either. We gasp in horror at the idea that young girls cannot have a pregnancy ended even in the case of it being the result of rape or incest, but we forget that those things by themselves are not ground for a termination in New Zealand.

The 'abortion debate' is one that throws up so many issues for me. I have come from a background of Christian belief that life starts from conception - although I don't know where that's backed up in the Scriptures. I have always had an uneasy relationship with the concept of terminating a pregnancy.

The recent resurgence in interest in the law around termination has come hot on the heels of a dear friend confirming her own pregnancy.

This is a very much wanted, and planned for, first baby. We are already starting to use the language of hope - at 6 weeks gestation we are referring to it as a 'baby' when it is nothing more than a clump of pulsating tissue.

This just emphasises to me that what we feel about something makes it what it is. Language matters, and right now, it matters more than anything.

Sitting alongside my friend's much wanted and already dearly loved first baby are the stories of women for whom this clump of cells was a danger. Danger is a strong word, but I will use it, even if it wasn't a life or death situation. Or maybe it was, just not in the ways we commonly describe it.

I know first hand the long term effect children have on your life. The 'motherhood penalty' isn't some theory that someone dreamed up. Its a real thing effecting the economic outcomes for women the world over. We cannot pretend that having a baby is just a physical manifestation and consequence of a physical act. We must acknowledge the far reaching economic and social impacts it currently has on the people who carry them - women.

I have four children whom I would not change for the world. They are delightful, clever, beautiful individuals. However, in a capitalist world, I cannot discount the economic cost I have borne for taking time out of the paid workforce to raise four children until the youngest was six years old.

As I moved away from my original religious ideology, and started to hear more of women's stories, I started to understand about the origins of life.

Life actually begins with the woman who is growing it. If she is not ready, if she hasn't met her potential yet, it is profoundly unfair to ask her for her life be usurped by someone else's.

I appreciated the meme that stated "what if that baby was going to cure cancer?" and the response that "what if the woman carrying that baby was going to cure cancer, but she didn't finish college because she got pregnant and and couldn't end the pregnancy?"

I feel profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of having a termination. Fortunately, I will not be in a position to have to make that choice, but I can appreciate what a difficult choice it is. 

I am also in a position where I believe that a woman's decision about whether or not she wishes to be pregnant trumps everything.

My dear friend is pregnant with a baby.

The baby is a wish. An idea. A dream. A future.

But they are not all like this.

Some are pregnancies that are wrong. Costly. Deadly.

They are pregnancies. Not babies.

Babies are our ideas, dreams, futures.

And pregnancies must not continue at the expense the lives of women who bear them.

We could be heroes.

Back in the late 90s we'd occasionally cruise around the streets of the Auckland's CBD with your mate John and his girlfriend. 

One night as we drove up Queen Street, you spotted a group of young women at the edge of Aotea Square. The scene unfolding in front of us appeared to be that they were being harassed by a group of young men nearby.

You and John decided that you would jump out of the car and follow the young women on foot to avert any danger. I drove around to the other side of the Town Hall ready to meet you once you were satisfied that the women were safe.

It's much harder to be the hero, though, when the necessity strikes closer to home.

When the outcome won't be grateful thanks and adulation but potential anger and heartbreak.

When the risk is higher but the costs are greater.

When there is nobody to see you.

It doesn't stop it being the right thing, though.

Does it?

And on it goes

When I last wrote, we'd been doing an unprecedented nationwide lockdown to stop the spread of COVID 19. We did slowly emerge from that state - I can't even remember when, now - and life slowly went back to normal. 

Personally, I had enjoyed being in lockdown. It meant quality time for my family. It meant no rushing. No two hours worth of commute. I had anxious moments (as per prior post) but mostly it was a positive experience. I found moving back into a workplace where most people had choices about being there or not when I didn't, somewhat challenging. I, and many others, experienced a kind of lockdown grief. My 13yo daughter said she cried because she had enjoyed the time she had spent (at her father's house) with her 18yo brother, and now he was headed back to work and his social and love life, she would miss him terribly. 

We ended up in what our government called COVID-19 Alert Level 1 - which mostly meant life as normal for most of us. We went back to our normal movements. Nyah and I even got in a roadie to Hawkes Bay. 

After 102 days of freedom, it all (sort of) came crashing down. Community cases were discovered, so Auckland went into another lockdown. I say 'lockdown lite' as, unlike the first time around, many businesses could still operate and people could still work in some industries. For us, though, it was working from home and kids home from school again. It was non-standard kids lunches, and again, the joy of sleeping an extra hour.

But it hasn't been so much fun this time around. The novelty has worn off. The rest of the country are cautiously business as usual (they are in "Level 2") and that feels a bit crappy to Aucklanders confined to home. Kids have had to cycle rapidly back into online learning, but will likely have to cycle rapidly out of it again. My 11yo son is in his first year at intermediate, and has spent nearly two months of it in various states of lockdown, doing online learning. Its tough for a kid in a new school trying to forge new friendships. He has found much solace in online gaming, where he can remain connected to the friends he cannot see while stuck at home. If I don't feel guilty about the online school work he isn't doing, then there's always feeling guilty about online gaming to fill the gap. Miss 13 has gotten taller than me, is cheerfully resilient, emotionally intelligent, and offers hugs readily. She is maybe doing the best of all of us.

Nyah's eczema and poor sleep betray her levels of stress, but she is calm and comforting in a crisis, and we can count on her to cook her way out of our malaise.

As for me - the bogeyman of anxiety is a constant companion.

This isn't 'feeling anxious.' It isn't 'feeling worried.' Its not the intense sensation of 'fight or flight' that marks an anxious moment, and then passes quickly.

Its an ongoing sensation of not just feeling anxious, but my whole body reacting to and pushing against it in a way that manifest physical symptoms. Its ongoing tiredness, the perception of breathlessness, the feeling of concrete in your shoes as you move through your day, the loss of interest in anything other than mindless scrolling through social media, the inability to hold onto snippets of information and the need to have everything written down, the difficulty focusing.

The worst part is the knowledge that the tight chest, the shortness of breath, the fuzzy head are not harbingers of any sinister health events, but they are nonetheless very real sensations. The worst part is knowing this, but that the reality is that it is still exhausting day to day work it to constantly affirm this to myself, leaving little energy to function normally in the middle of - in case we'd forgotten it was happening around us - a pandemic the likes of which we have not seen in over 100 years. The worst part is that there is still a sense of shame that while there is 'nothing wrong with me' there is still something very, very ...well...wrong with me.

Today we learned that we are in this 'lockdown lite' for another six days. Then we move back into the steps of 'business as usual.' The steps loss and gain. 

Today I went for a skin check at a GP who is also a skin cancer specialist. He was in full PPE, and the site was managed to minimise contact between clients.

"What a year its been." He said. "Pandemics usually take eighteen months to work through," he said matter of factly. 

"It looks like we're in for another year of this."

ANZAC Day in the age of COVID

At the time of writing, our pandemic lockdown is in week 5. We are not allowed to leave home except to go shopping for essential supplies, or to go to the doctor or chemist. We are allowed to exercise outside of our homes, by walking and biking in our neighbourhoods. We have bent the rules a tiny bit by driving to the local cemetery three kilometers away, where we can wander freely while still observing the requisite physical distancing mandated by the government.

One of the pandemic initiatives to spring up worldwide was to encourage people to put teddy bears in windows as a nod to the book 'We're going on a bear hunt' by Michael Rosen. While small children cannot even play on their local playground, they could go for a 'bear hunt' around their local neighbourhood.

As Easter approached, the Prime Minister assured children that the Easter Bunny (and the Tooth Fairy) was an essential worker, so was allowed to work over Easter - but added a reminder that he might be a bit busy, so might not make it to their house (and parents who hadn't stocked up on Easter eggs pre lockdown breathed a sigh of relief)

Easter eggs started finding their way into windows or in chalk drawings on footpaths and fences. A favourite in our very Westie neighbourhood was 'Happy Easter Egg" Unintentional, I'm sure, but amusing nonetheless.

Saturday was ANZAC Day, and in a time where gatherings of any sort are not allowed, people went to the end of their street at 6am for their own personal 'dawn service.'  There were reports of a bugle being heard across the whole suburb playing Reveille. People decorated their fences and windows with poppies. The creativity was joy to behold, but do people really know what this all means?

I do not get up for dawn anything, and ANZAC Day is no different. The few years after my Dad died it became a necessary part of my grieving process, but the pain faded and the sense of duty was no longer there.

On ANZAC Day itself, Nyah and I went up to the local cemetery and visited the memorial there. It is always interesting to observe social practices, whether or not we choose to partake in them. I was drawn to an information board which talked about the construction of the memorial, and about some of the adjacent graves. The Browne family lost four of their five sons. It is a loss incomprehensible to us today.

Just over a week prior to lockdown coming into effect, we visted Te Rau Aroha - a museum dedicated to Māori contribution to the armed forces, and the heavy price they have paid. It was a solemn and contemplative place to visit. My eldest son is now eighteen years old - the age he could have been conscripted into the armed forces and sent into the unknown - and possibly to die - like so many young Māori men in the service of their colonisers. Like the Browne brothers were. Parents the world over have experienced this heartbreak. Here we are locked into our 'bubbles'* to fight a war on a pathogen, but we have each other and we have relative comfort and safety.

As ANZAC Day dawned, I felt the grief of humanity. Grief for the boys who never came home a hundred years ago. Grief for my own father's lost youth and what it took from my whole family. Grief for my own son who is safe but who I have not seen for over five weeks. I miss him.

We have no concept of the losses families have experienced through war - especially World War I. Maybe the nationalistic fervor, poppy imagery and silhouettes of soldiers with heads bowed are us trying to make sense of it all.

We cry, we sing, we get up at dawn, and in the middle of a pandemic, we put poppies on our fences instead of in our lapels.




*'Bubble' refers to the small unit of people we can be a part of during the pandemic lockdown - our own 'bubble' is myself, Nyah and my two youngest children who live with us half of the time. Due to their movement between homes, our bubble technically also includes my two eldest children, their father and his partner. Our bubble does not extend beyond this, and we are not able to see any other family or friends. 

Back for the pandemic

It's a strange place we find ourselves in.

We are in the middle of a global pandemic not seen since the Spanish flu of 1918. We are three weeks into a mandatory lockdown where we are not allowed to leave the house except to go for exercise, go to the supermarket or go to the doctor or chemist. We are working in our homes, and the kids are doing online learning. The supermarket has queues of people standing two metres apart as they restrict access in order for us to practice appropriate physical distancing once inside. People are wearing face masks. We are trying to protect ourselves from a respiratory illness that ravages the lungs and leaves its victims gasping for breath.

I felt a weight of responsibility to record the experience of being on the inside of such a historic event. Pandemics like this have changed the trajectory of life on earth in the past, and now we have so many ways of recording our experiences of it this time, it felt like something I ought to do.

But I procrastinated. Where would I write these things? I felt like recording what was happening on here would be a divergence from my lane of grappling with panic disorder and queer identity.

Then today came the collision. The physiological manifestation of anxiety came to town, and it was time to write a Pandemic Diary.

I've always had health anxiety. At the beginning of the worst manifestation of panic and anxiety, I went to an A&E doctor who gave me a script for lorazepam and told me to get a hobby.

In the early 2010s, H5N1 bird flu reared its head, and I freaked out. Alongside an emergency kit I assembled a bird flu kit for a potential lockdown. There were vegetable seeds in there - I envisaged turning the front yard into a vegetable plot.

Then on 25 March 2020 we DID go into lockdown. As part of an email exchange with my ex-husband, I said "That bird flu kit doesn't look so whackadoodle now, does it? LOL"

Just before this, the anxiety was on the rise.

On Saturday 14 March, Nyah and I went for a trip to Northland. We saw the last cruise ship in the harbour at Paihia. Entry to the country became more restricted. On Monday we got onto a boat with a bunch of tourists and sanitised our hands and tried not to touch our faces. At Otehei Bay on Urupukapuka Island, school-aged children from Europe (presumably) frolicked in the still water on a late summer day. I wondered if they would get home, and if they did, what would await them there? Europe was being ravaged by this new and dangerous virus. It was bittersweet to watch their joyous play.

I woke up that day slightly dizzy and a little bit nauseous from the anxiety. That night I drank too much at a backpacker bar to try to release tension that had built up in all my muscles.

The Sunday after this I started to worry about a deadly virus on the loose, and we had possible exposure vectors through a kid working in fast food, an adult working with kids, and adult working in retail and kids at school.

My 13-year-old daughter wanted to go ice skating with her friends that weekend, and I worried about it. She assured me the skating rink was only letting in restricted numbers. The virus had no community transmission in New Zealand yet. I waited to see what the other parents would do. In the end, my daughter said that nobody was going to go, and maybe they'd go another time. My son kicked a ball around the park with his friend next door, but I wouldn't let him go to their house. As the boys headed back to their respective house, I was hanging out washing. "Two metres!" I yelled to remind them about our new physical distancing rules.

And then we were locked down and I cried with the relief. It's hard having all of us trying to work and learn and just cope in a small space, but I felt safe. We are mostly happily contained within our bubble, as the authorities to refer to it as. About once a week, I go to the supermarket. The first time was a disaster. We are only to have one person per household go shopping. I went to the New World, which is normally one of Nyah's happy places. We stroll the aisles, me pushing the trolley, while she creates culinary masterpieces in her head as she finds ingredients as she walks. But now it was just me, queuing to get in, lots of items missing off the shelves, the stressor of finding what you need as well as keeping a two-metre distance from other shoppers, messaging Nyah to check I've got the right meat, the right chia, the right tea, and paying with EFTPOS after someone behind a perspex screen scans your groceries and packs them in the trolley. When your EFTPOS card declines and you have to get your partner to rescue you by coming down with her card, the anxiety ramps up. It's a surreal experience.

Then you have to get your groceries into your house. Messaging in the public arena has indicated this virus lives on surfaces for up to 72 hours. So now coming home from the supermarket means you wipe everything down with a bleach solution, and the shopper puts their clothes in the wash and has a shower right away.

A glass of wine usually sorts out the tensions of the weird grocery shopping trip. Its a blip in a peaceful existence.

We are financially secure (for now) with nothing to spend our money on except for 'essential' goods we can get online. That means wine, fake booze, sweatshirts, hot cross buns and bread. We have a lovely outlook across a public park and can walk around our neighbourhood. Our Prime Minister is an exceptional leader who has been decisive and has, so far, made us successful in our fight against this brutal disease. We are doing ok and there wasn't much to worry about in our little bubble.

But then an old friend came to visit.

On Tuesday I went for a walk alone. I walked up a hill and pushed myself. I hyperventilated, and remembered that one of my issues was a form of agoraphobia...which isn't a 'fear of open spaces...'
- its a fear of something awful happening in the open spaces and nobody being around to help me. What if there really is something wrong with my lungs? What if I actually can't get enough breath? None of these are rational things to think. A few months ago I'd gone back to work too soon after a cold, and felt out of breath after a walk down the hill to get lunch. I had freaked out, so Nyah picked me up and took me to A&E, where I was diagnosed as having perfectly healthy and functioning heart and lungs, and my main issue was simply going back to work too soon after a viral illness.

Today I finally hit the wall. The full physiological effects of panic disorder all came out to play thanks to an earache. I periodically get an earache on the right side of my head. All my logic tells me this is an otorhinolaryngological issue. My anxiety tells that I am going to die of a brain aneurysm. It takes nearly all the energy I have to keep the latter in check.

So here's how it feels. Tight chest. A feeling that your breath is restricted. Pain in the side of the head. Fuzziness behind the eyes. Tight throat.

It is actually impossible to put into words just how this feels. Its fake impending doom that feels real because it's actually happening in your body. I've never fainted in my life but spent plenty of time worrying that I will. It's irrational and I know it, but it feels very real. It's exhausting and it takes focus to manage it.

And then there's a level of shame. I am a pretty healthy, if a little bit overweight, adult. I have nothing wrong with me. Nothing. Ok, maybe a slightly elevated heart rate that my doctor attributes to the "little bit overweight." But nothing else. So to be struggling to get my work done because I'm focusing on getting every breath into my lungs is ridiculous. Ridiculous.

I feel like past trauma has made me more resilient generally. I have been through some big upheavals in the last ten years, and I've gotten through and been ok.

But anxiety (and its black dog brother, depression) is a sneaky bastard and will catch you in the unguarded nooks and crannies.

Its the middle of a global pandemic, and I'm not afraid of getting a horrific respiratory disease. Oh no. I'm terrified that my mild earache is a harbinger of something that will strike me down at a moments notice. Today. And all the manifest symptoms to accompany that and support that diagnosis.

I got through to the end of the day, and I'm not dead. I pushed myself to go for a walk as I know I need cardiovascular exercise. In fact, I got further than the light stroll around the park I thought my tight chest would tolerate, and ended up walking over 2kms.

If nothing else, my age has given me the perspective to know that what my body is telling me isn't always the truth, because sometimes its shit my brain has made up.

Which kind of sucks, though, at an age where people are starting to know their bodies and understand them. Sometimes I find it hard to separate the manifestations of anxiety from actual physiological events.

Just something else to be anxious about, I guess. And the spiral goes on. Or is that sucks you down?

See you for the next episode. Tomorrow? Next week? Next decade? Who knows.

Here we are again....

I look longingly at the sweet morsels in the glass cabinet. I get to choose some today, but they aren't for me. My favourite is the pan au chocolat, but there aren't any there today anyway. The group at the office could enjoy raspberry, white chocolate, cinnamon brioche....

I collected my coffee and boxed up muffins, and headed back up the hill.

My knees groaned and I winced. I paused at the top of the hill to catch my breath.

Nyah has so lovingly packed a healthy lunch and a little container of nuts. I know that sugar is my downfall, and she is trying so hard to give me alternatives.

But I still struggle. My doctor says my blood sugar results are 'surprisingly good.' Surprisingly, because I am technically obese. My elevated heart rate is within the realms of normal, but would probably come down with better cardio vascular fitness and some weight loss.

But nothing seems urgent. The quarter of a cinnamon brioche and quarter of a raspberry and white chocolate muffin that found their way into my hands and into my mouth do not suggest a sense of urgency.

Back in 2012 and 2013 I weighed ten kilograms more, and struggled with self loathing because of it. I was tormented by a shape I didn't recognise and struggled with feminist ideals of body positivity vs not actually feeling like myself.

Now I feel more like myself than ever, yet my body is still trying to betray me.

I came to realise that the motivators around external validation and appearance held more weight (pun not intended) than very real health concerns. I don't have concerns about how I look, and am having fun with my appearance. But I took a panadol this afternoon to stop my back hurting, and I hobble when I get out of my chair to walk to the kitchen.

As I head towards being closer to my 'mid forties' than my 'early forties' my back, my knees, my heart are all telling me that I need to do something. I even have a loving partner to help me achieve it.

Why the resistance? Or not even resistance - a simple lack of will. Why do the motivators of appearance matter than the potential of reduced mobility and energy?

Maybe its time to look back to another part of 2012 where my therapist turned over rocks and found that lack of self care is linked to lack of self worth.

I might know myself better than ever before, but the question is, have I learned to love myself?

Who am I? And who are you?

At the moment there is a strong presence, both online and elsewhere, of women who are pushing very hard against a proposal for the New Zealand Government to allow people to change their birth certificates based on how they identify, and nothing else.

As someone with transgender friends and acquaintances, and with a number of friends and acquaintances with trans children, the aggressive actions and words of a small number of self-proclaimed 'feminists' is, at first, simply bewildering.

The issues around the self identification of trans women has come up before. Family First started making noise about a trans girl at a girls' only school. Some of the opposition to this on my social media came from surprising quarters. The biggest surprise to me was someone I'd known since we were politically aware teenagers, who expressed concern about 'men' in women's spaces.

And this ultimately is what has blown up recently. That trans women were actually men, deceiving us all in order to access women's spaces, and that trans men were butch lesbians who had been forced to transition to be men.

But once you scratch beneath the surface, it all become much more troubling (if that's possible - the original idea is troubling enough) and very, very personal.

The crux of anti trans activists campaign is around biology. "What is a woman?" they will collectively bark. The assertion is that women are oppressed on the basis of their biology, therefore trans women, not possessing the same biological construction, don't have a place in feminism.

Where we get into a really bizarre intersection, if you like, is that old school Lesbians (with-a-capital-L) seem to be joining forces with conservative Christians to push against the idea of gender being something determined in one's own mind rather than by genitalia.

I am struggling to keep up with the science speak which explains away the fallacies of biological essentialism, because before we even get to that, it doesn't even really even make sense on a logical level.

As for getting personal? Yeah...I feel that it starts to reach into the personal. Maybe I should be grateful its given me a chance to examine my own identity (again? really?) but I don't think my trans sisters (and brothers) are feeling it.

For what its worth, here are my theories. I want to start with my position, which is that trans women are women, and trans men are men. Just so we're clear about that.

I am very puzzled about conservatives and Lesbians (with-a-capital-L) being bedfellows in this, as I would have thought their position on biology would have been polar opposites.

By Lesbians with a capital L, I mean Lesbians for whom this label is a cultural identity. Trust me - I've done a lot of exploring around identity, and lesbian identity in particular. I have done a lot of reading, and I've done a bit of exploring around Lesbian identities in the New Zealand context. I went to a workshop at the Women's Centre; I've been to the Charlotte Museum. I've read. A lot. My bibliography is on this blog. I belong to online lesbian groups. I explore what it might mean to identify as a lesbian, and have spent a lot of time considering whether this is my identity or not. In fact, the current whirl of commentary around identity pulls it back to the front of my mind.

My exploration has led me to the conclusion that at this point, I'm happy to wear the label 'lesbian,' but it sits alongside a number of identities. Probably the main ones I like to have it sit beside are Mother, Partner, Writer, Photographer, Woman - not necessarily in that order. And not necessarily with capital letters, either. My 'lesbian identity' could mean that I am a woman who is in a romantic and sexual relationship with another woman. It could mean that I am attracted to other women. I could mean that I am a 'woman identified woman who doesn't fuck men.' All of them would be true, but the strength of any of them depends on what's going on around me on any given day, really.

I have spent a bit of time playing with identities. The veritable rainbow of identities meant I didn't have to shoehorn myself into anything before I was ready. But what is really interesting is the defensiveness of Lesbians of their particular identity. "If everyone is calling sexuality fluid, then where does that leave us?"

Indeed.

So when the idea that butch lesbians - the classic lesbian stereotype - are being pushed into transitioning into being men starts circulating, then the heads are thrown back and the howling starts. And understandably so - the patriarchy literally picking off women to bring into its fold is a pretty gross concept. If it were true.

But what of the movements of feminists to stop women being shoehorned into ideas of femininity? Cis-gendered, heterosexual women are no longer beholden to high femme ideals of appearance, or pushed into old fashioned gender roles and compulsory heterosexual life. Maybe once upon a time Lesbians were radical in their refusal (and psychological inability) to shackle themselves to the heterosexual nuclear family ideal. But now cis-gendered, heterosexual women can make those choices, too. So what then determines the 'lesbian identity' beyond who you want to have a primary romantic and/or sexual relationship with? For me personally, hinging a major part of my identity on who I am in a relationship with got me in enough trouble the first time, so I am not inclined to go there again. In the circles I move in at least, the fact that my romantic partner is also a woman is of no consequence. At work, my young, Christian, heterosexual and betrothed colleague and I regularly talk about our partners without any sense of novelty or strangeness. With the advent of marriage equality and the treatment of women living in a same sex relationship as equal to a heterosexual couple, has the lesbian identity become so assimilated into every day life as to be invisible? Lesbians pushed - and still push - against sexuality being defined on men's terms, for men's gaze and men's pleasure. To be fair, hetero women do this too, but don't feel the same resistance in the push as their lesbian sisters. Straight life is still the easier road. Is then welcoming women-who-once-were-men and identify as lesbians a step too far? We all come at this from our own life experiences, and maybe its just that mine is of the latter - all women pushing against men defining our lives, our course, our futures, for us.

So then lets look at the conservative point of view? If trans women are not women on the basis of the equipment they possess - and I'll take that to be uteruses, vaginas and breasts - then I'm going to go straight to the conservative assumption of women being defined as mothers - or potential mothers. I'm figuring that the conservatives think trans women aren't really women because they can't breed. But where does that leave women with fertility issues? Women who opt for surgical sterilisation?

So an identity crisis and some biological essentialism collides and makes a strange combination. Lesbians with a capital L who aren't inclined to act on any kind of social mandate to reproduce via sexual activity with men - thrown in with people who think that women are biological vessels to do just that.

I pondered then, as a mother, as a cis gendered woman, as someone who has spent a significant amount of time in a heterosexual relationship, and only a quarter of that time in a homosexual relationship - where does that leave people like me?

I can tell you that biology does its job. My four children are a testament to that. My four children are also a testament to the fact that fulfilling some kind of biological imperative wasn't awful, either. Biology means the body does what it needs to do. And mine happened to do it with a reasonable amount of feel good factor. (Yup, that added a layer of confusion when many of the ideas presented to you around sexuality can be so...well...essentialist)

And there are some people for whom it is awful, but we'll put up with it because that's what women do, right? And there are some people for whom it is an absolute non-negotiable not-going-there. How about that? A mix of social and cultural conditioning, and some people with resolute certainty. Certainly no essentialism there.

What everyone is arguing about is the brain. Trans people want to identify as how they feel, not how they look.

To be blunt, my body is going to behave all the ways a 'biological female' should on a basic animal level. Right now I am nearing the end of my reproductive life, and my body is telling me all about it by trying to get in some last ditch attempts at luring me into baby making. Biologically, I could have had what? fifteen? children by now. Socially, that would have been ridiculous.

Humans are way more sophisticated than just being animals. You and me baby, we are more than just mammals. What I discovered in a relationship with a woman was more than just appropriate biological responses to stimuli in order to ..umm..smooth the way... make reproduction happen. I discovered desire. Intimacy. Longing. Love. Satisfaction. Contentment. Joy.

These are experiences peculiar to being human, and as humans we are complicated.

If the two schools of trans exclusionary activists get their way we may as well live inside the Handmaids Tale.

If we are into biological essentialism being the root of identity, then lesbians with a capital L should be behaving like biological females and mating with men and producing young, regardless of what their brains tell them. And likewise with the conservatives, who have determined that the possession of certain organs with the potential for reproduction is the hallmark of woman, regardless of a woman's potential to wear all sorts of other identities alongside Woman and/or Mother. Where do we sign up, Commander?

Never mind the human experience, in all its tumultuous, complicated glory - of the things that go on in our brains - our hearts. Of the joy of the human experience. And the human experience of determining who we are.

And that is what it is in the end.

To be human.

Who would deny someone that?