I especially liked your colleague’s line: “people can feel very unsettled when somebody shifts who they had previously seen as mirroring their own – stigmatised – identity: the representation of themselves that they had seen in that other person has changed, and that can leave them questioning themselves in uncomfortable ways.”

A lot of it is where difference and diversity within a movement become divisive and personalised rather than an accepted range – and then of course where the line is that something becomes actually unacceptable (a lot of the stuff about trans women being men without penises for example).

Anyway I should stop reading the Internet and actually WRITE some essay.

Thanks so much for this Alys. It means so much to me that it’s resonated with you – and with some others who’ve said similar things. Your points about coming home and kindness are spot on.

The whole TERF war thing just tears me apart because there’s been so much pain on each side, and so much anger. Kindness is the only way any of us will survive intact.

What you got right to the heart of, though, is that awful question of why, after a lifetime being forced on to the “girl’s team”, after being a proud and vocal feminist for so long, just why you are ‘rejecting’ the gender-label that has located you so neatly on on both the axis of oppression and your activism. My experience differs a little from yours – as a genderfluid person myself, there have been aspects of conventional femininty and feeling female that have given me so much joy – but that was always crushed moments later, either by the way that I still wasn’t doing womanhood ‘right’ or that I was ‘a tomboy’ and wasn’t permitted those things. Finding a label is sometimes like coming home and that is the only way it can be said.

And I’ll stop gushing now, but thank you for this. So on point with my current state of mind it make me cry.