Yes, I know what you thought this was about, because I thought it too, when I saw Tim Tate’s book sitting on a library shelf but it was his idea of a joke, you see. The book is subtitled ‘The secret history of women’s football’. It’s all about how popular women’s football was during the 14-18 war, and how so many factories and other works had women’s football teams, and how desperately hard the mainstream (men’s) football associations worked to make sure women’s football was stamped out of existence after the war.
Well, in the last few years I think our women’s teams have finally convinced most of the world that women being interested in or (shock, horror!) wanting to play football is not a sign that there’s something wrong with them but I still think we need to join some dots on this issue.
During the 1960s and 1970s, feminism was making great strides knocking back the idea that girls had to be like this, and boys like that but then, by the turn of the century, the notion of ‘gender identity’ rose up against them, just like the FA had done after the war.
Gender identity
Many people under forty don’t realize that the notion that we have an innate ‘gender identity’, that it is a tangible, biological or neurological thing, is quite a new idea. It was around 2008 that groups like Stonewall and Mermaids started going into schools and telling kids they had a ‘gender identity’ that according to Mermaids, sat somewhere on a scale between ‘GI Joe’ and ‘Barbie’, and that if your gender identity was at what they called the ‘feminine’ end and your body was male, you might actually be in the wrong body. That the cure might be a medical ‘sex change’.
I’m with Graham Linehan and the 1970s feminists on that…
I’ve seen many different attempts to define gender identity but so far, none that don’t depend on sex stereotypes. Things like ‘boys like football, girls like dolls’. It always looked to me like the latest iteration of the force that was so determined to put an end to the growth of women’s football after the war.
But that’s all ideology and arguments, isn’t it.
Ideology
You base your beliefs on ideology when you’re short on evidence. The battles over ‘the trans issue’ in the last few decades have been all about people lining up according to whether they took the traditional feminist view (that gender’s a set of outdated stereotypes that should not be allowed to stop boys and girls, women and men from living exactly how they want to) or the gender identity view (that the way you see yourself and express yourself in relation to sex stereotypes is an innate and unalterable feature of your make up).
When the research is done, and the evidence starts mounting up, you don’t need to lean on ideologies so much. This week has seen the release of the final report from the Cass Review, and finally, we have a body of evidence about the two views of gender, and about what happens when you tell kids they are ‘the other sex, really’.
Some people appear to be in shock out there, judging by the fireworks I’m seeing on social media. Please keep calm, and read the report…
The Cass Review
Click here for a summary and download link
… it’s important for the health and safety of our kids that we get the facts straight, now we have some.
Oh and, in case you’re interested, here’s the book…
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Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 