Why I want International Women's Day to "do one"

Contains mild swearing and extreme doll mutilation

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Listen, no one asks to be born a girl. It just happens. You can like it or lump it, as my mum used to say. She thought it was a good thing where I was concerned because she was left labouring in a hospital corridor for refusing to sign a form agreeing to my circumcision. She thought genital mutilation of newborn babies was a bad thing, go figure. But she refused to consent to having my penis snipped, and despite her intransigence on the paperwork, I arrived just as the doctor was going off-duty and was a girl, and everyone went, phew, no foreskin.

I didn’t know I was a girl. I was just me. My brothers were three years older, and we were all the same-but-different. You know?  We all had different names, and we all looked a bit different, and they were older, but we were all just kids.

How do you know when you’re a girl? You know when you’re about four and someone buys you a doll. I can’t tell you how vile this thing was. Big plastic face, hard plastic body, spooky eyes, black nylon hair. A ‘baby’ apparently, but it looked nothing like a baby. Anyway, what did I want with a baby? I was four. I rejected it straight away.  And mum was embarrassed because it was a gift, and the visitor was still in the room. Apparently, I was supposed to cuddle it? I can tell you it was not cuddly. It was hard and cold and didn’t even bend at the elbow. Bits of it just stuck into you. I was told I had to give it a name. I called it Horrid. My mum apologised to her friend and named it Jane. While they were talking, I took Jane out onto the patio. I cut her hair short and stabbed out her eyes with a pencil. But I was still angry. So I pulled out her arms and legs, and set fire to her. Though I got into trouble, that pile of melted plastic is one of my happiest memories.

If ‘Jane’ was the first time I realised being a girl was annoying, it was not the last. My brothers got Matchbox car sets for Christmas. They were incredibly fun. They had loop-the-loops and all sorts. I wanted a Matchbox car set. I got colouring pencils. (Top tip: I sulked so hard on this issue that eventually, the next year, I also got a Matchbox car set.) Then my brothers were in a gang. I wasn’t allowed to be in their gang because I couldn’t throw a stone accurately enough to hit the ‘P’ on the ‘Cycling Prohibited’ sign. I practised for hours, but there was something seriously defective about girls’ arms. I don’t know why. Annoying. Even more annoying, because my brothers and other boys (I was getting the hang of this separation thing now) could say sneeringly, ‘Because you’re a GIRL’. Being a girl was an insult. And I was a living embodiment of that insult, and there was damn all I could do about it.

I wanted to do Woodwork and Metalwork at school but wasn’t allowed, because I was A GIRL. GIRLS had to do cookery and needlework, which I had already learned at home. They made me make a pillowcase, but I could already make my own trousers. They taught me how to boil an egg when I could already bake a Battenburg cake. I wanted to make bookshelves. But no. I was a GIRL. I started writing (mostly about all the things that were annoying me). When I was fourteen, I won a prize. My mum called me in to show off in front of her dinner party friends, and then my stepfather said, ‘The creative urge in women is only really about wanting babies. As soon as you have babies, you won’t want to write.’ If I was a fourteen-year-old boy, I maybe could have punched him in the face. But my defective girl arms were as good at punching as they were at throwing, so I just went away thinking, ‘I’ll show him,’ and that pretty much fuelled the next thirty years of my writing career. And then, dammit, if I didn’t start turning into a WOMAN!  Which is, honestly, even worse than a girl.

How do you know when you’re a woman?