The gender agenda

A friend recently told me she spent four years of her childhood living as a boy. ‘I hated dresses, cut my hair, gelled it and spiked it,’ she says. ‘From aged eight, I thought I was meant to be a boy. I remember going into a swimming pool changing room in board shorts and the girls shrieking: “It’s a boy!”’

It wasn’t until my friend hit puberty that she began to feel more comfortable in her gender. By her mid-teens she was living happily as female. Now she’s a married mother of three who looks back on her tomboy phase with an air of amusement. Yet she shudders to imagine what might have happened if she’d been a child going through the same thing today.

Over the past 30 years, our attitudes towards gender and transgenderism have shifted dramatically. A greater acceptance of LGBT equality means that more adults are now living as a gender different to their birth sex.