LGBT+

Let's first of all look at these four elements, you've got gender identity, that's the sense of "who I am" in my head. We don't know how it is that I was born feeling I ought to have been a girl. And at 70 years later, I still have that feeling. It never ever, ever went away. Occasionally, I was able to suppress it for a while, but it's been there all the time.

Magnus Herschel 100 years ago said he thought this was some other form of intersex condition that somehow the brain has been altered during foetal development. In Holland, the Institute of Brain Research has done a lot of work, they've seen differences between male and female brains that they can identify, microscopic differences. And they found that trans women have brains more like women and trans men have brains more like men, they have small, tiny differences that have evolved in terms of our roles in society.

So we know that they do exist, there are other people who say, "no, it doesn't exist", very hard to do brain research, because, you know, we can look at it with an MRI scan, but to actually physically look at it you have to be dead. And by the time you're dead, we don't know whether the changes in your brain happened during your life or whether at the beginning, so it's very tough. Anyway, that's gender identity, my sense of who I am in my head, never seems to change.

Sexual attraction, who I'm attracted to, who do I fall in love with, who am I romantically who am I sexually attracted to, so that also seems to be affected by the brain. Lots of debate on that as well. Sex, we talked about that that's a physical sense of whether have male female reproductive system or somewhere in between. All of that's secret. You don't know what's in my head, you don't know how I feel. And you know, laws say I shan't show you, my body. And in any case, that can be changed.

So you don't know anything about that, because it's kept away, the only thing you see is gender expression, how I present myself, how do I look to the world? That's all we're seeing and all of our judgments are based upon my physical appearance, now if I'm stereotypically male or stereotypically female, you will get that but a lot of people fall into the middle and we are basically forced to have to pick sides be one or the other, or be harassed.