Five Little Eggs
(a character-shaping childhood confrontation)
(NB: This is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Hounded: Women, Harms and The Gender Wars - Polity: 2024)
It is my contention that at some point in everyone’s life, usually fairly early on in childhood, they become aware that human beings are either male or female, that you are one or the other, and that this fact is important and unchangeable. Dis-believing this is something that must be learned. Doing so is something many of us are unwilling and/or unable to do.
Perhaps relating an early childhood, character-shaping experience may assist as a suitable analogy for why.
At age five, in Primary One, my teacher set the class a worksheet of simple maths questions, with the instruction that the answer to each question was either five or six. I found the exercises easy, completing them quickly.
When I took the worksheet to the teacher’s desk, she ticked all but one as correct and told me to fix my answer to that question. I returned to my desk and looked at the problem again. Count how many eggs are in the picture. There were five little eggs. There were. That’s what I had written. But it was wrong. Apparently.
Hopefully a reader can cast their minds back to their own childhoods to remember the hot feeling of panic that can overcome you if you are someone inclined to trust adults and they tell you that you are wrong about something. I rubbed out the ‘five’ and wrote ‘six,’ knowing that was incorrect but wanting to appease my (rather strict) teacher. I returned nervously to her desk.
“You stupid girl! Wrong again! Get back to your desk and get this right!”
Public humiliation often features in early childhood memories, and this was perhaps the first time I had been shamed in front of my peers. I remember the hot flush of embarrassment, the panic, the five-year-old child’s confusion. I’d given both of the only possible answers, and both were wrong.
There are five little eggs, there are. I tried to reason that perhaps the question itself was wrong. It did not dawn on me that my teacher was most likely distracted, busy, and incorrect when she first marked my worksheet, that I should just put down ‘5’ again, given that this was the right answer. Was I to count, instead, the rows of eggs? There were two rows. Two? Would that suffice?
Of course it didn’t. Though this treatment was illegal by the late 1980s, I was commanded to hold out my hands and was thwacked three times with the ruler by the furious adult, in front of some scared and some delighted peers. Thus ensued a lifelong fear of mathematics. Moreover, this incident has come back to me time and time again during the gender wars, when I am asked to do the equivalent of reasoning away five little eggs to make six, or two, and to deny personal certainties to try to appease others’ anger.
I presume not to be alone in having a comparable emotional and psychological response when first realising, approximately a decade ago, that the growing mantra of ‘trans woman are women’ was meant literally and not just as a sort of social nicety.
The trans women (males who claim to ‘live as women’) I had known since the early noughties in the poetry world had not seemed to be making such a request – at least I had thought.
A similar reaction was brought on when I realised that the command to use the pronouns ‘they/ them’ meant someone did not wish to be viewed as either male or female and that this was to be acquiesced to as a perfectly serious demand.
To make one’s response ‘correct’ some reasoning had to be done to try to turn five into six, or two. The thing that aids that is an acceptance of ‘gender identity ideology’, at the very least an acceptance that some people hold that belief system and are thus free to ‘identify’ with ‘gender’ in whatever way they wish to.
To an extent, as a staunch liberal, I and many other women are entirely accepting of that; indeed, a recognition and acceptance of competing beliefs may well prove vital in taking the heat out of this battleground. It is the demand to agree and the punishments for not doing so that are the main issue, alongside the presentation of a contested belief system as solid fact.
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