I was recently reminded of this part of Jeanette Winterson's seminal Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit with all the discussion of sex, gender and sexuality.
It all seemed to hinge around the fact that I loved the wrong sort of people. Right sort of people in every respect except this one; romantic love for another woman was a sin.
`Aping men,' my mother had said with disgust.
Now if I was aping men she'd have every reason to be disgusted. As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.
Then I remembered the famous incident of the man who'd come to our church with his boyfriend. At least, they were holding hands. `Should have been a woman that one,' my mother had remarked.
This was clearly not true. At that point I had no notion of sexual politics, but I knew that a homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros. Now that I do have a number of notions about sexual politics, this early observation holds good. There are shades of meaning, but a man is a man, wherever you find it.
Winterson here makes an important point that you would think would now have become uncontroversial - gay men and gay women are not born as the wrong sex or taking on the characteristics of the opposite sex, there are different ways to be a man or to be a woman.
It's so regressive the way gender non-conforming behaviour and homosexuality, especially female homosexuality can now lead to young people being pressured to believe themselves to be the opposite sex. If the same sentiment was written in a slightly different way, using the correct buzzwords, I wonder how many people would now agree with the protagonist's mother and her religious bigotry?