@DomesticatedZombie I've made a start...
EB: Why open a book about transitioning to a woman with your penis?
GL: I think my goal was really to focus on this strange and unlovely aspect of embodiment that strangely has become a matter of broad political controversy, which is the question of a trans woman’s penis, which is often treated with a great deal of embarrassment or shame on the one side but also a great deal of confusion or even hostility by another side so I wanted really to try to think about this part of the body as just that really.
EB: You mentioned about the politics as well there and how this gets talked about and is asked about and I’m very struck that we’re talking in the week after the leader of the Labour party here in the UK has refused to say whether a woman can have a penis or not. What do you make of that?
GL: I think clearly Kier Starmer is in a difficult position. He is trying to hold together a coalition with a broad and quite contentious set of interests around the question of what defines or constitutes womanhood which is I think the question that we are really asking when we ask about whether a woman can have a penis, which grammatically is a slightly strange construction anyway.
EB: Why?
GL: Because it implies that there is a woman who is asking permission to have a penis rather than the question whether or not the category woman includes a sub category or sub class of people who have penises or can include that sub class so grammatically I think it’s a slightly misleading formulation, but in any case he’s in a difficult position, I think the policy they’re going with right now is like trying not to talk about it very much but understanding that woman is a political category, broadly in line with my understanding of the history of feminism, umm, it strikes me as a sort of err, what should be a consensus position err, [???????] a lot of people would like to see in terms of support for trans people but it doesn’t strike me as a political disaster. In terms of the question itself, as I’ve said, I’m a little sceptical because what we’re really talking about is do we think that the word woman designates a particular class of biological being or do we think that it’s a political category whose meaning can change over time? I think reasonable people can take different perspectives on that question but historically speaking the people who have taken the position that it is a biologically essential category have tended to be on the side of patriarchy and those who have claimed that it is a political category that is deployed to oppress a class of people have been feminists and in the UK at the moment those terms seem to be contested but the terms of that contest [??] are a little confusing, and will remain confusing to me at least.
EB: Do you understand even if you don’t appreciate the construction of that sentence why a lot of women would think you could never have a penis as a woman? And I’m not talking about those that you debate with, those who are sometimes described as gender critical feminists, I’m talking far away from those who rage about this quite frankly, a lot of the time, certainly on the internet if they hear a political leader asked on a mainstream radio programme can a woman have a penis, they would only have one answer for that?
GL: Well again just to be clear, the question can a woman have a penis strikes me as a deliberately misleading construction. The question is intended to ask do you think the class women can contain people who have penises. I think KS’s answer to that is clearly I think yes he does think that, which is also what I think.
EB Well to be clear, he refused to answer.
GL: Yeah I know because it’s a question again that’s been designed to produce a sort of stupefaction and a sense of the general weirdness of the world as the class of women who have penises, never had that in my day.
EB: Although some people would say it’s the weirdness of the world that he can’t just reply “no women can’t have penises”.
GL: Right but again the question “can women have penises” is, for the reasons I’ve now stated 3 times, is a bizarre and pointless question, um if he had tried to rephrase it….
EB: To you, that is.
GL: No I think to KS as well and I think to most people. The question is…
EB: Well sorry, with all due respect speaking for most people is a dangerous sport as I’m sure you know by now.
GL: I, as an employee of the BBC you know you probably know that better than me but umm, sure I think let us say that apart from the internet where people rage about this issue there lies a group of women who find it absolutely ridiculous that there is another group of people who go around asking questions like “can a woman have a penis?”, when what they mean is “does the class woman contain a sub class of people who have penises?”.
EB: Coming to you, and I’m sure we’ll come back to what you said is at the essence of that question what is it to be a woman and I do want to get to that but just so that we know a bit more about you Grace because some will not you do talk about that moment and I wonder if you could take us there now where you first said out loud that you no longer wanted to be a man. Can you describe that?
GL: I can yeah and it’s one of the moments in the book that I describe I think with the least agitation or least fuss. I was on a sort of tour of the Southwest United States with my now husband and he had taken me to the Grand Canyon and then to [????] Arizona and we were sort of sitting in this hot tub in a [?????] hotel, just a road hotel somewhere along the way and I was standing in the hot tub and I kind of felt those words leaving my body, it didn’t feel like something I was choosing to say. Umm, I would describe it and I realise that this an embarrassing thing to say, I would describe it as a spiritual experience, it certainly felt like something that I was observing and participating in rather than directing and I didn’t know what it implied or what it would mean and what happens next in that story is that I make a variety of attempts to figure out what it might mean to no longer be a man, most of which sort of completely fall on their arse, so, you know, I go to various different trans support groups and find the people that [???????] don’t necessarily have stories that resemble mine or I don’t think that they resemble mine, I look on line for support and find surprisingly little that makes sense and in the end I decided to start hormonal transition really as a last resort to rule everything out rather than to move forward, it was not something that I had any kind of optimism about whatsoever, I really thought it would be a last gasp to get something that simply wouldn’t work and then to my great surprise the experience of being on hormones or changing my endocrine system was profoundly transformative and really completely reorganised my sense of myself. So that was really the moment where I thought oh my goodness, I mean I don’t know exactly yet what this experience of being on HRT has to do with this articulation in the hot tub and again if you’ve read the book you’ll know it has very few strong claims about the person I am or what transition is other than I can say that profoundly changing my endocrine system has profoundly affected my sense of my well being and erm yeah.