I had a long drive today, and found myself thinking alot about these revelations around Neil Gaiman, and also thinking alot about this thread, and this forum. What is it about the Gaiman story that connects with the sex and gender issues that this forum is set up to discuss?
My conclusion is that it's very relevant.
I think about the number of people who have said that they're not overly surprised to hear this about Gaimen. And then my own realisation that, actually, I could count on one hand the number of male novelists that I wouldn't be overly surprised to hear a revelation like this about. Not because I think male authors are particularly reppelant, but because they almost all demonstrate the same inability to recognise female people are just as real and whole and vibrant and existent as male people.
In so much fiction the female characters are an appendage, an afterthought, a helpmeet to the progress of the protagonist. The idea of a woman having a rich inner life, a genius all her own, an existence that makes no essential reference to a single male person, is beyond their ken.
And I think that ties in intimately with the whole point of this forum.
Lots of fly-by posters imagine that we have an "ick" response to the idea of transness, and that's what makes (some of) us hostile to the impositions (what I would call colonisation) of trans women, claiming womanhood.
But it's not the trans-ness at all. It's the same inability to really believe that female people actually exist, whole unto themselves, that we've come across over and over and over again. From male authors, from lovers, from friends, from our fathers, our brothers. It's not something we decide is true because we don't like trans women. Male people don't like to acknowledge our separate existence, they are all much happier with the idea that "woman" is an idea in a male person's head, a feeling, an identity, a dependency on the truly human.