SLOW PYRENEES

From the moment I signed up to Twitter, started blogging and embarked on study for my PhD it had always been my intention to keep gender separate from hiking, as if neither informed the other. It shouldn't have taken all the time and travel to make me realise that they do but there you go - there's none as blind as those who refuse to see.

It was eight years ago, I'd just walked the Camino de Santiago for the first time and had undergone a very curious and very Catholic religious experience deep in a valley in the wilds of Spain's Cordillera Cantábrica. Eight years, but in terms of how the world of identity politics has changed it seems like a lifetime and I find myself harking back to a gender-free prelapsarian paradise because, as sure as eggs is eggs, I never expected a personality disorder to become a fascistic political ideology.

Or society to go batshit crazy!  

Even before I got banned from Twitter for daring to contradict the most tedious mantra de nos jours - 'transwomen are women' - and calling out a bloke who thought he was a bird, I'd determined to break that vow because biological sex informs every social aspect of life, even at the summit crater of a volcano in El Salvador.

Especially at the summit crater of a volcano in El Salvador. 'Trans' ideology might try to run from socio-biological realities but it can't hide. 

Once a poser, always a poser! The photo above is of me somewhere in deepest Dorset way back in 1989, the final days of that gloriously glamorous gender-bending decade, when slapping on a streak of eyeliner and slipping into a frock didn't automatically turn a man into a woman. I was called Simon back then, a failed student and wannabe rock-star with an eye for the laydeez. There's no point in pretending, no point in trying to rewrite history to nudge Simon out the back door and slamming it shut because he was - still is - an inconvenient truth. 

I love that photo! 'Misgendering' and 'deadnaming' have never fazed me, society sees what it wants to see and if image meets perception it'll happily play along with the conceit. Because that's what 'trans' ideology is, a bare-faced lie dressed up as a liberationist narrative. But you know what they say, one man's freedom is another man's licence and, as always, women tend to be on the receiving end of it. 

Why and how 'Simon' became 'Sian' is another story, to be told on a long winter's night with a bottle of gin in front of a roaring fire after a watching an episode of Midsomer Murders, Nettles-era, natch. In this mini-essay I want to focus not on the inconsistencies but the ever-presents - the hair, of course, but also the map because even as I type this I'm surrounded by dozens of them; in the 32 years since that photo was taken they've never left my side. 

'Transwomen' and their lickspittle lackeys like to pretend that biology is an irrelevance and that any woman who says it isn't is pandering to essentialism. But only women bleed, what they wilfully ignore is that bodily functions play an integral role in the way society treats women and they way boys and girls evolve during their formative years. 

I prefer to hike and travel alone. In the Spanish Pyrenees, up a Nicaraguan volcano, on a train from Bristol to Romania, through the streets of San Salvador and Mexico City. It's my modus ambulare, a declaration of a state of independence. I don't like being told what to do or where to go. Assuming I'm female, people often ask 'aren't you ever scared?' or 'don't you feel vulnerable?'

The answers, of course, are 'yes' and 'yes'. When I was sitting in a snowstorm in the Pyrenees with a fractured kneecap and my mobile battery on 1%, waiting for a helicopter to rescue me, for example. Or when a guy in a bar in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, pulled a gun on me. On both occasions I lived to tell the tale and, of course, they only fuelled my desire for more danger and risk. 

But that, too, is another story.

There are plenty of women who hike and travel alone. I know of one who is currently in the final stages of walking solo across Europe and many years ago, in El Salvador, I met a woman who was cycling the Pan American Highway from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego - I still wonder if she ever made it. When I'm alone at night in the wilds of Catalunya I often ask myself, would I have done this had I not spent the formative years of my life 'as a male'? Who knows, but I can say with some certainty that spending the formative years of my life 'as a male' gave me the confidence to and that confidence was largely due to my biology and its social implications. 

As a boy, I was brought up not to fear but fight. If somebody threatened me I was told to stand my ground, not run away because the worst I'd experience would be a bloody nose. That four-letter word - rape - never featured in my vocabulary, neither did sexual assault. I could go out, get pissed, stagger home at three in morning without worrying about being attacked and made pregnant by a male. I could hitch-hike, alone, from Weymouth to Edinburgh to London (Xmas 1984) because although I was vulnerable, I was much less vulnerable than female students of the same age. And vulnerable in different ways.  And, of course, I could pursue a career without having my employer worrying that I might get pregnant and I never lived with the threat of FGM or child marriage.

So here's the thing. Thirty years after beginning my 'transition', twenty-five since lying on the operating table having my meat and two veg surgically transformed into something which resembles a very elegant inverted Yorkshire pudding, I give thanks that I grew up a boy. That I never experienced the oppression, discrimination or life-threatening violence that my female contemporaries did. And still do, on a daily basis, not just here in Europe but across the globe. If I'd been born female, I'm not sure I'd have the confidence to do what I do now. Or rather, if I'd been born female I'm not sure I'd been allowed - or permitted - to develop that confidence. The extent to which I'm a rebel 'woman' today is dependent on the socio-biological reality of growing up as a boy.

Don't get me wrong, as I pass the 55 year milestone and prepare for a PhD viva I also give thanks that I made that change. But it was neither the best nor the most important thing that's ever happened to me and it certainly doesn't define my life. Indeed, in terms of achievements it ranks very low on the list: it was a means to an end not, as most 'transwomen' perceive it, an end in itself. 

I hike therefore I am. Walking is my world and defines my existence. To this end, when circumstances permit, I have in mind a pilgrimage-oriented project that uses my academic and life-experience to foster this oh-so important confidence in those who, for various reasons, lack or have been denied it. It will feature the Camino de Santiago but it will also include excursions in the UK.

Enough already. F*** gender, let's hike!