ABSTRACT
‘Common sense’ tells us that to know who I am is to know that I am a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. When a baby is born, the first question is ‘What is it?’ We know that does not mean is it a frog or a lobster, but ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ When my third child was born the midwife said, ‘It’s a lovely boy. Oh … no.’ She looked again: ‘I mean a girl’. In those few seconds my mental image of my baby had to shift rapidly. The midwife was looking at the presence or absence of labia and a vagina or penis but for me, even in those brief moments, I had begun to think of my baby as a boy and in my head I had to reconstruct her as a girl. The journey towards establishing a gendered identity starts in those first few moments of life; that vivid moment of first realisation, ‘It’s a girl’; ‘It’s a boy’.
