Identity warriors: meet London's no gender tribes

Often people are very confused about what I might be. People will say, “All right, mate… sir… girl… madam…,” ’ says Ray Filar. A 27-year-old performer and writer from Brockley, Filar has short, brilliant-green hair and alternates between dressing in trousers, shirts and braces and, occasionally, in a skirt or dress. Filar identifies as non-binary gendered, meaning that they don’t feel either male or female, and would rather go by ‘they’ than ‘he’ or ‘she’. For Filar, gender is pushed on to us by society when we are babies, in line with our biological sex, before we have the chance to question it: ‘I don’t believe there’s anything innate about gender. I respect people who say that they feel it’s innate, but that’s just not my experience.’ Filar isn’t alone in this opinion. According to recent research by YouGov, 41 per cent of people in the UK view gender as a social construct, while half of those aged 18-24 claim they are not ‘totally heterosexual’ — implying, perhaps, that gender is becoming less of a factor in where we direct our affections.

If 2015 saw a series of breakthroughs for the transgender community — Caitlyn Jenner posing on the cover of July’s Vanity Fair; the Danish transgender pioneer Lili Elbe immortalised on screen in The Danish Girl; and model Andreja Pejic named the face of Make Up For Ever — we can expect 2016 to be the year we question the validity of gender itself. Or at least embrace the notions of gender neutrality (not identifying as any gender) and gender fluidity (feeling that your gender identity varies).

Last week, the Women and Equalities Committee, chaired by the Conservative MP Maria Miller, suggested the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ should be removed from official forms, recommending a gender ‘x’ option instead. Miller also suggested that different school uniforms for boys and girls were unhelpful, and that the legal age at which people could decide to change their gender without parental consent should be lowered from 18 to 16. In a recent interview, Miley Cyrus claimed not to ‘relate to being boy or girl’, and both rapper Angel Haze and Orange is the New Black actress Ruby Rose have come out as gender neutral. So many independent labels have sprung up offering gender-neutral clothing that last year Selfridges opened a dedicated Agender section, while in Kennington the Open Barbers offers gender-neutral hairdressing services.

What’s prompted this? ‘The idea that gender is constructed is not new,’ says Professor John Howard, a King’s College London academic specialising in gender and sexuality. ‘But since the 1970s, second-wave feminism, queer theory, LGBT activism and intersex organising have proven crucial in broadening our understanding.’

The internet has connected those who may have struggled alone with gender labels. George — formally Georgina — is a 13-year-old from Soho who, like Filar, asks to be referred to by the pronoun ‘they’. George came across the term gender fluid (having a gender that varies over time) on an LGBTQ website and learned about it by watching YouTube videos in which young people use the platform to talk about their myriad identities.

George describes the online community as ‘very friendly’; without it, they wouldn’t have heard about terms such as pansexual (not limiting your sexual choice to biological sex, gender or gender identity) or gender fluid. ‘I started thinking, “Could I be these things?” ’ says George. ‘I never really found myself to feel particularly feminine or masculine all of the time, so I decided to go with gender fluid as a blanket term. I have both male and female days now, sometimes a combination of the two and sometimes agender days, which is the feeling that you don’t have a gender or identify as a specific gender at all.’ George’s mother says she sometimes finds it hard calling George ‘they’. ‘It feels a bit distancing, like calling your child “it”,’ she jokes. (George’s mother, who doesn’t want to be named, says that George’s classmates are equally well-versed in the new terminology, with George’s best friend identifying as pansexual.)

While George found a term to describe their gender online, Jacob Mallinson Bird, 22, who lives between Knightsbridge and Oxford, where he’s studying music, started identifying as gender fluid at the age of 19 after a trip to New York inducted him into the world of drag queens, transgender people and androgynous club kids. ‘I was overwhelmed by the possibilities,’ he remembers. Once back in England, he considered that maybe he wasn’t cisgendered (when your gender identity matches the sex you were born with). He started presenting in a more feminine way, with silk shirts, long nails and lipstick. Now, he says, he fits into the gender fluid category because he doesn’t mind defining as either gender, choosing to be one or the other as he pleases.

Given the broader message that gender is an unhelpful concept, aren’t terms such as gender fluid and gender neutral counterintuitive in that they are putting yet another label to something amorphous? George doesn’t think so: ‘Looking up terms is a fun thing to do because you can figure out where you fit in. You’re always discovering yourself, especially as a teenager, and it helps to have ways to identify what you’re feeling.’ Bird argues that gender fluid is a useful term precisely because it accounts for these shifts: ‘I’ve got friends who used to dress more female, then separated that off into drag and dressed more masculine during the day, then went back to dressing more feminine. Your feelings towards your own gender and the way you act on them can evolve.’

Bird has the privilege of being able to ‘pass’ as a boy, meaning that if he wanted to present himself as a cisgender male, he could hide his effeminacy and appear masculine: ‘I can wipe off the make-up and go out the next day without worrying about getting shouted at on the Tube.’ This isn’t the case for everyone; some people’s perceived gender doesn’t match their lived gender. According to the Home Office, there were 605 hate crimes committed against transgender people in 2014-15; figures for the gender-neutral community aren’t known.

Travis Alabanza, a second-year student at King’s College London and performer from Vauxhall, identifies as non-binary and femme. That is, they do not identify as male or female but their gender expression — the way they enact their gender — is very much feminine. This, says Alabanza, ‘puts me in immediate danger, particularly because I am black and working-class, so there are certain expectations of my masculinity’. While wearing black lipstick, gold hoops and mascara on the Tube, Alabanza has been met with heckles, people moving away from them and even someone asking what kind of genitalia they have.