If you’re straight and cisgender, you probably don’t give Pride events much thought: they’re just parties, right? But if you’re LGBT+ you know that they’re much, much more than that. They’re places where, however briefly, you know you’re not alone; places where you aren’t hated or tolerated, but celebrated.

Pride events are among the many casualties of coronavirus this year. Spiller of Tea explains why that’s sad for LGBT+ people.

I’ve read a lot recently about how straight people are missing pubs and restaurants and cafes. This is entirely understandable, and I do sympathise, but imagine if your pubs were the only places in which you could safely relax your mannerisms, speak freely about your home life, or hold your partner’s hand. Then imagine that you lived in a city that only had one pub. Maybe go on to imagine that this single establishment only opened two nights a week, from 10 pm until 6 am, when the majority of old bastards like me are tucked up in bed. One place in the entire locality where, if you don’t like sticky floors, banging music and drinking until it’s light, you’re basically excluded anyway. That is the reality for huge numbers of LGBTQ people in the UK, and Pride is one of the few precious moments of relief we are allowed from this frustrating, constrained existence.

The outside world may have stopped, but homophobia, biphobia and transphobia haven’t. The trolls have more time on their hands, so they’re more vicious than ever. The newspapers continue their assault on trans people (just yesterday The Scotsman ran a column claiming that it was “a biological fact” that trans women are men) and politicians continue to court the bigot demographic. As I was reminded yesterday, people still stare and glare at you in the street.

You may well be bored and lonely, but you probably don’t have people wishing you dead on social media or calling you a deviant in the press.

…in these most difficult of times, when LGBTQ people are facing all of the physical, emotional and financial issues cis-het people are facing, they present an added burden to people who, like the rest of you, are already fast-approaching breaking point.

…This crisis has, distressingly, not even begun to put an end to the attacks our community is so often forced to endure, but what it has achieved is to rob us of one of our most vital coping mechanisms in the face of those attacks. And for that, I will unashamedly mourn its loss.

There’s a nice piece in Huffington Post by Kat Rossi.

When my son was 3, I made a mistake. We were at a shoe store in New York City, picking out new sneakers for his rapidly growing tiny feet. He was insistent: The next pair of shoes he was going to wear had to be bright pink. I steered him toward red. He pressed for pink, ignoring the usual varieties of blue for little boys. I am ashamed to admit that I eventually lied and told him that pink wasn’t available in his size. We compromised on orange.

Rossi talks about something many of us have experienced: the way gender roles are policed from a very early age. As I’ve written before, my daughter was informed in nursery school (by a boy, of course) that she wasn’t allowed to be interested in history or dinosaurs because “they’re for boys”; she was also told that her favourite fictional animal, a dragon, was not okay because dragons were for boys. Girls had to have a different fictional animal, a unicorn.

This bit felt very familiar:

My son entered preschool in our new home in Barcelona, Spain, and suddenly there were things girls do and things boys do. Girls dance, and boys play soccer ― or at least that’s what we were being told and shown. I took him to a ballet class where he was the only boy, and he took two days to make the decision of whether he wanted to keep going. No, he told me, because ballet is for girls. No number of Alvin Ailey or Fred Astaire videos, although agreeably cool, could convince him otherwise. Another mom at the school told me that her daughter had dropped soccer for the same reason ― it was for boys, she said.

When my son was a bit younger, he loved nail polish. And then overnight he stopped, because he’d been told that nail polish was for girls. Since then he’s often expressed his horror at the thought of owning anything pink.

Now it was no longer me, but the other influences in his life ― his classmates, teachers, the images he saw around us ― that told him you’re either A or B, girl or boy, and you’re expected to behave accordingly. Despite my attempts to keep the gender stereotypes out of his life, at age 5, he clearly drew a line in his head: On one side were the boys, and on the other, the girls.

The policing and reinforcement of gender stereotypes starts young, and the people who don’t conform – the boys who want pink shoes, the girls who don’t want to be sugar and spice and all things nice – are discouraged in all kinds of ways, big and small.

Asking for pink shoes don’t mean your son is gay, or trans. As Rossi writes:

just because you like something that’s associated with one gender doesn’t mean that you are that gender or want to identify as that gender, and it certainly doesn’t mean anything about your sexual orientation.

But there is an association in some people’s minds between how people express themselves and what their sexuality is, what their gender identity is. And some of those people react very negatively to anybody who doesn’t stay in their designated lane.

That means even if you are an evolved and enlightened human, you can still find yourself in the role of the gender police. You know that shoes or nail polish or anything else that’s been pointlessly gendered doesn’t mean anything, but you also know that other kids – and more to the point, other kids’ parents – often have very different views.

I think that’s a real shame, because what starts in the playground ends up in the pay packet. As kids grow up, gender stereotypes begin to limit much more than the colour of their shoes.

There’s an interesting article in The Scientist, the magazine for life science professionals, that includes a good round-up of the current research into trans people’s brains. There are lots of fascinating questions:

for people who transition to identifying as a binary gender different from that assigned at birth, “we still also don’t know whether male-to-female and female-to-male transsexualism is actually the same phenomenon, or . . . [whether] you have an analogous outcome in both sexes but you have different mechanisms behind it”…. Other outstanding questions include what, if any, differences there are in the brains of transgender people with different sexual orientations, and between those whose gender dysphoria manifests very early in life and those who begin to feel dysphoric during adolescence or adulthood. [and we don’t know]  whether the brain differences that have been identified between cis and trans people persist after hormone treatment.

Brains are wonderfully complex things, and the mismatch between the gender we’re assigned at birth and the gender we are is likely to be multifactorial: it’s never been as simple as “being born in the wrong body” (which was always a huge oversimplification in an attempt to help cisgender people understand trans people). As one of the interviewees in the piece says, it’s likely to be “a combination between biological, psychological and social factors.”

The more we know, the more we know that we don’t know. For example:

hormone treatments might even affect regions the brain that are not commonly considered to be among those sensitive to sex steroids—specifically, the fusiform gyrus, involved in the recognition of faces and bodies, and the cerebellum, known in part for its role in motor control

There may also be differences in the mechanisms affecting the brains of trans men and of trans women, because while we both take hormones we take different hormones – testosterone for the men and estrogen for the women.

The article concludes:

For now, as is the case for many aspects of human experience, the neural mechanisms underlying gender remain largely mysterious. While researchers have documented some differences between cis- and transgender people’s brains, a definitive neural signature of gender has yet to be found—and perhaps it never will be. But with the availability of an increasingly powerful arsenal of neuroimaging, genomic, and other tools, researchers are bound to gain more insight into this fundamental facet of identity.

Eleanor Penny, for Novara Media, on “bathroom bills” and anti-trans scaremongering:

It seems to matter little that all this has been repeatedly debunked as statistical nonsense or swivel-eyed conspiracism. They aren’t really propositions to be proved true or false – they are ways of telegraphing disgust. Of signalling to those who fall outside normative conceptions of gender: ‘you don’t belong here’. This may be where we empty our bladders – but the real filth is you.

There are zero confirmed cases of a man pretending to be a trans woman to commit sexual assault. It’s a fever dream of conservative culture war strategists and overly-online obsessives determined to forge a cover story for their own reheated prejudice. There are, however, many cases of cis men assaulting people in women’s bathrooms without such a pretence. As journalist Paris Lees has charted, there are many cases of gender-non-conforming cis women being stopped in public bathrooms on suspicion of existing-while-trans.