Lily Maynard

I was happy and honoured that the inspiring Robert Webb retweeted me today.

My family are all huge fans of ‘Peep Show’: I’d rather the teens watched that than ‘Britain’s Next Top Model’ and luckily so would they. It’s hilariously funny and a very pertinent social commentary & goes down very nicely as a post-dinner chill. I’ve just read Robert’s book ‘How Not to be a Boy’ which is both very funny and very sad. But mostly very funny.

Robert is quite outspoken on the subject of ‘the Trick’. What’s’ the Trick’? Watch here:

https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10155187428901939/

Robert retweeted two of my Tweets:

… and although many people were really supportive and interested, some were not very happy at all.

A ‘Mermaids’ representative said she was ‘deeply concerned’ and spoke of my ‘ferocious anti-trans propaganda’, while someone else claimed that I ‘attack trans people all the time’.

Juno Dawson claimed that my story was ‘entirely fictional’ and I’d just made it up to be mean to trans people.

Others have suggested, not for the first time, that I’m an evil, hideous parody of a mother and that Jessie has been scared into pretending she isn’t trans until she can escape my evil clutches. <eyeroll>

You can read the threads here:

Notions of identity are deeply held but to divorce the 'me-ness' of 'me' from the environment that created 'me' seems odd. Long, great read. https://t.co/0DCEfWnY7a

— Robert Webb (@arobertwebb) September 23, 2017

and here:

https://twitter.com/arobertwebb/status/911545666425548805

Robert stood his ground, and over the next few days mine & Jessie’s story on 4thwave received several thousand new hits thanks to his retweet.

PS I just read through my bedtime Twitter ‘mentions’ & the support there is huge. I wasn’t expecting that much. Going to bed happy and a little bit ‘fangirling’.

‘Gender roles’ are the ways in which society expects women and men to behave. Gender is both a social construct and a hierarchy. It is confining and restrictive and especially harmful to girls. Gender stereotyping starts from the moment we pop out of our mothers’ wombs to be greeted with, “Isn’t she pretty!” or “He’s a strong one!”

We may think we don’t stereotype kids but we do. How many times have you heard, “Girls just sit and play nicely; boys just dash around fighting”?

But a girl who wants to run round yelling in the dirt is still a girl.

A boy who likes sitting quietly; pink and dresses is still a boy.

If we accept this as true, what possible reason could we have for transitioning children? The barriers that gender builds up need to be broken down, not fortified with puberty blocker bricks and cemented together with a paste of pronoun changes.

If we are to genuinely value both authenticity and honesty then we need to start by recognising that pushing children into gender boxes is oppressive and sexist. Telling a boy he can become a girl or a girl she can become a boy is not only untrue and unkind, it is also unrealistic.

Lily Maynard

The Twitter Peep Show

“Would you like the pink box or the blue box?”