Tag: Politics

Here in the UK, life appears to be returning to at least some semblance of normalcy. Pandemic restrictions in England are gone; in Scotland, whilst masks remain, there are no limits on gatherings. Nightclubs are opening up again. Students are going back to universities.

Have you ever told someone about a problem you’ve been having, and had the always-infuriating response, “Oh, that’s all just in your head”? Have you ever been told that by a doctor?

This year, throughout Pride month, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own journey as a queer teenager, then a non-binary adult, and how I’ve changed throughout my life. As with the metamorphosis we see in nature, my identity and self hasn’t changed – in the way that a butterfly is never not itself, even as a caterpillar.

From a young age, I was always told that I was a bossy person, and I just accepted it and took it as the criticism it was intended to be. Thinking back to when I was labelled bossy, it was when I took charge of a task and put myself in a leadership position in order to do something. This adjective has never been used to describe one of my male friends, but many of my determined female friends.

In primary school, a boy once asked me, “Aren’t all brown people quiet?” I had no idea what to say, standing there in my oversized bottle green cardigan and kilt. I was eight years old. I mean, I knew I was quiet, but not because I wanted to be; in a predominantly white area, it was the best way to fit in, to survive the glares and stares I received day on end. At home, I was different. I would speak up about anything I could, and as soon as my friends got to know me, I would tell them stuff too. As I got older, I found my voice: first by writing, then by speaking. By the time I started my undergraduate degree, I had plenty to say.

When I was younger, living in the north of Scotland, we would have some pretty miserable winters. It would be dark at 3pm, wet and cold and windy. The one silver lining was that on clear nights, even when your fingers felt like they would fall off as you broke the ice in a water trough, you could see so many stars overhead. I could stand with my neck craned back and stare at them for hours.

It’s been two months now since Scotland moved into Phase 3 of lockdown restrictions, and pubs, shops and workplaces are beginning to reopen. I recently started a new job, and received a long policy email about how to fight COVID-19 in the workplace as part of my starter pack. Unfortunately, not every woman has been given this privilege: experts have found that women in the workplace have been set back ‘decades’ by the effects of lockdown…

71 years ago, Simone de Beauvoir concluded her foundational work The Second Sex by discussing the then status of ‘The Independent Woman’. Her existential feminist thought was crucial for the wave of feminism that followed and today her understandings of independence remain pertinent and needed…