Why I want International Women's Day to "do one"
Contains mild swearing and extreme doll mutilation
Listen, no one asks to be born a girl. It just happens. You can like it or lump it, as my mum used to say. She thought it was a good thing where I was concerned because she was left labouring in a hospital corridor for refusing to sign a form agreeing to my circumcision. She thought genital mutilation of newborn babies was a bad thing, go figure. But she refused to consent to having my penis snipped, and despite her intransigence on the paperwork, I arrived just as the doctor was going off-duty and was a girl, and everyone went, phew, no foreskin.
I didn’t know I was a girl. I was just me. My brothers were three years older, and we were all the same-but-different. You know? We all had different names, and we all looked a bit different, and they were older, but we were all just kids.
How do you know when you’re a girl? You know when you’re about four and someone buys you a doll. I can’t tell you how vile this thing was. Big plastic face, hard plastic bo…
