When I saw that India Willoughby was going to enter the #CBB Celebrity Big Brother House, I thought it would be good for the trans community and help improve attitudes towards trans people. In the past, trans people have always been popular on Big Brother, and India already has a high profile as a newsreader and panelist on Loose Women.

Oh, how wrong I have been.

She has certainly turned heads. But for all the wrong reasons.

I think part of the problem is that India has gotten into Big Brother’s house too soon. This is something that Shane/Courtney brought up in the conversations. I remember when I transitioned 15 years ago, it was an embarrassment to many people, especially my family.

But what’s worse, I really damaged my own reputation, and that has taken a long time to repair.

The challenge was that when I transitioned, all the pressure of hiding in the closet was released and I was finally able to be the woman I always felt I was. But it wasn’t easy. I didn’t have 50 years of growing up as a girl/woman behind me. I had missed out on the teenage years, dressing up for a night out, wearing spaghetti strap tops and miniskirts.

I had to relearn life now as a woman and build some memories and experiences, which was fun, but frankly a little embarrassing. I also had to unlearn 50 years of behaviors and experiences of growing up socialized as a man, which wasn’t easy either.

I immersed myself in the world of women and found new friends who told me the truth when I was wrong and began to learn the new social and commitment skills that I needed as a woman.

One thing that helped me a lot was going to university, shortly after the transition, to study Gender. Being in college meant that I socialized a lot with younger people, especially women, and also got involved with the LGBT community, where I was generally well accepted despite my age. This entire resocialization process took me about 5 years and is still incomplete.

There are some experiences that I will never have, simply because I was raised as a child. I never experienced the risks of getting pregnant, having periods, or fear of sexual abuse. I never experienced the joy and pain of childbirth and motherhood. I experienced, although I didn’t appreciate it until I lost it, male privilege.

So I understand why some feminists get upset when trans women yell “I am a woman.” as if the transition made them like any other woman. It doesn’t. But I’m not more of a man either.

There is no universal experience of being a woman or being a man and it is much more than the body we are born with. The binary system of men versus women is outdated and obsolete. We need to rethink our entire approach to sex and gender, exploring the rich diversity of third gender options; not something India Willoughby seems happy to do.

The mistake I think she’s making is, in one breath, loudly proclaiming “I’m a woman,” and in the next breath, stating, “I’m a trans woman and an activist.” If you want to identify as female, that’s fine. I know some women who have not even told their husbands that they were born with a male body. And before yelling badly, that is her right by law. It is a criminal offense for any person to reveal a person’s gender history without their permission.

But if you say you’re trans out loud, don’t be surprised if people treat you like a man or a woman. India actually seems to be locked into the gender binary. She sees herself as a woman, not a trans woman, and if she had walked into the house and she had been one of the women, then she would have been accepted.

Which brings me to the difficult topic of Misgendering. Who knew that term before #CBB?

I am a trans woman and I am proud to be a trans woman. There are currently only two legal gender options, so I prefer to identify as female. My driver’s license and passport show me as female. I have a gender recognition certificate and my birth certificate shows me as female. So I expect them to call me with feminine pronouns and titles and to call me madam, not sir.

However, my voice is quite masculine and I haven’t done much to try to change it. As a result, I am often referred to as male, with the wrong gender.

When it happens, I silently correct the person and move on. If they keep doing it, I’ll get irritated and may correct them more publicly. If someone persists in referring to me as a man, I will probably take some action because that is harassment and it can be really embarrassing.

If there was an option to have a third gender significator on my passport and driver’s license, I think I could do it. It’s a new world and it will bring with it some challenges, particularly pronouns. Kate Bornstein came up with the idea of ​​the third gender pronouns ze and hir instead of he/she or him/her, but no one remembers them. The other option is to use the plural pronouns they and their, which are difficult to get used to.

When I write, I use plural pronouns to avoid gendered text. My advice for using plural pronouns when addressing someone who identifies as bigender or gender neutral is to think of them as two people, a man and a woman, in the same body; then it is easy to get the pronouns right.

The government is proposing to introduce a third gender signifier on UK passports later this year. However, changing the law is relatively easy compared to changing attitudes.

What India doesn’t know yet is the huge backlash against her and her beliefs in the #CBB groups on Facebook and Twitter. I think most of that is because she has positioned herself as different from other women by trying to claim that she is the same. It also doesn’t help that she can be very rude and aggressive, qualities that women especially dislike.

I have been running transgender awareness training courses since 2005 and thought I was seeing a steady improvement in attitudes. Okay, 80% of my audience is female, but at least I thought most women were getting the whole trans thing. Apparently not. I have been struck by the level of virulence expressed, often by women, against trans people in general.

Clearly, there is a much larger undercurrent of hostility towards us than I imagined.

The topic of “which bathrooms do trans people use” keeps coming up. This has been a huge problem in the US, with some states passing local laws making it illegal for trans people to use gender-appropriate restrooms.

I thought this wasn’t really a problem here in the UK, but the last few weeks indicate that many people are being swayed by appalling anti-trans campaigns on social media. Then I read an article by India Willoughby telling trans women not to use ladies unless they are transitioning, and by transition she clearly means having genital reconstruction surgery.

1 in 100 people is born transgender – this is around 600,000 people in the UK at the moment. However, fewer than 10,000 have had any surgery. Most trans women will cross-dress and, whether or not they pass as women, they will not be safe in men’s bathrooms. In the UK it is perfectly legal and accepted by them to use female toilets.

The article from India incites harassment and hostility towards trans women and especially trans women who don’t have a good time. What it seems to be doing is creating a distinction between trans women who get surgery and those who don’t, and that’s discriminatory. Her comments about drag queens lead me to believe that she’s also not happy with trans women who don’t hang out or wear too much makeup or identify as transvestites.

Well, not everyone is lucky enough to pass; Not everyone is obsessed with fitting into the binary. No matter what we look like, we all have the right to live free from discrimination, harassment and victimization and without having to undergo invasive surgical and hormonal treatments in order to do so.

All trans people are different India – Get over it.