A transgender journey: The beautiful game

How will Juliet Jacques's transition be perceived in the macho world of football?

    * Juliet Jacques
    * guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 January 2011 11.27 GMT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/26/transgender-juliet-jacques-masculinity-football

On a train from Brighton to London, I check my appearance, wondering if my gender will complicate matters at my destination: The Den, home of Millwall FC and their notorious supporters. Football, widely seen in England (but not the USA or Australia, for example) as the last bastion of unreconstructed masculinity, is the final sphere of my life in which I began to present as female – largely because transitioning involved not just altering my body but rethinking all received ideas about gender.

As I said in my first column, my earliest consciousness of the role that gender plays in socialising came at primary school, when a friend said that I had to become "more masculine". Then as now, this seemed absurd; I ignored it until a few years later, when I realised my desire to transition. Now, I know that my fundamental transsexual impulse and my disdain for stereotypically 'masculine' traits are separate concerns, but their relationship has been complicated, and managing my assigned gender before starting the real life experience was, if anything, harder than dealing with the varied responses to my living as female.