Top Highlights

• ‘I have two homes,’ my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, ‘and I have no home.’ To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?
• She had aspired to marriage and motherhood, to being desired and possessed by a man in a way that would legitimise her.
• Yet my father’s aspirations – to succeed, to win, to provide – did not quite fit me either: they were like a suit of clothes made for someone else, but they were what was available. So I wore them and felt a little uncomfortable, a little unsexed, but clothed all the same. Cross-dressed I met with approval, for a good school report, a high grade. I...
• In that world of femininity where I had the right to claim citizenship, I was an alien.
• But I didn’t want help: I wanted equality.