The two years she has spent transitioning have been exhausting physically and mentally, and actually just “quite dull”. ‘I’m very wary of making being transgender look aspirational – because it is not a trend’ – Juno Dawson Or, as Dawson so eloquently puts it, how “’Gender is a ho and will fuck literally anyone.”Īs our understanding of gender evolves, accusations that being trans is now just a fashion statement often arise. Part diary, part manual, part polemic, The Gender Games examines how society’s obsession with a strictly male/female binary is ultimately screwing all of us over. ‘Gender will f**k literally anyone’ (Pic: Getty Images) Looking back now, my relationship with my boyfriends in my twenties makes perfect sense why I couldn’t find any sort of sense of peace or contentment even when I was with some really lovely guys.”

“Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it? When you’re in the middle of something, it’s really hard to see the truth of a situation. “Even though I was well aware something was afoot with my gender from my childhood, I didn’t really do anything about it until I was in my late twenties,” she tells i over the phone from her flat in Brighton. But while changes were happening throughout her life, her body and mind were never aligned. She swapped the north of the country for the south. Relationships and sexual encounters came and went as her career blossomed from teaching into writing. She bulked up, grew a beard, and complied with all of the traditional expectations of male masculinity. The award-winning young adult fiction author announced her transition in 2015 in an interview with Buzzfeed, a few months before her book Spot the Difference was due to be given to school children across the country for World Book Day.īingley-born Dawson came out twice, initially and mistakenly as a gay man while studying at Bangor University.

The gender games juno dawson