Original subtitles

Ladies, gentlemen and those of us smart enough to have

transcended gender.

CHEERING

I know, I know, I know.

I'm fabulous.

My pronouns are bad, bitch.

CHEERING

For me!

This place is wild.

It's rule-breaking, gender-bending,

and it's at the forefront of what I see as a gender revolution.

Gender - it's not about what sex you are.

It's about whether you feel like a woman, a man, both or neither.

What are your pronouns? They, them, she, her.

They, them, she, her. He, him, they, them.

It's a subject that gets some people very worked up.

People get so upset when they see someone like me in a dress.

And often very confused.

Bender gender, system offender.

Will exploring different gender identities across the world...

..help me understand gender and myself better?

Is this actually meant to be serious? No. Quite.

Half? OFF-CAMERA: Halfsies.

For me, I think that gender is probably

the most interesting

thing that runs through all of humanity and society,

but it is the conversation that people have the least.

This is probably the first time I've spoken about gender like this

ever in my life.

And it's been 29 years too late.

SHE LAUGHS

When I was younger, I was a little girl who liked dressing

up in boys' clothes.

I didn't like Barbies, I liked Action Men, I liked cars.

But then, if someone ever mistook me for a guy, I'd be like,

"No, I'm a girl! Can't you see that?"

I think I started having these gender identity crises

when I was a teenager.

I felt very alone.

Completely. There was no-one I could talk to.

But that's why even admitting it to myself was

so difficult. I just thought I...

There was something very wrong with me. I don't know.

The whole thing is very odd.

I'm still figuring it out for myself.

I know I'm not alone in feeling confused about gender.

So, to understand more about myself, I'm going

to meet some fabulous genderqueer folk.

There's no better person to start with than one of my favourite

friends. This is Mik.

Mik's glamorous alter ego is drag queen Gottmik,

who you might recognise from RuPaul's Drag Race.

All right, this is the angel of my life.

This is William's studios. Oh, my God.

A lot of artistry happens here. I got ready for Drag Race here.

Literally covered this whole place with all my stuff.

THEY LAUGH

This is iconic. This is iconic.

Traditionally, it's males that perform as drag queens,

but what makes Mik so unique is that he didn't start life as a boy.

So I'm a trans man, which means I was assigned female at birth

and then transitioned into a man.

But I definitely love playing with femininity.

And that's why I love drag so much because it just allows you to do that.

So I'd utilise it to kind of explore my boundaries.

I wake up as a guy, I go to sleep as a guy and Gottmik,

that female-ish persona, is 1,000%

just my art form.

When did you first, like, discover people can transition?

Well, I'm from Arizona, where it's very, like, conservative.

When I was, like, 18 years old, and I met, like, a bunch of trans

women that, like, taught me what trans was, and it just clicked.

I didn't transition for so long because I was very feminine

and all the trans guys I ever saw were just very masculine.

So I used drag as a way to kind of see what I was comfortable with,

and it kind of helped me find my gender and realise that I'm

1,000% not a girl, I'm 1,000% a guy.

It's amazing.

I started hormones, and it was just like everything fell into place

and I like... It was almost like every issue

I had was just, like, solved in one second.

Born a female, now a man with a glittery drag persona,

Mik's proud of his complex identity and his journey has got me

thinking about my own path.

If someone had asked me as a kid if I wanted to be a boy, um,

I do wonder about this a lot.

Like, if I hadn't have become famous, would it be different?

If I wasn't a model, would it have been different?

Yeah. I mean, it is scary.

When I started transitioning, I was a celebrity make-up artist and

it was just scary, because I was like, "Oh, my God, like what am I going to do?

"Go to my celebrity clients and just like, 'Hi, I'm a man today.'"

And so I can't even imagine even, like, playing with gender

and trying to figure out shit in front of the world like that.

Like, I think gender's so stupid.

Masculinity and femininity doesn't define your gender

and it doesn't define anything except for just, like, how you

want to present to the world, you know?

All right. So, where do you think you're headed with this?

I honestly don't know.

MIK SIGHS

The older I've gotten, the less I'm just trying to get

approval from my family.

I wonder if I said, "Guys, I want to transition into being a man,"

what they would do.

And by the way, I would never say that to them.

And this is the thing, it's nothing against them.

They love me. It's just some people don't understand what that is,

and it's like they look at you like they don't know you suddenly.

I love you so much. I love you more.

No, but I mean, that's the fun... It's like I want to be a daddy.

Yeah, you are a daddy, no matter what.

I'm feeling really inspired.

Maybe I can use drag to explore my gender.

So, Gottmik's put me in the make-up chair.

I love that I'm thickening your brows.

Yeah, you are.

What we're trying to build right now, like a gender...

Bender. Bender. System offender. Yeah.

Bender gender, system offender.

MIK LAUGHS

I used to think that moustaches were nose hair.

I used to get, like, the foam shaving cream,

I used to put it on my face and pretend to shave

with, like, the end of a moisturiser bit because it's hard.

Non-transferrable. OK.

Ven-gen, Gen-ben,

welcome to the world.

It's scary. WHISPERS: In a good way.

Oh, my God, you literally look like Zac Efron.

This absolutely matches my eyebrows, like, kind of perfectly.

I mean, it's not, not...

You honestly look hot as all hell.

Ah!

MIK LAUGHS

And after a bit of that Gottmik magic, I'm really feeling it.

Wow. Wow. What gender's happening here, ladies?

Yeah. Gentleman. You look cool.

I've been obsessed with drag queens for, like, the last couple of years.

I hadn't really ever done it, though, in practice, dressed

in male drag.

Apart from when I was, like, nine years old, when I would

go down the street dressed as a boy to try and see if people believed

me, or if I would get away with it, or what people would treat me like.

For me, drag is an outward expression of how

I feel inside in some way, shape, or form.

My gender is this kind of like multicoloured

sea, sometimes it's wavy and sometimes it's completely still

and sometimes there are these massive tidal waves.

But it just, it's... For me, it never feels fixed.

I know, from my own experiences, thinking about gender can

really make your head spin.

So, let's back it up a bit and get to the bottom of what gender

actually is and how it differs from sex.

Let's talk about gender, baby! Gender.

It can be controversial.

So I've called in my fellow Brit

and medical expert Dr Ronx to give their perspective.

We're going to do cue cards.

I'm a bit nervous.

Gender.

Gender is essentially how somebody feels inside.

It's an innate feeling, and it's not, um,

necessarily related to somebody's sex assigned at birth.

I mean, should we talk about what sex is?

Because I think people can, um, uh, confuse sex and gender.

Yes, exactly. Sex.

OK. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.

Medical term used to divide people into two binary categories

based on their, usually external, sex organs.

So, male, female.

Wah! Trans/transgender.

So, society assumes that if you have a vagina,

then you are going to feel that you are a woman.

And if you have a penis that you are going to feel that you are a man.

So, trans people feel that their gender isn't aligned to the

sex they were assigned to at birth.

So, if we think about a female child

may not grow into a woman,

they might identify as a man.

Yeah, yeah, of course. But the thing that we need to be

very, very clear about is

that the trans experience is different for absolutely everybody.

Not everybody wants to evolve into a binary gender.

Also, not everybody will take hormones or have a change

to their physical appearance or, in society, behave in a gendered way.

Me! Non-binary. My gender identity is nonbinary.

So I use the pronouns "they", "them",

and I do not identify as a man or woman.

I have a vagina and therefore I'm socialised by my

family and by society into womanhood.

But that doesn't mean that I have to walk around the world

as a woman.

So I also call myself trans.

So, what... What is your sex?

Um, I mean, my sex is... I was... I have a vagina.

I, personally,

I've always grown-up without feeling like I have a gender. Yeah.

But it's more that I didn't belong in any of the gender stereotypes.

For me, the whole feminine identity was so annoying

because I was like, "I am a person that likes to play outside,

"to build, to climb, to do crazy things."

And in a dress that my mother used to try

and put me in all the time, and with really long hair,

I was like, "I can't do any of those things." Yeah. So it was really confusing.

I think more people would be comfortable with the gender

that's been assigned to them if we didn't have all of these

societal pressures that come with it.

Wow. It's so true.

Some estimate that for around 98% of folk, their sex

and their gender match up.

But about 2% feel differently.

In the West, we've now got a set of words for gender identities.

But around the world, other cultures often see

and name gender diversity differently.

300 miles south of Mexico City lives the indigenous Zapotec people.

And for more than 500 years, they've recognised not two,

but three distinct genders -

men, women, and muxe.

Felina, like most muxe people, was recorded male at birth.

I love that.

Muxe make up about 6% of people in Felina's hometown.

Most work in stereotypically feminine trades such as cooking,

hairdressing or embroidering traditional dresses,

worn as a symbol of muxe pride.

Muxe people rarely marry.

Despite romantic relationships with men,

they're expected to stay home and take on caring responsibilities.

Today, Felina is bringing together muxes from all over the state for

an annual festival celebrating muxe culture, visibility and bravery.

The Catholic church is not exactly known for supporting gender

diversity. But here in Oaxaca, it's a big part of the muxe festivities.

HE SINGS SCRIPTURE

It's the start of a three-day celebration of all things muxe.

It turns out it's not just Oaxaca that has more than two genders.

India has the hijra.

In Naples, Italy, there are the femminielli.

Many indigenous Americans recognise two-spirit people,

whilst Samoa has four genders - men, women, fa'afafine, and fa'afatama.

And the Bugis people of Sulawesi have five genders,

similar to Western concepts of man, women, trans man,

trans women, and nonbinary.

No, don't eat the bird.

I think the Western culture that I grew up in, with just two

genders, men and women, is far too restrictive.

No wonder some people are showing the world options beyond this

binary, like writer, performance artist and activist Alok.

What do you want from me?! CAR BEEPS HORN

SHE LAUGHS

CAR BEEPS HORN

Alok's taking me to a tailor in the West Village whose family has been

dressing the gender-nonconforming community for 35 years.

Hi, how are you? Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, your dress is ready, I think.

But I want you to try it on. Oh! OK.

How do you like it? It's really great.

The length is good. And it looks great.

Can we get more room up here?

More room here? Yeah.

My shoulders are kind of wide.

We can do that. Thank you.

People get so upset when they see someone like me in a dress.

They'll be like, "That's a man in a dress!"

Like, so what?

What about just looking like yourself?

Mm. Exactly.

And how do you define your gender?

I don't like defining my gender because I'm fluid, which

means on a given day, I could look like something completely different.

I don't see it as necessarily being my gender

when I wear what society calls "girls clothes",

because my gender is internal, it's not external. Mm.

Do you think the binary has really affected us badly? Yes.

Is that kind of more along the lines...?

We're constantly saying, "You're not masculine enough,

"you're not feminine enough."

We're constantly made to feel like we're not enough.

Being a man has to be opposite with being a woman.

And it only gives us two options. Yeah, put in a box.

Black and white, this or that. Like, all of us have

fluidity in us, but we're constantly trying

to put people into these binary boxes because it's easier.

Meeting you, you're so outside of gender,

and you have such a confidence in your masculinity

and it, for me, was a wake-up call that all of us

are in this journey of trying to figure out who we are outside

of what we've been told.

And that, actually, in a world without that pressure,

that societal pressure, who would we be? You know?

But these things have just been so ingrained into us.

I realise how much internalised shade I have against myself and not to anyone else.

But it's still, you know, especially with whatever your parents'

beliefs were or your grandparents' beliefs were.

I mean, it just... It does take a long time to change,

but the quicker it happens, the more that people will find freedom.

What I often say is they will try their best to destroy you

and call it love. Yeah.

That it was often that people who said that they loved me

first who were policing my gender.

I had to deny myself, erase myself, "invisibilise" myself.

So I didn't allow any video recordings of me.

I didn't want any photos.

I didn't want audio recordings because I felt like I was too feminine.

My voice was too girlie and my gestures were too girlie.

And so I just literally became in a straitjacket.

I wouldn't express myself at all.

Can I ask how your relationship is with your family now?

It's so much better now.

I think because they saw how this is what happiness is.

Yeah. It's so important.

And one of the things I wanted to ask you is modelling, do you

feel like it's difficult for you to figure out what your own image is?

Yeah. Really. Um, I...

Like, my identity as a person, I don't...

I don't really know what that is.

In a way of like, I went from being a suicidal, depressed

teenager to going straight out of school and becoming a famous model.

I don't know who I am.

Like, a lot of people don't know who they are, right. Right.

You know, I'm nearly 30, and I still feel like I'm 16.

Both Alok's experiences and my own show how harmful rigid

ideas about masculinity and femininity can be.

For what it's worth, if I'd grown up in a world that understood

the complexities of gender a bit better, I think

my childhood would've been a lot easier and happier.

When I was a teenager, I mean, I had a lot of mental stuff going on.

Pretty heavy depression, suicidal thoughts, like, you know,

I had a mental breakdown. It was all, I think, to do with finding

identity and sexuality

and gender and, um, yeah, I think a lot of that was...

It was pretty rough, yeah.

Because I wasn't like everyone else.

But actually, I was wrong.

Like me, a lot of people growing up feel unsure about their gender.

The big question is - why?

One theory is that it's to do with how you develop in the womb.

It starts with the chromosomes you inherit, which set

you off on the path to being male or female.

Then, around week eight of development, sex hormones

like testosterone or oestrogen kick in to shape your body.

But sex hormones may also influence whether connections

in the brain develop in more male or more female ways.

One DNA study of 30 trans men

and trans women identified gene variants that affect

the amount of sex hormones produced just before and just after birth.

These variants could cause you to have a body that's one sex

and a mind that feels and acts quite differently.

It's one possible reason why gender is more diverse than just men

and women.

But perhaps surprisingly, so is your body.

Because when it comes to our sexual anatomy,

there can be dozens of biological variations.

Meet River Gallo - they're intersex.

That means they were born with reproductive or sexual

anatomy that didn't medically tick the boxes of male or female.

I used to religiously not step on cracks.

Oh, of course, me, too. Yeah.

If you do two in a row, it's good luck. Three in a row, it's bad luck.

Then you have to spin around ten times, kick a lamppost, spit on the

floor and go, "Aye, aye sailor." Ow, Ow.

THEY LAUGH

That's what happens when you don't do the luck thing.

Fuck you, tree. Ow.

River's family runs an El Salvadorian restaurant.

And I cannot wait to find out more about their extraordinary story...

This is my mum. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Cara.

Hi, nice to meet you. Baby! Hi, Mum.

..and to try their famous pupusas.

Cheese and meat. Cheese and meat. Yes, pupusa.

I always say the pupusas paid for my college.

THEY LAUGH

Tell me a little bit about you growing up.

I knew there was something different about me

since I was 12, you know, which is when, um, my doctors told me

that I was born without testicles.

I was put on testosterone to start going through puberty.

And then, when I was 16,

had a surgery to implant prosthetic testicles into my scrotum.

Those prosthetic testicles actually give me gender dysphoria.

River, like many intersex people, felt their sex

and gender was decided for them by doctors.

It wasn't until I, like, I really wanted to make a film out of it,

that I realised that my condition was intersex.

Mm.

River's ground-breaking short film, Ponyboi,

follows a young intersex runaway

navigating love and seeking self-acceptance.

It's one of the few films ever to star an intersex person

as an intersex lead,

and opened up a whole new world for River.

While I was writing the screenplay,

I discovered my condition is part of the larger intersex umbrella,

and found that there is like these intersex activists,

who were really vocal about their experiences.

Was it something you were quite scared of,

or were you just so happy to find out?

Like, like surely both, right or something? Yeah.

Definitely both.

It was like a relief, because I was just like, "Oh, my God,

"community, people, support."

Like, and then at the same time it was like,

"What the fuck?" How - why did it take this long?

Why did no doctor in these last, like,

ten, 12 years tell me anything?

I recently looked at my journals from that time,

and it was heart-breaking,

cause it was like, you know,

there was a lot of talk of like not wanting to live.

There was a lot of just like, just confusion.

Are you going to cry? Mm-mm. OK.

Just checking.

Slightly, but shut up, God, you're annoying!

That breaks my heart.

How can you not be pissed off?

Yeah, I turned that anger into activism.

Is it still normal for someone who's born intersex

to be assigned their gender? Pretty much, yeah.

Most doctors will just say, like,

this is just kind of, like, what has to happen.

Leave the kid alone!

And it's also doctors preparing children to have heterosexual sex.

Because that's what it is.

That's why it's, like, you know, a hetero patriarchal agenda.

And I think that's part of the reason why this, like,

what I like to call, like the intersex tipping point

is now happening.

Now we're finally realising our shared experience is

collective power to get these laws made,

so that no intersex child

has to go through what we, what we've been through.

What, what laws do you want to be put into place?

To just ask people to delay surgeries.

So, saying that, like, OK,

any medically unnecessary surgeries or cosmetic surgeries should be

delayed until the child can decide at age of consent.

Yes, exactly.

Within the realm of discovering who you are,

is it something you'll still figuring out?

Since I came out as intersex,

and then like, you know, now being nonbinary and trans,

I definitely feel like I have more confidence to just like be myself.

I'm still kind of figuring out what my identity is,

in terms of being trans, and if I want to transition or not.

Because at the same time I, I also feel really comfortable and happy,

inhabiting this non-binary body

and just kind of, like, rocking with it.

It was really, really nice to meet River,

but there was a sadness, you know, about like...

..being kind of emotionally unsupported

and going through all of the stuff medically alone.

And I think how crazy it would've been to have someone medically

make decisions that I couldn't even have control over, I suppose.

River's story shows our sexual biology is actually this

kaleidoscope of diversity.

It's estimated that up to 1.7% of us humans are intersex,

which could mean there are many hundreds of thousands

of intersex people in the UK alone.

Our bodies clearly don't always fit neatly into two categories.

So is this the same for our minds?

The University of Cambridge,

where scientist Dr Christelle Langley has been investigating

if gender shows up in the brain.

What we tried to do in our study was to look at whether we could

identify typically male or typically female brains.

So, do brains from males and females look different?

Well, no.

One grey blob is much like another.

But Christelle wanted to know if brain activity patterns

could tell you which was which.

Interesting!

But why are we looking at a cake?

So the brain is made up of a number of different areas and regions.

So things like synapses, networks, cortices,

they all function together, much like the ingredients of a cake.

Dr Christelle used AI to analyse 10,000 brains,

half from biological males, half from females.

Previous studies have identified different patterns of connectivity

in each sex.

The AI was tasked with identifying which of Christelle's brains

were male, and which female, based on those patterns.

And the results were plotted onto a brain sex continuum.

You'd expect the brains to divide neatly into two sexes.

But what Dr Christelle discovered was that many of us

don't have very gendered brains at all.

So in our study, what we managed to show was that

approximately 25%

mapped on to the male end of the continuum.

And approximately 25%

mapped on to the female end of the continuum.

And the really interesting finding was that actually

50% of people had what we call an androgynous brain,

and didn't show any of these very stereotypical

male and female traits.

If you just looked at the connection patterns of an androgynous brain,

you wouldn't be able to tell if it belonged to a male or a female.

They share qualities from both, and it turns out that's healthy.

Androgyny is related to things like higher cognitive flexibility,

better creativity,

and actually these allow you to better adapt in society,

and you're more likely to flourish in social situations.

But a more gendered brain leads to more rigid, insular thinking,

higher depression, social anxiety and isolation.

Both the female and the male ends of the spectrum

had worse mental health.

More research is needed to understand what this means

for trans and nonbinary people,

as none were knowingly included in Dr Christelle's study.

But we do know that all that toxic "boys should be boys" crap

makes for less happy lives.

All things considered,

I think I would choose a slice from this cake.

Ah, it's dropping. Sorry!

LAUGHTER

BIKE BELL RINGS

Gender is way too easily seen for most

as black and white, male/female,

because it's so much more dynamic

and interesting and fascinating.

It's like the whole thing is just so, so archaic in so many ways.

OK. Story so far.

Rather than being strictly male or female, our bodies and our minds

are more fluid and varied than I ever thought possible.

A massive mix of circumstances creates millions of unique people,

with their own gender identities,

and that's generating lots of revolutionary ideas

about who you can be in the world.

In Japan, there's a gender phenomenon

that's grown over the last 15 years.

Danso, people assigned female at birth,

working and often living as men.

This is a gender totally unique to Japan.

There are danso boybands,

danso bars

and danso heart-throbs.

But behind the showbiz glitz of danso's entertainment

lies a really authentic way of life.

Meet Jin, who lives as a danso full time.

Like many danso, Jin works as an escort,

a strictly non-sexual one.

He's got an escort date tonight.

Jin, like most danso,

doesn't identify as what we in the West would call trans,

or non-binary.

I totally get why the danso want to live and dress like men.

So far, I've only expressed my more masculine side through what I wear.

But I've never quite worked out

whether I should go further than that.

I'm going on a date on Wednesday night.

So what are we doing on Thursday? Oh, my gosh.

She will never escape.

When I first started learning about trans people,

I was like, wait, but I felt that.

Or like, I kind of went through that when I was young

or that's kind of crazy,

and then thinking, "Oh, am I living a lie?

Like, is this this giant secret that maybe I should be a man, or...?

And then like, but also no.

Alfie. Alfie.

I love him so much.

So what would it be like to have a man's body?

And is that me?

Well, science shows our sense of gender can be tweaked

if we perceive our bodies differently.

And someone in Spain can give me a taste of what that might feel like.

This lushly coiffed cognitive neuroscientist, Dr Marte Roel Lesur,

is the brains at a cutting edge laboratory,

packed with very cool tech.

Welcome to the gender swap.

Yeah. What? This is so cool.

Sit down here.

Here comes the curtain. Say goodbye to yourselves

In a cognitive experiment called the full body ownership illusion,

I'm going to swap bodies with this guy, Carlos.

And once... I don't know why I'm a little scared.

My VR headset is not showing my body, it's showing his on me.

Can it trick my mind into feeling a different gender identity?

They'll have a camera in front, so that they can see their full bodies.

And what we do is that we swap the cameras.

We mirror each other's movements.

Oh!

And before long, my head is actually starting to get in sync

with my masculine body.

Oh, my gosh, this is so weird.

It's a completely multisensory experience.

By providing these tactile and visual interactions,

they not only feel that they're located in this space,

but also that this body is their own body.

Three, two, one, touch.

Three, two, one. It's wild.

It is definitely tricking the mind.

There are certain brain areas that are activated

when people see themselves from a different perspective.

Brain areas related to the body,

body perception to planning of movement,

to perspective, to spatial cognition.

This combination of sight and touch

really makes me feel like I've got the body of a man.

Whoa!

Argh, I've got man hands!

Oh, no way.

That is crazy, guys.

We open a curtain that is separating the space between the two people,

and they face themselves as another person.

This is your hand.

This one right here. No, so confusing. Not happy.

This one. What?

I feel like I've become Carlos.

Whoa!

Dude, this is crazy.

Our self-identity,

the way we perceive ourselves is very grounded on our bodies.

The fact that I can see myself and, and know that it's me,

for example, when I see a mirror,

is very crucial to our human experience.

However, it's possible to shift this,

to feel that we are somebody else.

It tells us that gender is much more fluid,

and it shows that our identities are more malleable than we thought of.

When the brain's tricked like this,

experiments show a rapid impact on our own sense of gender.

Women can feel less feminine and men less masculine.

I'm so confused.

Wow!

That is so weird.

It's the coolest thing in the world.

Oh, my God! Whoa.

Ooh!

Illusion experiments like this suggest that our sense of gender

isn't entirely fixed,

and can change.

That was so crazy.

I, I knew it was going to be amazing,

I just didn't understand exactly how crazy that was.

Yeah, it's a lot. I mean, it's really like we're...

There is one moment that you lose your perspective as your body,

you know, and then you are fully introduced in that body.

Once you're in it for a while, it's like wow,

you just get so used to it, I suppose.

It's like, oh, my God, I've got such muscly legs.

We get a lot of people interested in trying these

that are transitioning gender.

This is very interesting for trans communities.

Soon VR could allow trans people to experience their new bodies

in 3D before permanent procedures.

It was emotional at the end when you see yourself and, like,

hug yourself. I was, like, "Cool."

It's like quite, quite shocking, yeah.

That made me really want to be quite sad.

Like, "Oh, my God, that's adorable."

Yeah, it's, it's, so, so, so interesting.

Trying to be a man, I realise, like, I was a lot more feminine

in the way sometimes that I moved than I thought I was.

I don't know how much I liked it.

It was quite uncomfortable, the feeling,

the sensation of touching someone.

So that's when it became real.

Then it was like, Oh, my God, I'm in a man's body.

It was really quite crazy.

It made me happy to be a woman, I suppose, in so many ways.

I was like, "Oh, I'm...weird."

Cos I usually was like, "Oh, God,

"would I want to look at my dick?" and I was like, "Not really."

I was like "Oh." Make me feel weird.

I'm in my hometown - London.

And ending this journey where I started,

with the fabulous folk at cabaret night, Bar Wotever.

A very, very special haven where, gender wise,

you can literally be whatever you want.

Tell me about tonight, I've never been here.

Bar Wotever is, I feel like the name kind of says it.

It literally is like a night that we put on and everything's welcome.

All you have to do is walk through the door,

and there is a room, a whole community of people right there.

It's so, so incredible.

How do you - what are your pronouns? Just so I know.

They, them, she, her. They, them, she, her.

He, him, they, their.

They, them. We did the thing.

She - she daddy.

She daddy, I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that's going to make a lot of people happy.

Yeah. Yeah.

You'd like that.

There's just like no pressure,

like everything should be allowed to be fluid, do you know what I mean?

Like, you can try pronouns, try different names,

try different pronouns, different expressions.

There's just so much freedom within it.

Especially at a night like this. It's like - it's just freedom.

It's liberating to now feel able to talk about this tricky subject

that I used to just run away from.

This is THE place to see, both on and off stage,

just how diverse gender can be.

Ladies, gentlemen, and those of us smart enough

to transcend a gender.

CHEERING

HARD ROCK MUSIC

Come on. It's time for the world to open up its arms

to gender, in all its fantastic forms.

And what about your gender journey?

Um, my gender journey is still on one.

For me, talking about it has just been a really interesting thing.

I am a she right now,

but like, I like also dressing up like a man, and being a he.

You don't have to put so much pressure on yourself

to know what you are, who you are,

whether it's masculine or feminine, it's just who I am.

Now I feel like I dance in between the lines.

I'd, like, sway back and forward.

I'm a loose willow tree, blowing in the wind of gender.

I don't think there are actually words to express how freeing

and how just "right" I feel in myself now.

I've realised that gender has no signifier on how you look,

how you act, how you talk, what you do with your life.

I hope that in the future we can all exist in the same space together,

and every single gender expression is completely valid.

I'm just living off this energy.

It's, um, it's a beautiful place and beautiful people.

I've never really been out and seen this community in this way.

Um, it's a lot of emotion.

It's a lot of support, a lot of love.

People can feel very weighed down by a conversation about gender.

But it is fun. It should be fun.

It should be an experience, an experiment,

a way of expressing yourself and playing with it.

Can I go back in? Can I go back in? Can I come back in?

OK, here I go.

Planet Sex.