Critics of Scottish Government’s list of genders have got it wrong

“There are only two genders – male and female”, answered Stewart in Holyrood. This amidst the general contumely about the Scottish Government’s list of gender definitions, arising from responses to identity questions in the recent census.

I guess what she really means here is only two biological sexes, male and female (although that is also complicated by “intersex”, those born with a mixture of male and female biological features).

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I thought “gender” was much more fluid – a social and cultural construct, always open to innovation and development.

Or did I miss that memo?

In any case, and to my eyes at least, there’s something glorious about the Scottish Government’s collation of human possibilities here.

It’s like the cast-list of some ambitious science-fiction novel.

Cisgender, trans man, trans woman, non-binary, trans (not otherwise specified), agender, trans masculine, trans feminine, genderfluid, genderqueer, intersex, assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth, pangender, bigender, autigender, androgynous, gender non-conforming, detransitioned, neutral, demigender male, demigender female, demigender…

My honest response to this list is: Wow! What a piece of work is a human! How infinite in faculty!

Or, if you prefer MacDiarmid to Shakespeare: I never set een on a lad or a lass But I wonder gin he or she Wi’ a word or a deed ‘ll suddenly dae An impossibility.

JK Rowling’s flying thumbs took to the X platform, deriding the list. “As the Scottish endarkenment gathers place, starsigns will follow. As a Nont*, I expect all 366 astro-identities to be recognised. (*Person whose astro-identity doesn’t match the sign they were assigned at birth…)”.

Rowling’s reaction deeply perplexes me, and has done for a while. She made her massive fortune creating a magical world of transformations, where young wizards train to be able to change anything (or anyone) into anyone (or anything) else.

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Indeed, they do so by means of a confident act of linguistic assertion and invention… Isn’t the parallel obvious? Why, then, so dismissive and sneering?

These are categories entered by census respondents themselves. Which makes me imagine that, out there in the supposed “Scottish endarkenment”, there are some truly fascinating people living their complex lives.

I want to hear the discussion between a pangender (identifies with all genders), a bigender (transcends binary genders) a genderfluid (no single defining gender), and a demigender (only partially identifying as male or female) person. What is it like to live in an internal ebb and flow like this? What new aspects of more mainstream lives could be pointed out, our stiffness and sclerosis noted?

Autigender also fascinates me. As the Scottish Government glosses this term, it identifies “an autistic person that thinks about and relates to their gender label – or lack of gender label – in the context of autism”.

What new insights on some very old behaviours might this produce? How much of male dominance and patriarchy, its narrow focus and orderly obsessions, can be understood through an autistic lens?

The stramash these kinds of terms produce usually rests on their claim as concrete, rights-asserting sexual identities – not just forms of role-play or cosplay, in the everyday theatre of life.

On a practical level, I can understand opponents’ complaints about the bureaucratic expense implied, if we were to cater to each one of these gender identities.

Again, with this list, the critics have got it wrong that it’s a script for Kafkaesque government. It’s as much a survey of how willing and creative people are being about their socio-sexual status, these days.

But how are “these days” doing? We seem to be in a brief lull in the culture wars about gender and sexual identity.

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Although if Trump clearly wins the American presidential election next week, you could expect those who live outwith the heterosexual familial norm to be targeted for demonisation again.

But I confess my overall bewilderment. Not so much at the steady march of more and more recognition, in law and policy, of substantial gender identities, and diverse sexual states of being. That seems to be progressing, crab-wise.

I AM bewildered because I partly live IN a world – rock and pop – where the “gender fluid”, “pansexual” or whatever is a steady and welcomed domain. Think of all your favourite pop moments, and it won’t take long for some on the Scottish Government’s list of genders to come shimmeringly alive in your brain (and bootay).

This is the claim of veteran rock scholar Jon Savage in his new history, The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Performers Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979), out now on Faber.

It’s a pantheon of the most quasar-like stars, their sense of possibility radiating from their sliding and slipping between sexes and genders. Bowie told Melody Maker in 1972 that he was “always gay … the guys that I know as friends are very positively gay, and I couldn’t lead that kind of existence in the papers saying I had Sophia Loren last night and it’ll probably be Raquel Welch tonight.”

Great copy there, produced by Ziggy Stardust alongside his trans-sister spiders. But Bowie knew that his aesthetic boldness had social consequences. As Savage writes: “Bowie understood that a new decade demanded new openness and frankness about human life that had been hidden … and in this was part of a wider cultural and political movement.”

It’s a thrill to watch Savage’s parade. The cover has Little Richard in his full-camp pomp, and the book alights not only on covertly gay artists like Dusty Springfield but also straight icons like Grace Jones (the gender-bender supreme) and Donna Summer, who welcomed their devotion from LGBTQ audiences.

Also welcome is the book’s reminder of how powerful Andy Warhol was as a scrambler of sexual and gender codes, in his visual art but also with his influence over the music of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.

“The real play of pop was that it had the ability to liberate everyone”, says Savage in his book’s intro. “Not just gay men, lesbians and trans people, but young heterosexual men and women who didn’t accept the standard definitions offered, indeed imposed, by the dominant culture.”

That’s so on the money. Look: I know that the indy movement is badly divided on the underlying issues behind gender and sexual recognition. I fall very clearly on one side of the debate.

But would it be possible to recover that moment when to be a Scottish indy supporter was to be somewhere near the front of progress in the world? Defying all the cliches about the angry, defensive and regressive nature of nationalism?

I feel pretty patriotically loyal to that idea, when I look at that carefully curated list of human possibilities from the Scottish Government. I am happy to see a wise, curious and capacious sensibility still brimming beneath those business suits.

And for some reason, a dearly departed first minister drenched in pink – glasses, feather boa and Ray-Bans – also comes to mind.