Antony Hegarty in The Guardian

Last.fm

The Guardian has a really nice (and lengthy) feature  on singer-songwriter, Antony Hegarty, who is curating this year's Meltdown Festival in London. He talks a lot of feminism, gender expression, and some of his own early musical influences -- too many disparate things to highlight only a few choice quotes -- however, this left me scratching my head a bit:

"There was another article I was reading in the Guardian," he says, with a grin, "about a year ago that declared there was no fundamental difference between men and women. I mean, are you off your rocker? The whole problem is this difference between men and women and our lack of self-knowledge about it. Our bodies are like computers with two different operating systems. One is called testosterone, one is called oestrogen. The same body, different software. And within the transgender community you see this very clearly. You watch people take oestrogen or testosterone and you see them change not just physically, but their whole way of thinking, their whole approach."

I adore Antony, but there's an uncomfortable amount of gender essentialism going on here. As much as I'd never want to even imply that gender identity is only a social construct (even Judith Butler says that gender is performative, not performance -- something a lot of people get wrong), or invalidate someone else's experience, I fully subscribe to the theory there are more differences among men and women (and binary and non-binary people) than between them. Needless to say, this makes me a little uneasy.