The photograph on the home page is of both a fine-looking gentleman called Billie and my equally fine-looking grandmother, Louise.

Louise was a male impersonator, working in music halls in the 1930s with her younger sister, Enid as the duo ‘Billie and Bunty’. During this period, male impersonators were a celebrated and familiar part of popular culture. It was an act which was very much of its time and, sometimes I think, ahead of our time.

Eighty years on, I share Louise’s interest in the fluidity, and expression, of gender identities. I don’t have a theatrical bone in my body but my interest is personal and political and, more recently, research-based. I am part of the LGBT+ communities and an advocate for the rights of those who define as such.

In 2011, I retrained to be an occupational therapist, an important but little known and occasionally misunderstood profession. Occupational therapy is a health and social care profession that seeks to understand how the things that people do in their daily lives enhance and support their identity and relationships. The word occupation doesn’t just refer to paid employment, it includes all activities such as leisure, self-care, friendships and hobbies. It includes working in areas of political social inequity and with communities and individuals who may face exclusion from activities and spaces important to them.

Sometimes I am asked by occupational therapists why I am interested in gender and I am sometimes asked by non-occupational therapists what occupation has to do with gender. In the words of someone very wise, I would say that the link is ‘fundamental’. How can we express ourselves, or live a life authentic to us, if we cannot interact with the world around us?