Living in a woman’s body: my body belongs to me. I can harness and shape it as I see fit

We get the body we get at birth. But I learned eventually that I didn't have to accept it, that changes are within our grasp

When I was 16, I asked my best friend, Kerry, why she was so into piercings. Because I was young, naive and suburban, I did slightly subscribe to the you'd be so pretty if you didn't have all that metal in your face" attitude - echoing my mother, probably. Kerry explained that she refused to let her body be arbitrary. At the time, I didn't know fully what arbitrary" meant, but I did not want to appear dense, so I waited until I got home to look it up.

For the most part, our bodies are arbitrary. We get the body we get at birth: our eye colour, our hair colour, our skin colour. We have no say in those things at the moment we are born but, talking to my friend, I realised that subsequent changes are within our grasp. We can go against the grain. My first act of defiance came in 1999, when I bleached my hair. Rather than platinum blonde, it turned the colour of Berocca piss. I quickly dyed it fire engine red instead; why would I want to look like my peers when I could look like Ginger Spice?