Gender: Your Guide

A Gender-Friendly Primer on What to Know, What to Say, and What to Do in the New Gender Culture

Lee Airton

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781507209011
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"An invaluable resource for both new and veteran allies…obvious and necessary" ( Library Journal, starred review) information for everyone who wants to learn more about how to navigate gender diversity in today's families, communities, and workplaces. The days of two genders—male, female; boy, girl; blue, pink—are over, if they ever existed at all. Gender is now a global conversation, and one that is constantly evolving. More people than ever before are openly living their lives as transgender men or women, and many transgender people are coming out as neither men nor women, instead living outside of the binary. Gender is changing, and this change is gaining momentum.We all want to do and say the right things in relation to gender diversity—whether at a job interview, at parent/teacher night, and around the table at family dinners. But where do we begin?From the differences among gender identity, gender expression, and sex, to the use of gender-neutral pronouns like singular they/them, to thinking about your own participation in gender, Gender: Your Guide serves as "a warm, inviting guide to a complicated area" ( The Globe and Mail, Toronto). Professor and gender diversity advocate Lee Airton, PhD, explains how gender works in everyday life; how to use accurate terminology to refer to transgender, non-binary, and/or gender non-conforming individuals; and how to ask when you aren't sure what to do or say. It provides the information you need to talk confidently and compassionately about gender diversity, whether simply having a conversation or going to bat as an advocate.Just like gender itself, being gender-friendly is a process for all of us. As revolutionary a resource as Our Bodies, Ourselves, Gender: Your Guide is "greatly needed…an impactful tool for creating a world more supportive of people of all genders" ( INTO! Magazine ).

PART ONE

WHAT TO KNOW

In this part I will describe how gender works as an ongoing process that we all participate in. Each of us is a gender expert, which means that we know how to follow the rules of our gender category, as best as we can. These rules change depending on where we are, and our gender expertise is honed as we move among all the different places where we spend time, making changes in our gender expression—how we act, style, talk, groom, and present ourselves—as we go. You know how to do this deep down in your gut, even if you don’t know that you know, and even if you haven’t thought of yourself as a gender expert. We most often use our gender expertise to avoid standing out and getting called into question by others, which can be harmful. But we can put our expertise to use instead to create spaces where standing out doesn’t mean getting called into question and doesn’t have harmful consequences. In such spaces the “rules” are less like a set menu and more like a buffet: take what you like, and leave the rest for others to enjoy.

You’ll also learn about some people under the transgender umbrella. Like everyone else, transgender people were assigned a sex and corresponding gender category at birth, but this assignment doesn’t reflect who we are. Transgender and cisgender people all work the same gender system—standing out and blending in, getting called into question and calling others into question too—but standing out can have worse consequences for transgender people. I debunk a common misconception that all trans people are on what I call a “binary” pathway, or moving from one side of the M-to-F binary to the other, and I will introduce three sometimes-overlapping groups of people under the “T”: transgender people who are women or men, nonbinary transgender people who are neither, and people who are gender-fluid. You will learn that there’s no one way to be in any of these groups, and that trans people face different challenges and have different relationships to being visible or out as transgender. I’ll end Chapter 3 by explaining the concept of transition in a way that makes it clear that transition, like transgender, is a spectrum.

1.

Understanding Gender in Today’s World

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Fact or Process? Two Broad Schools of Thought about Gender

Biology and Socialization Affect Each Other

How Gender Works in Everyday Life

In this chapter I explain how gender works and how we all participate in its work. I begin with a broad-brush look at the two major schools of thought about gender and its relationship to biological sex: gender as a fact and gender as a process. A key distinction between these schools, both inside and outside of academic disciplines, is whether gender differences are attributed to biology or to how we are socialized by other people around us beginning at birth. Next I explain how gender works from the perspective of gender as an ongoing, lifelong process. We participate in this process every day of our lives, including visually and verbally, by calling others into question when they stand out. I explain many ways in which the question-calling happens, whether or not we know we’re doing it. Thinking of gender as a process can help you begin seeing the role that gender plays and has played in your own life, from childhood. We also all have our own gender expertise, no matter our gender identity or gender expression. Naming yours is an important tool for creating a gender-friendly world around you.

It can be difficult to start making your own context more gender-friendly if you don’t have a sense of your starting place. And so, the end of this chapter gives you some tools to explore how gender currently plays out in spaces where you spend time. I call this process “drawing” your gender-friendly road map. I lead you through a reflection exercise where you’ll use your own gender expertise to identify what someone might face in your family, community, friend group, or workplace if they bump up against others’ gendered expectations. This will help you think and act proactively, as well as help you notice how gender might be restrictive there already.

Fact or Process? Two Broad Schools of Thought about Gender

We don’t usually think of gender as something that works—a process, like housecleaning—but as something that just is: a fact, like whether the house is clean or dirty. Facts seem like dependable things that stand still, whereas processes seem like things that are on their way to standing still: to being facts. But many facts are actually processes in disguise.

I’ll share an example of fact versus process that has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with a questionable life choice: living with two ginormous cats even though I have a cat allergy. Before I’ve finished cleaning the house, my cats have already begun redistributing their fur and dander. My house is never “clean” or “dirty” (fact) because the cleaning is never complete (process). What’s worse, the cats’ redistribution of fur and dander is actually helped by running all over the house to escape the vacuum! The process is never complete. In the same way, we can think about gender as a process a person participates in that is never complete, and not something a person “just is.”

Some people argue that gender is a fact about a person that we can know from birth and that it’s basically the same thing as sex. People in this camp primarily attribute gender differences to innate biological sex differences, as opposed to the differences reinforced or even produced through society’s expectations. Others argue that gender is a teaching and learning process that’s never complete, but they don’t believe that biology is irrelevant. In this camp gender differences are primarily attributed to socialization, including how we are socialized in relation to what our bodies do (or do not do).

Cat analogies can only take us so far. To better understand the two major schools of thought about gender—gender is a fact or gender is a process—let’s think about the moment a baby is born. (Let’s assume that the baby’s parents have not been given information about the baby’s body from an ultrasound in advance of the big day.) In a great tide of fluid and relief, the baby emerges. Someone (doctor, nurse, or midwife) catches the baby and notes the shape and size of its external genitalia. What happens next is largely based on the visual appearance of the genitalia, particularly the length of the organ containing erectile tissue (clitoris/penis) and how much of its length is visible. Of course, there’s a whole range of externally invisible factors involved in sex development, including hormones, internal sex organs, and gametes (eggs and sperm). But the doctor, nurse, or midwife notes only what they can see and then makes a pronouncement: “It’s a girl/you have a daughter” or “It’s a boy/you have a son.”

This pronouncement can be thought of as an ending (gender as fact) or as a beginning (gender as process):

• We can think of “It’s a girl!” as ending uncertainty about what the baby is: she is a girl, she will be a woman. From this perspective, “It’s a girl!” just shares factual information about the baby’s gender.

• But we can also think of the pronouncement as a beginning: of the tremendous effort required to teach the baby how to become a girl who will someday become a woman, and what that looks like in this time and place. From this perspective, “It’s a girl!” doesn’t just share information but actually does something: it signs up the baby as a fledgling member of a particular gender category with locally specified rules for how babies of that category must be dressed, addressed, and engaged with.

WHAT DOES “INTERSEX” MEAN?

Sometimes external genitalia alone don’t provide a clear-cut answer to the boy-or-girl question at birth. In these instances, a baby might be intersex. According to the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), the word intersex describes “a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.” In a review of research published in the American Journal of Human Biology, Melanie Blackless and their colleagues estimated that approximately 1.7 percent of the general population is intersex. Alice Dreger, a bioethicist and former president of ISNA, points out the sheer variety of conditions loosely brought together under this term: “the medical names for various intersex conditions may refer specifically to the genotype (genetic basis), or to the phenotype (body type), or to the etiology (causal pathway of the condition), or to some combination of these. So saying someone is ‘intersex’ does not tell you anything specific about a person’s genes, anatomy, physiology, developmental history, or psychology.” Not all intersex people are identified as intersex when they are born; some might develop indications at puberty. Furthermore, some people identify as intersex, while others describe themselves as having an “intersex condition” or a “disorder of sex development.” Phrasing varies depending on a person’s own relationship to the term intersex.

The phrase ambiguous genitalia is commonly used when referring to intersex people or conditions, but it’s a misnomer and considered offensive, as is the older term hermaphrodite Ambiguous genitalia is a misnomer because not all biological variations under the intersex umbrella involve genitalia, as previously stated.

Distressingly, there is a history in North American medicine of irreversible genital surgeries on intersex infants, which, according to research by Human Rights Watch, is still ongoing: “Operations aimed at ‘normalizing’ these differences include clitoral reduction surgeries—procedures that cut and remove sensitive, erectile tissue in order to reduce the size of the clitoris for cosmetic reasons. Such surgery carries the risk of pain, nerve damage, and scarring, and yields no medical benefit.”

The question of whether or not gender and biological sex are the same thing also separates the fact and process ways of thinking. If we think of gender as a fact, then reading an “F” sex marker on someone’s birth certificate is the same as knowing they’re a girl or woman, and reading an “M” is the same as knowing they’re a boy or man. But if we think of gender as a process, then someone’s “F” is simply shorthand for a quick survey of their external genitalia at birth. That isn’t the same thing as a person’s identity. Even though most female-assigned babies come to identify as girls and most male-assigned babies come to identify as boys, identifying isn’t just “what happens” naturally. It’s a process.

Sociologists of gender describe the process of teaching babies how to be the gender associated with their assigned sex as a process of socialization. The teaching process happens whether or not people know they are participating. For example, psychologist David Reby and colleagues found that adults attribute femininity (if told the infant is female) or masculinity (if told the infant is male) to a baby by listening to their cry, even though vocal pitch differences don’t emerge until puberty. In addition, psychologists Melissa W. Clearfield and Naree M. Nelson studied infant-mother play sessions with gender-neutral toys and found that the mothers spoke to, spoke about, and played differently with male and female infants as young as six months old—an age when their infants lacked any gender differences. From findings like these, we can take away an unsettling implication: we are often unaware of what we’re teaching other people about gender or how we’re participating in gender socialization.

Some would say that, because adults aren’t always aware that we treat boys and girls—or babies presumed to be on their way to boyhood or girlhood—differently, differences between boys and girls must be “natural” (closer to gender-as-fact). Others believe that, actually, adults learned “how to treat boys” versus “how to treat girls” (closer to gender-as-process).

This brings us to another big difference between the fact and process ways of thinking about gender: what about gender is natural (often used to mean innate or biological) versus what about gender is social. This is often called the nature-or-nurture debate. In many years of studying and talking about gender with all kinds of people, I’ve come to see the “debate” as more of a continuum. Few people live out at the poles, and most pitch a tent somewhere in between, whether they’re transgender or not. Where one sits on the continuum depends on many things, like whether one studied a particular discipline (for example, sociology and neuroscience have different knowledge bases about gender), how one’s own experiences with gender have played out, and how gender is understood in one’s culture or faith.

THE BIG GENDER REVEAL

Be honest: when you find out that someone you know has had a baby, what’s the first question you ask? Chances are, you, like many people, ask whether the baby is a girl or a boy. From a gender-as-process perspective, we don’t yet know the brand-new baby’s gender, but perhaps only their sex. In a Huffington Post piece, writer and new mom Jen Willsea breaks this down even further, asking, “Is it really anyone’s business what sex my child has been assigned? Since gender is not knowable at this stage of a child’s life (11 weeks!), people are really asking whether my child has a penis or vagina. That is completely inappropriate and weird!”

Whether you agree with Willsea or not, consider the popular phenomenon of the “gender-reveal cake”: a pink- or blue-dyed cake covered with icing, usually served at a party where slicing “reveals” whether the baby in question is a “boy” or a “girl” based on a prenatal ultrasound in which external genitalia is visible or not. I have an active imagination and have always pictured tense and furtive phone calls between obstetricians and bakery staff: “Do you have the intel? I have to get this into the oven!”

The next time you hear about a new baby, pay attention to whether the baby’s “gender” is volunteered, even if you don’t ask. I’ll share more about asking gender-friendly baby questions in Chapter 7.

Biology and Socialization Affect Each Other

By now you’ve probably inferred that I’m closer to the gender-as-process or “nurture” end of the spectrum. But this isn’t because I think biology and bodies are irrelevant. Many transgender people’s experiences have shown that how people relate to their bodies is itself an ongoing process, not just “the way things are.” As a result, it’s uncommon to find a transgender person on either extreme end of the nature-nurture belief continuum.

The meanings and practices associated with things like muscles, body hair, and particular body parts come from a complex interplay of socialization and biology. For example, if you happen to have a penis, it’s lots of fun to put out a campfire by pee...