Gender Expression & Policing Conformity

I am proud to be an aunt to three kids; in fourth grade, second grade, and kindergarten respectively.  Although I do not have the greatest relationship with the adults in my family, I want to be a good role model and supporter for these kids as they grow up in sheltered suburbia.  This past weekend I attended two of the kids’ sporting events.

As a gender non-conforming person, I am very aware of the attempts to gender police that happen everywhere I go.  I do not identify as a woman but rather a third gender or perhaps non-gendered altogether.  I do not wear makeup, feminine clothes, or shave my legs.  Yet I am fully aware of the assumptions, judgments and policing that regularly happens – especially among women, and especially among homogeneous suburban communities – around gender non-conforming people.

Going to these sporting events on Saturday I was enveloped in a gaggle of suburban soccer moms.  They used the opportunity on a warm, sunny May afternoon to do a little sunbathing.  I did not see any of them concerned about sunscreen.  Obviously this practice is not lost on their young daughters. During the flag football game I overheard the second graders reviling the umbrella that my sister-in-law put over them for protection, saying that she needed to be totally in the sun so she could get ‘bronzed’.  This girl was in second grade. By second grade, girls are already learning the gender conforming ‘beauty routine’ that is expected of women and are striving to meet it, even it that is to the detriment of their health.  This sentiment was echoed just a few minutes later by my older sister, age 36, who had her t-shirt sleeves rolled up to her shoulders and requested that I move the shade of my umbrella off her left shoulder so that she would not get ‘uneven’ sun.

Anyway, I digress.  I was wearing pants that day because I am fully aware of people’s judgments toward female-bodied people who do not shave their legs.  I know, I used to be one of them.  Most folks – especially in white bread suburbs – consider hairy-legged women to be disgusting, lazy, and/or ‘radical’.   The essence of the matter is, I wish to support my nieces and nephew and yet I cannot fully be myself while doing it; there are too many prejudices against gender non-conformity rampant in sheltered suburban communities.  I feel that I cannot wear my “celebrate LGBTQ diversity” t-shirt or my shirt that says “queer + straight = equal” in their conservative neighborhood.  I know that doing so would indicate that I am trying to ‘be political’ or ‘force my beliefs on them’ or any number of such ridiculous claims.  When will it be my turn to announce that they are forcing their beliefs on me?  It was over 80 degrees that day and my legs were sweaty and hot.  I wanted more than anything to roll up my pant legs to my knees and cool off.  I cautiously pulled the legs up just a couple inches past my socks and all of a sudden I saw a few of the moms staring at the sliver of exposed, hairy  legs.  The kids started staring too. I immediately pushed my pant legs back down and deeply felt the assumptions they were silently making about me. Freak. Dyke. Radical. Child molester? I don’t know how far their judgments went.  A few minutes later I could see parents’ eyes trailing me as I took my niece over to the playground.  It hurts me to know that in order to attend these kids’ activities I have to erase my unique identity and attempt to ‘fit in’…to be invisible.   How am I supposed to be an authentic role model for these kids if I feel required to erase my authenticity? 

I know I am not the only person dealing with this. Just as I was writing this post I got an email from Dr. Warren Blumenfeld, Associate Professor at Iowa State University about a post he just published at Huffington Post entitled “A Call to Rewrite the Scripts in the Gender Drama“.  In this article he describe the attempts of a North Carolina reverend, Sean Harris, to force parents to police their childrens’ gender:

“Dads,” Harris commanded, “the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and you crack that wrist. Man up! Give him a good punch.” He directed fathers to say to their sons: “Okay? You’re not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.” He also instructed that parents should be “squashing that like a cockroach.” He warned that “the word of God makes it clear that effeminate behavior is ungodly.”

And to parents directing their daughters, Harris shouted and flailed: “And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you rein her in, and you say, oh, no. oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you’re going to act like a girl, and walk like a girl, and talk like a girl, and smell like a girl, and that means you’re going to be beautiful. You’re going to be attractive. You’re going to dress yourself up!”

Gender roles are restrictive; encouraging this level of policing can be deadly, as we have seen time and time again with recent youth suicides.   To be clear, the majority of bullying-related suicide happening today is not directly related to the person’s sexual orientation but more specifically, their gender expression.  This North Carolina reverend exemplifies my point almost too well.  Dr. Blumenfeld goes on to say:

Though extreme in his language and tone, Harris promotes what most of us have been very consciously and carefully taught throughout our lives. … Rev. Sean Harris simply serves as an extreme and fanatical example of a director in the larger coercive societal battalions bent on destroying all signs of gender transgressions in young and old alike, and in the maintenance of gender scripts. Most of us function as conscious and unconscious co-directors in this drama each time we enforce gender-role conformity in others, and each time we relegate our critical consciousness by failing to rewrite or destroy the scripts in ways that operate integrally to us.

Storm: The Baby With No Gender

I have been keeping an eye on the news story out of Toronto about a baby whose parents are not telling people the baby’s sex, and is raising the baby non-gendered. I personally see nothing wrong with this approach; I have personally considered ways to raise my (future) child as genderless as possible until they are able to identify their own gender.  There is a lot to say about the issue but Questioning Transphobia did an excellent job of covering many of the important points.

The full post is worth the read, but here’s some highlights:

As one can imagine in our cis-centric* society, the family has received an enormous amount of criticism and little praise for their parenting choices. They have been accused of making their baby in to a “social experiment”, of “borderline child abuse”, and “being amoral hippies” in commentary from a multitude of sources. This fire storm of controversy and personal accusation have all come in the name of the “the good of the baby”.

But it’s hard for me to believe that any of this criticism can be counted on as being intellectually honest or in the interest of Storm.  Storm and zir’s parents are experiencing what trans people are well used to, namely, they’re receiving criticism that is not about Storm at all. Instead, Storm and zir parents are being used by cis people as foils for their own personal conflicts, confusion and stereotypes about gender and gender relations.

 

Socialization can come in good and bad forms. For example many kids today are socialized in to racist ideology and behavior. Yet we don’t talk about the evils of that kind of socialization because it would challenge white supremacy prevalent in American society. And in this case, we don’t hear about objections over gender socialization until people are giving their children the free will in a challenge to cis-supremacy.

And our normative gender relations and stereotyping have an enormous political agenda, namely in defending patriarchy, heterosexism and cis-supremacy to the bitter end.

 

*Here’s a quick explanation (paraphrased from this source)

‘Cis’ is an abbreviated version of ‘cisgender’ or ‘cissexual’, i.e. the opposite of ‘transgender’ or ‘transsexual’.

‘Cisgender’ means those whose identity and sense of themselves is aligned with the sex/gender they were born with. They have no sense of ‘bodily dissonance’ that trans people experience.

So cis-centric has the same function as heteronormativity, the insistence on straight orientation being the ‘default’ and anything else being the ‘other’.

If our society is ciscentric, it is because it assumes cis people are normal while trans people are abnormal.

Dear Riki: Less Schtick, More Substance!

Ever since I read “Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer“, I have held Riki Wilchins as a role model and favorite queer theorist.  So you can imagine my glee (and my squeeee!) when I heard that she was slated to speak at my university.

Riki Wilchins (taken by Todd Franson, borrowed from metroweekly.com)

Having seen Angela Davis speak last year, I was expecting a brilliant speech about transgender issues and identities, an opportunity to open the door to more conversations of this sort and an increased awareness among the students, faculty and administrators in the audience. Instead, what we got was a whole lot of schtick and very little substance.

In Remembrance: Recent LGBT Suicides

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

Clockwise: Billy Lucas, Asher Brown, Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh

In the past month, ten (ten!) lgbtq youth have taken their lives.  Every time I think about this my heart breaks and tears burn my eyes.  People like to think that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning individuals are completely accepted now, like there was some queer-friendly wave that rushed over the country after Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena’s tragic deaths in the 90s.

We are NOT a queer friendly nation. The resistance to ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) and the gay marriage are not just political games, they have real impact on our youth. There is a not-so-subtle message in these arguments and debates;  our society’s resistance to these policies is based on deep-rooted homophobia and transphobia.

This post is dedicated to our fallen youth, who will never again get the chance to shine their brilliant lights on this world.  You will not be forgotten, and your legacy will push people (myself included) to work harder to stop the hate and bullying and violence.

Raymond Chase

Among the deceased are: 13-year-old Seth Walsh who after months of relentless bullying hanged himself from a tree outside his California home this week; Billy Lucas of Indiana, 15, who hanged himself after being called a “fag” over and over again; Asher Brown, 13, whose classmates teased him without mercy and acted out mock gay sex acts in class, shot himself in the head; and Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi who killed himself by jumping off a bridge after his roommate secretly recorded him with another male student, then broadcast the video online. (Source)

Jeanine Blanchette and Chantal Dube

We also remember Raymond Chase (pictured above), a student at Johnson & Wales in Providence, Rhode Island, who died by hanging himself in his dorm room;  21-year-old Jeanine Blanchette and 17-year-old Chantal Dube, a lesbian couple who committed a double suicide; Justin Aaberg, age 15, who hung himself; and Cody Barker, 17, Wisconsin.

Related Articles

• LGBT Community Mourns String of Suicides (chicagoist.com)

New report reveals that LGBT-friendly campuses aren’t really all that friendly.

This does not come as much of a shock to me;  I have attended universities deemed in the “Top 100″ from the Advocate and they were rarely LGBT-friendly.  How do we create truly friendly campuses?  I think it begins at the K-12 level and in teacher education programs.

I’ve included a segment (with emphasis added), but here’s the article from the Boston Edge.

The nation’s first comprehensive survey of LGBT students, faculty and staff at America’s colleges campuses was released Sept. 23 at a briefing hosted by openly gay members of Congress on Capitol Hill. Considering the reputation college campuses have of being ultra-liberal, trendy and sexually aware (not to mention relentless criticism from right-wing bloggers, talk radio hosts and religious leaders for it), the results were surprisingly downbeat.

Indeed, the survey is an eye-opener for those of — probably nearly all us, gay straight, left, right — complacent enough to believe that college life is a walk in the park (or on the campus). Even choosing one of those schools touted as being particularly “gay friendly” doesn’t guarantee a happy time in academia.

The 2010 State of Higher Education for LGBT People reports on the experiences of nearly 6,000 students, faculty, staff and administrators in all 50 states. It shows significant harassment of students and a lack of safety and inclusiveness, even among those supposedly “welcoming” institutions.

As if to dramatize the report’s findings, on the same day advocates unveiled the study, members of the University of Rhode Island’s GLBT Center and Gay-Straight Alliance staged a sit-in to demand that its administration take immediate steps to ensure the safety and inclusion of LGBT students and employees after a rash of anti-gay incidents.

Harassment, the Closet, Even Physical Assaults
The survey’s key findings included these shocking statistics:

Transgender Teen Denied Homecoming Crown

Posted on Advocate.com September 27, 2010

Trans Teen Denied Homecoming Crown

After being elected homecoming king by his peers, a transgender Michigan high-schooler was denied his crown by school officials.

Oakleigh Reed, known as “Oak” by students, was told by his principal that all the votes he received had to be invalidated because he enrolled at Muskegon, Mich.’s Mona Shores High School as a female. Teachers, school staff, and fellow students refer to Reed as “he,” and appear comfortable with his status as a young transgender man. But for some reason the homecoming race was viewed as different, and a runner-up king was given the crown.

Fellow students launched an “Oak Is Our King” Facebook page and plan on wearing T-shirts with Oak-supportive messages on October 1.

Read the full story here.

Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics | World news | The Observer

via Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics | World news | The Observer:

“All the mounting evidence indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male and female brains are wrong,” says Lise Eliot, an associate professor based at the Chicago Medical School.  ”Yes, there are basic behavioural differences between the sexes, but we should note that these differences increase with age because our children’s intellectual biases are being exaggerated and intensified by our gendered culture. Children don’t inherit intellectual differences. They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.”

I’m glad this is getting some coverage not only in the media but more importantly in scientific research.

LGBT post round-up

Image via Wikipedia

There’s been some great LGBT related posts in the blogosphere recently. Here’s some that I found interesting:

From Tranifesto: It’s Time to Lose ‘I Didn’t Choose’ (to be Transgender)

From Womanist Musings: When studies and debates are insulting

From Pam’s House Blend: Transgender, And Transgender Like Veterans

From Feminists for Choice: Stonewall Inn: A Legacy

From Roll Call: Why We Need the Employment Non-Discrimination Act

From Feministing: Bitter and Beaten

Have any other LGBTQI related posts to share?

The socialization of men and women

A few weeks ago in one of my classes, we were talking about gender and education.  We talked about how “all of us women remember how we played with barbies” or “every woman remembers wanting to gussy up to impress the boys”. To the contrary, not every woman has had those experiences.  In the same way, not every man “acts a fool” in order to impress a woman.  It oppresses those people outside the gender binary to assume those things.

We are socialized to understand what it means to have a female body or a male body. There is no scientific basis for gender, it is a social construct. Think for a moment about how you know you are the gender you believe yourself to be. If you present as a woman, how do you know you are a woman? If you present as a man, how do you know you are a man?

In a class where we are taught to hear every voice and explore every culture, we are blatantly ignoring the fact that there are members of our society who do not subscribe to the expected gender norms. There are people who were born into a male body and now present as female; there are people who were born with a female body who now present as male; and there are people who were born into a female or male body and who present themselves androgynously; there are people who were born with a mixture of chromosomes or reproductive organs who must decide which gender to present themselves as being.

For all of my life, I have never had a classroom experience that oppressed my racial identity; this is a product of my white privilege. However, every time we discuss gender in our classrooms we still cling tightly to the assumed understanding that there are only two genders, male and female. We never consider that there are people who have a disconnect between their sex and gender, and we never consider that someone could choose to live their life fitting the gender norms of neither male nor female.

Gender Roles Hurt Boys, Too » Sociological Images

In this video, the dad, without thinking, tells his three year old son that he can’t dance and sing the song because he’s not a “single lady”. The three year old does not understand why he can’t participate but soon it will be ingrained in him that boys can’t do the same things as girls. This is why gender roles hurt boys, too.

Gender Roles Hurt Boys, Too » Sociological Images.