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)