“Sex is fucking, gender is everything else.”
In Westlake, Louisiana, a red state with a population of 4,668, sixteen percent of households consist of females with no husband present. You are in this 16%. Your mother has recently chopped off all of her hair. You don’t know it yet but she has a drug problem and a girlfriend and a life you never imaged. You are a part of it but not in the way you think you are. You’re just eight. You don’t need a babysitter. It’s 1995 and you have MTV. You have her one pair of high heels on and are spritzing her last drops of perfume on the nape of your neck, your wrists, your flat hairless chest. You drape a sheet around your shoulders and wrap a towel around your head. It’s like someone flipped a switch and you are a perfectly feminine essence. Subtly, your movements become more fluid. You are malleable and soft and it’s the most natural thing in the world. It isn’t okay like this at school. School is exposing. When you are finished pulling a piece of paper from your binder you make yourself stop abruptly. You carefully hold back the extra three inches your hand wants to glide in order to make the movement feel complete. Your breathy voice and the nervous click your tongue makes against the roof of your mouth before you speak is betraying you. You don’t feel free to move. You mime a careful rigidity into the way you walk. You can’t focus on anything at all but this. You’re thinking about this in your mother’s bathroom. You unearth the plastic clip on earrings you stole from the goodwill and they humorously weigh down your tiny ears. You put on a cheap green sequined tube top that a strange woman left at your house. It’s the 90s and you are Beyonce. You sing into the spinning fan blade to give the illusion of vibrato in your voice. It is still a high tenor, not the baritone of the future. It will never be easier than it is right now for you to be yourself.
You dress in drag the way I would dress as a character from a favorite Disney movie: Because it is childhood.
“Whatsoever can be named as loveliest, best, and most graceful in woman, would likewise be good and graceful in man.” — Lydia Maria Child, 1843
It’s 2012 and you’re sitting on the couch with me. Your kohl eyes, your flammable wig, your little mini dress and ripped nylons… these should make you unrecognizable but they don’t. I see how they have made you new. I think you look beautiful and I tell you so. Your flat blue eyes look green somehow and the way you’ve painted your nose has changed your entire face. It’s a total transformation, a refurbishing, an art. You have made something where nothing was before- breasts, high cheekbones, full lips. You have concealed everything that does not suit your purposes and perfected your body to your every specification through smoke and mirrors, shadows and illumination. You have mastered your body and established complete control of it. I tell you that you’re beautiful but what I really mean is brave. A year ago I didn’t understand that. A year ago I laughed and cheered at the magic of seeing a man I look at everyday become a beautiful woman. But it isn’t about that at all. It isn’t about looking like a pretty man in a dress, the attention, or the fantasy. You don’t want to be a woman. And you aren’t trying to be funny. I understand now that although it is fun, there is nothing funny about it. What you want is to be free. You want to be a man who loves men but enjoys and appreciates what it is to be woman. Even other gay men have trouble understanding this about you. You hide it from romantic interests because, “Gay people take it the wrong way just as often as straight people do. They think I am rejecting my masculinity, that I want to be a woman. When someone is attracted to you because you are one gender, they don’t always take it lightly when you dress as a different one.” So, my question is, since when does what we wear change what’s between our legs? This is obviously ridiculous. We all know that nothing we say or wear, no one we kiss or make love to, changes our actual sexual organs, our abilities, or our value. So why do we treat each other like it does? We all do it. We make assumptions. I make assumptions about people who wear pink too much. But just because we all do it doesn’t mean we should. These are all things I rarely thought about before I met you, even though I always considered myself a friend of LGBT organizations and supporter of marriage equality. I held the belief that overthinking gender is in itself a problem, because if we are all equal and gender doesn’t matter, why are we still writing books about it, pulling at our hair and fighting worldwide over gender related issues? In a world full of complications, it’s easy to overlook something so seemingly straightforward as the presence or absence of a Y-chromosome. You’re born a woman, you do womanly things, you learn to love them, they make you happy, being with men makes you happy, the end. But simply because many of us are comfortable with our gender identity, doesn’t mean we are allowed to fail to acknowledge those who aren’t. It is important because we dictate our lives by it, and sometimes never even question why. You defy every misguided and immature gender assumption I ever had. You can paint your toenails and refurbish an engine, sew yourself a dress while you watch hockey alone. You become someone else because you can and it makes you a better person. Walking a day in someone elses shoes is the quickest way to learn about acceptance. When you attempt a transformation into womanhood, you succeed. When you exist as the man you are, you excell. You are gender bilingual. Why should you have to choose pink or blue? “You know,” you murmur in your deep showgirl voice at me and scoot a little closer, “there was a time when putting on a wig and powdering your face was the epitome of class and masculinity. The wig was a status symbol- you could afford it.” I imagine colonial men, then Louis XIII, then Kurt Cobain being pushed out on stage in a wheelchair and a wig, and lastly you. I start to think about what you have to do to look this way. I fast forward in my mind all the youtube videos I have watched with you about “tucking” and waxing and taping and gluing and applying clay here and shadowing there. And all the hours I have spent watching you work to enjoy several hours of feeling like yourself, of feeling at home in your own skin, of feeling free to do or not do anything at all.
“Drag imitates the imitative structure of gender, revealing gender itself to be an imitation.” — Judith Butler
I drive you home and find peace in your thoughtful pauses. You are 6’2 without your high heels on and not including your 8” high wig. We are coming home from your show early because I twisted my ankle. Clumsily, I toppled off a curb and you ironically carried me to the car while wearing your little dress. I tell you almost daily that you are a better woman than I am, and particularly when it comes to wearing heels. I think about things like the show Rupaul’s Drag Race, transgender beauty pageants, pride festivals worldwide and I know we are living in a better time. I know every day more people like me are meeting people like you and are counting themselves among one of the millions who, now that they are awake to the injustices and the preposterously outdated notion that “God hates homosexuality,” can not rest until something is done about it. But it’s easy to forget the world is changing when I still have to drive you home at night so you won’t get jumped again, won’t get a knife held inches from your throat, won’t have to resort to violence yourself. Yes, the world is waking up, but still much too slowly.
“As an imitation, gender is not something one is born possessing, but rather something that one becomes through disavowing the desires, styles of dress, and personality traits that do not fit the gender one is “meant” to be. This loss of self cannot be acknowledged, because to acknowledge the loss would be to acknowledge that one is not really what one purports to be. The subjects very identity rides on the denial of this knowledge. This construction of gender creates the rigidity and polarization of gender identities- they are too close, so the difference between them must be boisterously proclaimed. Such elaboration of difference is taken as the proof of this difference, putting to rest anxieties that there really is no difference at all.”
The following morning, some of the photos that had been taken of my fiance and myself at your show ended up on facebook and my conservative future mother in law sent me a message with a lot of questions:
“Who is ___?
Are they a man or a woman?
How do you know them?
Why are you friends?”
I shied away from this opportunity for days. I didn’t want to make waves. Eventually I recognized what she had given me. She was asking questions she had probably never asked before. She had trusted that I wouldn’t laugh at her. She cared enough to ask before she assumed. I told her openly that you are a close friend, a co-worker and that the Facebook account she was seeing was created for your drag persona. Her response was not what I expected: “Holy moly! I’m so sheltered and confused! Is he really gay if he dresses like a woman and likes men because then are the men he’s with really gay because he is looking and acting like a girl??” It was a completely earnest and well-meaning question. And I was thrilled at the opportunity to discuss this with her, although I may not have had the right to speak for you as I did. Her questions awakened a realization in me and highlighted what I feel is one of the most dominant lifestyle misrepresentations for everyone who is not heterosexual. This is the assumption that everything gay, bi, or trans people do is seen through the lens of sex or is done simply to result in sex. The question she had asked me made one giant sexual assumption which is: You dress in drag to attract men and/or for sexual satisfaction. I replied as concisely as I could: “That’s a good question. My co-worker is actually single and is very monogamous. I don’t believe he dresses up to get dates but instead does it because he is an entertainer and he makes good money at it.” She didn’t reply and it was never mentioned again.
“Gay marriage legalized on the same day as marijuana makes perfect biblical sense. Leviticus 20:13: ‘A man who lays with another man should be stoned.’ Our interpretation has just been wrong for all these years.” — George Takei
Since I have gotten to know you, I mean really know you, I have thought frequently and tirelessly about gender. Specifically, about the unconscious rule in our society that gender is a binary and that a large part of what society thinks of as a “true man” relies upon him sharing no characteristics of a woman and vice versa. I feel it is problematic to even use the term “true man/woman” as I believe no such person exists and I want to draw the distinction that I am using this term merely for simplification. However, I will state the long definition of what I mean by “true man” as a heterosexual, masculine dressed man who operates his life in the constraints of societally held beliefs concerning masculinity and vice versa for a “true woman.” I use this term simply because although I believe that every person walking around with male genitalia, female genitalia or both can each have entirely different ideals about what a man or a woman is, but that society as a whole (media portrayals, religion, politics etc.) has very set and specific criteria on the matter. Furthermore, I belief that misconceptions surrounding what is masculine and what is feminine lead to immense and damaging issues in all of our lives, not just the lives of those who live outside this dichotomy. Eating disorders among impressionable teenage girls, or brides starving themselves so their husbands can carry them over the threshold on their wedding night seem to me no different from men taking steroids or male enhancement drugs for reasons of physical prowess or attractiveness. Body image, sexual identity, and societal enforcement of gender polarity are things which damage us all. Although I recognize that it has never been less difficult than it is now to subscribe to a third gender or un-gendered life, I also realize that there are few ideologies so unchanged and starkly black and white in our society as gender is today. The symbols of dichotomy are everywhere: “M/F” on our driver’s licenses or the symbols used for men’s and women’s restrooms despite half the people entering the “dress” symboled door are likely to be wearing pants. They are perpetuated by the media in things like magazines, movies (“chick flicks”), colors (pink or blue), advertisements (clearly THIS ad is targeting only straight guys), the list goes on ad nauseam. When there are only two gender categories in the running, it seems almost instinctual to deem one as “better.” Undeniably throughout history there has been beliefs about a dominant and a submissive gender. Still I can’t help but question if more genders were recognized, validated, and thrown into the running, would it remain that way? The truth is, ignorance about other sexes and genders is harmful particularly to those who do not fit so easily into societies imposed dichotomy, but also for us all. It is harmful to us as human beings to walk around so unconsciously (yep, that’s a Todd Akin clip.) In present day America, where we celebrate and embrace Martin Luther King Jr. Day, why do we still create second class citizens and then punish them for being what we have made them into?
A recent article written by the Huffington Post titled, “Policing Gender, Arresting Sex” illustrates just one contemporary way that we as a society punish the ambiguously gendered in particular ways exclusive to them simply being what they are:
“Anti-prostitution laws cause tremendous harm to people engaged in the sex trade, especially those who are LGBT. The article notes that transgender women are particularly likely to be booked on felony prostitution charges on a second or subsequent prostitution offense under legislation that advocates argued would increase penalties to clients, not sex workers. What’s more, in what seems to be a flagrant violation of Chicago anti-discrimination law, police officers arrest transgender women (overwhelmingly women of color) for prostitution, classify them as male and, in a disturbing twist of logic, post their mugshots online as part of an effort to “shame” men for attempting to buy sex.”
In essence, the laws instituted to prohibit and prosecute those attempting to buy sex are used against the transsexual workers, and they are prosecuted for selling themselves as women and then charged as men. These laws do not help clarify a societal consciousness about the humanity of transsexuals, but rather add to their ostracization, and their feelings of societal diminutization. Laws like these, and the grey area of harm caused by improper enforcement of them, further instill in the minds of those who are unsympathetic to the LGBT community the notions of LGBT individuals as people who operate outside society, outside the law, and are ultimately not included in the same laws intended to aid and protect us all.
How does the gender binary hurt us? How does it hold us back?
You glide so flawlessly and perfectly between this binary that I am tempted to write this entire paper on you alone but, in issues of the gender binary those who subscribe to it are just as caught in the shifting paradigm as those who operate on the outskirts of it. I keep arguing with myself about why my gender paper seems so male-centric when I, as a female, am most acutely aware of the inequalities surrounding my own gender. In that very statement lies my answer. I am curious. Within the very nature of this outdated alpha masculinity I struggle so much to understand, there lies its own form of oppression. Men don’t talk about it because it’s not “manly.” Most men identifying as heterosexual (as well as many who don’t) rarely talk about their body issues, their trauma, or their displacement so freely. Whereas women’s inequality, although it is still just as much of a hot button, is less shocking to hear protested through a loudspeaker. A man I know turns red when his co-workers make a joke about his girlfriend. He doesn’t laugh and shrug it off. It bothers him. He sounds hurt and objects, “No, man, I love her.” Because of this reaction, they tease him twice as much. While I understand that many men really wouldn’t be bothered by a joke like this, and I don’t necessarily agree that that makes it okay to say it, I understand how few men actually mean it when they do this. But the very fact that men engage in this regardless of their true emotions, that they are expected to say things they don’t mean and think little of it, is exactly my point. For the sake of being manly, many men express less. However, recent changes in the percentages of women attending college, seeking degrees in things like engineering and becoming CEO’s of companiess like Yahoo, seem to have released the floodgates for some pretty reactionary male emotions. What I find interesting is that amidst what some people call the “rise of women” is that it seems to be, in the social consciousness, synonymous with the fall of men. In fact, a book was published this year with that exact title: The End of Men and subtitled with And the Rise of Women, written by Hanna Rosin, claims to highlight men’s identity crisis and struggle during the current economic challenges while simultaneously addressing male displacement in the face of female success. Or, as John Harris from the Guardian puts it: “‘Plastic woman’– adaptable, well-educated — is besting ‘cardboard man’, who surveys endlessly changing realities and crumples into defeatism.” Books like this and “The New Male Mystique,” which aims to illustrate how men’s stress over work-and-family conflict has increased due to shifting gender roles, are suddenly everywhere. Although I agree that women are becoming increasingly educated, independent, adaptable and powerful and acknowledge and do not intend to undermine the very real feelings of certain types of men who feel lost amidst this deeply held patriarchal “role reversal,” I also believe that when you educate a woman you educate an entire family. As a country, we are only strong as our weakest members, we are only as rich as our poorest citizens, and groups who were once conditioned into being satisfied with domesticity (for women) or silence and secrecy( for trans/bi/homosexuals) are currently some of the most effective and educated advocates for positive changes to American legislation and equality. I see women being risen up to a similar status as men as a benefit to those men and not an overshadowing force that diminishes them. But despite the embrace of these changes by so many men and women across this country, many are still struggling to find their balance on this shifting ground of gender roles. I do not blame them for it whatsoever, nor do I feel it is their own personal fault. I feel as though they are the product of their time, a time that resonates a long and undisturbed history of male dominance in America that is struggling to fit within this many faceted age of change. I’m not saying that if the tables were turned, and America was built upon beliefs about “Founding Mothers” and we said “Awoman” at the end of every prayer that things would be any better. Naturally, when any one facet of society is given too much power, there will be abuse of it. And there are definitely women on either side of these issues as well. The mothers who never teach their sons how to take care of a home or do their own laundry, the women who vote against themselves and their own best interests, and the feminist friends of mine who claim I am perpetuating patriarchal dominance because I enjoy cooking every night for my partner, enjoy cleaning as a means of expelling my nervous energy. I find both these sides of the spectrum equally ridiculous. It is equally acceptable for men, women, children, bisexuals, transsexuals, homosexuals, and un-gendered people to cook, clean, play football, ice skate, knit, or watch Lifetime. To believe anything else is bigger than a gender issue, it becomes an issue of freedom. There are countries who deal with much more harmful gender issues than our own, but there are also countries that have a lot of answers. The Swedish government in particular has taken numerous and costly steps to promote gender equality in their schools and have spent 16.3 million (USD) “in an effort that included the introduction of laws requiring teachers to actively help reverse gender stereotypes.” Sweden has gender neutral preschools, and popular advertisements that work despite the reversal of gender normative beliefs. These are great steps toward the kind of future many Americans want. But until we all begin teaching our children how to learn to accept people different from themselves, we will continue to perpetuate ignorance in our society. We should not impose our prejudices onto our children, but rather allow them the freedom to surpass our knowledge and better our society. We should not cling to outdated ideologies that are no longer relevant, and sometimes even result in societal regression. Any ideology which propagates hatred, bigotry, small mindedness, suppression, and conformity is certain to stunt our growth, and is in need of renovation. By ignoring and omitting huge numbers of our society, we are engaging in a diminution of all that we can learn, experience and share.
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