Gender’s in my pants? What pants?
It was Mother’s Day, 2014. Everyone had just departed and I was now left to tidy up the house. I’d cooked for the family, as in years past. Finally, everyone knew I was transgender. I changed out of the pants I’d been wearing and into a dress while I cleaned. That night, I laundered them, and the next day they found their way to the thrift store. After 41 years, I had finally banished pants, something I hated so much, from my life. I resolved that it would be dresses and skirts from then on out, immediately seeking to define myself by what I wasn’t. Besides, no longer would anyone be able to second-guess me based on what was in my pants.
When I decided to transition, my feelings leaned rather more androgynous than the presentation I offered when the day upon which I both started hormone replacement therapy and introduced myself by my chosen name arrived. I worried that if I did not present a binary female appearance, one directly opposite what I had tried for years to perform, that I would be held back from getting to simply be myself. And so, instead of aiming to be myself, I aimed for a point I deemed most directly opposite the one I had started from.
My path to understanding
My own story is one which I can trace to the first six years of my life, one where my questioning of my gender was met with the consternation and misunderstanding of the adults around me. I lacked the resources to explore it while young, and even with the full resources of the main county library as a high school student many of the tools which might have helped me to an earlier grasp of the issues at hand eluded me.
As a second-year college student, I finally had a basic concept I could, and did, express to the woman I was dating. Still, it wasn’t until that relationship had blossomed and elapsed, and then a second marriage transpired, that I felt I could move ahead with being myself. The process has come at a price: among other things, we’re now devolving that marriage, as well.
There are more than two options
One transgender narrative commonly put forward involves a simply understood motion from a single point to another single point. In a world where the only genders commonly understood are binary, the transition from female to male or vice-versa is at the very least one that is easily described to someone who has neither a background in gender theory nor has had any reason to contemplate their own identity.
For many of us, though, that model is inadequate. People who exist at neither commonly accepted fixed representation of gender find themselves misunderstood, often left without advocacy, and sometimes scorned even amongst people who have had to fight for their own gender to be recognized. Even as battles are going on over who should be allowed to use which bathroom, there is a forgotten class of people who most properly would prefer to be in neither, as they ARE neither.
We all must live in the same world, one where a simple model of gender does not describe us like it does others. I am one of those people. I am non-binary.
You were assigned a gender at birth, and perhaps you are fortunate enough that the one you were granted is that with which you identify. Just as likely, though, you’ve simply not much considered what gender is and more particularly what your own is.
What gender isn’t
It’s unfortunate that to explain what it’s like to not fit into the concept of binary gender, you first have to explain that concept, thus defining yourself by what you aren’t. Yet, that’s the most likely way to convey the desired information to most third party observers, and so I will do the same.
Be not confused by reproductive organs: there is no tangible thing which may be pointed at as a manifestation of gender. Gender exists at the intersection of physiology, society and lived personal experience. In Western cultures, we’ve evolved concepts which are generally accepted to be masculine or feminine expressions, but it’s unlikely that anyone wholly fits within the limits of those thoughts. Yet, most people do not have their identity policed for not fully complying with these concepts.
Gender isn’t who you love, who you have sex with, what organs you have, or a single set of traits you embody, so let’s look more carefully at what it is.
Gender is intensely personal
Perhaps the thing that so many find threatening about the concept of non-binary genders is the intangible unknowns, the idea that this cannot be simply quantified and understood. Humans fear uncertainty, and the personal experience of gender is rife with it. In a world which proscribes what is an allowable margin of error for the traits one can manifest while existing as a man or a woman, it should be unsurprising that some people will find themselves outside those margins. A unique description of one’s gender is a mark of someone who has considered their position relative to masculine and feminine traits; of societal interaction in the context of gender expectations; of their body and what it means to them; of the behaviors and beliefs they can ascribe to. It is a mark of the strength needed to resist the influence of the surrounding world, and of the willingness of the person to embrace a greater understanding of their place in the world.
Gender is a social construct
Any cluster of humans will evolve shared contexts, for better as well as for worse. One factor in who we are as a society is the experiences of the generations before us, which offers the possibility for stereotypes of what gender means to become ingrained and culturally enforced. Once that’s true, the coercive nature of the world on people too young to have contrary opinions and too young or weak to resist assimilation will have a biasing effect on what is considered to be gender.
Gender is lived experience
At the same time, some people will discover that what they’ve been led to believe doesn’t hold true. The most obvious possibility will be one which is simply contrary: being the opposite of what one is told. In some cases, quite possibly a majority, this is true. In others, having no idea that other results are possible, it may simply be an acquiescence to the generally available set of outcomes.
My gender is mine
Today, in spite of the trials and travails my transition has presented, I am strong and feel quite confident in the person I am, and my understanding of her. I unhesitatingly and unflinchingly use she and her to reference myself, but today, I stand before you showing my true self: I am femandrogyne.
In a world with two options, I would be delighted if you continued to address me as a woman, and I will be a sister-in-arms with others as we try to eke out a better world for ourselves and those around us. But if you truly wish to honor my gender identity, you should know and respect that I am non-binary feminine. I exist in and have internalized at least some of a culture that has certain expectations of men and women. The path I took to being myself means I do not feel I have a gender in such a system, but the traits and behaviors I feel to be part of me are feminine. I cannot simply pretend to exist as a binary gender and thus participate in the erasure of the existence of my fellow, non-binary siblings.
My gender identity — my genderqueer identity — is but one piece of who I am, and I endeavor to be someone who can be proud of who she is. Today, Transgender Day of Visibility 2016, I will show you the real me. I will, today, take back the identity I let lapse in fear when I came out. I will wear pants, have unconventionally-colored hair, stomp about in combat boots, and just as every other day try to find ways, however small, to improve the world.
My name is Daria, and my pronouns are she and her.
