Here are some things I told a class of undergraduates this morning:
- When I was a kid, I was never sure which pronouns–she/her/hers or he/him/his–applied to me.
- When I was a kid, I was often confused about which public restroom to use.
- When classes or teams were split into boys vs. girls, I wasn’t always sure which side to join.
- I let people use feminine pronouns and refer to me as a ‘girl’ because that’s what they seemed to prefer, but I was not convinced they were right to do so.
- When I was a kid, I was a biological female who lived in fear of being outed as a fraud for identifying as a ‘girl.’
- When I was a young adult, I was a biological female who never felt comfortable being referred to as a ‘woman.’
Here are some other reasons:
- In my statistics class, my instructor recently explained that ‘gender’ is a ‘simple,’ binomial category: There are only two possible responses.
- As a culture, we spend too much time assuming gender and biological sex are the same thing.
- As a culture, we don’t spend enough time thinking hard about gender identities and gender performance.
- As a culture, we’re quick to judge people whose gender identities aren’t simple to interpret.
I still sometimes wonder which restroom to use. Sometimes people use masculine pronouns to refer to me, which I’m absolutely fine with. Other people always use feminine pronouns to refer to me, which is also okay by me. The last time someone tried to split us up into boys vs. girls, I argued and it never happened again.
I rarely ‘pass’ as a man and I rarely try to ‘pass.’ I rarely identify myself as a ‘woman,’ but I often talk about myself as a ‘lady’ or as a ‘gay lady.’ I like using the word ‘lady’ because I think it suggests an ironic relationship to gender and gender performance. Which suits me just fine.
Here’s a good video about the anxieties caused for transgender and gender-nonnormative people by public restrooms.
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