KarMel
Scholarship 2007
|
“Decoding the Gender Binary” By Marielle
Messing |
Desciption of Submission: An editorial about the gender binary
and a transgender student at SU
It was about 12:30 one Tuesday afternoon at the end
of August and Kelly Rawson was alone using a campus bathroom. Sie was just
leaving when a police officer accompanied by a middle-aged woman came knocking
on the door, looking for the man that had entered the women’s restroom. When
Rawson emerged, both their faces relaxed and as sie*
passed, sie heard the officer and the woman laughing. “She really looked
like a man,” the officer remarked to the woman who had made the report.
Sie promptly reported the incident to the Department
of Public Safety and was pleased when the situation was handled quickly and
with sensitivity. Hir encounter will now be used as instructional training for
DPS officers.
This is not the first time that Rawson, a doctorate
student in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, has run into conflict while using
a restroom and sie also knows it will not be the last.
Rawson identifies as transgender and is one of many
people who are left out by the gender binary, the prevailing system we
use to label each person we meet as either male or female.
We are surrounded by the binary:
bathrooms are divided into men’s rooms and ladies’ rooms; doctors call out at
birth, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” based on the presence or lack of a
penis. Think about your favorite toy store and how it is divided into “girl
toys” (Barbie dolls, Easy-Bake Ovens) and “boy toys” (dinosaurs, Nerf guns).
Consider the last form you filled out. Most likely they asked about your gender
and they provided two options: M or F.
In the English language, people are commonly referred
to as either ‘she’ or ‘he,’ while ‘it,’ the only neutral pronoun, is reserved
for inanimate objects. The pronouns sie (see) and hir1 (here) were
developed by transgender activists to acknowledge those who don’t want to be
called he or she.
Rawson, for instance, does not identify as a man or a
woman and uses different pronouns depending on the context. On a day-to-day
basis sie has no problem being addressed as he, she or sie, but says, “If I’m
in a group of transsexual folks, I’ll identify as female after identifying as trans to say I’m female-bodied and don’t plan on having
gender reassignment surgery.” In this case, Rawson is defining hirself inside
of a community used to gender-bending.
So what is gender, anyway? There are many factors
that make it up and the importance of each one is really an individual
assessment. There is one’s biological gender (what you have between your legs)
and one’s chromosomal gender (XX, XY, XXY, etc). There’s also social gender –
do you feel more like a boy, a girl, or something else entirely? The list goes
on.
The truth is that gender is not about two options or
three or even four. Gender is not a binary, but a spectrum.
“We are a movement of masculine females and feminine
males, cross-dressers, transsexual men and women, intersexuals born on the
anatomical sweep between female and male, gender-blenders, many other sex and
gender-variant people,” wrote activist and prolific author Leslie Feinberg
about the trans community in hir 1998 book, Trans Liberation. “All told,
we expand understanding of how many ways there are to be a human being.”
You too belong somewhere on that spectrum based on
your personal gender identity and your gender expression. It can be simple,
like a girl who prefers wearing pants over skirts or it can be complicated,
like an intersexual person born with ambigious genitalia or a chromosomal
defect, who feels like a bit of both and is in truth, really is a little of
each. If you’re a girl with a forceful handshake who always makes eye-contact,
you’re bending the gender rules. If you’re a guy who enjoys watching Project
Runway or who keeps long hair in a ponytail on the back of your neck, you give
your peers female gender cues. The binary is just as constrictive for you as it
is for someone who identifies Trans. Because you’re a girl in this country, you
are expected to be thin, pleasant and bad at math and science. Because you’re
an American boy you are expected to do all the heavy lifting and you probably
earn higher wages than any woman at your job. The binary constricts everyone
and that’s why we need to ignore the gender rules and see people for who they
are outside of the gender box.
For example, Rawson stands at 6’1” in hir size 10 and
a half men’s sneakers. Sie has a soft-featured, round face with blue eyes and
short-cropped hair. Sie usually sports men’s jeans and a loose-fitting t-shirt.
Silver loops cling to the cartilage of hir ears. Sie has no problem wearing
women’s clothing, but said it is usually hard to find something that will fit.
“I have a really long wingspan,” sie explained,
extending hir arm at a 90 degree angle. “I have a long inseam and a short torso
and women aren’t built that way.”
Because Rawson has a healthy mix of both male and
female qualities, sie sometimes confuses the people around hir and that’s when
conflicts occur.
“I don’t want
to say I’m a woman because I don’t feel that,” sie said. Sometimes the thing
that throws people off guard is something you wouldn’t expect, like what color
her clothing is. “The darker the clothes, the more confrontation I have,” sie
noted.
People feel threatened by transgender individuals
because they are encountering something that does not fit into neat categories,
explained Professor Minnie Bruce Pratt, who is teaching a class this semester
called “Trans Genders and Sexualities” in the Women’s Studies department. She
said that people are brainwashed into believing that they must be either male
of female, because science, medicine, and legal jurisdiction say there are only
two genders. “When they observe someone who is gender-contradicting, it goes
against what they are taught is truth,” said Pratt. In their fear and their own
insecurities they snap.
“Ignoring [the gender binary] is an ignorant
standpoint on life,” said Greg Snyder, a Sociology major taking Pratt’s Trans
class this semester. “It’s to the benefit of all to challenge the norm. For
anybody that’s not the prom king/prom queen image, it’s going to benefit you
not to have to fit those standards.”
“Inside each of us we want to be in a place where
we’re free to express ourselves without the constraints of social pressures,”
said Pratt. “I think that somewhere in everyone there’s this longing for
someplace profoundly human.”
Side
bars: Binary Break-down for
·
New York State has
not yet added gender identity or gender expression to their anti-discrimination
laws, but a court ruling on August 24, 2006 stated that Transgender individuals
are protected under the Human Rights Act along with those who face racial,
religious and sexual discrimination. (
·
o
That means that
in 41 states, trans people can still be fired from
their jobs, denied healthcare by doctors, and be discriminated against without
consequence to the bigots who think nothing of it.
·
1 out of every
2,000 babies per year is born intersex, diagnosed with a chromosomal disorder,
a hormonal complication, or ambiguous genitalia. Recently medical professionals
have been shifting away from immediate “corrective surgery,” opting to allow
children to grow and form a gender identity before considering surgery.
o
Every year,
however, there are still surgeons rushing to assign genders to babies who will
often not identify as that gender later in life.
Who
may be considered transgender?
Intersexuals – the un-p.c.
term: a hermaphrodite. People born with ambiguous genitalia that is either
underdeveloped or is a combination of both male and female sexes. Some intersex
people have normal-looking genital, but have hormone imbalances or chromosomal
defects.
Transsexuals – people whose
biological sex does not match their gender identity and who seek surgery and/or
hormone therapy to change their physical body so it matches their gender
identity.
Transvestites – i.e., cross dressers; a person who derives pleasure out of dressing
in the clothes of the opposite gender. This applies to people who do it on the weekends for a kick as well as trans people who go around every day as the opposite gender
but do not seek gender reassignment surgery. Many transvestites are
heterosexual men, often married.
Sources:
http://www.pridesource.com/rssarticle.shtml?article=19953
http://www.slate.com/id/2102006/
http://www.ctoutreach.org/faq.pdf#search=%22transgender%20definitions%22
Feinberg,
Leslie. “We Are All Works in Progress.” Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and
Blue.
(1998)
Kelly
Rawson, krawson@syr.edu
Minnie
Bruce Pratt, mbpratt@syr.edu
Greg
Snyder, gcsnyder@syr.edu
* sie and hir are sometimes used in place of gender-identifying pronouns by those who don’t identify strictly as male or female. The difficulty for many readers to familiarize themselves with the additional pronouns demonstrates the strict socialization of the gender binary