Lesley Brey
Reporter
Lately, I’ve been thinking about gender a lot. I mean, it’s hard not to. If the 2020’s were the decade for anything, so far it seems to be about questioning many of things we may have taken for granted, especially in regards to privilege.
You could say I was ahead of the times, but the first time I thought about my gender was in 2014, freshman year of high school. At the time, I felt deeply uncomfortable being seen as a woman, so I chopped off all of my hair and started wearing clothes exclusively from the men’s section. It definitely worked: a lot of people assumed that I was a teenage boy whose voice hadn’t dropped yet, but that wasn’t really my goal. I didn’t want to be a man, it was just that I didn’t want to be treated as a woman. Put simply, I didn’t want to be treated as inferior.
By the time I graduated, I had become more comfortable being seen as a woman, in fact I had dedicated a decent amount of time to learning how to apply makeup. I worked hard to manicure my presentation, not too girly so as to be taken seriously, but not too boyish to avoid being accused of being queer. All the while, I felt like even more of an alien in my own skin. The face staring back at me in the mirror was either a problem in need of correcting, or a stranger looming menacingly.
We exist in a world of people, and like it or not those people will have a reaction to you. In fighting to get the reaction I wanted all I was really doing was commodifing myself, hoping in vain that if my presentation was more easily consumable that I would be seen as a person. Therein was the problem. Personhood is not found so easily among the other. No matter what I wear or how I present myself I will always be fighting a losing battle, unless I simply chose not to fight.
In 2019 I stopped shaving. Of course, at first everyone and their cousin had something to say, but then the pandemic hit and suddenly people had bigger concerns. In that quarantine solitude, I found peace in my presentation. I became comfortable dressing and grooming how I saw fit, irrespective of people’s attitudes towards me. More over, it put in perspective the fundamental arbitrariness of so many gendered standards. Neither the length of my hair, nor the use of makeup, nor the jewelry I like has any real barring on my identity as a woman.
Gender it seems was rather like those games preschoolers create where the rules have no basis in reality or even practicality. My gender is not a good marker of anything about me. It doesn’t tell you anything about my interests, about my goals, about my values or about how I will behave. Yet, that does little to change how much my gender apparently matters to other people. Being perceived as a woman in society is more like being a member of a caste rather than just a mere label.
As COVID-19 specific guidelines are rolled back, I am increasingly more aware, once again, of the presence of others. I’m far from the only person who explored their gender while staying home, and as more and more becomes open to the public, society will have to adapt to the large influx of newly gender-non-conforming individuals.
There are no easy answers for what that should look like. In America, we are segregated by gender moreso than anything else. That isn’t to say that other social classifications are less impactful. Certainly a person’s race will shape every interaction they have, in both big and small ways. However, it is still considered acceptable for the government to enforce concepts of gender. Virtually all public bathrooms are segregated by gender, just like most dressing rooms and locker rooms.
Why does this sort of segregation matter? Because during the pandemic one of my closest friends realized that he was trans. He has just barely begun the process of socially transitioning and there have been a lot of discoveries along the way. Recently we were talking about becoming weekly gym buddies once I get my second vaccination. I made the off hand comment that I like working out in the morning, but that I always shower off before heading to class because people who don’t always smell so terrible. My friend looked at me sadly when he replied that he would probably be one of those people, because there isn’t a shower he can use on campus.
For all the time I had spent thinking about gender, it still hadn’t occurred to me how absolutely it dictates our lives. My friend can’t even do something as simple as work out without having to consider how his gender impacts the situation. Without a gender neutral locker room, he is effectively being excluded from the experience of going to the gym. When we fail to provide gender-non-conforming people with resources, what we are saying is that we don’t want them to exist. Lack of available restrooms prevents them from doing even simple things like grocery shopping, or going on car rides.
Gender-non-conforming individuals are not rare, nor should they be. Treating them as second class citizens is a mark of how far we have yet to evolve as a society. Until people like my friend can just exist without having to jump through hoops just to get through their day, we cannot claim to live in a free and equal nation. That’s why I’ve been thinking about gender lately.
