Literature, Life-Writing, and Identity

Gender Identity

There is a certain vocabulary that students must be aware of as we discuss gender identity. Up to now, we have defined sex, male, female, masculine, and feminine, as well as gender. Gender binary has also been mentioned above in that our society focuses on two “types” of people – male and female. In doing so, we begin to assume that all those people within the type are the same. Gender binary is applied not only to people but “objects, places, activities, talents, and ideas.”³⁶  In our society, it begins as soon as a parent can determine if the soon-to-be baby is a boy or a girl.  Will I buy a pink or blue outfit?  Will I buy a tiny dress or a cute romper with a fire engine on it?  Will I paint the room a shade of blue or pink?  At schools we also follow a gender binary by reinforcing a separation of activities and sports.  Once children understand these divisions, they begin to act upon them and around the age of six, children become extremely rigid in doing things the “right” way – appropriate “gender way”.³⁷ 

This idea of gender binary, does not apply to all societies. In some, there is a third gender category, in addition to male and female, distinguishing that a person may belong to another group. This group may be labeled as third sex, gender and/or transsexual depending on the society. In our class textbook, Joan Ferrante includes examples of the Kathoey of Thailand, Whakawahine/whakatane of New Zealand, Mamluk of Egypt, and the fa’afafine of American Samoa. In each of these cultures, these third cultures are distinct from the other two. In the case of the fa’afafine, people are not biologically female but take on the “‘ways of women’ in dress, mannerism, appearance and role.”³⁸  Others in the family decide if a person is fa’afafine based on behavior and circumstance – if there are not enough girls in the family to complete the work necessary to maintain a family/home. Research concludes that most likely something within the society allowed for gender blurring. This idea of gender blurring reminds me of the book, The Underground Girls of Kabul:  In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan, in which girls born are raised as boys due to the disadvantages of families with only girl children in the country. Sociologists refer to this as the temporary or permanent sex switching due to strict social rules.³⁹

Some societies define gender by expertise.  In Dayk, being a woman is tied to expertise in rice – identifying types and their uses.⁴⁰  Other societies use social status to assign gender.  For example, a high-ranking woman would be considered male and could marry another woman and her lovers could father children for them.⁴¹

I know my students will find this information about others interesting yet, I believe, they may also find it difficult to wrap their minds around some of the texts they will be reading.  I anticipate some confusion and believe that Sam Killermann’s work will help them as it also helped me. He considers his work to be a primer of sort.  He focuses on four aspects of our identity that are interconnected but not interdependent:  gender identity, gender expression, attraction, and sex.  As he explains, gender identity is who you know to be on the inside, “how you think about yourself”⁴².  This goes back to Chaz Bono’s quote as well as the example of George (the YA book) who knows herself to be a girl. Gender expression is how you present gender through your actions, clothing, demeanor, etc.  This is also reflective of how others perceive you as these expressions follow societal gender norms.  Attraction refers to the sexual (physically intimate) and romantic (relationally intimate) ways in which one is attracted to others.  Gender identity as a spectrum refers to woman and man at each end with genderqueer in the middle.  Gender expression as a spectrum refers to feminine and masculine at each end with androgynous in the middle.  Sex as a spectrum refers to female-ness and male-ness.  For the purpose of this unit we are focusing mostly on gender identity although sex was previously explained in great detail as it is often confused with gender.

Sam Killermann is careful in his writing on this subject. He states that these identifiers are the best explanations he could come up with. Additionally, he believes by including information from people who consider themselves to be within a particular category, that their words are more useful in understanding the information than his own.  As I found this to be true, I will use them with my students and have included them here. Killermann’s advice is to limit the use of labels as this may lead to more bad than good, as sometimes happen with labels.  The following are terms and explanations that will be reviewed with my students. People who consider themselves to be agender (gender neurtois, gender neutral, or genderless), a relatively new term for gender nonconformity, are those who have no strong “connection to the traditional system of gender, no personal alignment with the concepts of either ‘man’ or woman,’ and see themselves as existing without gender.”⁴³

“ ‘I was born female, but it never clicked.  If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have nipples.  My ideal physical body would be without genitalia or breasts, and I prefer when people refer to me as ‘they’”.⁴⁴

Bigender people identify with two separate genders. This division can be clear-cut as in specific times or it can be more “gray, hovering between the two at any given time, but at all times they still fully identify with both.”⁴⁵

“ ‘A lot of people think of gender as a continuum, and that’s fine, but I see it more like apples and oranges.  Some people are apples, some people are oranges, some people are grapes, etc.  For me, I just happen to be an apple and a grape – like a fruit salad.  At times you’ll taste 100 percent apple.  Others it’s 100 percent grape.  Others it’s a bite with both, so you taste them both at the same time.  But I’m not a grapple.  I’m a grape, and I’m an apple.  I fully align with ‘man’ just as much as I fully align with ‘woman’”.⁴⁶

Genderfluid refers to a “dynamic” fluidity – a movement on the spectrum that usually responds to situations not times.

“ ‘When I was younger, my parents thought I suffered from chronic depression because I would consistently go through phases where I was despondent and just turned off from the world.  As I grew up, I realize this was just my gender shifting from woman to man, and my body not knowing how to make sense of it.  I would feel completely outside of myself, because I was a girl and didn’t feel like a girl for a few months, but then it would all come back to normal for a while.  I’ve since realized what was happening and can support the boy part of me when it comes out better and not feel like an alien in my own body every couple of months.’”⁴⁷

Genderqueer encompasses a variety of identities, “an umbrella term for anyone who doesn’t identify within the gender binary.”⁴⁸

“ ‘I see saying I’m genderqueer the same way someone might say they are agnostic:  I believe that gender exists, and I have it, but it’s beyond me to say that I can comfortably define what it is.  If you think you know what gender is, and are sure about yours, I think you’re making a leap of faith.’”⁴⁹

The next two terms are common in that they are associated with what most of my students may better understand – those who identify as a man including transman, trans man, or Female-to-Male/FtM man and those who identify as a woman including transwoman, trans woman, or Male-to-Female/MtF woman. These people have no qualms with the ways in which they express themselves or the roles and norms related to the specific gender with which they identify.

“ ‘It makes sense to me that I’m a man.  I like manly things, and I’m comfortable around other men.  I’m not super athletic and have a job as a teacher, which I guess to some people might make me “less of a man,” but I see being a man more as being comfortable in the gender I’ve always had and never feeling any pressure from inside that something wasn’t right.’”⁵⁰

“ ‘As a kid, seeing the girls on TV playing with Barbies, I was always like, “Yes, that is so me.  That’s my friends.  That’s my life.” I never needed another option.  I was a pink girl.  I was a fashion girl.  I want a career, but I also want to be a mom – yes, a “mom,” not a “parent.”  There’s a difference.’”⁵¹

Transgender is “an umbrella term for anyone whose gender identity doesn’t correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth in the socially expected way.”⁵² This is helpful in many ways:  encompasses a diversity of identities, assists in “group cohesion”, and aids in civil rights work.  However, it is damaging because it does encompass a diverse group of people and their identities.  Again, one must be careful in lumping people into one category, one experience, and one story.