by Robyn Ryle
16
You’ve been born into a society with infinite genders, which might seem pretty weird. Where, exactly, are you?
Right now, the possibility of infinite genders is a way of understanding gender rather than an actual cultural gender system. Infinite genders is a mind-set, so while you might be in a place that claims to have only one gender or two genders, you’ve seen through that illusion to the more complicated truth of the situation—the number of possibilities for gender categories is really endless.
Say you’re a woman, which means you’re supposed to act feminine. Do you? Do you act feminine all the time, or do you sometimes break the gender rules? Do you act more competitive than you’re supposed to or curse too much or smile too little?
Look around you at all the other people who are also women. Are you exactly alike? Do you demonstrate your femininity in the same way? Are you at least more similar to the other people called women than you are to the other people called men? If you’re not, what’s the point of calling you a woman and calling those other people men?
Maybe one truth about gender is that no one can live out a perfect version, regardless of how your particular culture lays out the rules. As transgender activist Kate Bornstein says, sometimes the gender system lets all of us down.
If we’re not all doing the exact same version of gender, if all of us are out of step at one time or another, are we all really doing the same gender? Or would it make more sense to say that we’re all doing our own, very unique, versions of gender? Instead of saying your gender is man or woman, maybe it would make more sense to say your gender is Abdul or Maria. Your gender is as special and distinctive as your name. Your gender is as unique as you are.
And maybe, to make things even more interesting, we’re doing a different gender depending on the time of year. Or the day of the week. Or the hour. The gender you’re doing at lunch is completely different than the gender you’re doing come bedtime.
As far as we know, there aren’t any cultural gender systems that treat gender as infinite, unique, and fluid right now. But maybe there could be someday in the future.
To start a new gender journey, TURN BACK TO 2.
17
What it means to be a socialized as a girl is going to be very different depending on the time and place in which you find yourself. Gender socialization for girls is the process of learning how to be feminine, but how does your culture decide what femininity is?
That’s a question that Margaret Mead, a famous twentieth-century anthropologist, was interested in answering. At the time, most of her fellow anthropologists believed that gender was hardwired. That is, they believed that what it meant to be a man or a woman was built into our biological makeup, so that the rules for masculinity and femininity were fixed and unchanging across time and place. Mead suspected that this was wrong, so she headed to Papua New Guinea, an island in the southwest Pacific, to study a diverse group of tribes living there.
The Mundugumor were one of those tribes. If you were a girl among the Mundugumor, you’d find that people in your culture don’t make many important distinctions between what it means to be a boy or a girl. They hold up the same basic set of ideals for everyone, regardless of their gender. The characteristics that are most highly valued among the Mundugumor include violence, competitiveness, being jealous, and being ready to take action and fight. As a girl being socialized among the Mundugumor, you’ll be rewarded for getting into fights and punished for behaving in too weak or passive a manner. You’ll be expected to act in ways that, from the perspective of someone from the contemporary United States, would be viewed as masculine.
To explore a different gender path, TURN BACK TO 2.
18
Your gender is nonbinary (NB), which means that your gender is not exclusively masculine or feminine. You might also describe yourself as genderqueer (your gender is “queer” or non-normative) or gender nonconforming. You think of your gender identity as escaping from the binary of woman and man or female and male.
It’s important to distinguish the difference between being genderqueer and being queer. Genderqueer refers to your gender identity, while queer refers to your sexual orientation. One way to think about it is that sexual identity is who you want to go to bed with, while gender identity is who you want to be when you go to bed.
As a nonbinary or genderqueer person, the possibilities for your gender expression are wide open. Maybe you look mostly like a woman or mostly like a man. Perhaps you dress mostly as a man but also wear lipstick and paint your nails. Perhaps you appear androgynous, dressing and interacting with people in a style that makes it difficult for them to identify exactly what your gender is. For you, that might be the whole idea.
NONBINARY
adj. /ˌnän-ˈbī-nə-rē/
Of a gender that is not exclusively masculine or feminine.
GENDERQUEER
adj. /ˈjen-dər-ˌkwir/
Being a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as solely male or female.
Though your identity fits under the larger gender-expansive umbrella, you’re different from many transgender people. The gender-expansive category includes those who are transgender, but also anyone who expands their own culture’s commonly held expectations about gender, whether that means how they express their gender, how they identify their gender, or the norms they choose to follow or not to follow. You don’t want to “cross” genders to become the “opposite” gender from the one you were assigned at birth. So if you were assigned a feminine gender identity when you were born, you don’t feel that you’re masculine instead. You might feel that you’re both or neither or something else entirely.
GENDER EXPANSIVE
adj. /ˈjen-dər ik-ˈspan(t)-siv/
Describing when one’s identity or behavior is broader than the commonly held definitions of gender.
GO TO 49.
19
You’re agender. As a relatively new gender category, exactly what it means to be agender is still in flux. The literal translation of the word means “without a gender.” You might think of yourself as nonbinary, which is to say that your gender identity exists outside the binary of masculine and feminine. Or it might be more accurate to say that you have no gender identity. You might describe yourself as genderless or gender neutral or simply lacking a gender.
GO TO 49.
20
Though it’s been a fairly rare thing in the past and still is in the present, you have a man as your primary caregiver. He’ll be teaching you a lot about what it means to be masculine.
Historically and in most cultures, women have been the primary caregivers, either singly or in groups. We don’t know as much about what happens to your gender identity when your primary caregiver is a man. In fact, we know more about how being the primary caregiver changes the men doing the caregiving than we know about how it affects children. In the first three weeks after a man’s child is born, the level of testosterone in his body drops by a third. Like the hormonal changes that take place in women’s bodies, these shifts may exist to help men get ready for parenthood. Studies have shown that men with very low levels of testosterone will hold baby dolls longer than men who are flooded with the hormone, while men with very high levels of testosterone are more likely to engage in non-nurturing behaviors. A study of brain activity demonstrated that men who are primary caregivers exhibit the same pattern of emotional processing that is seen in women who take care of children. So it seems to be true that being a primary caregiver has biological and emotional effects on the men themselves.
What about you, as a boy being raised mainly by a man? Will your masculine identity be more stable because you’ve learned it firsthand by spending most of your time with a man? Maybe boys raised primarily by men will be more invested in taking care of their own children when they have them. Perhaps the growing generation of boys with men as primary caregivers will significantly change what masculinity looks like. For now, we’re not su
re.
Regardless of the gender of the person doing the socializing, how exactly does gender socialization happen? There are different explanations, but many focus on the ways in which you’re rewarded and punished for behaviors that are considered correct or incorrect for the gender you’ve been assigned.
What your gender socialization looks like depends on the particular gender norms of your culture. Learning gender as a boy in colonial America will be different from what it means to be a boy among the Arapesh in Papua New Guinea. Both of these will be different from learning masculinity in the contemporary United States.
You’re socialized as a boy in colonial America. GO TO 51.
You’re socialized as a boy in the contemporary United States. GO TO 52.
You’re socialized as a boy among the Arapesh in Papua New Guinea. GO TO 53.
You’re socialized as something different. GO TO 54.
21
Congratulations! You’re a boy! The nurse pulls out the blue hat and sticks it on your head. You’ve only been in the world for a few short minutes and you officially have a gender. Look how much you’ve accomplished already!
Snug in your blue hat and your blue booties, you might still have some lingering questions. Why two and a half centimeters? Why is that the length at which a newborn’s body of genital tissue becomes a penis?
For doctors in the United States, those two and a half centimeters are important because they give an indication of what you can do with your collection of genital tissue. Specifically, a penis is a penis if it’s long enough to allow the person to pee standing up and to achieve vaginal penetration. A penis is defined, in other words, by what doctors have determined to be its most important functions—upright urination and one particular, heterosexual type of sexual behavior.
It’s worthwhile before we move any further down our gender path to consider these rules for gender assignment. What do the criteria for what makes a penis reveal about our cultural assumptions regarding gender? The most important things that make a man a man are the ability to stand up while he pees and to have a certain kind of sex with a woman. Maybe those seem like okay points of emphasis, but it leaves us with questions about men who don’t pee standing up and who don’t have penetrative sex with women. Is their officially designated penis going to waste? Are they not real men?
Perhaps your blue hat doesn’t feel quite as comfy and warm as it did at first. But you’re still a boy, so take some comfort there.
Exactly how good you’ve got it being born a boy depends on the type of society you’re born into. Namely, it’s important to know whether or not the society you’re in is patriarchal—dominated by men and masculinity.
GO TO 23.
22
Congratulations! You’re a girl! The nurse pulls out the pink hat and sticks it on your head. You’ve only been in the world for a few short minutes and you officially have a gender. Look how much you’ve accomplished already!
Snug with your pink hat and your pink booties, you might still have some lingering questions. Why one centimeter? Why is that the length at which an infant’s collection of genital tissue becomes a clitoris instead of a penis?
For doctors in the United States, that one centimeter is important because it gives an indication of what you can’t do with your collection of genital tissue. Specifically, a clitoris is a clitoris if it’s not long enough to allow the person to pee standing up or to achieve vaginal penetration. A clitoris is defined, in other words, by what it isn’t. It isn’t a penis because it can’t do what doctors have determined to be the most important functions of a penis—urination and one particular, heterosexual type of sexual behavior.
You might notice that these criteria are all about defining what makes a man a man and have nothing to say about what makes a woman a woman. In this formulation, men are the norm that needs to be specified. Women are the deviation from that norm. Men are normal and women are not. This assumption or attitude has historically been reflected in the language that we use—in the past (and sometimes still in the present) the word man was used as a substitute for all humanity. This implies that the normal state of being human is also to be a man. As a woman, this might have you feeling a bit left out.
Perhaps your pink hat doesn’t feel quite as comfy and warm as it did at first. Maybe it’s feeling, in fact, a little itchy and too tight.
Exactly what it’s going to be like living life as a girl depends on the type of society you’re born into. Namely, it’s important to know whether or not the society you’re in is patriarchal—dominated by men and masculinity.
GO TO 24.
23
As a boy, you’re probably hoping to find yourself in a patriarchal society, where power leans toward men and masculinity. Lucky for you, you’re much more likely to be born into a patriarchy than a matriarchy, where power lies with women and femininity. Around the world and throughout history, there are a lot more patriarchal societies than there are matriarchal ones. But there’s an off chance that you might find yourself in a matriarchy instead.
You’re born into a patriarchal society. GO TO 7.
You’re born into a matriarchal society. GO TO 8.
24
Who has more power in the society you’re born into? In a patriarchal society, power leans toward men and masculinity, and androcentrism is a central lens through which people see the world. Androcentrism is the idea that men and masculinity are superior to women and femininity. As a girl, a patriarchy probably doesn’t sound so great.
Unfortunately, we know of a lot more patriarchal societies than we do matriarchal ones. In fact, some who study gender argue that all known societies are actually patriarchal. But in some places, power does lean more toward women. In matriarchal cultures, lines of inheritance and lineage flow through women instead of men, and myths and stories emphasize the power and importance of women. Although you’ll probably be born in a place where men have more power, there is a chance that you could find yourself in a matriarchy instead.
You’re born into a patriarchal society. GO TO 36.
You’re born into a matriarchal society. GO TO 9.
25
You might not be labeled intersex at birth because your condition doesn’t include any externally visible signs. That is, your genitalia appear to be within a “normal” range when you’re born.
Some intersex conditions don’t show up externally. You’re not likely to get a genetic test or have your internal organs scanned when you’re born, unless the doctors think something is “wrong.” So your intersex condition will probably go undetected.
You might end up living the rest of your life never knowing about your intersex condition. Most intersex conditions are not life-threatening and some will produce few noticeable signs. The fact that some people can live their entire lives unaware of their intersex condition is part of what makes estimating the size of the intersex population so difficult.
Another possibility is that your intersex condition could become apparent when you hit puberty. If you’ve been assigned as a boy, you might find yourself developing breasts at puberty and menstruating, because you have female internal organs. Either way, for now, you’ll live as a girl or a boy, based on the gender assignment your doctor makes.
You’re assigned as a boy and remain unaware of your intersex condition. GO TO 23.
You’re assigned as a girl and remain unaware of your intersex condition. GO TO 24.
26
The idea of just two people (a mother and a father) being solely responsible for taking care of children isn’t the way it worked for most of human history. During most of our past as hunter-gatherers, you would have been taken care of and socialized by a large group of people. This group would have included your mother and father, but also aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, sisters, brothers, cousins, and other members of your group. In some places, your mother and father wouldn’t necessarily have been seen as more or less important than other people in
this group.
In general, it seems that gender identity among these groups was less rigid than it is today. The differences between women and men apparently weren’t as important as they are in contemporary culture.
You’re socialized as a girl. GO TO 37.
You’re socialized as a boy. GO TO 38.
You’re socialized as something different. GO TO 54.
27
When you tell your parents that your gender identity and your gender assignment don’t match up, they might be a little confused at first. “I’m not really a girl, I’m a boy,” you tell them, and they insist that it’s just a phase you’re going through. Or you explain to them that you’re neither a boy nor a girl, and they’re not sure how to make sense of that. But eventually, they listen to you. They take you seriously. They believe you, and they’re committed to doing whatever they can to help. You’re lucky enough to find yourself in a supportive, loving family environment, which makes all the difference in the world for transgender and gender-expansive kids like you.
What happens next depends on how you feel about your gender identity and expression. Although the experience of transgender people who have surgery to modify their bodies is the most common representation of what it means to be transgender or gender-expansive, that’s not everyone’s experience. It might not be yours.
You are a trans man, a transgender person whose gender assignment at birth was feminine but whose gender identity is masculine. GO TO 47.
