She/He/They/Me
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You like wearing clothes that aren’t seen as appropriate for men. What exactly does that mean? What are “men’s clothes” and “women’s clothes,” anyway?
If you’re a history buff, you know that the answer to those questions has changed a lot over time. As recently as the nineteenth century in places like Europe and America, little boys and little girls dressed alike, and they both wore dresses. It was only at a certain age that boys would put on pants (breeches), while girls would stay in dresses. Boys would (literally) get their big-boy pants somewhere between the age of two and eight. This was called “breeching.” Outside of historical examples, you might also know that adult men wear skirts today in places like Scotland (kilts) and India (lungi or dhoti). In the contemporary United States, male priests, college professors, and judges in their robes are all technically wearing a dress, even if it’s worn on top of pants. Designers and stores like 69 Worldwide, a designer brand out of Los Angeles, are even starting to come out with gender-neutral clothing lines.
So if you’re a man who likes wearing skirts or dresses, there’s really nothing strange about it on a global and historical level. But if you’re in a place like the contemporary United States, you still might get some looks for your fashion choices. Depending on exactly when, where, and why you wear women’s clothes, you might be a cross-dresser or a drag queen. And, no, they’re not the same thing.
You’re a cross-dresser. GO TO 63.
You’re a drag queen. GO TO 64.
46
Before you can figure out whether you’re in a country with high or low levels of gender inequality, you must first figure out exactly what gender inequality is. And that could be hard, since it is a difficult thing to measure. Maybe to you it’s all about how much women and men get paid for the work they do; you think that should be the most important way of determining how much gender inequality exists in any given country. But someone else might have a completely different way of measuring gender inequality. For instance, someone else might think that what really matters is how many elected officials in the government are women. Another person might argue that gender inequality is all about women’s ability to control their reproductive lives. Someone else might insist that it is determined by the levels of violence against women in any given society.
Given that people disagree about what the most important determinants of gender inequality are, ranking different countries in terms of their level of egalitarianism can get contentious. But international organizations whose goals include reducing gender inequality, like the United Nations (UN), need some way to measure the relative status of women and men. In order to measure how close we are, on a country-by-country basis, to achieving gender equality, the UN developed the Gender Inequality Index. Another global measure is the Global Gender Gap Index, generated by the World Economic Forum, which places more emphasis on women’s economic status than the Gender Inequality Index does.
Both of these indexes focus on four main areas—health, education, political empowerment, and economic status. Health-related equality is measured by gathering statistics about women’s life expectancy, teen pregnancy, and pregnancy-related health in general. Looking at the percentage of women who have some schooling beyond the primary or elementary level provides a measure of gender equality in education. Political empowerment includes the percentage of elected positions held by women and how long women have been in those seats of power. Finally, economic equality is measured by the percentage of women in the labor force, as well as how their salaries and access to high-skilled employment compare to men’s.
In both indexes, the higher a country’s number is, the greater the gender inequality. Women living in a country ranked 175 (out of 188 countries) on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, for instance, endure significantly more disparities than those living in a country ranked 25.
So, according to these criteria, how much gender inequality is there in the country you’re living in?
You’re born into a country with high levels of gender inequality. GO TO 56.
You’re born into a country with medium levels of gender inequality. GO TO 57.
You’re born into a country with low levels of gender inequality. GO TO 58.
47
You’re a trans man, which generally refers to someone whose gender assignment was feminine but whose gender identity is masculine. You feel like a man, but that can mean a lot of different things.
Often, when people in the media talk about transgender people and transgender issues, they don’t discuss trans men like you. Depictions of transgender experiences tend to focus on trans women, or those born with a masculine gender assignment who have a feminine gender identity. The small number of transgender celebrities—like Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, and Jazz Jennings—are trans women. Stories about trans men are less common, and as you’ll discover, the experience of being a trans man can be very different from that of being a trans woman.
You feel like a man inside, but you might also feel like you need other people to recognize you as a man. You’re aiming to achieve social maleness, which means that you want people to interact with you as a man. You need your sense of who you are on the inside to match how other people perceive you on the outside.
How do you go about achieving social maleness, given that at least for the first few years of your life, people have been treating you as if you were a girl? Even though you didn’t feel like a girl on the inside, the gender socialization directed at you was all about teaching you femininity. Now you have to figure out how to cross over into the world of masculinity and exactly what that will mean for you, specifically.
You’ll probably find yourself in a society where gender is defined by more than simply what kind of body you have. Altering your gender identity can involve a complicated, bureaucratic process to make sure the many documents that record your gender all line up in the correct way. In some states, you can change (or correct) your birth certificate to reflect your gender identity if you have a notarized letter from your doctor stating that this change is necessary to living your life in a way that reflects your gender identity. In these states, you don’t need to have any sort of surgery or need to be taking hormones to correct your birth certificate. The same standard is used by the Social Security Administration, as well as the Department of Homeland Security and the Veteran’s Health Administration. In other states, you need medical proof that you’ve undergone gender-confirming surgery before you can change your birth certificate, which presents a significant hurdle if you don’t feel that you need gender-confirming surgery. Three states—Idaho, Ohio, and Tennessee—have laws that forbid changes to gender on birth certificates for any reason.
The rules for changing other documents also vary depending on where you live. In some states, you’ll have to appear in court to change your gender on your driver’s license or other government-issued ID. This makes if difficult if you can’t afford an attorney or the legal fees required. Technically, anyone can legally change their name to whatever they want. In reality, courts and other legal officials are often hostile to transgender people attempting to change their name. Other gendered records include your school transcripts. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) gives you the right to change your school records so that they accurately reflect your gender identity. All of these changes can be expensive and time-consuming, sometimes taking years to ensure that all your documents reflect your correct gender.
After making all these legal changes to your gender identity, you might feel that, for you, you need to have a body that matches your gender identity. In that case, you’ll probably pursue some set of surgical and other medical options. You might also feel that you’re okay with the body that you have.
You pursue surgery and other medical options in order to change your body. GO TO 66.
You don’t pursue surgery and other medical options. GO TO 67.
48
You’re a trans woman, whi
ch generally refers to someone whose gender assignment was masculine at birth but whose gender identity is feminine.
If you feel like a woman on the inside, you may also feel like you need other people to recognize you as a woman. You’re aiming to achieve social femaleness, which means in part that you want to look like a woman. You want people to interact with you as a woman. You need your sense of who you are on the inside to match how other people perceive you on the outside.
How do you go about achieving social femaleness, given that at least for the first few years of your life, people have been treating you as if you were a boy? Even though you didn’t feel like a boy on the inside, the gender socialization directed at you was all about teaching you masculinity. Now you have to figure out how to cross over into the world of femininity and exactly what that will mean for you, specifically.
You’ll probably find yourself in a society where gender is defined by more than simply what kind of body you have. Altering your gender identity can involve a complicated, bureaucratic process to make sure the many documents that record your gender all line up in the correct way. In some states, you can change (or correct) your birth certificate to reflect your gender identity if you have a notarized letter from your doctor stating that this change is necessary to living your life in a way that reflects your gender identity. In these states, you don’t need to have any sort of surgery or need to be taking hormones to correct your birth certificate. The same standard is used by the Social Security Administration, as well as the Department of Homeland Security and the Veteran’s Health Administration. In other states, you need medical proof that you’ve undergone gender-confirming surgery before you can change your birth certificate, which presents a significant hurdle if you don’t feel that you need gender-confirming surgery. Three states—Idaho, Ohio, and Tennessee—have laws that forbid changes to gender on birth certificates for any reason.
The rules for changing other documents also vary depending on where you live. In some states, you’ll have to appear in court to change your gender on your driver’s license or other government-issued ID. This makes if difficult if you can’t afford an attorney or the legal fees required. Technically, anyone can legally change their name to whatever they want. In reality, courts and other legal officials are often hostile to transgender people attempting to change their name. Other gendered records include your school transcripts. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) gives you the right to change your school records so that they accurately reflect your gender identity. All of these changes can be expensive and time-consuming, sometimes taking years to ensure that all your documents reflect your correct gender.
After making all these legal changes to your gender identity, you might feel that, for you, you need to have a body that matches your gender identity. In that case, you’ll probably pursue some set of surgical and other medical options. You might also feel that you’re okay with the body that you have.
You pursue surgery and other medical options in order to change your body. GO TO 89.
You don’t pursue surgery and other medical options. GO TO 90.
49
As a gender-expansive kid who doesn’t feel male or female, puberty can be a difficult time. If you’re transgender in the sense that you feel you were born into a body that is the “opposite” gender from what you really are deep down inside, puberty brings about an unwanted set of changes to your body. If you were born a girl but feel that you’re really a boy, it’ll probably be disappointing to develop breasts and start menstruating. You might, in fact, take hormones that delay the effects of puberty. This will make it easier to transition surgically and medically later on.
If you’re genderqueer, nonbinary, or agender, puberty might still be sort of weird for you. Maybe you feel okay with some of the changes happening to your body but not others. Maybe you make sense of those changes differently from the way cisgender kids might.
What will your sexual identity look like as a gender-expansive person? Many genderqueer people identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or straight, which might seem strange at first. If you’re not a man or a woman, how can you be gay or straight, categories that are based on a binary gender system? Perhaps you’re a nonbinary person who identifies more on the feminine end of the spectrum. If you’re also attracted to more feminine people, you might identify as a lesbian. Or maybe you think of yourself as falling in the middle of the spectrum—as gender neutral. But when you have sex, you have sex as a man who has sex with other men, so you see yourself as a gay man.
You aren’t a woman or a man. GO TO 76.
You are a lesbian. GO TO 77.
You are a gay man. GO TO 75.
You are a straight man. GO TO 79.
You are a straight woman. GO TO 80.
You are a bisexual man. GO TO 81.
You are a bisexual woman. GO TO 82.
You are asexual. GO TO 83.
You are demisexual. GO TO 84.
You are queer. GO TO 85.
50
In your culture, people believe that gender and sexuality are connected. In European-influenced cultures, this can be traced back to nineteenth-century ideas about same-gender sexual behavior. In the nineteenth century, scientists started to study the sexual behavior of people. They wondered why some people sometimes had sex with people of the same gender. They didn’t call this behavior homosexuality because the word didn’t exist back then. The word homosexual was first used in English in 1892, and for a while, it wasn’t exactly clear what it meant. At one point, the word even referred to people who have sex with those of a different gender.
Most of these early studies of sexuality didn’t focus on women’s sexuality, which was, not surprisingly, seen as less important than men’s sexual behavior. In fact, to an extent, it was hard for nineteenth-century scientists to believe that women had much sexuality at all. What sexuality women did have was supposed to be safely contained within the confines of a marriage and preferably geared toward the aim of getting pregnant and having children. Though there was some speculation that it might be necessary for women to have an orgasm in order to conceive, any scientific interest in women’s sexuality was still tied to their status as potential mothers.
During this period, one of the first explanations for same-gender sexual behavior was sexual inversion. This theory stated that if a man wanted to have sex with other men, it was because he was really a woman on the inside. He was an inverted woman. The same would be true of a lesbian, although that part of the theory didn’t receive as much attention. If a woman desired other women, it was because she was really a man inside.
Most people no longer think that gay men are really women on the inside or that lesbian women are internally men. But the idea that gay men are more feminine and lesbian women are more masculine hasn’t completely gone away. In cultures like these, if you’re a gay man, people might expect you to be less masculine. And if you’re a woman who does masculine things like having short hair or playing certain sports, people might assume you’re a lesbian. In these cultures, we believe that a person’s gender tells us something about their sexuality and that a person’s sexuality tells us something about their gender, even if this isn’t true.
You are a lesbian. GO TO 77.
You are straight. GO TO 80.
You are bisexual. GO TO 82.
You are asexual. GO TO 83.
You are demisexual. GO TO 84.
You are queer. GO TO 85.
51
Ideas about what it means to be masculine change from one place to another and from one time period to the next. So it makes sense that gender socialization will be different depending on where and when you’re born. Gender socialization is the process of learning the norms particular to your own time and place.
As a boy born in eighteenth-century America, the two ideal forms of masculinity available to you are the Genteel Patriarch and the Heroic Artisan. Like many ideas about gender, these ideals are specific t
o social class—meaning, where you are positioned in a hierarchy based on economic resources—as well as specific to the different lifestyles and opportunities available to you.
If you’re the son of a wealthy plantation owner, the Genteel Patriarch is the ideal that is held up for you, the model of what it means to be masculine. Your identity is based in the fact that you own land—probably a lot of it. Since this is the eighteenth century in America, this also means that you are white, as nonwhite people are by and large prevented from owning land. To be masculine, you are supposed to be refined and elegant. Think Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, with his carefully arranged hair and fashionable clothes. It is both acceptable and expected that you, like Jefferson, pursue activities that are pleasing to the senses. You might be a wine connoisseur or like to wax poetic about the beauty of nature. You probably even write some poems yourself. It’s also okay for you to write long, affectionate letters to other men in which you proclaim your undying love. Men are expected to have passionate friendships with other men that have nothing to do with sexuality and without any sense that this might make them less masculine. Fatherhood is important to the ideal of the Genteel Patriarch too, and you spend most of your time supervising your family and your estate.
If, on the other hand, you’re expected to live up to the ideal of the Heroic Artisan, you’re more likely to be a white city-dweller. This masculine ideal emphasizes physical strength paired with dedication to budding democratic ideals. As a Heroic Artisan, you’re likely to be a shopkeeper or an urban craftsman. So instead of Jefferson with his powdered wigs, think Paul Revere, who worked as a silversmith, a trade requiring physical strength and hard work. The Heroic Artisan doesn’t just supervise people, like the Genteel Patriarch does. The Heroic Artisan is also a family man, so you’re supposed to be a devoted father who teaches your son your craft. You’re economically autonomous, as well; you work for yourself rather than being dependent upon the labor of others, like the Genteel Patriarch is.