She/He/They/Me

by Robyn Ryle

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  You’re a white man. You move through life as both white and masculine, even if as a white person you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about your race. The ability to not have to think too much about how your whiteness impacts your day-to-day life is one of the privileges, or benefits that you did nothing to get, that go along with your identity. There’s a lot of power that comes with being a white man in most places in the world.

  In the United States, most of the representations of masculinity that you see are white representations. All but one of the forty-five presidents of the United States have been white men like you. Everywhere you look, you see men like you in positions of power. On average, you make more money than any other group in the United States. It might be easier for you, as a white man, to come close to the ideal forms of masculinity that are held up in your culture than it is for men from other racial and ethnic groups.

  White men have it pretty good, but it might not feel that way to you, personally. There’s a great irony that even though a lot of power is conferred on white men by the systems of race and gender in which we live, many white men don’t feel particularly powerful. Why is that? Part of the answer has to do with how difficult it is to make connections between our individual lives and larger social structures. When you go through your day-to-day life as a white man, the power that you have isn’t obvious because it’s something that you take for granted. You don’t have to worry about being profiled based on your race, so you’re less likely to be pulled over in your car by the police or pulled out of the line at airport security. Compared to women, people assume that you have knowledge and authority. They’ll defer to you in conversations and ask you for help, even when the issue or task at hand isn’t something that you particularly know about or can do. If you want to return an item at a store, no one will question you. No one will follow you around when you’re shopping, assuming that you’re going to steal something. You’ll find it easier to get a loan, to buy a car or a house, or start your own business.

  All of these things are true, but if you have no sense of how other people have to deal with challenges like these every day, you might focus instead on the ways in which you don’t have power. You might focus instead on the fact that you can no longer tell sexual jokes in the workplace, for fear of accusations of sexual harassment. Or the fact that when you call an automated phone service, you have to listen to a prompt for instructions in Spanish. Very small changes like these may stick out to you without any connection to the many, many ways in which you still have power. Without any awareness of the big power that you have as a white man, these very small changes can seem magnified.

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  You’re a white woman. Even if, as a white person, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about your race, it matters for how you experience your gender. The ability to not have to think too much about how your whiteness impacts your day-to-day life is one of the privileges, or benefits that you did nothing to get, that go along with your identity.

  As a white woman, you can assume that when people talk about “women’s issues,” they’re probably talking about your issues specifically. For much of its history, feminism has been dominated by other white women like you. From the very beginnings of the women’s movement in the United States, women of color were involved and in the front lines. But their particular needs and interests were often pushed to the side. In a famous speech, Sojourner Truth pointed out the differences between the experiences of many white women and her experience as a freed slave. Unlike white women, Truth was never treated as delicate and therefore incapable of working. She was never put up on a pedestal. Like many women of color throughout U.S. history, Truth always worked.

  That your experiences as a white woman are seen as the norm is an important way in which your race and gender intersect. That doesn’t mean that you don’t face discrimination as a woman, based on your gender. But power and privilege are complicated things, and though you may be oppressed as a woman, your whiteness also gives you power.

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  You were born a biological man and are living as a woman. Transgender people like you experience discrimination, harassment, and violence in a wide variety of settings. Trans women may be fired outright from their jobs. Or your employer or fellow employees may act in subtler ways that make your workplace hostile and uncomfortable until you quit.

  Because the workplace is a masculine space, you’re likely to face a great deal of discrimination and harassment if you transition during your working life. As a trans woman, you might be fired from your job after your transition. You’ll also experience a decrease in your earnings as a woman relative to what you made or would’ve made living as a man. Philecia Barnes served as an Ohio police officer for twenty years (as a man) and scored in the top 20 percent on her sergeant exam. But when she began her transition and started to look feminine, she was demoted rather than promoted. Federal laws about discrimination in the workplace don’t explicitly cover transgender individuals like you, so the options available to you for fighting this kinds of treatment are limited. Like Philecia, you’re likely to lose your patriarchal dividend in the workplace as a trans woman.

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  You’re one of the increasing numbers of women worldwide who work for pay outside the home, in addition to the work you do inside the household. Chances are, you’ll get paid less than your male counterparts for the work that you do. As a woman in the United States, you’re likely to earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. That’s the average, but the gender pay gap will be much worse if you’re a woman of color. For example, if you’re a Latinx woman, you’ll make 54 cents for every dollar earned by white men. If you’re an African American woman, you’ll earn 63 cents for every white man’s dollar.

  Why are you, as a woman, earning less than most men? There are lots of factors that we know go into explaining the gender pay gap, as well as some unknowns. One of the first things to consider is whether or not you’re working in a job with a high level of gender segregation. Is almost everyone in the place where you work of the same gender, or is there a pretty even distribution across genders?

  You work in a place with high gender segregation. GO TO 151.

  You work in a place with low gender segregation. GO TO 152.

  144

  You probably don’t spend all your time working. Everyone needs to relax and have a little fun from time to time. But even in your spare time, you won’t completely escape the effects of gender.

  You’re a woman (a cis woman or a trans woman). GO TO 156.

  You’re a man (a cis man or a trans man). GO TO 157.

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  Different sorts of jobs require different sorts of skills. Working in a factory might require physical dexterity or strength. As a woman, you’re likely to find yourself working in a job that requires emotional labor. Emotional labor is work that requires you to either induce or suppress feelings, in order to produce a certain state of mind in other people—usually customers or clients. In other words, emotional labor means that your job requires you to hide the fact that you’re angry or sad or bored so that you can keep the customer happy. Think of the emotional labor a waitress does. If her customers make her angry or disgusted, she can’t let that show. She has to continue to act polite, pleasant, and cheerful, in order to keep the people she’s waiting on happy. It is, in fact, part of her job description to keep her customers happy.

  Most service jobs like waiting tables involve emotional labor. And not surprisingly, women dominate service jobs. But emotional labor isn’t valued as highly as other types of skills and abilities, so women in service jobs generally make less than men in other types of occupations. Take the example of paralegals, a profession that emerged in the 1960s. Eighty-five percent of paralegals are women. They do many of the same tasks as the lawyers they assist but get paid much less. Lawyers, on
ly 36 percent of whom are women, earn more than twice as much as their paralegal counterparts. Paralegals’ regular duties include doing legal research, summarizing court transcripts and depositions, and reviewing and analyzing documents produced in large litigation cases. None of these are tasks that lawyers themselves don’t also do. The main difference between a paralegal and a lawyer is the emotional labor required of paralegals, who are expected to nurture and mother their bosses.

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  If you play any kind of sport at almost any level, you probably play in a gender-segregated setting. That is, if you’re a woman, you play sports with and against other women. If you’re a man, you play with and against other men. You can count on one hand the number of competitive sports that aren’t gender-segregated—horse racing, automobile racing, and ultimate Frisbee. Here’s a question you’ve probably never asked yourself: Why are sports segregated by gender? Does it make sense to organize sports this way? The answer is yes, if part of the purpose of sports is to reinforce gender differences, which is exactly what sports in their current configuration do.

  For much of the early history of organized sports, women were excluded from competing. In fact, even cheerleading as a sport used to be just for guys. Women didn’t take over cheerleading until after World War II. Excluding women from sports obviously helped contribute to beliefs about gender differences. Women were said to be too delicate for the exertion and physical contact that came with playing sports. In fact, playing sports was often specifically about increasing and reinforcing masculinity, and women weren’t supposed to have any part in that. During the early twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt worried that with the closing of the American frontier and the rise of office jobs, American men would lose their rugged masculinity. He very intentionally promoted the sport of American football as a solution to his worries about the loss of masculinity. When women did start to play sports, their participation was limited to certain activities that were considered appropriately feminine. Namely, women weren’t supposed to sweat or engage in physical contact.

  Women in the United States began entering sports in unprecedented numbers in the wake of the passage of Title IX in 1972. This piece of legislation dictated that any colleges and universities that received federal funding (which is pretty much all colleges and universities) had to provide equal opportunities for women and men. As it applied to sports, that meant that colleges needed to provide equal opportunities for their male and female students to receive athletic scholarships and play sports. In the decades since Title IX, the participation of girls and women in a wide variety of sports has increased dramatically at all levels. But women and men by and large still play sports separately. Teams are generally gender integrated only when there aren’t high enough numbers of children to make up gender-segregated teams.

  Arguments in favor of gender segregation in sports are usually based on presumed differences in athletic ability between men and women. But differences in athletic ability are based on more than just anatomy and are shaped by social forces, as well. For example, in almost all types of races at the elite athletic level, women’s times have been converging with men’s over the past century. Women athletes are getting faster and faster. Why? In part, it’s because with increased gender equality, elite sports programs across the globe are distributing their resources between men and women athletes more equitably. Women are getting more and better resources, equipment, and attention than they did in the past. The question of whether women’s athletic performance will catch up with men’s remains unanswered. But part of that answer lies in the motivation for women to pursue athletics at the elite level.

  Are the rewards for female and male athletes still unequal? The answer is a resounding yes. Tennis is one of the few sports where women are compensated at the same level as their male counterparts, and it took decades of struggle to obtain that equality. It’s only recently that elite tennis tournaments began to pay men and women the same, after a battle that began with Billie Jean King in the 1970s and ended with Venus and Serena Williams finally achieving the goal of equity in major tournament prizes in the 2000s (although pay disparity often still happens in smaller tournaments). In every other professional sport, women are paid less than men, even if their sport is more popular and successful. The U.S. women’s national soccer team, despite having won three World Cup championships, is still paid less than the men’s team, which has won zero World Cup titles. In 2017, Sylvia Fowles, the highest-paid WNBA player, made a mere $109,000 compared to the $37.4 million made by Steph Curry, the NBA’s highest-paid player, in the 2017–2018 season. Women playing professional softball in the United States make between $5,000 and $6,000 for the season. That’s compared to the average salary of $4.5 million for a Major League Baseball player. We live in a society where monetary rewards are at least part of what motivates our behavior. So, we can assume that these salaries, which aren’t even enough to live on, might affect the amount of time, effort, and resources women dedicate to becoming an elite athlete in their sport. The fact is that most women won’t be able to earn a living playing their sport at the professional level.

  We don’t know for sure exactly how close we might get to closing the gap in athletic performance between women and men. Given today’s differences, how could sports be reorganized in a way that’s not gender segregated? One possibility would be to structure leagues on the basis of athletic ability, rather than on gender. There’s precedent for this in sports like wrestling and boxing, which use weight classes for matching competitors. In this system, instead of separate men’s and women’s basketball leagues, there would be different levels of ability-based leagues, similar to what exists in Major League Baseball, with A, double-A, and triple-A levels. Instead of assuming that gender automatically divides people by their skills and abilities, these leagues would use individuals’ actual, demonstrated skills and abilities to structure competition.

  You play Olympic sports. GO TO 153.

  You don’t play Olympic sports. GO TO 147.

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  Even if you’re not necessarily the sporty type, your body will still matter for how you experience gender. Being a man or a woman will make a difference in terms of what types of illnesses you experience, as well as what happens when you get ill. Gender also plays a role in how long you’re likely to live and how you’ll die.

  You’re a man. GO TO 158.

  You’re a woman. GO TO 159.

  You’re a transgender person. GO TO 160.

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  The way you live your gender continues to shift and change throughout your life, so there really isn’t an end to your gender adventure. Hopefully at this point you have a better understanding of the ways in which gender in all its complexity unfolds in our lives. You’re ready to contemplate a final question: Is gender a category that we should be working to get rid of, or not?

  You think gender should stay the same as it is now. GO TO 95.

  You think we should work for more gender equality. GO TO 100.

  You think we should work to get rid of gender altogether. GO TO 108.

  You have a completely new and different idea about what should happen to gender in the future. GO TO 161.

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  Your experience as a woman going to the doctor will be shaped by your gender in important ways. This is partly because of the long and complicated history between women and medicine as an institution. Doctors have a long history of both ignoring women’s unique medical problems and simultaneously treating women’s bodies as inherently diseased. Take the case of hysteria, a disease commonly diagnosed among women in the nineteenth century. Hysteria was literally defined as a disease of the womb. The symptoms included nervousness, emotional outbursts, and hallucinations.

  Hysteria was an especially common diagnosis among upper-class women; writers like Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were both diagnosed with hysteria. There were a variety of treatments for hysteria. The re
st cure dictated that women be isolated from all activities and forced to stay in bed for extended periods of time. Inducing an orgasm was used as another method of treatment, and doctors treated women with medical devices that were the first vibrators. Hysteria is no longer seen as a real disease, and many historians understand its existence as an attempt to control the activities of creative and powerful women.

  Hysteria is an example of the medical institution turning the basic functions of a woman’s body (having a womb) into a disease. In other cases, the differences between women’s and men’s bodies have been ignored in ways that are harmful to women. For example, women on average have a higher percentage of fat deposits in their bodies, which affects the absorption of many types of drugs. It also turns out that the classic symptoms of a heart attack that have been broadcast for years don’t apply exactly the same way where women are concerned. Women may experience chest pain or pain in their arms, but they’re also more likely to experience other symptoms, like nausea, shortness of breath, or light-headedness. Because of these subtle differences, women are less likely to realize that they’re having a heart attack and therefore less likely to call for emergency assistance.