Do We All Have a Weird Relationship With Gender?

I mean our own. Our own gender. Not other people's gender.

The other week in the course of a political comment thread online there was passing mention of ‘the trans issue’ and how it’s seen by the right vs. the left. I had written in response how I didn’t entirely understand why so many people seemed to be so provoked by the very fact that trans people exist and wish to be able to pee in peace, and the person I was having the exchange with had responded with something along the lines of ‘let’s agree to disagree on that issue’. As the conversation had been about a completely different subject I hadn’t pressed it further, but the thought of that exchange, of the fact that some people’s existence was a subject other people got to agree or disagree on, stuck with me and kept turning over in my mind.

In the last few days we have been witnessing a bizarre phenomenon where Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting have been dragged up and down through both legacy and social media for the crime of being Too Good At What They Do For a Woman, and not fitting in with the classic Western beauty standard. Meanwhile the actual trans man athlete, Filipino boxer Hergie Bacyadan, had totally flown under the radar, also fighting in the women’s category because that’s where the Olympics rules slot him - they don’t allow anyone to compete in a different gender category to the one in which they passed their puberty. It really made me reconsider my own relationship with my gender, and gender in general. Is being ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’ something intrinsically ours? Is it something other people can decide to strip away from us?

I have never identified as a trans person. I have trans people in my life and I love them dearly, I read and watch a fair amount of content created by trans people, but I cannot pretend to know what their lived experiences really feel like. I haven’t seen many texts written on the subject of gender experience by people who were neither part of the trans community, nor in opposition to the trans community (though it still confuses me how you can be ‘in opposition’ to people simply being). Perhaps that’s pretty reasonable, we normies might feel this is not our subject to talk about, we do not want to appropriate it or to usurp the conversation with our outsider views.

But as the ‘trans question’ has been quite dominant in the public eye for a while now, it really made me dig around in my own mind in order to sort out some thoughts on my personal relationship with gender. 

My pencil drawing of torch ginger with a (female?) firefly. During daytime.

I remember a casual conversation I had some years ago with my husband, following some bit of news that had just come out about ‘The Trans Question’. He had pondered for a moment and said ‘I can’t imagine what that would feel like, not feeling like your true gender and your physical gender align. I have always felt quite definitively male.’ 

This made me curious in turn, as my husband is in many ways the opposite of what one may consider a stereotypical ‘man’s man’. Soft spoken, artistic, invested in literature and disinterested in sports, he doesn’t in my mind embody many traits that are traditionally ascribed strictly to men. But then upon further thought, he doesn’t have any particular feminine-coded qualities either. To me he had always seemed to be just ….a person. I was very interested in how he saw himself. ‘Which of your traits specifically make you feel that way?’ I asked. 

He gave it quite a lot of thought and finally said ‘You know now that it comes to it, I can’t rightly say. I suppose it’s just that the world told me I was male, and that never felt wrong.’

This was also a very interesting take. You are simply you, whatever you happen to be, and the world tells you, say, ‘what you are is called female’. And you’re like ‘ok I guess.’ 

Growing up I have been anything but a ‘feminine woman’, drawn to diving and fishing, books, climbing, drawing, snails and rocks and insects, for the longest time I wore my hair boyishly short and didn’t own any dresses or skirts. I tended to make friends with boys and be awkward around girls, boys’ pastimes made more sense to me back then. It seemed more fun to scale rooftops in order to steal cherries from the neighbor’s tree, ride bikes, feed stray park dogs and try to teach them tricks, and experiment with setting small fires, than to jump elastics and… I genuinely don’t even know what the girls were doing. They didn’t much want to hang out with me either. 

To my great fortune, no one in my surrounding seemed to have any particular thoughts or ideas on this lack of femininity I was displaying, positive or negative, so it just really never even entered my mind as any sort of issue to be pondered.

Then I met someone who did make me ponder after all. One of my friends had an older sister, who would sometimes hang out with her older, cooler friends in the same place where we, the younger and infinitely less cool, were also spending time and trying to, you know, grow into some coolness. And the thing that caught my attention about her was that she would mix her tenses, sometimes using feminine, and sometimes masculine forms. 

Pencil drawing of blue ringed octopus. Fun fact - blue ringed octopi seem unable to distinguish between the males and females of their own species and regularly try to copulate with both, basically figuring out the gender of their partner based on how it feels to get it on with them :)

Now because this was in Serbia, and because the Serbian language actually has feminine and masculine forms for many many many things English does not - including, most notably, some verb tenses - this was a lot more noticeable than it might be in English. Because in English you may say ‘I went’, but in Serbia you have to choose - ‘išao sam’ (I went, but also I consider myself to be male) or ‘išla sam’ (I went, but also I consider myself to be female). So you’re really declaring your gender in almost every sentence. And before this moment I had never really encountered anyone who would do so inconsistently. 

It, like everything else about her, seemed very interesting and cool to me. The reasons I still say ‘her’ are manifold. First, to my knowledge she herself never actually stated anything about her gender or wishing to be addressed in any specific way. Transness or being non-binary wasn’t really something any of us had had much experience with - of course queer communities did exist in Belgrade in the nineties just as they had in every other place and time, but they were definitely not in the public eye, and we as kids had very little awareness of them. I still know her and she went on to live a fairly typical female-coded life - always presented feminine, married a guy, had kids… the standard stuff. So I don’t really feel comfortable just making up different pronouns for someone based on the fact that they liked mixing up their pronouns for a while in third year of high school. 

But it stayed with me. 

I remember thinking ‘that actually makes so much sense.’ Like, it actually felt very weird that we would keep declaring ourselves male or female through so many grammatical elements. Like why would you have to be a boy specifically, or a girl specifically? Couldn’t you just be a person? 

This question intensified as we kept wading through our teenage years and being faced with all sorts of social stereotypes. ‘Girls are boring, all they want to do is gossip. But you’re not like other girls! You’re kind of cool I guess.’ (The famous ‘Pick Me’ pipeline.) ‘That’s not for girls! It’s not very ladylike. Let the guys do it.’ ‘You’re a girl, you shouldn’t sit like that! Where’s your elegance?!’ 

As someone who had confidently tomboyed through childhood I was a bit affronted by this new categorization. I didn’t mind being a girl, but I sure as hell minded being bossed around because of it. 

Then everything became infinitely worse when my boobs came in and random goddamned men started, like, perpetually staring at me on buses, in ice cream parlors, walking down random streets, waiting for my friends in front of our school yard. I was very confused. My parents had put no effort into telling me about the birds and the bees, and they certainly never mentioned that thirty something old male bees will be buzzing around me on public transport, breathing down my neck and trying to brush against my ass in passing pretending they couldn’t help it because of the crowd. I can’t count the number of times I was late for school because I had to get off a bus and wait for another one, hopefully with a lower creep count.

So in this context being a girl also didn’t really seem to be much of a prize. On the one hand you would get a ton of attention, most of it from men you would really rather have never met - on the other, you had to attract some reasonable seeming guys in order to secure your social standing and not come off as an awkward loser. 

At that moment, if the option of classifying myself as non-binary, a.k.a. Absolutely Not Interested In This Entire Circus, had presented itself, I would have leapt at it. 

Recently I read a text saying there has been an increase of young people identifying as trans or non-binary who report being perfectly happy with who they are, have no gender dysmorphia, do not wish to alter their bodies in any way, but merely do not want to be classified as their gender any more. I understand these kids absolutely. They’re managing to formulate what I never succeeded in explaining, even to myself. It’s not that I don’t like who I am. It’s that I don’t like how I am treated. (It goes without saying here that those trans people who DO experience gender dysmorphia and DO wish to alter their appearance and get gender-affirming care are absolutely every bit as legitimate as anyone else and of course should be able to do that.)

So it’s really all a massive tangle. Sex as a complex biological concept, with so many more variations and intricacies than the mainstream debates would deign to acknowledge… Gender as a social construct that serves to shove many of us into boxes we have no interest spending our lives cooped up in…. Our bodies, with so many different shapes, forms and variations… And our minds, navigating this ocean of nuance we’re sometimes told doesn’t really exist.

My pencil drawing of several species of starfish. You can generally not tell the gender of a starfish by looking at it. The only way to tell is to watch them release eggs/ sperm during mating and to see who releases what.

I have recently seen someone declare their pronouns to be ‘she/her, but not like a woman - more like a car, or a ship’, and I have never resonated with a pronoun statement more. I am extremely content being myself, with all the foibles and peculiarities that brings, but I would be grateful for a bit of determinism to be shaved off from society’s perception of me as a woman. I mean, I am one. But maybe not, like, that much. 

Maybe it’s time that we all start reconsidering our relationship with gender. Our insistence on the binary classification of something that is clearly more complex than just A or B. Our complex social prejudices that we instinctively attach to people - ‘men are like _______’, ‘women are always _________’. Our weird discomfort with the idea that some people defy categorization, whether because it doesn’t fit them, or simply because they don’t see the purpose of it. Or more interestingly - because they DO see the purpose, and they reject it.

How different would your perception of the world be if our language didn’t differentiate between male and female pronouns? How would society change if we all magically lost every assumption we hold about each gender? How terrible would it be if we all just thought of ourselves as ‘people’? Would our society crumble? Would it just become more just?

If there is anything I would wish for in the sphere of society’s treatment of gender, it’s just that we lose some of that sharpness, that intensity, with which we fly into these debates. That we approach people with more good natured curiosity than eyebrow-wagging criticism. Because the right to be weird, different, and not quite like everyone else is an inalienable human right, and one that I will fight for as long as I am able. And instead of you telling me how critical you are of my weirdness, I would far rather have you tell me something personal about yours.