Two Truths and No Lie: Gender Edition
Take these to your next “gender” talks and let the building begin.
This short piece of writing is intended for anyone concerned with actualizing liberation on behalf of our “gendered” bodies. You can fall absolutely anywhere on the spectrum of “gender identity” and find these two truisms useful. I consider them a new north star, meant to be a guide down a path where love and logical thinking are in symphony together. If you care to acknowledge there is such a spectrum, or prefer some rigidity with your “gender roles”, I ask you to try these two statements on and walk around in them for a bit. For those with an appetite to break things down to build them back up fresh, let these truisms marinate and slow roast in your mind, chewing on them as you continue cooking this awareness. This is as relevant as an assignment for self-reflection as much as it is in building collaborative thought across intersections. I hope you take this into your next conversation and let it have the attention in thought it deserves, and get back at me on what it inspires.
TRUISM #1: Everybody gets to “have” gender.
I like this idea for the fact that it breaks through our tendency to re-create hierarchy, and therefore, run oppressor patterns at one another. People who are perceived as “marginalized” are not exempt from this. That’s a hella uncomfortable concept I learned in RC (Re-evaluative Co-counseling), echoed by the incomparable ancestor Audre Lorde quoted below. I came to this gem through a comment section under the YouTube video “Gendering is a Luxury (That I can’t afford)”, which I will reference again given how it led me to TRUISM #2. Featured creator Jessie Gender gets the credit for this first one, however I do have criticism for the way they framed it.
TRUISM #2: There are people who experience their sex and gender synonymously, and people who don’t.
Making a choice about gender is not a given for all. For some of us humans, sex and gender are synonymous. There is no need to make a choice, no space to fill with decision. We might be called “cis”, privileged, and whatever else. When we view this concept in its banality, there is no inherent reason for disdain. Assigning malice to this fact as opposed to recognizing it as another possible experience of the human condition is useless, and as many like to phrase it these days, a trauma response. In activism and interpersonal relationships, this understanding could halt so much futile pressure and pushiness. This recognition could allow us to stop projecting our own confusions, curiosities, and unmet needs onto anyone else, and be a mirror reminding us to self-reflect. This could assist young people who feel they are supposed to come to some conclusion about themself when they are, in fact, not missing any pieces of who they are. (Like the one this top-commenting parent mentions in response to this story).
The way people assume a position of higher ground while using “you have privilege” as a tool to shame, blame, and absolve themself of power to act has got to have its time in the hot-seat.
In the “triggering comment” chapter of Foreign Man’s video essay, he discusses this question: How did you know you were a cisgender man? He goes on to say it was uncomfortable for him given that he had never had to grapple with the question at all. That he is because he is. This is about as far as I got before I paused to deconstruct the idea that a man — a Black one at that — had never dealt with his own gender identity as a man. I did this using my partner as a reference (which is where I admittedly veered away from Foreign’s experience and point). I later watched further, but this is where I have criticism for how Jessie framed their point. I know for a fact that my partner has faced his own man-ness as much as he’s faced his own black-ness. This is in terms of how he relates to his family, his fatherhood, his citizenship, his teaching, his lovership. It spans across his childhood foundation into his present day. Of course it is colored to an extent by internalized sexism and the structures of male domination, and we both work at understanding how. However, to use this awareness of sexism and male domination to assume otherwise (that he doesn’t deal with gender) is dismissive, borderline disrespectful, and something I wish didn’t have to be glossed over in order to have the gender-identity conversation. It’s the initial speculation I held when I saw Foreign’s video, that this is the point he will probably be illustrating. It is worth a FULL watch, for sure.
As a sidenote, my preference is that if a conversation is about “transgender identity”, let that stand in its glory and importance and be the center of the conversation. I can respect that. If the conversation is “gender identity”, let’s be at the table with who’s at the table, and leave the misguided desire to generalize people we deem at the top of the hierarchy at the door. That means truism #1 still stands, and just because layers of oppressor patterns will interlock and co-mingle doesn’t mean some have no seat at the table. The ping-ponging between pyramid-shaped and circle-shaped thinking doesn’t serve us in building understanding.
I understand that some of the discussion in Foreign’s video was under the premise that the way men relate to gender is filtered through the patriarchy. That the patriarchy in and of itself is oppressive, purely manufactured and affirmed by the powers that dominate. I get that. The fact that it happens so often in these conversations is indicative of healing work still to be done on an internal level. But that’s just my reaction as a viewer living my own heterosexual-partnered life and centering that wealth of work.
On a final sidenote, I recently published my article on self-identification being the standard we teach. I would add here that the level of envelope pushing in media on this subject has led to more than unhealthy extremism. It has ushered in a new, necessary middle ground to arrive at for folks who had never considered gender identity outside of the binary, or outside of their own (the cissies and such LMAO). So as always, I appreciate this platform for the many folks I get to follow the minds of who have an experience far from mine in this gender conversation. As varied, valid and worthy as mine too.
Thanks for reading dear won. If you like feeling Rhythm with your Words, peep the vibes. I don’t play about my pen! If you also love YouTubery, I’m on that! Solo and with my beautifully human partner.
