by Robyn Ryle
NOTE ON THE COVER
How do you choose an image to convey the fluidity of gender as explored in a book like this? What would that look like?
The symbols on the cover of this book that surround the title are an attempt to do exactly that. They originated with a discussion among a group of nonbinary Brazilian artists in 2014. The symbols are the result of the group’s collaboration, and they are freely available for individuals to use and share.
Because gender is fluid and contested, these symbols may not have the same meaning for people outside this original group. You might have your own way of representing your genderqueer or bigender identity. You might have arranged the symbols in a different order that makes more sense to you.
Trying to come up with an image to convey gender as it truly exists is like trying to reduce a complicated dance into just one frozen moment. It can never be perfect, but it can serve as the beginning of a fascinating conversation.
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2019 by Robyn Ryle
Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Zoe Norvell
For information on the cover illustrations, see p. i.
Internal design by Jillian Rahn/Sourcebooks, Inc.
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.—From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations
This book is not intended as a substitute for medical advice from a qualified physician. The intent of this book is to provide accurate general information in regard to the subject matter covered. If medical advice or other expert help is needed, the services of an appropriate medical professional should be sought.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ryle, Robyn, author.
Title: She/he/they/me : for the sisters, misters, and binary resisters / Robyn Ryle.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, Inc., [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010903
Subjects: LCSH: Sex role. | Sex (Psychology)--Social aspects. | Sex differences (Psychology)--Social aspects. | Gender identity. | Gender nonconformity. | Sex discrimination.
Classification: LCC HQ1075 .R949 2019 | DDC 305.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010903
To Jeff, my partner in all things.
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
The strange thing about life in the twenty-first century is that gender has probably never mattered more than it does right now. But gender has also never mattered so much less. How can both of these statements be true?
Gender matters more because it is front and center in our daily lives. We are surrounded by gender as it permeates our world, seeping in through multiple avenues. With the explosion of social media and other online sources of information, you can look at almost every aspect of your life through the lens of gender. You can find cartoons that play with gender by drawing princesses from Disney movies as boys—and the princes as girls. You can watch BuzzFeed videos that portray what it would be like if men were treated the way women are in the gym. In other areas of popular culture, you can read about the lack of strong female characters in movies and on television and in novels.
Politically, you can become absorbed in debates about the status of transgender people in the military and their right to use bathrooms. You can see gender playing out on the global stage through the worldwide celebrity of teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, whose advocacy for young girls in Pakistan made her a role model and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Gender is there when we go to the polls to vote, when we take to the field to play, when we get up to go to work, when we come home to our families, and when we relax and do nothing at all—gender is still there.
But in other ways, gender also matters less than it has in the past. Though the progress is uneven, many women around the world have more choices available to them now than they ever have before. Many of the strict rules that society has laid out for girls and women are loosening, even if the rules for men are often still fairly tight and confining. Transgender people still face violence and discrimination, but their growing visibility and acceptance has the potential to radically transform our ideas about what gender is. There’s no denying that for many people, gender as a concept is changing and transforming. If the gender you’re born isn’t the gender you end up living, then what exactly is gender, anyway? In all these ways, the grip that gender as a social system has on our lives is gradually loosening, so that year by year, gender matters a little less.
The ways in which gender matters both more and less are connected because they’re two sides of the same coin. Evolving ideas about gender draw more attention to the complexity of gender itself as a category. For some people, radical changes to how we understand and treat gender give rise to fear and a desire to keep things the way they are. Gender matters more precisely because of the ways in which it matters less, and it’s like that no matter where you reside.
I teach and live in a small town in Indiana. People from the outside might describe it as backward compared to places like New York and other coastal cities. But even here, gender is changing faster than some people can keep up with. In small towns as well as big cities around the world, people have pressing questions about how to negotiate the territory of gender, which seems to be shifting under our feet. The particular versions of gender that have traditionally dominated are fading away, and that can be a very scary thing.
Before I started writing this book, a friend contacted me looking for information that would help a young person who was wrestling with questions about their identity. This book is partly for people like them—people who want a much broader perspective on all the ways in which gender matters.
It’s also for the student in one of my classes who is cisgender—meaning that he identifies with the gender he was assigned at birth—and straight and never really thought about gender much at all until his cousin came out as gay. It’s for the friend at a dinner party who wasn’t sure what it would mean to write a book about gender because she wasn’t really sure what gender was in the first place. This book is for anyone who’s intereste
d in discovering how much they might not know about something that’s so very taken for granted in our day-to-day lives, and for everyone who’s trying to navigate the shifting terrain that is gender today.
So let’s start our exploration of that shifting terrain with a stupid question (because really, there is no such thing as a stupid question): What exactly is gender?
It seems like a stupid question, but it isn’t. People who study gender from a social science perspective point out that gender is kind of like what water is to a fish. We’re swimming in it all the time. It’s all around us, but we don’t necessarily spend a lot of time trying to understand it. Everyone knows what water is, right? And everyone believes they understand what gender is. But do we really?
The perspective we’ll be looking at in this book takes all those questions about gender—the ones you thought for sure you knew the answer to—and asks you to think again. How do you know what someone’s gender is? Are there really only two genders or might there be more? What is sexuality? What does it really mean to say you’re gay or lesbian or bisexual or asexual? How do we sort through the things that we’ve been told to believe about gender and the things that are actually true? Do we need gender or is it something that we should do without?
Exploring these questions is what we’ll be doing in this book, but before we set off on our gender adventure, there’s something you need to know. Gender, like many other social identities, is partly forced upon us by the societies in which we live. You didn’t choose to be born into a culture that believes that there are two genders instead of just one or an infinite number. At least in the beginning, we don’t have a choice about the gender paths that are open to us. In real life, there are a lot of things about gender that we don’t get to create. This book, however, is a “create-a-path” book, allowing you to explore how different possibilities interact in complicated, sometimes convoluted ways, to form our experiences of gender. Between these pages, you get a chance to explore what it might be like if all of the many gender possibilities were open to us.
If gender isn’t really a choice—because many of the decisions have already been made for us by the particular society we find ourselves in—then you might be wondering why I would write a book about gender in the create-a-path format.
I’ve been teaching gender to college students for more than fifteen years. Many students—especially heterosexual, cisgender students—come into the classroom on the first day fairly confident that they know what gender is. Pretty quickly, they discover that a lot of their assumptions are wrong; many of the things they believe about gender are simply false. The ground falls out from under them. At first, it’s scary, like looking in a fun-house mirror where everything familiar becomes distorted and weird. Seeing the world in new and different ways can be a little scary. But eventually, it’s liberating and exciting, like a really good roller coaster, full of unexpected twists and turns. There are places where you’ll hold on for dear life and places that make you want to get back in line and do it all over again. I wrote this book because I wanted to share that scary and exciting adventure with people everywhere.
The second reason to use the create-a-path format is that the more you know about gender, the more pathways for living your own gender become open to you. There are a lot of aspects of gender that you don’t get to choose. You didn’t choose the particular set of chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy that you were born with. You didn’t choose your family—at least, not at the beginning—so you didn’t get to choose the particular set of lessons your family taught you about gender. You didn’t choose your culture and its specific ways of understanding gender. If you’ve lived your whole life in a culture where there are only two gender options—feminine and masculine—those are probably the only possibilities that you can imagine. You’re stuck in the boxes that your society created for you with no way to see what might exist beyond the walls of those boxes. Once you know what’s outside the boxes, though, you might begin to plan an escape. Or maybe you’ll decide you want to make a new box for yourself.
The more you know about gender, the more gender becomes like a path that you get to create for yourself.
If gender to us is like water to a fish, then you can choose the pond you swim in. You can choose to explore the murky places where the water is not so clear. You can choose to dog paddle or to show off your breast stroke. You can dip your toe in or plunge in cannonball-style. You can begin to see and understand gender for what it is. Some choices will be harder than others, but if you understand the social aspects of gender, you’ll see the possibilities; you’ll see what could be different. You can make your own path because gender is always changing and shifting.
So, how do you get started? In real life, gender has a lot of rules to follow, but in this book, you’re free to make them up as you go along. Navigate through your gender adventure by making your choice and then flipping to the corresponding number at the top of the page. You can certainly read this book by following a path similar to your own, choosing options that are true to your own life experiences. That’s one possible route to take: use this book to learn more about your own unique gender adventure. Following that strategy, you’ll still learn many new and surprising things about your personal gender adventure. But you should also follow paths that are nothing like your own experience. You may have been born into a society with two genders, but what would it be like if you were born into a culture with one gender? Or more than two genders? The fun of create-a-path as a format is figuring out all the different places you can end up. Feel free to explore all the twists and turns. A create-a-path book isn’t usually read straight through, but if that’s what you want to do, go for it! It’s your adventure, so choose whichever path you like and then after that, choose another and another.
Now, let’s dive into the deep end and get started on your very own gender adventure!
1
You are born and so your gender path begins. Or does it?
You might think that the first question to ask about your gender path is whether you’re born a boy or a girl. But the first question comes even before that. Some of the most important factors related to your gender adventure began long before you were born. You’re born into a particular time and place. Your gender path is going to be very different if you’re born into one of the hunter-gatherer groups in which humans lived for most of our history than it will be if you’re born in the twenty-first-century United States.
Therefore, the first question is: Exactly how do people in the time and place where you’re born think about gender? Or an even crazier question: Do people in the time and place where you’re born think about gender at all?
You’re born into a time and place where gender exists. GO TO 10.
You’re born into a time and place where gender doesn’t exist. GO TO 11.
2
In the society you’re born into, gender assignment happens at birth (or sooner). Unless you are a very unusual newborn, you don’t have much say in your gender assignment. As a baby, you aren’t able to disagree with the gender assignment that’s given to you. Already, choices about your gender path are being made for you.
You also don’t get any input into the particular gender categories that are available to you. Maybe two gender categories are just fine with you. Maybe you’d prefer three or one. Maybe an infinite number of gender categories sounds about right to you. Either way, it’s very hard to suggest alternatives when you’ve just been born.
All the same, the culture you’re born into will have its own way of organizing gender, and those categories are the options that are available for your gender assignment.
You’re born into a culture with one gender. GO TO 12.
You’re born into a culture with two genders. GO TO 13.
You’re born into a culture with more than two genders. GO TO 14.
You’re born into a culture with infinite genders. GO TO 16.
3
Congratulations! You
’re an intersex infant! You’re perfectly normal and you’re not alone.
The term intersex covers a wide range of reproductive or anatomical conditions that don’t fit the claims of sexual dimorphism, or the typical definitions of male and female. Some of the conditions are anatomical and therefore identified at birth, but many are not.
INTERSEX
n. /ˈin-tər-ˌseks/
A person who is intersex does not fit the typical definitions of male and female. Often describes a person who has ambiguous (or both sets) or external genitalia.
It may feel a little disorienting at first, not having a pink or blue hat, but being intersex is completely natural. Intersex people like you have always existed. Being an intersex infant isn’t the result of any disease or genetic mutation, and it’s much more common than most people think. Estimates vary because it’s hard to know for sure who is and isn’t intersex, but the frequency of all intersex conditions may be as high as 1.7 percent of the global population. For comparison, that’s about the same as the percentage of people in the United States who are born redheaded (2 percent of the population). So being an intersex person is about as common as being a ginger.
Intersex is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of biological realities. Historically, intersex individuals were called hermaphrodites, a word with Greek origins that implies a combination of man and woman; this older term has been mostly abandoned in favor of intersex. Some intersex people are born with both a penis and a vagina. Others have ambiguous genitalia—their collection of genital tissue falls in the gray space between what doctors call a penis or a clitoris.
AMBIGUOUS GENITALIA
n. /am-ˈbi-gyə-wəs ˌje-nə-ˈtāl-yə/
Genital tissue that falls in the gray space between what doctors call a penis or a clitoris.