She/He/They/Me
Page 5
You are nonbinary or genderqueer. GO TO 18.
You are agender. GO TO 19.
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You tell your parents that you’re not really a boy. Or you tell them that you’re a different kind of boy. You might even say that you’re not a boy or a girl at all. But when you tell them about your gender-expansive or transgender identity, they refuse to listen to you. Or they tell you that you’re wrong. Maybe they ignore you altogether. Or even worse, they yell at you or hit you. Some families kick their transgender kids out of the house. Why?
For some people, gender matters a lot. It is a system that they’re deeply invested in, and a set of rules that they believe everyone should follow, including children like you. Among those rules is the idea that you are the gender you’re born and that’s that. You don’t get to change, no matter how bad or wrong it feels. They might be scared about what could happen if those rules changed. If you could change your gender, what would that mean for their own sense of who they are?
Your parents might be afraid of what will happen to you if you go from being a boy to a girl. They might be sad about losing a son, even if they’ll be gaining a daughter. They might feel guilty, as if your transgender identity is the result of something they did wrong as parents. They might find it hard to deal with the uncertainty of your gender-expansive identity. Maybe you know at once that you are a girl instead of a boy, but there might also be a period when you’re still figuring things out. It might be difficult for your parents to live through not knowing what your gender will be.
As a transgender kid, your power to assert your own identity is limited by the circumstances you find yourself in. If your parents don’t support or even acknowledge your identity, it’s hard to take action. If you find yourself in a family like this, you might struggle in school. Transgender kids who lack support are more likely to engage in self-harming activities and have higher rates of suicide. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll find support in an online community or with a group of friends. You might stay in the closet, hiding your transgender identity until you can find a safer, more supportive environment.
For now, you conceal your transgender identity and live as a cisgender person. GO TO 40.
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Your parents might be a little confused at first when you explain to them that you’re transgender or gender expansive. You tell them that you know, deep down, that you’re meant to be a girl. Or you tell them that you think you might be neither a boy nor a girl. They’re uncertain at first, but eventually, they come around. They listen to you and take your feelings seriously. They believe you, and they’re committed to doing whatever they can to help.
So what happens next? Just like there’s not one way to be a girl or a woman, there’s not one way to be transgender. The dominant media representation of what it means to be transgender is usually someone who “crosses over,” most often through surgical or other medical means. But that’s just one way to express your transgender or gender-expansive identity. There are lots of other paths you can follow too.
You are a trans woman, a transgender person whose gender assignment at birth was masculine but whose gender identity is feminine. GO TO 48.
You are nonbinary or genderqueer. GO TO 18.
You are agender. GO TO 19.
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Your primary caregiver is a woman, which means that she’ll be doing much of your gender socialization. It’s important to examine gender socialization because it draws attention to the fact that very little about our gender identities is already in place when we’re born. In other words, we have to learn what gender is. Someone or something has to teach us, and the gender of your primary caregiver can influence how your gender identity forms.
Gender identity is how you think about and understand who you are in relation to your gender. It is the way you answer the question “What is my gender?” for yourself. According to this particular theory, if you’re a little boy and you spend most of your time with a woman, it becomes a bit harder to learn your masculine gender identity. You’re supposed to act like a man, but the person you spend most of your time with is a woman. You might say the first rule of masculinity is to not act like a girl or ever be caught doing anything in the least bit effeminate. So boys learn their gender identity by doing whatever women don’t. Masculine gender identity becomes a rejection of everything that’s feminine.
Because this is how boys learn to be boys, masculine gender identity has stronger ego boundaries, a psychological concept that comes from Sigmund Freud and describes how we make sense of where our own selves end and the rest of the world begins. Freud argued that ego boundaries are something we have to learn, because babies aren’t born with an innate ability to differentiate between themselves and the outside world. Because men develop stronger ego boundaries, you’re more easily able to make distinctions between where you start and the rest of the world (especially other people, but also animals and objects) ends. Stronger ego boundaries make it easier for you to shut yourself off from the feelings and emotions of other things, including living beings. In other words, because you have stronger ego boundaries, feeling empathy for other people is more difficult for you. Freud considered this a good thing, since it makes you more independent and autonomous.
GENDER IDENTITY
n. /ˈjen-dər ī-ˈden-tə-tē/
How one thinks about and understands the self in relation to gender.
On the other hand, as an identity, masculinity is less stable than femininity. That means that you might end up feeling like you have to prove your masculinity over and over again, throughout your life. People might talk about something called your “man card” and believe that it can be taken away if you don’t successfully demonstrate your masculinity. And just like you learned as a boy, the worst thing you can possibly do as a man is anything girly or feminine.
The gender of your primary caregiver is important to how you learn your gender identity. But aside from who’s doing the gender socialization, how exactly does it happen? There are different explanations, but many focus on the ways in which you’re rewarded and punished for behaviors that are considered correct or incorrect for the gender you’ve been assigned. And, not surprisingly, what your gender socialization looks like depends on the particular gender norms of the culture you find yourself in. A boy in colonial America, a boy in the contemporary United States, and a boy living with the Arapesh in Papua New Guinea are all going to have very different experiences of gender socialization. In each place, you’re going to be taught a very different version of what it means to be a boy or a man.
You’re socialized as a boy in colonial America. GO TO 51.
You’re socialized as a boy in the contemporary United States. GO TO 52.
You’re socialized among the Arapesh in Papua New Guinea. GO TO 53.
You’re socialized as something different. GO TO 54.
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Your intersex condition isn’t apparent at birth. Your doctor doesn’t label you as intersex, and there could be a couple of different reasons why this might happen.
You’re born into a time and place where the label for being intersex is different or doesn’t exist. GO TO 33.
Your intersex condition isn’t externally visible. GO TO 25.
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Your intersex condition is discovered at birth. This usually means that your intersex condition is externally visible. Intersex conditions that exist at the chromosomal level or that have to do with internal organs are unlikely to be discovered when you’re born. Unless there’s something visibly different about a baby, doctors are unlikely to do a genetic test or scan your internal organs.
If your intersex condition is discovered at birth, it’s probably because you have ambiguous genitalia, meaning that your doctor can’t tell whether your collection of genital tissue is a penis or a clitoris. Depending on which direction your doctor is leaning, ambiguous genitalia may be identified as an enlarged clitoris (if the doctor is leaning toward girl) or a micro
penis (if the doctor is leaning toward boy).
At this point, your doctor will probably order a genetic test as well as other tests that let her know what your internal anatomical structure is. What she does with all of that information depends on the particular model your doctor follows. There are two different possible models for how doctors and other medical professionals deal with intersex conditions. The first is the concealment-centered model and the second is the patient-centered model.
Your doctor follows the concealment-centered model. GO TO 41.
Your doctor follows the patient-centered model. GO TO 42.
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You might not be labeled intersex at birth because you’re born into a time and place where people’s understanding of genital ambiguity and gender are different. People like you are still born in these times and places, but the meaning given to your body and your gender are different.
People like you have been born with a wide range of genital, chromosomal, anatomical, and hormonal configurations throughout all of human history. Being born intersex is a natural phenomenon. Myths and religions across a wide range of cultures address the existence of people who are neither man nor woman. In Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, was merged by the gods with a female water nymph, becoming both man and woman. In Hinduism, Ardhanarishvara is an androgynous form of the male god Shiva and his female wife, Parvati, and is depicted as half man and half woman. Jewish legal tradition includes specific marriage laws for intersex people.
Because different cultures have different ways of making sense of gender, they also have different ways of seeing variations in sex and gender. In the contemporary United States, being intersex is generally seen as a medical condition, which means that it’s something that needs to be treated with medical measures—like surgery and drugs. But in other cultures, being intersex might be seen as a gift from the gods or a sign of having been chosen for the role by the gods or destiny. Tiresias, a blind prophet from Greek mythology, was a man but was transformed into a woman for seven years, and he was supposed to have special insight because of his multiply gendered life.
In places and time periods with different ways of thinking about gender and genitalia, being intersex wouldn’t necessarily be seen as a problem that needs to be fixed. Today, many intersex infants are treated surgically, but this wasn’t possible if you were born before the twentieth century. Historical records tell the story of one intersex woman who was born in the nineteenth century with both a functioning penis and a functioning vagina. She lived as a woman and married a man. But she also took women as lovers on the side, because she found sex with women more pleasurable. When asked why she stayed married to her husband, she answered that it was for the financial support, of course. Her life and decisions demonstrate the complicated nature of gender, which is not just biological, but also economic, social, and sexual.
If you’re born into a culture or time period that has a different way of making sense of people with bodies like yours, then your body is probably less likely to be seen as something that needs to be “fixed.” There might not be any rules laid out for exactly how you’re supposed to live. Maybe you’ll choose to live mostly as one gender or another. Maybe you’ll mix it up. Maybe you’ll have your own special status.
Or maybe you’re born during a time period when genitalia weren’t the most important marker of biological gender. In the nineteenth century, gender was more likely to be determined by the presence or absence of a uterus. Women were people who had a uterus and men were people who didn’t. These criteria reflect the values of that time period—being able to become pregnant and bear a child were the most important aspects of gender, so from that perspective, putting an emphasis on the uterus makes sense.
If your doctor doesn’t see any reason to pull out the measuring tape when you’re born, you’ll be assigned as a girl or a boy. You might live the whole rest of your life with no knowledge of your intersex condition. Or signs of your intersex condition might emerge at puberty.
You live as a man. GO TO 23.
You live as a woman. GO TO 24.
You live as a nonbinary person. GO TO 18.
You live as an agender person. GO TO 19.
34
Your primary caregiver is a woman, which means that she’ll be doing much of your gender socialization. It’s important to examine gender socialization because it draws attention to the fact that very little about our gender identities is already in place when we’re born. In other words, we have to be taught what gender is. We’re not born knowing it automatically. The gender of your primary caregiver can influence how your gender identity forms.
Gender identity is how you think about and understand who you are in relation to your gender. It is the way you answer the question “What is my gender?” for yourself. Girls with a woman as their primary caregiver end up with a feminine gender identity. How is that identity connected to the person who spends most of their time taking care of you?
If, as a little girl, you have a woman as your primary caregiver, you get to learn femininity firsthand, by watching and imitating the person you spend most of your time with. You don’t have to reject any of the behaviors you’re observing in order to become feminine. The strong bond between you and the woman who takes care of you never needs to be broken in order for you to learn to do femininity correctly.
Because of these experiences, feminine gender identity has weaker ego boundaries, a psychological concept that comes from Sigmund Freud and describes how we make sense of where our own selves end and the rest of the world begins. Freud argued that ego boundaries are something we have to learn, because babies aren’t born with an innate ability to differentiate between themselves and the outside world. Because women develop weaker ego boundaries, you’re less able to draw a line between where you start and the rest of the world (especially other people, but also animals and objects) ends. In other words, you find it much easier to experience empathy for other people in your life. Freud considered this a bad thing, since it makes you less independent and autonomous. He argued that, in some ways, women never quite grow up, because they never learn to separate themselves from the rest of the world. Weaker ego boundaries make it easier to feel what other people feel, so women tend to see themselves and the world as interconnected. Freud may have seen this as a bad thing, but many feminists argue that it’s actually pretty great.
EGO BOUNDARIES
n. /ˈē-(ˌ)gō ˈbau̇n-d(ə-)rēs/
Distinctions that describe how one makes sense of where the self ends and the rest of the world begins.
Some psychologists suggest that our ego boundaries affect many parts of our lives, ranging from how women and men think about justice to how they communicate. Since you feel more connected to other people, your sense of justice is less likely to be based on objective criteria and more likely to emphasize empathy and compassion, and to take into account the specific context of any given situation. In the area of communication, your conversational style as a woman is aimed at establishing connections. When you tell one of your woman friends about something bad that happened, she’s likely to match your story with her own tale of woe. Both of you work to establish similarity and connection—I’m just like you.
Because, unlike boys, your gender identity isn’t formed by a rejection of femininity, your feminine gender identity is more stable, which means that you’re less likely to feel like you need to prove your femininity. Femininity is simply part of who you are. Other women probably won’t threaten to take your “woman card” away if you don’t demonstrate your femininity correctly.
The gender of your primary caregiver is important to how you learn your gender identity. But aside from who’s doing the gender socialization, how exactly does it happen? There are different explanations, but many focus on the ways in which you’re rewarded and punished for behaviors that are considered correct or incorrect for the gender you’ve been assigned. What your gender socialization
looks like depends on the particular gender norms of the culture you find yourself in. Learning to be a girl among the Mundugumor in Papua New Guinea will be different from learning gender socialization in the contemporary United States.
You’re socialized as a girl among the Mundugumor in Papua New Guinea. GO TO 17.
You’re socialized as a girl in the contemporary United States. GO TO 59.
You’re socialized as something different. GO TO 54.
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What happens to your gender identity if you’re a girl being raised primarily by a man? Will your feminine identity be less stable? Will your ego boundaries be more rigid? Though there’s less research about this situation, some studies suggest that, at least for middle-class girls, having an involved father can matter for self-confidence and how heterosexual girls approach sex and dating. For these girls, fathers are important resources that prepare them to resist pressure from boys to have sex before they’re ready, and to place less importance on dating in general. However, this research focused broadly on girls having strong relationships with their fathers. Due to the fact that, across history and in contemporary society, men are less likely to be primary caregivers, we’re still not exactly sure how being taken care of by a man affects feminine gender identity.
Aside from who’s doing the gender socialization, how exactly does it happen? There are different explanations, but many focus on the ways in which you’re rewarded and punished for behaviors that are considered correct or incorrect for the gender you’ve been assigned. What your gender socialization looks like depends on the particular gender norms of your culture. Learning to be a girl among the Mundugumor in Papua New Guinea will be different from learning gender socialization in the contemporary United States.