Neither one nor the other: something of each

A few definitions:

“cisgender” - when your gender identity matches your biological sex (example: you were assigned female at birth and identify as a woman)

“transgender” - when your gender identity does not match your biological sex (example: you were assigned male at birth and identify as a woman)

“nonbinary” (similar terms include “gender nonconforming” or “genderqueer”) - when your gender identification falls somehow outside of or challenges a binary (male/female) conception of gender.

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The first time it happened was in middle school.  I was in eighth grade when I first buzzed my hair, and with that particular indicator of traditional femininity gone, my gender was anyone’s guess.  My body was not all all through puberty, and had been completely swallowed by oversized clothing anyway.  And as I stood in the bathroom, washing my hands, I heard an angry voice from behind me say, “Excuse me, this is a girl’s bathroom!!”

I turned around and said, “I know,” and my voice probably did it—higher than she expected, and the girl immediately lost all the color in her face as she said, “I’m sorry—I thought you were a boy.”  I reassured her that it was okay, an easy mistake.

People get very uncomfortable when they feel they’ve misgendered you, as long as they also assume you’re cisgendered.  Of all the things that people have ever apologized to me for, this is the thing they bend over backwards, start to make excuses, to the fact that I usually end up, as above, reassuring them that it’s okay that they did not immediately know what gender or sex I am.

Which also makes me wonder why people feel like they have to know that information in order to proceed.

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If you ever want to have a conversation with someone about sexist behaviors and encounters, talk to someone who has passed for multiple genders.

I can speak to it a bit—not nearly as experientially or as eloquently as some of my friends who’ve undergone medical transitions.  I can tell you that the amount of harassment I experience vastly depends on what gender I am presenting.  I usually only tend towards a hyper-feminine presentation on particularly important Sundays, which means what I attract, walking around the streets of New York City in a dress early on a Sunday morning, are people still drunk from the night before.  The beauty of this is that one of their first questions is, “Where are you going?” and I respond brightly with, “Church!” and then they have no idea what to do.  I can tell you that I get more respect when assumed male, that in those times I command a “sir”, as opposed to a more feminine presentation which usually gets a “miss” because I look too young to be considered a “ma’am”.  I would tell my family that I was safer in neighborhoods with high crime at night because I could pass for a man, and it was true.

None of these things have been enough to make me change myself or how I act or how I present, except for occasionally changing my clothes after I leave the bar and before heading home late at night.

—

I used to refuse to talk about gender.

My friends REALLY LOVED to talk about gender and I adopted a tone of “oh my god why does all of this have to be about gender all the time seriously??”  I was in a class once where the teacher asked, “Can we have a conversation about romantic love without talking about gender?” and I believe I was the only person in the class who said, “Yes!”  Not denying or erasing gender but not holding up gender as The Primary Difference Between People.

The issue what I didn’t understand the difference between biological sex and gender.  Biological sex has to do with your body, gender has to do with a societal concept based on sex.  “male” and “female” talk about sex, “masculine” and “feminine” are better ways of conceiving gender.  (someone tell this to all form makers in the world, please.)  I was frustrated by the assumption that because I had certain physical characteristics, I was being defined in a certain way.  And I’m perfectly happy to challenge and expand definition, but it wasn’t that I wanted to change how woman was defined, but rather that femininity was of so little interest to me. Same with masculinity.  I wanted to take them on and off at will, mix and match, engage them or disengage with them when I felt like it.

I was never a tomboy, let’s make that clear.  While I spent an extreme amount of my childhood climbing trees, sports were never, and probably never will be, my thing.  I had male and female friends and I barely distinguished between them.  My father tried to call me “his princess”, and I very sternly told him that I was NOT a princess.  I loved princesses, I grew up in the golden days of Disney, but I was not a princess.  Playing pretend with my friends I was sometimes the prince, sometimes the female best friend (not the princess).  Once I remember my brother pulling his shirt up over his head and hooking it around his shoulders, exposing his chest.  I tried to do the same and was told that I couldn’t do that.  I didn’t understand why not—our chests looked exactly the same.  I played with Barbies.  I played video games.  In middle and high school I wore oversized clothing in all black to Make A Statement About The World; I was that kid.  I shaved my head because a kid at my church was diagnosed with cancer and we did a head shaving to show support.  And also because I liked doing things other people wouldn’t do, I liked doing things for shock value, and sometimes I get crazy ideas in my head and have to do them.  I discovered that I actually liked that style, though I grew it out in high school because I wanted to be an actor and thought I needed more flexibility in my physical appearance.  When I was in Ghana one night all the girls in my building got together and painted their nails.  I have always been terrible at nail painting, but I joined in.  I woke up the next day and saw my nails and they looked good but I was filled with this overwhelming feeling of “This is NOT ME” and proceeded, not to find nail polish remover, but to scrape the polish from each nail, leaving them rough and brittle.

The other thing to note is that I grew up in the earlier days of the internet, where we’d all lie about being thirteen and sign up for Neopets and create our own Geocities, Angelfire or Expage masterpieces.  These were the days way before Myspace—forget Facebook.  These were the days where no one used their own name.  The glory day of the screen name.  (My hotmail email address was “bookworm328” and one time on AIM I asked out my best friend whose screen name was LITERALLY “Vegeta22222222222222”.)  I got involved in several online communities and the joy was that you didn’t have to be judged by eternal factors, which for me, was primarily age.  People generally thought I was several years older than I actually was, based on how I presented myself.  But people also didn’t always know what gender I was.  I didn’t particularly present one so people didn’t know and it didn’t matter.

In fact, my closest friends in middle school would call me by my online name (once I had, of course, matured past “bookworm328”).  For a while I had adopted a name that I found out later had been used in a popular Dragonball Z fanfic, so I stopped using the name, and I felt very lost.  I remember telling one of my friends that I felt nameless, because I couldn’t accept the name Colleen.  It’s a lovely name, I love the way it sounds, I love how it ranks on the rarity scale, but I will always have a slightly difficult relationship because it literally means “girl”.  (It’s Irish Gaelic for “girl”.)  And very early on, I remember saying, “I mean, yes, I’m biologically a girl, and I don’t want to be a boy, and I’m not a tomboy, but naming me ‘girl’ isn’t the most accurate thing.”

One of my friends, later on, famously renamed me.  She had been told that I was a brilliant sound designer, was very religious, and that my name was Colleen.  She expected someone with long blonde hair and bangs, and when I showed up at her door, she said, “You’re not Colleen.  I can’t call you Colleen.”  Eventually she nicknamed me “Slats”, a name I still use in parts of my New York theater life.  I was volunteering for a fancy event and, while my badge said, “Colleen”, I knew that the executive director of that organization knew me primarily as Slats, and so I gave my crew a heads up that he might refer to me as Slats.  When he came over to brief us, he said, “And Slats will—“ and when we giggled he said, “I know her name is Colleen but come on, does she seem like a Colleen?”

I considered trying to fully switch over to Slats, but even in the new opportunity that seminary afforded me, I had made too many connections at Montreat as Colleen to switch over to Slats, and also if there was any ever conflict between me and that friend who named me Slats, that’d cause some issues.  I list it as a nickname, though, and there are two people on campus who call me Slats, one of whom is a professor.

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There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

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Once I went to the Popeye’s by my apartment in Brooklyn.  The person who took my order called me “sir”.  The person who gave me my food called me “ma’am”.  That was a good day.

Not too long ago I was at an amusement park, as part of my quest to ride all the coasters before the park closes for the winter.  I’d come from church, where I’d worn a short black dress over a pair of pants.  But, it was cold, so I also wore a hoodie.  While the bottom of the dress could be seen, peeking out for a few inches beyond the bottom of the hoodie, I was overwhelmingly assumed male that day.  I wasn’t binding my chest or anything.  I wish I was somehow that effective on days when I’m TRYING to pass for male, but oh well.

I was standing in line to buy some food, and the person behind the counter beckoned me over with, “Can I help you, sir?”  I lowered my voice a little bit, not straining, but a more masculine tone.  Partially to avoid any issues, partially to take advantage of this opportunity for genderplay.  All was fine until towards the end of the exchange when I saw him read the name on my debit card.  These moments are very subtle, when they happen.  It’s a couple flicks of the eyes, from the card to you, back to the card, as they search for any indicators they can find without being impolite.  I almost felt like I’d been caught.  He didn’t say anything, possibly out of his own embarrassment, and I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t use any polite title for me when he handed me my food.  I continued in the gender presentation I was using, despite, or maybe because of, being caught by my name.  A kind of “you don’t entirely know how to deal with me and that’s okay”.

But, every time I went to the bathroom on that trip, I made sure to unzip my hoodie, showing the dress I was wearing, because I didn’t want to risk bathroom violence.  When you’re in middle school, people are just confused when you seem to be in the “wrong” bathroom.  When you’re older, you’re considered a threat.  I don’t have it the worst because I tend more towards androgyny or neutrality than opposite, and I use the bathroom that aligns with my biological sex.  The hostility I have experienced in public restrooms is nothing compared to the violence that trans people experience.

—

I actually kind of panicked the first time someone asked for my preferred pronouns.  I don’t even want to describe the situation because I’m embarrassed about it and he might read this.  But I panicked a bit and stuttered, partially because I was caught off-guard but partially because I was afraid to deal with that question.  I was afraid to deal with my own conflicting perceptions of gender.  I was happy being an ally and wanted to insist that that was it, that I was not refusing to participate in my own self-examination because I didn’t NEED self-examination because I was a woman right?

Because there is a choice here.  I could choose to deal with these things or I could not.  But the more I didn’t, the more it would grate on me, particularly working so heavily in LGBT advocacy in the church.

So I decided to deal with that.  Which involved a lot of experimentation in both self-perception and in my relationships with others.  My friend Graham, in a phenomenal sermon he co-preached at Middle Collegiate Church, spoke to that moment of transition, of leaving behind one name or set of pronouns but not fully feeling comfortable in the new name or pronouns.  That’s what the personal process of experimentation is, discovering for yourself what feels right and even retraining yourself. I found spaces where I could do that on a smaller scale, and starting this year at the seminary I found myself faced with the choice of how out I was going to be about this.  I chose to be more out than closeted, because I felt the seminary needed me to be.  Did I need to be?  I mean, sure.  It’s incredibly beautiful when people respect how I define myself.  I’d say that’s 20% of the time, though, and that other 80% can really suck when you’ve had conversations about this with people and they still don’t.  It’s not as bad when people don’t know.

There’s no place I’m specifically in the closet right now, but there are some places I’m not going to bring up my gender identity, for various reasons.  I am the most out at the seminary.  Some other places, though, I’m like… hanging out in the open doorway of the closet.  I won’t deny anything if asked, but most people won’t ask, because most people have no conception that there’s anything to ask about.

Being misgendered feels like a scratch.  It’s not awful.  Except when you’re constantly getting scratched in the exact same place, throughout the day, and then you never know which scratch is going to be the one to push you over your breaking point.  I can feel my ears twitch sometimes when it happens.  Do you correct, do you not correct, you don’t want to embarrass people unnecessarily but you do need to help them.

—

In class yesterday, we were reading a text by a female author.  The professor invited comments from both men and women in the class about how her gender did or did not affect the reading of the text.  Some men spoke first, and there were fewer women in class that day than normal, several people were absent.  This professor doesn’t know about my gender identity—very few professors here do, because there’s little opportunity or space to have that conversation, and frankly many of the professors have never encountered non-binary gender identities so that process becomes a longer process of explanation just to be able to be correctly perceived and referred to.  And I was worried that this professor might call on me if there weren’t any women who volunteered to speak, because he knows me, because he knows I generally have opinions, because he knows he can count on me to spark conversation.  And the longer the silence lasted, the more my anxiety grew, because, no, I didn’t feel like it appropriate for me to a speak “as a woman” about this woman author because I wasn’t, but I also didn’t want to correct him on my gender identity which I’ve never spoken to him about before, in front of the whole class.

A woman raised her hand to talk about how empowering it was for her to read this as a woman.  Another woman offered a counterpoint, that she felt some of the language perpetuated a patriarchal narrative with was hard for her to stomach especially coming from another woman.  I was glad they spoke, because I didn’t particularly feel any affinity with the text or not based on gender.  I have reactions to writers who identify in some way as queer in a way that I never have (and many of my friends who identify as women have) with women authors.  I wasn’t the right person to speak on that.

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I don’t have all the gender answers.

Despite apparently being the person to ask about gender on campus, I really don’t have all the answers.  No one does.  People tend to think of gender as a strict binary of male and female but really it’s like a great ball of wibbly-wobbly, gendery-bendery… stuff. Everyone defines their gender differently and people with the same identification have different ideas of what that means.  (Much like every man has a different idea of what it means to be a man and every woman has a different idea of what it means to be a woman.)  Some people put genderqueer into the trans umbrella—I don’t, not for myself, anyway, because there are a lot of issues that trans people have to deal with that I don’t and it’s important for me to acknowledge that privilege.  Everyone has different language, some people are uncomfortable with the use of the word “queer” because of its use as a slur, some of us are reclaiming it.  The best advice I have is to let people define themselves, and respect it.  “What are your preferred pronouns?” is the jackpot question.  It asks for only the information you need to know, aka, how to refer to them, can open up the gender conversation if someone wants to engage, but is not invasive.  It gives them the power to define themselves and shows them that you will respect that.

Things not to do include invalidating someone’s identity.  Ever.  In any way.  “That’s not real” or “but you’ve always been one thing you can’t just switch” or “those pronouns aren’t real” or “singular they is not proper grammar”.  Just don’t do it.  Really.  And yes, the grammar questions are harmful.  Clarifications are not—I’ve had people ask me the proper verb form for my pronouns (singular they, “they are”, not “they is”.  Like the singular you where we say “you are”, not “you is”.  “You” didn’t start off as a singular pronoun either).  That’s cool.  The constant, “but but but grammar” is not.  I’ve felt myself slowly losing patience with this as I go along, and the reason is bothers me is because we made up grammar.  We made up language, and language is an evolving thing, and if language fails to accurately describe things, we can change the language.

One time in first year design class, very very very early on, second week or something, we all left the circle of chairs to look at projects posted on the walls.  I was joining the crowd around one of the pieces, trying to find a place where I could stand without disturbing the circle of chairs.  My teacher saw this, and said to me (this is one of the first things he ever said to me, actually), “They’re the chairs.  We’re the people.  Just move them.”

They’re the words.  We’re the people.  Just change them.

When you go to Webster’s Dictionary as the “be all and end all fact of definition”, you forget that the dictionary was written by people, who all had a context and a point of view.  When you hold up definition and grammar as set things that limit human self-expression, you are prizing the constructs over people’s lived experience and that is an oppressive use of language.

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In worship class recently we were sent, in small groups, to church services outside our own traditions, and then each group gave a presentation about their experience.  One group went to a Russian Orthodox service where they stood for the entire three hours.  They were also separated, so men stood on one side of the room, women stood on the other.  In order to help us more fully experience what they experienced, they told the women to stand on one side of the room and the men to stand on the other side of the room, and had us stand there for the entire presentation.

Theatrically, I love this.  This was smart.  Remember that in undergrad I had assignments like “experience this street corner then make us experience that street corner in this room”.  I am ALL ABOUT the experiential in the classroom.

But I didn’t know where to stand.  I considered grumpily staying on the women’s side, but I didn’t have long to consider because most people don’t have to consider anything in this situation so they were getting to their places rather quickly so I made a choice and I stood in the center aisle.

And I sit in the front row in worship class, so I was standing there front and center, in a spot where no one was “supposed” to be standing.  Most of the class probably had no idea why I was standing there, looking so conspicuous.  I know the professor had no idea what I was doing.  Had I been at that church I would have stood with the women, out of respect for the tradition.  But it didn’t feel right at the seminary.

—

I call myself genderqueer which I like to define as “my gender is not what you think it is”.  No one else uses that definition, but it explains what I like about the word.

Ultimately, gender is a label.  Genderqueer is almost a “don’t label me” label, and there are those people who (rightfully) think it’s absurd to have a label that indicates that I don’t want a label, can’t you just not have a label?  Which ultimately I think is what I’d like but I have been given a label my whole life, a label I am still constantly given, and no matter how I’ve tried to stretch it or adjust it or put it on, it doesn’t fit.  It doesn’t feel right to be called a woman.  And it feels like if I don’t pick my own label I’ll just keep getting “woman” my whole life which just doesn’t feel right.

I subscribe to the view “you get to pick”, but I do think there are reasons we pick what we pick, if we’re honest with ourselves.  There’s a reason I don’t really pick woman or man, and I don’t know if that’s a mental or emotional or even biological reason.  I don’t know where it comes from.  But pick something that feels true to your experience, and if your experience changes, switch it.  Our lives are far more fluid than we like to think.