The Barbies that Leo never played with
Sarah Ditum wrote in the New Statesman today about being genderqueer as a child. No I’m just kidding, she wrote about being a child who thought her favorite cartoon character was a girl.
My reasoning went like this: I am the most important person in the world and a girl, therefore the most important person in my favourite cartoon must also be a girl. And many happy games of Muskehounds were played by me, in my dungarees, oblivious to the unlikelihood of a children’s cartoon having a female lead in the first place, let alone giving that female lead the lovely Juliette as a romantic interest.
Then she realized her mistake, and grew up to be a feminist. I recognize that trajectory. A lot of us do.
But it could all have gone another way. On Radio 4’s iPM this week, the mother of a 10-year-old called Leo explained that one of the reasons she knew her female child must be either a boy or non-binary was that Leo’s fictional idols were always male: Peter Pan, Iron Man, Wolverine.
Another piece of evidence was that Leo prefers pirates over princesses as a birthday party theme. And then there were the Barbies that Leo never played with. All of this, according to Leo’s mum, showed that Leo couldn’t really be a girl but must instead be either “male mind who happened to be born in a female body” or (in the family’s current favoured explanation) “a non-binary mind who happened to be born in a female body.”
Yeah well guess what, we’re all non-binary minds who happen to be born in either a female or a male body.
(Don’t any of these credulous parents remember their own childhoods? Were they all so tranquilly “cis” that these failures to match the stereotypes simply never happened at all? Not a single yearning glance at pirate adventures or tea sets?)
Accounts of trans children consistently return to these stereotypes. Long hair or short hair. Trousers or frocks. Blue or pink. Children’s preferences are filtered through an adult rubric of gender and used to decide what sex they “really” are, despite the fact that we should know by now that sex is nothing more or less than our bodies. Our sex is a fundamental fact of who we are and how we are treated, but its ultimate truth is not decided by where we fall between the rigidly maintained domains of pink and blue. And thank goodness, because as much as I liked being a cartoon dog, I’m glad I know I’m a female human.
And a female human, furthermore, who doesn’t have to comply with the stupid stereotypes, and knows she doesn’t have to.
Laurie Penny said no that’s all wrong on Twitter.
@NewStatesman @sarahditum this is a reductive interpretation of what it means to be genderqueer/non-binary. Yes, lots of reporting is sexist
the more interesting question is why cis writers feel such a need to deny the experience of trans/NB people.
What I want to know is how Laurie Penny thinks she knows what “the experience of trans/NB people” is, and how she thinks she knows it is experience as opposed to just new words people have decided to use. What is experience and what is a label?
Sarah starts off with her own experience, which is valid. But it doesn’t invalidate other experiences.
I consider myself a genderqueer woman. I was never a tomboy growing up. One of my sisters was. She’s cis.
Penny naïvely takes those labels to be transparent and reliable, when they could be just different words to describe exactly what Sarah is talking about. What does she mean by “a genderqueer woman” and what makes her so sure it’s different from “a female human”? How does she know her sister is “cis” and that that word accurately describes anything?
I’d like to know, but I doubt I’ll ever find out.
I’m not confident that anyone can actually explain them to me, but what do “genderqueer” and “non-binary” really mean?
If it’s just “failing to conform to one degree or another to the prevailing gender norms of one’s society,” then we all are genderqueer or non-binary. Sure, you might be more non-binary than me, but that person is less non-binary than me.
My head.
Exactly. That is what they mean, and that is the consequence. It’s such nonsense, yet people like Penny solemnly mouth it as if it were Revealed Truth.
I’m female, and just did ‘three fictional characters that represent you’ on Twitter, and they were all male. Imagine that. It terrifies me sometimes to think that if I were 30-40 years younger I’d be being strongly encouraged to consider medical interventions (I have been mildly encouraged to consider it a couple of times).
I’m a guy who doesn’t really like sports and prefers fashion. Am I genderqueer? Or should not bother with these horseshit terms and just go back to looking up blazers on pinterest?
Gender queer, a.k.a. perfectly normal.
That actually was proposed to me at one time when I was in therapy. I frequently discussed with my therapist the difficulties that had come about from the disconnect in what I was taught (standard feminine women-stay-home-obey-take-care-of-children trope) and what I felt (different than that). To his credit, the minute I explained that what I wanted was to be able to feel better being who I was, and didn’t want to change to be someone else, he backed off and we worked on helping me try to rid my mind of those shards of embedded glass known as societal expectations, so I could be who I was rather than being someone else. He helped me toward my recognition that there is no one right way to be a woman (or a man, for that matter, which I had understood all along).
I grew up playing “boy” parts with my female friends, climbing trees, despising dolls, relating to male characters in books, etc. etc. and never once wanted to be a boy/man. There is nothing remotely “feminine” about me and I never wear dresses/skirts, though I do wear makeup for aesthetic reasons having less to do with sex than personal preference. Thankfully, no one in my life told me I was doing it wrong–except society. I don’t always feel comfortable in my female body and I’m pretty assertive in most situations.
I don’t feel genderqueer, and yet by some definitions its exactly what I am. It’s all bullshit, this idea that what marks you as a man, woman or genderqueer is what societal expectations or stereotypes you adhere to, or don’t.
The imposition of pre-fabricated gender stereotypes is relentless, and seems to have gotten worse over the decades as Consumer Purdah explodes into the culture.
Remember the revelation that intersexed children used to be surgically altered to match whatever gender seemed plausible? Usually with no pretense of consent, and sometimes even without informing the parents.
What kind of mental isolation does it take to produce parents like Leo’s mum ? How pointless has the movement for the rights of women and gender minorities been?
“genderqueer” sounds like a fancy new way of saying “tomboy”, which never struck me as necessarily disparaging to begin with…
Whatever it is, it’s all too common. I grew up in a family where all the men and all but one of the women (me) believed that very thing. I wasn’t seen as “feminine enough” because I was bookish and intelligent, and can’t remember a time that I didn’t plan to go to college. My mother interpreted that through the lens of her own assumptions. She did not assume I would be a man, or wanted to be, or should be (transgender horrified her). She assumed that meant I would be an unhappy, unloved, and useless woman who would not bear children and take care of a man (she’s right about that last; my man treats me like an equal partner).
Most the women I meet (who are almost all college-educated, teaching college themselves) buy into at least a portion of this, at least the women more nurturing and prefer “girly” things part. It’s the old “Men from Mars, Woman from Venus” nonsense, and it is so pervasive that even a strong belief in the equality of women can’t break through the strong socialization to woman/man divides and the innate differences between the sexes.
There is/was a meme going around that went something like ‘Trans and afraid is trans. Trans and unsure is trans. Trans and in denial is trans.’ To people who think these are words of wisdom, saying something like ‘I identify with male characters sometimes, I enjoy some things that our culture codes as ‘for boys only’, I don’t typically wear clothes or adornments that are considered appropriate to women, but I’m not interested in becoming physically male’ means you’re trans and just not willing to acknowledge it.
Which seems to boil down to: Trans* get to determine their own gender identity, and it should be accepted by everyone everywhere. The rest of us? Trans* get to determine our appropriate gender, and if we think otherwise, we are in denial, probably because of our privilege.
Pretty much. (Though the person telling me this (online) may not him/herself have been trans.)