We’ve all been conditioned to assume other people’s gender. How often do you look at someone and make a snap decision about whether to refer to them as he or she, based solely on appearance? If you were raised in a culture with gender roles (ahem, all of us), probably daily. I’m not trying to condemn anyone — it’s pretty much what’s going to happen in a culture that upholds and reinforces the gender binary. But guess what? There’s a lot more to gender identity than male or female, and anyone is capable of relearning what they’ve been taught. If you’re ready to think more critically about gender, good for you! Now it’s time to navigate a new language, with different terms, new expressions, and pronouns beyond he and she. To help, we talked with human rights activist Bethany C. Meyers about living outside the gender binary.
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BM
Something that’s helpful for people who are just stepping into gender language is to understand there are multiple different segments to gender. To start, there’s gender assignment, which is the gender you’ve been given at birth. The doctor holds you up and looks between your legs and they decide if you are a boy or a girl, based solely on genitalia. That’s what you’re assigned, and that determines a lot of the ways in which you live your life, the way that you grow up, and the way that you’re perceived by the world.
Then there’s gender expression, which is how you personally express yourself: the way that you dress, if you have facial hair, body hair, long hair, short hair, all these different things that we interpret as male or female.
Finally, there’s gender identity. If gender expression is how you outwardly express, then gender identity is how you feel. So that’s like if you feel inside that you are male or female, if you’re trans, if you’re nonbinary, whatever that may be.
I think having those different layers to look at and to understand can help people puzzle-piece it together more easily. So in my case, I was assigned female at birth, I express myself through both feminine and masculine things, and I identify as nonbinary.
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BM
Right now, we’re creating a new language to describe all of this. There is definitely an awakening happening right now, both inside the queer scene and outside of the queer scene. We’re trying to find more ways to describe races, describe genders, describe the way we feel. I personally think what that’s going to lead to is a dismantling of all of it until we end up living in a world, where gender doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who you’re dating or who you’re sleeping with, or what’s in between your legs. It’s about love and what you feel. That’s my ultimate ideal and my ultimate goal, and I think that we are in the process of getting there.
“There are multiple segments to gender.”
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BM
Oftentimes, when people feel so resistant to language it’s because it feels very distant because it’s new, and it’s something that you have to learn. You have to learn how to use they/them pronouns the same way that you have to learn to conjugate verbs in a foreign language. You have to practice.
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I wish more people knew we’re not that sensitive. At the end of the day, effort is everything. When people make the effort, you can tell that they care and that’s what really matters. We learn together, and we figure it out together.
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Interview courtesy of Bethany C. Meyers
