) Try not to assume someone’s gender identity only based on appearance or behavior. Call others what they want to be called, identify them as they want to be identified, and find that out by either asking or listening attentively for their own cues. Many women don’t like being called “Miss, Ladies, Honey, Ma’am or Tranny.” Some people don’t dig gender identifiers at all, and just like to be called their names. When in doubt as to someone’s gender or how someone prefers to ID, just ask.
2) Turn the switch in your brain that makes you say things like “All men are jerks,” or “Women just want money,” or “She looks/acts/sounds like a boy.” There are NO sex or gender absolutes, and the less we fall for or support them, the less power they have to keep everybody down.
3) Nix staring and whispering. When someone looks or acts in a way which you think is incongruent to their sex or gender, check yourself out. Think about WHY you think that way, where those ideas come from, and if it’s reasonable or positive. Take a few minutes to wonder how much the criteria you’re thinking about even matters. It’s okay to be curious or confused and to ask respectful questions. What’s not cool is making someone else feel unsafe, insulted or demeaned because you’re uncomfortable with your own lack of knowledge or understanding (or insecure about your own gender identity).
4) Be a gender outlaw. If there’s something in your school that is unfairly closed to a given sex, gender or gender identity, that is based on gender appearance, that excludes others on the basis of sex or gender when it just isn’t reasonable or fair, question it. If in your relationships, you have a partner who is clearly holding you to a gender role or status that isn’t okay with you, or which you aren’t interested in meeting, speak up. Challenge sex and gender issues directly when need be, and gather your forces to do so. Write letters. Engage discussion and awareness. Be visible. Don’t accept gender norms, roles or status at face value (even if they are just fine for you): question.
5) Work on tolerance and compassion. You don’t have to agree with someone or understand where they’re at to be kind, humane, accepting and fair. Imagine yourself walking a mile in another person’s shoes, including the blisters you’d wind up with in their heels.
We’re all lucky, in that some aspects of gender have become less binary, less limiting, and less strictly enforced than they have been though much of our known history, even though we still have a long way to go. Gendernormativity is becoming more of a choice than a mandate for many. Even though, as a culture, our progress is slow, people coming of age now are often given more latitude when it comes to gender identity -- and what’s expected due to assigned sex -- than in generations before. Just a hundred years ago, for instance, women who did something as simple and surface as wearing pants or cut their hair short, or who made bigger strides, like directly challenging higher male gender status could nearly always find themselves victims of intense violence, social isolation or even execution.
We could certainly still stand a lot of improvements. Women are still greatly oppressed as a class – in every way from limitations to how we present to our victimization as a group via rape -- based on nothing but sex and gender. Men who have shrugged off or challenged their gender roles or presentation are still often met with disdain, aggression and violence, and many men have been reared to instigate violence or aggression to uphold a gendered status quo. Many trans gender, trans sexual, genderqueer or crossdressing people, of all genders, are isolated, cast out of homes and communities, abused, sexually and/or physically assaulted and even murdered based on nothing but their gender identity and appearance.
A lot of us would be safer, happier, healthier and more whole if sex and gender -- and very rigid ideas about them -- weren’t such big deals in the world. But for now, it still is to a great majority of people, and a very limiting view of sex and gender is accepted, supported and encouraged in numerous ways. So, gender identity tends to be pretty important, as does the sex we’re born with or assigned. Our challenges based on those things may be great or small, but a rare few of us will have none.
Like anything else, it is only one part of you, a whole person with a million facets. How you identify and what genitalia or chromosomes you were born with, gets to be only as important and relevant to YOU, alone, as you want it to be. Even if you can’t identify and present exactly – or at all - like you’d like to out and about yet, what goes on in your head is all yours, the relationships you’re in and the roles you accept and live out in them is up to you, and the way you choose to define yourself – and the latitude you give others around you in their gender identities -- is your choice.
Written by Heather Corinna at Scarleteen.com
