One Saturday afternoon, at my monotonous service job at a New York theater, a man with salt and pepper hair walked up to me. Clutching his plastic cup of beer, he inquired, “Isn’t New York one of those places where they let the men use the ladies’ room?”
It took every ounce of my self control not to clock him on the head with the giant basket full of wine-in-sippy-cups I was holding.
This wasn’t the first time I’d fielded a remark of this sort, nor was it the last. For me it was irritating and uncomfortable, but for members of the trans community these interactions are harmful and potentially dangerous.
In this day and age, media representation of trans and genderqueer people is better than it’s ever been, but we still have such a long way to go. We still have cisgender actors playing transgender characters. Our armed forces are still intolerant of trans people. When older generations are shutting doors on gender nonconformists left and right, it can be difficult to imagine them ever understanding a narrative beyond the hetero, cisgendered normative one that has prevailed in this country for centuries.
This begs the question: in a nation divided on gender, can we bridge the generational gap? I talked with my mom who is a baby boomer — but doesn’t look a day over thirty three — in pursuit of common ground.
Let’s go back to ten years ago. How did you understand gender then?
Mom: Well, there was the binary. There’s male-female, there’s boy stuff-girl stuff. And as a feminist, I never believed that girls couldn’t do some things that boys could do and vice versa. There are no girl careers or boy careers, or girl toys or boy toys, but boy/girl was either/or.
I first became aware of the spectrum when, as you remember, the school I work at accepted two students who were trans.
And who were out.
Who were out, right.
The summer before they were to start [the] ninth grade — I was diversity coordinator, so I had to understand what it meant to be trans. I was given a book that really changed my paradigm completely. It was called “The Transgender Child”, and that’s where I was first introduced to the idea of gender as a spectrum and of gender as being separate from sexuality, as two distinct parts of someone’s identity.
That really made me understand the complexity of it much more than I had before. Before that I understood that people who were transgender were born with the physical sex characteristics, but felt that they were the other gender.Â
Now, twenty years ago you have two young children — you’re forty. How did you understand gender then?
I think I was even more steeped in the stereotypes of looking at it from a binary perspective. I’d say twenty years ago — I’m embarrassed to admit it — but I thought it was a choice or that there was something disturbed about someone who would dress or present as a gender different from their sex. I’ve learned a lot.
How do you identify in terms of gender?
I identify as a cisgender woman.
What does being a woman mean to you?
It’s kind of hard to answer that because I don’t really have anything to compare it to. It’s just [such a] big a part of my identity that it’s hard to kind of tease it apart and isolate it. Can you come back to that one?
Sure. Are there any moments that make you really aware that you’re a woman?
Well, yes. I think within the last couple of years, especially in the political environment that we’re in, it sometimes feels very frustrating to see what happens when men, especially rich old white men have the power.
For me, I think the #MeToo movement made me re-contextualize what being a woman meant, because I lead a very privileged life, a life in which I am safe and accepted by those around me. But it’s scary sometimes, to be a woman.
Yes. I think it’s even scarier to be a young woman. I feel less threatened at times in public than I did when I was younger.
When I was your age and in my thirties and even forties, there were times when I felt inhibited from doing things because I was a woman alone. I couldn’t run by myself at night…I think it is harder for you as a young woman at times.
On the other hand, I think that young women are so much more powerful today than when I was a young woman. I think young women see their power and feel entitled to it much more than when I was young. On the flip side I think, in the culture we’re in, it can be easier to be a woman when it comes to expressing emotion. Being able to understand how we’re feeling and being able to talk about it… and not only to express feelings but to express gender with fewer constrictions.
People who identify as male have a narrower perimeter of what is accepted in terms of gender expression. This is maybe more true for older men in the U.S., but if you’re a man and you wear feminine clothing — that’s not often accepted. Women can dress in a more masculine way and it can be stylish and fashionable and acceptable.
Have you ever questioned your gender?
No.
Have you ever questioned gender itself?
You mean the concept of gender?
Yeah, the concept of gender.
I think I’ve learned a lot more about it than I thought there was to know within the last several years. Like most people, I grew up steeped in the dichotomy of male or female with nothing in between.
Now I’ve learned over the course of the last several years working in a school that’s had to educate ourselves in order to serve our students the way they should be served, that there’s so much in between the two ends of the spectrum and that there’s a whole range of not just identity, but of expression and behavior. That’s how I’ve grown to understand it.
You know, I feel like there was a learning curve for me as well. Binary trans-ness was a concept that was very easy for me to understand. I learned about it in middle school, from “This American Life” actually, where they did an episode on trans kids. The binary is so ingrained in our society that I was able to understand [being] trans as long as it was binary. I remember starting college, and I hate to admit it, but I had trouble grasping the concept of nonbinary identity and they/them pronouns. I was one of those people for a short period of time.
Thankfully, I learned, grown, and evolved. But everything is gendered, everything in our world. Like sunglasses, like school supplies and lotion, you know, razors. Everything that we consume is gendered. And it doesn’t need to be.
The power of the media and advertising hasn’t failed to reach the young kids I work with. I have lunch in [the] Early Childhood [department] on Fridays, and I see the girls’ Hello Kitty lunchboxes and the boys’ superhero lunchboxes and I’m sure that they’re saying to their parents, “I want a pink lunchbox, I want a superhero lunchbox.” So they’re being influenced by the media and advertising say boys should have… and girls should have… even as three and four year-olds. Now what they’re learning from their school is very different, and I can hear their learning and understanding of that in their conversations with each other. For example [I’ve heard kids say to each other],“Girls can do that, too.”
[And the other kid says back], “I know girls can do that, too, I just wanted to play with my friend who happens to be a boy.”
You know what I’m saying? They understand and can articulate that there’s an equality. In fact, just today I heard someone say the name Sal and a girl said “Sal can be a girl’s name or a boy’s name” and another kid said “I have an aunt named Sally,” and someone else said, “My neighbor’s name is Salvador.”
You’ve got two perfect examples there.
So this year in our K-1 class they’ve done a lot of work on identity and gender as part of identity, as a piece of it. The kids all made these really cool life-sized portraits that are hung up all around the balcony in the foyer of the new building. It’s really cool looking. They hung smaller self-portraits on these strings [which represented] the [gender] spectrum and the kids put their self portrait where they felt they identified, closer to boy, closer to girl. Some were right at boy, right at girl, and some were right in the middle.
Their expression was clearly one way or the other, but the way they were feeling was a little less binary. And so they talked to the kids about how that can even change day to day. Some days you might be closer to one side or the other, or not. You might say “every day this is how I feel” and that it’s all okay.
That sounds like a really wonderful project.
It was a really good lesson.
And it’s amazing that they’re learning it early.
Well, they’re learning it whether they’re being explicitly taught or not.
You know, I’ve actually questioned my gender before.
Have you?
I have, yeah. What I ultimately came to realize was that I was confusing gender identity and gender expression because I do tend to present in a more androgynous way.
Our society tells us there’s one specific way to be a woman, and I thought if I didn’t fit into that box, then maybe I wasn’t a woman. And it wasn’t just me. Sometimes other people are confused by me. In my classes in college, I remember there was a man who would just never use any pronouns for me. It was a theater class and he was directing us at one point and he was like, “Okay, Nora’s gonna go over here and Nora’s gonna do this and Nora’s gonna do that,” and I remember thinking, “You are playing a strange game.”
Still, I feel really lucky to have a community of people who I can talk openly with about gender. And at the end of the day, I take a lot of pride in being a queer woman and in being a woman who presents in a way that is not always deemed acceptable and is sometimes frowned upon.
I hope that even if there’s one kid in the afterschool program I work at who is, one day poised with a razor in the shower about to shave their legs and stops and thinks, “Oh wait, I had that one afterschool teacher who didn’t shave her legs. Maybe I don’t have to shave mine.” If I can be that for one kid, I will have done my job.
I think you already have been just by being there for them to see. You’re that window for them.
I’m the window.
And I’m sure there are kids for whom you are a mirror.
I hope so.
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Photos (in order of appearance) by Adyana Covelli, Kate Phillips, and Antonia Adomako.