Fausterella

Archive for gender

Father’s Day Feminism

June 16, 2012 / admin / 2 comments

It’s Father’s Day this weekend. It may be a manufactured holiday but I celebrate it anyway, so I’m in a shop trying to find a card for my dad in the three minutes before the toddler starts wanting to get out the buggy and start destroying things.* I scan the shelves, sigh, and give up.

In all the years that I’ve been buying Father’s Day cards for my father, I don’t think I have ever bought one from the Father’s Day section. My father is not into football, beer, fast cars or jokes about bodily functions, so that cuts out 90% of the options. And if I bought him a card with a message – or worse, a poem – about what a great father he is, that would feel weird. Not because he isn’t a great father, but because it doesn’t need saying. Or at least it doesn’t need saying in rhyme.

It’s all very blue.

It’s odd really. In some ways – perhaps as a response to the waning of the industry – there’s now more choice in cards than ever. You can buy serious cards, funny cards, sentimental cards, cards with badges, 3D cards, addressed to Dad, Daddy, Father, Stepdad, Grandad or Great-Grandad. But in other ways, the choice is tellingly limited. Colours, for example. If you can find me a Father’s Day card that’s pink, I’ll buy you a pint of raspberry beer. And if you can find one that references opera or painting, which are my dad’s two major interests, I’ll buy you an entire yard of it, if raspberry beer comes in yards, which I doubt. A card that features musicals or Dickens novels would be even better, since those are interests we have in common. I’ll be over here, holding my breath.

So what do Father’s Day cards tell us about the current perception of masculine parenting, as filtered through the imagination of the card industry? Well, there’s not much about the parenting part. What fathers do, in this version of fatherhood, is play sports with their sons, address their daughters as ‘princess’, and earn the money. It’s a depressing vision. And what are children’s images of their dads? Apparently they’re unshaven, overweight lumps in string vests and boxer shorts. Nothing wrong with being any of those things, but again, it’s a bit limiting. Is the assumption that Father’s Day cards only appeal to an extremely specific and stereotypical working-class market? Why?

And yes, this is a feminist issue, of course it is. The perception of fathers and the perception of mothers are all tied in together, and so are the wider perceptions of What Men Are Like and What Women Are Like. Fix one and you start to fix the other**. In the meantime, I’ve bought my dad a card from the general section, with a picture of a giant rubber duck sailing up the Thames. At least it’s interesting.

*I am unfairly maligning her here, by the way. I let her wander around Boots the other day and she began tidying up the shelves. I should start charging shops to let her in.

**I could also write an entire post about how many of my daughter’s birthday cards I buy from the boys’ section. Because while she likes princesses and fairies, she especially likes football and computer games and Dr Who. This should not be weird to anyone.

Category: feminism, gender, parenthood /

A Genderswitched Anthology

June 11, 2012 / admin / 3 comments

But it isn’t only that Jeeves’s judgment about clothes is infallible, though, of course, that’s really the main thing. The woman knows everything. There was the matter of that tip on the ‘Lincolnshire.’ I forget now how I got it, but it had the aspect of being the real, red-hot tabasco.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, for I’m fond of the woman, and like to do her a good turn when I can, ‘if you want to make a bit of money have something on Wonderchild for the ‘Lincolnshire.’‘

She shook her head.

‘I’d rather not, miss.’

‘But it’s the straight goods. I’m going to put my shirt on her.’

‘I do not recommend it, miss. The animal is not intended to win. Second place is what the stable is after.’

Perfect piffle, I thought, of course. How the deuce could Jeeves know anything about it? Still, you know what happened. Wonderchild led till she was breathing on the wire, and then Banana Fritter came along and nosed her out. I went straight home and rang for Jeeves.

‘After this,’ I said, ‘not another step for me without your advice. From now on consider yourself the brains of the establishment.’

‘Very good, miss. I shall endeavour to give satisfaction.’

As detailed elsewhere, I have been making something of a hobby of taking out-of-copyright classics and mildly desecrating them by swapping all the genders round. Not just the main characters, but everyone in the story down to every ‘Oh God’ becoming ‘Oh Goddess’. It’s a simplistic, binary change. It’s not a rewrite; it doesn’t introduce any new writing into the mix, unlike such mashups as (the surprisingly good) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But it does have the effect of creating – not exactly an alternative history, but an alternative literary past. Where women get to own property and men get to do sewing.

After I self-published Prejudice and Pride last year, I decided my next endeavour would be James Eyre. However, partway through editing it, I started thinking of other books that would be just as interesting to switch, and before long I realised that my next project was going to have to be a collection.

I ended up with a dozen writers ranging from the early 19th to the early 20th century; a chapter or two from each, and I found I had an anthology which gives the sense of an entire alternative literary canon. I ordered them by publication date, with Austen the oldest and Edith Wharton the newest. Here’s a bit from Sensibility and Sense, just after young impetuous Matthew Dashwood has had a fall:

A lady carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round her, was passing up the hill and within a few yards of Matthew, when his accident happened. She put down her gun and ran to his assistance. He had raised himself from the ground, but his foot had been twisted in his fall, and he was scarcely able to stand. The lady offered her services; and perceiving that his modesty declined what his situation rendered necessary, took him up in her arms without farther delay, and carried him down the hill.

And here, a century later, from The Age of Innocence:

He made no answer. His lips trembled into a smile, but the eyes remained distant and serious, as if bent on some ineffable vision. ‘Dear,’ Nuala whispered, pressing him to her: it was borne in on her that the first hours of being engaged, even if spent in a ball-room, had in them something grave and sacramental. What a new life it was going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one’s side!

Virginal boys, chivalrous women and buffonish ladies-about-town advised by their wise ladies’ maid (or gentlewoman’s gentlewoman?) – and we haven’t even touched on The Wonderful Witch of Oz, June the Obscure or The Picture of Daria Gray, which is perhaps my favourite of all.

So if your curiosity is piqued, James Eyre and Other Genderswitched Stories is available in paperback for about £5.99 or on Kindle for about £1.50 depending where you are – links below. If neither works for you and you’d like a .pdf, email me on fausterella at gmail and we can sort something out. In the meantime, have a freebie chapter: Chapter 1 of The Picture of Daria Gray.

And finally, thanks to my father, artist John Harrad, for providing one of his drawings for the cover art, and to James Wallis for providing advice on formatting (though any mistakes remain my own. Or can be blamed on my toddler for climbing on the keyboard at the wrong moment).

Category: books, creation, feminism, gender, genderswitching /

Can men be funny?

May 27, 2012 / admin / 10 comments

It’s a question some people think shouldn’t even be asked. But today we put political correctness aside and have the courage to say openly: are men funny?

Let’s look at the facts.

- Very few men get to become famous comedians. Is that because it’s just too hard for them? Would they be better off going into a different field altogether, such as, I don’t know, football management or beer tasting?

- Abbot and Costello, Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson… Of course it’s unfair to give specific examples and use them as evidence, but still, look at them. Could a gender that produced these people really rise to the heights of comic genius?

Men can certainly laugh. But can they cause it in others?

- Are men disadvantaged when it comes to humour? Through the ages they’ve been seen as the serious sex: hunting, gathering, breadwinning, governing, all these are weighty pursuits. Meanwhile, women have been able to develop their comic muscles through the boredom that comes of being stuck at home with the washing up. They’ve gossiped with other women, perfecting their comic timing and character creation skills, while men exchanged the odd grunted monosyllable as they roamed the plains together looking for things to kill. Clearly there are sound evolutionary reasons for a difference between the sexes in term of joke-making. What would men even have had to joke about, apart from the odd funny-looking mammoth?

- And, of course, it has traditionally been the case that women do the majority of childcare: an excellent source of humour, partly because it allows for a lot of time to think while performing menial tasks, partly because babies and toddlers can be an endless source of amusement, and partly because the stress of bringing up children helps one to develop a robust sense of fun as a defence mechanism. By being on the whole less involved, men miss out on a lot of material for amusing anecdotes.

- It’s not a criticism, and I’m certainly not being sexist here, but perhaps men do rely a bit too much on male gender stereotypes for their humour. Is it necessary to go on so much about being bad at housework and how much women nag? It all starts coming across as a bit woman-hating, to tell the truth. Men should branch out, perhaps explore the areas that women have tended to cover such as physical comedy (like Miranda Hart) or observational humour (like Victoria Wood). Although it’s not really fair to compare, I suppose: because everyone knows women are actually funnier, there’s unfair pressure on men to compete. Often their stand-up gigs have an air of desperation about them.

- Of course, it’s true that other men might find men funny, but that’s a very niche market since a lot of men don’t really watch comedy in the same way that many men don’t read literary novels – they have a preference for, let’s say, less nuanced forms of entertainment such as rugby and fighting. Or whatever it is that men do for fun. I don’t really know. Anyway, like it or not, women control the comedy market, so that’s probably why women do so well as comedians.

Now, I’m bound to get wild accusations of being a man-hater from all this, so let me be perfectly clear: there are plenty of funny men. Like Stephen Fry and Julian Clary. But some heterosexual ones too: Lee Mack, for example, is often very amusing in his own way, and that cute smile of his doesn’t hurt either.

So don’t twist my words to say that I’m dismissing all men as unfunny out of hand. There will always be honourable exceptions. And given time – and perhaps, if I’m allowed to say it, a bit more effort – men may well be able to rise to the heights of Lucille Ball, Sandi Toksvig, Tina Fey and the other mistresses of the craft. We must be patient with our male wannabe comics. They’ll get there.

Women watch comedy more than men. Probably. I haven't actually checked the research.

——-

(If you want to know why this post was made, please google for “can women be funny”)

Category: feminism, gender, see what I did here? /

The Truly Terrible Secret of Being Fat?

December 10, 2011 / admin / 3 comments

There’s an article in the Guardian today by Hopi Sen, the former Labour head of campaigns, about his struggles to lose weight. I liked it for being very honest and not melodramatic.

There’s one thing that struck me, though. He’s writing from his own perspective, of course, but at one point he generalises to say:

I discovered the truly terrible secret of being fat. It doesn’t greatly matter to other people whether or not you are. Given a certain level of talent, charisma or passionate interest, or even without any of these things, other people’s interest in your weight is pretty minimal, unless you’re some sort of celebrity.

Most people are not so superficial as to judge you on your weight alone, nor as interested in your flaws as you might wish. Unless you are the fabled One-Tonne Man, or mind-bogglingly boring, your weight simply cannot be the most interesting thing about you.

All of which may well be true – if you’re male.

Imagine a woman writing those two paragraphs. I can’t.

I have been lucky in that my life has contained very few people who have attacked or mocked me for my weight, but I cannot possibly be ignorant of the enormous cultural pressure for women to be thin.

And, of course, it’s not really true of all men either. But Sen’s statements really underline for me how different the cultural pressures are. It would have been useful if he’d noticed or acknowledged that too.

Category: bodies, feminism, gender /

Gendering Free: Exploring Outside the Binary

November 8, 2011 / admin / No comments

First published at the Huffington Post

So this is how I’ve started to think about gender. It is just a metaphor.

Once upon a time there was a country called Gender. The country consisted mainly of two large cities, one called Male and one called Female. Most people lived in one of the cities, and people who didn’t were frowned on, but sometimes someone would leave one city and go and live in the other, if they were allowed in. Other times, people would visit the other city and come back.

Some people didn’t want to live in the cities at all. They left and went to the space in between, or to a different part of the country altogether, and built their own houses there. They even founded villages with other people who didn’t take to city life.

Some of the people who’d left tried to persuade the city-dwellers that it was OK not to live in a city. Just because most people lived in cities, they argued, it didn’t mean that everyone had to, or that cities were better than villages, any more than villages were better than cities. But most of the city dwellers were very suspicious of the people who’d left, and often mocked them or even hurt them, because they felt that leaving the cities was weird and wrong, even though it wasn’t doing anyone any harm.

(Responsibility for this metaphor rests entirely with me. This metaphor is entirely my own opinion and is not legally binding. Use of this metaphor is at your own risk.)

I’m someone who’s always lived in the city of Female, but I know quite a few people who have gone visiting, or have rejected city life altogether*. They might describe themselves as nonbinary, non-gendered, genderqueer, genderfree, trans, androgynous or all or none of the above or something else entirely. What they have in common is that they can’t or won’t fit into a simple binary definition of male or female.

For example, when I asked some friends to describe their gender in one or two sentences, the answers included:

“Fluid, intermediate, opportunist, and very much free from gender when I am alone. It’s others who gender me. I just do what I can to work that system in work and social situations.” (Ash)

“The flip answer would be something like “Not as simple as you think it is”. The sensible answer would be something like “One of the many datapoints which combine to make the person I am.” (Klepsie)

“Indecisive tomboy feminine-in-some-ways dandy butch genderqueer woman. I think. Today, anyway.” (Yoyo)

“I’ve never really had a gender identity – I can’t decide if it’s more like being ambidextrous, or more like being tone-deaf.” (Ed)

This is obviously a world away from the way many people think about gender. It makes it clear that pink and blue aren’t the only colours in the world – no matter what toy shops may believe. So why do we feel the need to be so rigid about being male or female, and about what that means? Why do we teach young people that they have to fit neatly and naturally into one box or the other in order to be acceptable?

Rose Fox comments:
“A friend of mine has a delightful young child, M, who drew a picture of “mom’s friends” for school. M explained to her fellow classmates that the person with the short hair is Rose, who is a girl, and the person with the long hair is Dave, who is a boy. The five-year-olds had no problem with this. Why should they?

Another friend’s nine-year-old, Y, met me shortly after I’d buzzed off all my hair. “You look like a boy!” Y declared. “Thank you!” I said. Over dinner, I mentioned something I was doing that’s culturally male-coded, and Y exclaimed, “Wow, you really ARE like a boy!” I replied, “That’s right: a boy who likes to knit and wear dresses.” Other than that, gender was not at all a topic of conversation, and Y seemed perfectly comfortable hanging out with me and chatting about subway trains and origami and other items of mutual interest.

…So, no, I don’t think my mere existence poses a danger to children, nor do I think I should somehow be hidden away from them in order to protect their fragile little minds. They don’t know anything about sex or gender until we tell them, so why shouldn’t we tell them the whole story?”

Klepsie agrees: “The vast majority of things in life which are presented dualistically are in fact not so, and children are going to learn about these things one way or another – why not make sure that they get accurate information?”

Giving people more information about how other people work doesn’t spell decadence, doom or the end of civilisation as we know it. Nat of Practical Androgyny says:

It is my experience that children are happily open minded to the idea that someone could be neither [male nor female]. I often turn back the question when kids ask me if I’m a boy or a girl, asking which they think I am and if they think it matters. I’ve yet to receive a negative reaction from doing this. I was once amused to cause a group of children to argue amongst themselves shouting, “He’s a girl! No, she’s a boy!”

And Ed points out that:

“If you made everyone in the world think about their socks for ten minutes, then many people would probably decide to buy more interesting socks. But loads of people would still identify as men or women (and most people would stick with their existing socks).”

All that’s required here, to go back to my original metaphor, is more freedom for people to get out of the city if they want to, take a deep breath, and explore their surroundings.

———————–
I asked my friends other questions about gender too – read the full text here.

*This is mainly because I attend BiCon, the excellent UK annual bisexual convention/conference, which attracts any and all genders.

Category: gender, how people work, huffington /

Gender interviews

November 1, 2011 / admin / No comments

I wrote a post about non-binary gender for the Huffington Post, and as part of that I asked some of my friends some questions. Here are the full questions and answers.

If I asked you to describe your gender in one sentence, what would you write?

f: Pretty neutral and tending to be swayed by the person I’m with (in a range of contexts).

Rose Fox: I am female-bodied and genderqueer, with highly variable gender presentation.

Ash: Fluid, intermediate, opportunist, and very much free from gender when I am alone. It’s others who gender me. I just do what I can to work that system in work and social situations.

Xtina: “I don’t particularly care about my own gender. I can’t really help you out there.”

Klepsie: The flip answer would be something like “Not as simple as you think it is”. The sensible answer would be something like “One of the many datapoints which combine to make the person I am.”

Ed: I’ve never really had a gender identity – I can’t decide if it’s more like being ambidextrous, or more like being tone-deaf.

Yoyo: Indecisive tomboy feminine-in-some-ways dandy butch genderqueer woman. I think. Today, anyway.

What pronouns do you prefer?

f: I’d like simply to have a lot to choose from and a neutral.

Rose Fox: In an ideal world where it wouldn’t make anyone blink, “they” or something else gender-neutral. This isn’t an ideal world, and I’m female-bodied with curves that are difficult to hide, so I tolerate “she/her”. The rare occasion when I’m in full-on male drag is when I’d actually most like a gender-neutral pronoun, since… I don’t quite know how to put this… it feels almost appropriative of both maleness and transness to say that I ever feel male. I have moments of desperately wishing I could have a male body, but it’s not at all the same as being male-identified. That said, I do love being called “sir” by baristas, waiters, and others who glance at me and think I’m a guy, and I love those very few moments when I actually pass as male, just as I love putting on ballgowns and pearls. Would it make my day to hear “They look really stunning in that ballgown”? It sure would.

Ash: I’m not offended by any of them, assuming they are not said with sarcasm, but I feel especially pleased when people use the singular form of “they”.

Xtina: I’m okay with female pronouns, and don’t ask people to use otherwise, really. (I have anxiety.) I prefer the singular “they” and suchlike.

Klepsie: Ones appropriate to my presentation; but if people make genuine (as opposed to deliberate) errors I no longer get bent out of shape.

Ed: I don’t mind. It’s nice to get something other than the usual (which, for me, is ‘she’).

Yoyo: “She”/”her” – but am also perfectly happy with “zie”/”hir” or similar.

Do you think most people do have a binary gender, or is it just that most people never think about it?

f: I think most people do. But I also think some of us don’t think about the weird dissonance we feel because we assume others feel it to until it becomes clear they don’t.

Rose Fox: I have no idea and try not to speculate about this sort of thing. I wouldn’t want anyone speculating about my “real” gender or suggesting that I just haven’t thought hard enough about how to define myself, after all.

Ash: I don’t know. It seems to me like a matter of social conditioning (no more or less than whatever social conditioning lead me to be genderqueer – I’m not claiming to be “right” in any sense) but a lot of trans people, and indeed cis people who bother to think about such things, say they have an innate sense of their gender and their social conditioning may only have confused them because it was in such contrast. I’m not in any position to argue with their reality. If that’s how it is for most people, I accept it.

Xtina: I think gender is so embedded in everything that it’s super-hard to figure out where everything comes from and how everything goes. I mean, we start using gender-specific language when children are born, for heaven’s sake. “Oh, how [strong|sweet] little [Johnny|Suzie] is!”, respectively. It’s unsurprising that most people don’t think of it; it’s hard to tell if we are really mostly binary-gendered, or if we’re just really really good at enforcing gender.

Klepsie: I think most people do, but I also think that there are more people who don’t than currently are doing anything about it.

Ed: A bit of both – if everyone thought about it more, more people would probably identify in more complex ways. If you made everyone in the world think about their socks for ten minutes, then many people would probably decide to buy more interesting socks. But loads of people would still identify as men or women (and most people would stick with their existing socks).

Yoyo: Yes and no… I think there’s a lot more fuzzy grey area than most people stop to think about, and once I’d stopped to think about it, it became a whole lot more fuzzy. I think the majority of people fall comfortably into one of the two most well-known ballparks, though, if you’ll excuse the terrible mixture of metaphors.

Do you prefer to date people who are also non-binary-gendered, or doesn’t it matter?

f: Yes.

Rose Fox: Anyone I date needs to not just accept but enjoy all my different ways of presenting myself. They need to be comfortable telling me that my tie is crooked and that my earrings don’t really go with that dress–and, for that matter, that my tie doesn’t really go with that dress. I have found a very few, very wonderful binary-gendered people who are completely cool with this and I adore them to bits. My husband is male-bodied and male-identified and has been immensely supportive and loving without pause or question for ten years and counting.

Anyone I have a sexual relationship with needs to be bisexual/pansexual/queer, because my sense of my own sex and gender shift from day to day and of course that affects how I feel about my body and how I want others to treat my body. It’s not necessary that they also be genderqueer or gender-variant, though that can be a lot of fun!

That said, my relationships with gender-variant people are tremendously important to me not least because they know something of what it’s like to think and feel the way I do. Empathy based on shared experience is a fundamentally different thing from supportive acceptance. So I certainly seek out other genderqueer and gender-variant people to become friends with, and sometimes those friendships lead to romantic and/or sexual relationships, as friendships do.

Ash: It doesn’t matter, as long as there’s no pressure to always embody the gender expression(s) they find most attractive. That makes me feel objectified. I’d take someone like that as a lover if they paid me but I’d never let it progress into a relationship.

Xtina: It doesn’t… entirely… matter to me. I don’t tend to date people who are extremely on either end of an axis (or whatever the fuck that thing is called — pole? side? whatever), because I am already extremist cat, and cannot deal with more of the same. So I’m unlikely to date someone who is Really Feminine or Really Masculine, but I’m also unlikely to date a fierce anarcho-capitalist, so.

(The ellipses were because I’m starting to be uninterested in dating men. Cultural programming isn’t entirely their fault, but I’m kind of tired of dealing with it.)

Klepsie: Yes, I do prefer to date people who are non-binary-gendered, because they understand me better (and vice versa). However, I would like this to be less of a factor, because I’d like there to be general understanding of gender as an issue to the point where it becomes a non-issue.

Ed: I don’t mind. I quite fancy people who do their gender a bit differently.

Yoyo: It doesn’t matter. I prefer to date people who get it, but that’s not necessarily linked to their own gender identity.

Is your gender important to you? Or does it matter more to other people than it does to you?

f: Matters more to others, and matters to me mostly because of the assumptions people make.

Rose Fox: It’s important to me that I be able to express my gender and genderqueerness. I would probably feel bereft if I woke up one day and realized my gender had settled down at some point on the conventionally acceptable female-presenting end of the spectrum. So in that sense, yes, it’s very important to me and it’s a significant part of my identity. On the other hand, if I weren’t such a statistical outlier, and if the culture I live in were generally more accepting of gender-variant people, I don’t know that I would feel quite as strongly about it. I’ve had to fight for it and that necessarily creates a degree of attachment.

Ash: Ooh. Both I guess, depending on the circumstances. It’s more other people and organisations who can’t deal with me as I am who cause me the biggest problems. But I’d be lying if I didn’t have confused days where I wonder how much compromise I’m prepared to make to keep a friendship, work contract, etc.

Xtina: It matters more to others than to me. I’m more -neutral than -queer. (And more gender-apathetic than anything, when it comes to myself.)

Klepsie: It is less important to me than at any previous point in my life, and I’m happy with that.

Have you had to deal with a lot of hassle because of your gender/lack of gender? E.g. harassment, bureaucracy, bewilderment?

Ash: All of those, and physical assault, and death threats… not on a regular basis but enough to know it’s pretty much passive suicide entering certain places at certain times of day.

Rose Fox: I’ve never been outright hassled, because I live in New York City and people here pretty much don’t blink at anything. I’ve confused some people, and I’ve gotten occasional comments that I found borderline offensive but were probably just an expression of the other person’s confusion and discomfort. Bureaucracy hasn’t been an issue because I haven’t made it an issue, other than yelling at a lot of companies that require me to label myself “male” or “female” when filling out forms.

When I started getting my hair buzzed, I actually found that the incidence of street harassment dropped dramatically from the days when I was presenting as a conventionally attractive woman. Women get catcalled all the time because a lot of men treat a presentation of femininity as a statement of sexual availability. As soon as I dispensed with my hair – my most feminine accessory – I became insufficiently feminine/female to be of interest to those men.

That said, in most ways it’s very easy for me to pass as conventionally female, and I’m not particularly flamboyant, so I don’t get a lot of hassle for being a weirdo or a pervert. If anything has driven me to be more outrageous and overtly outside of the binary, it’s a desire to support and show solidarity for other genderqueers whose preferred presentation draws a lot of negative attention. That’s one of the reasons I buzzed my hair. I don’t want to pass as conventionally female. I want other queer and genderqueer people to know I’m “family”, and I want to diversify the world that binary-gendered people see, to make it harder for them to pretend we don’t exist or are all dangerous loonies.

Xtina: Not particularly. I am still female-bodied, and I use the female pronouns (as noted above), and I tend to at least try to “pass”, as it were, when I go on job interviews. When it comes to personal stuff (rather than work stuff), I mostly get “huh. okay.”.

Of course, I live in Portland, OR, USA, land of the weird, so.

Klepsie: I have been very fortunate in undergoing very little “hassle” (as you put it) because of my status. I don’t know whether this is simple good fortune on my part, or whether my general approach of “matter of factness” is a winning stratagem, or whether my being white and middle class has saved me from the troubles that some people experience, or what. I am quite aware that many others, especially those older than me, have had a much tougher time of things, and I have nothing but respect for those who’ve had a harder row to hoe than I have.

Ed: People get flustered when they identify me as a chap and then correct themselves – I used to say ‘Don’t worry, I don’t mind,’ but that didn’t seem to make people feel less embarrassed!

I get some abuse, but I suspect that’s because I look ‘like a lesbian’ (I wear men’s clothes a lot) – or, indeed, like a gay man (I kiss my boyfriend when I’m looking like a bloke).

I’m very open about it, but because people have rarely heard anything similar, it’s hard to ‘come out’. That’s good and bad – it’s more likely to be brushed off as a joke, but if people listen, I get more chance to explain how it works for me.

Yoyo: Some; not a lot. A little bit of hassle based on my appearance, and occasional embarrassment from strangers who read me as male and then realise that wasn’t quite right. Some bewilderment from acquaintances who live in the mainstream.

Do you think it would damage children to be made aware that some people are not uncomplicatedly male or female?

f: No.

Rose Fox: A friend of mine has a delightful young child, M, who drew a picture of “mom’s friends” for school. M explained to her fellow classmates that the person with the short hair is Rose, who is a girl, and the person with the long hair is Dave, who is a boy. The five-year-olds had no problem with this. Why should they?

A third friend introduced me to a genderqueer teen, A, who was delighted to meet a genderqueer adult. Gender-variant kids desperately need role models and mentors because we’re almost completely absent from media and cultural narratives. I was very pleased to be able to give A advice and reassurance.

So no, of course I don’t think my mere existence poses a danger to children, nor do I think I should somehow be hidden away from them in order to protect their fragile little minds. They don’t know anything about sex or gender until we tell them, so why shouldn’t we tell them the whole story? All this “protect the children” nonsense is really about protecting adults who are uncomfortable admitting to the existence of anything outside the gender binary.

Ash: So far, I think my son had FAR worse things to worry about such as various family members who sometomes use drugs and alcohol to excess. Maybe he will come to me troubled and/or with lots of questions in future. Can’t see that education could fail to help foster a more peaceful and understanding community in future.

Xtina: Do I think it would damage children to be made aware that sometimes, life is not straightforward black/white easy-peasy simple times always and forever? No, I do not.

Although I kind of want to see something based on that now.

P: It’s time I told you something — people, sometimes, get divorced.
C: *head explodes*
P: And some people aren’t cat or dog people!
C: *meltdown*
P: Finally… I saved this for last, because this is huge, but… not everyone works in the corporate world.
C: *expires*

Good lord, anyhow.

Klepsie: No more than it would damage them to know that some people are mixed race, or bisexual. The vast majority of things in life which are presented dualistically are in fact not so, and children are going to learn about these things one way or another — why not make sure that they get accurate information instead of having to rely on playground gossip?

Ed: I think it would be pretty reassuring – loads of kids worry about not being a girl/boy in the right way, not fitting in. Knowing there’s lots of ways of being a man, or a woman, or neither, would be a relief, I think.

Yoyo: No.

If you could make one gender-related change in the world, what would it be?

f: Voices. To render voices gender neutral somehow.

Rose Fox: I would love to see unisex single-occupancy restrooms become ubiquitous in public places. Unisex multiple-occupancy restrooms are great in theory but problematic in reality; our culture just isn’t ready for cis, trans, and genderqueer people of all genders and sexes to share that type of intimate space. Unfortunately, when the only options are male multiple-occupancy and female multiple-occupancy restrooms, that means that trans and genderqueer people have literally nowhere safe to go. And there is nothing more pointlessly binary-enforcing than two identical single-occupancy restrooms, one labeled M and the other labeled W. Unisex single-occupancy restrooms remove the concern of sharing intimate space with someone of a different sex or gender, and don’t require those of us outside the binary to label ourselves just so we can pee.

Ash: The US passport agency should catch up with Australia and allow the x (=other/not declared) gender on its passports.

Xtina: I’d make it less important, across the board.

Klepsie: I really don’t know, other that to say something vague and woolly like “People should get over it”.

Yoyo: (I suspect the answer to this would be different on different days and at different times…) Removal of gender markers from e.g. passports, driving licences, and doing away with the (internet age) assumption that everybody has to have a title – and making a gender-neutral title freely available to all who wanted to use it.

(You can find more information about all this, and further links, at Practical Androgny. I will soon be following up this article with another one looking in more depth at these issues, including an interview with Nat Titman of Practical Androgny.)

Category: gender, how people work, sexuality /