gender – The Establishment https://theestablishment.co Mon, 22 Apr 2019 20:17:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1.1 https://theestablishment.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/cropped-EST_stamp_socialmedia_600x600-32x32.jpg gender – The Establishment https://theestablishment.co 32 32 The Power Of Claiming A Name For Oneself https://theestablishment.co/the-power-of-claiming-a-name-for-oneself/ Mon, 08 Apr 2019 13:14:47 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=12095 Read more]]> For nonbinary and trans folks, stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge.

When I shook Leigh’s hand, the first thing I thought was, “He seems wise.” Maybe because he looked poised next to my gracelessness. Shaking his hand was an ordeal. In one hand, I carried a folder containing the interview prompt questions and a consent form for him to sign. In the other, an old school tape recorder—and a pen and a pad, in case the tape recorder finally succumbed to old age.

The first thing I asked was whether Leigh would be okay with my recording our interview. I wanted to have an authentic conversation instead of frantically scrawling everything he said.

He paused. Then he said, “Sure, but I didn’t write any prompts for myself, so I might struggle to articulate some things.” It confirmed my initial perception of him as precise, careful to say exactly what he meant.   

I was interviewing Leigh for The Story of My Name Project, which I coordinated from 2014-2015. The project began as part of my job at FreeState Justice, a nonprofit offering free legal services to low-income LGBTQ Marylanders—including name change services. The call for participants was vague; it asked transgender or non-binary people who had gotten legal name changes if they wanted to participate in a project that celebrated their lives. If they were interested, they could email me.  

And emails came. From people who had gotten legal name changes, but also from people who hadn’t. A transgender woman who kept her birth name. A trans man who had been going by a chosen name for years, but never legally changed it. The mother of a transgender teenage boy.

Each one taught me a little more about the inherent power in claiming a name.

Leigh is transmasculine; he injects testosterone into his muscles so that his appearance will align with his gender. But when he got his name changed to Leigh, he chose the female spelling.

“The name Leigh was traditionally male, until it recently gained popularity as the female spelling of Lee—the female spelling of a gender-neutral name,” he said. “I like how that experience of gender plays out in myself, because I’m read as male almost 100% of the time, but I didn’t want to go with a name that’s unequivocally male.”

At the time we spoke, Leigh was learning not to knee-jerk reject any femininity within himself.

“I associated such negative things with my femininity: times that I had been victimized, times that I had been abused, times that I had been made to feel not good enough. But that’s not all there is to being female. Why should my femininity be something I hate or fear, something I exorcise from my being completely?… I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.”

Leigh named himself after a woman who was important to him when he was young, whose strength he admired. He said she had been able to help other people, even while she herself was struggling.  

I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.
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This name has a history of being used as both a girl’s and a boy’s name; Leigh spells it the now-female way—but when one says it out loud, the difference is undetectable. It also has personal significance. To capture such complexity in a name feels like an art.

Monica had known she was trans since she was a child in the ’50s—before there was a word for it. In the ’60s, she ran away from home. “I needed rebellion,” she said. “I never would have transitioned without rebellion. It’s how I found out there was something besides what I was taught growing up, in church and at home.”

For many years, Monica was trying to name what she’d always known on a non-verbal level. But she kept going back into hiding. She tried to be “the perfect man” in her romantic relationships. She got involved with drinking and drugs.

When she got sober, she did so in a men’s recovery house. While there, she kept hearing the name “Monica” in her head. She thought pushing it away would help her stop drinking and drugging; if she could just make it go away, all her problems would go away, too. But sobriety was what brought her out of hiding.

“What I didn’t know was that the more I worked on myself, the more I would find out about my true self,” she said. “In recovery, they talk about peeling away the layers. I was peeling away the layers.”

One night out after the recovery house, her friend made her up. When the friend asked what she thought, her answer was one word: Monica.

When you call a person’s name, you conjure them; their essence is supposed to be contained in that one word. Of the dozens of people I interviewed, no story is the same. For some, like Leigh, the process of choosing a name was more cerebral. Others tried on a few names until one felt right—a more intuitive decision. Another person, Angela, chose her name because as a kid she drew pictures of angels for her mom: “They were the one feminine memory from my pre-transition self.”

But one thing was consistent: Most people knew themselves enough to know exactly why their name fit. Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge. Perhaps in some cases the process of choosing a name helped people understand themselves. In others, choosing a name was a chance to honor what they already knew—an articulation of self.

In Iceland, they generally use a formula to name babies. Siblings’ last names can be different based on their assigned gender. If a baby is assigned female at birth, for instance, her last name is her dad’s name, followed by the word “daughter.” Both first and last names are usually gendered. Names must only contain letters from the Icelandic alphabet.

The Icelandic Naming Committee approves or denies names, and determines whether given names not used before in Iceland are acceptable. If the naming committee allows it, transgender people—if their gender falls within the binary—can change their name to be more aligned with their gender.  

Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge.
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In America, parents can give their kid any name. Often, they pick a name before they even meet the baby—let alone know who the baby will be. Grey, who I interviewed for the project, said, “You need something to be called when you’re born—but it’s a big deal for your parents to pick this thing that is going to be such an important part of your life and your identity. It’s a big thing for someone else to decide for you.”

I was given the name “Tyler” at birth, but I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect name. I’m non-binary, assigned female at birth, and was always put on boys’ little league teams as a kid based on the name alone. In early 2017, after years of wearing binders, I got top surgery. Hair grows on my cheeks, neck, and chest. This is from Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and “abnormally high”—according to one endocrinologist—testosterone levels.

Thirteen years ago, I stopped taking the spironolactone (anti-androgen medication) I was prescribed. I like the ritual of shaving my beard in front of the mirror. I liked when a cis male former roommate and I shared a shaving ritual. I like choosing how much facial hair I have at a given time.

I buy most shirts in the boys’ section. Usually when I go to a fancy event, I wear a suit and tie. But I like feeling pretty. I most often wear women’s pants. Occasionally I wear eyeliner, and even more occasionally, mascara. I feel like a slightly femme man, who is a woman, but not. Not all non-binary people think about or express their gender this way—there’s a huge, wonderful range.

Most strangers who aren’t aware of the nuance call me “ma’am.” Most queer strangers ask my pronouns.

“Tyler” fits. Even the cadence of my name, the way it sounds when it comes out of peoples’ mouths—like some people said during their interviews, just feels right.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right. All I did was emerge from the womb.  

Before I entered undergrad, my school “mistakenly” roomed me with a boy. My senior year, when my school actually did begin to offer gender-neutral housing, a cis male friend and I lived together for a few months. But then residential life attempted to take it back, insisting they’d thought I was a boy because of my name. They’d been confused. I thought: “Me too.”

Transgender women are mistaken for boys at birth; they are usually given boys’ names and put on boys’ teams. The fact that something feels off about this is often informative.

Mine is the opposite story, in a way. People would always apologize for putting me with the “wrong” roommate or on the “wrong” team. But I’m not sure what the wrong team would mean.

While working on The Story of My Name Project, I got an email from a trans woman named Tyler, who had been given the name at birth and chosen to keep it. She didn’t know if her story was appropriate for the project, but when she was coming out as trans, she wished she’d seen a story about keeping a name that fit. 

Along with sharing my excitement about my connection to her story, I told her that it was very appropriate; the project had evolved to become more about the importance of having a name that fits, not solely about legal name changes. Hers fit, even if she didn’t have to change it to get there.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right.
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I came to learn the many, layered reasons Tyler’s name resonated. Growing up, Tyler’s parents had been horribly abusive. She said they used the name Tyler as code for “be a man.” But Tyler had known and admired a girl with the name since middle school; she said she would often look at her and think, “If I were a woman, my name would still be Tyler.”

It was not up to Tyler’s abusive parents to decide what the name meant. As she put it, “The name belongs to me, and it always will.”

In Ancient Egypt, people kept their real name secret; it was believed that if someone learned your real name, they’d have power over you. A version of this belief exists in many cultures, legends, and traditions—throughout the world and throughout history.

In the story of Rumplestiltskin, Rumplestiltskin is defeated when the miller’s daughter learns his real name. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is careful not to reveal his true name to the giant, calling himself a word that means “nobody.” Later, when he does reveal his name, it plays a role in his downfall.

There is a belief in the western world, though it’s hard to pinpoint where it originated, that if you can name something, it loses power over you.

If knowing a true name is powerful, then naming yourself is giving yourself a kind of power. Not the kind of legends, where your power lies in having a leg up over someone else. The empowerment in saying, “This is me.”

]]> Sometimes Real Education Doesn’t Start At Home https://theestablishment.co/sometimes-real-education-doesnt-start-at-home/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 10:43:50 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=11732 Read more]]> With little more than 20 students—comprised almost entirely of trans children and volunteering teachers—the Chilean school, Escuela Amaranta Gomez, aims to unite a society that is tearing itself apart.

The chairs in the classroom of the Escuela Amaranta Gomez are organized in a circle. The crowd of children takes a while to simmer down, their ages ranging from 7 to 16. Tall, thin, and beautiful, Miss Antonia Jorquera presides before them, wearing a crown and a sash. She waves to the girls, who look at her agape as if she was a Disney princess. Antonia talks about her childhood in the Chilean south, where there was little to no television. A time when she adored pink.

“Like me!” a girl answers.
Antonia laughs. “I’d also put on my mom’s high heels,” she continues.
“Did you do it in hiding?” another girl asks.
“I’d wear them daily! But secretly, otherwise my mom would berate me.”
“My mom lets me,” another girl brags.
“My mom would also let me,” another voice joins.

The side conversation goes on for a while—the classroom brims with the noise of the children. Teacher Romina intervenes: “Could somebody in the classroom define what is a ‘Miss’?”

“A beautiful woman, a diva!” answer some girls. “It appears in the video games, whenever I miss a shot,” jokes a boy.

“What could you say about being a Miss, Antonia?”

“To be a Miss means a lot of things,” she answers, ever smiling, waving her hand softly as she speaks. “It doesn’t have anything to do with beauty standards. It’s about socializing things that are not shown—it is to represent the people who live in hiding.”

“No to fracking!” says a hand drawn poster on the wall. Below, a grieving Earth is filled with iron towers. “I’m radical because I want happiness for everybody,” quotes another. It shows legendary Communist politician and Pinochet critic Gladys Marín. In a corner, messages dangle from a string: “It doesn’t matter what you decide to do. Just make sure you’re happy”; “What’s broken can be forged once again”; “If it doesn’t hurt you, let live”;“It’s not a wrong body, it is mine, it belongs to me, it identifies me and I LOVE IT.”

To be a 'Miss' means a lot of things. It is to represent the people who live in hiding.
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Jorquera is Miss Chile Trans, and minutes later will be joined by Fernanda Muñoz, Chile’s representative for Miss Trans Star International. They’re there to talk to the children as a part of their Civil Formation Workshop, one of the landmark classes in this trans feminist school. Profe Romina and most of the children here are transgender.

The school was created a little less than a year ago by Evelyn Silva and Ximena Maturana, both mothers of trans girls. It is a project of Silva’s Selenna Foundation, which protects the rights of transgender children in Chile. Wherever there’s a trans child, Selenna is there—usually using the school structures—offering speeches and workshops aimed at normalizing transgender and non-binary identities. (Just this past November, Chilean President President Sebastián Piñera signed a measure—the Gender Identity Law—which allows transgender youth over 14 to legally change their names, and guarantees their right to be officially addressed according to their true gender.)

Affirmations abound in the classroom of Escuela Amaranta Gomez.

“We have 50 families, more or less, with whom we work actively,” says Maturana. “This a communal work. It’s child, family and school. The foundation establishes strong bonds with whatever schools its children are in.”

Maturana says she didn’t realize the radical immersion she would undergo when she found herself fully committed to the cause. She began her journey by participating with her daughter—who is now a teenager—wherever and whenever she could, always following Silva’s lead. But eventually, she got asked to give talks by herself; she compares her change of worldview with her daughter’s transformation.

“I realized that my life before my daughter’s transition wasn’t going to be the same after,” she says. “I suddenly felt super involved with this social change—I realized that I could not only support my child, but also other children who needed it and whose parents didn’t have the time to do it.”

As a parent, Maturana recognizes the difficulty of accepting the reality that once your child begins to transition, their life in school could inevitably become more difficult before becoming better. There’s a lot of self convincing: It’s gonna be alright, they’re going to respect my kid.

“The thing is, children remember,” Maturana explained to me. “They’ve got enough consciousness to say, ‘you were previously this and now you’re that’. Then it’s the trans child’s turn to do the explaining. Over and over. And over again. It’s much easier when you start from scratch with your chosen name than having to struggle with an old version of yourself.”

Inevitably, violence kicks in.

While it manifests in all kinds of ways, Maturana says school violence often emerges through everyday actions, like when she used to pick up her daughter at school and every parent’s eyes were fixed on her as she came out. “‘I’m okay with you, but don’t mess with my child’, their eyes said. Before you realize it your kid ends up being the only one not invited to birthday parties. It’s sad that everybody’s in the birthday picture except for your child.”

Usually, before trans children officially enter any school, their parents speak with the headmaster in order to explain the need for the Foundation to preemptively address the students to raise awareness and respect through speeches.“The first thing the director often says is, ‘But the parents, they won’t understand’… I don’t believe any excuse to be valid, but there’s no one who knows parents better than the directors,” Maturana says.

Parents are—painfully—often the first to object to the speeches the Selenna Foundation gives. “Why should my child learn this stuff?” they complain. Maturana says she finds this rather ironic, considering that the Foundation has received calls from schools regarding “concerned” parents who’ve reported that their children are dating a trans classmate.

“I think parents can be even more screwed up than the kids,” Ximena posits.

The Misses’ visit became venting ground for both them and the children on their experiences in the school system. A trans girl of around ten years talked about the time a teacher shoved his foot into her path, tripping her onto the ground. Another trans girl remembers a series of violent bullying episodes. A gay friend of hers was beaten and bullied so much he hid in the bathroom and broke his finger punching the wall out of rage; she described a second episode where she lashed out and beat up a girl after being bullied herself.

Before you realize it your kid ends up being the only one not invited to birthday parties. It’s sad that everybody’s in the birthday picture except for your child.
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Teacher Romina intervenes quickly at the tail end of these recollections to remind the children that violence isn’t the answer, which was quickly objected to by another student. She felt it is only natural to lash out when you suffer from so much rage.

Romina knows something about pent up anger. A history teacher and trans activist, she put her pedagogy studies on hold for ten years in order to transit successfully. She finally got her degree two years ago, just after she got to change her name. Around the time of our conversation, she was going to retrieve her diploma with her new name as well.

Parents often recognize that their child can’t handle being in the same school they previously attended while they’re also in transition, so they take them out and let their children stay home. Some keep up by taking standardized tests, but others don’t even do that. “There’s a kid here [In the Amaranta Gómez School] who’s 16 and is about to enter fifth grade,” says Maturana. For years the child would constantly change schools, but only ever lasted a few months before giving up.

The Escuela Amaranta Gomez exists to put an end to that stigma, shame, and derailing of education. Classes start at 9 AM and end around 2:15 PM. Maturana arrives earlier because one of the girls arrives around 7:15, the only time her parents can drop her off. “The idea is to be as uncomplicated as possible so the parents can come drop off their kids. There can’t be any excuse for them not to come.”

With 22 children, the classes are divided in two, according to age. The day is divided in three modules and, according to the day they may have language, math, science, history or English. They also have workshops, which can range from art therapy and yoga, to programming and the aforementioned Civil Formation.

“The focus of the Civil Formation Workshop is more about participation rather than political alphabetization, like knowing about institutions, voting or traditional politics,” says Profe Pedro, a cis male history teacher for the teenage group. The Workshop is the only time all of the students are together. “It’s more focused on community participation, where the kids recognize themselves as political subjects in daily life and get to see school as a space for democracy.”

The Escuela Amaranta Gomez exists to put an end to the stigma, shame, and derailing of education that transphobia can cause.
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Such a radical vision of school also means democratizing issues such as content. What do the kids want to learn? When I was interviewing Pedro, they were divided into groups of three tasked with drawing a comic on a different moment in colonial history.

Maturana discussed the merits of a roleplaying game the teens created:

“They made their own characters and through some chips and dice, they created a parallel world in which they travel through time. If you’re in a determinate space and time, in order to go further you have to get to know that place. So you have to learn if there’s a president, an emperor, what did they eat, how did they dress, if it was cold, whatever. They end up learning about science, history, human traits like empathy and responsibility, because your character also has qualities and defects.”

While trans children are the majority of the student population, the school’s not exclusive to them. It has also received cis children who have had problems with bullying or are sent by government support programs. The only requirement is for the parents to agree with the school’s priority: trans issues. Maturana talks about a cis boy who had suffered from a lot of bullying and had entered just three days ago: “His mom was telling me that yesterday afternoon he was feeling badly and that the only thing he wanted was to come here.”

There’s a reason it’s called Escuela, and not Colegio, two words often looked as synonyms in Spanish. If it’s Colegio, it means it has the approval of the Education Ministry. The approval of the Education Ministry means it fulfills certain requirements, which Silva and Maturana aren’t sure if they want to accomplish or abide by yet.

There’s no way a formal school would allow a child to enter just two weeks before closing the year. The Amaranta Gómez School does. The Education Ministry allows some flexibility in applying a different grading system rather than the traditional Chilean 1.0 to 7.0 (worst to best), but that’s not enough in this school. “It’s not like you’ve got to study for a test and that’s the all reflection of what you’ve learned,” says Maturana. “It doesn’t have to be a 7.0. It can simply be an accomplishment, a congratulations, and that’s something we don’t wanna lose.”

The environment is celebrated alongside Communist politician and Pinochet critic Gladys Marín.

Profe Romina believes the Ministry’s focus doesn’t represent an adequate type of education. “It doesn’t give the teachers enough space to do the work we should really do, which is more oriented towards creation and not just obeying rules.”

Nevertheless, the Minister, Marcela Cubillos, actually came once and handed out a prize. “I forgot the name,” says Maturana, “but it was like ‘best relationship among the students.'” She still seems puzzled by the visit and no wonder, given that Cubillos is so conservative that when she was a Congresswoman, she voted against the legalization of divorce in 2004.

What’s most important about being recognized by the Ministry, however, is that the school receives financing by the State. As of this moment, all eight teachers are volunteers, and the children’s families don’t have to pay anything. Meanwhile, they’ve found financing through two international NGOs, one from the United States, and another from Switzerland. Now they’re going to apply to the International Trans Fund.

Such a radical vision of school also means democratizing issues such as content. What do the kids want to learn?
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“What do you think about the people that criticize you because ‘that’s not how God made you’?” a boy asks Jorquera. “Actually, I’m a strong believer,” she answers. “Thanks to God I’ve achieved many things. I would say those people are wrong because he made us all according to his image.”

“When we went to the Civil Registry, there were a lot of religioses screaming at us,” remembers a girl, speaking of the bigoted protesters using their gender inclusive neutral form created by the trans community. As young as she is, she shows empathy even for those who are not willing to grant her the same.

Maturana doesn’t remember the episode in the Civil Registry, but she does remember a time they had a field trip to Congress. It was the first time protesters aimed their ire at the children. Religioses.

“That had never happened,” said Maturana, “and it was super uncomfortable, but the kids were very brave.” Usually it’s the parents who get all the bullets. They’re the degenerates, they’re the ones distorting the children. A news crew came along with the Minister during her visit, after which “a lot of people started writing on our page. Really nasty stuff.”

Luckily, there haven’t been any physical attacks, and Maturana believes the neighborhood has something to do with it. They feel safe there. Unlike other quarters in Santiago, this one boasts a hot history. The last bastion of social housing in Chile, the National Stadium nearby—created during the ‘60s—had served as a camp for torture and extermination during the days after the coup.

It was also there where, years later, a dozen freedom fighters in hiding were slaughtered by dictatorship soldiers. After the damages suffered during the 2010 earthquake, the neighborhood organized itself into an assembly that still exists today and offers services such as cleaning brigades, newsletters, recreational activities, and a mobile library.

For the moment, though, they’re still uneasy about posting their exact address.

Like so many places in the world, Chile finds itself in the crosshairs of two colliding forces. On one side, not only did our own Daniela Vega became the first trans person to present in the 2018 Academy Awards, but the film she starred in, A Fantastic Woman, won the Best Foreign Film Category. After a heavy debate, the Gender Identity Law was also approved, a process that until this legislation passed, could take years. (You can thank the 14 years limit to the concerned conservatives who, as always, issued their “think of the children” shields).

On the other hand, you’ll still find fascism. Pinochet fanboy, José Antonio Kast, lost his presidential run in 2017 with 7% of the votes and a unified base in the ultra right, among them evangelicals and neo nazis. A few months ago, the conservatives rallied against the “Gender Ideology”, a term they use to demonize anything related to gender equality, from feminism to trans rights. The gathering amassed thousands and featured quite a few gems: neo-nazi splinter groups going out of their way to beat up kids who were dancing to K-Pop, the police force—famous for gassing any kind of protest prowled the forefront stick in hand like guard dogs—and President Sebastian Piñera’s government defended the conservative demonstrators’ “freedom of speech.”

The jury’s still out on how long this hate-wave is going to last, but Romina is sincere with the teenagers. Given the life she’s had, her insight is useful, especially taking into account that at some point, they’re going to apply to colleges and jobs. “I believe they should learn to defend themselves. Not to make them rioters, but to make them aware that there is violence outside—it would be an irresponsibility not to convey that knowledge.”

Regarding the smaller children, Romina offers another strategy. “Personally, I just try to allow them to live their childhood. I don’t talk politics, gender or anything. As kids, they’re worried about the next Disney film, about Christmas, about screaming, playing and jumping.”

That’s Maturana’s strategy as well: “What they need the most is a mother’s complicity.”

As the Civil Formation Workshop was ending, and the younger children who had succumbed to uneasiness and had started slipping under the tables, sliding over the floor and playing, came back to their seats, Miss Fernanda provided some final words of advice: “What’s important is that we don’t put a shell on against the world.”

]]> Three Lessons For Men From The Bad, Weird Year Of 2018 https://theestablishment.co/three-lessons-for-men-from-the-bad-weird-year-of-2018/ Fri, 25 Jan 2019 19:15:48 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=11764 Read more]]> 2018 was a year.


It jumped out of 2017 and scurried into the darkest corners. It latched on to satire’s face, only to burst from satire’s chest with the most ludicrous headlines. Overall, it was a bad, weird year, but men —  especially — did not come off looking good in 2018, and it’s time to examine what lessons we should glean from these past 12 months to make our collective futures less bad and weird…maybe even better.

#1 Words vs. Conduct: Louis C.K.

In response to displaying his penis at non-consenting women, comedian Louis C.K. took time off to allegedly reconsider himself. “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” he said in November 2017. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”  

That lasted all of five minutes.

Mr. C.K. was back on stage just a few months later, and was recently recorded dressing up his white guy whines as comedy, including his chagrin when people with Down syndrome asked the word ‘r***rded’ not be used anymore (he felt his freedom was invaded); he mocked black and Asian men, berated trans people, and belittled the students of the Parkland shooting who survived a horrific massacre.

The question is not whether he’s allowed to say these things – as far as I know, he’s not been charged – but whether he should.

Despite admitting to the sexual misconduct, C.K.’s response showed no development. Indeed, all his response did was cast off the veneer of the self-reflecting white guy that made him important to many of us: His insights into white privilege and being a (cishet) white man, for example, were poignant, challenging other white people.

His admitting of sexual misconduct should have been the catalyst for Mr. C.K. to use those assets he had cultivated to grow and to teach, as we know he’s capable of doing. Instead, Mr. C.K. simply became another angry, entitled white man, who viewed criticism as intolerance, progress as immorality and bigotry as entertainment.

The Lesson

People reveal their true selves at their lowest point, not at the height of comfort; it’s easy to be the good guy when you have nothing to lose, easy to use the right words to convey a belief. It’s much harder to demonstrate those beliefs via conduct. Men can easily learn to say the right words and support the right values without having to put any actual effort into themselves. This is why we have many cases of so-called good guys revealing the cracks made by patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

No one is claiming to be a good person you need to be perfect. Perfection is unattainable. Instead, part of what makes a good person is owning up to failure and mistakes, improving yourself and encouraging others like you to do the same, working toward never committing those same failings again. Being good is a verb, not a state anyone reaches.

Having cultivated the image of a woke white man, with an audience receptive to his moral challenges, Mr. C.K. shrugged it all off and swam with the status quo; it was flowing in his preferred direction.

Being good is a verb, not a state anyone reaches.
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Mr. C.K. is an interesting example because he shows what men should avoid but also—in his past—how men can be better: He used his privilege to speak out and challenge those like him. We need more men holding mirrors and fewer holding hammers.

#2 Listening to Women: Aziz Ansari

Aziz Ansari was accused by a woman of being incredibly inappropriate toward her, making her feel unsafe, and repeatedly ignoring her rejections of his come-ons. Ansari and the woman went on a date, back to his place, then he became increasingly aggressive: he kissed, fondled and so on, almost as soon as she was inside. As babe.net put it: “Throughout the course of her short time in the apartment, she says she used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was.” After eventually leaving, she was in distress. When she messaged him some time later, he conveyed surprise and an apology.

In response to the whole story, many men pointed to the Weinsteins and Spaceys of the world as “actually” deserving condemnation, for their aggressive, criminal assaults – Ansari’s conduct was handwaved away as confusion, miscommunication, or somewhat fictional. He thought it was consensual and even apologized!

For many, Ansari’s bonafides as an outspoken feminist male comedian created a large fortress from such accusations: How could someone like that, who writes and thinks and discusses the nuances of dating, who proudly and vocally supports feminism, be at fault in this? Maybe this young woman has just reacted poorly!

What’s more important than the story however are the responses.

The Lesson

It’s easy for men to speak out against the criminal acts of Weinstein and Spacey. It’s far harder to reflect on Ansari’s situation. Yet, it’s precisely that the incident isn’t an obviously criminal one that makes it more troublesome. The reality is: More men have been an Ansari than a Weinstein.  

The chances are, if you’re a cis man that’s dated or dates women, you’ve done something to make a woman uncomfortable in your attempt to be sexy.

You can prevent a lot of that by reading and listening to women. Take a mild example, as noted by the brilliant Madeleine Holden: men who never ask their dates questions. As Holden notes, the men say the dates went amazingly, while the women note how these same men didn’t ask a single question about their dates. It wasn’t so much a date as an unprofessional, free therapy session. If men are not even reading the room when it comes to basic conversations in public, is it any wonder, in their—arguably—aggressively horny states, that men will not read or consider women’s comfort levels in private? Men can and must be better than this.

If you’re a cis man that’s dated or dates women, chances are you’ve done something to make a woman uncomfortable in your attempt to be sexy.
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Patriarchy has taught men to equate our experience with truth, relegating other experiences to the language of sensitivity or ridiculousness. Instead of viewing women’s experiences as additional windows on the same experience, we dismiss those experiences as mere finger paintings.

Listen to women, not just in the immediate sense, but as an active part of your life — seek out their perspectives, pay attention, and read the goddamn room. (Also, you’re an adult in control of your conduct — you can’t use horniness as an excuse.)

#3 Opposing Nazis Works: Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer

If you’re worried only bad men had a good year, take some comfort: Both Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer had a terrible year.

Yiannopoulos, it was recently revealed, is almost $2 million in debt, and has lost a great deal of the fame he’d cultivated from the poisoned Nazi garden he had managed. He was banned from Patreon, Venmo, and PayPal. He also dropped his lawsuit against former publisher Simon & Schuster, after they refused to publish his (terrible) book.  

Spencer didn’t fare better. He cancelled his speaking tour due to low audience attendance but high numbers of anti-fascist protestors. Spencer’s wife filed for divorce, alleging he is a domestic abuser. He has had to rethink his strategy for spreading white supremacy and pro-fascism to young men – he’s been trying desperately not to say he’s losing to passionate anti-fascist protestors.

The Lesson

Actively not listening to fascists and Nazis works! As Rachel Kraus notes:


“The fact that Yiannopoulos has found his reach and influence so depleted that he can’t get new gigs and takes to comments on Facebook to complain shows the real world effect that de-platforming a toxic public figure can actually have.”

Spencer has stopped trying to lecture at universities because it’s far too troublesome, and his audience’s passion doesn’t match the numbers or organizational skills of his opponents.

We do not need to give equal time under the guise of fairness. Not all political issues are conceptual discussions about the best economic theory; some involve the lived experiences and social aspects of particular groups.

Nazis and pro-fascists aren’t giving alternative opinions about race or gender, they’re spreading hatred. They dress their supremacy under the guise of civil rights, complaining that their power is being taken from them, while at the same time saying those taking away power are beneath them. They never quite square this Swastika but it’s not about logic: hatred can’t be debunked, it can only be opposed.  

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to bring logic to a Klan meetup. Listen to those affected by hate groups, work toward actively opposing those wanting to spread Nazism and fascism and don’t give them even an inch. Men, in particular, are the leaders of these movements and it should be other men—especially white men—who speak out loudly, passionately and with full voice to their emotions.

Hatred can’t be debunked, it can only be opposed.
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The Nazi’s call for debate is a cheatcode to get you to debate people’s humanity, dragging you down into the racist trenches. Stay out, stay firm, yell, oppose, bring your placards, report abuse. We need more men showing emotion for good causes rather than ridiculous/racist/sexist ones.

]]> Pink As F*ck: The Colorful History Of A Sex Symbol   https://theestablishment.co/pink-as-fck-the-colorful-history-of-a-sex-symbol/ Mon, 15 Oct 2018 07:45:16 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=10480 Read more]]> Pink is an outrageous color.

Liberated from the “feminine care” aisle, you take a little pink box into the bathroom. You remove the device from its packaging, urinate, and wait for those tell-tale pink lines. As an expectant parent, everyone will wonder, girl or boy? Pink or blue? Because when it comes to the color pink, whether used traditionally, humorously, or ironically, pink remains emblematic of the double X chromosome. It is associated with babies, little girls, femininity, softness, and superficiality; hence the “feminine care” aisle’s pink palette.

Pink is associated with genitals, sexual intercourse, and sexuality. While the pink packaging on that pregnancy test don’t tell you if you are having a boy or a girl, they do tell you one thing: pink is a physically charged color. Pink is a sex symbol.

In the 1980s, with the advent of prenatal testing, parents quickly became fixated on their child’s sex (or really, their genitalia), and this foreknowledge fueled existing sexist color coding. In 1985, Luvs introduced pink and blue disposable diapers that featured slightly different padding for “boys” (in-front) and “girls” (in the middle). Prior to 1900, most infants in the United States wore white clothing, regardless of sex. These white ensembles signified a child’s age, while colorful accents were often based off of a child’s physical characteristics—brunettes wore pink; blondes dressed up in blue.

With the twentieth century’s infatuation with colorful baby clothes, the emphasis shifted from age to sex. As the blogger “Distracted Daddy” wrote in a post on his daughter’s all pink outfits, “hopefully once she is no longer a baby and any stranger can guess her gender at forty yards away, we can move on from this color.”

Pink, as a color in fashion, first appeared in the French royal court of the eighteenth century. From the Palace of Versailles this color spread throughout the Western World and was regarded not as an infantile color, but a “courtly and royal” pigment appropriate for clothing elite men and women alike. Ascending the throne in 1715, Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, cultivated pink as her favorite color.

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour in the act of “pinking.”

In her portrait by François Boucher, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, is at her toilette in the act of “pinking.” This facial flush, usually associated with sexual arousal or intense emotion is, however, painted on—Madame Pompadour’s compact of blush and powdered brush reveal that her appearance is cosmetic and manufactured, however desirable. 

Following the synthetic production of very bright, almost garish pinks, pink became a color at home in both “high” and “low” culture. Costume designers throughout the 1950s and ‘60s utilized pink in musicals as chromatic eye-candy, outfitting the sexually confident female or traditionally feminine woman in pink clothing.

The 1957 romantic comedy Funny Face, features a stalwart magazine editor directing “women everywhere to ‘think pink.’” In addition to handbags and shampoo, “think pink’s” song and dance sequence included an homage to Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), with a slow-motion shot of a girl on a swing dressed head-to-toe in—you guessed it, pink.

A positive pink theory was studied in the Baker-Miller experiment. Baker-Miller, a shade of pink created by mixing red and white, was painted in the holding cells of naval facilities in 1970 by the biosocial researcher Alexander Schauss. Also known as “Drunk Tank Pink,” the experiment showed that the color lowered prisoners’ heart rates and decreased physical aggression. Centuries later, scientists and social historians remain obsessed with pink’s capacity to activate the human psyche, or produce psycho-emotional responses.

Also known as “Drunk Tank Pink,” the experiment showed that the color lowered prisoners’ heart rates and decreased physical aggression.
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Hollywood’s infatuation with the potentiality of technicolor was one part of larger national sentiment; America was “in the pink” with postwar prosperity, giddy that the war was over and ready for some serious shopping. The same year Funny Face premiered on the silver screen, Hollywood’s bombshell, Jayne Mansfield, purchased “the Pink Palace,” complete with a ceiling-to-floor pink shag carpeted bathroom. But Mansfield wasn’t the only celebrity being enveloped in pink. Singer, songwriter, and actor, Elvis Presley, not only wore pink suits, jackets, and trousers, he also drove a pink car and slept in a pink bedroom.

Sex icons, both male and female, were channeling pink’s promise of prosperity and positivity. When asked why pink, Mansfield reflected, “because it made me happy.” This “pink effect” materialized at a party celebrating Mansfield’s pink swimming pool, in which she filled it to the brim with pink champagne.

Within that year, An Affair to Remember starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr premiered in cinemas with a pink opening title sequence and a featured specialty cocktail: pink champagne. The film begins with Grant and Kerr on a cruise from Europe to New York, and despite being engaged to other people, they decide to have an affair on board with all the characteristics of pink champagne, “fun, light, and enjoyable.”

But even with the nation’s collective intoxication with this rosy hue, pink was, and remains, a divisive color with contentiousness, coloring newspapers throughout the mid-twentieth century.

In 1950, Helen Gahagan Douglas, a blue-blooded Broadway star turned politician, would go head-to-head against Richard Nixon for a seat on the U.S. senate in the state of California. During the political campaign—due to her close ties with communist sympathizers within the movie-industry—a San Jose newspaper reported that if Douglas was not exactly red, she was “decidedly pink.” Pinko quickly became a noun for someone soft on communism.

Throughout the election, Nixon’s team printed damaging propaganda in opposition to Douglas on pink paper. These “pink sheets,” along with Los Angeles Daily News’ printing of the nickname “Pink Lady,” colored Douglas’ political career. Tricky Dicky famously declared that Douglas was, “pink right down to her underwear;” his off-color comment positioned pink as both a political pejorative (communist sympathizer) and illicitly sexual.

In 1991, Susan G. Komen handed out pink ribbons to runners in the New York City Survivor Race. The ribbon, designed by Evelyn Lauder of the Estée Lauder Companies in collaboration with an editor at Self magazine, was influenced by HIV and AIDS organizations’ red ribbon. That same year, 1991, the Visual AIDS Artists’ Caucus created “The Ribbon Project.”

The artist driven organization had tried to stay away from colors traditionally associated with homosexuality, but in Germany, male sex workers were referred to as Rosarote, which literally translates to “pink-red.” This colorful nickname was also the inspiration behind the pink triangle assigned to gay and lesbian inmates in concentration camps during World War II.

Over the years, the connotation of pink with the sexually transgressive has been reclaimed by activists (queer and straight), into a symbol of resistance. Yet, Gayle Sulik, author of Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health sees pink as a reinforcer of  “the notion that breast cancer is a danger only because it threatens women’s sexual identity and men’s access to their breasts.” 

Breast cancer’s pink ribbon not only defines it as a woman’s disease, it emphasizes notions of traditional femininity as it relates to the female body, specifically the nipples on a white human female’s breasts. As Gemma Tarlach writes, “nowhere, perhaps aside from Hooters, is the equation more ingrained than in the breast cancer industry…woman=breast=pink.”  

This juxtaposition of pink’s association with heightened femininity and underlying sexuality was embraced in “millennial pink.” The early 2000s saw female empowerment books employ pink in their cover art at around the same moment women were being taught to wear pink on Wednesdays.

This “ironic pink” attempted to extract the sugary sweetness of Malibu Barbie and replace it with the girlboss attitude of the Plastics from Mean Girls. Despite the rebrand, millennial pink’s not-for-little girls-ness carries with it the color’s storied sexual past.

On January 21st, 2017, 500,000 men and women, young and old, walked in The Women’s March on Washington, D.C. Throughout the day, news channels and social media sites broadcasted images showcasing the diversity of the march’s participants, but the photos also captured the movement’s clearest demarcation of empowerment and protest: the color pink. The leading article of clothing that contributed to this “pink effect” was the Pussyhat.

When asked about the pussy hat’s signature color, co-founders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, said, “wearing pink together is a powerful statement that we are unapologetically feminine and we unapologetically stand for women’s rights.” But not everyone felt the choice of pink, or the “pussy hat,” was the ideal icon for the Women’s March. Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak wrote a public address to her “sisters,” stating, that the “cute and fun” color threatened to trivialize women’s issues

In an effort to belittle President Donald Trump’s proposed Southern border wall, a group of interns at the architecture film Estudio 3.14 created 3D renderings of the wall. The “Prison-Wall Project,” allowed the public to see just what Mr. Trump’s “big,” “beautiful,” and “physical,” wall might look like. The designers’ concept? A bright pink wall that doubles as a prison.

As the President stated that Mexico will pay for the wall, the designers’ model pays homage to the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, most known for his pink-colored geometric buildings throughout Mexico. Barragán once referred to his pink floorplans as “architectural stripteases.” At Estudio 3.14, the pink design is not only nationalistic, its color undresses the American dream. It is the embodiment of Trump’s wall in all “its gorgeous perversity.”  

Estudio 3.14 created 3D renderings of Trump’s imagined wall in their “Prison-Wall Project.”

Pink, as a wall, or a mark on a pregnancy test, is a contentious line carrying alone within it the diacritical distinction pink/blue. Girl or boy. As the beauty expert Eve Nelson wrote in her novel, Take It From Eve, “while it’s true that she [a female infant] cannot actively appreciate a pink ribbon…these things set the mood.” This belief in the formation of a feminine personality from early childhood exposure to pink, was condemned throughout the uni-sex era of the 1970s by mothers who viewed the gendered clothing of their early twentieth century upbringing through the lens of second-wave feminism. Despite these anti-pink crusaders, pink’s stereotypes remain salient, even when contradicted in practice.

The Pink Tax, named after the color of products that are marketed to attract women and girls, refers to the price difference for female-targeted commodities compared to male or “gender-neutral” goods. On average, products for women or girls cost seven percent more than comparable products for men and boys. The Bic pen “For Her” is just one example of this prevailing sexist consumer culture. Designed for women, with a comfortable rubber grip for “female hands,” the pen demonstrates pink’s complex cultural history built, in large part on, sexual biology.

This “pink double-standard” found adoring fans in the American animated television series Jem and the Holograms. By day, Jerrica Benton was the owner of a music company, by night, she was Jem, lead singer of the Holograms. On television and on toy shelves, Jerrica and Jem wore pink.

Within the show’s narrative, pink linked Jerrica and Jem’s secret identities, and boldly showed pink as a color like none other—an innocent, yet honest representation of pink’s dualism in art, fashion, cosmetics, politics and pop culture. This notion of a color having two sides (natural and unnatural, virginal and virile, or male and female) was parodied in a 2005 Robot Chicken episode where Jem, dressed in her iconic pink wrap dress, is caught using a urinal in the men’s restroom.

As a color frequently found in flowers, alcohol and sweets, quartz crystals, a setting sunscape, genitalia, skin tones and discoloration, pink’s connotations take inspiration and innuendos from the physical world—it is a color with physicality. The use of pink as a current political statement in response to our contemporary government or as the latest trend, draws upon the versatility of pink’s associations, it’s intrinsic connection to the human condition, and its ability to arouse our sense of smell, alter our outlook, tantalize our taste buds, evoke our childhoods, or elicit a sense of touch.

It’s truly an outrageous color.

]]> Hip Science Media Has A Gender Essentialism Problem https://theestablishment.co/hip-science-media-has-a-gender-essentialism-problem/ Wed, 03 Oct 2018 08:39:09 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8384 Read more]]> When we conflate things like “sperm” with “men,” we erase the trans community, and perpetuate bad science.

This September, GQ ran a piece on the topic of lowering sperm counts, with the rather foreboding title “Sperm Count Zero.” Throughout the piece the author, Daniel Noah Halpern, asks scientists to take study data about sperm counts, and extrapolate on what that means for men. He starts the piece with a basic premise, which is that men are by definition people who make sperm, and that gender essentialism infects everything about the piece.

Reading it reminded me that while understanding science is deeply and profoundly important, after our schooling is done most of us are getting our scientific knowledge not from scientists, but from science journalists. And Mr. Halpern over at GQ isn’t the only journalist filling his articles with gender essentialism. In fact, science media as a whole has a massive gender essentialism problem. This problem is just as prevalent in new media as it is in old, just as likely to show up in hip publications as it is anywhere else, and it has massive implications for how we understand sex and gender as a society.

The conflation of sex and gender, and the use of gender essentialism and straight up sexism in science writing, contribute to an overall culture in which it’s easy for people to assume that sperm is what makes a man, that vaginas are what make a woman, and that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Mixing gender essentialism with science seems to give gender essentialism more weight and credibility, allowing bigoted ideas about gender to be assumed factual without being challenged.

Gender essentialism is so ingrained in the way that we talk about science, that unless you are looking for it, it can be difficult to even notice. It shows up in nature documentaries, when narrators often use heavily gendered language to describe animal behavior (I love David Attenborough, but any time he narrates animal courtship it is cringeworthy). There’s also more going on here than mere sexism.

Mixing gender essentialism with science seems to give gender essentialism more weight and credibility
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To understand the sex and gender issues at play in science media, it’s important to understand the terms. In general, biological sex is defined by a combination of physical traits such as chromosomes, genitals, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics (this includes stuff like whether or not you have a beard). Those traits are used to lump a person or animal into a category such as male, female, or intersex. Gender is the social and cultural stuff which is often, but not always, tied to sex. The simplified version of sex and gender that most of us learn when we start to dig into gender issues is that sex is physical, but gender is a social construct, or “sex is what’s between your legs, gender is what’s in your heart.” The truth turns out to be a little more complicated than that. For years transgender activists have been pointing out that the way we define sex is also socially constructed, and as this twitter thread from a scientist so beautifully illustrated, the two primary categories of male and female are hardly the best way to classify people.

All of this is easy to mix up with the scientific concept of sexual reproduction, which is just a form of reproduction that uses two cells in order to make a new organism. Many organisms reproduce sexually in ways that look nothing like the “two sexes” system we’ve come to expect. For instance, many slugs all carry both male and female sex cells, and during mating both fertilize each other. However, when humans look at the animal world, we seem to have a tendency to interpret in a way that makes it a little more human, and therefore a little more gendered. I can’t overstate enough that this is humans adding our own cultural biases to data that doesn’t usually conform to them. Scientists themselves are not immune to this, but science writers, in their attempt to make the data relatable and interesting to the public, take it even further. As journalists, they have a responsibility to convey the information accurately, and to attempt to check their biases at the door, but often they conflate sex and gender, fall back on sexist assumptions about sex and gender, and simplify the concept of sex so much as to make it inaccurate.

When writers (and to some extent, scientists themselves) reach for metaphors to describe scientific information, they often rest on gendered assumptions. The way we talk about sperm is a classic example of that; we tend to see sperm as aggressive and masculine when they are, in fact, just tiny cells. We also tend to assume that sperm production is for men, when in fact not all men make sperm, and not all people who make sperm are men. The popular science blog IFL Science ran an article called “Why Do Men Exist” which, no surprise here, was specifically asking about cisgender sperm producing men. Other winning IFL headlines include things like “Suffering From Man-Flu Not Attractive, Science Confirms.” As a transgender man and a science nerd, reading these articles can be anything from mildly amusing to incredibly irritating, as most of the time, I am not included in their definition of “man.”

When humans look at the animal world, we seem to have a tendency to interpret in a way that makes it a little more human, and therefore a little more gendered
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This gender essentialism can be found at all levels of science reporting. The WNYC show Radiolab has won a National Academies Communication Award “for their investigative use of radio to make science accessible to broad audiences,” and its unique approach to sharing scientific knowledge has made it a great way for people, myself included, to get interested in science as adults. Given its position as a cool, weird science radio show and podcast, you might expect a deeper and more accurate look at issues of biological sex, and a more progressive look at gender issues. However, in their 2008 episode about sperm, called simply Sperm, co-host Robert Krulwich referred to spermatozoa as “the wiggly cells that, along with male pattern baldness, seems to describe everything you need to know about being a man.” One would think that equating a single cell with the entire concept of manhood would be offensive not only to trans men, but to everyone, but the theme persisted throughout the entire episode.

I was cautiously optimistic when Radiolab announced a new series of episodes about reproduction and the human body, all under the heading of “Gonads.” The six episodes promised in-depth reporting by producer Molly Webster, and the name suggested some acknowledgement of the ambiguity between the sexes. The first episode, sadly, offered more of the same simplification and essentialism I’d come to expect. When describing the primordial journey of the cells of the gonads themselves, there was never any indication that there was any possible outcome other than testicles, which would make the fetus a boy, or ovaries, which would make it a girl. Even though intersex conditions are about as common as red hair, and have everything to do with how a fetus develops, they were left out of the conversation of fetal development. Later in the series, when, in all fairness, a slightly more nuanced and complex take was given, sex was still presented as a binary, and it was still taken for granted that simply having ovaries would make one identify as a girl. One episode featured a lengthy interview with Dana Zzyym, who is intersex, and that interview was handled with sensitivity… but that didn’t undo the rampant gender essentialism of the series as a whole. In a separate episode, chromosomal variations outside of XX and XY were casually referred to as “aberrations.”

Science writers often have to simplify big complex issues like sex and gender in order to explain the science to the general public. The problem is that these omissions, sexist metaphors, and gender essentialist assumptions are everywhere and they add up. And they do not happen in a vacuum. Right now transgender people are more visible than possibly ever before, but with that visibility comes a very vocal and often dangerous opposition. Transphobes want to be able to point to science and say “look, there are only two sexes!” and “having a penis makes you a boy, that’s just how it works.” Science doesn’t actually back up their bigotry at all (in fact, it confirms that both gender and sex determination are extremely varied), but science writing sure makes it look as though it does. As we’ve seen with climate change and vaccine issues in this country, what the actual science says often has less of an impact than public opinion.

But don’t just take my word for it, there’s even been a study showing that bigotry against trans people is fed by “scientific” information that seems to support that men and women are somehow wired differently.

The problem is that these omissions, sexist metaphors, and gender essentialist assumptions are everywhere and they add up.
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So what can be done? Well, science writers can be careful about journalistic standards, and avoid extrapolating study data based on their own gendered assumptions, for one. We could also all stand to be a bit more direct and say what we mean when discussing things like reproduction. If we’re talking about people who have testicles, we can very easily say “people with testicles” rather than “men,” for example. We need science writing that isn’t afraid to dig into that complexity, because that’s where the real story is.

Back over at GQ, Halpern fell right into the standard essentialist assumptions, even referring to cisgender men with lower testosterone as “less male.” I read the whole article with my mouth opened in not to so much shock, but amazement that a single article could so perfectly encapsulate everything I had come to hate about science writing. Through all the hand wringing about falling sperm counts runs an endless commentary about men, and he doesn’t have to say it for me to know I’m not included. At the close of the article, he offers up a few potential scenarios for the species. Either sperm counts will drop so low we’ll go extinct, we’ll become completely reliant on fertility treatments to reproduce, or we’ll figure out how to get pregnant using stem cells that have been converted into sperm with “no need for any males.”

Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty clear that Halpern thinks the final scenario would be worst of all.

]]> Listen To The Sound Of Gender Transforming: Five-Tracks Of Resistance https://theestablishment.co/listen-to-the-sound-of-gender-transforming-five-tracks-of-resistance/ Wed, 22 Aug 2018 08:17:35 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1144 Read more]]>

We experience not only the in-betweenness of gender, but also the instability of ‘home.’

I’m Ayesha Sharma, and I’m an agender multimedia creative. I move through emotions like waves and, especially with the experience of gender and cultural dysphoria, I’ve felt an urgency in the past year to find a community that would provide comfort in shared identities and could foster mutual growth at the same time.

I was motivated to find a medium to share these discussions around gender and cultural dysphoria sonically.

On several warm December afternoons in Cape Town, South Africa, old and new friends sat down around a coffee table to discuss something that was relevant to all of us: gender disruption. We are six trans and gender variant people of color who share a real boredom in the gender binary.

Some of us were determined in our resistance of gender conformity while others had grown tired and frustrated from the backlash we’d received and the dysphoria we experienced.

We had gathered on these afternoons to collaborate and spend time with one another, but our meetings offered us much more: community affirmation toward some of our daily struggles.

Shared identity definitely does not mean shared experience, but it can provide mutual comfort and potential growth.
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The group of us includes Rumano Fabrishh, Jay-Aeron Gertse, Reinhard Mahalie, Nazlee Saif Arbee, Suhail Kapdi, Saadiq Shiraz Soeker, and me, Ayesha Sharma.

We’re from South Africa, Namibia, and the United States.

From Southern Africa, East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia; we are diasporic migrants through generations.

And so we experience not only the in-betweenness of gender, but some of us also feel the instability of “home.”

I produced the beats for each track through personal meditations on diaspora and gender resistance and then traveled to Cape Town to take part in relevant conversations with other trans and variant people of color.

I then recorded our conversations and later sampled words, phrases, and sounds from these recordings to overlap and mix with the theme-inspired beats I had produced.

The process evolved to become this autoethnographic EP, called Diasphoria: A Narrative Archive for and by Trans People of Color. The EP features two main tracks, “Catharsis” and “Imagining.” “Catharsis” is meant to stand as an ideological and emotional exploration of (gender) oppression and imagining as a journey in seeking elevation from the personal struggles that oppression brings as well as from the mental restrictions that keep us from actualizing our expansive selves.

This five-track recording offers a taste of our theory-forming, community-affirming group discussions.

Trans and gender variant people of color, like in this very project, are often the creators of content; the teachers, and the earth-shakers.

That’s why, when several conversations are sliced up and put together, they stand as an exhibition of new knowledge — new theory. Trans and gender variant POC are academics, journalists, and creatives in the fact that our personal acts of resistance and persistence boldly oppose colonial social structures. In that, people who occupy these identities have the potential to be role models and uncomfortable truth tellers.

The sentiments shared in this EP are arranged specifically for trans and gender variant POC listeners, as the discussions themselves were initiated with the intention to promote insight, affirmation, and expansion based on shared identities.

They comment on colonialism and the gender binary, gendered bodies, queer desire, self-confidence and community affirmation, religion, morality, social media community, and much more.

Others who are not trans and gender variant POC are invited to listen to this EP too, but with the understanding that the goal shouldn’t only be to consume, but to hold oneself accountable to meaningful reparations as well.

Some of the ways that this is possible are by promoting the media visibility of trans and gender variant POC creatives as well as by supporting representation of trans people by trans people, when cis queers often gain disproportionate mobility for capitalizing on them instead.

This project would not have been possible without the energy and time of my friends and collaborators.

Jay, Rumano, and Reinhold

Jay, Rumano, and Reinhard are an inspiring team who possess the capabilities to revolutionize their industries and people’s lives in the process.

Saif, Suhail, and Shiraz

Saif is passionate, intentional, and steadfast in their messages of liberation, meaning that they come away from most interactions either getting free things, loyal admirers, or stupefied students. Suhail is a hilarious, humble, and explorative soul whose interests are subtly rooted in a motivation toward deeper meaning and morality. Shiraz is a force whose essence and beliefs challenge traditional knowledge through creative practice.

Wandile Dhlamini

Wandile Dhlamini was the illustrator for this project and created its cover in addition to individualized designs for each track. They’re brilliant, bold, hilarious, and talented in pretty much everything they do.

If you like what you hear in this project, share it. You can also download all five tracks directly through Bandcamp.

Also, check out my feature on this project’s collaborators soon to be released on Everyday Feminism and be sure to follow everyone on social media to support their latest work. You won’t regret it.

]]> What A Fake ‘Female Orgasm’ Statistic Says About Gender Bias https://theestablishment.co/what-a-fake-female-orgasm-statistic-says-about-gender-bias-591985f8d68c/ Thu, 12 Apr 2018 21:36:29 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2678 Read more]]> For years, experts have been peddling a damaging falsehood about the time it takes for cis women to orgasm.

While I was doing research for my book on female sexual empowerment, I kept coming across a statistic online: that cis women take 20 minutes on average to orgasm. It’s in articles with vague citations like “according to statistics,” “some experts say,” and “studies show”; it’s in blog posts and advice columns by sex therapists. Few of these sources say where the data comes from.

I began hunting down this figure’s source after reading Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters and How to Get It by University of Florida psychology professor Laurie Mintz, PhD. Mintz writes that women take four minutes to orgasm through masturbation on average, which was indeed found in sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey’s interviews and published in his 1953 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. But with a partner, she wrote, women take 20 minutes, while men took two to 10.

Mintz is adamant that the orgasm gap — the tendency for men to orgasm more than women — is cultural, not biological. (Note: Not all women’s bodies have vulvas, and not all bodies with vulvas belong to women. But as I researched this article, I found no data on trans or intersex bodies. This, of course, is its own problem, and has led me to refer exclusively to cis women throughout the rest of this piece.)

Why, then, I wondered, did she believe it took women longer?

Over email, Mintz said the 20-minute statistic doesn’t reflect a lack of sexual responsiveness, and she suspects it would be shorter with a long-term partner who understands the woman’s body. (If that’s the case, I wondered, why is it presented as a property of women’s bodies, not men’s technique? The orgasm gap doesn’t seem to be a problem with lesbians, after all.) Regarding its source, she explained, “That 20-minute stat has been written about by some of the most respected sex educators and therapists and researchers. You can find it, for example, on page 19 in She Comes First (Ian Kerner) and on page 9 of The Orgasm Answer Guide (Beverly Whipple).”

So, I flipped to page 19 of She Comes First. It reads:

“Irony, bigger and cruel, seems to be embedded into our respective processes of arousal: that a woman, so unique in her sexuality…should so often find this vast potential for blazing ecstasy smoldered — a magnificent conflagration left unlit — all for lack of a match that can hold its flame. It’s not a problem with the match, say many men, but rather that a woman’s fuse is too long. Perhaps, but then this raises the question how long is too long? Studies, like those by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, have concluded that among women whose partners spent 21 minutes or longer on foreplay, only 7.7 percent failed to reach orgasm consistently. … Few, if any, of the world’s problems can be solved with a mere 20 minutes of attention.”

The data Kerner’s citing are from Kinsey successor Paul H. Gebhard’s analysis of interviews conducted by the Kinsey Institute. Women were asked how much foreplay they engaged in and — here’s the kicker — the “percent of coitus resulting in orgasm.” Coitus, as in, intercourse — which most cis women don’t reliably orgasm from at all. A meta-analysis of 32 studies in Indiana University professor Elisabeth Lloyd, PhD’s The Case of the Female Orgasm found that only one in four cis women consistently orgasms through intercourse. Lloyd wrote that since many of these women could be stimulating their clitorises during intercourse, the number of women who orgasm through penetration alone is likely lower.

Casting further doubt on Kerner’s extrapolations from Gebhard’s data, it’s unclear what happened during those 21 minutes of foreplay. Blow jobs? Kissing? Role-playing? We don’t know. Whatever the case, it’s unlikely all 21 minutes consisted of clitoral stimulation, given that many men don’t even know where the clitoris is. Only 44% of college men in one study could locate it on a diagram. And that was in 2013, over six decades after these data were collected.

Along with claiming that “a woman’s fuse” is “perhaps” too long, Kerner goes on and on about how difficult and laborious women’s orgasms are — not exactly helping his mission of encouraging men to give them. After reading that “the female orgasm is a more complicated affair and often takes much longer to achieve” and that it requires “persistent stimulation, concentration, and relaxation,” many men may feel intimidated. Why put in so much work for something that may not even show up?

Per Mintz’s suggestion, I also checked out page 9 of The Orgasm Answer Guide, which indeed reads, “While some women have an orgasm within 30 seconds of starting self-stimulation, most women experience orgasm after 20 minutes.” When I emailed Whipple to ask where this came from, she replied, “I have not conducted or published any research on the average time for a woman to experience orgasm.” She forwarded my question to the book’s coauthors in case they knew. None of them got back to me.

Determined to figure out why people think the female orgasm takes so long, I then emailed Indiana University professor and Kinsey Institute research fellow Debby Herbenick, PhD, author of a Men’s Health article that states, “Studies show that it takes 15 to 40 minutes for the average woman to reach orgasm.” When asked where that statistic came from, she told me she couldn’t even recall writing the article. “If pressed to put a number to it, I am not sure I could, other than ‘seconds of stimulation to more than an hour of stimulation preceding orgasm,’” she replied.

Two experts — sex therapist Vanessa Marin, MA, MFT and Ball State University professor Justin Lehmiller, PhD — actually cited a source: the research of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who observed people having sex and masturbating in their lab beginning in the late ‘50s. (Lehmiller tells me he believes clitoral stimulation would take less time than the 10–20 minutes he cited but doesn’t know of any data; Marin admits her figure of 20 minutes is a “rough ballbark” since there’s “not much research” and that it applies primarily “when you’re first learning.”)

Marin linked to an article in the right-wing UK tabloid The Sun, known for reporting stories based on pure rumor. Lehmiller at least cited a book: Masters and Johnson’s 1966 Human Sexual Response. I also found that 10–20-minute statistic attributed to Masters and Johnson in a textbook: Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century by psychology professors Wayne Weiten, PhD, Dana S. Dunn, PhD, and Elizabeth Yost Hammer, PhD.

At that point, I didn’t trust anything I read about orgasmic timing, so I ordered Human Sexual Response off Amazon. After the hefty thing arrived in the mail, I spent a Sunday night poring over it. And poring over it. And not finding anything on this topic. Wondering if I was just missing it, I returned to the book’s Amazon page, clicked “look inside,” and typed “minutes” into the search bar. I learned some interesting facts (“frequently, the increment in breast volume is retained for five to 10 minutes after the orgasmic phase”), but again, nothing about how long anyone takes to orgasm. There was something in a forward by Sam Sloan written in 2009 — “it is said to take the woman 7 minutes 30 seconds to reach the level of arousal where she has an orgasm” — but he doesn’t cite anyone, and I can’t find that number anywhere else, let alone in the book. I did the same thing for Masters and Johnson’s Sexual Inadequacy with the same results. Baffled, I asked Lehmiller where in Human Sexual Response he got his information, but he didn’t have time to look. Fair enough.

It was Hammer who finally shed some light on this puzzle. When I asked her where the 10–20-minute figure that Psychology Applied to Modern Life attributes to Masters and Johnson came from, she replied, “The specific statement that appears in the textbook can’t be attributed to Masters and Johnson. The initial misattribution occurred a number of editions ago, was not caught, and was carried over through subsequent editions.” The real source? Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, she said. Numerous articles are misattributing Kinsey’s data to Masters and Johnson, who, as far as I can tell, didn’t even study orgasmic timing.

So, it appears that the 20-minute statistic is coming from nowhere, from Gebhard’s data on the length of foreplay before intercourse, or from Kinsey’s data on intercourse. In either case, the numbers are based on intercourse — which means we’ve been judging cis women’s orgasmic ability by an activity they don’t even usually orgasm from.

“The reason we think of men as being more orgasmic involves the ubiquity of ‘sex’ being defined as ‘intercourse,’” sexologist Carol Queen, PhD tells me. “Intercourse doesn’t offer sufficient clitoral stimulation for most women to allow for efficient, easy orgasm.”

But other activities do. As Occidental College sociology professor Lisa Wade, PhD points out, one study found that 90% of cis women orgasmed when their last sexual encounter included oral and manual sex, and another found that 92% did when they engaged in oral, self-stimulation, and intercourse. “The idea that women would have different rates of orgasm depending on what kinds of stimulation that they give their bodies seems almost so obvious that it’s stupid to say out loud,” says Wade. “But we have to do that because the assumption is that women’s bodies are bad at having orgasms.”

Of the 20-minute statistic, Wade says, “There’s nothing there. It’s crazy to me because I hear this said all the time.”

The idea that orgasms come (heh) far quicker and easier to men is one of the most ubiquitously believed gender differences, yet it’s been known since the ‘50s that this is only true during intercourse. Given that intercourse tends to favor male orgasms, it’s telling that our male-dominated society has defined it as “sex.”

When we look at masturbation, gender differences almost entirely evaporate. Kinsey found that 45% of cis women took one to three minutes to orgasm through masturbation, 25% took four to five minutes, 19% took six to 10 minutes, and only 12% took over 10. He wrote in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female:

“Many of those who took longer to reach orgasm did so deliberately in order to prolong the pleasure of the activity and not because they were incapable of responding more quickly. These data on the female’s speed in reaching orgasm provide important information on her basic sexual capacities. There is widespread opinion that the female is slower than the male in her sexual responses, but the masturbatory data do not support that opinion. The average male may take something between two and three minutes to reach orgasm unless he deliberately prolongs his activity, and a calculation of the median time required would probably show that he responds not more than some seconds faster than the average female. It is true that the average female responds more slowly than the average male in coitus, but this seems to be due to the ineffectiveness of the usual coital techniques.”

Sex researcher Shere Hite similarly found that 95% of cis women who masturbated “could orgasm easily and regularly, whenever they wanted.” She didn’t determine the average time, but she wrote in 1976’s The Hite Report that Kinsey’s findings were “similar to the women in this study.” She elaborated, “It is, obviously, only during inadequate or secondary, insufficient stimulation like intercourse that we take ‘longer’ and need prolonged ‘foreplay.’ But this misconception has led to a kind of mystique about female orgasm.”

Even today, the authors of widely used textbooks endorse this view. “During masturbation, 70 percent of females reach orgasm in four minutes or less,” psychologists Dennis Coon, PhD and ‎John O. Mitterer, PhD write in Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior. “This casts serious doubt on the idea that women respond more slowly. Slower female response during intercourse probably occurs because stimulation to the clitoris is less direct. It might be said that men simply provide too little stimulation for more rapid female response, not that women are in any way inferior.”

There hasn’t been much research on this topic since Kinsey, but I’d venture to bet that women might be even quicker if the data were collected today, given that 53% of American women in one 2009 study had used vibrators, compared to less than 1% in the ‘70s, according to Shere Hite’s research. A 2015 study of 100 users of the Womanizer vibrator found that half orgasmed in a minute or less using the toy. Toys aren’t necessary to make women as sexually responsive as men, as some companies would have you believe. They put us ahead of them.

I’m not saying that orgasm should be the goal of sex or that those who can’t orgasm are in any way inferior or unworthy (stigmatization of those who are anorgasmic is a serious issue). Nor am I saying that those who need more time have inferior sex lives. They may actually enjoy sex more, since they get more pleasure before they crash. They should ask for however much time they need unapologetically. And lastly, I’m not saying women’s partners should give up after four minutes. Everyone’s different, and it can take a while to get to know a partner’s body, regardless of gender.

But here’s why the 20-minute statistic pisses me off so much. As Wade puts it, deeming female orgasms more difficult “naturalizes the orgasm gap.” She explains:

“It makes it seem like the orgasm gap is inevitable and acceptable and just, and it makes women feel guilty for wanting to have orgasms and asking for orgasms from their partners because if their bodies are so bad at it and it’s just a burden, women don’t want to be a burden on their partners. And it also gives men an excuse to not try.”

She’s right: Fake statistics about orgasmic timing do get used to naturalize the orgasm gap. The website for Promescent, an anesthetic penis spray that claims to close the orgasm gap by prolonging erections, claims:

“Today, far too many people believe that when they have good sex, men and women are supposed to orgasm around the same time. But, like many other common misconceptions, the science just doesn’t back it up. On average, men take about five minutes to orgasm, while women take much longer, which means that men climax a lot more often than women do. This difference between the male and female orgasm is what we call the Orgasm Gap. Believe it or not, science is to blame. Because men and women are scientifically different. But the best way to beat science is with better science. And that’s where Promescent comes in.”

On Twitter, insecure dudes talk about how it’s not worth the effort to get women off, while women themselves often complain about men making these damaging assumptions.

There’s also another, deeper reason this stat pisses me off. Supposed gender differences in orgasmic timing are often considered God’s cruel joke on humanity, with women the butts of the joke — the unlucky ones. Female multiple orgasms have been deemed the great equalizer in this equation, but in reality, most cis women have refractory periods like men. “I am suspicious that ‘multiple’ is not really multiple in the way Cosmo has traditionally written about them,” sex researcher Nicole Prause, PhD tells me. “Rather, it seems likely that some women have a relatively short refractory period, just like some men.”

Or, we’re supposed to feel comforted by the “fact” that the clitoris has twice as many nerve endings as the penis, another baseless statistic that’s somehow made its way around the internet without any study ever cited. The clitoris and penis develop from the same structure in the womb, so they likely have around the same amount of nerve endings, says Queen. These supposed advantages are typically cited in praises of women, yet they’re often framed as consolations for not having the supposedly superior male body.

This is part of a larger narrative that says that being a woman is a disadvantage, a curse. It dates back to God punishing Eve through the pain of childbirth. He supposedly made the “female body” an unpleasant place to live in, and the idea that we have less access to sexual pleasure perpetuates that notion. From normalizing painful sex and painful periods to lamenting the “elusive female orgasm,” we learn that men’s bodies work for them while ours work against us. We learn that they’re built for pleasure while we’re built for pain. And when we learn we’re built for less pleasure and more pain, we come to accept lives where we experience less pleasure and more pain. Being taught you were born unequal on a physical level instills a deep-seated inferiority complex.

Spreading a false statistic about women as a group reflects and perpetuates the idea that women are poorly built — and that intercourse is the most valid type of “sex.” It also reflects and perpetuates the notion that female masturbation is threatening — hence the constant omission of that four-minute figure.

Consider this parallel: The clitoris is frequently omitted from medical textbooks. Scottie Hale Buehler, CPM, MA, a PhD Candidate in UCLA’s Department of History who studies this very phenomenon, tells me: “The clitoris embodies many misogynistic fears about sexual pleasure: that penetration and penises may not even be necessary for orgasm.” When asked whether the erasure of female masturbation statistics could reflect the same fears, Buehler told me, “I think your hypothesis sounds convincing,” adding that heteronormativity also likely plays a role.

So, perhaps it’s threatening for men to know that women’s own hands are far better at getting them off than a penis. As psychologist Manfred F. DeMartino wrote in the 1974 book Sex and the Intelligent Women:

“As more women become liberated sexually and thus more confident, aggressive, and demanding in their heterosexual relationships, and because of their ability to reach several orgasms in a short time interval, men may well experience a greater sense of threat with respect to their feelings of virility and masculinity — they may find it increasingly difficult to sexually satisfy women. Past and current research clearly indicate that the majority of women in our society are able to attain an orgasm much easier and faster from clitoral self-manipulation than from sexual intercourse.”

That said, I don’t believe that those who cite the 20-minute statistic are driven by misogyny or fear of the clit. They’re just trying to convince women’s partners to spend some goddamn time on them for once. They want to close the orgasm gap. We share that mission.

But achieving orgasm equality is not empowering if it’s framed as a way of overcoming cis women’s shitty biology. In that case, it’s only feeding the idea that women are inherently defective. Claiming that women need toys or vaginal treatments or extra time to gain equality implies that they’re innately unequal. True orgasm equality means abolishing this hierarchical thinking altogether.

Think about it: We’ve relegated the activities that give most women orgasms to “foreplay,” mere preparation for the main event that produces male orgasms. We need to adjust our definition of “sex” to accommodate women’s bodies, not judge women’s bodies based on a patriarchal definition of “sex.”

All we really need is more respect for the vulva and more accurate information about how it really works. Because, trust us: Contrary to popular belief, it works just fine.

]]> Blessed Is The Fruit Of Thy Womb, Or Why I Ran Out On My Moon Mother Workshop https://theestablishment.co/blessed-is-the-fruit-of-thy-womb-or-why-i-ran-out-on-my-moon-mother-workshop-798447a2a6db/ Fri, 16 Mar 2018 21:34:34 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2472 Read more]]> Why did a workshop designed to make me feel comfortable with my body leave me feeling so gross?

It was a long and winding road that led me to the basement of a 19th century stately house in Brussels for my initiation. Lined along a narrow stairwell leading down to the basement with 40 or so other women, all in bare feet, all waiting in silent awe for Miranda Gray to personally welcome us into the Moon Mother sisterhood, I began to wonder, how did I get here? And why had I already begun to wish I had never come?

It all started with my 10-year devotion to hormonal birth control. To me it was man’s greatest invention, providing welcome relief from monthly cramps that left me prostrate in bed for three days, alternately fainting or vomiting. At 28, however, I had the sudden impulse to find a more natural solution to my menstrual woes. I came off the pill, bought myself a menstrual cup, and began exploring yoga, herbs, a life without coffee (temporarily), full moon circles, Red Tents, and natural gynecology workshops. I read everything I could get my hands on that promised to reset my dysfunctional cycle, including Red Moon by Miranda Gray.

I became a doula and began accompanying friends through pregnancy, abortions, and gynecological disorders including endometriosis, PCOS, and uterine cysts. The more I accompanied these processes the more convinced I became of the need for us to reconnect with our bodies and recover our autonomy. So when a training to become a Moon Mother — someone (usually a cis woman) who feels a particular devotion to the “divine feminine” and feels called to accompany other women with similar spiritual leanings, and to host individual and group Womb Blessings and Womb Healings — coincided with a family visit to Brussels, I put my skepticism aside and signed up for the two-day initiation into the world of Womb Blessings.

Somewhere between the initiation ceremony and the prescribed activity of coloring in a menstrual cycle mandala, I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. Uncomfortable with the biological essentialism that was being preached from a pulpit adorned with crystals and porcelain fairies, with the idea that my whole world should be centered around my womb and its monthly whims, and with the imperative to embrace the “divine feminine” and rediscover my “authentic femininity,” as if my authenticity and my womb were one and the same.

Somewhere between the initiation ceremony and the prescribed activity of coloring in a menstrual cycle mandala, I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable.
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Discomfort turned to anger as we were repeatedly told that our “women’s problems” stem from being disconnected and alienated from our wombs, our authentic femininity having been suppressed in us as children by both our families and wider society. There was never any mention of the system that causes this disconnect — you know, the white imperialist, capitalist, hetero- and cis-normative patriarchy that has forced us into binary conceptions of gender and sexuality, and submitted us to a multitude of oppressions. Only that our wombs held the answers to all our problems.

I was baffled by this omission. Perhaps the existence of structural violence, inequality, and reproductive injustice was taken as a given? Perhaps it was unnecessary to mention the many factors that harm our bodies, regulate the functions of our uteri, and determine who or what can enter and exit our vaginas? Superfluous the discuss things like violence, discrimination, sexual abuse, rape culture, lack of access to contraception, adequate health care and comprehensive sex education, restricted or criminalized abortion, and personhood laws that impact the lives of menstruators and pregnant people across the world on a daily basis?

Perhaps this was all just too messy, political, and depressing for a space that focused on “purity and grace,” where the answer to “women’s problems” was to build a global legion of empowered women vibrating with the divine feminine womb energy, spreading love, light, and kindness wherever they go? I could have done with a bit less purity and a lot more mess, so I decided to cut my losses and leave.

I never expected I’d be so angry and frustrated with what was supposed to be an empowering women’s retreat. For a long time I wondered if I was too cynical, or if angry feminist activism had taken me too far. Or is there something at the heart of menstrual spirituality that just doesn’t sit easy with my feminist principles?

Chris Bobel, in her book New Blood (2010), characterizes the menstrual spirituality movement as a branch of feminist activism that began in the 1970s and continues to the present day, despite occupying a marginal, if not irrelevant, position within feminism. It is led by mostly white, middle class, cis, able-bodied women, who use books, websites, workshops, retreats, womyn festivals, Red Tents, and full moon circles to reach their followers, blurring the lines between spiritual leaders, healers, artisans, and entrepreneurs.

Miranda Gray is just one purveyor of menstrual spirituality. The book that launched her career as a menstrual guru, Red Moon, was published in 1994. Gray has since published three more books, developed her own menstrual tracking app, The Flow, gives multiple Moon Mother, Red Moon, and other trainings across the world each year, and hosts five global Womb Blessings a year via meditations that can be downloaded from her website. According to Gray there are currently more than 3,000 practicing Moon Mothers across 60 countries and and an estimated 180,000 women participating in each Global Womb Blessing. As global women’s movements go, it is not insignificant. It’s relationship to feminism, however, is questionable.

Why We Must Stop Calling Menstruation A ‘Women’s Issue’

I spoke to other Moon Mothers and discovered that I am not the only one to have come out the other side with doubts.

Cecilia Perez is a founding member of a local collective, Guatemala Menstruante, which educates members and others on issues relating to menstruation and sexual health, provides educational workshops on the menstrual cycle, advocates for youth sexual education, and makes and distributes pads in Guatemala City.

Cecilia became a certified Moon Mother in 2016 at a training in Colombia. She was interested in the training as a way to develop new skills for accompanying women in Guatemala. “I had no kind of accompaniment or training when I started out with Guatemala Menstruante, we just learned as we went along, reading whatever we could and sharing experiences,” she says. “Reading Red Moon, it was great to see that someone else had been working on the same issues.”

Don’t Judge A Girl For What’s Between Her Legs

Orlagh McIlveen is an engineer from Ireland and a certified Moon Mother. She has a history of disruptive menstrual problems and, for a long time, used hormonal contraception to correct them. Following a miscarriage in 2015, she began searching for ways to heal and feel better about her body and her womb. “I read a lot, including books by Miranda Gray. I decided that since Miranda was coming to Ireland for the first time, I would go along,” she says. “I didn’t fully understand what a Moon Mother was, but I’m very glad I did it. (…) Connecting with other people with negative menstrual experiences and linking with other people who had miscarried or had trouble conceiving is very helpful for me.”

While both Cecilia and Orlagh remain connected with the other Moon Mothers, and offer individual and collective womb blessings on a voluntary basis or as part of their general accompaniment, they also express doubts around the tendencies toward essentialism and universalizing the “female experience,” the lack of inclusion of diverse identities, and the accessibility of the trainings.

Orlagh questions the movement’s strong aversion to hormonal contraceptives. “[They] are very useful for all sorts of reasons, and while they can disrupt the body’s normal hormonal systems, that’s kind of the point. A focus on ‘only what’s natural’ is fine if that works for you, as an individual, but not as a blanket, ‘This is the One True Way’,” she says.

Regarding the participation of trans women, queer, and non-binary folk, both Cecilia and Orlagh agree that while the Moon Mother movement does not define itself as trans-exclusive, the language and concepts used are couched in binary conceptions of gender and essentialist assumptions around women’s biology. According to Orlagh, “while Miranda is very clear that the womb blessing is for anyone with womb energy, rather than anyone with a womb, I think it needs to be clearer that this is not a trans-exclusionary movement — because for some people within the menstrual spirituality movement it is. [They] make claims of difference between ‘real’ women and trans women (…) The odor of TERF-ism [that] surrounds the movement as a whole really needs to be addressed.” In their practices, Orlagh and Cecilia are clear that participation is open to people of all identities, minus cis men.

The odor of TERF-ism that surrounds the movement as a whole really needs to be addressed.
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Orlagh and I both also questioned the accessibility of the trainings we attended. While in Colombia the five organizations involved in hosting the event went to great effort to ensure women from across the country, including indigenous women and women of African descent, could participate, helping with travel, accommodation, and fees — but these considerations were apparently absent from either the Brussels or Dublin training. Orlagh says, “The cost of the training in itself will exclude many people from participating. I wish there was a way make it more accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford the hundreds of euros for the course, plus travel and accommodation. (There is a 10% discount for those on benefits, but it’s still a very hefty sum).”

More than 40 women attended the workshop in Brussels, each paying 225 euros and above, depending on the package they opted for. The workshop ran over Monday and Tuesday, which meant either you were on holidays, like me; a student; could afford to take two days off work; or could make suitable childcare arrangements. These factors might, in part, explain why participants in the Brussels training were predominantly white and middle class. According to Bobel, this participant profile reflects the overall trend in the movement: of all the menstrual spiritual activists Bobel interviewed for her research, 92% were white and 78% self-identified as middle or upper middle class.

If you add up economic accessibility, the essentialist overtones, and the majority participation of white women, what you are left with is a movement defined by rather considerable privilege with poor capacity for self-reflection or criticism. That this privilege so often goes unchecked in these circles also leads to widespread cultural appropriation. It is common for menstrual spiritual gatherings to take place in Red Tents or Moon Lodges, and for participants to be adorned with bindis and their spaces decorated with mandalas, yin yang, OM, and other “exotic” spiritual symbols. This mix and match of different cultural practices, rituals, and spiritual beliefs often occurs removed from their original context, with a minimum awareness of their spiritual meaning, and used for the benefit of people who have little or no connection with the culture or spirituality.

Pagan feminist Lasara Firefox Allen is a harsh critic of cultural appropriation in feminist spirituality, and insists on the need to decolonize spiritual practices. “For white people it means (…) paying attention when someone says that you are practicing their tradition without consciousness, relational awareness, or consent. It means taking seriously the topic of appropriation,” she writes in Jailbreaking the Goddess: A Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality (2016). “It means not casually ‘god collecting,’ or cherry picking from the spiritual systems and cosmologies.”

Bobel is equally critical of the tendency toward cultural appropriation. She writes in New Blood:

“When it feels good, traditions of their culture can be deployed in the service of our self-improvement. To demarcate and sustain these separations, race and class privileges are invoked, though often not consciously. Indeed, unspoken privilege is the engine that propels feminist-spiritualist menstrual activism. The project of self-improvement, after all, is itself a privilege and one that takes cultural capital to enact.”

Despite my discomfort and cynicism regarding the Moon Mother experience, it became quite clear to me over the course of my day at the workshop how moved the women around me were, how deeply they needed a space where they could connect with their own bodies and other women.

I am sure that if I had done the training two years previously I probably would have felt the same. I had my Red Moon moment at the very beginning of this journey, when celebrating, rather than cursing, my period was still a mind-blowing concept. Cecilia and I both agreed that it was a necessary step in overcoming all the shame and aversion to our menstruation and our bodies that had been drilled into us from an early age.

But it was just a moment. As we kept learning, reading, sharing with other women, and participating in feminist activism, we became more aware of diverse identities, and of the daily challenges many women face that prevent them from “embracing their menstruation,” “flowing” with their cyclical energies, or discovering the “divine feminine.”

Why We Need To Talk About Queer And Trans People And Birth Control

Bobel’s principal critique of the movement is that it rarely, if ever, transcends “life politics,” instead remaining rooted in the individual search for self-improvement that is accessible to few. Furthermore, it sidesteps or ignores uncomfortable truths about the nature and origin of women’s oppression. Nevertheless, you could argue that the very act of gathering women together to learn from each other, share experiences, improve their body literacy, and recover autonomy over their sexual and reproductive health is in fact profoundly political.

Cecilia’s experience, and the spread of menstrual spirituality across the Americas, also challenges the assumption that this is a movement only for white, western, middle class women. In her accompaniment of people through pregnancy loss and gynecological illnesses, she focuses on helping them reconnect, heal, and overcome feelings of guilt, largely influenced by the culture of shame and secrecy that surrounds all aspects of sexuality in Guatemala. These actions defy the patriarchy’s attempts to keep us separate from each other, in competition with each other, and firmly within the control of the medical industrial complex.

The challenge is to ensure that our actions transcend the individual goal of self-improvement toward collective social actions. To use the energy generated in these gatherings to support our activism around sexual health and reproductive justice and in breaking down gender binaries. These spaces cannot, therefore, be void of a feminist political analysis that situates our personal experience within the context of a global system of repression and struggles for reproductive justice. It is only through that analysis that they will become truly inclusionary.

]]> Why Would Anyone Ever Want To Be A Wife? https://theestablishment.co/why-would-anyone-ever-want-to-be-a-wife-b48d81d097c4/ Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:25:39 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2993 Read more]]> To become a wife is to become complicit.

By Katie Schmid

The wife is dead; long live the wife.

The wife has died and everyone comes to gather at her corpse to participate in the communal ritual of grief by which her body becomes a public monument. The dead body of the wife retains heat, a brick building that has soaked up the sun. People begin to rub up against it to warm themselves. A wife is a technology of pleasantness that all may enjoy.

“Her stroganoff was unparalleled,” says one person, leaning into the body of the wife and letting out an involuntary moan as the heat eases a shoulder pain. A dead wife is better than a rubdown with Icy/Hot.

Another man lies face down next to the body of the wife, such is his reverence for it. “I hear she followed her husband from job to job for eight years,” he says.

The body of the wife has expanded now and the mourners swarm. A man curls into her palm. Just before he falls asleep, he whispers, “She was an excellent mother. Amazing, given that I heard she also pioneered several advancements in some kind of science.” [1]

It is the woman who is gendered first, who is seen as the exception to maleness, the one who exists in the category of not-male. [2] It is the woman who finds her “natural” state in marriage, as wife. Marriage is, in the popular imagination, something that a man must be coaxed into, as a wild animal must be coaxed into a cage with a bit of meat. The woman is happy to be the meat and thus, through a series of coaxings, also known as “feminine wiles” or “nagging,” she entices him to accept his cage. (For more insight into the deployment of “feminine wiles” aka “harpyism” aka “bitching,” “being a real c word,” “the use of mysterious titpowers,” “that Cold War thing she does,” and “shrill whining only the dog can hear,” please see every sitcom ever made.)

But why is this the popular narrative when, in fact, the state of marriage, for men, increases their happiness and wellbeing? Research has shown that masculinity as it is socialized in the United States is a life-threatening condition, produced via aggressive policing in homosocial environments, characterized by violence and limited emotional expression, one popular solution for which is the salutary prescription of taking a wife. [3]

Wives are a technology of health. In the popular imagination, a man’s reward is the wife, who cultivates his emotional silence like a beautiful garden, imbuing it with worth and meaning; as a gardener who has for months sung and coaxed a bloom into being, the wife thinks she can feel the plant emoting back at her. The wife has been taught to make even the harshest ground bear fruit. The wife has been taught to look at an apple seed and call it an apple. [4]

“Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen Painting a Portrait of His Wife” by Dirck Jacobsz, 1550

The man is allowed his “essential” maleness, and this maleness is not seen to be threatened by the state of being a husband, provided that the man can make jaunts into homosocial environments, doesn’t accidentally become a stay at home dad, and doesn’t become mysteriously drawn into the yonic terrorhole of his wife’s vagina [5] such that he begins enjoying interior decorating, couples’ retreats, and “I” statements during arguments.

Contemporary culture is thick with images of reluctant, “feminized” husbands. We internalize the narrative of the horrors of the man who has been infected by marriage — we inhabit the logic and call it truth. This “feminized” man is a monstrous creature forged in the fires of a wife’s shrewishness. We can see this logic at work in every Judd Apatow movie ever written: A white, blond ice queen inflicts her will onto an equally monstrous 40-year-old frat boy, who slouches, cowers, and grows hair as his primary occupations. By the end of the movie, after several fights, an equal or greater number of bong hits, a montage of his manscaping, and several ironic deployments of the word “cunt,” the transformation is complete — the chastened man becomes a husband. For her part, the woman in such a romantic comedy displays very little emotional range [6] — she is angry, she is a font of tears. These emotions are part of the man’s journey to “mature masculinity,” but they’re also part of the fun. A wife’s misery is the highest comedy.

In the popular imagination, the state of being a husband is seen to be an attractive accessory to masculinity, a cravat or a particularly lush sock that decorates a man’s essential maleness, which has been painted on his body like a Ken doll’s underwear. Perhaps marriage-as-accessory is not entirely accurate, for the marriage is not purely decorative. Instead, there is a utility to the thing that is overlooked — it is the wife who allows him to escape the stranglehold masculinity has placed on his person. Studies of the sexual scripts of middle-aged men show that men do experience expanded emotional and sexual understanding as a result of moving from the locker room to the marriage bower, though this comes thanks to new narratives of women’s sexuality (in part due to the work of the sexual revolution and the Second Wave) rather than men’s. A corresponding revolution in the image of heterosexual male sexuality and gender performance does not seem forthcoming, and heterosexual men currently continue to be socialized to experience male sexuality as predatory, until such time as they find themselves in a relationship with a woman, who does that good emotional labor and provides him with a new paradigm. And still, men by and large view these more egalitarian practices in their relationships with woman as existing solely in their relationships, unable to incorporate them into conceptualizing their performances of masculinity outside their relationships. [7]

We can hear it in the ways that marriage is seen to enhance a man’s character and soften him: He becomes more sensitive, he’s “opened up,” his “rough edges have been worn down,” he is seen to have “settled down” after “sowing his wild oats” (sexual metaphors for men are always either confusingly of the naturalist bent, or incredibly violent). These metaphors are often employed in tribute to the wife, as though the man were stupid or not capable of it in his pre-husbanded state, as though transformation of the man into the husband was the job of the wife.

As in, “Wow, Derek really has opened up recently, and I think that’s all on you, Fran; he used to be a sucking black hole of rudeness and defensiveness.” Often, this kind of discourse sets up a logic wherein the wife is responsible for representing the husband to others (“I’m sorry Hank’s grumpy, he isn’t feeling well today. Due to masculine socialization, he frequently sulks when there’s inclement weather”), and is, thus, responsible for his behavior in public. Consider how radical Audre Lorde’s musing on emotional labor looks, in light of this cultural expectation:

“…I do not exist to do his feeling for him. Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.” [8]

Though in many ways women are still said to exist “to do his feeling for him,” to give him the practices and thought processes so that he might think himself out of the trap. To be fair, it is hard for a man to see his masculinity, much less theorize it, existing as it does in the form of covert, constricting nude Ken doll underpants. It is the wife’s job to delicately peel off the nude underpants, though she herself wears a choking pair of nude shapewear.

Portrait of Jane Stebbing, wife of Thomas Aynscombe, by John (or Johannes) Verelst or his niece Maria Verelst, circa 1706

Who, then, theorizes wifeliness with the wife? It is, of course, other wives. It is a peculiar phenomenon of marriage as it is socialized in the West that wives wife for their husbands, and wives also wife for other wives. Wives, once they have got the hang of wifing, tend to wife all over the place. Paradoxically, the very condition of wifeliness is predicated on curtailing a wife’s attachment to anything outside of the marriage, particularly if that thing threatens heterosexual monogamy. The condition of wifeliness is a technology meant to usher the unattached woman out of the dangers of being single. Wifeliness curtails the possibility of bonding between women, with its queer potential and oracular possibilities. Take, for instance, Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seaton — one day, they’re kissing in gardens and composing political tracts in the attic. Everything is possible; they might be about to join the Bolsheviks. The next thing Clarissa knows, it’s 30 years later and Sally won’t stop bragging to her about the virile boys she’s birthed. It is the great tragedy of Mrs. Dalloway that Clarissa feels everything is possible with Sally, because there is no map for what they are to each other, but when next they meet, they are wives, and their prophetic potential has been subsumed into the language of wifedom.

It is no accident that the language at the heart of descriptions of these types of relationships rests in the unknown. The queer power at the heart of many types of relationships between women is profound and unrealized. Adrienne Rich theorizes:

“Woman identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions, and community, the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other.” [9]

Consider Toni Morrison’s Paradise — the black womanist magic at the heart of the relationships amongst the women who live together at the convent. One by one, each woman comes to the convent to gather her strength apart from the world. A kind of power grows at the heart of their relationships with one another. It is so alien, such an affront to the known world, that the townsmen come and destroy it. It imagines another world. It is therefore destroyed by ours.

Every loving relationship between women is fed by an economy of care, the tools of which have been formed within heterosexist patriarchy, but which are profoundly antithetical to patriarchy. “Woman-identified,” a Second Wave term Rich uses, is meant to describe relationships between women that are undefined by patriarchy and exist, as much as they are able, in resistance to it. Rich draws upon Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” to define the erotic energy at the heart of “woman-identified” relationships between women as existing on “a lesbian continuum” where the erotic is “diffuse” and generative, a creative force, and springs up from “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, or psychic.”

These pockets of anti-marriage wifing crop up between wives, who turn to each other to repair one another. It is a betrayal. It threatens the very heart of the institution of marriage, which is hostile to all that it cannot contain.

Li Ch’ung (李充) and his wife before his mother, lacquer painting over wood, Northern Wei, by unknown artist of North Wei dynasty, circa 5th century

The wife is a technology that winnows potential. To become a wife is to move from the state of being something unknown or threatening into a state of intelligibility, to move from anti-meaning (a place of resistance) to stasis (a place of deadness). To even acknowledge the extent to which wives already wife for each other is a threat not only to the state of marriage, but to the state.

The state of wifeliness can determine the existence of both allegiance to nationhood (in the form of access to contingent citizenship) and the existence of state-acknowledged personhood (in the form of access to civil rights). Wifeliness is a lens through which the great eye of the state may focus on the individual. To deny someone the ability to become a wife has traditionally been a line of demarcation between those kinds of relationships the state considers sufficiently human, and those kinds of relationships the state does not wish to understand. [10]

The condition of wifeliness has often been exploited by the state to achieve state’s ends. Think of the mainstreaming of LGBTQ rights into marriage rights and the state’s continued marginalization of the myriad other queer relationships and families. Think of the practice of some slave owners allowing a contingent kind of informal marriage in order to answer abolitionists’ charge of the cruelty of separating families. [11]

It is the wife who is the symbol of nation. In the West, traditionally, the body of the white wife is the foundation of empire; the progenitor of nation whose purity is the battleground upon which all wars are fought. It is the reason Emmett Till was murdered. The wife is a technology of supremacy inextricable from white heterosexist supremacy. To become a wife is to become complicit.

The wife is dead; long live the wife. It begins again every generation with a fictive exceptionalism: Our marriages will be different. There is no language and no framework for a feminist marriage trying to solve the problem of emotional labor. To place the burden of making the marriage egalitarian onto the choices of the individual parties involved ignores the hateful, rotting boards of the building the couple willingly enters into. There is a wound at the heart of every heterosexual relationship. There is a wound at the heart of marriage itself. To pretend otherwise places more burden and invisible labor on the already burdened wife. Why would anyone ever want to be a wife?

Notes

1. Loosely taken from The New York Times’ obituary of Yvonne Brill.

2. Simone De Beauvoir. Post-structural feminism is helpful here. Judith Butler: “If one is a girl to the extent that one does not want a girl, then wanting a girl will bring being a girl into question; within this matrix, homosexual desire thus panics gender” (Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender: Refused Identification,” in Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: between clinic and culture, ed. Murial Dimen and Virginia Goldner (New York: Other Press, 2010)). We can see this logic in the way (dis)ability is produced, in part, by public spaces that take a certain kind of body as “neutral” and “normal,” but thereby create the non-“normal” body as disabled (Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor, Examined Life interview series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE (Accessed April 04, 2016)). The term “natural” is a logic of power that attempts to produce subjects, but then hides that production of subjects by pretending that their adherence to a law outside of them in fact originates in their bodies.

3. Michelle Adams and Scott Coltrane, in “Boys and Men in Families,” note that the state of adolescent maleness as it is currently socialized is detrimental to men’s health: “In 1996, for example, 2,110 suicides in the United States involved youth under the age of 19, 80% of whom were male,” while “…married men are less depressed and have lower rates of mental disorder than do married women.” From Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, ed. R.W. Connell, Jeff Hearn and Michael S. Kimmel (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005).

4. “When you are hungry/learn to eat/whatever sustains you/until morning” (“For Each of You”) Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).

5. Vaginas are whirlpools from which you may never return. The sirens of the Greek myths who lured sailors to their doom enticed them into the ocean, which everyone knows is an endless void, which everyone knows is a vagina. All vaginas lead via a network of oceanic tunnels to The Great Vagina, aka Terrible Nothingness.

6. A now famous New Yorker profile of Anna Faris revealed that movie studios require that a woman is reduced to tears within the first 10 minutes of the romantic comedy genre, in order to ensure that she is likeable.

7. In “Beyond the sex machine? Sexual practices and masculinity in adult men’s heterosexual accounts,” authors Chiara Bertone and Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto assert that much is to be gained by men from their interactions and heterosexual relationships with women, especially in the expansion of emotional and sexual scripts for men, but that this does not help the man construct a less restrictive conception of masculinity: “…the intimacy script allows him to redefine his sexual positioning in couple interaction, but not to construct a sense of self based on a new model of masculinity: he only distances himself from a masculinity which he keeps defining as predatory.” The authors assert that sex role changes occurred because of the “…sexual revolution, which were based on a collective redefinition of female sexuality and femininity, but even when activating a change in how men experienced sexuality, [this] lacked a corresponding collective redefinition of masculinity.”

8. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, (Berkeley: Crossing Press Feminist Series, 2007).

9. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Feminism and Sexuality, ed. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

10. See, for example: the way the ability to wife has become the primary aim of the mainstream LGBTQA movement, thus eliding the concerns and civil rights of less mainstream members of the movement. Michael Warner, in The Trouble With Normal, attempts to envision a world where marriage is only one part of a larger push toward civil rights in the gay movement: “Is it possible to have a politics in which marriage could be seen as one step to a larger goal, and in which its own discriminatory effects could be confronted rather than simply ignored? […] It would have to say that marriage is a desirable goal only insofar as we can also extend health care, tax reform, rights of intimate association extending to immigration, recognition for joint parenting, and other entitlements currently yoked to marital status. It would have to say that marriage is desirable only insofar as we can eliminate adultery laws and other status-discriminatory regulations for sexuality. […] Above all, a program for change should be accountable to the queer ethos, responsive to the lived arrangements of queer life, and articulated into queer publics.” Of course, as Warner acknowledges here and elsewhere in the text, to extend these rights beyond marriage would change the nature of marriage, and would involve widespread acknowledgement that “legal” marriage is a controlling function of the state, rather than the sacred bond it is regularly cast as. Such acknowledgement does not seem forthcoming.

Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).

11. Tera Hunter and Michael Martin, “Slave Marriages, Families Were Often Shattered By Auction Block.” Interview by Michael Martin and Tera Hunter. NPR. (Accessed April 04, 2016.)

]]> What Happens If You’re Genderqueer — But Your Native Language Is Gendered? https://theestablishment.co/what-happens-if-youre-genderqueer-but-your-native-language-is-gendered-d1c009dc5fcb/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 22:43:06 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1917 Read more]]> The way languages incorporate gender can have a powerful impact on the expression of identity.

Over the last few years, we’ve progressed significantly in our acceptance of gender fluidity: One seminal 2015 poll found that half of millennials in the United States believe gender isn’t limited to male and female, a meaningful change from previous generations. Today, Facebook offers a custom field for people to express their gender identity, and Tinder and OkCupid have expanded gender options that people can select before swiping left or sending a DM.

Wrapped up in this revolution is an understanding that conventional gender pronouns are extremely limited. But what if you spoke a language that didn’t even have separate words for “him” or “her”? Or what if just about every noun in your world was masculine or feminine — seemingly at random? What impact would this have?

Inside Planned Parenthood’s Push For Gender-Neutral Language
theestablishment.co

It turns out, the way language is constructed can have a significant impact on the way people think and interact with the world. One rather chilling study, for instance, found that people who read in gendered languages responded with higher levels of sexism to a questionnaire they took after the study.

For those who don’t identify along the gender binary, these distinctions also matter. To find out how and why, I spoke with people from several countries who have come out as genderqueer, nonbinary, or gender-questioning. Their insights reveal the crucial, and often overlooked, importance of one’s native language in the expression of gender identity.

Before diving in to the intersection of language and gender identity, it’s important to understand some details. Broadly speaking, there are three ways gender can be incorporated into language:

*Natural gender languages, including English and Swedish, don’t typically categorize non-human, non-animal nouns into male or female categories. A table and tree are it, while people are he or she.

*In gendered languages like Spanish, German, and French, both people and objects are given a gender. A table, for instance, is a feminine noun in French — “She is a lovely table!” — while a tree is a masculine noun in German. “I planted him in the forest, where he will grow very tall!”

*Chinese, Estonian, and Finnish are examples of genderless languages, which don’t categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine, and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.

Half of millennials in the United States believe gender isn’t limited to male and female.
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“Natural gender” languages like English perpetuate the idea of a strict gender binary for humans. But there is one option to challenge these parameters: the use of gender-neutral terms. In English, these terms include they as a singular, ze/zir or zie/zir, ze/hir or other variations, and Mx. in written forms.

These terms are undoubtedly beneficial, helping to allow for expression across the gender spectrum. But are they enough?

In a 2016 survey — Bucking the Linguistic Binary — 20% of monolingual, transgender English speakers said, “yes, English gender-neutral language allows me to express my identity”; 31% said “no, it does not allow for adequate identity expression”; and 19% said “yes and no.” About 4% specified that they felt that it currently did not allow them to express their identities, but, “the situation was improving and that they were hopeful that time and advocacy would lead to increased acceptance of the language that would allow them to express their identities.”

Those who answered “yes and no” detailed both positive and negative aspects. One participant wrote:

“When I was using gender-neutral pronouns in English, it was almost impossible to get anyone who wasn’t in the queer community to use ‘they’ for me consistently. This was at an early stage of me asking them not to use ‘she’ (the pronoun I was ‘assigned’ at birth), so I think people were still getting used to the idea of any pronoun other than ‘she’ for me. But I had the impression that people outside the queer world (not LGBT but ‘queer’ as in challenging gender binaries) had an even harder time with the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun than with the idea of someone ‘crossing’ gender lines (i.e. requesting ‘he’ instead of ‘she’). So people would default to ‘she’, which was unbearable to me. So ‘he’ felt lots safer to me since it was farther away from ‘they’ and easier for people to wrap their minds around.”

If it seems like English-speakers are dissatisfied, the situation for speakers of gendered languages is worse. In the same survey, transgender French respondent #171 was clear and succinct:

“[S]peaking a gendered language as an agender person fuckin’ sucks. I’m constantly misgendered, or I’m misgendering myself in order to be understood.”

Misgendering in a gendered language was explained by another respondent:

“For example, in English, there are multiple nouns that I can use to classify myself (partner, student) without making reference to gender, whereas in German I’m supposed to say the feminine form of many common categories into which I fit, like student (Studentin), and have to explain myself when I refuse.”

In English, one can say they are a teacher with a partner, and no one’s gender is revealed; French and German lack that luxury.

Transgender German respondent #98 added:

“The options that English presents work reasonably well for me and I can express my gender identity and use preferred pronouns […]. [In] German I struggle a lot with language and [I am] often very unhappy with the situation of [the lack of] German gender-neutral language. I lack usable and easy to learn/apply pronouns and descriptions of myself. That the language is very gendered is a big problem in my life.”

Russian is a gendered language that does feature a neuter third-person pronoun, оно [it]. This pronoun is not typically applied to people — instead it is used only for objects with neuter noun names, typically borrowed words like кафе (cafe) that do not take a masculine or feminine case. A few gender pioneers, however, have co-opted it. For example, Seroe Fioletovoe [Grey Violet] — a transgender Russian activist who is part of the artist collective Война [War], best known for spawning punk activists Pussy Riot — uses “оно” to describe themself.

‘That the language is very gendered is a big problem in my life.’
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Polina Ravlyuk, a Russian blogger who runs an information portal on gender and gender identification, wrote to me in an email:

“We don’t have a gender-neutral pronoun [for people]…Agender people use feminine or masculine pronouns according to their personal preference. There can also be situations where a woman can refer to herself in the masculine way grammatically and vice versa. It’s worth noting that the issue isn’t widely discussed [yet] in Russia, because in my opinion society isn’t ready to accept gender on a spectrum. ‘Homosexual propaganda’ is still a fineable offence in the Russian Federation…”

Tosha, a young Russian who identifies as agender, told me:

“I use masculine pronouns, even though they don’t suit me very well. Plural or ‘neuter’ cases in Russian aren’t comfortable for me. Maybe someday I could use them, though. I also speak English, and I use the ‘they/them’ in English. Because of the language barrier, that doesn’t feel unnatural for me, and besides, [i]n Russian almost all the verbs and adjectives have gender, and in English it’s not like that. Pronouns in English don’t hurt me, as long as no one does it on purpose.

In my opinion, the language plays a pretty large role in how agender people feel about themselves, because [Russian] isn’t flexible enough for us. It doesn’t allow for a lack of gender; you always have to pick something. It shapes how we are thought about and sometimes contributes to social dysphoria. In my own family, it’s been difficult for most of them, though my friends, mother, and grandmother easily adjusted to using masculine pronouns to refer to me. Those who don’t know why I use that case either question it, or they think I think I’m a guy, or they just ignore it.”

Tosha also notes that there’s the option to use a plural pronoun when referring to agender people. “When I don’t know someone’s gender, I talk about them in the plural,” they say. “I think after some time I’ll be able to do the same for myself [in Russian].”

It’s clear that, not surprisingly, natural gender and gendered languages pose problems for identity expression. But what about genderless languages? Are these, then, the gold standard?

A young Estonian agender person interviewed for this article who prefers the name Paul does find “tema,” the genderless Estonian pronoun, helpful. Temais used only for humans, and when used in a sentence, it is neither masculine nor feminine. Paul writes:

“Usually people use the gender-neutral ‘tema’ [when] talking about any person, and because it’s the most common way to refer to a person, there is no issue with which pronoun to use. I prefer ‘they’ or ‘he’ in English, but I don’t usually say it to people unless they ask. That is because I am not really out as non-binary. In Estonian there is no gender in pronouns, but there are marker words like ‘tüdruk’ (girl), ‘preili’ (Ms.), or ‘neiu’ (a young woman) that I don’t identify with, but which are used by older people addressing me. I would prefer the gender-neutral pronoun ‘tema’ or my name.

Friends and close acquaintances call me ‘Paul,’ which I really like to be called. I somehow identify more with neutral or masculine marker words, and names. In English when I use ‘they’ to refer to a person, most people don’t notice it. But that’s maybe because the people I talk to in English are not native speakers. So there is some slip of pronouns going on unintentionally, especially with Estonian people speaking in English. We don’t have gendered pronouns, so a regular person might call a cis man a she by accident, and not be corrected, because we are not native speakers.”

Asexual Finnish student Kati agrees, saying, “I’m so happy Finnish has only one [ungendered] pronoun. It makes some things so much easier…one does not need to make assumptions about gender when trying to address someone.”

Having just one pronoun for humans doesn’t equal perfect equality in society, though. Turns out that genderless languages can include “seemingly gender-neutral terms” that do in fact have a sneaky male bias, just like natural and gendered languages. For example, the word lakimies (literally lawman or lawyer) in Finnish is what is called a false generic. In principle, it refers to all lawyers, but in practice, it refers only to male lawyers. Female lawyers are called just that: female lawyers. Men are the standard and everything else is the exception.

A personal pronoun diagram for Estonian and Russian language learning courtesy of Eesti keele õppimiseks
English has many false generics (male nurse, anyone?) but at least in English, one can use female or other pronouns or nouns to, as the book Gender Across Languages put it,“emphasize women’s [or other’s] presence in the world.” In a language that can’t grammatically distinguish between he, she, and ze, androcentricity — or male bias — can be even more insidious. If I can say in my language, “She (or ze) is the CEO,” I can draw attention to the fact that the term CEO is a false generic. Without my clarification, most people will picture a male CEO. If I can’t use she or ze, this kind of sexist/gendered assumption can be even more difficult to notice and correct.

What can we take away from all this? Agender people have the hardest time expressing their identity in highly gendered languages, but genderless languages are not the utopia one may imagine. Assumptions about the binary nature of gender and the status of masculinity seem to survive intact, even under genderless language conditions. Though Estonian people using the term tema may not specifically picture a man or a woman, they invariably picture either a man or a woman, not anyone else in between.

In Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, authors Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman emphasize the politics of language itself and of having “the agency to have our own words and definitions of them, and insist upon them to linguistic passers-by.” A natural gender language with a history of borrowed words, like English, has the flexibility to create pronouns to suit a person.

This is far from perfect — but it may be the best option yet for those who identify along a spectrum.

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