The state of Arkansas becomes a world wide symbol of hate and bigotry
Governor Asa Hutchinson signed legislation this week banning trans kids from playing sports in the state of Arkansas. The Human Rights Campaign made the ad above to air in homes across the state during a game earlier this week.
This is clearly not about fairness in women’s sports. This is transphobic bigotry aimed at harnessing the dark side of human nature, plain and simple.
Harassing vulnerable kids in order to stay in power? That says it all, doesn’t it?
To all you young trans people out there: All of this may be hard to bear, but keep in mind they are doing this because LGBTQA people are winning, not because we are weak.
The Arkansas Senate on Monday also approved banning gender confirming treatments for minors. The governor has not signed this law yet, so if you live in Arkansas (or elsewhere in the US for that matter) make your voice heard!
Time Magazine has interview Elliot Page on coming out as trans and on the transgender struggle.
On coming out:
“What I was anticipating was a lot of support and love and a massive amount of hatred and transphobia,” says Page. “That’s essentially what happened.”
What he did not anticipate was just how big this story would be. Page’s announcement, which made him one of the most famous out trans people in the world, started trending on Twitter in more than 20 countries. He gained more than 400,000 new followers on Instagram on that day alone.
On the transgender struggle:
“Extremely influential people are spreading these myths and damaging rhetoric—every day you’re seeing our existence debated. Transgender people are so very real.”
“We know who we are…People cling to these firm ideas [about gender] because it makes people feel safe. But if we could just celebrate all the wonderful complexities of people, the world would be such a better place.”
The pandemic gave him room for thought:
In part, it was the isolation forced by the pandemic that brought to a head Page’s wrestling with gender…
“I had a lot of time on my own to really focus on things that I think, in so many ways, unconsciously, I was avoiding,” he says.
He was inspired by trailblazing trans icons like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, who found success in Hollywood while living authentically.
Trans writers helped him understand his feelings; Page saw himself reflected in P. Carl’s memoir Becoming a Man. Eventually “shame and discomfort” gave way to revelation.
“I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.”
“You have been silent in the face of hateful legislation in states that are slated to host championships, even though those states are close to passing anti-transgender legislation.”
NCAA is a member-led organization dedicated to the well-being and lifelong success of college athletes.
“We, the undersigned NCAA student-athletes, are extremely frustrated and disappointed by the lack of action taken by the NCAA to recognize the dangers of hosting events in states that create a hostile environment for student-athletes,” the letter says.
“Put simply: the NCAA must speak out against bills that directly affect their student athlete population if they want to uphold their self-professed ideals of keeping college sports safe and promoting the excellence of physical and mental well being for student-athletes.”
Aliya Schenck and Alana Bojar, two female athletes on the track and field team at Washington University in St. Louis, drafted the letter with help from two LGBTQ advocacy groups.
The New York Times reports that the NCAA, which moved championships away from North Carolina in 2016 when the state was considering a bill to prevent some transgender people from using the restroom that matched their gender identity, has said that it will “closely monitor” such bills related to sports participation.
That is simply not good enough.
Photo: Terry Miller, No. 4, transgender, competing in in Connecticut last year. A lawsuit in that state seeks to stop transgender girls from participating in girls’ competition. Photo: Jessica Hill for The New York Times.
Over at Pop Dust Keith Baldwin looks at the new Korean Netflix sci-fi drama called Space Sweepers, and discovers some serious gender diversity. There is even a gender variant robot!
The film takes place in the year 2092, in a dystopian future in which Earth is all but uninhabitable. The three heroes of the series are fighting a dystopian dictatorship.
Baldwin writes:
With the exception of Tiger Park — a hatchet-wielding former drug kingpin played by Jin Seon-kyu — each member of the Victory’s crew defies the norms of gender to some extent.
SPOILER AHEAD!
But the clearest example of the way the film plays with gender is a sanitized, sci-fi version of a trans-identity story. Bubs, a sarcastic and nondescript former-military robot, spends most of the movie saving money to pay for body modifications — which she finally receives in time for the film’s final scenes — in order to better match her appearance to her identity.
Bubs is voiced by a male actor — Yoo Hae-jin — but early on we see her secretly eyeing an advertisement for a “skin” that would give her the appearance of a human woman. And later, when Kkot-nim addresses Bubs as “eonni” (big sister), Bubs seems to be at once surprised and validated that the girl has recognized her gender identity.
It may seem odd to think of a robot — particularly a robot like Bubs, who has no face for most of the film — as having a gender at all. In another context it might seem like a plotline specifically designed to enrage a certain type of Star Wars fan. But the film makes it clear that Bubs has a rich internal life — at one point she is pictured reading the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke — and complex social relationships.
If we can accept the fact that gender is a social construct that groups certain outward presentations with certain social roles, there is no reason to think that a sentient, social robot wouldn’t identify with one grouping or another — regardless of her original design. Unfortunately for millions who are fighting to have their gender identities recognized, that framing is far from widely accepted in much of the world — though progress is being made.
Rosey from the Jetsons is an earlier example of a robot with a gender, as are Wall-E and EVE.
Let me add that the gendering of fictional robots represents a serious challenge to the idea that human concepts of genitalia can be used to limit gender identities and the gender flexibility of language.
The fact that we so easily assign gender to robots tells us that the way we see and understand gender identity and gender expression in real life is not limited by biology.
We do not ask to see other people’s genitalia before we “gender” them. And as far as social and cultural interaction is concerned, gender is definitely not about chromosomes.
That does not mean that biological sex is not real. It simply means that as sentient beings, humans or imaginary robots, we are not limited by it.
There are all kinds of gender variance and sometimes it can be hard to find out where you are in the gender landscape.
If you are confused about your gender or want to learn more about concepts like queer, trans or nonbinary, it might help to talk to others who are where you are or who have been there.
Over at Crossdream Life you can talk to other gender variant people about cross-gender dreams, gender identity and queer sexuality.
Karolina Żebrowska, a fashion historian and YouTube vlogger, has made a fascinating video about manly fashion throughout the ages. It turns out that all the stereotypes about “proper manly attire” were created in the late 19th/early 20th century.
Karolina reminds us that back in the day Jesus wore something that today would have been considered a dress.
High heels were actually originally men’s shoes and women wearing heels were considered manly:
“And some men actually complained about women stealing their ultimate attribute of manliness, which was high-heeled shoes.
The high heels also had a red bottom, which you may nowadays can be found in the manliest of all shoes – the Louboutin heels.
Well, at least they didn’t put too much care in their hair, as men nowadays with all the gel and…
Oh, wait! When ladies put their hair in simple modest buns and covered it with caps,men went f***ing feral with their gorgeous, voluminous locks.
Understandably, a lot of them wasn’t born with a shampoo commercial mane, so they wore wigs. Back when women didn’t. Because it made them look a lot like a man.”
And so on and so forth.
Watch the video. It’s fun!
Let me add that the reason some people stick to the “manly men” stereotype and spend so much time ridiculing people who break these imaginary rules, is that it is a way of forcing people to live up to their restrictive views of what it means to be a real man or woman. There is a lot of homophobia and transphobia hidden in that term.
A new study argues that 50% of people are some shade of androgynous and that this gives them an advantage as far as psychological health goes.
Male brains and female brains.
Is there such a thing as a “male” or a “female” brain?
Scientists have desperately scanned, dissected and mapped brains in order to see if there are any solid differences.Researchers have found some parts of the brain that seem to be different between men and women, but there are two important caveats:
These differences are only found on an aggregate level, so there are a lot of men with “female” structures and vice versa.
Moreover, scientists have never been able to fully document a causality between these brain differences and – let’s say – gendered behavior as reflected in interests, abilities, expressions and identities.
Men are not from Mars
One problem is that we have very messy and blurry notion of what it means to be male or female, so the research becomes equally messy. Much of this research is based on culturally defined gender stereotypes, which are not fixed in biology in humans.
Since culture and our ideas of the normative female and male behavior changes, the scientists are basically trying to hit a moving target.
One of the scientists who constantly talk about “female” and “male” brains is Simon Baron-Cohen. His own research shows that only half of women have “a female brain”, as he defines it. If that many women do not have a “female brain”, what do they have?
Contemporary science is gradually giving up on the idea that men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus. We are all from Earth.
The androgynous brain
To give you a recent example:
Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge, and her colleagues Christelle Langley, Qiang Luo, Yi Zhang and more, decided to use the connectivity between different brain areas as a measure of gender. This kind of connectivity has been known to vary between men and women on an aggregate level.
They included 4,495 scans of brains (magnetic
resonance imaging or fMRI)
from men and 5,125 from women in their sample. There is no data on trans participation, so I assume that “male” and “female” refer to biological sex.
“We discovered that brains were indeed distributed across the entire continuum rather than just at the two ends.
In a subsample, approximately 25 percent of brains were identified as male, 25 percent as female, and 50 percent were distributed across the androgynous section of the continuum.
What’s more, we found that participants who mapped at the centre of this continuum, representing androgyny, had fewer mental health symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, compared with those at the two extreme ends.
These findings support our novel hypothesis that there exists a neuroimaging concept of brain androgyny, which may be associated with better mental health in a similar way to psychological androgyny.”
Gender is a spectrum
There are at least two take-aways from this research:
1. Gender is indeed a spectrum. As they put it in the original paper: “The importance of brain androgyny, akin to psychological androgyny, is that you are neither male nor female, but a combination of both.”
2. Being somewhere in the middle between the male and female extremes is good for your health.
The latter may come as a surprise to trans and nonbinary people who have been bullied for not living up to the gender binary, but the point here is that being more “androgynous” gives room for a wider spectrum of feelings and expressions.
They write:
A meta-analysis of 78 studies of about 20,000 participants revealed that men who conform to typical masculine norms, for example never relying on others and exercising power over women, suffered more psychiatric symptoms than others, including depression, loneliness and substance abuse. They also felt more isolated, lacking social connections to others.
This tells me that trans and nonbinary people would probably have been more psychologically balanced than extreme cisgendered people , hadn’t it been for all the transphobia and the bullying.
Androgyny is natural and good
The researchers argue that this study documents that people who are more androgynous in their behavior are not going against their biological nature. They are doing things that their brains are optimized for.
So although their paper is not about transgender and nonbinary people per se, it does debunk the idea that androgyny is caused by the “transgender cult”. Gender variance is a natural part of biological and psychological diversity.
This study say nothing about gender identity, though. It is not as if trans people are necessarily more “androgynous” than cis people.
But what are they talking about, really?
To be honest with you, I am still not sure about what they are really measuring here, as brain connectivity is clearly not a solid measure of assigned gender, experienced gender or gender expression. It is simply a measure of brain connectivity. Reducing the “gender continuum” to a measure of brain connectivity is therefore not unproblematic.
To give one example: The effect a culturally conservative and restrictive upbringing has on a person’s psyche, may also help shape the relevant brain structures. The brain is flexible. Cultural conditioning causes it to change.
But even if these brains are as they are partly because of social pressure, the study nevertheless says a lot about the relationship between androgynous personalities and mental health.
The article also documents how far contemporary neuroscience have moved from previous attempts at documenting a strict gender binary. I suspect that the strong influx of female researchers, with a more flexible view of sex and gender, has caused these communities to develop new and more interesting research questions. At least half of the authors of the original paper are women.
BuzzFeed presents 31 examples of celebrities who have challenged gender expression norms. This does not mean that they are all trans or nonbinary, but it definitely proves that many have felt the traditional clothing customs to be too narrow.
This is the gender pyramid, which I came up with as a more inclusive alternative to the current “man—nonbinary—woman” spectrum. The idea is that there are infinite gender identities within the triangular pyramid. I think that it can be used very flexibly. For example, I identify as a maverique and my gender is consistently one spot close to the top and near the nonbinary point. Other people’s genders might move around, be multiple parts of the pyramid at one time, encompass a region of the pyramid, or possibly exist outside of it (go wild.)
As well as internal gender identity, there are uncountable factors that influence people’s expression and experience of gender. These include, but are not limited to, culture, race, sexuality, disability, age, class, sex, language and safety. No person’s gender identity, expression, label, or experience is wrong, and I do not condone any use of this idea that excludes or hurts anyone. My hope is that the gender pyramid can be used as a tool for expression and liberation.
I would love to talk to anyone who has ideas about the gender pyramid, or gender identity and expression in general! I will not respond to people who are transphobic, homophobic, racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful and I request that they do not interact. I will be maintaining this page about the gender pyramid. If you use the pyramid, please credit me and link this page.
For reference, this is the top face of the pyramid:
Link to my page about the gender pyramid in case the embedded link breaks:
Gender Affirming Portraiture has made an interesting model to illustrate the complexity of gender identity. No model can capture all of the complexity of the experience of gender or being “gendered”, but this one does manage to include both the nonbinary and agender experiences. I like that.
I know that some people would say that an illustration like this one is misleading, as the great majority identify as either men or women. This figure may be read to indicate that there are as many nonbinary people as women, and as many agender people as men.
That is a valid objection that has to be taken seriously. Still, I would like to point out that the male and female identities are so flexible – even in contemporary cultures – that they hide a lot of gender variance.
When someone says something sexist like “She is wearing the pants in that family!” it might be that they are questioning her femininity, but they are normally not questioning her gender identity. She is still seen as a confirmation of the binary.
The fact is, though, that this assertive and strong woman may perfectly well be some shade of nonbinary, even though she is not classified as such. Heck, she (or they) may not even think of herself that way, because she does not have the language or the role models needed to consider that an option.
Or she may be cis – safely anchored in a female identity. We do not know unless she is consciously aware of her own real self and unless she tells us.
The current increase in the number of nonbinary, transgender and agender people does not mean that more people are gender variant these days. It simply means that there are more nontoxic terms that make sense to them now, terms they can use to understand and describe themselves.
Still, society often demand that you identify as either male or female, so many people d, given that that strategy makes it easier to find acceptance in a binary world.
So what I am saying is basically that there is much more gender diversity around than people imagine, which again means that this model is probably closer to reality than many would think. Indeed, the color gradients explicitly make room for ambiguity and the “in betweens”.
Moreover, you may simply read this as a map of possibilities, and as such it works very well, regardless.
It may not look like much design wise, but it is packed with fascinating stories about transgender people from throughout history. They are written by Zagria, one of our most important transgender historians.
The site has helped me gain a wider perspective on transgender issues and what it means to be trans. I am using the term transgender in its main, wide, umbrella sense here. The way trans people understand and describe themselves changes over time, and there is much to learn from the way they express or expressed themselves.
There is also much to learn from Zagria, the historian, which is why I decided to interview her and hear her take on gender variance, transgender issues and her own life as a transgender woman.
I have published the interview over at Crossdreamers.com. You do not have to read the four parts in order. Click on headline that interests you the most:
