G

G — The G in LGBT+ is for GAY.

GAL, GAL PAL — Slang for a girl, in recorded use since 1795 as a vulgarism.

Gal pal is a phrase used without irony by media outlets and people who comment on romantic relationships between women, seemingly unaware that they are romantically or sexually involved with each other. It’s now used ironically between queers, lightheartedly mocking straight people’s inability to see a pair of women as anything other than friends.

see also: GIRL; WOMAN; SAPPHIC; ERASURE; SCISSORING

GATEKEEP, GATEKEEPER — Gatekeep means to arbitrarily delay or prevent access. A gatekeeper is someone who acts as a barrier to access.

The boundaries of queerness are deliberately blurry, but some people actively police them to keep others out. Any notion of gatekeeping, such as “not trans enough” or “not queer enough,” should be challenged.

Trans healthcare and access to public life are heavily gatekept. Trans people are only allowed access to vital treatment after we’ve “proven” ourselves to a panel of so-called “experts,” who often don’t even know what “transgender” means. Our ability to change our names and gender markers on IDs often relies on a letter from a psychologist and a formal diagnosis of mental illness, rather than a self-declaration. Medical transition is only allowed after a long, arbitrary period of counseling and “real-life experience,” which is more to assuage the doubts of cis practitioners than to ensure that trans patients are giving truly informed consent.

GAY — An umbrella term for homosexual, same-sex attracted, and LGBT+. A reclaimed slur.

Gay has come to be shorthand for all non-heterosexual people—sometimes it also includes heterosexual trans people—and the culture they create. Its use as an umbrella term is good because it’s inclusive and usefully reductive; but it’s also bad because it prioritizes homosexual men, erases difference within the queer community, and is justification for gatekeeping non-homosexual queerness (bisexuality, pansexuality, asexuality, and non-homosexual transness).

Gay has been, and continues to be, the umbrella term under which LGBTQ+ people politically organize. Gay is also a unifying cultural term through which all queer people can find representation and shared experiences.

Gay is a gendered term as much as it is about sexuality. Gay has a historic connection with trans: until the 20th century, gay and trans were regarded as the same, because both gay and trans were defined by being gender transgressions. Even throughout the 20th century, gay and trans culture were indistinguishable until the 1990s.

The modern relationship between gay men (as a group) and non-homosexual queer groups is fraught. Gay spaces are transphobic and misogynistic. There are LGB people campaigning to push the T out of LGBT+. The assumption that gay culture is all about sex—that the gay community is a massive orgy—means that aces and trans people (and anyone who doesn’t fall into hegemonic cisnormative beauty standards, i.e., young, cis, thin, white, rich) can’t participate in gay culture. Gay culture is all about playing with gender norms (e.g., drag, wearing makeup, calling each other “girl”); but when trans men do it, they’re “invalidating” themselves as men.

Homosexuality has long been seen as deviant and criminal, so accusations of being gay were very serious and insulting. Gay continues to be used as a slur to describe all things bad, or all things perceived as gender transgressions: failures of masculinity and femininity. In the 1990s and 2000s, gay replaced queer as the ubiquitous homophobic slur.

Though it encompasses all non-heterosexual groups, gay is distinct from queer and other sexuality terms. Gay has connotations of homonormativity, assimilation, and respectability. But an otherwise queer-identified person might still choose to call themselves gay in certain contexts where it’s simpler and safer to say “I’m gay” rather than get into the nuances of sexuality or gender identity. Other times, they’ll say, “I’m not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.”

GAY AGENDA — A demonizing term used by the religious right to suggest a monolithic and nefarious gay community, usually one driven toward corrupting youth and destroying “family values.”

It is also used with levity by gay people.

Levity aside, the LGBT+ rights movement does genuinely have a gay agenda. The foremost issue has been marriage equality, but a comprehensive gay agenda would also include: prison reform, sex education which is inclusive of queer and trans bodies and relationships, more hate crime laws, and full inclusion of trans and queer people in the military.

A queer agenda, however, would prioritize prison and police abolition, universal healthcare, ending homelessness (which disproportionately affects queer youth), abolishing borders and abolishing detention centers (which cage queer migrants and asylum seekers), and abolishing the military.

GAY BAR — A bar which welcomes or caters to queer people, explicitly or implicitly. The site of queer culture, with queer performances, music, and dancing.

Weimar Germany had thriving gay/trans culture, and in World War I US soldiers who went to Germany saw it and brought it back to America. The German influence, along with the rise in modern living, nightclubs, and youth living away from their parents, sparked the creation of the first major gay urban communities. Class distinctions were eroding because everyone went to the same gay clubs: “slumming” was popular among the rich, who went to places like Harlem’s Cotton Club (a segregated, prohibition-era cabaret nightclub) and hooked up with street queens. Some lived in butch or femme “drag” all the time, especially the lower classes who had less social status to lose for deviating from prescribed gender norms.

There were lots of gay clubs in America in the 1920s. Many were shuttered during the Depression in the 1930s, but more opened again during World War II when all the men went away to fight. Women weren’t allowed into bars at all before World War I, but with suffrage they were allowed to access more parts of public social life. When the men left for war in the early 1940s, queer women took over the gay spaces; and when the men returned, the women stayed.

Gay bars are closing again because gentrification and rising rents force them to shut down. Gay culture happens in low-income areas because queers are more likely to be poor and disenfranchised; gentrification happens around gay bars because straight people find gay culture “edgy” and “arty” and desirable.

see also: PROJECT 10; ALLY; ACTIVISM

GAZE — The act of seeing and being seen. The power dynamics of being watched.

As described in Foucault’s panopticon metaphor, we live in a self-policing society where we could always be being watched, and where we are in fact usually being watched or recorded. We adjust our behavior, without prompting, to assimilate and act “normal.”

The gaze comes not only from the state, but from individuals who police those around them. People who feel pressure from the gaze are encouraged to be insecure, docile, and to consume more. They also face mental-health problems and alienation.

The gaze is fetishistic and dehumanizing.

GENDER (n.) — A nebulous set of cultural norms surrounding behavior, community, and aesthetic. A relationship to power under patriarchy.

Gender is a feeling of affinity, a set of relations (hierarchy), and an alleged mark of biological difference (sex) and social difference (sexuality, under heteronormativity).

Gender is a social code; a set of norms which are culturally produced and ever-shifting. Gender is, in many cultures, a primary identity, so challenges to it can be extremely uncomfortable. Gender is internal (self) and external (society). It is neither possible nor desirable to try to distinctly separate these.

Gender is produced and reproduced through hierarchy, which is reinforced by compulsory heterosexuality which enforces gender roles and reifies that hierarchy. That hierarchy may begin with an assumption on gender based on the perception of genitals at birth, but it is mainly enforced through adherence to, or deviation from, gender norms and roles (i.e., appearance and behavior). Do you act like and look like the gender you are assumed to be, or not? Deviation invites punishment, but adherence is to be punished too. Everyone suffers, to varying degrees, under cisheteropatriarchy.

According to Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Some gender theorists think that our genders are “made” through privileged/oppressed relations: a person might be made into a woman when she is harassed on the street by someone who is made into a man as he harasses her. But gender policing doesn’t only enforce hierarchy; it also enforces gender normativity and punishes deviation from the norm.

Gender is something we do, not a fixed or essential aspect of the self. Gender is a performance. But gendered performance isn’t a single act; it is repetition and ritual, it is habit. It is the way we walk, the timbre of our voices, the way we interact with each other based on assumptions we make about other people’s genders without realizing we’re doing it. This performance is constant and so becomes naturalized, though there is nothing natural about it (and we can see how different it has been throughout history and across cultures). And, we are limited in the performances we’re able to do, based on our other (perceived) identities and what is considered intelligible by current cultural norms around gender.

Gender is performative, but it is not just performance. Emphasizing the performative aspect of gender is reductive, and does not leave room for exploring why certain gender roles are more comfortable or natural. Performance doesn’t explain dysphoria (physical or social). Saying simply that “gender is performative,” or “all gender is drag,” implies that gender is somehow not real. But of course it is real. It is elusive but extremely material, with concrete consequences.

In addition to performance, gender is an interior sense of self, aligning with or against cultural norms of gender. A person isn’t a woman because she has a body gendered that way, but because she identifies with “womanhood,” which can include aesthetics, behaviors, characteristics, and relationships to other genders.

Some types of feminism think that gender should be eradicated because its only purpose is to subjugate women, or women and queers; but for many queers and trans people, gender is positive and powerful. We want to eradicate gender hierarchies, but not the beautiful diversity of gender.

Gender is assumed to be a stable category, and upon gender “sexuality” is built. The current mainstream modes of describing sexuality—heterosexual and homosexual—depend on both the gender of the subject and the gender(s) of the people they’re attracted to. This assumes that the gender of the subject is stable, and that the genders of the people they’re attracted to are both stable and immediately recognizable.

Gender is flimsy and elusive when subject to interrogation. For lots of trans people who spend a lot of time thinking about it, it’s hard to pinpoint why we are our gender and not some other genders. Gender for trans people can be extremely specific (“My gender is sassy Spock raising his eyebrow”) and extremely vague (“My gender is obscurity”). Media portrayals can help people articulate their “gender feels” by providing a template from popular culture. It’s not within the scope of this book (nor my ability as a theorist) to fully explore the implications of “self,” “selfness.” Suffice to say that gender is about a sense of self, and that maybe it does not need to be further explained.

Gender is elusive but it is also material, with material consequences. It is produced through external material conditions and experience (e.g., sexism, privilege). However, the affects of an internal sense of gender are also material: to try to separate external “material experience” from internal experience of gender (e.g., a trans woman who is gendered as a man, who ostensibly then does not experience sexism where cis women do) would be an error. Her material experience includes internalized misogyny and transmisogyny and constant erasure, and her lack of direct transmisogyny is conditional on her hiding and denying a key aspect of herself.

Gender is also reproduced through relationships to others: the way I act in different gendered relationships reaffirms (and actually creates, day by day) my gender. A girl is a girl partly because she adopts the role of “girl,” and acts “like a girl” instead of “like a boy” or like both, or like neither. Our gender is reproduced by how we see ourselves, how our social group sees us, and how society sees us. We constantly signify our genders in order to “establish” or re-create them. What happens when people fail to see our gender despite the signals we send?

Failure. The production of gender norms means there are inverse gender failures. That there is gender at all means we are doomed to fail at it.

Gender norms define which bodies are legitimate, which are intelligible and “real”; bodies which defy these norms are illegitimate, unintelligible, and “fake.”

Normative, “proper” gender is underwritten by racial codes of purity and taboos against miscegenation.

Gender is constructed, produced, and reproduced within existing power structures, which are totalizing and inescapable. Therefore, there is no “authentic” gender against which to compare ours. All gender is a performance, but some gender can leverage performance and subvert the power structures of patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and so on, by challenging or questioning the gender binary, or cultural beauty norms.

Gender is constructed within other systems of privilege/oppression and other hierarchies, like white supremacy. The default gender template is heterosexual, cis, white, wealthy, and able-bodied. People who don’t fit within those narrow categories are doing gender “wrong” already, before they’ve done anything, and we will not gain access to rights or resources by trying to cram ourselves into a box that can’t contain us. Assimilation may afford you some safety, some invisibility, but it will not give you, or Others like you, liberation.

GENDER (v.), GENDERED — To assign a gender to a person, aesthetic, object, or behavior. Names, colors, occupations, clothing, and bodies are all gendered.

It is not possible to extricate gender from our experiences, because it is constantly imposed upon us, similarly to white supremacy and other systems of oppression. Everything is infected with gender. We must aim to contest the normative gendering with something better.

Gender abolitionists are not interested in erasing all things which are currently gendered from humanity, nor do they want a single gender to replace the current wealth of gender diversity we have now. Gender abolitionism instead aims for the eradication of an asymmetric power system based on gender (or, more specifically, traits and bodies which have gender imposed upon them). Gender abolition must constantly evaluate itself to ensure that it isn’t simply thinly-veiled misogyny, especially transmisogyny, which targets femininity as “gendered” while masculinity is prized as “androgynous.”

GENDER AFFIRMING SURGERY — Any surgery which “affirms” the patient’s gender.

The term usually refers to chest surgeries (top surgery), genital reconstruction surgery (bottom surgery), and other surgical procedures which alleviate dysphoria.

While it’s a useful phrase because it encompasses a range of trans-related surgeries, it’s generally preferable to use the specific term for the surgery you’re referring to. If using a blanket term is unavoidable, the phrase “transgender-specific surgery” is an alternative, though even that is not without its problems because cis people also get some of the same surgeries for different reasons (e.g., mastectomy).

This phrase is widely in use because it encompasses any surgery related to easing dysphoria for trans people. But, trans people’s genders don’t (necessarily) need to be “affirmed” through surgery.

Former terms to describe this include “gender reassignment surgery” and “sex change operation.”

GENDER BINARY — A classification of gender. A power structure.

The gender binary is the binding of gender, biological sex, and gendered behavior together, and into two opposite, distinct, fixed categories, with no liminality, cross-over, or alternative: woman/female/feminine and man/male/masculine.

Gender is a spectrum, and so is biological sex and gendered behavior. Smashing the gender binary means challenging the idea of what it means to be a “woman” or a “man.” Seeing gender as a binary reinforces power structures within patriarchy. The gender binary dictates not only what genders are permissible, but what ways of performing our genders are allowed.

Contrary to the claims of “gender critical” feminism, trans people do not “reinforce” the gender binary by existing. No genders “reinforce” the gender binary; the gender binary is not an individual choice of gender expression, it’s a system of sorting, prioritizing, and vilifying people and behaviors. Trans people, by definition, challenge the gender binary because they challenge the “fixedness” of gender to sex, even if they “fully transition” (whatever that means) to an “opposite” gender.

Gender critical feminism, it turns out, isn’t critical of gender; it’s critical of trans people. For trans people, there is no winning in this game. There is no gender expression a trans person can adopt which will satisfy the call, seemingly put only upon trans people, to “smash the binary” rather than reify it. By naming themselves in opposition to the default binary, they are allegedly reproducing it.

What are we to do instead, other than simply be born in a different time? There is no possibility for existing fully outside of cisheteronormative patriarchy; to oppose it is to undermine and hopefully undo it.

Bisexuals are also accused of reinforcing the gender binary, based on the misconception that bisexuality is attraction to “the same and opposite” genders. Bisexuality has always included people outside the gender binary, and most modern bisexual groups have updated their definitions of bisexuality to “attracted to the same and other genders, attracted to two or more genders, or attracted to people regardless of gender.” If anything, homosexuality and heterosexuality are more “binary” sexualities than bisexuality, though they are likewise not absolutely rigid.

If the gender binary were an accurate representation of human biology and gender, no one would ever deviate from a single column on the chart below:

	Female/Woman/Feminine	Male/Man/Masculine
Chromosomes	XX	XY
Dominant hormones	Estrogen/Progesterone	Testosterone
Genitals	Vagina	Penis
Sex organs	Uterus, ovaries	Testicles
Gametes	Egg	Sperm
Gender identity	Woman	Man
Gender expression	Hegemonic femininity	Hegemonic masculinity

In reality, human biology, gender identity, and gender expression are extremely diverse.

The gender binary is not “real” (tangible, infallible, ultimate); it’s a social construct. But it is real in the sense that it has significance, cultural weight, and consequences.

GENDER CRITICAL — An anti-trans ideology which suggests that trans people are inherently reinforcing the gender binary.

Gender critical people argue that being trans is conforming to and reproducing outdated gender modes and the gender binary. The entire premise is based on a conflation between gender norms, and gender identity and dysphoria. When trans people conform to traditional gender norms, it’s often because they need to in order to be gendered correctly, or to be taken as “serious” about their transition.

Rather than criticize the strategies that trans people use to navigate the world comfortably, we should be subverting systems of cisheteropatriarchy which prescribe the “correct” ways to do gender.

Feminine	Masculine	Gender neutral
Sister	Brother	Sibling
Mother, Mom, Mommy, Motherhood	Father, Dad, Daddy, Fatherhood	Parent, Ren, Renny, Parenthood, Rentherhood
Aunt	Uncle	Ankle
Niece	Nephew	Nibling, Niblet
		Cousin
Girlfriend	Boyfriend	Partner, Lover, Enbyfriend, Date mate, Babe, Amour
Girl	Boy	Kid, Child
Woman	Man	Person, Adult
Gal	Dude, Guy, Man, Bro, Mate (masculine coded), Comrade (masculine coded), Buddy (masculine coded)	Friend, Pal
Ladies	Gentlemen	Everyone Kind audience Esteemed guests Friends People Y’all Youse