“Let’s do check-in, y’all!” César, Spectrum’s program director, hollers over the din of the music pouring out of the speakers. We approach the overstuffed armchairs that form a circle on a rug in the center of the space. Under strings of multicolored holiday lights made nearly invisible by competing day-bright fluorescents, a motley crew of adult staff, volunteers, interns, and youths slowly come together, quieting down for the daily ritual known as “check-in.” On some days, the number of adults in the space awkwardly outnumbers that of youth; on others, the youth dominate, and the group spills over to the benches that surround the chairs, more filtering in as check-in proceeds. César, with a flick of his black, asymmetrical bangs, commands attention with ease, and the various side-conversations die down quickly as he begins to speak:
Welcome to Spectrum, a safe space for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning youth and their allies. We don’t care how you identify, just that you are down with queer liberation [to which those of us in the know raise our “claws” and say, “RAWR!”]. We’re going to do a little thing called check-in where you tell us your name—doesn’t have to be your real name—your preferred gender pronoun—examples of pronouns are things like “he” and “she,” but you can also use gender neutral pronouns like “ze,” “they,” or “hir”—let us know how your day is going. Who has a question of the day?
It is within this daily practice of checking-in that youth and adults alike are socialized into the queer milieu that is Spectrum, the process serving both as an initiation for first-timers and a time-honored ritual for regulars. Undoubtedly, the question most likely to stump people new to the space is the one referring to the preferred gender pronoun (PGP).1 In most social spaces, people do not take the time to explain to others the gender pronouns they use to identify themselves; it is taken for granted to be obvious. Yet gender is not obvious for everyone. In addition to being a safe place for youth to explore non-heteronormative sexualities, Spectrum is a safe place for genderqueerness. Processes like sharing one’s PGP among the group effectively disrupts the invisible work that naturalizes gender. People may ask to be referred to by female pronouns like “she” and “her” or male pronouns like “he” and “him.” Alternately, gender neutral pronouns like “they,” which can be used to refer to an individual person without signifying a binary gender, and other gender neutral pronouns like “ze” or “hir” are offered up as options for how to refer to a person without using a name. At Spectrum, not only can you be someone who embodies genderqueerness and still be recognized, but you can also be a gender normative person who plays around with using different pronouns. By queering gender in this way, the effect is to reorient the possibilities of what a gendered person can do and be. In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed says, “Gender is an effect of the kinds of work that bodies do, which in turn ‘directs’ those bodies, affecting what they ‘can do.’”2 What happens when you challenge society’s ideas about what a gendered body can do?
Queer-oriented spaces like Spectrum are utopian in their willingness and ability to reimagine gender, if not undo it entirely. In her book, Undoing Gender, the gender theorist Judith Butler talks about how “fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise.”3 The possibility for social transformation can be located in the moments in which norms are disrupted. Butler refers back to her work on drag—as well as nods to the contemporary transgender movement—to argue that these ways of bending gender are political, “by not only making us question what is real, and what has to be, but by showing us how contemporary notions of reality can be questioned, and new modes of reality instituted.”4 Similarly, in Cruising Utopia, queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz speaks of queerness as an ideality. For Muñoz, the hope lies in the striving toward queerness, not necessarily the accomplishment of it: “What we need to know is that queerness is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality.”5 At Spectrum, where there is an institutionalized effort to recognize cisgender privilege and support the trans* movement, gender—along with sexuality—has become particularly salient component of youth identity. Spectrum’s approach to gender shows us the potentiality of queerness.
In Spectrum, I think it’s very accepting. I never even heard, until I came here, or even thought about asking somebody about their gender, their pronoun preference. Never, never ever in any place, and I get that every time, every time people come, like, even when I ask something they’re like what are you talking about? When I meet somebody new, I’m like, “What’s your pronoun preference?” And I’m like, “Yeah, well, what do you identify?” And people out in the street . . . I’ve had trans people who like, don’t pass, be like, “Thank you for asking.” But it’s something . . . I love about that. We’re very trans inclusive.
—Ernie, twenty-one-year-old, queer Chicanx
While gender has long been a matter of concern in LGBTQ communities, rethinking the use of gender pronouns and the adoption of a gender identity—in addition to a sexual identity—are indicators of a new way of thinking about sexuality and gender. Young people coming of age during the rise of trans* awareness have witnessed increasing exposure to trans* experience, including high-profile trans*-identified celebrities and countless news stories about trans*-identified children and youth, and among their peers, they are experiencing a proliferation of gender identities beyond the binary male/female. The young people coming of age today are living with a different phenomenological experience of gender than those who came of age before them; they are experiencing transgender phenomena. According to the transgender studies scholar Susan Stryker, “transgender phenomena, in short, point the way to a different understanding of how bodies mean, how representation works, and what counts as legitimate knowledge.”6
It was simply not the case that the teenagers in the 1980s, when I grew up in a flyover city in the western United States, formed gender identities that required discussing gender pronouns, regardless of one’s ontological understanding of their gender. We did have names for sexual orientations and identities, and we had the term “straight” as a way to begin to understand that heterosexuality was as much a sexual orientation as homosexuality. This was radically different compared to our parents, who would have only understood two options for one’s sexuality and gender, normal or queer (meaning queer in a derogatory sense). But the generation that the youth of Spectrum belong to, those born after 1990 or so, have largely grown up in a culture in which homosexuality is relatively normalized and gender identity is becoming as prevalent a part of the formation of self as sexuality. While I do not think that most of the people in this generation have widely accepted transgender, gender fluidity, and gender non-conformity—familiarity and acceptance varies widely, particularly by geographical area and region—they are, as a group, exposed to transgender phenomena in a way that previous generations were not.
Although the mainstream emphasis on trans* experience reifies transitions from one gendered body to another, transgender phenomena are not simply about transbinary experiences. By focusing particularly on the experiences of how young people experience gender ambiguity, in this chapter I show how the youth of Spectrum complicate gender beyond the binary. For these young people, gender identity is a process of self-recognition and peer influence that is complicated by how others attribute their gender and is often mired in ambivalence. Below, I share some more detailed experiences of genderqueer youths in order to demonstrate how being ambiguously gendered/sexed is a complicated—while not altogether troublesome—experience.
While spaces like Spectrum are often associated with sexuality and sexual identities, trans* people have always occupied LGB spaces. Trans* activists have been hard at work pushing for the recognition of trans* rights within the sexual rights movement. They have had to remind the larger cisgender LGB community to accept that people with trans* experience have always been part of the movement yet to also understand how the needs of trans* people are in many ways distinct from the needs of sexual minority groups.7 It’s important to understand that sexual identity is not always the most salient identity among the kids who frequented Spectrum.
By way of example, Spectrum participates in a statewide queer youth conference every year. During the conference I attended a workshop on trans* identity that featured members of Spectrum’s community. During the question-and-answer period, Jaime, one of Spectrum’s peer staff who is cismale, spoke up, explaining that he always thinks about coming out as being about sexuality, not gender, and he wanted to know what Jack, a Spectrum regular who is transmale, thought was different about coming out as trans* as opposed to coming out as gay. Jack responded that there was a point in his experience where he really made it much more about gender than sexuality because his biggest fear was that people would react to the fact that he was a trans* male who liked men by asking him why he didn’t just stay a straight female? People who are naïve about trans* experiences often get caught up in this very conflation, and resulting confusion, of sexuality and gender.
Often the youth of Spectrum conflated sex, sexuality, and gender, therefore my observations of and interviews with youths about their sexualities were almost always also about their gender. Many times during interviews, when I asked people to tell me their sexual identity, they might say “male,” or when I asked what their gender identity was, they’d say, “gay.” The ethnographer in me was never sure whether to correct them, although I usually ended up giving them some sort of hint as to the difference between gender and sexuality, as I had intended it. But the confusion that occurs when trying to distinguish between the two is evidence of the interrelatedness of sexuality and gender.
It is difficult to separate gender from sexuality because of the way one signifies the other in a semiotic sense. The fact of Jack’s experience, where others automatically assume his gender identity is directly related to his sexual identity, is a good example of this. The sociologist James Dean, in his book Straights, explains the increasing importance of gender identity: “Gender identity practices, then, have taken on a renewed importance in sexual identity practices and politics. Since gender identity practices are the grid for a heterosexual/homosexual sign system that is overlaid on them, masculine/feminine practices have become a key site and structure for the performance of sexual identity and straight and gay identity politics.”8 The reality is that each of us likely experiences our gender and sexuality as deeply intertwined, and similarly we tend to ascribe sexual identities based on gender expression or behavior and vice versa.9
This study began during a moment in history in which the first generation of trans*-identified children is being reared.10 Where pointed discussions about gender identity were once only the purview of LGBTQ-friendly and trans*-friendly spaces, gender talk is increasingly becoming mainstream. Thanks to several high-profile cases, the visibility and awareness of trans* people are on the rise. While I was doing my fieldwork at Spectrum from 2010 to 2013, feature stories about trans* children ran in both the Washington Post and the New York Times,11 and high-profile figures like Lara Jane Grace of the rock band Against Me! and Lana Wachowski, co-director of The Matrix film franchise, came out publicly as trans*. In the subsequent years since I conducted my research, trans* issues have seen an unprecedented volume of media attention, the most high profile cases of which have been transwomen Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner. It is not uncommon to see posters on college campuses that state, “What gender do you prefer?” along with a list of options. Another strong indicator of a sea change taking place is that, in 2015, the Washington Post officially changed its style guide to allow for writers to refer to individuals using the gender neutral pronoun “they.”12
In addition to trans* awareness, increasingly more people—especially young people—are adopting “genderqueer” and “gender fluid” (along with fluid sexualities) as terms to describe gender that does not conform to the female/male, feminine/masculine binary. Social media plays an important part in the shifting norms around gender as people across the globe are having real-time discussions and debates about gender, trans* issues, and queer sexualities on forums like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. A favorite celebrity role model of LGBTQ youth, Miley Cyrus, stated in a Paper Magazine interview during summer of 2015, “I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl.”13 Yet society is so deeply socialized into a binary gender order that the process of gender attribution, the act of determining whether someone is a boy or a girl the first time we see them, is difficult to disrupt.14
While young people, like Cyrus, may embrace the idea of gender fluidity, culturally the dominant social norms around gender continue to reproduce the binary. It’s one thing to embrace a gender-fluid identity, but actually embodying an ambiguous gender may result in a hostile climate—both in and outside of the LGBTQ community. For those kids whose gender does not conform to society’s norms, the process of forming a gender identity is complicated, not only by how they understand themselves but also by how others perceive them. Because of the intertwining relationship of gender and sexuality, discomfort around gender ambiguity is often tied to how it troubles taken-for-granted assumptions about how gender determines sexuality (as discussed in the previous chapter).
Adam is an eighteen-year-old, white, gay, cisgender man with rosy, freckled skin and strawberry blond hair who embodies feminine characteristics like a soft, round face and body. While we talk, he gesticulates his hands and arms animatedly and can transform into a bawdy showgirl at the drop of a hat. When I ask him what he thinks other people usually assumed his gender to be, he responds, “That’s a really good question. A lot of people . . . first mistake me for a girl for a second. And then they realize that I’m a guy.” Jude, a twenty-two-year-old, white transwoman who identifies as pansexualtransplus, is tall, thin, and fair skinned. Her hair is dark with blond-highlighted tips, and she parts it off center, with one side of her bangs hanging in her face. She and I had a quiet visit one afternoon in the interns’ office. She was temporarily living in town and had sought out Spectrum, knowing that LGBTQ communities are typically safe spaces for trans people to be. Although her voice and muscle tone suggest maleness, she evokes female-supermodel androgyny. Similarly to Adam, she explains, “I think most people perceive my gender—if they haven’t already asked—um, then they’re gonna assume male most of the time. I’ve had some people identify it as androgynous. . . . They have difficulty placing it.” Both Adam and Jude are describing how others attribute their gender. In fact, you can see my own process of gender attribution in the way I describe their gender expression. Gender attribution is the process by which a “perceiver” assigns gender to a “displayer,” based on secondary and tertiary sex characteristics like body size, location and characteristics of body hair, voice, facial expression, movement, and body posture, as well as non-essential extra-body characteristics like clothing, makeup, and hairstyle.15
Spectrum engages in various practices to make the process of attribution more visible. For example, asking youth to identify their PGP and holding everyone accountable for then using the right pronoun when referring to each other is one way to disrupt the process of gender attribution. If people learn not to rely strictly on their attribution of others’ gender and instead allow others to self-identify their gender, it makes the process of attribution more visible. This has the effect of encouraging a climate in which gender identity becomes an important aspect of self-expression and understanding for everyone in the space, regardless of their gender. Potentially, it might help us call into question many of the assumptions we make about gendered hierarchies. This is not to say that the PGP question removes inequalities among gendered people, but it opens up an opportunity to interrogate gender. But of course, inequality persists, between masculine and feminine people, as well as between cisgender and trans* gender people.
For those who take for granted their gender and therefore never question their preferred gender pronoun, being asked to identify it can be rather flummoxing. For Spectrum attendees, check-in is likely the first time they have heard someone talk so explicitly about gender. Newcomer reactions to this topic are generally mixed, ranging from simple confusion to awkward laughter. The first time I had to share my PGP I misspoke and said, “I prefer he/she pronouns,” much to my embarrassment (I use and respond to female pronouns). I was not alone in my awkward nervousness when it came to answering this question, as this field note demonstrates:
There was a young woman at Spectrum yesterday, one of the Goth kids, who, when she introduced herself, instead of saying what gender pronouns she preferred stated that she was bi. I’ve never heard anyone identify their sexual orientation at check-in, so I think it was a combination of her being nervous and confusing sexual identity with gender identity.
Beyond the awkwardness of grappling with one’s PGP, being put into a position of having to think about it often starts important conversations about gender, trans* individuals, and cisgender privilege, as demonstrated by an incident I noted involving a newcomer to Spectrum, a cisgender boy with short, curly hair dyed purple and lipstick to match:
During check-in when it got to him, in response to gender pronouns he stated that he didn’t want to offend anyone, but that he calls everyone “girl” and was that okay? He said he’d been at Burger King earlier in the day and called someone “girl” who got really angry with him.
I have no way of knowing the gender identity of the person whom he referred to as “girl” at Burger King, nor do I know the rest of the story, but as check-in made its way around the circle, Mark—a transmale youth with boy-short brown hair, dressed in the typical male adolescent uniform of a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers—made his feelings clear about this topic when he said, “I prefer male pronouns and I will get upset if you refer to me as a female.” This is not an uncommon occurrence. Often, those in the space have to confront their assumptions and prejudices, like having to think about why gay men’s practice of calling everyone “girl” might be problematic as some youths are explicitly striving to not be recognized as a girl.
Although the practice of sharing PGPs during check-in is meant to alert everyone in the space to be mindful of people’s identities, there continue to be slipups. Those youth whose gender is difficult for others to place confound the gender attribution process. This can result in the frustrating and hurtful frequency of having their gender misappropriated, even after they have announced their PGP. For example, I noted this particular exchange between a cisgender female youth and Adrian, a graduate student intern who is a transman, prefers male gender pronouns, but embodies some secondary and tertiary feminine sex/gender characteristics like a feminine sounding voice:
Later, Saffron referred to Adrian as “she” and César again called her out and said, “Adrian uses male pronouns.” Saffron looked right at Adrian and said she remembered him saying that at check-in. “Do you hate me?” I didn’t hear Adrian’s answer.
While among regulars at Spectrum Adrian is generally properly gendered male, newcomers would often misgender him as female. Similarly, I found it to frequently be the case that people in the space would forget to use gender neutral pronouns such as “they” for those who stated that preference during check-in. Unless the individual really worked hard to remind others to use gender neutral pronouns, most people would fall back into using binary pronouns pretty quickly. As the practice of acknowledging pronouns becomes more widespread, the use of gender neutral pronouns is sure to become more common, but as I show here with Adrian—who wants to be referred to by male pronouns—using “they” to refer to him is not necessarily acceptable.16
This may or may not be the generation who breaks through the confines of binary gender to a place where gender ambiguity or a third or multiple ways of being gendered is embraced. They most certainly seem to be laying the groundwork by adopting gender neutral identities and pronouns and working at resisting binaries, but what I describe here is not reflective of a mainstream movement yet. The power of binary gender is hard to escape. As the sociologist Betsy Lucal explains in her reflection on what it is like living as a woman who embodies masculine characteristics, “We cannot escape doing gender or, more specifically, doing one of two genders.”17 But perhaps within spaces like Spectrum, where a concerted effort is being made to disrupt the gender binary, ambiguity can more safely occur.
Many have documented elsewhere that the medical pathologizing of transsexual and transgender persons has necessitated that individuals seeking medical or surgical transition comply with an origin story that somehow proves how they know they are the wrong gender.18 According to the American Psychiatric Association, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) describes gender dysphoria as “a difference between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, and significant distress or problems functioning.”19 A formal gender dysphoria diagnosis from a doctor is often necessary for health insurance plans to cover medical and surgical procedures that would otherwise be determined elective. As more and more young people are identifying publicly as trans*, explanations rooted in biological or psychological—as opposed to sociological—origins reinforce this narrative of being assigned the wrong gender at birth or a child insisting that they are one gender stuck in the wrongly gendered/sexed body. Without negating the lived experience of those who do experience their gender this way, of the several trans* youth I came to know at Spectrum, very few of them describe their experience as being trapped in the wrong body. Most of them describe a process of recognition that paralleled the onset of puberty, sexual awakening, and the development of other identities.
Like all of the transmale youths I interviewed at Spectrum, Spencer came out as a lesbian (he told me this while enclosing the word “lesbian” in finger quotes) before he came out as trans*. As discussed in a previous chapter, gender non-conformance is often assumed to be a signifier of homosexuality, and it was not unusual for transmale-identified youth at Spectrum to have first come out to others as lesbians or gay before realizing that, for them, it was their gender, not their sexuality, that they were negotiating. Spencer once explained that he met a girl in middle school who asked him, “Do you really want to be a girl?” He replied that he did not and she said, “Let’s be trans.” Similarly, other youths’ explanations of their acquisition of gender identity reflect how the influence of peers and others who share similar experiences were crucial to their identity formation. Jude, for example, shared how she learned about trans* through an online gaming community she belonged to where, over time, members of the group began to disclose their trans* identities to each other. In a different case, Adam shared with me, looking back on his late childhood, that he believes that had he known being trans* was an option, he likely would have grown up to be a girl.
The narrative of being trapped in the wrong body takes for granted that there is such a thing as an authentic trans* person (or authentic gendered person, for that matter) and it is rooted in the assumption that one is either born a boy or a girl but that, in a small number of cases, biology somehow got it wrong. Conversely, anyone who cannot prove the origin of their sense of wrongness, or whose gender identity is not fixed but fluid, is not seen as legitimate. Therefore the assumption that there is a right or a wrong way to “be” gendered dismisses the experiences of ambiguity that complicate gendered experiences. The pathological model forecloses on any opportunity to understand gender ambiguity as normal and healthy. But not all genderqueer people are interested in transitioning gender or even in identifying as trans*, for that matter; many of them will live their lives occupying the ambiguous space in between.
Among the genderqueer and trans* youth participants, many spoke of their struggles with gender at school, at home, on the street, and among peers. Spencer, first mentioned above, is a nineteen-year-old Latinx with the voice of a boy and who typically identifies as male at check-in. He is quite short and wears dark, bulky clothes like long-sleeved T-shirts hanging down to his knees, too-big jeans dragging at the heels, and a wallet chain swinging at his hip. He keeps his dark, curly hair short, sometimes shaving his head. He has braces, and although he’s supposed to wear glasses he doesn’t because he claims the combination of glasses and braces “fuck with my game.” Walking to the park together one day, Spencer christened the illuminated walking man at the crosswalk “Transman,” then he said, “FTM Man,” to be specific, which is how I learned Spencer had been assigned a female gender at birth. Spencer explained that he has an information-processing disorder and has attended several high schools. He said, “Schools don’t get me,” referring to his gender status. He also told me about how his mother, who has made some effort to use his male name and refer to him using male pronouns at home, referred to him by his “girl” name at a family funeral. She describes him as being a “tomboy,” rather than referring to him as a man. He stated angrily that he hasn’t been a tomboy since he was eleven and that it was insulting to him to have people see him as a girl. He kept insisting that he wanted to be recognized as a guy and not a tomboy and that he wanted to be taken seriously.
Jack, an eighteen-year-old white transmale who identifies as “pansexual but leaning towards gay,” says he now passes for male in most situations. He wears small, wire-frame glasses and, in the winter, an orange Carhartt-brand jacket. Jack, who did most of the talking while I listened attentively, is quite comfortable sharing his experiences with others, especially in the interest of raising awareness. He is an evangelical Christian and feels that he has an obligation to do as Jesus challenges him, to share his experiences as a transman with others. He refers to a parable from the Bible, “Why, if you were given a lamp, why would you hide it under a bush?”20 He sees his reality as a queer person as the lamp he should not hide and that he should be out, shining the way for others. When I ask him how others read his gender, he claims that he appears to most people “like your typical working-class dude.” He recounts how in high school he struggled to get teachers and other administrative staff to refer to him using male pronouns owing to the fact that all of his official documentation identifies him as a girl. Even though in most cases he was being read male, he explains, “The professors would always correct people. I don’t know if they thought they were being helpful or . . . most people who, like, correct people are just being helpful, but I felt like it wasn’t being helpful. It was almost a power thing.”
Taylor is a white, eighteen-year-old transwoman who identifies as a pansexual female and dresses like a glam rocker from the 1970s in heeled, knee-high boots, dark clothes, torn shirts covered in netting, and black eyeliner around her piercing blue eyes. Taylor grew up in an abusive family and was hospitalized many times as a youth, initially for drug abuse and cutting, later in attempts to “cure” her of gender dysphoria. She had recently fled her hometown, where her mother made her life as a transwoman untenable. She followed a Facebook friend to this town and is currently staying in a shelter for homeless youth. The day we spoke, her blond hair was dyed black and worn short and spiky. When asked what most people think her gender is, Taylor explains that she is most often taken for male:
Most people . . . when I’m walking down the street, I’ll have two or three people, every time I do it, walk up and say, “I like your look, brother.” So people just seem to think I’m just a hardcore rocker guy. Cause I wear black, I’ve got the high heels with the belts, I’m just, I don’t know. I don’t mind it, but I really wish I could, you know, make people see me as a woman more.
These accounts show how at school, on the street, or among family, youth are negotiating gender. At school these gender non-conforming youth are, as Judith Butler describes in Gender Trouble, unintelligible.21 In situations with authority figures, youths have to consider how they are being perceived—what gender others are attributing them—in order to negotiate interactions. Among family, youths have to struggle against fixed gender attributions, often with little or no help from family members to reimagine their gender. In her reflection on her own gender ambiguity, Lucal describes, “How I see myself, even how I might wish others would see me, is socially irrelevant. It is the gender that I appear to be (my perceived gender) that is most relevant to my social identity and interactions with others.”22 Gender attribution intrudes upon the private experience of one’s gender identity because no matter how one personally identifies, without affirmation from others, the opportunity to be recognized as that gender—binary or otherwise—becomes less attainable.
While the youths at Spectrum who identified as trans* were in various stages of transition, many lived their day-to-day lives as the gender they identified with and were successfully passing as that gender in most cases.23 They were deeply invested in their trans identities and talked a lot about the significance this experience had had and continued to have on their lives. Spencer talked about being a “regular guy,” or about “guys like me,” or “I’m not that kind of guy,” when he is referring to girls and dating. Jack told me it is important to him to identify as a transmale, but stated, “Most people don’t think I’m trans*, I think at this point everybody thinks I’m male.” About his gender identity, Rick, a nineteen-year-old white male, stated, “I’ve been passing about one hundred percent of the time since this time last year. Like after I went to college and there were no people who knew me before I was male, I passed as male one hundred percent of the time. Usually as a gay man, but passing as male.”
It surprised me one day when Spencer—who had been so adamant about his male identity in all of our previous exchanges, showed up one day wearing eye makeup, fingernail polish, and a feminine blouse and shoes, hand-in-hand with a girl. He explained to me that with some people his boy comes out and with some people his girl comes out and that “his girl had been coming out for the first time in forever” because he’d been spending time with a lesbian friend. Spencer shared with me many times that he had very strong feelings for this girl, but their relationship had most recently been on the rocks. Now that they were hanging out again, was Spencer feeling some pressure to align his gender with her sexual identity as lesbian? Not only are youths influenced by their relationships with others, but, as Spencer’s experience demonstrates, the logic of the sexual order—an order that now includes same-sex sexualities like lesbian and gay—simply does not always fit their own understanding of themselves as gendered, sexual beings.
One can easily perform gender in a myriad of ways by simple alterations of dress, makeup, facial and body hair, and body movements, but there are certain embodied characteristics that cannot easily be transformed without hormonal or surgical treatments, if at all. These include the sound of a person’s voice, body size and shape (including, for example, having breasts or the size and shape of one’s hands), and location and thickness of facial and body hair. Some people’s gender expression is very masculine or feminine, but most of us fall somewhere along a spectrum of gender characteristics: some closer, others further away from those polarities. Jude expressed that although she is doing hormone replacement therapy, she would rather embody an androgynous than a female gender.24 She sums up nicely how she recognizes her own gender on a spectrum: “In fact, I would say pretty commonly the direct ratio of male to female, uh, stereotypically based on social constructs of the gender binary, would be about twenty-three [male]: seventy-seven [female].”
But there are those people whose gender expression is quite androgynous, and they experience others always questioning whether they are a boy or a girl. Not only are these individuals subject to policing of their sexuality, as social norms result in a conflation of sexuality and gender, but they are further sanctioned for not fitting into appropriate gender norms.
There are a handful of youths at Spectrum that I refer to as ambiguously gendered for whom the PGP question is helpful because it allows them the opportunity to identify as they want to be identified, not as others decide for them. As I mentioned previously, it also eases the discomfort of those around them who are unsure of their gender, and unlike the cisgender youth, they are more likely to get mis-identified both inside and outside the space. For clarity, I understand these particular youths to be people who (1) are more or less comfortable identifying with the gender that aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth even though they embody a gender that often contradicts that identity, or (2) prefer to identify as genderqueer or gender fluid because their embodiment and expression of gender is ambiguous. Although one could describe youths in either category as trans* in that their gender expression fits under the umbrella the term is meant to encompass, the youths described below did not identify as trans*.
Corey, an eighteen-year-old Latinx who identifies their gender using the term “universal” and their sexuality using the term “energy,” has a very unique style. For our interview they had on a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, along with two leather studded belts, one worn around their waist and the other worn like backpack straps over their shoulders. Corey wore pink running shorts over dark leggings, one side of which were torn open. On their feet were fuzzy, thick neon ankle socks and no shoes. They wore Wayfarer-style sunglasses throughout our interview, so I could only barely make out their eyes. When I asked Corey to clarify their gender identity, they said, “You know, I just, with gender references, I really just don’t think of male or female for myself. It’s just me.” Corey explains how they are understood as femme within the LGBTQ community and how they often confuse people in the broader community when it comes to their gender:
Well, I know in the LGBTQ community . . . they think I’m really feminine and really flamboyant, and very, uh, “twinkie,” you know? So, it’s . . . depending on where I’m at. ’Cause even . . . like going on the bus, people will probably think that—from the way that I dress and um . . . how I bring myself out, I guess you’d say—I don’t know what they would think. I think that’s exactly what they think . . . is they don’t know, you know? It’s like, well, I don’t know.
I was often struck by the irony that some youths at Spectrum so easily passed—and therefore were mistaken—for another gender than the one with which they identify, while others who wanted to transition from one gender to another found it hard to pass as they desired. The difference has to do with how one embodies gender and therefore how others attribute gender to them. I use “embodiment” in an attempt to distinguish more fixed gender characteristics—for example, secondary and tertiary sex/gender characteristics like the sound of one’s voice or the location and amount of body hair—from “gender expression,” which is the multifaceted ways that each and every one of us can choose to display our gender to others, including clothing, makeup, hairstyles, mannerisms, and more. But, of course, embodiment could be understood as a form of gender expression.
Gabe is an eighteen-year-old bisexual Latinx who is about five-and-a-half feet tall and slight of frame. He typically dresses in masculine clothing like blue jeans, hiking shoes, and T-shirts. He wears his dark brown, wavy hair long, usually highlighted some shade of red. He has a soft, feminine face but almost always has a beard of dark hair that grows just up to his throat and over his chin and jaw bone, but not up the side of his face. More notable even than his feminine facial features and small stature is his voice, which sounds very much like that of a young woman. He is overall gentle, soft-spoken, and kind. Gabe claims no gender pronoun preference during check-ins and introduces himself both as Gabe and as his alter ego, Kaylee. I have never heard anyone refer to him as anything other than Gabe and using male pronouns, indicating that among his friends he is attributed a male gender. Outside of Spectrum, though, he is often mistaken for a woman. After telling me this in an interview, I asked him how he feels about being identified as a woman by strangers, and he explained:
It actually makes me feel happy, knowing that, even when I’m not trying, like, people will think that I’m a woman. And it’s just, like sometimes, it kind of grinds my gears, ’cause sometimes I’ll be dressed completely like a boy. I’m wearing a nice button-up shirt, some good jeans, it’s just like, I’m obviously wearing—I mean, I own more boy shoes than I do girl shoes—it’s just like, I go out completely dressed and looking like a guy and I even have facial hair and everything and yet I still have somebody mistake me for a woman. And sometimes I’m just like, “Grrr, like hello? Do you not see the facial hair? Does it look like I have breasts?” [laughs]. So like, it’s kind of bittersweet sometimes but most of the time I just feel happy knowing that I can get people to think that I’m a woman without even trying.
Using secondary (non-reproductive, physical characteristics) and tertiary (non-verbal behaviors such as facial expression, movement, body posture) sex/gender characteristics, people find it difficult to categorize Gabe’s gender because of the ways that his ambiguity defies a clearly male or female gender. As described above, Gabe does not seem bothered by his gender ambiguity. In addition to his experiences with strangers who think he is a woman, he also likes to perform in Spectrum’s drag shows, and his embodiment of gender makes it easier for him to pass as a woman, which results in various symbolic and material rewards in a space where being a man who can successfully pass as a woman in a performance setting is highly valued.
Another example of a genderqueer youth is Ditto, a twenty-year-old bisexual, biracial Latinx who is six feet tall and, in her own words, “fat.” The first time I ever saw Ditto, she was performing at the drag show. She performed “Cannibal Queen” by the indie pop band Miniature Tigers. She wore a tiny top hat on her head and swung a cane around as she walked up and down the runway. Her face was made up to look like her lips were stitched shut and fake blood dripped out of her mouth while she lip synced the words: “Comin’ for your heart like a cannibal / Oh, she lets me right in and I’m fed ’til I’m full / If something goes wrong, I’m accountable / Oh, a life without her is no life at all.” At check-in, Ditto is likely to say that she does not care what gender pronouns are used to refer to her. In our interview she explained that she has a disorder that causes her to have ambiguous gender traits, and that, along with her size, makes people question her gender. When I asked about her gender identity she offered this account:
Ditto: I am predominantly female, sometimes I’m genderqueer.
Mary: And people out in the world, people who don’t know you personally, how do you think they perceive your gender?
Ditto: Uh, a lot of people just don’t know. I have a chemical imbalance, so sometimes I’ll grow facial hair and so people question then, too. They’re like, “I don’t know if that’s a fat guy or a hairy girl.” So, I just throw people off with my gender all the time.
Mary: So people are confused by it a lot.
Ditto: Yes, a lot of times I just hear “freak” and that’s fine.
People like Corey, Gabe, and Ditto, who embody an ambiguous gender, did not describe feelings of gender dysphoria to me. Their self-identification is not in contradiction with the gender they were assigned at birth.25 Even in the case of Jude, who is undergoing hormone therapy and identifies as a woman, she says, “I just want to be like a female that dresses like a guy.” For these young people, ambiguity is the norm, not a moment of transition. Being genderqueer, however, is not just about those people who want to change their gender identity and expression: It includes people who live entire lives of gender ambiguity. Trans* people encompass a diverse variety of individuals and experiences, from those who have successfully transitioned from one gender to another within the binary, to those who are in the midst of that process or want to be, but also to those who are in the spaces in between. As with any community of people striving for legitimacy in larger society, there are rifts and divisions among the trans* community that are often based on authenticity or successful achievement of transition. But largely, the trans* movement has embraced the idea of opening gender up for interpretation beyond the binary.26 And it is important to state that not everyone who embodies gender ambiguity or who plays in non-binary realms of gender expression identify as trans*.
Genderqueer youth are exceptionally marginalized because their very presence disrupts the seemingly natural gendered order of things. Those youths who do not fit into the gender binary struggle with being understood at school, at home, and on the street. They are labeled “disruptive,” “learning disabled,” “mentally ill,” “delinquent,” or, in hate language, “freak.” Yet the youth of Spectrum are living in an age where gender is being challenged in a new way. They are more likely to understand gender as fluid rather than immutable. They potentially have access to new technologies in the form of clothing, makeup, wigs, hair removal, hormones, and surgeries that make it easier than ever to physically transform the embodied aspects of one’s gender. Being genderqueer is nothing new, but the expanded possibilities and options for transition and expression have grown immensely. Along with this, the possibilities for gender identity have expanded as well.
Spectrum has played a crucial role in the lives of genderqueer youths who face certain bullying and harassment, as well as other forms of social sanction, for not conforming to society’s expectations of looking and acting like typical boys and girls. By institutionalizing the disruption of gender—asking people to identity their PGP, for example—Spectrum allows for non-binary, ambiguous genders to be recognized. It has allowed Gabe, Ditto, and Spencer to find a place for themselves as queers in a straight world, and they all acknowledge the role Spectrum has played in bolstering their self-confidence. As Ditto says about her first visit to the space,
Then I got to go and see there was all these people and I wasn’t a freak; I wasn’t that one person who’s that gender they don’t know. I was Ditto and everyone was okay with that. So “I’m like, oh yeah, I’m bi!” “That’s cool, I’m a lesbian! What, you want a cookie for that?” It didn’t feel like it was a judge thing, it was like, that’s cool, it was like saying, “Oh by the way, I live here.” It was not a big thing.
This does not, however, change the fact that people whose gender expression confounds a clearly male or female attribution shoulder the burden of society’s discomfort with gender ambiguity. Adolescent negotiation of sexual and gender identities is not a universal experience. It is still the case that those young people who are consciously forming sexual and gender identities are members of already queer communities, while most teenagers who conform to the dominant order take their sexuality and gender for granted.
In his discussion of the state’s role in “administering gender,” the legal scholar Dean Spade shows how identity documentation, sex-segregated facilities, and access to healthcare are all ways that the government plays a role in upholding binary gender norms, a role that he argues results in violence against trans* and genderqueer people. Spade states that “data collection and management-focused programs like driver’s licensing, Social Security benefits, and taxation are less often analyzed for their racist and sexist impacts. In reality, these systems are part of a national security project that constructs national norms to sort populations for the distribution of life chances.”27 Because the state does not permit for gender neutrality or gender ambiguity, efforts towards trans* rights have had to focus on formal recognition within institutions that control driver’s licenses, passports, and other forms of formal identification, requiring rights to access medical and surgical care in order to transition from one gender to another.28 The effort to “prove” one’s binary gender spills over quite significantly into the debate over sex-segregated facilities, like bathrooms.
The increasing visibility of trans* children in schools has erupted in countless debates over bathroom use. Parents, administrators, and teachers battle over whether a child has a right to use the gendered/sexed bathroom of their choice, while the simplest solution—gender neutral bathrooms—rarely comes up. And given that people whose gender seems to deviate from the norm are assumed to be sexual deviants, particularly in the case of transwomen, adult anxieties about bathroom use are deeply tied to adult anxieties about sexuality.29
As advocacy for the legislation of trans* rights has increased, the opposition has resulted in the form of what Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook call “penis panics.”30 By conflating transwomen with sexual predators, campaigns that oppose trans* rights legislation work to convince people that allowing male bodies into women’s sex-segregated spaces will result in increased incidence of sexual assault. In addition to reducing all women and girls to vulnerable victims and all men and boys to sexual predators, this discourse relies on an essentialist understanding of sex, where genitals are the sole determination of one’s gender. North Carolina’s 2016 House Bill 2, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, legally defines sex as “the physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a person’s birth certificate.”31 It is considered by many to be one of the most—if not the most—anti-LGBTQ pieces of legislation passed in the United States to date, and it has resulted in widespread boycotts of North Carolina. The U.S. Department of Justice (under the Obama administration) considered House Bill 2 a violation of the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, and the Violence Against Women Act and as a result filed suit against the state of North Carolina and several entities within it.32 Setting aside for a moment the notion that this type of legislation is hauntingly similar to Jim Crow–era “separate but equal” forms of racial segregation, there are other reasons that legislating gender in this way does not make sense. Although in some states it is possible to have the sex on one’s birth certificate changed, the reality is that doing so requires access to a lot of resources, including medical diagnoses, hormonal treatments, and surgeries, along with the wherewithal to navigate complicated bureaucracies. In addition, requiring that a person’s gender expression and identity be in line with the sex on their birth certificate negates gender non-conformity and all the myriad ways people experience their gender. Not all trans* people desire to identify within the gender binary, and not all genderqueer people identify as trans*.
Allowing a transitioning child to use the gendered/sexed bathroom of their choice or a segregated bathroom within the school, as has so often been the case, does not solve the bathroom problem for people who embody ambiguous gender. There continue to be human bodies society struggles to categorize as “girl” or “boy.” Bathrooms, security lines in airports, organized sports, and even identification checks for purchasing tobacco or alcohol become sites of struggle and, in some cases, violence for people whose gender is often mis-attributed. Beyond these day-to-day obstacles to moving around in society, genderqueer people are particularly susceptible to violence in the form of bullying and harassment, often because of the way their gender ambiguity fails to align their gender and sexuality. Trans* and genderqueer people have been violently attacked and/or murdered by perpetrators who justify their actions by accusing their victims of deception when their genitals do not align with their perceived gender.33 Embodying ambiguous gender comes at a very high cost in our society.
I have tried to show here the strength of the binary gender order, which continues to compel people—whether they are trans*, genderqueer, or cisgender—to either be a boy or a girl, not something in between, and that the gender order is upheld through the process of external gender attribution, not just internal gender identity. Although Spectrum youth in many ways embrace gender ambiguity—like Gabe, for example, who says it makes him happy to be mistaken for a woman—Ditto is still seen as a freak, often identifiable as neither a man nor a woman. Jude, who identifies as a woman but is really most comfortable as an androgynous person, says, “I feel like it’s a lot of pressure behind me to dress and act feminine, because I identify that way.” Finally, while countless stories about trans* children and their parents fighting for the right to transition and be supported in their communities and schools is a sign of a revolution, the dominant message remains that one must still be a boy or a girl, not both or neither, which assumes that there is such a thing as a boy or a girl and that we all know who they are when we see them. What does that mean for Spencer, who after several years of rejecting his female self and identifying as a guy, needs the space and freedom to be a girl sometimes, too? In our efforts to protect transbinary youth, we need to take care not to create more invisible categories of people who will be marginalized in the process.34 Perhaps another one of the ways society can break the habit of the gender binary will be through queer media, a topic I take up in the next chapter.