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As I was scrolling through Facebook a few weeks ago, I noticed a new trend: Several friends posted pictures (via an app) of what they would look like as “the opposite sex.” Some of them were quite funny—my female-identified friends sported mustaches, while my male-identified friends revealed long flowing locks. But my sociologist-brain was curious: What makes this app so appealing? How does it decide what the “opposite sex” looks like? Assuming it grabs the users’ gender from their profiles, what would it do with users who listed their genders as non-binary, trans, or genderqueer? Would it assign them male or female? Would it crash? And, on a basic level, why are my friends partaking in this “game?”
Gender is deeply meaningful for our social world and for our identities—knowing someone’s gender gives us “cues” about how to categorize and connect with that person. Further, gender is an important way our social world is organized—for better or worse. Those who use the app engage with a part of their own identities and the world around them that is extremely significant and meaningful.
Gender is also performative. We “do” gender through the way we dress, talk, and take up space. In the same way, we read gender on people’s bodies and in how they interact with us. The app “changes people’s gender” by changing their gender performance; it alters their hair, face shape, eyes, and eyebrows. The app is thus a outlet to “play” with gender performance. In other words, it’s a way of doing digital drag. Drag is a term that is often used to refer to male-bodied people dressing in a feminine way (“drag queens”) or female-bodied people dressing in a masculine way (“drag kings”), but all people who do drag do not necessarily fit in this definition. Drag is ultimately about assuming and performing a gender. Drag is increasingly coming into the mainstream, as the popular reality TV series RuPaul’s Drag Race has been running for almost a decade now. As more people are exposed to the idea of playing with gender, we might see more of them trying it out in semi-public spaces like Facebook.
While playing with gender may be more common, it’s not all fun and games. The Facebook app in particular assumes a gender binary with clear distinctions between men and women, and this leaves many people out. While data on individuals outside of the gender binary is limited, a 2016 report from The Williams Institute estimated that 0.6% of the U.S. adult population — 1.4 million people — identify as transgender. Further, a Minnesota study of high schoolers found about 3% of the student population identify as transgender or gender nonconforming, and researchers in California estimate that 6% of adolescents are highly gender nonconforming and 20% are androgynous (equally masculine and feminine) in their gender performances.
So, let’s all play with gender. Gender is messy and weird and mucking it up can be super fun. Let’s make a digital drag app that lets us play with gender in whatever way we please. But if we stick within the binary of male/female or man/woman, there are real consequences for those who live outside of the gender binary.
Allison Nobles is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota and Graduate Editor at The Society Pages. Her research primarily focuses on sexuality and gender, and their intersections with race, immigration, and law.
if you work to stop gendering strangers, it becomes much easier to gender trans people right, cause you lose the sense of “facial hair = male” and “boobs = female” and stuff. when you see someone cute at walmart and think “dang he’s cute”, correct yourself to “dang they’re cute”, it’s a small thing but correcting yourself without feedback or backlash or anything does become habit and it increases the ease in which you can change pronouns for people who ask because you aren’t entrenched in gender binaries and stuff.
If the binary is so natural why does it requite such rigid enforcement?
This quote from Samantha over at CDL got me thinking: Are there any other presumably natural processes than requires the kind of policing transphobes are engaging in these days?
Hunger maybe? Nah. People seem, for the most part, to eat when they are hungry (and even when they are not). You do not have to force them to add more energy and nourishment to their bodies. Thirst? Nope.
The strict gender binary has to be enforced because it is a cultural and not a natural phenomenon. Sure, there are eggs and sperm, “innies” and “outies”, but as far as gender identities go, they are not necessarily following these binaries. The same applies to gender expression and abilities and interests.
This why so many do not live up to the sexual binary (being some shade of homosexual, bisexual or pansexual) and also why so many mix the masculine and the feminine to their heart’s delight.
Men and women are not two separate species. We are one species, and we all share a wide palette of sex and gender colors.
Bad: aliens that insist upon referring to human women as “feeeeemales”.
Good: aliens that insist upon dividing humans into binary categories, but the binary in question is based on something we’d regard as trivial and bizarre.
pro cilantro and anti cilantro
Just to screw with us they refer to have designated half the population as “edible” and the other half is “inedible.”
No intention of eating anyone, they just like how uncomfortable it makes everyone.
Even better: the aliens all agree on who is edible and who is inedible, but the humans have no idea what the criteria is
Even better: there is no criteria, the Aliens just keep a running list of whenever one member designated a human as edible or not. People are baffled because the selection appears random yet all the aliens are up to date, so there must be SOMETHJNG
I love this because it implies the aliens possess either (1) a universal hive mind or (2) an intergalactic group chat dedicated to fucking with humanity
(This is being reshared months later as I know quarantine is difficult for many and who knows who may need it!)
My name is Zeno, I am new to the discord world but as I dive head first into managing my first server, I’d like to invite fellow brothers and sisters of the Transgender community to take a trip on over to my new set up!
It’s a pretty basic format of a community and its sole purpose is to be a safe space for people in all stages of transition to reach out! DM or comment if you are interested and I will foreword the link :) Much love from your fave gay posh boy xx
Up until now, reproductive science has been steered by a male-dominant perspective, which explains why the narrative of reproduction has historically adopted patriarchal terms. But now this new science “undercuts the dominant, founding myths of Western culture — that men are active and women are passive, that men seek and find and women wait and choose. There is an interaction between the two.”
BTN(B)/B2N(B)/B2X/BTX: a transneutral or otherwise non-binary individual who considers emself as transitioning from binary to non-binary. Encompassing M2N(B)/M2X, F2X/F2N(B) and BtA(b)/B2A(b) (FtA(b)/MtA(b)/M2A(b)/F2A(b)) experiences.
Gender binary: an encompassing term ascribing the embedment of two gender arities, commonly describing individuals who have either male or female gendered feelings, prescribing identities such as woman or man, boy or girl, gal or guy, feminine or masculine, it really depends the culture and not all cultures are binarized like this or have a binarity at all.
Combining colors from the original binary flag, except this time it’s not used interchangeably with cisness, because it includes the trans binary flags colors by @x-mogai-glitch-x. I couldn’t take the colors from the common transgender pride flag, since “trans woman” and “trans man” do not specify it’s binary or not.
Disclaimer: I’m nullary, not technically binary nor non-binary. But I feel flags like this need to exist, to validate our feelings of belonging to real groups/space-ness. Some people consider themselves outside the binaries of cis or trans and AMAB/DMAB or AFAB/DFAB, among others too.
[Tweet from @/fozmeadows: “human gender and sexuality are very much like animal taxonomy, in that both look structured and simple on the surface, but once you start investigating, it turns out there’s actually no such thing as a fish despite the fact that we all know what a fish is, and that’s okay”]
As a biologist, that is a fantasticcomparison.
We talk about “fish” (which, cladistically, do not exist, there is no monophyletic group of “fish” that simultaneously includes all organisms we understand to be “fish”-like while also excluding, say, humans) because, despite the utter fiction that is fish, it’s still a useful label when we talk about certain features that “fish” tend to have in common.
The solution to an oppressive system that puts people into pink and blue boxes is not to create more boxes. The solution is to tear down the boxes altogether.
A new side project: trans/gender non conforming dolls. This is starting as a design challenge: to practice pattern drafting and making made-to-measure clothing. But I want to think beyond the hyper gender binary fashion “norms” that keep deterring me from fashion. So here’s the beginning. Stay tuned for fab outfits.
as a trans man whose gender is not entirely binary I want to debunk some common misconceptions.
making jokes that equate genitalia with gender is transphobic even if “everyone else is doing it”
trans men are not always twinks.
trans men are not more compassionate or empathetic than cis men by nature
cis men can express gender in many ways just like trans men
trans men can be discriminated against in ways specific to trans men
everyone’s experience with gender is different and is often shaped by their race, ethnicity, culture, and economic standing among other things
non binary encompasses a range of gender way more varied and complex than the binary system, so acting like it is “trans-lite” is both incorrect and transphobic / discriminatory
not everyone whose gender lies outside the gender binary proliferated in European/European-colonized countries identifies with the label “non-binary”
trans people are not obligated to identify themselves as trans. cis people are not obligated to identify themselves as cis. no matter who you are, your gender and your genitals is your personal business.
drawing a hard line between trans people and cis people just creates a new binary that is not useful for anyone
*if there is a better word to use here than nbphobic i don’t know what it is.
If any of these points are new/unfamiliar to you, that’s okay. We are all constantly learning and what’s important is that we have a mindset of growth. Being unnecessarily aggressive towards ourselves and others for not always having all the information helps no one. This is not shared out of a sense of “moral superiority” but just things I want to get off my chest that I see people having the wrong idea about a lot. Thank you and happy birthday trans
“Numerous studies have found that the differences between adult men and women are overhyped and largely influenced by the dynamics of biology and culture. Humans are naturenurtural—a fusion of nature and nurture.
For example, many explanations for differences between males and females rest on assumptions about the disparate evolved costs of reproduction between them. But human reproduction is more complex than two individuals having sex, then the female giving birth and taking care of the offspring. While today it is common in many societies for women to raise children on their own or with a male (who often does not contribute equally to child-rearing), this setup developed very recently in human history.
There is massive evidence that the genus Homo (humans) evolved complex cooperative caretaking more than a million years ago, changing the patterns and pressures of our evolution. Such ‘alloparenting’ practices are still widespread among many human groups, in which mothers and fathers, grandparents, other female and male relatives, and boys and girls in the community all help feed, teach, and care for children. This complex overlap in social and reproductive roles is exciting and hopeful. When it comes to raising kids, humans don’t come in two kinds. Rather, we evolved to be a collaborative and creative community.”
Found and photographed by Hannah Ebben, and used with permission. Hannah gives this description: “It was taken on the first floor of the Erasmus building of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.”
This is definitely my favourite proposed toilet door symbol so far. :)
