OP-ED // Bending the Binary: Gender Fluidity Benefits Us All
We are experiencing a long-overdue shift from an immutable, pink-and-blue gender binary toward an evolving galaxy of gender expression. This is largely thanks to activism for transgender rights, a new spotlight on non-binary, agender, and other nonconforming identities, and the response to and recognition of these issues by mainstream media and corporations. As a result, there is a growing conversation examining and deconstructing opposing and sexist assumptions about correct ways to emulate masculine or feminine gender roles. This conversation ultimately broadens the ability of every single person, cisgender or transgender, to express themselves physically and emotionally without the limits of a prescriptive binary.
The social and cultural characteristics we ascribe to the male and female sexes make up gender, which includes both the intrinsic (gender identity) and extrinsic (gender expression). Separate from biological sex, gender is, broadly, a series of traits we define as “masculine” and “feminine” and use to create identities that either fit into or break these molds. Most gender tropes are cliches ascribed to fundamentally universal and unisex experiences. These cliches include our assumptions about what we should wear, how we should speak, what we should prefer, how we should act, and how we ought to feel. Often, what is masculine opposes or precludes that which is feminine and vice versa: Women are nurturing, men are providers. Women are emotional, men are stoic. Pink is for girls, blue is for boys.
However, neither sex nor gender are properly or adequately represented by binary poles labeled “male” and “female.” Nearly two percent of the population is intersex, possessing both biologically male and female sex characteristics, hormones, and/or chromosomes. In 2016, one study estimated that 1.6 million Americans identified as transgender, nearly double the estimate from five years earlier. That number is rapidly growing as more teens identify outside of their birth-assigned gender and as the stigma against gender-nonconforming and transgender people decreases. (It was only this past May that the World Health Organization stopped classifying transgender people as having a mental disorder.) GLAAD has found that up to 20% of Millennials identify as LGBTQIA+, with 12% identifying as transgender or gender-nonconforming, double that of Gen X. As a result, some employers are now preparing for what a gender non-binary world may look like at their companies by creating inclusive hiring practices and inquiring about employee pronouns. To support trans and non-binary students, progressive schools are beginning to inquire about pronouns as part of their getting-to-know-you exercises.
Mainstream media is also increasingly recognizing gender-nonconforming individuals. The reboot of the cartoon She-Ra on Netflix features a canonically non-binary character in its fourth season. Cartoon Network’s series Steven Universe features characters that are both non-binary and intersex. In September, singer-songwriter Sam Smith spoke openly about being non-binary and using gender-neutral pronouns, to much mainstream news coverage. Afterward, following a SNAFU in which the Associated Press failed to follow its own guidelines and used the wrong pronouns for Smith, Miriam Webster dictionary announced the addition of the singular “they” as a personal pronoun and APA Style modified their official guidelines to include recommendations for use of the singular “they” pronoun. The gender-neutral, gender-fluid person is here to stay.
Corporations are responding incrementally to this push toward gender neutrality. In 2015, to a decent amount of backlash, Target removed references to gender in their toy aisles. Just last month, toy-making giant Mattel released a line of gender neutral dolls. Most recently, at the request of trans and non-binary activists, the brand Always removed the female symbol from the packaging of their menstrual products. The rationale is this: Just as some women don’t menstruate, some (trans) men do, as do intersex people of all genders. The overarching message? These products aren’t for men, women, boys, or girls, they are for anyone who needs them.
Every time we gender a product, a preference, an emotion, we also set up its opposite, what it is not, and therefore create a bias about its correct usage or expression. Dresses are considered feminine, for example, and therefore men should not wear them at the risk of being labeled as such. But the idea that expressing feminine traits makes a man somehow lesser is not only demeaning to women, but also harms men by limiting their self-expression to a narrow range of appropriate appearances, attitudes, and emotions. The idea that boys should stifle their emotions to “be a man” is part of an attitude of toxic masculinity, part of which is an inability to healthily express emotion, that is killing men. According to the CDC, men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women, and make 77.9 percent of all suicides. And while women have fought for equal rights in politics and the workforce, they still earn only 82 percent, on average, of men’s salaries. Though women make up half of the college-educated workforce with math and science scores on par with men, women represent only 28 percent of those employed in STEM fields.
The ultimate irony is that we inflict this gender specificity upon ourselves, socially and culturally. Recent studies reveal that, in fact, there is fundamentally no difference between the male and female brain to denote sex or gender differences. We can and should choose think more expansively. When we continue to restrict concepts of gender to an oppositional binary of masculine and feminine stereotypes we harm men, we harm women, and we harm all those who don’t fit into this construct. We have brains and bodies that in no way limit how we are able to express ourselves. It’s high time we embrace our myriad differences and gender ourselves as we please, whether that be as he, she, or they, in dresses or pants, bare skinned or made up, or in softness or strength. There is no correct or default setting when it comes to gender. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can all reap the benefits of thinking and living outside the binary and in a more inclusive gender “galaxy” with freedom of expression and rights for all.
