Beyond the Gender Binary, pt 4.

This is part 4 in a series of 4.

Through the experience of Drew’s life, Norris was able to learn to accept who he truly was, and be okay with the fluidity of gender in his life.

“Coming out the second time was not as hard,” says Norris. From the outset, his mom was not accepting, and he says since he already felt like somewhat of a black-sheep, “it’s not like it could get much worse,” he says, despite it still being a scary process.

As far as being sure about transitioning, Norris has had some reservations.

To transition, in the transgender community, means to engage in a process, physically, mentally, emotionally and/or legally, of expressing themselves in the gender they identify with, rather than the gender commonly associated with the biological body into which they were born.

This can mean transitioning from male to female or female to male through hormone therapy, sexual or gender reassignment surgery; this can mean legally changing one’s name and birth certificate to reflect their gender identity; this can mean possessing a female body while living full-time as a man. Or it can mean something else all together: transitioning in any phase is up to the person expressing their gender identity and whether or not they are comfortable living in their particular biologically-sexed body.

This can be a long, complicated, and expensive process, depending on the individual’s needs, desires and socio-economic status.

The Dimensions Queer Youth Clinic in San Francisco, Calif., holds a philosophy of care towards transgender youth that the process of physical surgery and hormone therapy will not make one any more or less of a “real” transgender person– these factors rest on the individual’s personal identity and what they are comfortable with, if they can love who they are gendered as, despite feeling born in the wrong physical body. There is a need to assess a personal desire and readiness for transitioning

Transitioning also involves the personal coming out process– the shift of “getting everyone on the same page with pronouns, a new [gender-appropriate--or not] name,” and friends and family adjusting to one’s identified gender role, as Norris puts it.

He has been contemplating hormone therapy for quite some time, and feels that the time to begin this process may be soon.

“Hormones do change a lot physically,” says Norris, “but hormones change quite a bit emotionally, too.”

He grew up as an angry kid. And while watching Drew through his own process of taking hormones– he saw how hard it was for Drew to express any semblance of emotions during the beginning of that period.

“For a long time he had a really hard time having empathy and couldn’t physically even force himself to cry,” says Norris.

Hormone therapy can take as long as about five years to be complete, according to the Dimensions Queer Youth Clinic Web site. The process of transitioning can take anywhere from a few months to years to life– it is dependent on when transgender individuals feel that their body and their life is an alignment with their gender identity.

Norris worries that taking testosterone therapy would deplete the strides he’s made in getting through his anger issues. At the same time, he says Drew became much more capable of being more assertive at work, and wouldn’t let people walk on him nearly as much as when he had lived as a woman.

Halloday, however, says she’s a very practical person and has no pressing desire to transition physically to the gender she identifies with.

“I’m not overly concerned with appearing male or having male parts,” she says. This part of the transgender identity is what is called one’s gender expression– the visible aspects of a person’s gender identity.

She adds that she recognizes transitioning as something very important for transgender people, though, it’s just low on her priority scale. She says she knows she’s never really going to have enough money to go through that process.

“I don’t like the overt female-ness of my body,” says Halloday, “but I mean, if I had a ton of money dumped in my lap and found an amiable doctor, I might say, ‘okay, the boobs, you can get rid of those.’”

She says she’s also sure that once people get to know her, they’ll figure out her gender identity that way. Those close to her are the people she’s primarily concerned with.

“The majority of the world isn’t going to know me, and they’re going to interact with me by what they perceive based on visuals anyway,” she says. “It would be an uphill battle.”

And the thought of surgery, cutting, and needles? “I am not keen on that anyway,” she says.

The legal process can be just as daunting– and it’s often an aspect of transitioning that many people don’t think about. Norris is still legally known by his birth name.

The name you are given at birth and the names you claim for yourself are about more than just boys and girls.

A transgender person’s given name can sometimes be a source of relentless pain for gender expression. It is common to choose or reclaim a name that is appropriate and empowering in relation to an individual’s identity.

“I do not want to be [his birth name] any longer,” says Norris. Norris asked that his given birth name not be used in this article.

The legal process of filing for transition in paperwork varies from state to state– in Colorado, laws allow for changing both name and sex, and the state will issue a new birth certificate for a fee. However, for a recognized legal sex change one needs documentation from a sex reassignment (SRS) surgeon. One must also obtain an original or certified copy of a court order for the preferred name change.

“Class is hellish sometimes,” says Norris, “as well as anything involving my driver’s license.”

Considering the intense dichotomy of gender in this society, in legal paperwork and documentation, there are two boxes to recognize sex: male or female. For individuals like Norris, who relate to the genderqueer identity, being legally recognized or going through any sort of bureaucratic process can be a huge distress. For some, it can be identifying as neither male nor female, masculine nor feminine, and a possibility of never being able to reconcile that identity, at least bureaucratically speaking.

You have to consider what it means in terms of renewing your driver’s license or what that means for international travel if your passport name doesn’t match your legal name, says Norris. There’s often a shuffling and reshuffling of papers at the DMV, second-guesses, blank stares.

Those situations can be arduous. Changing his name is something he’s always wanted to do, he says. It’s still a labyrinthine process of bureaucracy, however. It can take over nine months if not more for all of the paperwork and notarizations to be processed.

***

Gender expression is a story about more than just boys and girls.

Part of this whole process has been a journey  of figuring out how to live his life in a place of gender ambiguity, being comfortable with that, breaking those binaries, and making people question their own gender roles. For Norris, understanding and experimenting with his gender expression has been a gigantic part of that, too.

There are those of us that walk the line, says Norris. The line in question has been discovered to be so much more than just a pencil-thin marking between “boy” and “girl.”

“I’m not male or female,” says Norris. “I don’t fit well in that binary at all.”

Halloday will even refuse to check the box at times, unless it’s in legal paperwork areas, in which case she’ll just check female. She’s never checked both, but has been known to write in on the side of the boxes as androgynous.

Upon further inspection, identity, and more specifically gender identity, seems to be like a set of Russian dolls. Transgender folks, just like anyone, are layers and layers of an intersectionality of identities; their gender expression is just one of those facets.

“A lot of times gender just feels like a set of clothing,” says Norris. “A set of society’s standards around everything, how you’re supposed to interact with people, how you’re supposed to date.”

***

Being human is a story about more than just boys and girls.

Another Russian doll opens up, revealing a more detailed, intricate doll; another boundary is broken, revealing more ambiguous gender territory.

“Are you a boy or a girl?” is a question often asked of Norris. His favorite responses are: “Today I didn’t choose,” or “I’m a little bit of both.”

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Beyond the Gender Binary, pt 3.

This is part 3 in a series of 4.

Duff Norris, 24, also grew up with an ambiguous sense of gender identity:  the shades of grey in between the black and white, masculine and feminine cultural definitions in the United States.  At a restaurant in downtown Fort Collins, Norris sits at a table for lunch, waiting to meet with friends. Two tables away, a mother and her daughter sit, peeking inquisitively over their menus at his green polo shirt and backwards baseball cap, whispering back and forth at their guesstures to his gender.

Norris identifies as a transgender man.

“I get sir-ma’amed all the time,” says Norris, laughing hysterically. There’s something about his laugh that’s uniquely his own; it begs invitation to join in on the fun of society’s strange reactions to gender blurring and grey spaces between these chasms of man and woman.

The term genderqueer challenges our society’s gender binary—the twin pillars of male and female that reflect the masculine and feminine—as well as traditional images that we see of transgender folks.

Genderqueer is that space outside of that linear model of gender, Norris says.

“I hate the linear perspective of gender,” says Norris. It exists on more of a plane, he says, where, for him, he can feel really comfortable in that middle space but still simultaneously really uncomfortable. He laughs again. The spectrum idea of male on one end, and female on the other, is like “trying to match the science to the theory rather than the theory to the science,” says Norris.

***

Falling in love is a story about more than just boys and girls.

Halloday grew up with her parents’ traditional notion of falling in love with and marrying your best friend from high school. At the age of 16, it seemed like a necessary step, then, to ask her best friend, Josh, to date her.

“We were fighting over the position of being the gentleman,” she says. He was socialized to be chivalrous, a male characteristic– to be the dominant provider, the dominant giver, she says. To open doors, pull out seats.

Halloday was confused. This was a huge turning point for her in recognizing her gender identity. All of these social roles that males seemed to play were like sirens calling her to action. She immediately felt a disconnect between perceptions of her as a girl, and more specifically a girlfriend, and who she felt she was.

It then became obvious at this point that this gender role wasn’t what she wanted.

Despite her deep love and affection for Josh, “I wasn’t interested in anything more than just holding his hand,” she says. Halloday adds that in fact, she wasn’t interested in dating males at all.

In her junior year of high school she came out to her parents as “undecided” in both gender and orientation.

This added a complex facet to her gender identity, as generally in the United States, the larger society tends to associate gender identity with sexual orientation. Halloday, in her freshman year of college, figured that because she had no interest in the male sex, she must have been a lesbian. It was the only concept she had come across through research and talking with friends to explain the way she felt inside.

This is when she came out a second time to her parents as gay.

“At this point,” says Halloday, “I still thought there were two genders.”

The issue with this identity, for Halloday, was that being a lesbian implies feminine gender expression, or that her mind was that of a woman, which later on she discovered was not how she identified at all.

***

Sexual orientation is a story about more than just boys and girls. The gender binary and all that lies in between have a lot to do with our sexual orientation, but they are not one in the same. We tend to create our identities out of who we want to be attracted to us and who we desire—this makes orientation closely bound with gender identity.

Her initial unchallenged assumption of the gender binary as a teenager actually confused her more before she discovered these new exploratory concepts about gender identity and sexuality. If she wasn’t attracted to men, she must have been attracted to women. It didn’t occur to her until years later that maybe she was attracted to neither, or perhaps that sexual attraction of genders didn’t matter to her at all, but the quality of a person’s character.

This is when Halloday stumbled upon the concept of asexuality. Later, a friend came out to her as transgender, the first time she was ever exposed to this concept. She did research on concepts, personal stories, and other issues of the transgender identity. Again, another piece and then another clicked into this puzzled universe beyond the binary of masculine and feminine.

For the third time, she came out to her parents as asexual and transgender.

***

During puberty, Norris felt a huge disconnect in comparing who he was supposed to become, as female-bodied, and watching the path his four older brothers took. As his brothers developed more muscularly and grew in facial hair, Norris did not welcome any of the feminine changes happening to his body.

“Those [male] physical changes were what I wanted to happen and I was always really jealous of that,” says Norris. “I wanted those things and not these things.”

As Halloday did, Norris at first chalked those desires up to his sexual orientation, and never to a gender difference. At  15, he came out as a lesbian. At 16, light reading and research into the transgender identity caused him a complete shut-down. Like magnets, something clicked. Also like magnets, Norris retreated and ran away.

At 18, however, he made a connection that forced him to reflect on who he truly was. Drew, well, Drew was genderqueer and really hard to identify as male or female. Drew was the first person that Norris ever met in whom he saw his own reflection.

“It was terrifying, oh my god, it was overwhelming and scary and exciting and really, really cool and just.. really overwhelming,” says Norris. “It was like, I really want to hang out with you every moment of the day and I want to run like hell from you, because if that feeling is true, then holy s—, does this change the game? Because that’s a game changer, it’s not a little thing to recognize in somebody else.”

Drew and Norris became best friends. Drew was confident in his gender identity, says Norris. Being between those lines was okay in that space; he didn’t have to pick or choose. Norris was able to walk with Drew as his family went from wishing Drew’s transgender identity was just a phase, to truly accepting and celebrating who Drew was as a person. Norris also watched as Drew went through the beginnings of the complicated and expensive process of transitioning from female to male.

“Drew was always comfortable with fluidity,” says Norris. At this point in time, Drew was someone Norris could finally look up to and relate to like no one else in his life.

Norris was still figuring out if his identity was that of butch lesbian, trans man, genderqueer, if transitioning was something he might want in the future. The path that Drew took helped Norris see how the process of transitioning through medical processes unfolded.

“They buried Drew’s old person,” says Norris, recalling the past month in which old family members of Drew’s posted pictures of him as a little girl on Facebook. Drew’s mother requested the pictures be taken down, as Norris says: [His mother and family] buried Emma*, Drew’s birth name, years ago.

Drew passed in a car crash earlier this year.

“[Emma] is not who passed away,” Norris says. “That person passed away a long time ago.”

Continued in Part 4.

*Name has been changed.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Beyond the Gender Binary, pt 2.

Editor’s note: This is an in-depth perspective into what it means to not just walk between the gender binary, but embrace and curl up inside of it. Although many transgender people in the United States struggle to forge an identity in a two-gendered society, this is a story that explores the process of gender exploration and what that means. Theories and perspectives of fully transitioning are lightly touched on but not fully explained in this article, so please keep in mind that for many transgender folks it is a necessary process to complete in order to feel like they can truly express who they are.

This is part 2 in a series of 4.

This is a story about more than just boys and girls.

It’s the mid-1980s in a Southern California school district. The high school girls smoke at the edges of campus and apply make-up in bathroom mirrors, the middle school boys throw paper airplanes in math class and eat bugs during recess, the elementary school girls cut out construction paper hearts and write out their multiplication tables.

In kindergarten class, little boys and little girls are getting ready for their chaperoned lunches by lining up against the wall in their neatly separated genders: boys with boys, and girls with girls. Except, one mousey-haired little girl is standing with the boys. The kindergarten teacher thinks she must be confused.

“Kerry, the boys and the girls are lining up separately,” she says.  “Get in the girls’ line.”

“But I don’t belong there!” the little girl replies, staying in the little boys’ line.

“You’re a girl, go in the girl’s line,” says the teacher again.

The little girl refuses again, and the teacher repeatedly asks her to move. This little girl knows she is in the right line and that the teacher is mistaken.

“I got very irritated in the early parts of kindergarten,” says Kerry Halloday, CSU communication graduate student. She didn’t want to go play with “those strange other people,” as she puts it, who were wearing pink and squealed and didn’t play with bugs. “They were obviously not who I belonged with.”

Gender is a social construct about more than just boys and girls. According to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and World Health Organization, this is separate from our concept of biological sex, which refers to the physical characteristics our bodies possess and the social implications of those. In the United States’ society, it is common for girls (female-bodied) to be socialized into roles that are culturally defined as feminine, and boys (male-bodied) into roles that are masculine.

Halloday was socialized  like the rest of her female-bodied peers, but says she feels most comfortable when surrounded by people whom she relates to most—men. If she had to be categorized, she says she identifies as the gender of androgynous or one of the guys.

“Not male,” she clarifies, “but one of the guys.” Although she  prefers to use female pronouns.

Part of her desire of this stems from practicality, she says. However, many transgender folks prefer to go by the pronouns that correspond to the gender they identify with; some like to go with both by inter-changing them; others prefer using androgynous or revolutionary new gender-neutral terms such as “hir,” “ze” and “zir.”

Androgyny as a third gender means gender ambiguity—or possessing both masculine and feminine gender characteristics. Sometimes androgyny is right in the middle between a dimension that stretches from masculine to feminine. In the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (GLBTIQ) community, genderqueer is also a common term for those who feel that their gender identities do not correspond to the biological attributes of the bodies they were born with; the biological attributes that outside society often associates with assigned gender roles and identities.

Continued in Part 3.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Beyond the Gender Binary

This is part 1 of  4 a part series for Transgender Awareness Month. The following pieces will explore the realms of the gender binary in Western society through the experiences of three individuals.

It’s March of 2006. Kayla Horn stares at her closet anxiously. Biting her nails down past the ends of her fingers, they bleed. Her closet is daunting.

Two sets of clothes reside in the closet, a side for men’s, and a side for women’s; she’s sharing it with someone else. Horn cannot wait until she is able to take all of those men’s clothes out of that closet and toss them out, so that man is out of her life forever.

In April 2006, Horn began living full time as a woman. That man she threw out of her life is actually the body that she was born into, a body she knows she doesn’t belong in.

“It was such a relief for me to get rid of the clothes,” says Horn. “It was a relief to come home and see nothing but clothes for me in that closet.”

Horn got to a point in 2005 where she could no longer live in a male gender role. She couldn’t wear male clothes, it wasn’t who she was. She knew she needed to transition and live full time as a woman.

“Full time is living in the gender that you know that you are,” she says.

Naturally, this meant taking all of those masculine clothes and throwing them out. Wearing make-up. Accepting the good and bad that comes with moving through this society as a woman. This also meant recognizing the ways in which women, and trans women, might be marginalized in this society.

“It terrifies me to think that there are people out there that would hurt me because I was born this way,” she says. “This isn’t a mental condition, it’s a medical condition.”

Finding understanding was hard. From a very young age she knew, but growing up in the American mid-west, Nebraska, left no room to express her feminine qualities with a male body. She remained closeted for a very long time, and it wasn’t until she moved to Colorado in the early 1990s that she was able to untangle the complex web of her masculine social conditioning, like unraveling a flowered cable-knit sweater of her true identity of being a woman.

At first, she began to cross-dress in secret. After not being able to hide her true self from her wife at the time any longer, she revealed it. She began doing outreach with the local chapter of Tau Sigma Kappa—a cross-dressing support group, but it wasn’t until she met a post-op transsexual woman, Jenny Jackson, that she realized that she was more than a cross-dresser.

“You’re a girl,” Jackson said to her. “And you need to find a therapist.” Horn needed to figure herself out before losing her mind in a world that said male body parts equals a masculine mind.

She began with therapy, which was not so successful. The therapists couldn’t understand the difference between a transvestite, a cross-dresser and a transsexual. She was not a man dressing up as a woman, a cross-dresser. She was a woman in a male body. She’d always felt this way.

Then, support from the Lambda Community Center of Fort Collins directed her towards help, and towards people she could relate to, who could understand her struggle.

This is when she made her decision to transition.

“I began to reflect and realize that I’d been living a lie for over 30 years,” she says. “I didn’t want to see the whiskers, I didn’t want to see him. I wanted to see me.”

She laments on her nail-biting habits. Since beginning to transition, including going through hormone therapy, her nails are perfect, manicured, un-bitten.

She’s been on hormones for almost four years.

It made her emotional, moody. The hormone therapy also gave her a feeling of walking on clouds. Her fat distribution changed, her receding hairline was reduced, her skin softened. Her physical body began to more closely match her gender, her mind, her true identity.

“I can be me. I’ve always been this way. I don’t have to cover it up,” says Horn. “Ultimately, it’s freedom to express myself as myself, and to show all the beauty that’s inside of me. I don’t have to keep any of it locked away, hidden, or closeted. I don’t have to do that anymore.”

Horn reflects on the case of Josie, the seven year-old transgender male-to-female child, whose story hit headlines in 2007.

The structures and institutions in which transgender children and youth move through do not know how to accommodate for them and leaves many obstacles to be overcome, as is the case with Josie and her parents’ decision to have her homeschooled.

However, Horn says that she feels that there is hope for the younger generation because they are more open to gender fluidity. She notices that her two daughters and their friends are a lot more open to exploring their gender identity and are not stuck inside of society’s assigned gender roles.

“It’s kind of like a butterfly being in a cocoon and then coming out,” she says.

 

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

KRXQ Makes Apology, No Words On Intersex Remarks

A couple of days ago I recapped the KRXQ issue. Today, June 11, the Rob, Arnie and Dawn show came on air to officially apologize for their crudely ignorant and dehumanizing remarks on transfolks and transgender children.

Arnie States, one of the hosts, apparently claimed ignorance in his apology, saying that he “didn’t realize that my words could really affect and hurt as bad and as negatively as they did,” which, I mean, makes sense, except for the fact that they advocated throwing shoes at children, which, in my case, seems like it could hurt.

Rob Williams, brilliant owner of the Rob, Arnie and Dawn show, apologized by saying that “our audience made it clear that we had actually made it seem as though we endorse or allow… or encourage the harming and abuse of children, the bullying and villifying of those who are different and singling out of transgenders * for harm and/or mocking.”

(*Transgender people is a more accurate term.. just a note.)

One thing that I think got completely swept under the rug was one of the hosts’ remarks about intersex individuals as “the real, literal freaks of nature.” No one necessarily apologized for this comment nor did any of the advocates that I saw actually say mention to defend intersex individuals.

Intersex does not always mean transgendered. Intersex individuals are those who are born with both sets of biological sex characteristics.

In the past, parents dealt with this issue by deciding on the sex of the child, removing the “null” biological parts, and moving on with their lives. Often times, the child grows up feeling distressed about gender identity. What if the gender the child feels does not match their biological characteristics? There has been extreme controversy in the past decade as to whether genital surgery on intersex infants is ethical or the right thing to do. One of the largest advocates for intersex people, the Intersex Society of North America, has found that the best possible way for parents to help their children with this condition is to assign a gender (withOUT biological surgery) and, with extensive therapy and counseling as well as peer-to-peer support, allow the child to figure out for his, her or their fluid self, which gender feels more appropriate for who they are as they get older and come more into their own.

This does run in the same line with transgender folks on this aspect, and while I think there is a lot inter-relativity, intersex individuals still get swept under the rug a lot when it comes to advocacy and education.

ISNA has done extensive research on the conditions of these individuals and can provide a TON of information for those looking to learn more on the issue.