Resist the Regression

No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us. - Marsha P. Johnson

Too often, the act of gendering is a danger to people. All people, even if they don’t identify as trans or non-binary. The fact of the matter is that the sex and gender binary is deadly and intentionally so. If it’s not killing you physically, it is killing you spiritually. It is killing your humanity, killing your self-love and expression, and killing your self-discovery and potential. It leaves little to the imagination, trapping our minds with only certain tools: stereotypes and assumptions. Fear is bred here.

Gendering happens everywhere. Unconsciously, every moment of every day, people are determining the sex they assume someone to be based on their gender performance; people are determining their gender performance based on the sex they have been assigned. The worst part is that most people don’t even realize they are doing it.

Charlotte Witt writes about the “uni-essentialism” of gender within our culture. She says gender is the great unifier for our social understanding of ourselves and others. We come to know people and their role or relationship to us based on gender. It becomes the lens through which we see and judge others. A person we perceive as a woman may then be understood as a daughter, a mother, or any number of social identifiers that all come with baggage. The same is true for someone we perceive as a man, granted that the realm of possibility is greater for what we imagine men can be.

This act of labeling is an attempt at understanding, she writes; it’s not evil, but it is limiting. Witt makes this assessment of the world not to prescribe how things should be but to draw attention to how they are. Like Marilyn Frye and her birdcage, Witt believes you must see the whole system to understand the oppression. You must see how gendering occurs to know why it is limiting to everyone, not just those on the periphery.

This is not to say that the so-called men’s rights movement (MRM) has a leg to stand on. MRM is explicitly anti-feminist, and that is not something we should abide. I am saying that feminism seeks to find an end to patriarchal oppression for all sexes and genders.

Intersectional feminism and the men’s liberation movement (MLM, not MRM) worked together at one point. The MLM even divided into two factions over whether or not to support feminism. We saw women and men working together on issues like rape, abortion, violence, and pornography. While our views on some of these topics have evolved over the decades, the commitment of some men to help advocate for women remains.

Unfortunately, what also remains, in new and empowered form, is the anti-feminist faction of the MLM: the MRM. Men belonging to this group have been led to believe that feminists have achieved their goals of equality and now seek to have a higher social status than men. They work to maintain the patriarchy and more traditional understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender.

This is the danger. The willful maintenance of an already self-reinforcing system. Willful ignorance of the damages done by binaried understandings of sex and gender to a human psyche.

This binary traps people. Not just trans people. Not just cis women. Everyone. However, what matters most about this ensnarement is the fact that people are being killed. Transgender people are being killed. Cis women are being killed. Gay men are being killed. Men are killing us (if anyone #notallmen 's me, I'll roll my eyes at the obvious). They're not just killing us, though. They're beating us, raping us, maiming us, dismembering us, and scattering us to be found and pieced together later. It is men's violence against us that results in our mass deaths–murder/suicides, punitive slayings, and torture. BIPOC trans and genderqueer people bear the brunt of this hate, too.

Focusing on the trans community out of urgency will reveal a path to gender liberation for all.

A dead name is not just a name that is no longer used but the one that will be used for you after you have died. Did you know most trans victims of murder are misgendered after their deaths? In fact, in 2017, 85% of trans homicide victims were misgendered in the police and news reports about their deaths. Did you know the average life expectancy of a trans person in this world is only 30-35 years old? People will kill us in the street for anything. Are you passing (or, as a cis-person might call it, lying)? Are you revealing yourself to be trans? Are you in public with a lover? Are you non-binary and confusing? All grounds for murder. As most marginalized communities are aware: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Trump’s election and the wave of “bathroom bills” that followed in 2016 coincided with a record number of trans people being murdered. His re-election in 2024 secured the end of gender progressive and inclusive policy, creating a new wave of fear within and violence against the genderqueer community.

Bathrooms are arguably the worst place to be gendered. Anytime it is obvious someone is sizing you up feels perilous, but there is something particularly frightening about the exposure you face in a bathroom. It is not simply the fact that you are half naked that is vulnerable, but also that you have made a declaration of kind. You have stepped into a room that is dictated for the use of one sex and one sex only. You may think that you are the sole judge in determining which sex applies to you, but the truth of the matter is that everyone gets to form an opinion and express it should they so choose.

People express "opinions" of confusion or distaste through anger in violent and cruel ways. Even legal protections cannot prevent this; they can only respond.

Our culture demands sex and gender conformity, but you are still in danger, even when conforming.

The point of a law is to discourage behavior. To condition one, over time, to behave in a certain way. The hope is that people will adhere to this determined moral code as the law becomes normalized and accepted. Culture impacts laws, and laws impact culture. However, culture will always exist, even if there are no laws. Laws always rely upon culture. Laws require taboos, mores, and a social contract. So, how do we change laws to reflect a society and culture that respects non-binary and trans individuals? Especially when the cultural support is not wholly there.

My thoughts on this vary. Part of me feels content to let cis women experience the torment of policing femininity as our society restricts gender expression. Let them get stopped and frisked by police for going into a bathroom that they don't look like they belong in. Maybe then they will understand that these gender norms negatively impact cis people, too. The other part of me realizes that this will, as always, be levied most against Black and Brown people, as the standards of femininity are white-washed to an impossible degree.

Resist the urge to know ‘what’ someone is. Unlearn that obsession. Seek to know “who” instead.

Gendering yourself and those around you is a conditioned behavior. The word ‘natural’ wants to creep in, but there is no place for it here. There is nothing natural about gender. Nothing essential to our existence that it supplies. For those who relate gender to sex and sex to reproduction, you might be thinking that it is essential to the propagation of the species. To this, I say, don’t be daft. The connection is tenuous, at best.

Let’s consider Charlotte Witt again. In The Metaphysics of Gender, she explains that this perceived relationship is a means of entrapment. It's a way to secure gender roles in an ever-changing society that has shifting norms regarding professional and personal expectations of people.

In our society, we think that if males beget and females bear, there is no need to argue the finer points of who does what in the relationship. The reproductive capabilities of the individual dictate roles. Males will enter the workforce and provide for their families, while females will stay home and tend to their bodies and children. Distinguishing men from women ensures a better chance of knowing what a person’s life will hold.

Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out in her book We Should All Be Feminists; men vie for power and status while women are expected to aspire to marriage and children.

The implications of this are myriad. Not only does it lead to the oppression of female-bodied people, but it challenges the validity of all femininity in a society that only values the dollar and those who provide it. It leads to toxic masculinity as a direct response to the devaluing of the female. Because the traits ascribed to femininity are considered less desirable than those of masculinity, we see many male-bodied people exaggerating the latter in an attempt to eliminate the former. It leads to killing that which is feminine, literally and figuratively.

We may be centuries or millennia away from a culture where sex or gender are not essential to our understanding of people. Still, we do not need to be so far away from a world where violence against the feminine is not normalized.

Our obsession with knowing ‘what’ someone is is pervasive and violent. We want to know someone’s gender, sex, race, sexuality, ethnicity, country of origin, religion, or anything else we can imagine reveals some identifiable information or distinguishing traits. We will ask the most personal of questions to find our answers. We do this without even considering the possibility of plural identities. We don’t leave room for someone to exist as more than one thing at a time, and we certainly don’t allow those identities to be shaped by someone’s thoughts on themselves.

Invasive interrogations are only the beginning of the violence, though. They are called microaggressions because they happen at the interpersonal level, not because they are small. Harsh and aggressive gendering is one of these microaggressions and can lead to endangerment or even death. Although they pave the way for the physical violence that we may or may not hear about in the papers, they are, for the most part, ignored.

When you don’t take the time to understand someone beyond the stereotypes you have internalized about people like them, you may feel a certain anxiety. An uncertainty. Fear. We tend to avoid things that scare us and, in doing so, behave in such a way as to discourage what we fear from interacting with us. For this reason, fear is a petri dish of cruelty and hate.

When we fear people, we may even want to punish them for their differences. Perhaps as a way to get them to conform, to fit. Or to teach them that they never will. Either way, the result is the same: people are hurt or killed. People are misgendered and kicked out of bathrooms. People are murdered on dates. People are brutalized walking home from work. This is a crisis of our creation. The end is far from sight, but the path is clear.

Not only must we strive for gender equity, but we must demand an expansion in our understanding of what that means. When we ask for equality of the sexes, are we also talking about the two percent of the world’s population that are intersex? When we seek representation of all genders in our leadership and media, are we including trans and non-binary people in our efforts? As a culture, do we acknowledge the myth of the sex and gender binary? Or do we cling to the pseudo-biological renderings of our social roles?

Take the time to teach yourself how to address someone without gendering them based on your assumptions. Ask for pronouns and names so that you might respect their identity, not satisfy your curiosity. Do not draw conclusions about someone’s sex, gender, sexuality, relationship status, or anything else based on your observations. Do not draw conclusions about someone’s sex, gender, sexuality, relationship status, or anything else based on the information they give you. Get off of using stereotypes. Stop depending on them. They do not enhance your understanding of the world around you. They do not prepare you for interactions with people. They set you up for failure. Let people tell you who they are. Let people show you who they are. Explore the insular and come to know others through a deeper relationship with yourself. Understanding and kindness will follow.