Episode 1: Gender 101

Hey, it's tech host of the gender reveal podcaster currently listening to. We released our first episode in January 2018, but what you are about to hear is the remake of that episode, which was written and released in October 2021. We are fast forwarding in time because the original episode one was, for obvious reasons, our most frequently downloaded episode by far, and I think it was, frankly, missing some key information and important context, which makes sense because when I made it, I wasn't yet a professional gender detective, but people kept downloading it, and at some point, it started to feel irresponsible to enable that. So keep in mind that if you proceed from here to episode two, three, et cetera, you'll be listening to episodes that I made in 2017 back when I was first figuring out what gender reveal was, what I was, what gender was, just little details like that. If I were you, I would skip ahead like 60 episodes or use our starter packs at genderpodcast.com/starterpacks to find episodes that fit your interests, but I'm not the boss of you. I'm just a disembodied voice on a podcast, so things are being here, and here's the show. Welcome to gender reveal. A podcast where we hopefully get a little bit closer to understanding what the hell gender is. Welcome to gender reveal season eight. If you are a long time gender reveal listener or if you made the questionable decision to binge the show from the beginning, you may recall that we started this show with a glossary of terms for folks who are new to talking about gender or transness. That episode was made in 2017, which as we all know, was 400 years ago. Since then, I co-founded Sylve Young Consulting with my friend Cass Adair and began teaching dozens of workshops that also aimed to explain in simple terms what gender is. But here's the thing, gender isn't simple. We don't even have a widely agreed upon definition for what gender is, and the more I teach these workshops and revisit our initial gender 101 episode, the more I'm faced with the fact that these basic definitions are a little bit too basic. I really believe that we can create space for nuance, even in introductory conversations about gender. So what I'm going to do here is take another swing at our gender 101 episode to reflect both the changing way that our communities speak about these things and the things that I've learned over the four years of making this show. And disclaimer here, that trans people are not a monolith, as shown by the roughly 100 people I have interviewed on this show. And people might very well disagree with me on key points. To be honest, I might not always agree with me on some points, but we have to start somewhere. So I'm going to start by giving you a version of my standard intro to gender spiel, and then I'm going to go back through and add a bunch of caveats. Ready? Great. Let's start with sex. But first, speaking of sex, the other kind of sex, actually, this episode is sponsored by our friends at shopnb.com. Shopping for sex toys can sometimes feel overwhelming or dysphoric, but shopnb.com aims to create a better experience for the queer trans and gender nonconforming community. Their entire website is gender neutral, which makes it fun and easy to explore products that maybe never felt good or okay to explore before. 2% of all profits are donated to organizations focused on improving the lives of queer and trans people of color. Visit shopnb.com that's s-h-o-p-e-n-b-y.com and use the code gender reveal at checkout to get 10% off your entire order and support gender reveal. Okay. Let's go back to the show. Biological sex is broadly determined by a combination of physical traits sometimes called sex characteristics, including our internal and external genitalia, chromosomes, and hormone levels. We're typically assigned a sex at birth based on our external genitalia, like if a newborn has a penis, they're assigned male. You may hear guests on the podcast use the terms a-mab, a-m-a-b, and a-fab, a-f-a-b as abbreviations for assigned male at birth and assigned female at birth, respectively. But outside of this show, in some specific medical context, like you're providing hormone replacement therapy or a pap smear to someone, there's not many reasons why you would need to know what someone was assigned at birth, or what their quote-unquote sex is now. For one thing, someone's sex at birth doesn't always match their gender, more on that in a moment. But assigned sex at birth doesn't even tell you anything definitive about someone's current body. As we all know, two women who are both assigned female at birth could have dramatically different heights, body shapes, hormone levels, etc. and just because a person is born with a uterus or a penis or whatever, it doesn't mean they still have those parts now. And that's not to mention people who are intersex. Intersex Many people's physical traits don't neatly align with a rigid biological sex binary. For example, someone could be born with XXY chromosomes or with testes and ovalva. These differences are called intersex treats. Research indicates that as many as one or two percent of people have some kind of intersex variation, that's as common as red hair and more common than identical twins. Intersex children often face medical stigma and misinformation and even coercive surgeries, and I strongly recommend learning more about this at InteractAdvocates.org. You can also learn more in our interviews with Marie Roby and Hill Malatino. This is my least favorite part of the whole thing because I have to give you a definition of something I already said was undefinable, but here we go. Gender is the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with being male or female or something else. In other words, gender is whatever we collectively decide it means to be a particular gender recursively in a circle. You may have heard me describe gender as a localized group project, and it's true that while our definitions of biological sex remain somewhat stagnant, our concepts of gender vary widely throughout time and space. The way we gender people in 2021, Portland, Oregon, which is where I'm recording this, is very different than how people were gendered on this land 500 years ago, which is different from how gender worked in China five years ago or Brazil 100 years ago or Iceland now. In this show, and increasingly in society at large, we typically classify folks as either transgender or cisgender. Transgender. Transgender includes anyone whose gender does not neatly match the sex they were assigned at birth, such as trans men, trans women, and on binary people. Cisgender. Cisgender is a word that trans people invented to describe everyone else, and simply means that your gender neatly aligns with the sex you were assigned at birth. I sometimes say that if you don't know what cisgender means, you're probably cis. Non-binary. You've probably heard the word non-binary before. It refers to anyone who isn't strictly a man or strictly a woman. Terms like gender queer, gender fluid, and age gender all refer to different non-binary identities. Okay, let's stop there for a minute because I have a bunch of caveats for what I just said. First of all, the cis trans binary can be just another false binary. There are many people, including many who listen to this podcast, who at some point or another feel like they don't quite fit perfectly in their assigned gender, but for whatever reason, also don't feel comfortable calling themselves "fully trans". And we can talk about whether that's internalized transphobia or imposter syndrome, but nevertheless, it is a common phenomenon. Meanwhile, most people in the world have never personally considered their gender in any meaningful way, and I don't know if you can even call that cisgender so much as unexamined. Have you ever asked a cis person how they know what their gender is? We have on this very podcast, and let me tell you they generally cannot answer the question. And yet, somehow we live in a society that is entirely shaped by cis-sexism and cis-normativity. Backing up again, I'm pretty sure I just said something about assigned gender, which may be confusing when so far we've only talked about assigned sex. The truth is that while we can pretend for convenience's sake that sex and gender are completely separate, they obviously overlap in myriad social, legal, and personal ways. Most of the markers on legal documents are technically sex markers, but we collectively use them like gender markers, mostly except when we don't. It's complicated in part by the fact that, as far as I know, no coherent definition of sex has ever been written into law in the United States. Meanwhile there have been leak battles for years over whether laws banning sex discrimination also protect against discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation. It also feels disingenuous to argue that sex and gender are never connected for individual trans people. When we talk about trans people medically transitioning, which we will talk about in just a minute, we often say phrases like gender affirming surgery. But by the definitions we gave earlier, those surgeries aren't affecting gender, they're affecting sex. Why then do many trans people change their quote-unquote sex characteristics to alleviate gender dysphoria? And while we're here, what does sex even mean? It's not as cut and dry as six grade bio may have led you to believe. As trans professors saw your camp recently tweeted, "There is no such thing as biological sex. There is an aggregate of five different biological data that we collect about infants that all present in various ranges and change over time. I'm sorry that science has improved since you would die as school 40 years ago." In other words, just like gender, biological sex is also not a binary but an overlapping series of spectrums. Despite this, rigid rules about what constitutes the female sex have been used to gatekeep not only trans women and girls and intersex people, but also black and brown cis-gender women. For example, two Namibian women were disqualified from the 400-meter race in the 2020 summer Olympics because their natural testosterone levels were deemed too high. For more details on that, check out episode 99. But as we discuss in our episode with Lola Pelagrino, it's not even clear what delineates one sex from another. And there's certainly no clear line on when a trans person has quote-unquote changed their sex. My body personally in this moment is probably less coherent in terms of sex than it is in terms of gender. What I'm trying to say here is that in the current system that most of us live in, sex and gender are not the same thing definitionally, but they do overlap in various ways for various people. And while we used to say that sex is a real scientific thing, while gender is a vague made up thing, many people now believe that sex is just as socially constructed as gender. Former guest Vidya Arivan has said that sex is gender in a lab coat, and I wouldn't say that she's wrong. But speaking of the current system that most of us live in and also racism, this podcast is speaking from a specific time and place, which is my little bubble of transness in Portland, Oregon in 2021. And in this episode, I am using terms that have been developed to try to carve out space for trans and queer and gender non-conforming people in a rigid binary system in which we were never meant to exist. But if you somehow didn't grow up in a culture directly shaped by colonialism or western ideologies, this language wouldn't necessarily even make sense. Words like cis and trans and non-binary don't work if you weren't assigned a sex and gender at birth, or were always presented with options outside of a strict sex and gender binary. Cultures around the world, including Indigenous peoples who are displaced from the very place I'm recording this now, existed for thousands of years with different gender frameworks than our strict western binary. And many people are working to decolonize their own concepts of gender by embracing and uplifting those traditions. This work is especially important because western culture loves to weaponize binary sex and gender as a tool of white supremacy, gatekeeping quote unquote proper or legitimate manhood and womanhood from black and Indigenous people while also denying them any alternatives. As we expand our own concepts of gender, it's important that we don't generalize by trying to assign words like trans and non-binary to folks whose concepts of gender are rooted in different times and places. It's not radical to assign western gender labels to people of color who don't subscribe to them, that's literally just more colonialism. We talk more about decolonizing gender in many episodes of gender reveal, including our interviews with Letitia Rico, Kaminosh Piles, Anali Rashatwar, Meredith Talucin, Jack Maustrem, Demi and Dene Azay, Farhat Rahman and Tori Ruby, plus our upcoming interview with Deshaan Harrison. Okay, we've spent quite enough time here in the weeds. Let's keep going. Transitioning As the name implies, trans people typically undergo some sort of gender transition at some point. But what exactly that transition looks like and whether it has some sort of definite endpoint is different for every individual. We can break transition down into three broad elements, social, legal and medical. Social transition is often a first step, although certainly not always. It might include asking people to use a different name for you, or different pronouns, or different gendered language, or all of the above. It might include a new hairstyle, a new aesthetic, or some other shift in gender presentation. Physical or medical transition typically consists of surgery, hormone replacement therapy, which we call HRT, or both. HRT typically involves taking testosterone or estrogen in shot, gel, pill, or pellet form, sometimes in combinations with other medications. Surgery can consist of some kind of chest or top surgery, some kind of genital or bottom surgery, facial feminization, and/or something else entirely. Not every trans person medically transitions, either because they don't want to, or they aren't able to put together the thousands of dollars that this often costs. I should also add that, despite what many vocal transphobes would have you believe, children under 15 or 16 aren't often considered eligible for gender-affirming surgeries. If younger children have access to gender related care at all, it is usually puberty blockers, a medication that prevents puberty from setting in and making irreversible changes to the child's body. puberty blockers are completely reversible and low-risk, and are also used by cis children to prevent early menstruation, or for other sometimes frivolous reasons, like a parent wants their kid to be taller. Finally, legal transition involves changing your name and/or your sex or gender marker on a big pile of documents and government forms, depending on where you live and what your gender is, this process ranges from doable, but expensive, to figuratively impossible, to literally impossible. For example, in Oregon, it's possible to change the marker on your birth certificate or driver's license by simply checking a box on a form and paying the associated fees, but several states only allow people to change their sex marker if they've had a "sex reassignment surgery," which is not a term we use, by the way. And while many states now allow residents to choose an ex-gender marker on legal documents, others still limit people to M or F markers. I cannot stress enough that there is no one correct or normal way to transition. Trans people approach social, legal, and medical transition in different orders at different times due to both personal preference and an array of logistical and financial hurdles. My own transition timeline doesn't necessarily match what many of my friends have done, but it's what made the most sense for me. "Gender non-conforming" While gender non-conforming is sometimes misused as a synonym for non-binary, it really means exactly what it says on the tin. Someone who's gender does not conform to a stereotypical notions of how someone with that gender should look or behave. In the time and place that I'm writing this from, any cis or trans man who, like wears dresses and makeup, is considered gender non-conforming. Similarly, which dikes can be considered gender non-conforming. If we go back to like when my parents were growing up, something as simple as a woman wearing pants or playing football or becoming an engineer, that would all be gender non-conforming too. This feels important to name because when someone does a hate crime, they don't stop to ask, "Excuse me, do you identify as transgender?" Gender non-conforming people, many of whom are queer, are assaulted and discriminated against and thrown out of bathrooms in similar ways whether they describe themselves as trans or not. And because our concepts of gender and conformity are racialized, trans and gender non-conforming people of color, especially black, trans feminine folks, are most at risk for this type of violence. Queer You might have heard queer used as a slur at some point in your life. These days, queer is an umbrella term that can include anyone on the LGBTQ spectrum. It's a word that's been in the process of being reclaimed for at least three decades and is not considered an insult, especially if a queer person is using it to define themselves. That said, gender and sexual orientation are both deeply personal experiences. Everyone understands themselves and navigates the world in their own way. So if words that other people use to describe themselves like queer or dyke or fag or transsexual don't feel good to you, you're under no obligation to use them for yourself. Like everyone else, trans people can be queer, straight, gay, bisexual, asexual, or something else entirely. There's a myth spread by anti-trans activists that kids these days are transitioning or being forced to transition to avoid being gay, which is hilarious to me as someone who knows hundreds and hundreds of trans people and like six straight ones. If nothing else, being trans gives us the opportunity to be gay in new and exciting ways. Pronouns Pronouns are parts of speech that we use to refer to people in place of their name or a generic descriptor. In the four years since I last made this episode, many people have started treating pronouns as the end-all-be-all of gender, but pronouns don't always neatly map to gender. For example, when was the last time you heard a cis gay man call another cis gay man? She. I'm not going to get deep into pronouns in this episode. As our friend Drew Gregory once tweeted, I would rather someone work on shifting their cis normative view of gender than work on memorizing my pronouns. The former will result in. in the latter, but the latter will not result in the former. If you would like to hear a lot more about pronouns, I suggest both of our episodes with Kirby Conrad, as well as our series of advice episodes, many of which are mostly about pronouns. But if I can offer you one broad piece of advice, I think it would be, don't overthink it. Which actually is probably my advice for gender as well. Some of y'all are thinking about it way too much. Some of y'all are thinking about it never once for five seconds, and I like to believe that there's a happy medium out there somewhere for all of us. That's gonna do it for this week's show. If you'd like to learn more, please check out our transcription of this episode, which is annotated with links to additional resources. You can find the transcript at genderpodcast.com/listen or at the link in the show notes. You can also learn more by subscribing to this very podcast and listening to our other one, Zillion episodes. If you're not sure where to start, we've got a list of some of our favorite episodes sorted by interest at genderpodcast.com/starterpacks. And if you would like a roughly two-hour version of this topic in workshop form for your company or organization, please reach out to us at Sylveon Consulting via Sylveon.co. That is S-Y-L-V-E-O-N-D-C-O. This is an independent listener-funded show. So if you learned something from this episode, please join us at patreon.com/gender where you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter and get all sorts of other rewards for supporting the show. We are on Twitter and Instagram @genderreveal. I'm on Twitter @tuckwoodstock and Instagram @tuckwoodstockjunior. If this episode feels like a useful resource to you, please consider sharing it with your friends and community. If you are looking for a community of very nice people from around the world to talk about your gender feelings with, you are welcome to join the gender reveal Slack community at bit.ly/gender-slack2. Today's episode was produced and edited by Julia Linus Goodman. It was written by me @tuckwoodstock with a lot of help from Cas Adair, Julia Linus Goodman, Naveen Pendinmal, Kaimanosh Pyle, Taya Rice, and Sawyer Kemp among others. Our logo is by Ira Mly. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. We'll be back next week with more feelings about gender. HRT typically involves taking testosterone. Oh my god, the non-binary option.