I was one of the younger people walking into the first session of a new program at my school called “Gender?” There were several other Freshman, but also a handful of Juniors and Seniors who had had far more life experience and were far more educated in the world of gender than I was. Even so, I couldn’t help but feel like an old timer. And I don’t mean a wise-sage-sitting-on-a-mountain kind of old timer. I mean the grandpa-is-a-little-racist-and-senile-just-give-him-his-saltines-and-he’ll-quiet-down kind.
Because when I first came out, there were no Laverne Cox’s, Caitlyn Jenner’s, or Ruby Rose’s. There wasn’t a single trans person who could be considered a household name. When I first went to therapy, I was taught about the wonderful world of the gender spectrum. You see, the world isn’t really split up into two separate boxes of male and female, or at least it shouldn’t be. In actuality, we exist on a line called the gender spectrum, on which you are free to travel from one end to the other. Isn’t that incredible? No more boxes! Now we upgrade to lines! Don’t you feel so free to express yourself in terms of varying degrees of masculinity and femininity? Don’t you feel liberated and radical?!?!
And at the time, I did. I’ve always had the pretty typical transgender narrative (a term I didn’t even know existed until fairly recently). The gender spectrum being described as a line from which I could travel from end to end as I pleased made sense to me. It gave me all the room to explore that I needed.
I loved teaching this understanding of the spectrum to others. I even came up with this graph which put gender identity on one axis, gender expression on another, and sexual orientation as a color. That’s everything you need in one simple formula, right? How convenient and simple! Now everyone could understand the gender spectrum, and the curse of the binary would be broken! I thought I had it all figured out.
Now, of course, I look back at that graph the same way I look back at my excessive number of baggy cargo shorts, which I continually wore with ankle high socks and crocs, my bleach blonde hair, and that one time I thought fedoras were cool. It was a phase. A step in my growing understanding of gender. The more people I meet, the more I’m starting to realize just how little I actually know about gender. There are plenty of non-binary labels and terms I’m just now learning about. There are arguments on either side of the debate over the use of labels I never even considered. There are so many ideas in the gender-sphere I can’t even begin to comprehend.
I understand now just how old fashioned and limiting my own ideas have been for the past few years. Fuck the graph, I’m ready to learn something new. I’m ready to toss aside the confidence I once had in my understanding of gender and dive into something new. Let’s see if this old timer can learn a few new tricks.
-Connor
trolleyproblem 