Now this whole gendering thing has gotten ridiculous...

Courtesy of Sociological Images, Cupcakes For Men.

I thought gendering socks was ridiculous, but food? And cupcakes of all things?

The most hilarious part is that the very idea of "Cupcakes For Men" implies that cupcakes are inherently feminine. Last time I checked they were food, an inanimate object. The most feminine thing about them is the egg that comes from female chickens.

I'll just be in the corner with Captain Picard.

(Incidentally one commeter on the linked post reminded me of the Men's Pocky my mother and I discovered a few years ago. It's actually quite good, though the idea still cracks me up.)

Access to Bathrooms and Gender Identity

One issue that frequently comes up when discussing gender identity and transgender and transsexual people has to do with access to bathrooms, an issue most of us never think twice about. We take advantage of the fact that in a public setting we can walk into the gendered bathroom of our choice and not face retaliation or even a second look. But if you're a person who identifies otherwise an essential part of daily life becomes a stressful ordeal each and every time you have to use the bathroom.

The Advocate covered a story about a transgender woman was was barred from using a Denny's restroom consistent with her gender identity until she had finished transitioning, and the question now is whether or not she has the right to sue the company. Denny's denied the charge of discrimination, saying that "allowing a biological male to use the female restroom despite gender identity will pose a direct threat to the health and well-being of staff and customers". The story goes on to use the "slippery slope" argument, arguing that someone with "devious intent" could take advantage of any concessions.

There's a growing body of literature on this issue and a growing awareness of the issues in and outside the LGBT community, with sites like safe2pee compiling city-by-city lists of gender neutral or single bathrooms, and several college campuses have started instituting gender neutral facilities to help transgender students.

Before the end of the school year I was interviewed by two students in a media class who had been interviewing students about the proposed introduction of gender neutral bathrooms on our campus. After I did my spot, where I argued that since every middle class home in America already has a gender neutral bathroom without issue this should not be that big of a deal, I was told by the two students that in taking interviews they had found the female students more receptive to the idea, while the male students expressed nervousness at the idea of women being in the same bathroom. This surprised me, but it got me thinking.

Why is this such a contemptuous issue shows that it's an intersection between gender, sexuality and social norms, as well as bringing in issues of privacy and access. In some ways bathrooms represent the last significant and formal gender divide in our society, so it's understandable that it causes people to react strongly to it no matter where they stand on it. But when it comes to denying people access to the bathroom of the gender they identify with it crosses into human rights and privacy, since it opens up large avenues of legal issues. Whether the person who needs to use the facility has more right than a person who may be uncomfortable with the idea of a person who is still biologically another sex using the same facilities is a philosophical debate that I can't fully cover here, but it's a fight that we usually aren't aware of.

I was in a multiple -stall gender neutral bathroom at an LGBT conference last year, and while I was a bit startled when a man walked in it didn't seem especially weird. Just about everyone was some variant of LGBT at that conference, but the point still stands. It doesn't seem like this should be as big an issue as it is, but one thing I've found is that whenever an issue like this is brought up people's reactions are unpredictable and sometimes very revealing of how deeply we hold certain sociological norms.

Schools, Normative Language in Policy and Gender

Coming of the heels of my first “What Does That Really Mean?” post about the word Normal, we have a story about dubious application of norms and normative language coming off the wire.

Justin Reynolds, a gay male student in Florida, was removed from class after coming to school in a v-neck shirt, blue jeans, high heeled boots and jewelry. He did it so he could make a presentation about transgender rights. He checked with his teacher first, and though the teacher discouraged him they did not explicitly tell him not to do it. Later in the day was removed from the school due to a dress code policy that states that student’s clothing should be "keeping with their gender", and that a student can be removed if their clothing is "inappropriate" and "disrupts the school process".

Besides issues about whether under that logic girls shouldn’t be allowed to wear typically “male” clothing (and I can tell right away that would get me in trouble), there’s a clear application of norms here, and since they never actually define what clothing “keeping with their gender” is there are huge assumptions at play here. You’re expected to know what your gender is supposed to wear, and I suppose if you come from a country where it’s different or reversed you’re out of luck.

There have been similar cases in the past, including one in Massachusetts in 2000 that tackled the issue of whether Pat Doe, a biologically male student who identified as female, was allowed to wear clothing matching her gender identity to her high school. The court ruled in favor of Doe, and rejected the idea that the harassment she was receiving from her peers constituted a “disruption” to the learning environment and grounds for her to be forced to wear “male” clothing. Justice Linda E. Giles’s opinion on this facet of it the case was particularly succinct:

"To rule in [the school's] favor in this regard, however, would grant those contentious students a 'heckler's veto’… This court trusts that exposing children to diversity at an early age serves the important social goals of increasing their ability to tolerate such differences and teaching them respect for everyone's unique personal experience in that 'Brave New World' out there."

Of course, that’s Massachusetts, and this case clearly isn’t identical. However, it does raise some interesting points about whether what Justin did should be considered educational as well, since he was doing it for the express purpose of giving a presentation. And is this issue really about what he wore, or is it about whether people respect each other enough to not care what another person wears? There’s an interesting cause-and-effect relationship here, and several of the students interviewed for that particular article didn’t seem to think he was disruptive, if anything it seems that it was the staff who had a problem with it.

The attire worn by Justin doesn’t strike me as especially “male” or “female” – it’s just jeans and a shirt, though he did pad a bra to give the illusion of breasts and wear eyeliner and mascara, though in the case of the latter two many men who aren’t in drag wear it as well. A bit of personal bias is about to creep in here, but I personally prefer clothing that’s gender neutral. I’m also critical of clothing and products that are gendered when I don’t feel they have to be, like slippers and socks. Part of this is because I happen to have very wide feet and am not fond of high heels, but also it’s because I really don’t think it’s needed in some cases, and it just complicates things when all you want are things to keep your feet warm. Now, would he have been considered disruptive if he'd just worn it without trying to make a point? The policy is so unclear that it's hard to tell, though other things about this school make me think that they would have done it anyway.

I don’t think there’s much about what he did that could be considered inappropriate or disruptive, since trying to make a point is not the same thing as being disruptive, though they can overlap. It’s been my experience that school policy tends to use very ambiguous language, and it tends to result in issues like this. What do "disruptive" and "inappropriate" mean? To whom is it disruptive? Is it still inappropriate if only one person feels that it is? If they change their mind does it stay disruptive, or can it stop being inappropriate? As you can see it gets muddy, and this is the danger of using subjective language in policy, especially when it's normative language, and the administrators at Dunnellon High School have fallen right into it.

Justin says he’s not planning on pursuing the issue any further, but maybe this will make them rethink their policies and what they're really saying in them, since from the sound of it they don't know themselves.

Gender Identity, Intersexuality and Sports

There was a story in The Advocate yesterday about the controversy surrounding Sarah Gronert, a tennis player who was born with both male and female genitalia (also known as being born intersexed). This semester I’ve been in a college course about the Philosophy of Race and Gender, and one subject we’ve looked at is the way intersexed people are treated in our society. Gronert is facing controversy because some people are claiming that she’s not a “real” woman because of her physical strength, and that shouldn’t be allowed to play against other women as a result. To me this is a perfect example of the way our society treats intersexed people and the issues they face in our society.

Among the people who fall under the ever-growing umbrella term of LGBTQI, intersexed people get the least attention and have the least known about them by the general public. Historically intersexed people have often had to pick a gender role and are not allowed to express their identity for fear of retaliation. There have been cases of intersexed people being put to death if they refuse to conform, and it's an accepted practice for an intersexed baby to undergo surgery to "correct" their genitalia before they are old enough to give consent, and it's claimed that this is done to insure their quality of life. But despite the fact that Gronert has undergone surgery to become more female she's being treated with hostility, and as this story shows, some people are going to so far as to claim that she’s “really” a man despite legally identifying as a woman and living as a woman.

Do other people have the right to define who you are? This has been a fundamental question posed in my class and in this story, and I cannot in good conscience say that other people do have that right. From a sociological standpoint the forcing of intersexed people to choose a gender identity is a way to reinforce gender norms, since by their very nature intersexed people call our strict male/female gender dichotomy into question. In this case the idea that she’s a “threat” to the convention is made clear by the reactions of other people to her, but whether or not she does have a physical advantage because of her body structure I think is irrelevant compared to the way she’s being treated and how people are trying to define her identity for her.

I’ve posed the question of whether it really would be so bad to allow intersexed people to live openly and express their identity, but the recent elections have shown that we still have a long way to go when it comes to just tackling male/female gender differences, issues surrounding homosexuality, and the treatment of transgendered people, so unfortunately it appears that any sort of intersexed movement that might tackle issues such as this will have to wait for a time when they can make their voices heard.

Dora the Explorer, Tomboyism and Gender Policing

A minor event that caught my attention this week was the unveiling of at “Tween” version of everyone’s favorite bilingual elementary schooler Dora the Explorer, and the resulting kerfluffle started by parents over it. But besides allegations of turning her into a mini street walker, a thing I didn’t see people focusing on were some of the wider implications of this new look and what it tells our young girls. It’s being touted that she’s now 10 and “grown out of” being a shorts-wearing tomboy and is now obsessed with fashion, friends, and all the things girls are supposed to obsess over at that age. I grew up in the late 1990s, and was by most accounts a tomboy myself, and even back then I noticed that once I hit middle school it suddenly became unacceptable for a girl to be a tomboy, we had to “grow up” and start acting like “real women.”

A necessary disclaimer at this point is that I am not, for the most part never have been, and do not try to be what’s considered a “proper” girl or woman, in part because I happen to be dating another very wonderful girl at the moment, and that tends to put a bit of a crowbar between me and conventional definitions of femininity by default. I’m also what would usually be classified as butch, though I do have my feminine aspects and am not afraid to embrace those. I think I’m a healthy distance from the usual expectations as a result, so I tend to look at these things with a sociologist’s eye and try to figure out just what function they serve in society. Back when I was 10 to 12, however, I tried to fall into what was being touted as correct for my gender and tried to get into fashion and makeup, or to quote a friend of mine, “Let the programming begin!”

Now of course if you refuse to go along with it the insults begin, and at about the same time I realized that being a tomboy at that age was culturally unacceptable I had my first experience of homophobia. In retrospect the girls who first introduced me to the term “lesbo” were absolutely right, but we didn’t know that at the time and it doesn’t change the fact that they were using the term as a slur, a way of categorizing an outsider and a deviant.

Girls who refuse to conform to the expectations of femininity and continue being tomboys after the acceptable age often find themselves accused of being lesbians, and by extension defective women. This is what’s referred to by sociologists as “boundary policing”, and this sort of behavior extends beyond gender and racial definitions into all sort of groups that seek to define themselves against others and decide who’s in and who’s out. This in itself isn’t bad, but this behavior can very often be used to reinforce existing norms of behavior and allow them to go unquestioned, even if they’re in drastic need of a reevaluation.

So what does this have to do with Dora? The media is possibly the largest source of boundary policing in our culture, and it plays a huge role in shaping what we think we “should” look like, feel like and act like. The extent of the reaction against the image projected by this new Dora doll shows how many parents rely on this character to help their children through childhood, so there’s little doubt that Dora’s influence is huge. I’m not disturbed by the feminizing that Dora has been subjected to in and of itself, but rather it’s the idea that a little girl not unlike what I used to be like might be given this doll and start to doubt herself and her puddle hopping and frog collecting hobbies and trade them in for makeup and fashion not because she wants to, but because she thinks she has to.

I eventually said “screw this” to what was expected of me and chopped all my hair off when I was 15, but in my middle school years I felt that I had to become obsessed with makeup, fashion and boys, and when I found that I didn’t really care for any of those I started thinking something was wrong with me, which no doubt contributed to the depression I was already struggling with.

So my main questions about this “new” Dora are about what it’s really trying to accomplish, and if the little tomboy girls who have followed this character are about to find themselves pushed into a box that they don’t necessarily fit into, and if parents really want to enforce such a strict definition of femininity.