So many of us crave a world where it doesn’t matter. “It” meaning our difference, the thing that, in this world, has set us apart. Marginalized us. Sexual orientation. Race. Gender identity. Whatever.
Raise your hand if you’ve run into people who have told you “Well, then, quit making an issue of it, why don’t you? Just be you! Don’t be so quick to stick a label on yourself. Why does it matter what sex you are, or if you like boys or girls or both, or any of that stuff? Let’s all just be people!”
What do you tell them?
I totally get the inclination to roll one’s eyes and sigh and say “You just don’t get it”, believe me. But rolling my eyes at them and telling them they don’t get it isn’t likely to expand their understanding.
From the snippet of Within the Box I’m reading to my author’s group on Sunday:
“I don’t think none of us really knows what it’s like to be in another
person’s skin”, George says. “But it’s not just because of pride that
I’m always aware of being a Black man. World ain’t gonna let me
forget it. We all have our own shit we have to sort out, but I don’t
think it’s right to make out like seeing people with racial attitudes
is hostile when this happens all the time.”
We can’t draw attention to ways in which we’re prevented from “just being people” and make an attempt to change that unless we can describe the pattern and, yes, stick a label on it. Something to call the phenomenon.
But yes, to those of you who don’t see why “it” should matter, yeah, it shouldn’t, and glad to hear that to you it doesn’t make any difference, that actually is a good thing, even if you’re annoyingly oblivious about the ways in which the world won’t let us forget about it yet.
I’ve often found it useful to compare being genderqueer to being lefthanded.
In today’s world, being lefthanded does not marginalize me. I can “just be people” despite being lefthanded. The world does not make an issue of it and draw my attention to it. I’ve never been treated substantially differently from how other people are treated because of being lefthanded.
I do still live in a world where being righthanded is the default, the standard assumption. Sign-in sheets at meetings have the pen glued to the wrong side of the clipboard, and I have to stretch the cord awkwardly to write my name on the form. Desks with the little table attached have the tables on the right instead of the left. But you know, these are trivial things; the truth is that it’s simply not a “difference that makes a difference”. Kids in elementary school didn’t invent an array of hostile mean-spirited things to call me because of it. I didn’t grow up hearing hateful epithets that meant “lefthanded person”. I haven’t faced discrimination in employment or housing or banking. Or singled out for special treatment by the police. Politicians aren’t telling voters I’m a threat to their way of life and things need to be done about people like me.
But guess what? It wasn’t always like that. Did you know? If I’d been born in the 1800s I might have had the back of my left hand hit with a ruler if my teacher saw me writing with it. It was considered to be the wrong hand. There was judgmental hostility. And if we go back even further, there was a time when it was associated with the devil. Not just wrong in the sense of incorrect, but wrong in the sense of evil. I might have been considered by the community to be morally depraved. It could have affected my ability to work and live and basically “be a person”. It could even have played a role in getting me burned at the stake as a witch!
So if I’d been alive back then, it would have been fair to describe myself as a marginalized person for being lefthanded. It would have been legitimate for me to make a political issue of it, to point out that this was unfair and unreasonable.
Moving back to the present era, yes, I hope that having an atypical gender identity will someday be no more problematic than being lefthanded is. Maybe people will still make cisgender assumptions about people by default, but it will be no more oppressive than those signature clipboards and desks.
But a big part of the process of getting there is drawing attention to how that is not so yet, and testifying to what it’s been like and why it’s unfair and so on.
