Male? Female? Yes. No. Maybe.
26th September 2008
Cole Thaler is a gay man. But, he explained, he was “assigned female at birth.”
Confused?
Many people who fall into the traditional gender binary of male or female, including gay men and lesbians, acknowledge they sometimes can’t quite grasp the wide variety of gender identifications included in the so-called “LGBT” community.
Thaler, 31, lives in Atlanta and serves as the transgender rights attorney for Lambda Legal. He said he understands there can be confusion, but the best way to understand how people identify is to accept people as who they say they are.
Thaler stressed he didn’t have the “classic” transgender experience people hear about, where a person knew as soon as they could think that they were born in the wrong body. For him, and others, identifying as transgender was a gradual process.
“I was assigned female at birth, but as an adult I felt ‘not female,’” he said. “But I was unclear how to be my true self.
“When I came out as transgender in law school [at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, Mass.], I was lucky to come out with a wide range of identities around me — I knew there were large numbers and space between or beyond the binary,” he said. “This allowed me the space and time to find the identity that was right for me.”
Thaler said when he first came out as transgender, he identified as “genderqueer” and declined to take on a male or female identity. But after he graduated and entered the work force, people began identifying him as male and he started thinking and functioning as a man.
“This started solidifying my identity as a male,” he said.
‘ENOUGH BOXES’
Transgender — an umbrella term for people who don’t fit into the established gender roles set up by mainstream society — is often the word used to describe cross dressers, post-operative transsexuals, people transitioning from male to female and those transitioning from female to male.
And then there are so many others, including effeminate gay men and masculine lesbians who may not actually identify as transgender.
“Anyone who is gender variant can fit under the transgender umbrella,” said Cat Turner, business manager for the Southern Comfort Conference, the largest transgender conference in the nation, held annually in Atlanta. This year’s conference, with the theme “Celebrate Life,” is set for Sept. 30-Oct. 5.
“I firmly believe we have enough boxes to start with,” said Turner, who said if asked to pick a label, then genderqueer is the “box” to check.
“A lot of people ask my friends, ‘What is Cat?’ And they say, ‘Cat’s just Cat.’ We tend in this society to put people on a specific space on a spectrum, but sometimes I wake up feeling more feminine and others I wake up feeling more masculine. We all slide along this scale.”
More and more young people are casting aside the gender binary, Turner added, and simply identifying as queer or genderqueer. By taking on the label genderqueer, they don’t specifically identify as male or female.
“The youth … are not concerned with trans, gay, straight, bisexual — they have so much more freedom of expression than when I was their age,” Turner said. “Their inner being is so strong, they demand to be able to be who they are.”
This year’s Southern Comfort Conference includes the second annual Career Expo, numerous workshops, and a new people of color reception, something Turner said the organization has been working on for awhile as more black transmen come out.
Turner expects close to 1,000 to attend over the long weekend of events; the conference consistently shows that nearly 40 percent of attendees are newcomers.
GENDERQUEER REVOLUTION?
For Atlantan Jae Cripe, 21, genderqueer is a label mostly taken on by privileged people in academic settings.
“A lot of my peers identify as genderqueer, but what I’ve observed is that many who do [identify as genderqueer] come from colleges and live a very privileged life. This term comes out from people immersed in academics where they have access to that language and theory,” he said, but noted not all genderqueer people come from such a background.
After experimenting with how to label his identity, such as genderqueer, Cripe realized he is simply a young man.
“I have a binary identity, my gender is a man. But my sexuality is queer,” he said.
Cripe grew up a “very unusual girl” and came out as transgender at 16 after meeting another trans person and realizing this is where his identity best fit.
“I used to go by ‘tranny boi,’ but those words make it like my gender is childlike,” said Cripe, who has been on testosterone for two months and hopes to have surgery on his chest in the near future. “Tranny is also a pejorative term, especially for trans women. It’s like if a rich person pretends they are poor.”
Author, playwright and performance artist Kate Bornstein wrote the book “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us,” published in 1995. Bornstein said it’s actually OK to identify as what you are not.
“I don’t identify either/or but I live girl to the max,” Bornstein said. “I’m not-man, not-woman.”
Bornstein’s website makes use of gender-neutral pronouns such as “ze” and “hir” that some trans people use.
“I use those with the chief purpose of mischief,” Bornstein said, laughing.
But when it comes to filling out tax forms, even Bornstein admits she must follow the rules and checks “female.”
When someone meets someone who they are unsure how they identify, it’s really fine to simply ask what pronoun, if any, that person prefers, Bornstein said.
“Asking is the most important. Don’t assume,” Bornstein said. “And it’s also the most important thing to remember to respect. I have a weird definition of myself compared to others. It’s OK to define what I am not, because I’m nothing I’ve seen before. And it’s up to you to live your heart’s desire.”
Bornstein, whose newest book, “Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws” continues the discussion on varying identities, will be in Atlanta as the keynote speaker for the second annual Atlanta Queer Literary Festival on Oct. 17. Bornstein will also give a presentation at Emory University on the same day as part of the college’s celebration of Gay History Month.
The genderqueer revolution is fairly new, said Bornstein, who is 60. But “Gender Outlaw” likely inspired many trans activists to throw away the traditional binary male/female boxes.
“Now there is a whole generation of people living that to the max … they’ve made that book old,” said Bornstein.
What about possible friction within the transgender community itself on how to identify? Some people, she said, don’t want to identify as transgender because while they may have been assigned a certain gender at birth, they do not believe they were ever that gender.
“And that needs to be respected, too,” Bornstein said.
RECOGNIZING A THIRD GENDER
How a person identifies really comes down to a cliché answer, said Gayle Salamon, an assistant professor of English at Princeton University who has written extensively on transgender theory.
“It depends,” she said. “It depends on local practices, the local community.”
Salamon, who identifies as queer, was Princeton’s first LGBT Cotsen Fellow. She said it’s the queer community where language can often evolve on gender.
“For example, gay men calling each other girls,” she said. “Queer seems to be a special case — it’s not a specific designator of gender identity or sexuality. There’s a certain ambiguity to it. Some trans people embrace that.”
But for some trans people, being identified as transgender is similar to being outed, she added. And so how a person identifies is often a political and personal choice.
Transgender people also have a more serious reason for wanting to remain stealth, or keep their past identity secret, because of the astronomical violence they face, Salamon added.
Cripe, the young man from Atlanta, said that he does wish one day for some people to not know he is transgender, such as in the workplace and with different social circles.
“I have an unusual medical history for a guy,” he said. “I don’t consider my body female. I do know I will probably want to be stealth other than with close friends or any partner I have. There is a lot of hate for transmen, and so I know why guys don’t want to have to go through all the trouble all the time. Sometimes I don’t think people need to know.”
And for Thaler, the Lambda Legal attorney, he hopes one day the U.S. picks up on what other countries are offering on documents such as passports — an option for a third gender. On Sept. 20, the New York Times had an extensive piece on a gay Nepal activist working to include a third gender within the country’s population, such as what South Africa already has.
“The law here only recognizes men or women. We are very binary or at least there is not a lot of wiggle room, but we are moving in that direction,” Thaler said of a classification of a third gender.
“I’ll hear of another country that is putting a third gender marker on passports and I suspect our courts here will catch up to what society already knows,” he said. “We’re going there.”
Source: Dyana Bagby, SOVO