Yesterday, our family had a visitor. Living in China, where genders outside of men and women are not generally discussed or even talked about, I assumed that the person who showed up at our home for BBQ chicken pizza was a girl, because they were described to me as the “daughter of a friend.”
Halfway through the meal, once I had referred to them multiple times as “her” and “she,” they slipped their pronouns into the conversation.
“By the way, I always forget to say that my pronouns are they/them.”
(That’s probably why they say when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.)
I immediately apologized, and they smiled and didn’t make a big deal out of it. But one of the people eating with us was older, and having never been exposed to people who identified as non-binary, had a difficult time remembering to address them as “them/they” instead of “she/her.” Indeed, even I, when I pride myself on my inclusivity and consideration for other so much, made the simple and amateur mistake of calling them a “her” more times than I should have liked.
The mistake of calling them a “her” had, hopefully, nothing to do with my own prejudices against the non-binary community. But I realized, as I spent more time with them and conversed more deeply with them, how much I had to learn, especially about this community of people that I seemed to have ignored in my research of the LGBTQ+ community, a glaring error that I sought to resolve immediately.
First and foremost, for those who are, like me, less knowledgeable about this community, it is important to define a few terms. In this piece, gender will refer to gender identity, which according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, is:
“A person’s internal identification as male, female, something in between or something other than the two conventional gender options. A person’s gender identity is not visible to others and can match or differ from their assigned sex at birth.”
As in the case of my visitor, their assigned sex at birth may have been female, but they identify as a person whose gender falls outside of the two-gender construct, and as such identify themselves as neither men nor women. Sex, on the other hand, according to the same website, refers to:
“The classification of a person as male or female. At birth, babies are assigned a sex that typically corresponds with their external anatomy. Yet an individual’s sex is influenced by a larger combination of factors, including their chromosomes, genes, hormones, reproductive organs and secondary sex characteristics.”
This would be, in the case of my visitor, the female sex they were assigned to at birth, but prefer not to identify with as their gender identity. There are people whose sex assigned at birth may not be either male or female; these are people who would be classified as intersex, which is in itself a complex topic, and will be discussed in a later post.
With the definitions of these terms under my wings, I began to do more research on the different types of genders there are. It turns out that gender identity as the binary perception we have of it now has not always been the case in history. The Samoan culture, for instance, considers the fa’afafine, people who are male in sex but behave femininely, a third gender. They are attracted to straight cis-gendered (people whose gender matches their sex assigned at birth) men. Many Native American culture also make mention of more than two genders in their culture. According to the Dr. Sarah Hunt in her paper “An Introduction to the Health of Two-Spirited People: Historical, Contemporary, and Emergent Issue,” they are collectively termed "two-spirit" or “two-spirited". So it would appear that the gender identity perception many continue to hold today, the men or women identification, has not always been true in the history of human civilization.
My teacher said something during class that I think we would all do well to remember. He said, to quote him verbatim, “I am too old to be able to wrap my mind around the new genders, but I have and will always support self-expression. Everyone is free to live however they chose, so long as it does not impact anyone else around them negatively. I don’t even have to understand it, but respect it I will.” Whether or not a person’s gender identification is something you can understand, respecting their choices is the least we can do. As the Walt Whitman quote goes: “Be curious, not judgemental.”
Citations:
The Annie E. Casey Foundation. “LGBTQ Definitions, Terms & Concepts.” The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 3 June 2021, https://www.aecf.org/blog/lgbtq-definitions.
Schmidt J. Paradise Lost? Social Change and Fa’afafine in Samoa. Current Sociology. 2003;51(3-4):417-432. doi:10.1177/0011392103051003014.
Hunt, S. (2016). An Introduction to the Health of Two-Spirit People: Historical, contemporary and emergent issues. Prince George, BC: National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health.
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