Our Bodies, Ourselves (17 page)

• Don't weigh yourself. Instead ask: How do I feel in my own body right now?

• Interrogate your own self-talk and dispute it when it is either self-hating or judgmental of others' bodies. Invite your biggest fan into your head to counter the criticism. What would your best friend say about the viciousness you just unleashed on your belly?

• Change conversations about weight to conversations about well-being.

• Speak up against fat discrimination.

• Ask yourself: When and with whom do I feel happiest and most beautiful? How can I be there, with them, more of the time? Consciously choose your community.

• Put your money where your heart is. Don't buy products from companies that make you feel inadequate, dirty, or insecure in their advertising.

• Get involved in feminism! It offers an empowering lens by which you can understand what you are going through.

• Redefine your notion of what a successful girl or woman looks like. She's not just a high achiever. She's also healthy, resilient, joyful, and full of self-love.

• Make intergenerational friendships that help you see the big picture. Suddenly life may seem long and the size of your thighs might just prove irrelevant.

• Shift your priorities from achievement and appearance to fulfillment and joy at every opportunity.

• Learn to love the beauty of your own true nature.

• Say it out loud. If you tell a trusted friend or family member about your struggle, you help make it real. This creates accountability.

• Never diet. It is documented that this industry is the gateway to eating disorders.

• Get professional help, if needed, as early as possible. It's critical that you trust your own instincts, not the medical profession's definitions of wellness. Only you know what it's like being inside your own head.

© iStockphoto.com/Bonnie Jacobs

Seeing an individual struggle with body image as part of a larger social and political
struggle can be helpful as well. Organizations and movements, such as NOW's Love Your Body campaign, provide a full context for understanding the role of corporations and the media in keeping women dissatisfied with their bodies and offer easily accessible ways to take action on the issue. Check out the presentation on “Sex, Stereotypes and Beauty” at loveyour body.nowfoundation.org, where you can also find other guides to help develop a critical eye toward beauty standards. Plus, there are tips on everything from staging a mock beauty pageant on a college campus to sounding off to offensive advertisers.

Altering our attitudes and behavior is only a first step in chipping away the prison bars of the beauty culture. In the long run, the only way for any of us to truly break free is to change girls' and women's position in society. As Rose Weitz writes in
Rapunzel's Daughters
, “Only when all girls and women are freed from stereotypical expectations about our natures and abilities will we also be freed from the bonds of the beauty culture.”
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Fostering this affirmative environment for all of us is ultimately a collective project, where we join forces to educate new generations and transform our present one.

CHAPTER 4
Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation

O
ur attractions and identities are powerful and intimate parts of who we are. More and more, people understand that gender identity and sexual orientation are aspects of life that don't fit neatly into boxes. This chapter addresses these separate yet sometimes intertwined topics that affect our relationships with ourselves, one another, and the world.

Sex? Gender? These two words are often used interchangeably, but there are distinct differences. Sex is commonly understood to be based on a person's genitals (clitoris, vagina, penis) and reproductive organs (ovaries, uterus, testicles). These anatomical
details are thought to define a person as male or female. If the person's anatomy is not clearly or exclusively male or female, a person is said to have a disorder of sexual development, or DSD (formerly called “intersex”).
*

Gender is often understood to refer to gender identity, meaning your internal sense of yourself as female, male, or other, regardless of biology. Gender also commonly refers to gender roles or expression, most often to behaviors and physical characteristics considered masculine or feminine in a particular culture at a particular time.

A shortcut way of understanding the difference between gender and sex: Sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears.

In U.S. culture, gender is believed to follow directly from one's biological sex, so a baby born with a vagina is considered female, called a girl, and expected to grow up to be a woman who acts, dresses, and talks in a manner considered by the culture and her community to be feminine. A baby born with a penis is considered male, called a boy, and expected to grow up to be a man who acts, dresses, and talks in a manner considered to be masculine. In this binary way of thinking, our genitals, not our internal sense of self, are the deciding factor.

Many people challenge the expectation that our biological sex should dictate our physical, emotional, and psychological attributes. What if being a woman isn't about having a vagina (or not having a penis)? What if people don't fit neatly into male/female and masculine/feminine boxes? How we see ourselves and how others perceive us in the galaxy of masculinity, femininity, and the countless points swirling between cannot always be constrained within the two simple categories of man and woman.
†

Moving beyond the concept of two fixed gender identities is a new challenge for some of us, and a very personal story for others. Some of us grapple with and analyze our gender; others take it for granted, especially if our gender expression fits society's conventions based on the sex we were assigned at birth.

Where does gender come from? Its source is not entirely understood—and may not be the same for everyone. The formation of gender identity is likely established by hormonal influences in the womb, but it may also be affected by social and cultural factors, including the messages we receive from the media and from our families and communities. Our gender identity and/or gender expression may shift over time.

An increasing number of feminists and other activists are advocating for the expansion or elimination of either-or gender norms, in order to allow for a full range of human behavior and expression. Knowing that gender is separate from sexual anatomy enables us to express ourselves in ways that may conflict with how society dictates we should look and act.

When we live in a world that leaves only the tiniest sliver of room for the least complicated among us, it's difficult to find a place for all our complexities. I am afraid that it pushes us to leave our genders unexplored, and I am pretty sure that it does not allow us to express them in all the ways we would prefer. As it goes with many
things, it's easy to be afraid of genders that seem dangerous, unusual, or even merely new.

At the same time, some of us want nothing more than to have our gender identity respected:

As a trans woman, in a couple of my relationships with [non-trans] partners, I felt like I was being objectified—they would often talk about how “cool” it was that I was trans, like I was somehow “above” gender and this super-radical person. They even felt “subversive” for dating me. In reality, I was just being myself, and I am definitely not outside of gender, and I didn't even really want to be. My gender doesn't make me radical, it just is who I am. I didn't want to be seen as “beyond gender.” I just wanted to be seen how I saw myself, which was and is as a woman.

Below are some of the terms most widely used to describe gender identities. Many originated in medical, academic, or activist settings, which might not encompass all perspectives. The terms are fluid, changing meanings over time, and used differently by different communities. A term that pleases one person may offend another. When in doubt, it's best to ask what terms people want used for themselves.

gender identity.
How one identifies; a person's innate, deeply felt psychological identification as a woman, man, both, neither, or somewhere in between. Your gender identity may or may not correspond to your external body or sex assigned at birth (the sex listed on your birth certificate).

gender expression.
How one looks; the physical manifestation of a person's gender identity, usually expressed through clothing, mannerisms, and chosen names. Your gender expression may or may not conform to masculine or feminine socially defined behaviors and characteristics.

gender nonconforming.
Refers to people whose gender expression is neither clearly feminine nor clearly masculine, or does not conform to mainstream society's expectations of gender roles.

genderqueer.
Someone who blurs, rejects, or otherwise transgresses gender norms; also used as a term for someone who rejects the two-gender system. Terms used similarly include gender bender, bi-gender, beyond binary, third gender, gender fluid (moving freely between genders), gender outlaw, pan gender. A twenty-two-year-old woman says:

I identify as genderqueer and very recently have been moving away from also identifying as a woman. I am somewhat androgynous/masculine and I like to mix it up and play around with femininity, to intentionally push myself out of my comfort zone in regards to gender presentation and also to have fun confusing other people. I am very rooted in feminism and come from a long line of feminist ancestors; so while I lately find myself shying away from words like woman and girl and have started using the pronouns they/them/theirs, I also feel very solidly invested in pushing myself and others to expand the definition of the word “woman” to include people like me.

Some genderqueer people don't identify as male or female, and don't consider themselves trans, either, because they're not crossing from one to another but are existing in a third place altogether.

Recently, I have been in the process of informing others of my true gender identity. What I am is androgynous—both man and woman. What my birth sex is, is irrelevant. I'm finding that more
and more people are saying things like “What sex is …he? …she?”—though always to friends, never to my face. I'm finding this very pleasing, although I wish people would say it to me. I do take it as a compliment!

transgender.
An umbrella term referring to people whose gender identity and/or gender expression does not fit their sex assigned at birth. Groups often included under the transgender umbrella are transsexuals, genderqueers, people who are androgynous, and people who identify as more than one gender. Drag kings (women who perform as men) and drag queens (men who perform as women) often do so to entertain and may or may not identify as transgender. Similarly, cross-dressers (men who dress as women or women who dress as men) do not usually identify as transgender.

Transgender does not imply a sexual orientation; transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, or asexual—or consider labels irrelevant or inapplicable. Transgender is sometimes abbreviated as trans or used interchangeably with gender variant.

transsexual.
A person who lives and/or identifies as a different sex from the one assigned at birth. In
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
, the biologist Julia Serano writes that she uses the term to “refer to people who (to varying degrees) struggle with a subconscious understanding or intuition that there is something ‘wrong' with the sex they were assigned at birth and/or who feel that they should have been born as or wish they could be the other sex.”
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