Rebecca Stanborough - She/He/They/Them: Understanding Gender Identity

It was a hard lockdown.

Students huddled in secured locker rooms, practicing how to keep safe if an active shooter entered the school. Boys huddled in the boys locker room. Girls huddled in the girls locker room.

One student was left to face a wall in the hallway, completely alone.

The teachers in the Stafford County, Virginia, middle school didnt know which locker room the student should use. The student was transgender. And because the school district had no clear guidelines about where she belonged, that student was sent into the hallway by herself.

If there was someone armed, she told a local newspaper, I wouldve been the first one gone.

The separation of a transgender student from other students during an active shooter drill led a large group of supporters to attend a school board meeting to protest the schools actions.

This event was a drill, not an actual active shooting. But the fact remains: a transgender student was left in a hallway on her own because the school district had not made it clear that her right to safety was as important as every other students.

Across the nation, conflicts over the civil rights of transgender people are taking place in businesses, schools, hospitals, and government agencies.

Newspapers are full of headlines like these:

Transgender HS Student Says He Was Removed from Prom King Ballot

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 21, 2019

Administration Moves to Revoke Transgender Health Protection

The Washington Post, May 24, 2019

Supreme Court to Rule on Gay, Transgender Employment Rights

Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2019

Yet, even as transgender rights are being challenged in courts and classrooms, some parts of U.S. society seem to be making strides toward accepting gender differences. Some people are fighting for progress on these rights, while others are pushing back.

People understand more now then ever before about the science of sex and gender. Social media have created new ways for people of different genders to express themselves. Customers are questioning product categories like girl toys and boy toys. And athletes are breaking gender barriers in lots of different sports.

Customers may be questioning boy and girl toy separation, but girl-focused aisles full of dainty dolls and boy-focused aisles teeming with trucks are still commonplace.

For some people, that feels like good news. For others, it may feel like the world is changing too fast.

Even language is changing. The gender revolution has given rise to a new vocabulary. Transgender, cisgender, gender-fluid, genderqueer, nonbinary, ze, and zir these words represent different ways of describing ourselves and each other.

Are these words just a social trend? Or might society finally be acknowledging identities that have been part of the human experience all along?

People in the U.S. are hotly debating what should be done about the needs of people who dont fit into tidy gender boxes. Many government policieslike the Virginia school districtsdo not protect the rights of transgender people. And that means people are being left out and put in danger.

All over the United Statesand in many places worldwidepeople have gone on the march in support of equal rights for gay and transgender people.

Why does it arouse such strong feelings when someone assigned one gender at birth feels that they belong to another gender? Or that they dont relate to any one gender? Thats what will be explored in this book, along with cultural conflicts that have arisen with the recent expansion of our understanding of gender identity.

Gender identity is the sense of ones own gender. For some people, naming their gender is relatively easy: they see themselves as men or women, boys or girls. But those two categories dont work for everyone. Some people see themselves as somewhere in between. Or both. Or neither.

Its important to point out that gender is a core part of overall identity, but it isnt the only part. Other parts of identitylike race, , sexual orientation, faith, social class, and family connectionsmight be just as important to a persons sense of self.

Because of the way our society is organized, gender identity and gender expression have a powerful influence on peoples lives. Gender can determine a persons friends, toys and games, fields of study, and even the jobs and professions that they choose. It can even influence how much money people are likely to make as adults.

In How to Understand Your Gender, authors Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker say that gender is bio-psychosocial. That is, your gender is influenced by your biology, your psychology, and your society.

Your understanding of your gender is shaped partly by your biology. It may be influenced by your body parts and the chromosomes and hormones inside you. You have an innate understanding of who you are. That understanding may or may not line up with how other people see you. It may or may not line up with the body you see when you look in the mirror.

Your gender is also influenced by your social surroundings. Your family, friends, school, church, neighbors, people on social mediaeven strangersall have a lot to say about how you should act based on how they see your gender. These social rules and opinions may or may not make sense to you.

For the most part, gender identity stays the same over a lifetime. But it is possible that as your body, mind, and culture change, how you see your gender might also change over time.

Lets look first at the bio part of the bio-psychosocial gender equation.