Boy? Girl? Agender?

This week’s article summary is Boy? Girl? A New Generation Ovethrows Gender.

Last week’s article summary introduced a new term, adulting, and this week’s introduces the term agender. 

In my previous headship, I did a lot of school accreditation visits. Different from Trinity’s accreditation organization SAIS, the Midwest’s ISACS asked schools to write as many as 37 reports about aspects of the school, including one on Equity and Justice. When I would meet with groups of trustees, parents, faculty, and administration, I always asked the same litmus-test question to gauge where a school was on the diversity spectrum: “What is your school’s position on same-sex families and gay/lesbian faculty and students?”

Five to ten years ago one’s opinion about same-sex issues was the frontier of diversity, just as race was in the 60s and 70s and feminism in the 80s and 90s.

And today, when many of us have been learning about gender identity, the frontier is moving again: this time to agenderism--not identifying or expressing as either male or female but a little bit of both.

For me, empathy—be it through my own experiences, feelings, or rational thinking and reflection—has been the foundation of my diversity journey, both personal and professional. As I was raised by open-minded, free-thinking parents and attended liberal, diverse private-independent high school and college, it’s not too surprising I lean that way as an adult. 

Whenever I learn about someone or some group being marginalized, I think about how sad it is to be the one on the outside looking in; to have to hide aspects of one’s identity; to be teased and bullied; to be alone, ignored, and invisible.

The article below is an introduction to this new frontier of being agender and its implications for our society, our schools, and for ourselves.

Joe

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Max, age 13, does not identify as male. Ordinarily, that would be enough to deduce Max’s gender. But Max does not identify as female, either. Max is agender. When referring to Max, you don’t use “he” or “she;” you use “they.” Once strictly a pronoun of the plural variety, “they” is now doing double duty as singular, referring to individuals who do not see gender as an either/or option.

Max explains: “What agender means is I’m neither guy or girl, and that’s how I feel, which is different than terms like ‘gender fluid’—which means you feel like a guy or girl at different times—because I don’t feel like I’m both guy and girl; I’m neither.”

If same-sex marriage was yesterday’s battle to redefine gender roles and privileges, and transgender rights today’s, we just may be on the cusp of the most transformational stage yet. 

This phenomenon involves the splintering of what heretofore has been one of the most resilient organizing principles of American society—the division of the entire human race into male and female.

These individuals may use any number of terms to describe their gender identity: genderqueer, gender-fluid, gender creative, gender-expansive. While definitions fluctuate, “nonbinary gender” has emerged as an umbrella description.

How widespread is the nonbinary phenomenon? The results of the most recent survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality revealed that out of almost 28,000 respondents, more than a third chose “nonbinary/genderqueer” when given a choice of terms to best describe themselves.

And there is growing evidence that even those outside the transgender community are buying in.

A 2015 survey of 1,000 people age 18-34 found just 46 percent agreed that “there are only two genders, male and female.” Fifty percent, meanwhile, said “gender is a spectrum, and some people fall outside conventional categories.”

As more people redefine their gender identity in nonbinary terms, schools, governments, workplaces and parents are having to adapt.

The California Healthy Youth Act of 2015 requires comprehensive sex education for grades 7-12 to “teach pupils about gender, gender expression, gender identity, and explore the harm of negative gender stereotypes.”

Official recognition of nonbinary gender appears to be accelerating. Last June, a county circuit court judge in Oregon, in what transgender advocates believed was a first in the U.S., affirmed the legal change of 52-year-old’s gender from female to “nonbinary.”

Max’s mother acknowledges she was clueless about gender issues when Max came out.  “Sexuality–no big deal,” she says, explaining the commitment she and Max’s father have always made to gay and lesbian rights.

But Max’s nonbinary identity definitely threw her. “I was taken very much by surprise in terms of gender. It came from left field, I knew nothing, I was scared.”

“It’s a lot harder as nonbinary than trans,” Max says. “I’m not saying it’s not hard as trans, but you can’t really say ‘Oh I’m not a boy, I’m a girl.’ If you say ‘I’m not a boy, I’m not a girl’—so what’s left? It’s hard to define what that means.”

That is an existential quandary with real-world implications.

While the question of who can go to the bathroom where may sound prosaic, about a third of transgender people have reported abstaining from eating or drinking in order to avoid using one, because of frequent harassment and confrontations.

At school, Max would use the boy’s room only during class, when it was less crowded, and only when desperate. They didn’t like to use the girls’ room, either.

“It would just feel like ‘I’m in the wrong place, I’m not supposed to be here,” Max says. “Something in your stomach—this just doesn’t feel right.” The family lobbied Max’s school for a gender-neutral bathroom. It took awhile, but the school converted a faculty restroom, which can now be used by anyone.

The acceptable rules and privileges within a binary male-female gender system have long been challenged, and ultimately expanded, by feminists and LGBT activists. And while the concept of other genders may be novel to Americans, it’s nothing new to many cultures around the world.

The biologist Ann Fausto Sterling titled her seminal 1993 essay about individuals who are born with ambiguous sex characteristics “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.” “If the state and the legal system have an interest in maintaining a two-party sexual system, they are in defiance of nature,” she wrote. “For, biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from female to male.”

Underlying the nonbinary phenomenon is the belief that gender is a social construct. This view sees the duality of gender, so entrenched in human society, as not a fundamental truth, but a perspective.

For the current generation of nonbinary pioneers the issue isn’t the ultimate success of a breakthrough vision of gender, it’s a matter of simple truthfulness and dignity.