The Reality of Gender Variance

I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where I was able to have open conversations with my parents and I was free to ask any questions without judgment. When it came to sex, bodily functions or sexuality, nothing was off limits. From a very young age I had been introduced to the ideas of homosexuality, transvestites, and other non-typical ideas about gender that most kids were foreign to. When we began the topic of gender in class, I had been thinking to myself that I already knew about all gender and that I would gain nothing from the experience. I was dumbfounded to find that certain things were new to me and even though I had grown up in a very open household, particular topics made me uncomfortable. It’s amazing to me that even though I thought I had been shown everything there was, I was in fact unfamiliar with many of these ideas and how they affected people themselves.

I had always known in my head that gender was more than “boy” and “girl,” but when I first read Ruth Padawer’s article “What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?” I was introduced to the idea of a “middle space.” She identifies the middle space as the area between the typical norms of boy and girl, an area that can span from heavily masculine behavior and thoughts, to very feminine and everywhere in between (Padawer 2). Being introduced to this idea gave me insight into how people view themselves or their children. People who occupy that middle space (and I believe that to be most people), don’t see themselves as simply masculine or feminine. Where they fall in that middle space is what makes them who they are, which is something that I had never thought of before.

            I had never realized the real-life factors that had affected my thoughts about gender. Seeing television commercials for Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels and Vannah White in her beautiful dresses had indirectly taught me about how a man or a woman should behave, think and act from a very young age.  In Melissa Bellow Tempel’s article “It's OK to Be Neither: Teaching That Supports Gender-Variant Children”, she taught her students that gender is not set in stone and that society’s view of gender is not necessarily the correct one. She would ask her students about boy toys and girl toys. When she asked girls if they liked to play with “boy toys” like Hot Wheels, most shouted yes (Tempel 2). But when she asked if it was okay for boys to play with girl toys, most were hesitant until she showed them real life examples of people that deviated from gender norms that our society had created. This was the same for me when I was in kindergarten. When it was play time, the boys (and I) would run around chasing each other and the girls would sit and play with dolls. Tempel also had to deal with how parents handled their children. Some parents were more than accepting of their children, while others, like New York father Anthony, had a hard time adapting to their children’s atypical behavior. “[Anthony] is still distressed when his son talks or moves flamboyantly, and he’s not sure why” Padawer observes (9). This was upsetting to me to find out that parents could be upset at their children for acting in an unusual way. 

During my elementary school years, activities were ALWAYS separated by gender. When we got in line to go anywhere, when we sat on the floor and even when we ate lunch. There was always a gap between boys and girls (whether spoken or unspoken).  “When we lined up to go to the bathroom, I kept my students in one line until we reached the bathroom,” Tempel noted, “and then I let them separate to enter their bathrooms” (2). If she did need to separate lines, she would do it by topic as opposed to gender, “I thought up a new way for them to line up each day. For example: ‘If you like popsicles, line up here. If you like ice cream, line up here.’ They loved this” (Tempel 2). By using this technique it showed her students and I that gender did not need to be separated from such a young age, and that teachers could have found different ways to separate us.

Later in my life, particularly in high school, I was introduced to people that were far more expressive of their gender variance than I had previously seen. In Jan Hoffman’s “Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?” A school counselor notes that “Some boys have worn makeup and pink frilly scarves; girls wear big T-shirts, long basketball shorts — and look like male gang members” (qtd. In Hoffman 3).  Students felt freer to wear different clothes and express more of who they are as individuals. Openly gay boys in my high school wore makeup and would dress in a more feminine fashion and Padawer observes that “Boys and men do have more latitude these days to dress and act in less conventionally masculine ways” (10). Seeing  men and women dressing and acting that way didn’t make me feel uncomfortable, but when you grow up in a small town like I did, seeing kids stray from the normal conventions always makes your head turn.

 As someone who was raised to be an open-minded and accepting individual, it surprised me that I ended up learning new things about gender that I never would have recognized before. I never would have known that parents were having such a difficult time dealing with their kids who would rather fall away from typical gender norms. I also never realized that there are such a large number of people who wanted to be different from what society had taught them, and that so many people felt incomplete because they were born a certain way. I guess you can think you know a lot about gender, but until you really delve deeply into it, you have absolutely no idea.