On the Topic of My Gender

 Despite heated discussions around gender, gender identity, and gender expression, there is no consensus on what gender is. Some mistakenly believe gender is determined chromosomally or reflected in external genitalia. For clarity, when discussing my gender, I define gender as the socially constructed binary of man and woman. However, recent societal changes mark the acceptance of a third gender for people who don’t fit into the categories of man or woman. I should note, however, that the formation of gender is entirely abstract. Thus, there are an infinite number of genders.

In my eighteen years of life, I’ve always been aware of my gender. My shoulder-length hair, wide hips, figure-hugging clothing, valley girl accent, cardigans, tote bags, and long nails have made the world aware, too. These physical attributes allow people to identify me: there goes that girl, and more recently, there goes that woman. They treat me accordingly. I’m frequently greeted with a smile and treated like I don’t have a brain in my skull. Men will explain anything and everything to me, especially within an academic setting. My parents let me out of the house less than my 12-year-old brother because the outside world couldn’t be “trusted with a girl.” Within an educational environment, I’m told, with surprise and shock, that I’m “very smart.” In other adult settings, I’m treated with kindness only if I have a big smile. I don’t take up space. Instead, I exist transiently throughout my life to not inconvenience anyone. All these experiences, challenging or not, occur within the bounds of my existence as a woman. I would not behave this way if I weren’t a woman; if I weren’t a woman, society would not expect this of me.

Societal expectations of femininity and who should perform the act of femininity permeate my daily life. Being in good standing as a woman includes being feminine, a trait that society expects of me. Despite being one term, in binary opposition to the word masculine, femininity entails many things–the to-do list of being a woman. High up on the list are kindness, helpfulness, helplessness, acts of service, innocence, sexiness, and so on. As evidenced by this list, being a woman entails a life of in-betweens. Of course, gender is just a portion of one’s identity. I’m not only a woman but a Latina one at that. Society perceives me as a (somewhat ambiguous) woman of color. However, my racial ambiguity grants me access to what is often inaccessible to darker women of color. Thus, I’m posited in a position of second-class citizenry. In the realm of gender, I exist as a woman, subaltern to a man. In the realm of race and ethnicity, I live as a light person of color, a privileged one among a subalternate group. As a result, my gender expression depends on who I’m around. In professional and academic spaces, stoicism grants me access to opportunities typically reserved for men. However, in my day-to-day societal interactions, docility brings about an understanding in people who would otherwise brush me off. Thus, I can manipulate my gender identity and its oppositionally-associated roles to navigate the world. The result of this shapeshifting practice is two-folded: on the one hand, it allows me to function within the many realms of my life, and on the other, it has left me with no sense of self. While desperately chasing the appropriate ways to be a woman in the world, I lose track of the person I am without expectations imposed upon me. 

Expectations aligned with the intersection of racial and gendered expectations are even more constricting than gendered expectations. Rather than being aligned with anything it means to be a woman, I must be an adequate Latina woman. New impositions arise from this intersection, which outsiders and the members of the communities I occupy pose. 

Preconceived notions of the brown/Latina woman exist in many forms. Scripts associated with the Latine community as a whole(but especially Latine men) include laziness, stupidity, hypersexuality, and deceitful. Dissimilarly, scripts associated with women are cluelessness, caregiving, innocence, and vulnerability. As a result, the scripts of Latina women exist not as somewhere in between these two identities but as an entirely new identity in and of itself. People typically describe Latina women as curvy, loud, controlling, incapable, and disposable. What marries these two identities is the part they play in relation to the white, cis, male norm; they’re disregarded and othered. Women of color outside the Latine community share similar plights to mine, although their specific struggles vary. Asian women are typically assigned the model minority myth, western society infantilizing East Asian women and desexualizing South Asians. In contrast, society understands black women as strong and masculine. 

Similar to how identities of race and ethnicity augment gender socialization, sexuality/sexual orientation and class do so as well. Because gender roles in relationships are so pervasive, sexual orientations outside of straightness upset the mile-wide line between being a “man” or a “woman.” As a result, society begins by forcing a pseudo-reassignment of gay men and lesbian women into the “opposite” gender category(given that society at large perceives them as non-straight). 

Not dissimilarly, class augments how people operate within their gender role and how society perceives them to exist in the world. Working-class people are seen as tough and are thus lent favorable terms of masculinity that address work ethic. For instance, by describing single mothers living paycheck to paycheck as “badass” and “strong,” people attempt to compliment a woman by giving her the status of a man. Conversely, wealthy people are dubbed “soft” to convey their lavish lifestyles and the grace and ease these lives grant them. This notion implies that wealthy people are viewed as more feminine because they have time and space for fragility. The implications of these intersectionalities are massive. Despite the perceived rigidity of gender categories, they are fluid to fit the intersections of other identities, all for the purpose of categorizing groups of people.

Despite my difficulty moving through the world as a woman, my ability to fit neatly into the woman category in people’s heads grants me unparalleled privilege. Although gender roles resulting from the gender binary harm the opposing genders involved, they inflict even more damage on individuals who don’t fit neatly into these categories.