Return to Self: A gender affirmation learning resource

Cam:

I always felt as long as I can remember that I didn't really fit these two gender categories. I knew that I wasn't a girl from a young age, and being a boy also just didn't feel like who I was. A big myth about trans people is that transition means going from point A to point B, or from one gender to the other gender, and the idea that there's only two. Thinking that people that don't identify as a man or a woman are some kind of anomaly. How strange it would be actually that there would really be just kind of two ways of gendered expression?

Ari Heart:

What Cam is describing here is something that a lot of people realise once it's pointed out to them, but we don't spend necessarily that much time thinking about. Which is that we tend to categorise many things as if they are a binary. A binary is a system where there are only two possible options. There's no grey area. They're completely distinct. A true binary is something like morse code where there's dashes, and dots or binaries are used in coding logic - so a signal is either on or off, true or false.

When we try to apply that kind of thinking, which is useful when we need clear distinctions to any other system that is in the social or physical world, often, that way of thinking fails to capture the whole of that system. There are always instances or individuals who fall outside.

When systems assume only two possible options exist, everyday things like forms, or records, facilities can become more complicated for people whose lives just don't fit that structure. So while binary thinking might feel normal and familiar to most people, it can have real impacts on people whose lives just don't fit neatly into those two categories.

Andy Perfors:

I think - this is with my scientist hat on because I study categorisation - I think humans, we have an irresistible urge to categorise things and binary classifications are by far the easiest, but they are almost always imposed by us. The world is almost always much more complicated and nuanced than that.

When I first came out and got to know more trans people, I am such a binary person myself, it took some mental work to realise they actually, for reals, don't feel like either a man or a woman. It felt like this deep insight that one could actually have that experience because it's so different from my own. Even if you are completely cis, it is wonderful that non-binary people and trans people exist because we point out that ambiguity, and we point out that you do not have to live according to these very tightly defined categories. You can just do what works for you. And maybe, if you're cis, it's less extreme than if you're trans. But we all crave not to be put in little boxes.

Ari Heart:

Yeah.

Cam:

I love to ride my bicycle around. It's one of the spaces that I feel most free. And I've done a lot of interviews with trans and non-binary people and it's been a theme because it's freedom to move around without being looked at. People wondering, people are making assumptions.

I remember this moment when I was probably 15. I was just speaking with my dad and saying like, "This is just so hard. I don't know why mom has such a hard time with my queerness." And he said, "It's not so much that. It's just she hates that you look like a boy." And there are just these kind of moments throughout growing up that shaped me kind of keeping to myself, and also feeling like there wasn't a place for me.

Non-binary as a word didn't exist until fairly recently. So when it started becoming more used, I felt like, “okay, there's possibilities for being recognised, legally recognised actually, as who I am”.

Ari Heart:

When Cam says the word non-binary is relatively new, it can sound as though gender diversity itself is new, but that isn't the case. Across cultures and throughout time, there are countless documented examples of people whose gender did not fit neatly into the categories of women and man that we understand there to be today.

In many societies, those people held recognised respected roles within their community. Trans author and activist Leslie Feinberg wrote about these histories in their book, Transgender Warriors. And historians like Susan Stryker in the US and Noah Riseman in Australia have done the same. Understanding that gender diversity has always existed helps us recognise trans and non-binary people, not as anomalies and not as a recent politically motivated phenomenon, but as part of the natural diversity of human life.

When language and awareness expand, it can appear as though a group of people that they're suddenly increasing in number when actually what has happened is that language has become more available to describe those experiences.

Having language which reflects our experience can be profoundly relieving because it provides us an opportunity to understand what's going on for us, and accept that experience in ourselves, and then also to articulate it to other people so that we can be better understood by others.

One way to make space for the fact that gender diverse people exist in this world is to incorporate representation of trans and gender diverse people in any place where we are representing humanity. So that might be in the context of university in teaching slides, or it might be in data if we're reporting on people and we're categorising them in terms of gender in any way.

Including representation of trans people isn't about making it about trans people. It's about accurately portraying the true diversity that exists within humanity. And importantly, it's also about allowing for stories and images which trans people can see themselves in so that they feel like they're not an anomaly. They're not an afterthought. They are actually members of society that belong to humanity.

Andy Perfors:

Especially in a university setting, where we are on the forefront of human knowledge and pushing bounds, we have to be comfortable with the ambiguity - of not having nice, tidy categories with no fuzziness where there's only two of them - in order to actually properly understand the world.

Ari Heart:

I had this experience, and I've spoken to probably hundreds of non-binary people who've had a similar experience, whether or not they articulated in the same way or a different way; that they feel, at one point in their life, insufficiently human, that being a woman or a man is so core to what we think of a human being - a human being being - that if you do not resonate with either of those categories, it's very, very easy to feel like you are not real. This is what's at stake, I guess, for non-binary people.

Andy Perfors:

And the solution is not to change your inner being which, of course, none of us can do anyways. The solution is to recognise our stories are massively impoverished. Our cultural stories, I mean, our meaning. Universities and academia, well, for staff and for students though, it's a job that you do best by bringing your whole self to it. So it's even more incumbent on a place like this that… even if you put aside the moral reasons of supporting everyone, if you want to get the best out of everyone, they need to feel like they can bring themselves to it. Yeah.

Cam:

It's rare that I actually encounter misgendering in my work at Melbourne Uni and on campus. It feels like this is how it should be. I can devote time and energy to my work because I'm not kind of worrying about this. Being queer, being non-binary, being trans, they're all gifts. It's allowed me to form really deep relationships with people.