What Does "Making Room for Gender Diversity" Look Like?

Two incidents, and why we need wiggle room

Photo by Marc Stress on Unsplash

My post last week, in part about bathroom incidents in years past, got me thinking about other bathroom incidents, including when a relative invited my family to go swimming at her fancy-shmancy club. We enthusiastically accepted the offer, and skipped into a marble-clad entryway to the welcome desk—feeling like ragamuffins, but excited to swim.

“Do you want to go into the locker room with me or Daddy?” I asked my daughter.

We sometimes ask her this because she is often mistaken for a boy, and it’s just easier to go in the boys’ room on occasion, to minimize the possibility of public conflict. You may have strong opinions about who should use which bathroom, but the truth is, without awareness and acceptance of gender nonconforming people who embrace their biological sex, it can be pretty unpleasant out there. So sometimes we just let her choose.

The attendant at the front desk overheard me and said, rather admonishingly, “Our policy is he has to go in the locker room in accordance with his gender.”

I was not as generous as I made myself out to be in my earlier post; I was snippy. “She’s female,” I said, in a way that pissed off my relative and slightly embarrassed my conflict-averse kid. The attendant was confused. My daughter said to me, “I’ll just go with you,” and we left.

Thinking about this now, I wonder what the attendant meant by “his gender.” Was she saying that people must use locker rooms in accordance with gender stereotypes? Because if self-ID is their policy, why assume anything about anyone? Did they mean one must use restrooms in accordance with gender identity, and then they assume any short-haired child in gym shorts has a male one? Where do the non-binary, genderqueer and genderfluid kids go, in that case? How about a middle-aged woman raised as a feminist who still doesn’t shave her legs or armpits?

Later, post-swimming, we were back in the locker room, looking at the hairdryers and curling irons by the bathrooms, which are provided in fancy-schmancy locker rooms. I don’t remember what we were doing, but we were laughing, maybe pretending to curl her short hair, when a woman stormed up to me and growled, “He’s way too old to be in here!” Her young daughter—or so I assumed—cowered behind her.

This time, I behaved myself. I said, “Oh, she’s actually a girl, but I know it’s hard to tell by the way she dresses.” I defused the situation. The younger child stared—a normal reaction—and the mother demurred, then apologized. “Totally fine,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

And it’s not her fault, it really isn’t. It’s the fault of a society that stopped teaching people that gender stereotypes can be defied, not defining. It’s the fault of a society that has embraced black-and-white thinking around one of the grayest subjects out there.

For those of you keen on changing the way we teach kids about gender, or for those of you concerned about the medicalizing of gender nonconformity, how do you propose we understand and accept gender nonconformity? For those of you who want girls to use the girls’ room and boys to use the boys’ room, how do you propose we minimize the anger, and, yes, sometimes even violence—actual violence—directed at gender nonconforming people? I’m thinking of the time my masculine lesbian friend got gay-bashed on the subway—the bashers assumed she was a gay man, called her a fag. She wasn’t doing male or female right, and that’s what made her vulnerable.

Making room for gender diversity also means accepting autogynephilic trans women and cross-dressers. From what I understand autogynephilic males’ penchants for women’s clothing, or to have a female-like body, often don’t fade with age, the way some kinds of childhood-onset gender dysphoria does. If they aren’t allowed to transition when they’re boys, before puberty strikes, they’ll never “pass.” Which means they need acceptance as men who look and behave in ways that may make some people very uncomfortable in public spaces. For those who want to end the teaching of the theory of gender identity in schools, how do you propose we teach kids these variations of gender and sexuality? Or do we not teach about it? We see enough gender diversity where we live that my kids no longer stare when their brains can’t slot someone neatly into a male or female category, but most people don’t.

When I wrote about tomboys, I noted that the word conferred a protective bubble of ambiguity on their childhoods. Sure, there was a lesbian-tomboy stereotype, especially for the very typically masculine girls, but nobody knew for sure who they’d grow up to be. Some suffered. Some were comfortable. Some got told they were in the wrong bathroom, but there was no culture war over it. We created a culture awareness of masculine girls and they became, largely, unremarkable. How do we create such cultural awareness again?

I’m worried about the messages from both the extreme right and extreme left. I find so much of the dissenting dialog, even among liberals, slipping back into “boys and girls are fundamentally different emotionally and psychologically, not just physically,” leaving little room for how massively gender norms have switched generationally.

Remember when girls had short hair and wore shorts and tube socks? Remember when girls played baseball in the 19th century, when they fared better at science and boys at literature? Remember, in many centuries, when men peacocked in makeup and frilly clothes? Remember when there was a crisis in the 1990s, and girls were falling behind? Well, we focused resources on that, and now there’s a crisis among boys. My suggestion has always been to de-emphasize gender differences while acknowledging sex differences. I’m not denying average behavioral and skill differences among males and females, but I’ve spent years studying those who defy them, and those are the people I’m asking to accommodate. But I feel there are so few others in this corner with me.

Maybe it’s because conservatives have controlled so much of the dissent—although I am no longer sure what a conservative is, or a liberal, as those words now apply to people, to wings of each political party, that have earned the word radical (a word I once associated with my grandmother’s peace activism). I have been wondering if the activists who label objectors right-wing—the ad hominem attack response, in lieu of actual discussion and reasoning—are accurate in some way. Does wanting to hold onto the gender gains begun and in some ways accomplished in the 1970s now make me a conservative? I don’t think so, because I believe in socialized medicine and government regulation and abortion rights and gay marriage. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know what to do.

We need better policies, yes, which respect familial coherence and are based in science, but we also need to leave some wiggle room. And wiggle room is tough for policy makers. You want to have a bathroom regulation, or a sports law, or rules for prisons, but there will be exceptions. How do we deal with them?

I don’t know. But I do know I want to go forward as we shift, not backward, and figure out how to truly embrace gender diversity—to make all colors, all toys, and, yes, all clothes, available to all kids, to let them experiment, to develop skills marked as masculine and feminine, and to use the frigging bathroom without being yelled at. I don’t know how to enshrine such tolerance in policy, or in educational trainings, which are so often about divisiveness and not diversity.

Any suggestions? Leave them in the comments, please. Or drop me a line on Twitter.