Children are wonderfully honest and direct; when adults can't figure out my gender without asking, they react with embarrassment, irritation, and, sometimes, anger. These reactions used to confuse me. Why embarrassment and anger? What had I done to them? I finally realized that confusion and embarrassment are onramps for fear -- fear that we don't know what's going on, fear that others will mock us for that ignorance, fear that we'll embarrass ourselves by incorrectly gendering someone and have to deal with their anger or the derision of our peers. My androgyny didn't threaten them physically, but the confusion it caused translated into an emotional threat. For people who cling to their worldviews like life rafts, having that worldview challenged is a threat. And I have found that people who cling to biology-based binary gender are very threatened by those of us who cross gender lines or don't believe in those lines at all.
-- CK Combs, Nonbinary Memoirs of Gender and Identity, p. 97
No comments:
Post a Comment