A.GENDER THEORY
Along with the, somewhat accidental, decision to start a manly dress making company, (which is a thing I've done, in case you're unaware, check out our website! www.beardladies.com) came the realisation that people would ask me why I've decided to do so, and why I want to dress in skirts and dresses. But that's not really what this is about.
I started writing what follows as a way of processing my thoughts about gender, trying to work out what I actually thought of it all. And while, even in the act of promoting our wares, the questions of “Why?” will almost entirely be answered with “Because I felt like it.”, I expect I'm also going to be asked a lot of questions about my own gender, and how I feel about the topic in general. Now I imagine a number of those asking will be people that don't deserve any sort of well considered answer, in fact I'd go as far as saying I don't owe any kind of explanation to anyone at all. But I'm anticipating conversations where I want to give a coherent, well considered answer (so I can feel intelligent and feed my ego, obvs), to people who are feeling confused in the same way that I have, or (rather cynically) while promoting our company and trying to create a kind of brand identity that I think our customers will identify with (and therefore buy stuff from).
I feel like people are going to have a variety of reactions to this. Big insight, huh? For those that vehemently, or even just broadly, agree; Great! Thanks for reading, feel free to share. For those that are offended; I'm sorry, I have no intention or desire to cause offence. Of course there's a number of reasons some might take offence. Misunderstandings are always possible, though I've done what I can to make sure that what I've written makes my thoughts clear. Or some that read this might just fundamentally disagree with my core beliefs, in which case sorry (for the offence), not sorry (for my beliefs). I'm sure, too, that there's more than one aspect or topic that some people feel I, as a straight, white, cis man (I mean cis-ish, that's sort of the whole point of this), shouldn't be the one commenting on, and maybe some of my ideas have much wider implications I haven't considered and I should rethink some things. I don't want to seem like a Debate Me Bro but, like, I could be wrong. I'm open to discussion, and encourage you to let me know (in a non-asshat way) if there's anything you take issue with.
I was assigned male at birth (AMAB). I always considered myself a boy, since I had (as far as I could tell then and now) an entirely biologically male body and that's how society as a whole considered this gender thing to work. My parents, particularly my dad (probably because he was the one at home that got all my questions about the world), brought me up to consider ideas of gendered behaviour and clothing outdated. Your biology didn't dictate anything about your personality or capabilities or beliefs, the actually important things, and this was part of a wider philosophy about identity and respect, and accepting people for who they are, and who they tell you they are. It was about letting people express themselves however they want, so long as that expression doesn't prevent someone else expressing themselves however they want. So wear what you want to wear, act how you want to act, and if you feel like you were born or assigned the wrong gender and you want to transition, then you should be free to do so without judgement.
I wasn't always the most masculine child, in part because I was a child. Being ginger, I had fair skin and deep pink lips, I remember a few times being accused of wearing lipstick. In my early teens I had long hair and had more fat around my thighs, bum and chest than I wanted to. Even at the time I was aware that, at a glance, there wasn't a lot to distinguish me from a girl of the same age. Two memories come to mind: one was getting on a bus on a school trip and the driver thought I was a girl; the other was in a golf clubhouse. My hair wasn't long enough to tie back yet so I was wearing a baseball cap, I was with my dad and we were both wearing jeans. One of the club members came over and, in a very passive aggressive, smiling way said that we could of course stay but they really didn't approve of jeans, and certainly not caps, at which point he snatched the cap off my head. My hair fell around my face and I watched him recoil in horror as he tried to work out if I was a girl, suddenly apologising profusely.
The first one, on the bus, I remember suddenly being very conscious of the parts of my body that caused the confusion. It was a physical sensation. The thighs, the bum, the small man-boobs. But not the hair, not the skin or the lips, just the fatty bits I didn't like for totally non-gendered reasons. It's not gender dysphoria, (for one thing, genuine dysphoria is a medical diagnosis, even if it often gets used to describe the feeling and experience, so now it means both because that's colloquial language for you, and for another, the bits I was uncomfortable with may have been feminine but they were, crucially, not actually female) but it's an experience I remember any time dysphoria has been described to me. I think it's the closest thing I've got, and it's still fucking miles away.
The second memory is different. I already disliked the guy for his general judgement of people in jeans, and his smarmy, Farage-esque, shit eating grin; and physically getting his hand in my face to snatch the hat off my head was an unnecessarily aggressive move for a grown man to be pulling on any 14 year old child. So when it became clear that he couldn't tell if I was a boy or a girl, I just felt anger about him throwing his middle class judgement around. Angry that he, and a huge amount of society, cling to such restrictive and arbitrary ideas of what is appropriate and allowed and approved of. Admittedly, my different reaction this time, could equally be the result of my older age, or the safety offered by being there with my dad.
In terms of behaviour I always acted in a more or less masculine way. At times belligerently contrarian, perhaps, but still mostly displaying predictable masculine habits and attitudes. I was always more drawn to more masculine toys and cartoons and clothes, though my parents intentionally didn't steer me towards anything overtly gender coded, and there was a hard rule against anything that represented or glorified modern day guns and warfare (so lasers and swords, fine, G.I. Joe, not so much). James Bond was always reviled in our house as a violent misogynist, so I've never really connected with that whole series of films. I was never restricted if I chose to pick a plastic sword toy and play He-Man, and I don't doubt for a second if I wanted a doll, or a pair of fairy wings that would have been cool too. Somewhere there still exists a photo of 4 year old me in my mum's high heel boots, I'm sure.
The rule of ‘express yourself how you want’ applied to me too, so once I had my own money I was free to buy as many toy guns as I wanted. Which was none.
This was never about gender, though, or even toxic masculinity. In my eyes it couldn't be, because these weren't behaviours inherently related to gender, since no behaviour is inherently related to gender. They were just shitty ways of being and acting towards others. They display a lack of respect for other people and encourage taking pleasure from causing suffering.
All this is to say that I connected to some bits of masculinity and manliness, but a lot of it felt like it was for other people, and I never felt like I had to change or behave differently to feel like more of a man. To me, I was a man by virtue of finding myself in the body of one and not experiencing dysphoria about it, which meant that I got to define what a man is, not the other way round. It felt kind of powerful to be honest.
The agender flag, I’m not sure who gets to decide, I don’t really give a shit about flags.
So all of this kind of sounds like biological imperialism, the idea in gender theory that your biology and genitalia dictate your gender (the “adult-human-female” crowd). And it is, because the society I grew up in was in many, maybe even most, ways built around that system of categorising people. It's the foundation on which I built my own sense of gender. But what about the people who don't feel like that framework works for them? Well they're still free to express themselves however they see fit, including changing pronouns, getting surgery, whatever you want. And I never knew enough about trans people or biology for that to rule out biological imperialism for me. At that point I think my logic ran something like: Male and female brains may work differently on a biological level, and intersex people can be born with a range of genitalia, what's to say that female brains born in male bodies can't happen?
But I didn't know what it felt like to be in the wrong body. My body is definitely male (from a visual inspection at least, I've never had my chromosomes sequenced). I feel like my body is me and I'm my body, so that must mean I feel male. Whatever feeling male is, this is it. Maybe all the people that feel they are in the wrong body have differently wired brains, ones wired more like the opposite sex from their body. It allowed me to shoehorn trans people in a biologically imperialist philosophy and just get on with my life.
But then I learnt a lot more about gender theory because, especially over the past few years, I've come to know a number of people who express their gender in a variety of ways, and I wanted to understand, partly, what it is they're going through, and also, what the hell they're talking about. I remember feeling sort of overwhelmed and confused about the way some people talk about all of this, using words and terminology that I thought I understood but in ways that really seem at odds with my understanding of physical reality. And part of me still feels like the language we use to discuss gender topics is a little lacking, that there should be a clearer way of talking about gender and sex, and how they relate to and differ from each other, without confusing the layman, who, I firmly believe, more often than not, has the best of intentions. Of course, it's a very complicated subject and maybe that clearer way can't exist, at least not yet.
I feel like I could meander through a few anecdotes, which could end up with a slightly fuller story, only I’m lacking the will to write it all (and I'm pretty sure it wouldn’t be worth the read), but a central part of my thoughts around this have been the need, or at least the desire, for some kind of external framework that I can use to define my gender. The world I grew up in gave me that. In fact it demonstrated daily that the entire society around me was built around that categorisation, and while I saw and accepted trans people in that world without judgement, it had no impact on my own sense of gender because they were outside of the norm and so had no impact on the wider biologically imperialist framework.
But as I came to know more non-binary and gender fluid people, I came to wonder what made them feel like neither a man nor a woman. This new idea didn't fit, I needed a new framework. And, unsurprisingly, gender theory has proved very useful; I guess because, at this point, it's a well debated and researched academic field that a lot of very intelligent people have put a lot of work into (though I wouldn't deny or disagree that it's under constant and increasing attack, and sure could do with a lot more support and funding).
The question I had to answer is; Where does gender come from? Something gender theory encourages everyone to answer for themselves. I think, thanks to the previously mentioned philosophy of my upbringing, I've always instinctively known that gender is basically a nonsense. It's a pair of conceptual categories, and some subdivisions, that we came up with to help organise and make sense of the world; like time, or religion, or user interface software, or biscuits. I never felt like it was dictating to me who I was (I'll ignore, for now, the philosophical rabbit hole of how I was, in fact, dictated to through the limitation of my options), but it classed me as a man and, in my eyes, left it up to me to show everyone around me what a man could do and be.
Classing me in that way acted as shorthand for other people, giving them a slightly less vague idea of the kind of person I am and the experiences I've lived. As a conceptual construct it has mostly been useful, in our current society at least, in defining and describing people in relation to each other. So if my gender is only relevant and meaningful in relation to other people and how they think of and interact with me, I didn't see how it could possibly come from me.
Gender theory, as I've come to understand it, divides things into three categories: Gender Expression, Biological Sex, and Gender Identity. The expression part lines up exactly with how I was taught to see the world; it's simply how you behave. We could debate for lifetimes what different behaviours, actions and ways of living actually constitute displays of gender expression, so let's just go with most of them, but the gist is that, whatever way you act, and however other people perceive your behaviour, it doesn’t have to be dictated or restricted by your Biological Sex or your Gender Identity. Meaning the opposite is also true, that your Gender Expression doesn’t say anything about, or necessarily define, the other two. It’s all very non-judgemental, which I’m a big fan of, and I find it interesting from an anthropological point of view, but not especially helpful in working out how to live my life.
The area of Biological Sex is, I feel, where a lot of the confusion and tense confrontations happen. It's also the area where people (on both sides, but I'd guess more on one than the other) seem almost keen to argue without really knowing what they're talking about. Having been exposed to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure at a young age, I tend to lean towards the Socratic acceptance that I truly know nothing, but I feel like I've come to understand some things that are almost certainly true:
Biological sex is mega complicated, it's certainly not binary, it's not really a spectrum either, more like a large cloud made up of a sort of 3D Venn diagram of a bunch of smaller, intersecting clouds.
It involves a lot more than X and Y chromosomes and your variety of genitals
While there's no definitive consensus on where the boundaries of categorisation are, a person's biological sex is set and unchanging, and exists as objective, physical reality (again, skipping over a philosophy rabbit hole) separate from their wants and desires.
I'm less sure of that last one, but only slightly. I'm around 99.9% on the first two, and still like 95% on the third. For what I'm trying to work towards here, though, the last area of the subject, the Gender Identity, is the most important.
As far as my grasp of it goes, your Gender Identity is, quite simply, the gender that you feel you are right now. And that might change. It might change in step or at odds with your gender expression, or it might be subtle and unnoticeable to anyone else, completely unrelated to any other aspect of you. Even as I write now, with a more comprehensive view of the whole thing, a part of me feels like that description comes across kinda wishy-washy.
Part of the old framework was the idea that gender doesn't change: if someone realises they are trans, they have always been trans. An important and powerful idea, which allowed trans people to be recognised in the old paradigm, and one that still empowers a lot of people today. But there wasn't a space for genderfluid or non-binary people, or a whole host of other ways people identify.
At one point I feel like I fell in a trap that a lot of people are belligerently stuck in; considering gender identity based on how you feel to be the same as a change of mood. When so much of how we organise, separate and govern our society is based on it, the idea of allowing people to pick and choose what category other people should put them in, seemingly based on a whim, feels destructive and unsettling on a level that I don't think (maybe judgmentally) most people have a full awareness of. It threatens, not just their own sense of identity, but the very foundations, the framework, on which that identity was built.
But of course it's not that straight forward.
The way I was labelled according to the old paradigm never gave me cause to feel that my experience, and society's consensus on what my experience should be, didn't match. I don't think I have the mental framework to even come close to understanding what it is like to feel like you are not the gender that everyone around you claims your body to be. And the concept of gender fluidity, feeling more masc at times, more femme at others, to the point that you feel the need to be referred to with different pronouns, is an experience I simply cannot fathom. It's so alien to my own experience of reality and my body that any meaningful comprehension of the actual feeling is next to impossible. But I don't need any of that comprehension to accept that they are going through what they're telling me. To accept that they know better than anyone else who they are. To understand the prejudice and persecution they have endured and empathise with the pain and trauma it has caused. To respect them for who they are and consider them as human and as valuable as any other person in the world. To care enough about how the sounds that come out of my face cause emotions in others to try (and often fail... thanks a bunch, social conditioning!) to use the pronouns that others wish to be used in regard to them.
In short; I don't need to get it in order to not be a prick.
This doesn’t have any relevance, but I want to break up the text and this is an excellent image. I think I need it on a t-shirt.
So now comes along a new paradigm, a new framework, much more complicated and nuanced, but ultimately with a way of describing, as much as is possible, all the different ways people want to live and identify. There's a philosophical point of view that says we're not obliged to use it, that it's not an inherently better way of organising society. And maybe it's not. But I don't think there's any getting away from the fact that continuing to operate under the current system will continue to marginalise, ignore, and erase the experiences of people. And, despite a lot of recent evidence, I believe erasing people is something most of humanity wants to move away from. We either use a system that acknowledges they exist, or one that doesn't. They do exist, so any system that denies that is, in my view, not able to recognise the reality I live in every day, and therefore not fit for purpose.
Back to me and my problems. How does any of this help me with the “Where does my gender come from?” question?
For a long time I couldn't find any sort of tether in the Gender Ideology philosophy to hang my identity on, a category, defined irrespective of me, that feels right as a description of my experience/feelings/thoughts/philosophy. That's something that, for better or worse, I feel like I need, and perhaps not everyone does but I think that we all need something, even if it's just so that we can discuss and express and communicate with each other. Everything's better when people actually communicate properly with each other.
As mentioned, I didn't feel I could comprehend the feeling of being in the wrong body because I'd always just felt like myself. I felt comfortable in a male body, which meant I didn't feel like I was a woman, therefore I felt like a man. The only other option. Now there were a lot more options, so how was I supposed to know how I felt?
I did eventually find a peg to place my gender hat on, after finding a really quite comprehensive quiz (even just taking it was an informative experience, link below if you’re interested), I felt like the ‘Agender’ hook was a good fit. Similar to the idea of being non-binary but kind of going a bit further (is the only way I can think to put it), to the point of not recognising ‘the feeling of having a gender’. Some people feel like they’re a man, some feel like they’re a woman. I can accept that they simply feel something that I don’t. So I’m agender.
https://www.quotev.com/quiz/11233383/What-is-your-Gender-Identity-version-255
Once you point out the conceptual nature of gender and how removed from the physical it is I find it hard to know what any of it really means, or how to identify as anything other than just some person, just me in the body random chance gave me. Certainly the idea of feeling like a man doesn't conjure in me anything I can relate to any more.
Now people don't necessarily need to learn as much about all the colours of the rainbow as me to find their place in it, and to accept all of the others. They don't need to pick apart their own life philosophy in a way that I for some mysterious reason (I mean, my dad, obvs) feel compelled to do. For probably the vast majority of cis people it doesn't have to change or challenge their identity, but my gut says there might be a surprising number of people who would experience something similar to me. We all at least seem to live in the same reality, and I think we all want to agree with each other on how it works, and know how to relate to one another. And even though a system with a new framework can still lead to a lot of the same outcomes, everything needs to be reevaluated from the ground up, and I feel like what those same outcomes mean in relation to everything else can be changed massively. Even though most of the reporting on it is alarmist and negative, it does seem like numbers of teenagers identifying as something other than their assigned-at-birth gender are rising, so I think we're already seeing the results of what happens when people who are really just starting to build their identity are able to do so in a more open and accepting framework, one that allows them to freely explore, create and express themselves. It seems kind of inevitable to me that as more adults learn more, more of them are going to find things they didn’t expect.
I've always been comfortable with masculine pronouns, which isn't going to change, and it occurred to me that maybe I had some sort of obligation to ask to be referred to with gender neutral pronouns, in a kind of display of solidarity. But I instantly knew that to do so would feel fake, like I was claiming to have lived an experience that I simply haven't. It's the same reason I wouldn't ever describe myself as queer, or trans. I haven't changed. I haven't gone through any kind of transition. I didn't define myself by my gender before, and I'm not about to start now. I've just learned a new way of thinking about gender. I've expanded my life philosophy and understanding of the world around me, and in doing so, my reality is richer and I have friends and relationships I wouldn't have otherwise.
The fact is though, I'm not agender any more than I am a man. Both of them are simply categories in different classification systems. They describe my place in relation to others, but they don't define me. I exist, unchanged, regardless of which framework anyone else, or even I, decide to operate under.
It seems inevitable to me that, assuming society at large doesn't imminently collapse (hardly feels guaranteed right now), we will continue moving towards using systems that genuinely recognise and value people, however they identify, and, eventually, consigning the restrictive ideas of biological imperialism to the distant past. Unfortunately, it also seems inevitable that it's going to be an extraordinarily messy and destructive process. And maybe there's nobody that would disagree with me but I still think there's a general underestimation of just how messy and destructive it's going to be.
It's a process that's already started. It's basically unstoppable. And it’s only predictable(ish) to a certain point. There's nothing you or I can do now except sit back and witness it all from the back of the stalls, or jump in the middle of the mosh pit. Worry and stress won't get you anywhere. The main driver, I think, is the internet and how it allows people, especially those growing up with it as a daily presence in their lives, to explore and experiment with identity separate from the restrictions of their physical reality. But I also feel, seeing it in retrospect, like the deconstructive analysis of post-modernism was sort of bound to get to gender eventually (I might be talking about meta-modernism now, maybe, I've not been keeping up with my cultural philosophy terminology). In fact I'd say we're only in the very early stages of a very weird journey when it comes to identity. As I write there's a pile of shit in the media about school kids identifying as cats, an obvious nonsense, but I can see a not too distant future where people with synthetic body parts and additions wish to be recognised as cyborgs, or mutants, or other as yet unimaginable identifiers.
I'm getting off topic. Back to gender. Regardless of cause, like I said, there's going to be destruction. We can already see seeds of it in the debates (and abuse people have to endure) around what to do with changing rooms and toilets, what to do about fair competition in sports, and what to teach kids in schools. I don't really know how to fix any of those (and the last one is just a part of a much wider problem with education systems serving the status quo instead of the pupils) but they're only symptoms of the larger clash that is coming: namely that using men/women as a categorisation in so many situations isn't going to work any more. It's not going to be the best, easiest, or more appropriate method.
So much of the backlash against any new way to look at gender is, to me, so clearly driven by a fear of the unknown. People inherently sense the imminent destruction of their reality, like dogs before an earthquake, and I think part of the difficulty in calming them down is that what they really fear is that “others” want to take away their way of life. The one that allows them to exist in mind-numbed comfort within a system that exploits minorities, and encourages them to not only hold, but vehemently express, intolerant, xenophobic and bigoted views.
And the problem is; they're totally fucking right.
Those “others” are real and they're working really hard in a Sisyphean attempt to dismantle that way of life. I, for one, hope they succeed. There's another side of the backlash, though, that I feel like I can understand, even while I think it's misguided, and knowing it's a topic that many would argue I have no place commenting on. For a lot of women who have lived their life in an oppressively patriarchal society, fighting against it relentlessly, not through choice, and have won recognition and protections through years of hard sacrifice; women who have been abused and dehumanised by people with penises, and have been forced to define themselves in opposition to that - I can get how all of these changes might feel like another form of male control, or a kind of appropriation. Which feels to me like it comes from an inability or unwillingness to understand/accept/embrace anything outside of a binary gender mindset.
I don't believe, for the most part, that these people are bad, uncaring people, but they, kind of understandably, are incapable of envisioning anything outwith the reality they have lived in for their whole lives. They're scared, and confused, and so they lash out. The other side hit back. And both are stoked on and distracted/used as a distraction by those who have vested interests in maintaining the more general global status quo.
So why does any of that mean that it makes sense for me to make (design and get others to make) dresses?
Honestly, I'm still not entirely sure how related the two things are. I know that I've always enjoyed confounding people's expectations of me. I get a kick out of it. When I was in high school I grew my hair long, when I was in university I wore my converse shoes and long jeans until they were ripped up to the knees and I could get my arm, up to the elbow, through the shoe while it was still on my foot. I worked backstage in the theatre industry and often made the most of the fact I was never required to be smartly dressed or well groomed. I've always kind of got that a person's fashion is their way of broadcasting a little bit of their personality and life philosophy to the world, and I think the signal I was always trying to send was “I don't buy into all your bullshit rules”.
And in a way I think that's what I'm still doing by wearing skirts and starting Bearded Ladies. (If I’m being brutally honest, when it comes to skirt wearing there’s a part of it that’s cynically business motivated, in that I didn’t start doing it until I had to think about promoting a masculine dress company. I was told I should be wearing the clothes we’re making (because branding), which we didn’t have any of at the time, so skirts got added to my wardrobe. I’ve never had the desire to wear dresses or skirts and shied away from it for fear of how people might react, and maybe I would have more legitimacy in the eyes of some if I were finally fulfilling a life-long dream. On the other hand, the only reason I didn’t do it before is it never occurred to me (and/or I never had easy access to skirts or dresses that would fit/suit me), and, for whatever reason (dad again, of course), I don’t feel any anxiety or stress about wandering around being judged in public, meaning I’m a fairly ideal person to do exactly that, demonstrating to other people they have permission to do it too, which I can tell you from a number of Instagram accounts and a few encounters I’ve had, is something that some of them are really looking for.)
But none of that was in my mind as I drew the original designs. It started as concept art for a potential comic book, and accidentally became a real life company, because each step seemed like a good idea at the time. And the more we do, and the more we tell people about it, the more it seems like a good idea for this time right now.
That's why I'm doing it.