For a bigger explanation, visit http;//bit.ly/genderbread.
By Nicole Rodriguez, ’16
March 31 was the international Transgender Day of Visibility, so it’s only appropriate that soon after, Dr. Kelli Chapman’s sociology of masculinity class was visited by a guest speaker that educated her class on transgender issues.
Codie Stone holds a B.A. in sociology from Muskingum College, has held positions in sociology and gender and women’s studies at Western Michigan and Grand Valley State University, and is a longtime LGBTQ activist.
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
Stone begins class by pulling up an image of a “genderbread” person, a fun take on the gingerbread man. He jumps right into explaining the difference between gender identity, biological sex, and sexuality. Gender identity, he explains, is how people identify themselves. Biological sex refers to what chromosomes, hormones, and genitalia you have. Sexuality refers to what genders you are attracted to.
“The genderbread person uses these linear scales to show how people can be varying degrees of masculine or feminine and even male and female sex,” he explains. “We like to think, ‘there’s only males or females’, but what nature actually provides us with is a wide variety of configurations of chromosomes, hormones, and primary and secondary sex characteristics. We then have to decide, ‘how do we want to categorize those who don’t neatly fit into our preconceived notions of what male sex and female sex looks like?’'”
“People are constantly coming up with new ways of identifying themselves,” he explains. Many people write off these new forms of identification as things crazy millennials seem to be making up, but this just isn’t the case. “Gender, sex, sexuality are a lot more constrained around how society views people who are different and how society treats them. If you go back in history and you look at how gender, sexuality, and sex was considered … we can see these types of identities throughout the world.”
He pulls up a slide listing a wide variety of gender identities. “Transgender people identify with a gender other than the one that was assigned to them at birth,” he says. “There are people who are assigned female at birth who don’t grow up feeling female. There are people who are assigned male that don’t grow up identifying that way.”
“Other folks that are under this transgender umbrella are folks that identify as genderqueer,” he continues. “This is a broad terminology to talk about people who don’t identify as male or female, but identify as somewhere in between or beyond.” Hijras are an example of an ancient gender identity, although we still see hijras in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh today. In India, hijras just won a third gender status, so it can now be listed on their legal documents.
The Challenges of Transitioning
Stone is a transgender man himself, and has a lot of personal and sociological experience with the challenges of transitioning. “Coming out to yourself can be something that’s really scary,” he says. “Imagine if you were suddenly faced with the possibility that your life is not going to progress that your family, friends, and you may have thought it was, because that’s not something you can live with or would make you most happy.”
Social transition is also a huge component of a transgender individual’s journey. “Having that recognition from other people that ‘you see me as me’ instead of ‘that other person who you want me to be’ [is important],” says Stone. Coming out socially also usually means changing your pronouns. “Getting people to use the right pronouns is usually a challenge, because when you’ve known somebody for a really long time and you’ve been using those pronouns, it can be hard to switch. Some people just decide ‘eh, I’ve don’t really care to even try to do that’. Some people have a hard time remembering. It can be very hard if you’re moving from a pronoun within the gender binary like ‘he’ or ‘she’ to a gender neutral pronoun. There’s a lot of people advocating for more gender neutral pronouns. The singular “they” has become popular, [but] people get a lot of pushback on it. There’s also other types of gender neutral pronouns, like xi or xim instead of he or she. They don’t have as much traction as “they,” because “they” is a little easier. It’s a word we use unconsciously all the time to refer to singular people in different ways.”
“Part of making the decision to come out to family and friends … is preparing yourself to lose your friends, family members, and support systems,” he continues. “For a lot of transgender people, that is their story. [However,] LGBT people are really good at finding family members, what we call ‘chosen family.’ People who understand our struggle and are willing to stick by us.”
Not only do transgender individuals need to come out to family and friends, they also have to deal with coming out to the state. It’s difficult and costly to legally have your gender changed on many documents. States, and cities also have varying laws on transgender rights that can make it difficult for a transgender person to live their lives across these borders. “I have a Michigan driver’s license,” says Stone. “I’d like to get an M on that driver’s license, but currently it has an F on it because in the state of Michigan, in order to have my driver’s license amended to the correct gender marker, I need to have a birth certificate that has an M on it. But, the state of Ohio has decided that they will never change the gender marker on a birth certificate for any reason whatsoever.” While this may not seem like a big deal, this carries implications that weigh on Stone’s mind on a daily basis. “What if I hand this cop a driver’s license with an F on it, looking like this? Are they gonna think that my ID is fake? How is a cop going to react?” Stone knows from studying transgender issues that cops are not always friendly to people like him. “There’s been a lot of violence by police officers against transgendered people, so it’s something I really have to worry about now.”
In addition to getting documents changed from male to female, that still doesn’t address the issue to gender nonconforming people, or people who are agender (meaning “without gender”). “What are they supposed to do about their driver’s license, their documentation?” Stone asks. “We don’t even give them an option for that yet.”
Most states also don’t have any kind of laws that protect transgender people from discrimination. “The state of Michigan, for instance. We’ve been trying to get gender identity and sexual orientation covered as a protective class for at least the last three years,” he says. “I live in Kalamazoo, so I’m covered. My landlord can’t kick me out, but if I go to Battle Creek 20 minutes away, and I have a job there, I’ve got no protections. I could lose my job. This creates gaps in coverage, and we don’t just live and do everything within these isolated bubbles.”
Many transgender individuals are expected to also transition medically, but not everyone chooses to. “Some people don’t think that they need to change their body to match some social standard of what a man, woman, or person is supposed to look like,” says Stone. “Some people’s bodies can’t physically handle the changes. So then when we have state requirements saying you have to have been taking hormones for this long and have these surgeries [to have your documents changed], that’s really hurting people who are medically unable to get those kinds of things done…. It’s also very cost prohibitive. Chest reconstruction surgery can cost between $6,000 to $10,000.” Many insurance companies even explicitly state that they refuse to cover transition-related care, so transgender individuals are expected to pay for all of these surgeries and hormones up front.
Privilege in Passing
“I often get read as a cisgender gay man instead of as transgender,” say Stone. Cisgender refers to gender assigned at birth based on social assumptions around primary biological sex characteristics. “That means that I get to go more places and feel safer. I don’t have to come out to people. I didn’t have to come [here]. I could have just stayed up in Michigan and lived my entire life only telling doctors and close friends. That is a privilege that I have, because other people get beaten up, killed, and arrested.”
Cisgender passing privilege can have a lot to do with ability and class. In order to pass, some people must be both physically and financially able to get hormones and surgeries. There are also hidden costs that most people don’t think about, such as buying a new wardrobe that matches your gender identity. Not everyone, however, is comfortable trying to fit the mold of a typical cisgender person.
“Some trans masculine people are also femme. That makes it harder to pass,” says Stone. He argues that anyone should be able to wear whatever they want, transgender people included. “If I were to wear a dress, I should be able to wear a dress and still identify as a guy, just like any cisgender guy should be able to wear whatever the hell they want without getting beaten up for it.”
Stone knows that he holds a certain amount of privilege in his gender identity. “I’m part of a lawsuit with the state of Michigan right now. ACLU [and I are] trying to get Michigan to overturn its laws about the amended birth certificate. Not everybody could be part of that lawsuit where you have to be [out], but I’m in a position where I know I’m not going to get fired from my job if my employer finds out I’m transgender because of this lawsuit.”
High Rates of Discrimination
“For my dissertation, I’m interviewing transgender people in Southwest Michigan about their experiences with discrimination and micro-aggressions and their ideas about how to make the area a more welcoming place,” says Stone. He has found through his research that race often influences how transgender people are treated. “Particularly transgender men of color are moving into this space where they’re now being seen as a black man, and we know how society treats black men. Not only do you then have the marginalization of being transgender, but now you’ve got to deal with this racism that’s particularly against black men. Is it a good thing to pass as a cisgender [black] man, or are you putting yourself in more danger at that point?”
To put some of this discrimination into perspective, Stone cites the national transgender discrimination survey published in 2011. “We saw twice the rate of unemployment in [transgender people],” he says. “For transgender people of color, it was four times the rate of the general public. There’s certain areas of Washington, D.C., for example, where trans women know that if they are seen by police walking in that area, they will be picked up for prostitution. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing; it’s assumed that they’re prostitutes.” Transgender people also see a higher rate of incarceration, which can be problematic considering that prisons are gendered. Most will put you in the gendered prison that matches your birth certificate. “A lot of transgender women who are not able to have surgery are being placed in men’s prisons, where they have 13 times the rate of sexual assault [as cis men].”
A hot button issue in the media lately is transgender bathroom laws that require everyone to use the bathroom with the gender listed on their birth certificate. This is supposedly to protect women from predators from posing as transgender people to gain access to female restrooms. “If you look at the data,” argues Stone, “transgender women are much more likely to be the victims of violence and abuse in bathrooms; 33 percent of the respondents [to the survey] reported some type of verbal harassment or disrespect in public places.”
Healthcare discrimination is also rampant. Many transgender people have a hard time receiving non-transition-related medical care simply because some hospitals refuse to treat them. “We don’t have classes in [some medical] schools that talk about transgender people. [Some] nursing colleges don’t think we need to talk about gender, sexuality, race, or ethnicity, and how those factors may impact how somebody interacts with the medical community.”
One of the most heartbreaking statistics is the fact that 41 percent of respondents had attempted suicide at some point in their lives. The national average is only 1.6 percent.
This high rate of self-inflicted violence isn’t the only source. “Violence against LBGT people has been going down, but violence against transgender people is going up,” says Stone. “Trans women of color in particular are at the highest risk of violence. It’s estimated that one transgender woman is killed every 29 hours.”
“A lot of times when transgender people die or are killed, the media [and sometimes their families] will use their old names and incorrect pronouns without respecting their gender identity, thus erasing their identities completely,” he says. “The transgender community is small. We know when our people die. We know when our people are beaten up. We know what happens to people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The International Transgender Day of Remembrance organization keeps an updated list of all the anti transgender killings around the world in honor of their memories. Additionally, the Transgender Day of Visibility is working to combat the hate, discrimination, and erasure of transgender people with things like marches, hashtags, and art.
“We exist,” says Stone. “We’re not going anywhere. Society keeps trying to kill us, but we just keep coming back.”
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