Half a year ago, I'd take a deep breath and repeat to myself, "If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it," when I started to panic because I was feeling or thinking something that meant maybe I wasn't really an androgyne.
At the time, I hadn't yet embraced the political side of my feelings toward the gender binary. I was just trying to release myself from the pressure to conform to the social construction of gender identity, reminding myself that it was an idea and not absolute truth, that just because some people found it useful, didn't mean it had much explanatory power over me.
To me, the construct of "gender identity" includes a few things that can get me to panic:
1. Recognition of gender as a real thing, not a social construct
2. Therefore, everyone has an innate gender
3. This gender is stable and intelligible--the person "feels" like that gender all the time and always knows what gender they are
4. Therefore someone who always feels different from their assigned gender is trans, whereas someone who doesn't have that feeling must be cis and has no place in trans communities or identities
5. Society is right to gender people because that affirms something essential about them (that needs affirming to prevent dysphoria), and this is only a problem--and a fixable one--for a few atypical people with a medical condition that causes them to be miscategorized
In reality, I feel like most of my issues with gender come from the fact that it's a system of social control that doesn't give a damn about individuals. I don't feel like social gender does me any favors, and I feel like I'd be better off if it didn't exist. The concept of gender is a pretty obvious leg of the patriarchy, so de-politicizing nonbinary experience as an exceptional variant of "gender identity" seems like a form of appeasement to me.
Now, I don't mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the nature-vs-nurture debate, yes, there is a "nature" component to gender experience. Most trans people identify with the "born this way" narrative. I'm not entirely an exception--I could tell you all the childhood memories of struggling against the gender I was forced into. And even what I'm talking about as gender experience that doesn't fit the concept of gender identity can be pigeonholed in with labels like "genderfluid," "agender," and "graygender". Some people might find that satisfying, but to me it seems like a lens that's focused on a different part of the landscape, where maybe I'm a blur in the periphery--but I need better tools than that to understand and accept myself.
And those tools have to be political. No sucking up to the gender binary on this one. What is oppressing me gender-wise isn't a unique personal difference. It's the same thing that's oppressing everyone else gender-wise. People looked at my genitals when I was a tiny baby and sent me on one track because of that: I was given a certain name, referred to by certain pronouns, dressed in certain clothes, expected to be friends with certain other kids, rejected by the other label of kids, taught to be passive, taught I was disgusting for being attracted to other people of the same label, taught my value was as a sexual object, taught my body wasn't worthy, told I didn't have the right to leave my assigned category or choose what pronouns and nouns could be used for me, and many other things besides.
These things are wrong. These things are wrong to do to someone whether their brain developed to expect a different body or not. There is nothing weird or wrong with me for not liking them. There is nothing personal and apolitical about me not liking them.
Again, I do not wish to deny the good that other people find in their relationship with this oppressive system: As an integral part of our social fabric, it structures many of the ways people have to connect with others or feel good about themselves. There's nothing wrong with dressing up pretty, or showing off a manly skill, or bonding with other women, or bonding with other men. There's nothing wrong with valuing and identifying with certain gendered body types, styles, or ways of being in the world.
But there's really, really something wrong with how these things are categorically imposed upon one group of people and denied to another group of people. There's something really, really wrong in having to choose one set or the other as a package deal. There's something really, really wrong with the wage gap, masculinity as violence, and lack of political representation of women. I don't think you can separate inequality from categorization. As long as the culture literally doesn't allow you to talk about someone without putting them into "he" or "she," how can stereotypes that perpetuate inequality ever dissipate?
I won't choose a gender because there is nothing in me that always feels like the same gender, but I also won't choose a gender because gender wouldn't exist (at least as an obligatory thing) in society if women had never been oppressed. As a society, you don't need to know what gender people are unless you're going to use it to discriminate against them--to change your behavior toward them based on the whole non-consensual package deal that has nothing to do with them as individuals. I don't want any part in that. I have to have a part in it because it's so embedded in our society, but I'll minimize my part as much as I can.
Okay, fine, you say, why is asserting that such a big deal for you?
If you haven't struggled against it, you might not realize it, but one of the most insidious parts of the gender identity construct (my point #4) is that you have to have been born this way, and you have to really be this way, to escape your assigned gender. It's a common bias in our culture, that anything about someone can and should be accepted as long as it isn't tainted by agency. Poor because you had no opportunities? Definitely deserving of help! Poor because you did drugs and dropped out of school? Oughtta throw you in jail! There's obviously a positive side to this bias--it gives people an incentive to pay attention to cause and effect in their decision-making--but tools of social policing are flexible, and in this case are used to support the patriarchy by regulating who can step outside its central construct of "biological" gender. It's really, deeply messed up to tell someone an important part of who they are is only legitimate if they can prove they didn't choose it. A lot of the most important things about who we are and what's going on in our lives--good, bad, neutral, and fuchsia--is chosen, driven by an incomprehensibly complex tapestry of nature, choice, and experience. One of the many abusive things you can do to someone is deny and devalue their choices and preferences, teaching them they have no right to be a person.
I don't think anyone who I learned about gender identity from meant for me to interpret it that way, but I did. Trying to cut off the role I played in choosing my own gender identity was truly cutting off a piece of me. That's why I had to tell myself, "If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it."
This was a version of the saying, "If the shoe fits, wear it," but recently I was reading variants of the Cinderella fairy tale, and I noticed the parallel in the title of this post, where one of Cinderella's stepsisters cuts off her heel to fit the shoe that means the prince will marry her.
It's an unflattering comparison. A violent, treacherous act by a bully. But the surface reading isn't the only one. Cinderella's stepsisters are upper-class girls whose biological father is dead. They probably don't have the skills to work, and even if they did, work would be unthinkable for someone in their class. Their only hope for survival long-term is to find a good husband, and meanwhile they're stuck in a household under the absolute authority of their abusive mother, as the absent rich man's wife. Such a hierarchical society requires a pecking order, so they must bully Cinderella (since their mother hates her and has chosen her to be on the bottom of the heap), or fall themselves. And if they fall... no mother's help means no husband, no father means no family wealth to support them as spinsters, and so they perish.
Choosing to attack my own reality--and, given how closely gender is tied to the visible, my relationship with my body--to conform to the narrative of transness that sits most nicely with the patriarchy was not so far from the person who attacked their own body to survive in a historical patriarchy. Remember that next time you want to protest that nonbinaries aren't political, that our identities don't exist to change society--they don't have to be, but they can be, or someone's cutting their heels off.
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