By Skylar, TeenSource Guest Blogger
How to Gender
Imagine that your body was, one day, swapped into the opposite sex’s body. Everything looks the same, except what was once masculine is now feminine, or vice versa. This includes your sex characteristics. You may think this is weird, or funny, but how about this: imagine being born in the wrong body. That is my life. I was classified as a girl when I was born, but I’m living as a man. I am transgender.
We’ll go over specific definitions at a later date, but for now, let’s talk about what gender identity is!
Gender identity is the gender that your brain identifies with, not necessarily the sex that your body is. Someone may have a female body, but that doesn’t make them a woman if their brain says they’re a man or something other than a woman or a man.
Transgender people come in all races and sizes, with different abilities, identities, and sexual orientations. Yes, you heard me right: transgender people can have many different sexual orientations. How? Let me explain!
Imagine four horizontal, parallel lines. They represent several different aspects of a person’s identity.
-
Biological Sex: On one end, you have people who are assigned female, and on the other end, you have people who are assigned male. In the middle there are intersex people, who are somewhere in between male and female biology.
-
Sexual Orientation: You have interest in women on one end, interest in men on the other end, and the middle is a sliding scale of different levels of interest in certain genders.
-
Gender Expression: Here, you have feminine presentation on one end, and masculine presentation on the other end. Examples of who could be in the middle are drag queens, butch lesbians, people who dress androgynously… pretty much any type of clothing, body language, or other gendered aspects of someone’s appearance. This can include someone dressing in a way that doesn’t have a predetermined label, or someone using a label while not conforming to what others think that label should describe. (Important: Identities are defined by the people who claim them.)
-
Gender Identity: On one end, you have women and girls. On the other end, you have men and boys. In the middle, there are gender identities that don’t fit as women or men, known as nonbinary identities.
I was classified as a girl at birth. I am interested in different genders, but I have a slight preference towards men. My gender expression is relatively masculine, and my gender identity is even more so masculine. It’s all related, yes, but they are not dependent on each other.
Everyone can make one of these. As you can see, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, and gender identity are not the same thing.
That is an intro to gender as a whole. Next time, I’ll start out with some terms and definitions so stay tuned for my next TeenSource blog post!
For the rest of the series, click on the below links.