Women Like Sex | Ep. 15: Transcending Gender
Artwork by Ted Nunes
If the previous episode’s topic, virginity, was a huge social construct, this week’s is even huge-er: gender.And, like virginity, the ideas, roles and expectations of gender are shaped by society and culture – NOT biology.
We humans love to gender everything, and twist ourselves into all kinds of gender knots doing so: from jobs and language to inanimate objects. And in ever-changing and arbitrary ways that vary by context. Take the moon. Just in the languages I speak, it’s masculine (Serbo-Croatian), feminine (Italian and Spanish) and essentially non-binary, like so much of the English language.
As for jobs, if I held all the power, I would definitely call cooking and cleaning “men’s work.” But more broadly speaking, there are various examples of the changing ways we gender work. For instance, brewing. Centuries ago in Europe it was very much “women’s work.” Today, we celebrate the few who make beer professionally as if they were the first to ever do it.
The way we adorn ourselves by gender also shifts. For a long time, pink was a boy color, because it was “strong,” and blue was “girly.” In the 20th century, clothes manufacturers switched that...because they could. But colors - like fabric – DO NOT care about the genitals of who’s wearing them.
We used to call women in pants cross-dressers, now it’s men in skirts or dresses. Unless they’re in kilts, or are Kenyan Maasai men, or Catholic clergy. And so on.
And makeup and heels? Males who wear them today may get called effeminate, or worse. But not long ago, they were the accessories of kings, the most powerful men on the planet.
Gender assignations change, but our view that they’re somehow biological imperatives stays surprisingly deeply ingrained. And we can punish those who don’t follow the rules of their time.
Perhaps none more so than folks who change sex or gender. Like my dear friend Professor Queerstrokes, who I’m so happy to have on during Pride month. He’s using a moniker he loves because…anonymity is important when our trans peers are particularly under threat.
The professor cut his teeth teaching in the Midwest before making his home on the East Coast 20 years ago. He calls himself a neuro-spicy pet dad to two lovely beasts and aims to foster authenticity wherever he can.
He helped me deepen my understanding of how gender tropes constrict, confuse and hurt us all – whether in education, bathrooms, certain women’s festivals and generally the expectations of the people in our lives. He also shares how to best support trans friends. And how men offered much more love during his transition than the women in his life.
A full transcript of our conversation is available here.
Women Like Sex is a Flipped Script production
Executive Producer / Editor: Natasha Senjanovic
Website Design and Artwork: Ted Nunes
Associate Producer: Edecio Martinez
Music: Funky Fortune by Danny Shields