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When the Gender Boxes Don’t Fit
When I finally reached my classroom I was beyond relieved. I already knew my teacher, one of many perks of going to the same school where your mom teaches, and I was excited about her class, Identity and Ethnic Studies.
Our first activity was a game called Stand and Declare: The teacher reads a statement and students who feel the statement is true about themselves are instructed to stand silently. The idea is that the statements get deeper and more personal as the game progresses, but you have to start out easy. And what could be easier than the most basic aspect of human identity, the first question asked about a newborn baby? As my teacher read the first statement aloud, “Stand if you’re a girl,” my heart dropped.
What was supposed to be an easy question, a throw-away, a way to break the ice before delving into more personal issues, was for me a question I had been grappling with since elementary school. With what ease that teacher, herself a lesbian feminist, asked me to completely define my identity, something much more complex than standing for five seconds could ever express, something that I had been struggling with for years and continue to struggle with to this day. The simplicity of the question in her mind was apparent to me.
Although I was unsurprised, having lived my entire life in a world defined by a gender binary system, I was still angry.
