Did you know that there are boy cars and girl cars? Don’t bother looking underneath — they all have a tailpipe.
But when I started my gender transition, I was driving a teal blue Subaru Impreza. My friends immediately told me that I was driving a girl car and I needed to do something about it and quick. It took a few months of driving around self-consciously before I traded it in for a black Honda Civic — not a “guy” car, exactly, but it can pass as gender-neutral.
The relationship between gender and physical sex, and how those concepts are perceived, varies from culture to culture and from experience to experience. But unlike physical sex, or the makeup of the body, gender extends into almost every area of life. And, as many trans people will tell you, gender can have very little to do with one’s sex.
Now if you’ve already had Transgender 101 (or if you’ve lived it), the concept of gender and sex as two different things is pretty central to your understanding of life. But if you’re just starting to explore gender diversity, or if you think that gender and sex are interchangeable, read on, because the difference between gender and sex underlies much of what transgender people are all about.
Everyone has a gender identity — who you think you are — and everyone has a physical sex — what you see when you stand naked in front of a mirror (and the older I get, the more I try to avoid this particular practice). In most cases, these two things agree. But sometimes, they don’t. And that disagreement is what, by my definition (and there are others), makes a person transgender.
Most of the time, the people we see around us are fully clothed (and most of the time, we are grateful for this), but we usually don’t have a question about the gender identity of even strangers on the street.
That’s because gender is expressed in a multitude of ways — clothing, hairstyles, accessories, mannerisms, vocal patterns, personal tastes, activity preferences, and, yes, even cars — and the culture has guidelines and standards for these expressions that we understand. Without seeing any secondary sex characteristics at all, we usually have a pretty good idea of a person’s gender — and, from that, we tend to make an assumption about a person’s sex as well.
While some people believe that gender is purely a social construct, I believe that there is a biological component to gender. If there were not, people could be “taught” their “correct” gender — the gender that matches their physical body — and transgender people would not exist. But while there appears to be a biological component, the expression of gender is the visible piece that leads us to identify a person as a man or a woman.
In fact, if trans people teach one thing (and we actually teach plenty), it is that you really don’t really know what’s under a person’s clothing, and you definitely don’t know what makes up a person’s chromosomes. The best you can do is make assumptions. Physical sex — the makeup of the body — is not always reflected in gender presentation or expression — how a person presents or expresses him- or herself to the world — or in gender identity.
Don’t beat yourself up for making assumptions — I make them every day. But keeping these differences in mind will not only help you stop making assumptions about people, but it will make it easier for you to understand transgender and gender-diverse people.
And it might make you understand what a person who buys a HumVee is trying to say.
