Apples and Oranges

The first instance of the word “orange” in the English language was in 1512. Contrary to the clever quip you’d heard before, the English language did have words for the color orange before that—saffron and yellow—saffron used to refer to yellowish hues, and red-yellow used to discuss redder hues. Of course, many of the colors we traditionally think of as orange were simply categorized as red, giving us the strange phenomenon of red deer, robin redbreast, and red hair.

The word “orange” changed everything about how we thought about those colors. Before, orange objects were described as part of a spectrum of yellow to red. The interjection of the color orange didn’t change the fundamental nature of the color. It is still part of the whole color spectrum, neither red, or yellow. Yet, because we have a unique term for it, it is much easier to talk about varying shades of orange. It has validity as one of the secondary colors. No one today would confuse orange for red or vice versa.

Yet, it wasn’t a smooth transition. To this day we still think of Mars as a red planet, even though it is obviously orange. Language affects the way we perceive the world, and it can take generations for the ideas behind new words to take hold.

My favorite stylist is non-binary. They prefer gender neutral pronouns like “they” or “ze.” Yet, they deal with the public, which means that they also let people call them “he” if it is too hard to keep track of.

It shouldn’t be that hard to keep track of. But it is. Gender is fundamental to our concept of people. When I talk about my stylist, it is easy to slip up. It takes effort to wean out any “he’s” or “his” in my sentences.

I don’t just struggle with my stylist. Gendering is part of our basic social interaction. When I meet someone, subconsciously I decide if they are male and female. Everything from my greeting to the way I stand around them is affected by their gender. Although I know that there are both intersex and non-binary people around me, I cannot seem to break my brain from this habit. I have been trained since birth that men and women are different. There are different social rules for how I behave around them and how they behave around me.

I need to know what gender they are in order to be able to know what the social rules are.

I do believe that eventually our society will accept non-binary people as valid representations. I even believe that eventually we might get to the point where it is natural to think of gender as a spectrum rather than a binary.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world yet. We are still trapped with our yellow saffons and our red robins. That idea shapes everything about how we interact with other people. It is important whether someone should be treated like a man or a woman. We don’t have social rules for the middle ground yet.

Every now and then, someone will ask me why transgendered individuals can’t just call themselves queer. They point to the toxicity of our gender binary and see trans people as reinforcing that stereotype. This is especially true of trans individuals who don’t experience body dysphoria. They aren’t unhappy with their body, but the social set they are being categorized into. Many people see their desire to be recognized as their real gender as reinforcing that binary.

I understand how restrictive the binary is. After all, I was a tomboy, comfortable in boy’s clothes with boy friends playing boy games. I see how gendered stereotypes shape us, and I hate them.

But I am Cis. I’ve always been Cis. Even as a child, groaning that my brothers were camping or white water rafting, my anger was that I, a girl, couldn’t do what the boys got to do. There was never any question of my identity as a girl. I don’t know what it is like to be misgendered. I do know what it is like to be sure that I am a girl. It has little to do with my body and hobbies. It is part of who I am as much as my hatred of bananas and love of mint chip ice cream. Maybe that belief is a fallacy built on a social construct. But I am a product of our world, and I live in it.

That is the rub. We live in a gendered society. There is no escaping it. It is learned behavior, yes. But it is still a fundamental building block of our social world. No matter how much we may long for an advanced society free from our biases, we still have to live in our world.

And in our world gender matters.