The Gender Binary Shattered in the 2010s
By: Meredith Talusan
Tags: The Whiplash Decade, Gender, Lgbtqia, Equality, Culture

This piece is part of the The Whiplash Decade, a package on the wild ride that was the 2010s.

For centuries in the United States, gender was largely simple, imposed, and compulsory. Even as indigenous people have recognized multiple genders for millennia, and black and brown urban communities have enacted rebellions against prevailing gender norms, the standard, white-driven U.S. cultural assumption was that there were men and there were women — no one had a choice in the matter. Even those of us who ultimately left the gender we were assigned at birth could only transition with the understanding that we had once properly belonged to the other gender, and that we would hew to the norms of our new gender. Those of us with the ability to seamlessly blend in would try to erase all signs of our previous history.

No one could have predicted that an entire generation would upend these assumptions in the span of a decade. Even as we revel in the visual spectacle of fabulous streaming and social media products that interrogate and rebel against binary gender — from the wild popularity of trans-driven shows like FX’s Pose and HBO’s Euphoria to the Instagram-fueled success of nonbinary figures like Jacob Tobia and Alok Vaid-Menon — we must also remind ourselves of the liberation such acts foretell, a world where our thoughts, actions, and destinies can no longer be determined by the gender that society insists we are.

Tracing how we arrived at this moment is like traveling upstream on a raging river to search for the major tributaries that have fed into its waters. A sure source, as Jenna Wortham argues persuasively in the New York Times, has been the development of the internet; from heartfelt Tumblr sharing or YouTube video-watching, from private Facebook groups to Instagram influencer accounts, an array of platforms that provide alternate gender models for people who would otherwise be unable to find them in their immediate vicinity — degrees of engagement and intimacy that were previously impossible in non-interactive platforms like books, documentaries, and zines.

No one could have predicted that an entire generation would upend these assumptions in the span of a decade.

Moreover, the specific emergence of two politicized trans celebrities of color, Janet Mock, who came out in a 2011 Marie-Claire article, and Laverne Cox, who shot to stardom with a role on Orange Is the New Black in 2013, gave us media figures who deployed their Hollywood-driven normative attractiveness by making space for the expressions of trans people who run afoul of binary gender assumptions. They have been instrumental to advancing voices with more complex histories and identities, from justice-seekers like Cece MacDonald, who was imprisoned for defending herself against a transphobic attacker, to nonbinary actors like Indya Moore, who refused only to be called a woman even as they graced the cover of women’s magazines. These gender-complex role models have multiplied exponentially, from genderfluid celebrities like Ruby Rose, Miley Cyrus, and Sam Smith, to social media influencers like Chella Man, Jeffrey Marsh, and Gigi Gorgeous.

The Obama administration also certainly played a role, making it easier for transgender people to avail themselves of state-funded medical care in 2014, and in 2016 allowed people to obtain government identification in new genders without the requirement of surgery. But perhaps the most salient tributary that led to this gender era has been the advocacy that led to the medical community finally taking steps to de-pathologize gender nonconformity. Transgender healthcare changed radically with the publication of the 7th edition of World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in 2011, which significantly shifted major transition decisions from gatekeeping medical professionals to trans people themselves, in what has come to be known as an “informed consent” model. And in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) shifted the name for the condition of being trans from “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Dysphoria” in its fifth edition.

Prior to 2011, WPATH recommended long periods of therapy, often amounting to several years, before hormones and surgeries could be prescribed and performed. More perniciously, these guidelines recommended the “real-life experience” of a trans person living in their new gender for at least several months prior to hormone therapy or surgery. This requirement not only psychologically punished but actively endangered trans people, often scaring them into receding back to their assigned genders. These barriers not only made it more difficult for large numbers of people who desired to transition to do so, but also resulted in legal trans-related care only being provided to people who wanted to shift from one binary gender to another, or were among a courageous few who were willing to lie to avail of services.

This is the world that the vast proportion of trans and nonbinary people seek, where the goals of the #MeToo and transgender movements are very much aligned.

At the end of the decade, the prevailing model is informed consent. This gives agency to the trans person and not the medical provider, who now plays the role of advisor rather than gatekeeper. The effect of trans people having a greater right to self-determination is that we now have more ability to judge our relationship to the medical community for ourselves, which in turn helps us enormously in defining our individual genders on our own terms. This has resulted not only in greater numbers of trans people living openly, but also many more whose transitions don’t correspond to the norms of binary gender identity and presentation.

While this account may seem to only deal with a tiny minority of people, it’s worth considering that the demand for bodily self-determination in the transgender community is the same demand that has undergirded cisgender women’s movements for contraception and abortion rights. More pressingly, one of the key demands of the #MeToo movement is also a call for bodily self-determination — shifting the norms of sexual consent. Tarana Burke founded the movement in 2006, sowing the seeds for its emergence as a widespread reckoning for abusive men starting in 2017. The assertion that all parties in a sexual encounter must give explicit and verbal permission for that encounter not to be rape has come to be known as an “affirmative consent model.” Women must actively and verbally consent in sexual situations with men — a call for agency that echoes those of trans people.

Sexual harassment and assault would be significantly less prevalent in a world where people of all genders are taught to seek and obtain consent prior to sex — an idea which can extend to a world where there are no assumptions of behavior whatsoever based on gender. This is the world that the vast proportion of trans and nonbinary people seek, where the goals of the #MeToo and transgender movements are very much aligned.

Yet even as these social developments have shifted the dynamics of gender over the last decade, they have also meant that gender is now much more contentious than it was in the past. The #MeToo movement persists against the backdrop of a president who has documented history of sexually abusive behavior, and an administration that is actively hostile toward transgender lives. The next decade must be one of continued vigilance as we strive to overcome gender’s continued oppression of us, whether cis or trans people, women, nonbinary folks, and also men who themselves have fallen captive to gender’s oppressive system, even though it no longer serves any of us.