Episode nine of the Some Gender Going On podcast: Going up against unshakeable confidence. You can play it or download it here:

Notes

SGGO 9: Unshakeable Confident

Hi, I’m Izzy Grosof

This is the Some Gender Going On podcast

Going up against unshakeable confidence

Cisnormative and binary normative people

Enforcing the gender system, they speak with such intense confidence.

They glance at a kid, a kid like me, and say “Boys don’t dress that way”. How do they know? How do they glance at me for a moment, know that I’m a boy, know how boys are supposed to dress? How do they know so much? And if they know so much, well then surely they must be right?

They’ll look at two innoncent friends and say “You’re playing at husband and wife”. How do they know? How do they know that a romantic couple is all we’re capable of being? And they’ll be so absurdly confident of it they’ll repeat it every time we interact and pester us with it for decades afterwards, when I’ve forgotten she even existed, all I’ll ever remember is that it was hillarious that I tried to explore being friends with someone they perceive to be a girl because all that I’m capable of being is a husband to her. Who cares that we’re four. Gender norms must be enforced, and that means no female friends. Because then you could learn about what it means to be a girl and that is utterly forbidden. Everyone knows this. They know this. They’ll never let you forget.

You’re a boy. It’s obvious. Never mind that I haven’t even hit puberty, they can just tell. They can read my soul and tell. So it must be written there. It must be inescapable. If everyone can read it, it must be there.

You’ll get bullied if you do that – with the unstated implication: and you’ll deserve it. Because if it’s obvious to everyone that you’ll get bullied, then that’s how the world should be. Trying to step outside those norms is being bad, and being bad deserves to get punished. And bullying at school is that appropriate punishment. Because it can’t possibly be any other way. Unshakeable confidence.

What are my questions, my wondering, in the face of that confidence? Better to shut up, keep it to myself, explore only in absolute secrecy. Because if no one knows I’m exploring, no one can tell me I’m wrong. No one can shatter my fragile ideas with their heavy boot of utter confidence.

Cisnormative people are often extremely confident in gendering people - so confident that it bypasses their reasoning and emerges directly from subconscious to speech. Correcting people, typically they don’t even realize they were making a choice, they don’t have the conscious experience of making a choice.

They’ll begin to form conspiracy theories - I only get it wrong when you’re around. Or when someone else is around to correct me. Because I know I’m good at this. I know I’m perfect at this. How could I ever be wrong.

Just roll up to someone they’ve never met, have no direct information on their gender, just a bunch of often-mixed signals, and without even thinking make a snap judgement and cling to it like it’s written into the laws of reality.

They won’t even glance at a pronoun pin. Because they shouldn’t need to. They just know.

I don’t know someone’s gender, until they tell me, or otherwise give a clear and direct signal. At times, I’ve been uncertain or questioning my own. It’s weird and hard to be uncertain in the face of so much certainty, and maintain the feeling that you’re closer to reality than they are.

To be curious and wonder, about something so strange and dead and obvious

This is why it feels euphoric to confuse people. Si- ma- uhh, uhh. Their certainty is gone. They’re still not right, but they’re a damn sight closer than almost anyone ever gets.

That unshakeable confidence isn’t looking so unshakeable anymore. It’s a tiny glimpse of another, truer world.

Imagine a world that didn’t assume that someone’s gender was obvious from glancing at them, from glancing at yourself jn the mirror, from glancing at your child.

Maybe we wouldn’t have assigned gender at birth, if people actually understood they just don’t know. Maybe names given at birth wouldn’t be gendered, maybe people would only pick gendered names once they were old enough to choose.

Maybe we wouldn’t have gendered terms of address with strangers, like sir and ma’am and mister and miss and missus and he and she and so the rest.

Maybe gendered terms would be like names: you don’t just guess someone’s name by looking at them, you wait for them to fucking tell you, or you look at their fucking name tag

Wouldn’t that be nice.

If people could have a modicum of humility and internalize that they just don’t know.

As I’ve been hatched long enough and around trans people long enough, I’ve gotten to the point of gender humility.

I notice myself checking whether I’m just assuming a pronoun or if I’m copying what’s being used by someone in a position to know better. I think a moment, it enters conscious thought it’s not automatic. And it’s good too, because I still have instincts, and they’re wrong sometimes. And I can be better than my instincts, because I can think, I can check, I can evaluate. Because my instincts aren’t unshakeable anymore.

I’ve learned enough to know I can be wrong. And I’m glad.

And I’ve learned enough to not care how confident someone is. It’s no substitute for a shaky, wobbling, fragile answer that might just let us peek towards something real.