Episode eleven of the Some Gender Going On podcast: A World of Norms. You can play it or download it here:

This is a bit of a longer episode – I’d been accumulating thoughts about this for a while.

Notes

I’m Izzy Grosof, and this is the Some Gender Going On podcast, episode 11.

Today, we’re talking about norms.

What’s normal, what’s abnormal. How we feel about doing what we’re supposed to do, and about what we’re not supposed to do. And how it all interacts with gender.

People expect unusual individuals without the sign-off of structures of power and expectations to be scary. A street heckler, a stranger, a one-off deviation from the norm.

They’re so used to the norm being good, and bad being in the weird people who don’t follow that norm. “Normal is good” is their whole perspective on the world, the only lens they have to view it.

But what if normal isn’t good? What if normal is kind of shit actually? That’s gender, my experience of it, anyways.

The scariest interactions for me aren’t when I’m encounter someone weird, out on a dark night or in a packed bus terminal.

The scariest interactions are the most normal, the most norm-filled. Bureaucracy - HR most of all. Filling out a form, not knowing if it’s going to be used to deny me healthcare if I complete it accurately or used to misgender me for years if I complete it as expected. For reference, it was neither - the form had already been fixed, it was just out of date. Of course, the HR person didn’t know that.

Our laws, again intensely norm filled. Fearing I’ve violated something, or that someone might complain about me to authority. This is one of the many reasons I didn’t switch my bathroom usage until this summer - the pile of norms. I worry about what I wear in my own apartment, worry someone might see me in my window and feel that I’m indecent and report me. I don’t worry a peeping Tom might see me and it’ll be unpleasant or embarrassing. I’m not scared of that one abnormal individual, in the face of all those norms. No, I worry a peeping Tom might see me and get me arrested. I worry about people with the oppressive power of norms behind them.

I don’t feel like I’m normal and I should be fearing weird people. I feel like I’m weird and I fear excessively normal people, excessively norm-enforcing people.

So whenever someone tells me to get home safe on a dark night, it doesn’t fit. Out on a dark night, that’s when the norms are the lightest, when nothing matters, when I can be anyone and pressure is as light as it gets. The night belongs to me.

Norms growing up

Every norm around gender tells us constantly: Don’t explore. Don’t grow. Don’t discover. This is who you are, who you’ll ever be. This is all you can ever enjoy, the only way you can ever present yourself, who you can love, how you can think of yourself, restricted and bound and nailed down and immovable. And if you don’t obey, you don’t confirm, you don’t fit, you’re gross, you’re deviant, you’re ugly. Or, if someone’s just as norm-bound but less mean about it, you’re setting yourself up to get attacked or bullied and it’s your fault because you could’ve just stayed in your lane and kept your head down and done what you’re supposed to and done what you’re told. Oh and I’m just telling you all this for your own good, I don’t want all these norms to crush you to a pulp, I’m just going to make sure they do.

Because rules enforcement isn’t just done by people who feel antagonistic towards those being suppressed. It’s done by everyone who expects that nothing will change and who sees a norm, and sees a person who want things to be different and says “I’m so sorry but there’s nothing that can be done, that’s just how things are. Now don’t put a toe out of line.”

But norms do change. If we can see that they shouldn’t be there, if we can see that how things are is not how things should be, we can do better.

This is why I think the truer version of “ally” is “accomplice”. An ally is someone who sticks with you when the norms are on your side. It’s nice, it’s something, but the rope is only as long as the norms reach, and beyond that, when push comes to shove and you hit the end, that’s it. That far and no farther. You’re too weird, so you’re on your own.

An accomplice is someone who’ll have your back even when the going get rough. Even when the norms aren’t on your side. To go a step past the rules, into to the realm of how the world could be, not just how it is.

Conformity and complacency never got us anywhere, especially when it comes to gender.

I think this is why a lot of people hatched over the pandemic. For me, I’d say I solidified, shook off the remnants of eggshell. People say the pandemic gave us time to explore, and that’s true as far as it goes. But it’s more than that. During the pandemic there were much less norm enforcement of gender. More socializing was text rather than visual or audio. More freedom to wear what we wanted. Just less people around to enforce the norms on us. No day job to be used as a mechanism for enforcement. No in-person shopping to be used as a mechanism of enforcement. With that lifting of norms, with that freedom, comes authenticity. Comes gender. It’s not the end of the story, there were many more factors, but it certainly helped.

On shifting norms

In some spaces, the body of norms have reoriented, so people don’t think I’m so weird. Instead, people have a norm that they’re supposed to get my pronouns right. So if they don’t, and I tell them they got it wrong, then they’ve failed the norm. So they’re intensely apologetic. And they’re peeved that I’m enforcing the norm on them. Because if I don’t point it out, they haven’t violated a norm. Norms have this heavy weight, like they come from the narrator of the story. And they feel like they’re omnipresent. Like if you stick one toe out of line you’ll be caught. So people feel like every time the mess up a pronoun someone’s jumping down their throat. When in reality, it’s a very reticent, gentle, conflict averse reminder, at least when I do it, and it’s not every time. It might be one in five if I feel comfortable around you, or one in a hundred if I feel like I have to, or never if I just want out of the situation.

I’m so reticent in part because I don’t like enforcing norms, even when those norms are in line with my preferences, what’s accurate to describe me. I don’t want to be a cop. Because norms only create guilt. They don’t create change, except perhaps over years.

But on the other hand. I’d like to stop preemptively talking someone down whenever they’re apologetic about misgendering me. It is a form of self-minimization, which is certainly a pattern I have in many aspects of my life. So I need to practice. When someone “he”s me, then I say “they/she, by the way”, then they apologize profusely, “oh shit oh I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to”. And instead of what I do now, which is tell them it’s not so bad as rapidly and panickily as I can, I want to just smile a bit and say “thanks, I appreciate it”. It’s going to take a lot of practice, I’m certainly not there.

Because their emotions aren’t my responsibility. Because if I model a chill reaction that’ll gently shift the norm towards it being a chill learning process not a desperate slight, and more than that isn’t up to me. I’m not making them apologetic, the norm is. And the norm is out of my hands.

But it’s not like everyone likes the norm. Some people want to be able to call people whatever they want. It doesn’t feel like it an insult to them to intentionally misgender someone, so they’re resisting the “don’t insult people” norm, so it’s “compelled speech”. In other words, they want to hold the reigns of norm-creation in this discourse space, and they don’t, and they don’t like it, and they’re dressing it up in the language of freedom.

And in other places, people don’t like the norm in a different way. They want us to be regarded as gross sinners, like I grew up thinking I was. So they’ll talk about “protecting our children”, to promote their goal of harming their children. What they’re really doing is trying to exert control over the norms that their children exist within, the pressures that are exert on their children. They’re trying to exert that control because they feel those norms slipping away from them. They’ll dress it up in the language of safety, but it’s all about control of norms.

They want to enforce the world they want to see.

It’s not their world to shape, not any more. And they hate it. And they’re desperately trying to control those norms, to push back the tide. It’s not going to work.

At a more fundamental level, outside of visible signifiers like pronouns, there’s a more fundamental change in norms going on. Trans people are becoming people. Not monsters or murder victims on cop shows, not a punchline on a sitcom. People. And the norms around us are shifting too. As people, the norm is that we deserve respect and care and inclusion. Just like everyone else.

Governments will pass laws against us. They have, they are, and they will. They’ll try to control the norms. They try to make us disgusting and inhuman again.

They will fail.

A less normative world

All of this fighting over whose norms are best, whose norms control our actions, it all matters, in the world we currently live in. A world where the dominant norms dictate a thousand aspects of how we live our lives, what’s acceptable, what’s possible, what’s reasonable, what’s good. In a norm-ruled world, having trans-supportive norms is deeply vital.

But what about a world in which we didn’t put our faith in norms?

To be clear, I’m not talking about having less norms. Often, norms are in a push and pull conflict with each other, where the presence of one norm seeks to push away another. For instance “don’t yell transphobic things at people in public” is a norm that seeks to prop up the norm of “it’s fine to be trans in public”. And “it’s fine to yell transphobic things at people in public” seeks to prop up “don’t be trans in public”. There’s not really a “less norms” option here.

But it’s very easy to conflate the norms that do exist with the norms that should exist, or the norms that will inevitably continue to exist. And it’s very easy to see norms as permanent and inflexible and there’s nothing any of us can do so we should just get in line.

But we have choices, we have control. We can say “sure, that’s how it is, but that’s not how it should be”. Norms do change. Gradually and piecemeal, and through the collective actions of many many people pushing on them. And even before they’ve changed at large, we can carve out little parts of our world where they don’t exist. Where we can foster a little community with different rules than elsewhere. Where we don’t trust the norms that already exist.

Norms within our group

This also extents to thinking about the kinds of norms we want in spaces where we have more control. For instance, if we see a classic internet callout post/video/google doc, we can think about what norm is being pushed, and whether we want to maintain and strengthen that norm. Remember, the norm being pushed is whatever caused the callout post to be written - many of the incidents and/or allegations on the post are dredged up to flesh it out, but ancillary to the underlying concern.

For an example of a callout post I like, I saw one alleging (with considerable evidence) that an organizing/leadership figure in a tech space had a very long history of sexualizing the spaces that he had control over, directed both at adult women and at girls. This is an entirely appropriate callout post, and the norm being enforced is one I agree with and support.

For an example of a callout post I don’t like, I saw one where a visible trans person was being castigated for including a brief voiceover in a video she made. The voiceover was made by a trans person with a very different opinion on what the trans community is and should be. The voiceover person centers his transness in his biology - putting the focus on his hormones and surgery, and describes himself as transsexual. Transgenderness, the self-conception part, is not a key part of his identity. He also doesn’t think nonbinary people like me should be considered transgender at all, apparently. This person is both describing his identity (he is transsexual) and also attempting to resurrect a former norm (the key part of transness is transing one’s sex, not transing one’s gender, and nonbinary people, presumably regardless of whether we trans our sex, shouldn’t be in the community).

I think it’s entirely appropriate to attempt to push people out of a community for trying to promulgate a harmful norm, and that’s what’s been done with this voiceover person, and I agree with that. This is in contrast to someone who centers their own identity on transing their sex, but doesn’t try to exclude people like me who don’t center their identity in that way from community. These people are more than welcome, in my book, and there are some norms that need to be changed to make that work, such as lifting the taboo on the word “transsexual”.

But that’s not the callout post I saw. People weren’t trying to enforce a norm against the voiceover person, they were trying to enforce a norm against the person who made the video which included the voiceover. And that’s a different situation. The norm they were trying to enforce was “Everyone must enforce the norm against transmedicalism.” A norm of “enforce this norm or else” isn’t generally helpful. It leads to a culture of extreme rigidity, inflexibility, where we’re too busy enforcing norms and verifying that other people enforce norms to think about what norms should exist. Nothing can change if life is all enforced enforcement.

Note that this isn’t a situation where the video maker was platforming the norm enforcement by the voiceover person. That was just stuff the voiceover person had advocated in a separated context. In the video itself, it was pretty anodyne.

So I don’t want a norm of “enforce norms, don’t associate with people who are pushing harmful norms”. It’s too police-y, too circular firing squad. And so, at long last, having decide what norms I want to exist, I can finally decide what norms I will support. And it’s not this one.

I’m onboard with discussing the ills of the voiceover person, and using this situation as an opportunity discuss community norms around their positions, and to bring that contrast to the attention of the video-maker, but I’m not on board with trying to castigate them, have major professional consequences, or anything like that, for not enforcing this norm.

Does it matter, the norms that are enforced against famous people? Yes, because this is how norms disseminate. If a famous person is visibility raked over the coals, it makes it clear what is and is not acceptable, for everyone, not just the famous person. Or at least starts to move a norm in that direction. If a famous person is accused and not much happens and things go back to normal, it makes it clear what is and is not acceptable for everyone. Or at least starts to move the needle.

I’m just not in favor of required enforcement. In large part, that’s how we got to the situation in wider society around gender. The norm that really makes parents shut down their kids’ gender nonconformity isn’t just the norm against the child doing that - it’s the norm against the parent allowing it to happen. The parent having the awkward conversation with the school, or with other ‘concerned’ parents. The norm of enforcing gender norms on those under one’s control.

So let’s chill. And let’s think, separating the norms that are, and the norms that we see people attempting to create, from the norms we want.

Wrapup

We live in a world of norms. One can be aware of these norms, and not internalize them into one’s sense of self, one’s sense of how things should be. We can choose where we want to strengthen norms, and where we want to shift them. When to be an accomplice that a friend needs.

In the world of gender, we step into a world of rigid, heavy rules. And we destabilize, subvert, evade those rules. Maybe personally, maybe just by living, maybe because there’s not really any other option. And we carve out our own little worlds that look the way we want them to.

So think about the norms you see. Think about who they help or harm. Think about the world that you want to exist. And think about who you can help and who can help you.

This world is so much brighter for all the norms we’ve shed. And as we enjoy that change, we can also carry it forward into a colorful, joyous future.

Thank you for listening, and thank you for thinking.