Ep. 7 - GENDER (Pt. 1)

Transcript:

Lori Mannette: The school that I went to, I had this very Eurocentric idea of history and hadn't learned about native cultures, which traditionally had five genders. Like, most of the native cultures in North and South America recognized more than two genders. And when you start to just say, like, "This is not the way it's always been, this is not the natural order..."

You're listening to "The Talk"—A podcast where we explore the possibility of creating a radical new communication environment between parents and children. An environment that's open, honest and candid, and where nothing is off limits.

L.M.: I am not a non binary person. I don't think it would be fair to identify myself as such, but I am not a girly girl and I grew up in the South, where I think the gentility that was expected of me, that I was never able to deliver...Sort of hearing that, well, that's not like something that's naturally expected of you, that's something we've constructed, was very interesting and really fascinated me.

Lori Mannette first appeared as a guest on our episode BODIES (Part 2). Lori told me about adopting her child, Charlie, and about the ways they navigate conversations about body diversity, body positivity, and about critically interrogating information that we are exposed to. In that same conversation, Lori had some great insight into the ways we conceive of gender and how gender has been co-opted and weaponized by capitalist culture. Here's Lori again.

L.M.: He'll say things sometimes that are very grounded in gender because, of course, children do notice gender very strongly. Like, we'll watch a TV show: "Well, I know she's going to kiss him because girls always kiss boys." I say, "Always? What if a girl kissed a girl? Do we know girls who kiss girls?" You know, things like that. "Yes, yes, yes, you're right. It's not always that way." But sure. Like most of the time...this is a hetero-normative culture. The presumption is that that's the way that it is. But there's other words and there's other ways to be.

Charlie came into Lori's life at a time and in a way she was not at all expecting. After a long, expensive, and disheartening ordeal with IVF treatments, Lori got a call from her mother.

L.M.: And she was like, "I found a kid." Because my mother's hobby is looking online for who's available. Like, she literally looks online every day at all the available children in the whole world and has done this for 20 years. I was like, "Mom, I don't want to hear..." "I found a kid! I found the perfect fit for you." I was like, "Mom, stop. No, no, no." She was like, "OK, so this kid is in China." I was like, "No, mother, not China." "The kid is four years old." I was like, "I don't want a four year old." She goes, "And...this kid is intersex. They don't actually know whether this is a boy or a girl." And I was like, "Oh. Interesting." She goes "I really think this is the kid for you, I'm going to send you the information." I was like, "Ugh, fine, whatever. Send it to me, I'll never qualify, it doesn't matter." And really, like, the second I saw the thing she sent me, I was like, "That's my kid and I need to go get him." And it was just very interesting because, again, like, none of that was on my radar. But like, as soon as I saw the picture, I just knew it was my kid and I never even looked at any other child.

Jeremy: What perked you up about the fact that this child was intersex?

L.M.: So I learned about intersexism when I was in college, which is, of course, interesting, because, like, this is one of those very basic things that we should all learn from the time we are children. And it was one of those things—when I was in college and somebody brought this topic to my attention that, like, not all people are born male or female, I was like, "What?" And he sat there and outlined for me the basics of how we conceive of the binary sex and like all the possibilities. And it was one of those things where I was just like, "How could I never have thought of that?"

Jeremy: Yeah.

L.M.: And it became very interesting to me. And I started taking all these classes in gender and sexuality and, like, it sort of felt like this black and white world had suddenly become full of color, where I actually started seeing the system by which we built these ideas of gender.

Jeremy: You said Charlie was four when he came to you?

L.M.: He was four when I started the process and five when I finally brought him over. Five and a half.

Jeremy: And how old is he now?

L.M.: He'll be eight in December. So it's been two years and two months that he's been in America.

Jeremy: OK. He identifies as male, as a boy. And...

L.M.: Um...no. He uses he/him pronouns. Those are the pronouns that feel most comfortable. If you forced him to pick on the binary, he would pick boy. But most of the time, if you ask him, he will say, like, "I'm both." And he is fairly fluid and very aware of how we construct gender and his own identity. He knows that he is intersex. He knows that he can choose any gender, but that generally both feel comfortable for him. He also understands that most people perceive him as a boy and that doesn't bother him at all. But when he gets made fun of which he does very frequently for, like, wearing sparkly shoes or this or that, he just lets people know that, like, well, I'm a girl, too.

Jeremy: Yeah. Wow, that's remarkable.

L.M.: And it's interesting because he is legally female. But what he gets made fun of is actually for expressing any sort of femininity in his approach. And what I get rewarded for as a parent when people say, "Oh, you're doing such a great job, you let him be himself because you let him wear sparkles." I'm like, "I don't think you understand that the sparkles are not the controversy." But that's the thing is most people do perceive him as a boy.

Jeremy: Yeah. How do you feel about the fact that he gets attention for that? What does it make you feel when you observe that?

L.M.: I am always amazed at my child's strength of character. I was teased relentlessly in school on a whole host of topics and didn't have nearly the strength...It truly doesn't bother him. He doesn't get upset by it. He sort of seems to be above it. He has a tremendous amount of social intelligence that's very mature well beyond his years. He is very popular and well liked. Children absolutely love him. And I think that sometimes gives him the confidence when they challenge his expression to just be like, "Mmm, no. I'm the cool one here and I'll do what I want." But I certainly have had a lot of kids come up to me when I drop them off in the morning: "Is that a boy or a girl?" And things like that. It threw me more in the beginning than it does now. Like, I'm a lot more used to it now. I think I went into the adoption overconfident in my knowledge of these issues, my ability to handle these issues. I was a little blindsided by, like, what it really is to live in these identities. I've been such an ally of LGBTIQ+ plus identities my whole life. But the truth is, like, I'm a cis straight white female and, like, I did not know what it was going to be like.

If you'd like to hear more from Lori, you can listen to our episode entitled BODIES (Part 2), which was released December 3rd, 2020.

Next up, a conversation with author and Concordia University professor Dr. Emer O'Toole about the performative aspects of gender, social conditioning, and why, as parents, we may not often be as aware as we think of the gender reinforced messaging our children are being exposed to.

But first, I want to say thanks for listening to The Talk, and thanks to all of you who send us voice memos. We're working currently on a two part episode entitled SKIN. It's a conversation about how we see each other, and specifically how we see other people who don't look like us. And most vitally about how we can raise our kids to listen, to seek to understand and advocate for the people in our world who are marginalized, devalued, discriminated against, and physically violated because of their skin. In the U.S. there are fundamental differences in the way that parents engage in raising white children versus children of color. The priorities of black, indigenous, and parents of color must be different because for centuries the structures of our society have rewarded and awarded privilege to white people and have systemically and insidiously punished black, indigenous, and people of color just for existing. This has to change, and the change must start at home with parents of children of color modeling and teaching their kids about their own power and voice, and deconstructing the internalized racist structures that have been thrust upon them for generations. But mostly this change has to start with white parents of white children. With white children being taught the truth about history and about the importance of using their position of privilege to uplift those who need it, and to work toward repairing past wrongs. In this upcoming episode, we'll be exploring ways that parents can talk to their kids honestly about the legacy of racial relations in our country, the harm that it's caused, and where they fit into it. We'll be looking at how we can begin and continue to raise children who are firmly rooted in anti-racist thought and action, and create a culture where fighting for equity and justice are the norm. I'm really eager to hear from all of you for this episode. How do you talk to your kids about where they fit in to the systems of social injustice that are so deeply embedded in our culture? Do you feel adequately equipped to start and continue that conversation? And what messaging and education did you receive growing up about the history of race in America? What do you wish white parents understood about the experience of raising black, indigenous, and children of color? If your kids are white, have they ever heard the term "anti-racism?" If you'd be willing to share a voice memo with our listeners, you can visit Thetalkthepodcast.com and click "contact" or you can email your voice memo to us at TheTalk@TheTalkThePodcast.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Dr. Emer O'Toole: Overall, the literature would suggest that little girls and little boys are incredibly similar to each other, but there are small, innate psychological differences that appear to be biological. But overall, it our treatment of little people in male bodies and female bodies that kind of grows these very different social behaviors.

In 2012, after appearing on the UK's ITV This Morning as part of a panel discussion on body hair, Emer O'Toole went viral. O'Toole was a research student at the time, and appeared to discuss her decision to stop shaving her body hair, which had begun as an experiment 18 months prior.

Emer on TV: "It really hit me that there was just so much pressure on women to conform to an arbitrary gender norm—to a kind of artificial gender norm. I realized that when I was 14 and the hair started sprouting up, I didn't think, 'Oh, will I keep this or will I shave it off? I knew I had to shave it off...'"

Emer's experiment resulted in a deep examination of her own relationship between physical appearance and self-confidence. The appearance on the show feels a bit like a setup, pitting O'Toole against a salon owner who's been invited to advocate against women growing or displaying body hair. The show's hosts ask pointed questions and include a live online poll inviting viewers to vote: "Hair free or care free?"

TV Interview: "...lots of viewers are phoning in and they don't believe you. They don't see your hair. So they'd like to see..."

Emer on TV: "Do you want me to get my pits out for the lads? [sings] Get your pits out for the lads!"

But the setup doesn't quite work. The banter between the two guests is jovial and genuine and feels refreshingly supportive of one another. They both understand that a woman's choice to shave or grow her hair is the important piece of this puzzle, and importantly agree that that choice is deeply influenced by cultural norms and expectations.

Emer on TV: "Because what has happened is I've started to examine the extent to which my confidence comes from my looks. And if your confidence is coming from your looks and that's where you're getting your self-esteem from—from what your body looks like, what your face looks like—then it's not with you when you wake up in the morning before you put your makeup on. It's not with you when you go to bed at night, when you take it off. It doesn't grow old with you. So you have to find confidence in other places. If you're going somewhere and you feel "I look disgusting, I'm not confident..." then you have to remember that you're a wonderful person and you're interesting."

[Salon owner]: "If I could bottle that and sprinkle it on my little girls before they went to school every day, I would be the happiest person in the world. But I mean, you're just amazing. I don't know hardly anybody that..."

In 2015, Emer O'Toole published a book called Girls will be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently. It's a humorous, accessible, and deeply thoughtful examination of the performative aspects of gender, and what it means to act out our gender on a personal level and within the confines of cultural pressures and expectations.

Jeremy: Thank you so much for chatting with me, I'm delighted that you agreed to do this.

Dr. Emer O'Toole: Delighted to be on the show.

Jeremy: Your book was—when I read your book shortly after it came out—was a huge revelation to me. And so I think I made you in my mind, into like a really big deal, which, you know, you are!

E.O.: Well thank you!

Jeremy: Your thoughts and the things that you explained in the book were a really big deal to me. As a straight white dude I've spent most of my life not paying attention to things that I needed to pay attention to. And there are ways that I've done a lot of deconstructing of myself over the last 15 years or so. But I feel like every few years there's things that come up that I'm like, "Oh, I can think more about this. I can try to look inside myself about this." And when I read your book, the idea of gender as performance was that to me. It was a real revelation. So thank you for the book, first of all.

E.O.: Well, thank you for reading it.

Jeremy: I think that one place culturally where people get hung up on like a basic level when we talk about gender is understanding the difference between biological sex and gender. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about why it's important for us to make that differentiation and how we can do that from the time that our kids notice that there are different people out there. How can we do that for them? And why is it important?

E.O.: Well, I think the reason that it's important for us to get a grasp on the difference between sex and gender is because we're so influential in our kids lives. We are the ones who are handing them the script that they're going to live by the rest of their lives. When you learned that script—your brain is so elastic when you're when you're a child—that it's very hard to unlearn later. You can, but, you know, the gendered identity that you're learning from the people around you is just going to be such a fundamental part of you for the rest of your life. So, to be raised by people who have a handle on what sex is, what gender is, and how they operate socially and culturally in our society, that's just such a blessing for a child. It gives them a full palette to paint with. It doesn't leave them limited to one small set of blue shades or pink shades. It allows them to really express every facet of their personality and their being. Educating yourself on this as a parent is an enormous gift to your child. You're just opening up a world of possibilities to them that could be limited otherwise. So sex: Sex is the biological facts of chromosomes, of hormones, of secondary sexual characteristics like breast tissue or facial hair, right? It's the material facts of those things. There are also intersex people. For the vast majority of people, sex is binary. You're a man or you're a woman, you're male or female. But there are also intersex people, and the percentage of intersex people is difficult to cite exactly. Some people say it's as many as 1.6 Percent and other people say it's as little as .02 percent. So it really depends how you define intersex. And like a lot of these questions it's quite politicized. But, you know, I think it's important to acknowledge that intersex people exist, too. But in the main, biological sex is binary. It's chromosomes and hormones, genitals and secondary sexual characteristics. However, even within that binary where most people are demonstrably male or female, the distribution of secondary sexual characteristics doesn't necessarily line up with your chromosomes, for example. So a huge percentage of men at different points in their lives will have breast tissue. That's a condition called gynecomastia. Up to 40 percent of women report having facial hair and some women have full beards. So even within the, kind of, more or less simple binary of biological sex, it's not as simple as XX and XY. There's spectrums of secondary sexual characteristics. But in the main, sex is the biological fact of those things—the material fact. Your chromosomes, your genitals, your reproductive organs, those things. And then gender is very different. Gender is the set of cultural and social meanings and expectations that we attach to biological sex. And I think a good way to think about the difference between the material biological fact of sex and the social and cultural impact of gender. Think about the fact that if we took a Homo sapiens from two hundred thousand years ago—we went to the jungle in Africa and we plucked him out right? Or her. The sexed body of that person would be very much like the sexed body of a person today. That hasn't changed. That's stable over time. For the two hundred thousand years that Homo sapiens have been around, there have been female bodies and male bodies and a small percentage of intersex bodies and some male bodies with some female secondary sexual characteristics. But that stuff—that material stuff—that's been around for millennia, right? But then that's not the same with gender. The costumes, the behaviors, the social roles that have been built by different people at different times on the fact of biological sex. Those things are so different from historical period to historical period, from culture to culture, that it looks like we're a multitude of different species. Like if we were any other animal and acting this differently in relation to sex, you'd assume that we were different species. The things we wear, the things that people are expected to do because of the sex that they're born with, those things just change so much over time and from culture to culture that you'd have to be very strange, I think, to claim that they're some kind of natural extension of biological sex. Yes, they're related to it. They're based on it. They're social and cultural meanings that people have built upon biological sex. But they're arbitrary and they're culturally specific. They're historically specific and they're malleable and changeable throughout time. They're sets of beliefs and behaviors, they're stereotypes, they're roles. And the ones that you live with that are a part of you, of your identity? They are specific to your time and place, you know? And when you start thinking about it that way, you start thinking, OK, cool, so it's not like...things don't have to be this way. What's good about the gender roles that we live with? What do I think is a boon to society? What would I like to pass down to my children? What would I like to see them passing down to their children? And what do I think we could maybe...we could maybe play? With what do I think we could improve upon, and what's ripe for a little bit of re-imagination.

Jeremy: Yeah. And it seems kind of clear that culture at large is OK with, maybe small steps or small tweaks in those things. But when they see something that seems dramatically out of what aligns aligns with their framework, there can be a very kind of adverse reaction to it. It seems like, almost like they're taking it personally, as an affront to something that they truly believe in. What is it that allows us to, like, be OK with those tiny steps—men helping with housework—like, that's a tiny step that most people are not going to have a problem with. But why is it so tough for people to accept things in those bigger bites?

E.O.: I think our gender is so fundamental to who we are. We have learned, like from the time great tiny children. Taboos and gender norms are taught to us in in a system that uses both rewards and punishments. You can be punished for performing your gender wrong, you know? Our identities and our ideas of what's right and wrong in terms of gender are just part of us fundamentally at this very profound level. And the sense of shame that we might feel for being differently gendered. We kind of repress that, right? A more correct version of what a man is and what a woman is becomes a part of our way of thinking about ourselves and our way of seeing the world. And so when we then see a child acting in a gender nonconforming way, we feel like we need to correct it, like we were corrected. And it might not be a conscious thing. You might be someone who identifies as a feminist, who thinks that men should have the right to be more effeminate, who thinks that women shouldn't have to do as much housework. But still, when a child is acting in these gender nonconforming ways, you start to panic. There's some kind of emotional reaction there. And it's not necessarily coming from a place of ideology, you know, so there's an idea of what the society is going to accept. But then I also just think is like..."I am like this and it is correct." Because it's very hard to break down your own social conditioning. It's very hard to chip away at a worldview that you've been told your whole life is correct and to imagine things differently. I think we're very bad at that as a species. I think we're very bad at recognizing that the beliefs we hold are contingent and arbitrary, and that they don't have to be that way. Instead, we internalize them as right and wrong, and then we kind of condone behaviors that we think are right and we punish ones that we think are wrong.

Jeremy: It feels kind of tricky to have the desire to raise kids with a healthy awareness of gender and a healthy outlook on gender, and to encourage them to explore and to think critically about it. And to do that in a culture where they are constantly being barraged with messages that just seem to reinforce those outdated, rigid, binary ways of thinking about gender. And it's everywhere. It's in school, it's on TV, it's in subway ads, it's at the grocery store. And so I'm curious if you have any thoughts on how we might go about raising our kids with a healthy outlook on gender in a world where there's so much coming at them that seems to be to the contrary.

E.O.: When we talk about trying to kind of 'correct' gender nonconforming children, I think there's often an idea that people are coming from a place of prejudice or bias. But I think so much of it is under...its subconscious. It's almost under the radar. We don't even know that we're doing it. In fact, if you ask most parents, they'll tell you that they're raising their children in relatively gender neutral ways—that they treat both sexes the same, that they're egalitarian parents. And that's how they're experiencing themselves, but then if you actually put those parents into clinical context and you study what they're doing, that is not what's happening. They're not treating their children...their male children and their female children the same. I think a lot of it is because we ourselves are products of a gendered world. And you can't just get rid of all of that information by claiming that you're that you're you're kind of gender liberated now. There's a very interesting book. It's from the '80s and it's called "Good Girl" or "Be a Good Girl" [There's a Good Girl]. And Marianne Grabrucker was like a second wave German feminist. And all of her friends were radical and in their 20s, imagining a gender-liberated world. And then they all started having children and all her feminist friends started saying, "Well, we're raising them in completely gender neutral ways. And still the boys are such boys and the girls are such girls. It must be biologically innate after all. And you know, this social construction idea is just nonsense." So Marianne Grabrucker was like...she was about to have a child herself. And she said, OK, well, what can I do to actually think about this logically? So she started to keep a diary of every gendered message that she saw being given to her daughter, who she was trying to to raise without gender stereotypes. And it's a three year long diary. And it's just such an interesting account of the way that the world is shaping children's genders. And she says herself that if she hadn't been keeping the diary, she wouldn't have noticed. That it was because she pointedly decided to look for it, like in her own behavior, in the behavior of her mother, her partner, her friends. But because she was keeping the diary, she was attuned to it. If she hadn't been, she, like her friends, would simply have said, "Oh, well, I've done everything gender neutral. And still she loves dresses, and she wants to, you know, she's such a little girl."

Jeremy: As she was keeping that journal, did she have a strategy for ways that she interacted with her daughter? Like, would she address those things when they came up as a way of trying to push back against them? Or was this like a strictly observational project?

E.O.: She did. She certainly did. And what was interesting was that, like...and it's a while since I've read it so I'd have to go back to it get it. But I distinctly remember that, like, the little girl with notice something and she'd have a response. But the interesting thing was that the response got better the second time. So the first time that something happened, she'd be like, "And then this happened and I didn't really respond." But then the next time it happened, she'd have a response ready because she had thought about it, right? When things are happening in the moment, it's very difficult to know how to direct, you know, to direct your child's understanding of the of the situation. But if you're paying attention to it—they say in French, it's escalier wit—"Staircase wit" that, you have it after the fact, right? So paying attention allows you to kind of apply those, "Oh, I would have done this differently the next time the situation comes up." But yeah, I remember particularly from the book her looking at the dynamics of when her female child was playing with male playmates and her just noticing over time that every time there was a scuffle over a toy, the little girl was always encouraged to to share it. And the little boy was assumed that he would get it. And then after a while, the little girls stop trying, you know? And then she started intervening in that, and that seemed to cause kind of social, you know, some social anxiety with people when she would suddenly step into the play and say, "Actually, Marcus, it's not your turn. You did it last time and now it's my daughter's turn." And that shocked people because they hadn't been aware of the dynamic.

Jeremy: Right. I think I'm going to try to look for that book. It sounds really fascinating.

E.O.: Yeah, it's old. Like you can tell...like a lot of the conversations have moved on, but I think if anyone kept a three year diary like that with their child, I think you'd see similar things that even if you're committed to kind of a gender, a gender neutral parenting strategy or a gender liberating parenting strategy—to use the terminology of a psychologist that I like called Sandra Lipsitz Bem—that there's just a whole mess of gendered expectations and ideologies that are being thrown at your child all the time.

Jeremy: Yeah.

E.O.: And I do think you can give your child the tools to navigate them.

Jeremy: My wife and I have two sons and I think I feel a particular...not pressure, but a particular responsibility, maybe, because these cultural ideas have been so dominated for so long by patriarchal structures. But do you feel that the onus is more strongly on parents of boys to make that primary effort to model and educate those boys in a way that allows that shift to happen?

E.O.: I don't think it's a case of putting it all on the parents of sons, thank the Lord, because that's what I have at the moment—I don't want to do all the work. And I don't think it's a case of putting it all on the parents of girls. Rather, I think it's a case of recognizing that they're they're very similar little beings who are incredibly capable of understanding each other and of enjoying similar activities and similar toys if we give them the tools to do so. So one innate difference seems to be language acquisition, for example. Girls tend to learn language a few months earlier than boys. And then because we tend to praise our kids for what they're good at, then the little girl is getting all this praise for being so good at talking, so good at talking. And the little boy is kind of getting ignored because he's not picking up words as quickly, but maybe he's more physically able. And that does seem to be an innate difference as well, actually, that little boys seem to have better spatial reasoning by the age of five years old. So the little boy is getting all this praise for kicking a football around, picking an example from my old life right now. And the little girl is getting all this praise for pointing to different fruits and saying "Apple, banana", right? And so our treatment of those differences grows them into bigger gaps that lead to boys are underperforming compared to girls in reading and writing at school, and that lead to things like girls underperforming in maths and technical subjects at school. So something that we can do is like recognize the difference, that the difference is there. And instead of only praising the thing that your child appears to be good at, also praise the other things and encourage the other things. It's not going to make them any less good at the thing that you are encouraging. But what it will do is give them a broader palette. If your child isn't speaking as early as their sister did, for example, spend a lot more time saying "Apple, apple", you know? Spend a lot more time narrating what they're doing—that's a good way of getting kids to pick up language—and narrate things that they're interested in doing so that it's not a boring lesson for them. And similarly with girls ensure that there are plenty of jigsaws and towers and things that involve spatial reasoning, even if it's not as exciting for you to watch her precocious behavior because she's not as good at that. Make sure that you're also doing that conditioning. It's not just about math and literacy. It's also about empathy and anger. It's also about knowing when to share and knowing when to say, "No, that's mine, actually." It's about knowing when it's your turn. It's about recognizing the people around you as fully human individuals. Very difficult for a for a 15 month old, I can tell you. But I plan to teach him.

Jeremy: I would like you to talk a little bit about why seeing gender as a performance is important. And it occurred to me when you were talking before that even if we don't use that language necessarily, of talking about gender as performance, or even if there are people who would outright claim that gender is innately aligned with sex, that we do call things that our kids are doing "acting". Acting like a boy, acting like a girl, and so that's an acknowledgment. Even if you haven't kind of explored that very much, that's an acknowledgment that acting is something that is changeable, is malleable, is fluid and is contextually based. But would you talk a little bit about that word performance?

E.O.: I think when people say gender is performance, it's a metaphor. It's like they're not saying that it's literally a performance, like an actor who, you know, who can take off the costume at the end of the day. And the term in gender theory is that gender is "performative'. To draw that slight difference between performance as something pretend, not real, something that you take off, and something that is a little bit like that, but not quite, right? So within gender theory, people talk about performance of gender, which might be like a drag queen getting up and performing an ostentatious, crossed-sex identity. But then the genders that we inhabit every day, we can think of them through the lens of performance. We can think of them, you know, in terms of costumes, behaviors, scripts, gestures. But I think thinking about them as performative is an important little distinction, because the difference is that there's no true actor self underneath this performance of gender, right? You can't strip it away. It's part of you at this very fundamental level. OK, it's a costume. It's weird because it's like, there's nothing fundamentally masculine about boxers. Maybe, in fact, the little pocket of the front—strike that! But there's nothing fundamentally feminine about a skirt, right? Lots of cultures throughout history, and in the present day, men wear things that in Western culture we might call a skirt or a dress. There's nothing fundamentally feminine about it. And yet your ability to wear that as a woman in our society is very much a part of your identity. If you're a girly girl, if you're someone who likes to wear dresses, that's very much a part of your identity. There's nothing fundamentally masculine about short hair. You know, we all have hair, it grows. But for some men, the idea of growing out their hair is just a total affront to their gender identity, right? It's like, yes, it's a costume. Your haircut is a costume. The clothes you wear are a costume. But they're also part of your identity in this very fundamental way. And when we talk about gender as performative as opposed to to just performance, we're kind of moving beyond that metaphor. That metaphor of, "oh, look, it's a costume. It's a script. It's..." OK. That's true. But also, these are our real, actual lives that we're living. There's no other life. There's no character behind this costume that I can reach by stripping it off. OK, I can play with it. But it's going to feel very strange to me if I woke up tomorrow and I just completely changed my gender presentation. I think of myself as quite an androgynous individual. If I suddenly tomorrow decided that I was going to wear a full face of makeup and high heels everyday, that would feel so weird to me, right. It would feel so outside of my identity, this identity that has been crafted over the years in relation to the society in which I live, in relation to the ideologies about gender that I that I hold. So it's not just a performance. And yet. There are elements of this that look like performance, right? It's like...

Jeremy: Well, the way we act around people of our own sex, of our own gender.

E.O.: Right. Right. That there's different scripts for different situations, like there's "locker room talk" and then there's... Did you like my American accent? I tried really hard..."locker room talk"

Jeremy: I hope it comes back.

E.O.: Yeah. And then there is how we talk in mixed gender company. There's how we talk with their parents and how we talk with their children and how we talk with our friends and how we talk with our workmates. And, you know, there are different scripts for all those situations. And I suppose the really kind of mind boggling thing about all of those things is that every single one of those performances is you. None of them is fake. The way you are at work isn't fake. The way you are with your parents isn't fake. The way you are in the locker room isn't fake. But they're all different scripts for different situations. They're all part of you. They're all as authentic as any other and this is kind of an insight of a gender theorist called Judith Butler, that the way that you behave over time, that becomes your identity. So you are your actions over time. There isn't like some secret internal core of "you-ness".

Jeremy: A true self.

E.O.: Yeah. If every day you get up and you act like an a-hole. I'm sorry, but you're not a nice person.

Jeremy: That's your identity.

E.O.: Right? That's the long and the short of it. If every day you get up and even if you're having these really quite nasty thoughts, but you get up and you do good deeds and you go out there and you're a good person. I'm sorry, even if you have a secret conception of yourself as a bad person, you're a good person! So that's kind of a Butlerian sense of identity. But the thing is that it's not just as simple as like individual choice, right? It's not just like, I decide I'm going to be a certain way today. The scripts that are available to us, the actions that are available to us, all of those things are conditioned by society. So that's kind of the last ingredient in the in the Butlerian sense of identity. It's your acts over time. So you can be horrible one day and it doesn't mean that you're a horrible person. We all have bad days, right? But it's like your acts over time constitute your identity. But also those acts aren't like freely chosen. They are very much conditioned by the world in which we live. So that can kind of be a difficult thing to philosophically grapple with, too. That often it feels like we're making free choices, but if we go back and we look at where our beliefs came from, and if we consider if we would feel comfortable acting the other way, we often realize that our choices are very curtailed. And our identities, which feel really personal, are in fact shaped by the society in which we live. You know, that's so important to keep in mind when we're thinking about gender and I suppose when we're thinking about gender liberated parenting, because the scripts that we inculcate at this point, the scripts that we're creating for our kids, they're going to be living them for the rest of their lives, you know? The more they repeat the behaviors that they're being taught now, the more those behaviors become their identities. And then when they are their identities, it's very difficult to just shed them.

Jeremy: Ok, so I want to talk about pronouns for a little bit. My kids are three and five and one of their favorite babysitters came to us several years ago identifying as a cisgender gay man and now identifies as non binary. And it's been really interesting to watch the kids kind of struggle to adapt to the new they/them pronouns. Our older child has actually been a bit actively resistant and will say, you know, "I don't want to say 'they/them.' Ty is 'he' to me. So I'm going to say 'he'." So it's tough for him. And I wonder if you have any ideas about how to approach that challenge.

E.O.: Pronouns are hard for everyone, right? I mean, they're hardest for trans people who are trying to live as their authentic selves. But pronouns are hard for for grown ups. And then for a five year old who's...think about how we learn language. That's a knowledge system that is developing from the time we're in the womb. And I read a book when I was pregnant called How Babies Talk, that seems to show that babies are able to differentiate male and female voices from the time they're...actually from the time they're in the womb, because women's voices are higher and they travel differently through the fluid. So, really fascinating work happening on gender in language from even that super young age. So you're asking your kid to do something really difficult, which is kind of learn a new language. Like, gender is embedded in languages in very complex ways. Like, I'm someone who's approaching bilingual because my partner is French and I live in Montreal. And gender in French...just...my lord, why is the table a woman? I do not understand! And you're asking your child to do a lot of cognitive work around something that had just been completely natural before. You're asking them to like, denaturalize something that has been perceptual for them for a long time. And it's difficult work. It's a difficult thing to ask a little kid to do. The thing is, your identity is acts over time, your relationship with language is how you use that language over time. The table is a woman to me now in French much more than it was five years ago. And the more that these norms are practiced and used, the more they become part of our linguistic identities, our gender identities. But of course your little one is going to feel some kind of resentment at the beginning because it's hard. And I think that might be a lesson for all of us actually, moving into what I'm going to call a radically newly gendered world, is that it can be hard and that's OK! Be patient to the child in yourself, right? Acknowledge that your frustration is because you're being asked to relearn things that are deeply embedded in your psyche and your psychological makeup—what the psychologists might call your your schema, your linguistic schema, your gender schema. And give yourself time. I think exposure is obviously so important. Your kid already has a leg up, because by the time they get to secondary school or whatever, they'll already have had a non-binary friend for a long time and they'll have already done work that many people are being asked to do in their 40s and 50s. My experience of the LGBTQ community, of which I consider myself a member, but my experience of that community is that if you're trying, people are nice. No one minds if you if you mess up, you know, if most of the time you're trying. And I think it's also important for us to remember when we feel those frustrations, that feeling of mis-gendering someone and knowing you've done something bad and knowing that they're hurt and then you're like, "But why do I have to do this? This wasn't even around twenty years ago!" Recognizing that that's coming from...that that's not their fault. It's not the fault of the person who's reimagining the gendered possibilities for our society and finding ways to live outside of the gender binary. It's not their fault you're feeling that way. And it's not your fault you're feeling that way. It's kind of we're moving between or moving...it's a conversation between two very different ways of thinking about gender that are so deeply embedded in us as people. I feel like I've said that about 20 times. This interview, just like, "Our gendered identity is profoundly embedded within us!" and it takes a lot of work to change. In fact, in my book, Girls Will Be Girls, that was part of what I was playing with. I was like, "Is it possible for me to change my gendered expression and my gendered identity through performance?" And I found kind of yes and no. No and yes. It's very hard. And I think that time, that element of time that Judith Butler points to—that our gendered identities are not just repeated acts, but repeated acts over long periods of time—that becomes very important. So your five year old will become a 10 year old who's had a non binary friend for half of their life and for whom "they" is easy. And for those of us who are middle aged, it's going to be a little bit harder. Our brains are less elastic and we're probably dealing with, you know, these kind of negative emotions that we feel maybe we can't express. Like, your five year old's like, "I don't like it!". It's like, of course, you can say that. You're a five-year-old. You know, you tell grandma to go home.

Jeremy: That's a great point. That's a great point.

E.O.: We can't say that, but we might be feeling this. So just honor the five-year-old in you and recognize that there's work to be done.

Thanks so much to Dr. Emer O'Toole for sharing her time, knowledge, and experience for this episode. Emer is currently a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, where she teaches courses in theater, film, and Irish culture. You can find her writing in The Guardian and The Independent, among other places, and her wonderful book, Girls Will Be Girls, published by Orion Publishing Group, can be purchased through your local independent bookstore. If you'd like to know more about Emer's work and about the other books mentioned in this interview, you can visit the show notes for this episode at thetalkthepodcast.com.

Thanks also to Lori Mannette for appearing in this episode. You can hear more from Laurie in our episode “BODIES (Part 2)”. And thanks to you for listening to the talk. You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetalkthepodcast, and you can find transcripts, show notes and more info about us at Thetalkthepodcast.com. If you'd like to support us, you can do so by visiting Buymeacoffee.com/coffeetalks, or you can buy one of our new tote bags at Thetalkthepodcast.com/merch. Dana Gertz designed all of our original artwork. And finally, thanks in alphabetical order to Ezra, Harrison, and Jenny for being the reason this podcast exists at all.

Goodbye.