Yesterday I was challenged on one of my central stances as a nonbinary social researcher. My stance is this: I think it is very possible to shift our social visual habit that guides us to assess strangers along the gender binary. Put another way, I don’t find it necessary to look around me and divide the world into men and women. I may visually assess those individuals who might present a risk to my personal safety as a non-man but I don’t like to assign a gender identity to complete strangers. This kind of arbitrary assignment is the root of my own social dysphoria and I don’t want to inflict that hurt on other people.
The individual I was speaking with suggested that not seeing a person’s gender is similar to the rhetoric of “I don’t see colour” that comes up in conversation about race. They went on to say that their own identity as a non-man is significant to the treatment they receive in the workplace and they wouldn’t want that to be ignored or swallowed up by a homogenizing, un-gendering eye that can only see ‘people.’
My initial reaction was defensive (because I absolutely reject the stance of colour-blindness and see it to be harmful) but I also don’t think these stances are equatable and I want to share my reflection on this.
If you’re not familiar with the rhetoric of colour-blindness here is a brief recap. People who use this language often claim that “we’re all human, I don’t see colour, I’m not racist.” Many people continue to think that this kind of philosophy makes them inclusive but they’re wrong. Skin colour continues to be a powerful determiner of quality of life in our society. In an article written for Forbes in 2019, Janice Gassam Asare writes “…it’s important to understand that the goal is not to be color-blind. The goal is actually to see and recognize skin color but to control and regulate your innate impulse to make decisions based on such characteristics.” (Read the full article here).
On the surface, my commitment to see people as people and not assign gender based on what I see may sound a bit like “we’re all human, I don’t see colour” but there are some fundamental differences.
First, I am aware of how gender acts on a social level, particularly within a heteropatriarchal system. By no means am I suggesting that gender no longer be recognized. Issues like unequal wages, sexual harassment and gendered violence, and unpaid domestic labour disproportionately impact people of certain genders. We must recognize how gender dictates how people are treated in our society in order to address it. Perhaps there will come a time when gender is no longer a determining factor in success, opportunity, and general wellbeing, but that is not yet the case. So we must see gender as a social structure.
Second, when someone’s gender is disclosed to me, I do not cover my eyes and insist that they are a genderless human because I don’t see gender. I recognize that gender can be an important part of an individual’s experience and ignoring gender can be extremely hurtful. Maintaining gender-neutral language when you have been told the gendered language an individual prefers is a form of misgendering. So we must see gender as an individual experience as well.
Clearly, I do ‘see’ gender. But what I am not doing is imposing my ideas of gender on the bodies of strangers based on an outdated set of visual codes that may or may not contain any real information. I am not assuming that the tall person with the beard and the flat chest is a man because biological sex and gender are not the same thing. I am not deciding that the stunner in the satin dress is a woman because clothing choices do not have to be gendered.
Personally, I don’t wear dresses anymore because when I do I am forcibly put back into the woman box. My pronouns and my lived experiences evaporate. Writing this, my dysphoria is so strong, I feel physically unwell.
I am a person.
I am a person.
I am a person.
If we don’t deconstruct our visual assumptions about gender, the gender binary will never stop being the norm, and genderqueer people will always be threatened with erasure. What I am advocating for is a reworking of the way we understand and ‘see’ gender, a change to the order of operations. For many people, gender can’t be seen accurately without first being disclosed.
If this is challenging, and you’re annoyed with me for making all this gender stuff so darn complicated, try thinking about gender the way you might think about a name. Your neighbour might look like a Bob but you probably won’t call them Bob without asking if that is their name. If it’s not, you probably won’t persist in calling them Bob. You’ll call them by the name they offer.