Queer Sexism
Letter submitted by Margaret Wetzel
I couldn’t stand the sensation of shaved skin, so I pitched my razor just after seventh grade. A couple of days into eighth grade, a group of five developed a habit of following me through the hallways chanting “D@mn girl, you need to shave those hairy-@$$ legs!” This is an example of traditional sexism: “You’re a girl, so you shouldn’t have hairy legs.” Traditional sexism takes your sex and then layers it with expected behaviors.
In response to the bullying and my lesbian attractions, I joined “LGB”TQ+ clubs. I thought they would be a great escape from weird hallway strangers, but “You have to be a trans man or at least nonbinary. Just look at you, you can’t really be a girl” became a comment I didn’t stop hearing until I stopped attending pride clubs. To make sense of “You don’t shave, so you’re not a girl,” I made up the term “queer sexism.” It’s like sexism, but reversed: rather than regulate your behaviors, queer sexism seeks to alter your “identities” to match the behaviors you display. (I put identities in quotations because I don’t consider woman or lesbian to be identities – they’re just labels to describe my body/orientation regardless of whether my brain “clicks” with them.)
Queer sexism is not unique to the “LGB”TQ+ clubs I’ve partaken in. Examples can be seen in GLAAD’s article “9 Young People Explain What Being Non-Binary Means to Them” where some discuss the nonbinary label as a source of permission to explore both stereotypical masculine and feminine styles/behaviors. Rather than stick with their sex while going against sexist stereotypes, they disconnect from their sex, suggesting that the stereotypes run deeply.
As Stock points out in Material Girls, this group seems to want reduced sexism. The issue is that attempting to reduce sexism by changing labels to enjoy stereotypically cross-sex activities/styles actually ends up furthering the idea that those things aren’t for people who stick with their sex. This attitude is further demonstrated by Penn State’s Non-Cis Club’s language guide making their definition of “cisgender” not include those who deviate from stereotypes and Butler’s interview with Kian implying a similar attitude, although with Butler, it’s hard to tell what she’s actually trying to imply.
Queer sexism seems to get lost on those pushing it, and I do think it’s harder to pick up on. In her book, The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children who Live Outside Gender Boxes, Diane Ehrensaft (2016) claims to be against forcing sexism onto kids, but labels the following as “gender creativity”:
“Gender Priuses – Half-Girl/Half-Boy: This gender was taught to me [Diane Ehrensaft] by a school-age child who, from the front, looked like any third grade boy in basketball shorts, tank top, and basketball sneakers, and, from the back, had a long blond braid tied at the end with a bright pink bow. As this little person explained to me, ‘You see – I’m a Prius.’ And then, in response to my puzzled look, ‘I’m a boy in the front, a girl in the back. A hybrid.’”
I agree that the “hybrid” comment from the boy shows a creative connection between cars and people, but Ehrensaft doesn’t seem to recognize that a child claiming to be half girl/boy based on stereotypes involves sexism and creates a “gender box.” I suspect she’d be upset by a mother telling her daughter “she has to have a long braid tied in a bow because she’s a girl,” but queer sexism slides under her radar and is unknowingly celebrated.
To be clear, I have no issues with a child describing themself this way. It takes time for theory of mind, language, schemas, and an understanding of sexed bodies to develop; it’s not concerning when kids say the “darndest of things.” My source of concern is that a PhD-holding children’s psychologist involved in universities, healthcare providers, and in leadership positions acts as though this child has unveiled some deep, “gender creative truth” and escaped “boxes.” Additional confusion arises from the glowing endorsements The Gender Creative Child received; how do they not see that Ehrensaft’s idea of gender creativity partially rests on notions of rigid sexism, even if that sexism has been queered?
In addition to being a headache of self-contradictions, queer sexism is harder to spot because it acts nice. I knew the kids yelling at me in the hallways due to my hairy legs were not my friends; it took years to hit the same realization about the kids telling me I should go on testosterone because I was “clearly a transman or nonbinary.” Picking up on who to trust is normally harder with my autism, but thankfully the self-contradictory nature of fighting sexist statements by reversing the statements eventually tipped me off.
Queer sexism needs to be recognized because it is physically dangerous. Queer sexism has demanded more than just a label change; on multiple occasions, I was told I should go on testosterone because I wasn’t enough like other girls. To make matters even more confusing, some of the kids pressuring me to transition would also claim that “there’s only social pressures to be cisgender,” “you should never question someone’s gender,” “there’s not one type of male/female/nonbinary body,” and “nonbinary = not sexist.” Self-contradictions were abundant.
I never transitioned, but there were times I was tempted to because claiming to be a boy seemed like a quick way to make more friends and stop the struggles I was having with rigidly sexist family members. There were also times I became so confused at the contradictions in the pride clubs that I’d freeze up when kids asked my gender. When I finally made sense of the queer sexism and pointed it out, l lost freinds, which only fed into the pressures I felt to transition even though I could see transitioning was a bad idea. Worse yet, the majority of kids in the “LGB”TQ+ were trans, and some of the same ones telling me to take testosterone based on queer sexism were interested in cross-sex hormones for themselves.
Queer sexism almost drove me to make an awful decision, and I suspect some of my peers in the “LGB”TQ+ groups wound up mistakenly transitioning. I thought this was something unique to me until Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier came out with tales of young tomboys and lesbians coming to believe they should have been born as boys. A similar situation can be seen with Kierra Bell where her tomboy childhood and difficulties with puberty led to her and others suggesting that she might be better off altering her body to be more like a boy’s. Kierra Bell and many of the girls from Irreversible Damage actually transitioned, taking on the physical, mental, and financial costs of binding, hormones, and surgeries. The prevalence of queer sexism in “LGB”TQ+ spaces in alarming, especially when those publishing guidelines for the treatment of dysphoric and non-stereotypical children fall into the trap of queer sexism.
While I don’t think it benefits anyone long-term, I suspect queer sexism is especially bad for autistics and future LGB adults because we’re especially likely to be non-stereotypical. Adolescents noticing their emerging LGB attraction would have a motive to join “LGB”TQ+ groups and be taught queer sexism while autistics might have a harder time processing the strange, contradictory language used in these spaces. Plus, with higher rates of homosexual attractions in the austism community, I’m not the only one who has dealt with this intersection.
Again, I do believe that many enforcing queer sexism actually want to end sexism; some of the kids pressuring me to transition even framed it as the only way to beat sexism. While I somewhat agree with their motives, their actions take “LGB”TQ+ spaces in the wrong direction by entrenching sexism and leading people to mistakenly undergo a major medical transition due to the entrenched sexism.
The use of queer sexism and inability to notice it extends beyond my bizarre high school “LGB”TQ+ club. It’s present in peer reviewed research articles too.
As evidence that rigid thinking doesn’t contribute to the over-representation of autism within the transgender community, two peer-reviewed sources pointed to a prevalence of nonbinary identities within the autism community (Jack, 2014; Walsh, et. al., 2018). The idea that nonbinary labels are inherently non-rigid/not sexist was also represented by a researcher not asking non-binary participants about whether gender stereotypes mattered to them because it was assumed that stereotypes wouldn’t matter to non-binary participants (Strang, et. al. 2018).
With the real-world examples of queer sexism I’ve come across in my own life and in pieces like Irreversible Damage, this assumption doesn’t hold true. More importantly, a researcher that didn’t make this assumption found that nonbinary people displayed low mentalizing, a trait hypothosized to lead to rigid thinking about gender stereotypes (Kallitsounaki & Williams, 2020). (For example, someone with low mentalizing might see a man who sometimes wears dresses as “genderfluid” where others would just see that sometimes men wear dresses; there becomes an emphasis on “diversity of labels'' instead of “diversity within labels” when rigid thinking is used.)
It should be noted that this study did find binary trans people had the similar mentalizing abilities as cis people, so it seems unlikely that low mentalizing would explain all cases of transitioning. Additionally, only a small portion of the paper explored the mentalizing of nonbinary-identified people and the follow-up study did not investigate the nonbinary/low mentalizing overlap (Kallitsounaki & Williams, 2020; Kallitsounaki, et. al., 2021)
However, another researcher (Kung, 2020) examining theory of mind in transgender individuals found it to be lower in both nonbinary and binary trans people. With only a few studies and inconsistent results on binary trans people, it’s hard to know for certain what’s going on (especially when other researchers make assumptions that result in them not considering sexism and low mentalizing). Additional research is needed, but with the three available studdies that actually explored low mentalizing finding a correlation between low mentalizing and trans identities (especially the nonbinary ones) and real-world observations of queer sexism, it seems incorrect for researchers and everyday people to just assume that “queerer” labels represent reduced sexism.
References
Ehrensaft, Diane. (2016). The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes. The Experiment.
Jack, J. (2014). Autism and gender: From refrigerator mothers to computer geeks. Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Kallitsounaki, A., & Williams, D. (2020). Mentalising moderates the link between autism traits and current gender dysphoric features in primarily non-autistic, cisgender individuals. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50(11), 4148–4157. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04478-4
Kallitsounaki, A., Williams, D. M., & Lind, S. E. (2021). Links between autistic traits, feelings of gender dysphoria, and mentalising ability: replication and extension of previous findings from the general population. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 51(5), 1458–1465. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04626-w
Kung, Karson T. F. (2020). “Autistic Traits, Systemising, Empathising, and Theory of Mind in Transgender and Non-Binary Adults.” Molecular Autism, vol. 11, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-020-00378-7
Strang, J. F., Powers, M. D., Knauss, M., Leibowitz, S. F., Kenworthy, L., Sadikova, E., Wyss, S., Willing, L., Caplan, R., Pervez, N., Nowak, J., Gohari, D., Gomez-Lobo, V., Call, D., & Anthony, L. G. (2018). “They thought it was an obsession”: Trajectories and perspectives of autistic transgender and gender-diverse adolescents. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48(12), 4039–4055. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3723-6
Walsh, R. J., Krabbendam, L., Dewinter, J., & Begeer, S. (2018). Brief report: gender identity differences in autistic adults: associations with perceptual and socio-cognitive profiles. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48(12), 4070–4078. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3702-y