#genderunicorn

Last weekend, I had the good fortune of celebrating a friend’s wedding to a man she met when she was 14 and reconnected with a decade later. If you heard the full story, you might think a little fate had something to do with it all. For the gathering, there was a party bus, I wore something semi-fashionable for once, and I even drank mixed drinks without getting into trouble!

There was something else about this particular wedding that has stood out, however. One of those times when you are reminded how much you don’t know you don’t know about your fellow humans. 

It so happens that the man my friend married is transgender. This in itself was not what surprised me. It really stemmed from a one-page letter that accompanied the party invitation, in which my friend included some personal information about herself along with an image and explanation of the “Gender Unicorn.” Here is the exact diagram, courtesy of Trans Student Educational Resources:

I’d seen the Gender Unicorn before, but never fully grasped all the concepts it attempts to break down until my friend explained her own place on each of the different spectra in her letter. The thing that’s really stood out, then, about this wedding, was my dual-sided reaction to it.

In sum, The Good and The Thing That Needs to Change:

The Good

Talk about eye opening. You don’t realize how much you’ve been putting people into boxes until someone places something like that in front of you. 

Then you see just how many boxes you’d need to capture the diversity and awesomeness of the human experience. 

I hadn’t known my friend long before I became aware that she had been in relationships with both men and women. So the first box I put her into was “bisexual.” A little more time passed, and it occurred to me that this term didn’t really capture it. Then as I read her very honest letter, I learned that there were more invisible layers than that. As she described her own gender identity, expression and sexual orientation, the Gender Unicorn’s diagram made sense in a new way. For instance, I understood how someone’s gender identity and gender expression might not match, and not in a conflicted or tortured way, but in just the way that they are. In my friend’s case, she does not consider herself “female.” I never would have guessed that, because most of the time, she dresses in a very traditionally feminine manner, an aspect of her gender expression.

I needed a ton of new boxes. Maybe some new ones for myself, even, if I ever felt the need to put myself into some boxes in the same way (which I typically don’t - more on that in the next section).

It’s natural to want to categorize things, I think. Our tiny conscious brains have to organize our world in certain ways to help us navigate it, understand and appreciate others, and sometimes to protect ourselves. (One male friend suggested that most men start by putting people they encounter into one of two basic boxes: “Will you have sex with me? [y/n]”) 

In and of itself it’s not necessarily a bad thing to want to organize your world. But it can turn bad if we use the same mechanism to justify judgment, rejection or hatred of someone else because we don’t understand, can’t name, or perhaps because we identify uncomfortably close with the particular box that we think an aspect of another’s identity fits into. This brings us to the next lesson from the experience.

The Thing That Needs to Change

I appreciated that my friend shared something so personal, which allowed me to both get to know her better and to better comprehend things of which I had previously been ignorant. At the same time, the reason for her letter was upsetting. Its stated purpose was as a response to people reacting negatively to her marriage to a transgender man. As a means of helping people accept something often misunderstood and therefore feared, the letter was mature and informative.

The Thing That Needs to Change, though, is that anyone, ever, would feel compelled to justify the choice to enter into a partnership and create a life with someone they love simply because one or both parties don’t fit into a common box.

While I appreciated the letter, I felt upset that my friend needed to write it. She expended time and energy that should have been focused solely on her own celebration of a great moment in life.

Just imagine if I, a heterosexual cis woman, had to write a detailed letter to my close family and friends about my sexual desires, history of emotional connections with men, and reasons for dressing the way I do, in order to make them okay with my marriage to a hetero cis man. Know what? I wouldn’t do it. People who don’t fit into my gender/orientation boxes shouldn’t have to, either.