My partner and I recently watched this movie. I’m not going to mention the title, mainly for my own benefit as I think it will lead my little mind off topic, rambling on about parts of the movie that don’t matter here.  Initially I was expecting a movie that went for a lot of easy laughs of the men-only-think-about-sex variety.  However, after talking to some people, I was told this was not really the case.  So we watched it. 

Although I would not say it was the most prominent, cultural ideas about men and sex were a theme.  The main character is a straight man that is constantly urged by those around him to engage in the stereotypical behaviors associated with being straight and a “man” in our culture.  That is about as far as I want to go in summarizing the plot.  Suffice it to say that the character fails to meet many of these expectations for a variety of reasons, mostly because of personality traits like shyness. 

However, the movie got me thinking about how every person fails to meet all the criteria for any gender.  Even people who pressure others to act in more “gender appropriate” ways do not meet the standards.  I mean it seems sort of impossible to completely satisfy these expectations as the measure since gender is not a description of any sort of reality as much as it is a set of rules to obey.  Mostly I am talking about the binary gender system our culture attempts to sort us into, but I think it is (unfortunately) also possible for some trans/queer identities to become plagued by a set of expected behaviors. 

One of the interesting things about this type of gender regulation is that people who care about the person being scrutinized often initiate it.  And of course we are also subjected to all types of gender tyranny from people we don’t even know.  Gendered expectations of this sort are so…well, constant. 

A couple months ago I started reading two books within a few days of each other and both of them expressed a very similar idea about gender.  One of these books is Gendering Bodies in which authors Crawley, Foley, and Shehan write, “Gender is not just what you do but what others do to you.”  The other is Gay Masculinities where a contributor named Matt Mutchler writes, “At the same time that individuals do gender on a daily basis, gender is also done to individuals.”       

When I read these two quotes, I thought about how we are unable to control how people read our behavior or our gender display(s).  An individual might, for example wear a certain article of clothing with an intention of disrupting the gender binary, but others may not understand or honor that intention.  Anything we do to subvert gender can be read by others in a manner that just re-inscribes it.  Most people only consider gender to have two possibilities and if we don’t make ourselves fit one, they will do it for us.  As far as these people are concerned whatever we are doing with our gender, we are doing it wrong.

I would agree that other people police our behavior in these ways; that they “do gender to us”.  But it is important to realize that we also do it to ourselves and to others.  The way we uphold norms through routine interactions seems insignificant, assumed, and minute all of which can make it kind of invisible, because we often don’t even see it happening. 

A few months ago I was with a group of mostly straight guys and two other queers.  The straight guys were talking about something they wanted to do and one of the queer women asked “Why?” and then answered herself “Oh, because you’re boys.”  The guys all laughed and I searched my brain for something appropriate to say, and then the conversation had moved on without me and I never said anything.  It was such a small exchange, but they got a pass for their behavior.  But I think no one but my partner and me even realized it or thought it notable.

I’m not talking about this stuff just to be depressing.  I’m also not saying that this is the only way gender is enforced or the only way it can be resisted.  There are lots of ways gender asserts itself in our lives and lots of ways to fight it.  However, I think one of the advantages of focusing on these minuscule interactions is that anyone can do it.  It doesn’t matter how you identify: trans, genderqueer, cisgender (non-trans), whatever.  Without becoming so aware of these things that you can’t stand human interaction or beat yourself up for everything you let slip, you can find your own way to point out when people are making each other conform to the rules of gender. 

Sometimes it feels really overwhelming when I think about how pervasive the binary gender system is in our culture, and during those times it is nice to focus on the “small” things.  Sometimes I feel like I don’t have any control over how people respond to me or the way they feel about me, then I remind myself that I do have control over my own behavior. 

When I am feeling like the world is too hostile a place to play with gender, I try to stop focusing on myself.  I try to forget about how other people are reacting to me and try instead to concentrate on how I gender other people and really question if I am upholding my own standards.  Owning the ways that I help reproduce gender is just one more way that I can try to change it.  I also pay extra attention to the ways I use internalized ideas about gender to measure myself up or let these ideas shape my own actions.  I can’t change the fact that sometimes people are going to give me a hard time, but I can stop giving myself a hard time.  It may not seem like much, but I think it helps.