Why So Gendered Group Speaks Out

Concerned parties,We hear your voices.We deeply appreciate the concerns that have come up as our interventions have progressed.You might find it encouraging to know that people of a diversity of gender experiences, including transgender experiences, have been collaborating on the design and execution of this campaign. It is the product of many painful, careful discussions drawing from our own memories and daily realities. It is the fraught, imperfect cry for recognition that to make social change you have to draw people in who otherwise would not care. And that process can be uncomfortable for people in many different ways. It certainly is uncomfortable for us.

"It is the fraught, imperfect cry for recognition that to make social change you have to draw people in who otherwise would not care."

We have been stunned and gratified by the overwhelming community response. We have now at Exeter a remarkable concentration of people asking questions about the foundations of "gender" on which much of our society is based. Do we even need to identify people by “gender”? What function does that have? These were questions that we hadn’t heard being asked around Harkness tables, or in the many social spaces on campus usually so game for discussion. And all over the country, when people like us try to simply ask these questions in person we are dismissed as a minority interest group.This last campaign aimed not only to acknowledge the pain and difficulty faced by those of us particularly marginalized by gender segregation (and in particular bathroom segregation), but also to complexify people’s previously easy understanding of the gender binary, so that everyone—not just a tiny minority—is both affected by and implicated in this segregation.For those whose gender has never been questioned by others, or whose gender presentation is not regularly taunted and mocked, it can feel like questions of which bathroom to use are non-issues. But those very same people are often willing to share vocal opinions on whom to “allow” in these segregated spaces. By postering the bathrooms, we wanted to communicate the urgency of our entrapment in the litany of invasive questions that so many of us are accosted with every day-- by the genuinely curious, the openly hostile, the jeering, the threatened, the people just trying to be nice.These questions are not resolved by answers so simple as just “biology.” If bathroom designation is based on the person’s configuration of sexual organs, how do we account for people who have had medical procedures that have altered the configuration of those organs, either shortly after birth to “correct for abnormalities,” or later in life to keep them alive? If it is based on genetics, how do we account for people whose external features have always been completely consistent with a sex usually considered ‘opposite’ to the one their chromosomes indicate? How do we account for people with the many chromosomal differences that humans can be born with?It only gets more slippery from there. Is there a cutoff for waist-to-hip ratio? Breast size? How do we account for the enormous physical variation between different genetic lineages? Is there a cutoff for hair length? Fashion choices? How do we account for cultural variation in the meaning of these choices? When people read us as one gender or the other by calling us pronouns or yelling at us to get out of the bathroom or the dorm, they don’t ask about our personal identities, nor do they perform medical tests. They eyeball it.

"We must engage a broader community that is not prepared for the discussions we so urgently need to have."

When public interventions get people talking about their confusion, hearing those conversations is painful for many of us most affected by that confusion. We understand that pain and we know we have contributed to it. But in order to actually address the systemic causes of that pain, we must engage a broader community that is not prepared for the discussions we so urgently need to have.Major social change doesn't happen from people feeling comfortable. It often happens when we explicitize the biases and assumptions that make many people’s lives hard every day. With this bathroom campaign the humor came out of bitterness. And if you are angry about the way the complexifications and representations of the absurdity of gender policing made you feel, please also be angry with us against a system that exploits all of our bodies and holds them up to be scrutinized in relation to one another.There will be a forum on gender at Exeter in the Forum at 6 PM on Wednesday, October 30, hosted by GSA, Feminist Union, and Men Club. Some of us will be there. We hope to collaborate on solutions to these problems with as many different voices and experiences as possible. We encourage anyone with concerns about the operation of gender at Exeter to bring them to that discussion, and to the many other Harkness spaces we hope to create with you going forward.Thank you.This opinion piece was submitted to The Exonian under anonymity.