There are occasions when singing not beautifully matters and as long as you have infrastructure in place to heal from the times when you sing less beautifully because it matters that you do that.

This is all me summarizing what we've said so far here in the Zombie Apocalypse edition.

And we decided that the our next step after Let It Burn because the world is on fire is one of our most powerful fire hoses is the deconstruction of what I have come to call the binary mirage.

Good.

Yeah.

So let's first talk about, and if you've read the two chapters about the binary mirage in Come Together, then you know approximately what I'm talking about.

But here's why it's so important.

If anybody doesn't know what Come Together is, it's Emily's newest book.

Yeah, it's the book I published this year about sex and long term relationships of any structure and any gender combination.

And so 2020, for no particular reason, I spent a lot of time learning about what a sex educator's role might be in an autocratic state, especially in a modern autocratic state.

And it turned out to be quite simple because it turns out the gender binary is a keystone of the modern autocratic state, particularly the kleptocratic cakestocracy, particularly in the kind of kleptocratic cakestocracy that is intended for the American autocratic state.

Before you define cakestocracy for us, I also want to say that enforcement of rigid gender roles was a major highlight of old school fascism in Mussolini's Italy.

Oh, yeah, I'll get that.

Hitler's Germany.

Just okay, okay, good, good, good.

It's not new.

Yeah, no, it's not.

It is in no way new.

It is absolutely foundational to any 20th century onward, like from the very origins of fascism.

Mussolini was sexually compulsive with crowds of concubines whose lives were permanently changed once Mussolini had had sex with them because he would have soldiers follow them around.

It was very bad and gross.

It was all gross.

The nugamilias making all the bad faces.

You're making all the faces that make sense to make when we talk about Mussolini's sex life.

Gross.

Mussolini's sex life was real misogynist.

Surprise.

And in case anybody got confused by J.K.

Rowling not knowing this, Adolf Hitler absolutely targeted LGBT people in his regime.

He burnt books about transgender health.

That's absolutely and J.K.

Rowling upon being confronted with like, "Hey, so does it bother you at all that the thing you're saying is in line with what Hitler said?"

And she was like, "That's not true."

And when people were like, "Here's some history," she was like, "It is in no way true that transgender people were the primary target of the Holocaust."

Like, bitch, nobody said they were.

They were a target.

We all know the Jews were the primary target, but you don't have to be the primary target to feel very fucking targeted to be a literal target and to be in extreme danger for your life.

Because it's never just one group they come for.

It's never just one group they come for.

And here's the thing.

There's always a different group that different groups come for.

Right?

So whether it's Italy in the original fascists of the 1930s, or it is the Hutu power movement of the 1990s, or is present day Poland or Turkey, they always have a them.

But the them is going to be different, depending what continent and culture is claiming dominance.

Right?

The them is going to be different.

Because it isn't actually the villainy of that group that's the problem.

It's the fact that they need to name an enemy.

So they just pick somebody who is actually perfectly innocent.

So the specificity of the enemy is going to vary from culture to culture.

But what does not vary from culture to culture, it doesn't matter what century it is, it doesn't matter what continent the fascism or autocracy is on, there is always a rigidly enforced patriarchal, cis hetero patriarchal, specifically misogynist culture, laws, norms, integral to all of these autocracies.

There is a father of the nation, and his moral authority is deriving from his strength to physically dominate others.

So why?

Why?

Why do all of these fascism's autocracies, dictatorships require rigidly enforced gender binary?

Because the men are the gears in the capitalist machine until they are needed as cannon fodder.

And women are the manufacturers of those gears.

The government requires women to raise and make the babies and men to make and use the weapons.

The autocracy requires our bodies to perform our genders according to our reproductive anatomy, in order to fuel the turning destructive engine of the kleptocracy, in particular at the core of 21st century autocracies.

For example, women were punished in Hitler's Germany for not wanting children, for refusing to marry and have children, and also for being what they called promiscuous, for having too many partners and not having children within the structure of a family, like a nuclear family.

Yeah, all the way up to Putin making the LGBT movement illegal.

Yeah.

Add to that Project 2025, and we are caught up to the full future.

And so it is a universal aspect.

The function of the binary mirage being enforced, being policed on our bodies, is to keep us fueling the engine to make the richest people in the world who are in control of our government now even richer.

Our bodies are a combination of manufacturer and cannon fodder.

Yeah.

So is that a bleak enough assessment of why we need to talk about the gender binary?

I believe you.

Yeah.

They're going to punish us for not behaving ourselves.

We're not having enough children.

We are two people who have never given birth, either one of us.

Though you have parented three children.

Yeah, I'm a step parent.

I'm a step parent of three people now in their late 20s and early 30s.

And you've been in their lives since they were tiny children.

Since they were tiny, tiny children.

Yeah.

Sarah was a baby.

So you have parented, you've done a lot of parenting under difficult circumstances.

More than I ever expected to.

I actively did not want children.

And it was a hesitation for me getting together with my husband.

He's got kids.

I'm going to have to be a stepmother.

And oof, I don't want to do that.

But it turned out to be the best possible thing ever to happen to me.

I love almost everything about it.

I still am glad I never gave birth to children.

I didn't want to do it.

I don't think I could have been a competent mother when I was younger.

So I think the role I had was the level of parenting that I was prepared to do had the capacity for it.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So you got to make a positive contribution.

You got to do something that contributed, I am absolutely sure, positively to those kids' lives.

And also, it was good for you too.

Yeah, exactly.

And let's face it, it was really good for you to be in the presence of someone fathering their children beautifully.

Yeah.

He's a good dad.

He's a great dad.

Yeah.

He tells his kids he loves them out loud.

They hug.

They see cugs.

Yeah, they call him daddy.

As adults, they're grown.

And they're like, "Luffy daddy."

Like, yeah.

Witnessing someone be a father like that when our mother was never like that.

It was really moving to be a part of that.

And yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we are not anti-child.

We are not anti-parent.

No, no, no.

Yeah.

This is not for us.

We just are people who never did that and therefore defied the script and are exactly the people that J.D.

Vance means when he says, "Childless cat ladies."

Yeah.

He believes that we are miserable because we are not fulfilling our role.

Yeah.

Although both of us have been teachers and I taught elementary school, middle school, and high school as well as college, I have taken on shaping the future of children as a profession and I love it.

And I feel like I made a difference to some kids.

And I don't enjoy children. [laughs] And I feel like I don't understand them.

And the world is a better place because I never taught children.

I only ever taught at the college level.

So the reason we're talking about gender is because an autocratic state, especially a kleptocratic state.

So, so cakistography, cakistogr- cakistocracy?

A cakistocracy is a state that is run by the worst of us.

The intention is to destroy the institutions so that they are badly run so that theft can take place, which is the kleptocracy part of it.

So that we already live in rising wealth inequality.

That's going to go up rapidly.

And the point of breaking our institutions is to make, like crack it open like an egg so that Elon Musk can suck out the yoke.

And it's gonna leave the people who are already struggling the most in the worst shape.

And the lie that's going to be told is that it is the fault of feminists.

Because we, we apparently broke the economy.

Apparently we in our feminism in the 70s broke the economy.

It's us and not trickle down economics.

And let me say, like there's a correlation in the, in the time periods that women went into the workforce and trickle down economics.

But I'm going to go ahead and say that women moving in vast numbers into the workforce had more to do with it was no longer possible to buy a home and raise a family on one income because of trickle down economics than it was because women were in the workforce and that deflated salaries.

Yeah, correlation not causation.

Yeah.

The causation is between trickle down economics, the attempt at that.

That's the causation.

But there's, there's a, there is a correlation between women joining the workforce, but that's not where the cause leads lies.

Right.

And so that's the lie that's going to be told as the economy gets worse and worse and worse and worse and all the people who voted because they wanted eggs to be more affordable are going to find that eggs are way less affordable, not least because there's going to be a whole lot more bird flu in our eggs.

Yeah.

If, if our cake gets nominated, oh my God, don't get me started.

If that happens, we'll have a, let's just talk about gender.

Let's, we'll just have a whole public health episode, some other episode.

Let's focus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We'll talk about the price of eggs later.

But the reason they're, so they're going to lie.

They're going to say that it's because women are not obeying their natural biological role.

Yeah.

So that's the reason why it is so essential that we not buy this myth.

It is not in any way supported by anything that the science has had to say about gender by any reasonable scientist for a couple of decades now.

Let's talk about the natural biological role of gender for a hot second, because I needed you to explain this to me.

Oh, okay.

Back many years ago, I needed you to explain to me about, because, about gender.

Cause I was like, well, isn't it an anatomical though?

Like, isn't that true?

And you were like, yeah, anatomical sex, not binary.

And I was like, but I mean, there's that whole X, Y thing.

And you were like, yep, chromosomal sex, not binary.

Not binary.

And I found that to be a tremendous relief.

So in terms of anybody claiming that like, the science says there are two sexes.

And so if anybody feels like they don't have the, the weapons to argue that, to fight against that, the, the, the science that refutes that is anatomical sex, not binary, chromosomal sex, not binary, social gender ideas, gonadal sex, also not binary.

Gonads are your, um, sexually producing organs.

It's your testes ovaries.

That's what I meant by anatomy.

Anatomy is, uh, your external organs.

So whether you have a penis or a vagina or a clitoris, like there's the, so intersex folks are the example of anatomical sex, not being binary.

And there's a wide variety of intersex conditions that result in, in genitals that, I mean, when you look at them, maybe some people see it's a boy and some people see it's a girl, but a lot of people are like, something in the middle.

Yeah.

So anyway, anatomical, gonadal, chromosomal, all not binary.

All real.

All biological sex is real.

But not binary.

And at no level of analysis is it binary.

And also culturally, it's really only a few cultures who decided that gender is a strict binary and there's no in between.

Um, and we happen to be the culture that colonized most of the rest of the world.

Yes.

Western Christian colonization erased from the earth, a great variety of cultures where as people grew up, like they were growing up in cultures that had three or four or five or no genders as differentiated based on reproductive organs.

Yeah.

So, which is why all of us can confidently say that gender is a social construct of the white supremacist patriarchy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

It's colonialism.

It's imperialism.

Yeah.

So even biological sex is not binary.

Yeah.

So why on earth would cultural gender be binary?

Right.

The reason it would be binary culturally is that the machine needs cogs.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Great.

Good.

So clarifying biological sex, real and on no level binary.

And the autocracy requires you to believe that binary is not only real, but also a mandatory, and you are violating your role as a human on earth.

If you do not follow the rules that are associated with the category you get put into on the day you're born and people look at your genitals and go, it's a boy or it's a girl, or it's an intersex person.

We're going to have to operate, which, um, the United Nations special reporter for torture has, it's been categorized as a form of torture to operate on the genitals of an intersex person before they are old enough to give consent.

Yeah.

That's, that's the thing that's been true for a long time now for way over a decade now.

Yeah.

And here we still are.

Yeah.

So have we all bought into the idea of the gender, not sex, biological sex, for sure, not a binary biological sex, real and not binary.

And I want to acknowledge that humans are like a sexually dimorphous species.

Our basic system of reproduction is based on like, right?

The it's a boy people having sperm and the it's a girl people having eggs, but that does not in any way change the reality that when you get down to the individual level, you find a vast array of diversity.

Yeah.

Not just people in the it's a girl group in the it's a boy group group.

That's a science thing I learned while writing burnout, the difference between things that are true at a population level and the things, those same things as they manifest at an individual level are so much more nuanced because, and it's valuable to talk about things at a population level.

Girls become women who have babies at a population level.

That's true.

But at an individual level, that means nothing.

Yes, it means nothing.

So you as you are, are you, and it may be true for you.

It may be true for any given listener as it is for me that basically the role I got assigned on the day we were born was not an awful fit for my identity.

When people indicate me and say she that feels better for me than if someone indicates me and they say them or he.

I have been misgendered.

I've been called Mr.

Nagoski.

I've been called sir.

Yeah, we fly together and people think we're like a married couple or something.

Right.

And they call me Mrs.

Nagoski and you Mr.

Nagoski.

Yeah.

Even, even though we're both technically Dr.

Nagoski, even though we're both technically Dr.

Nagoski.

And this was like actually a revelatory moment for you because it happened.

And I was like, oh, that doesn't feel good.

I was like, I was a little jealous.

Yeah.

How come you're the one who got misgendered?

How come I'm the one who got misgendered is just because my choices in clothing were slightly more obscuring all our lives.

I have presented as more feminine than you.

Would you say that's true?

Yes.

I think that's partly why you carry around.

And I have always been like, why are you doing that?

Why are you putting on makeup?

Why are you wearing a dress?

Yeah.

And I've always been like, how come you're not doing this thing we're supposed to do?

Because I have been performing gender for as long as I can remember.

As kids, my favorite color was pink because I was told that's what girls favorite.

It was never my favorite color.

I'm just admitting that.

I'm sorry, Aunt Sally.

You bought me all that pink stuff because you thought it was my favorite color.

It was the color I was told that girls were supposed to be their favorite.

So I was doing that when we got our first big girl bikes.

Yeah.

I'm a rule following autistic, right?

Yeah.

Right.

I'm not a big girl.

Breaking autistic.

Yours was sky blue.

Yeah.

With a big banana seat and streamers on the handlebars.

Yeah.

And clouds, but it wasn't pink and I was, I really like, I love that bike so much.

Mine was a black BMX.

Yeah.

And I love that bike.

Yeah.

And credit to our mom.

I was like, I want that one.

Yeah.

I got no shit for it.

Yeah.

None.

Yeah.

Clearly, our mother had other things, bigger fish to fry in our life than like, which bike her kid chose.

Yeah.

But like there are a lot of parents who would have at least question my choice, pointed me towards something more feminine.

Yeah.

And it just didn't happen.

Yeah.

Thank goodness.

Our mother had bigger fish to fry than my gender expression.

Yeah.

And I also think that she had had experiences where she felt obliged to put on makeup every time she left the house and she knew that that was uncomfortable and kind of unfair.

And she, you know, anyway, I absorbed the idea that these are things that girls do.

And so I, as I always, you have the blessing of having an internal experience that shouts at you.

Yes.

So that you just don't, if a rule doesn't feel comfortable, you just don't follow it.

Mostly.

Yeah.

Mostly.

Unless I get punished for not following.

Whereas my internal experience is barely a whisper.

So if a rule comes along, that's much louder to me than anything coming from inside you.

Right.

So I just follow the external rules until the stress of trying to reconcile the external rules with my internal experience becomes so stressful that I ended up in the hospital.

Yeah.

So that's not great.

But I think that's why I always conformed more to like the gender expectation than you ever did.

And I think that might be why you kind of still have this like underlying feeling that I was always the pretty one.

I was always the one who was following the rules.

You were always the feminine one.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah.

You were the one who obeyed and that made you pretty.

It made me conform.

Yeah.

And conforming is kind of what we always thought of as pretty.

Whereas I have always had access, for example, to my rage.

Yeah.

So in the fourth grade, I was really angry at an adult.

Yeah.

And that adult told me, you look really ugly when you're angry.

Right.

And I remember that.

And you just didn't have access to your rage.

And so nobody ever told you you were ugly when you were angry.

Because yeah, because I you didn't do it.

Yeah.

So let's let's talk about, do you want to talk about the science of this?

I don't feel equipped to talk about the science of it.

Do you want me to explain to you some of the science of how our gender identity develops?

Please do.

You tell the science and I'll be like, oh, yeah, this is true.

We're not true for me.

Yeah.

So we're primary looking at the research of sorry, Van Anders and, and Fosso Sterling, and Fosso Sterling has been studying this since the 80s.

And her work is really, really essential.

Yeah.

Back in the 90s, she was writing about the five sexes.

And it's just really brilliant way ahead of its time work.

I don't recommend that people go and read the work from the 90s, because like the language has changed so fast.

Right.

The science has changed so fast that it feels out of date in a way that can feel alienating to people who aren't aware of the history.

Gotcha.

But like, let's just stick with the work from the 20, from the 2020s.

Okay.

So Dr.

Van Fosso Sterling explains the development of gender as beginning roughly at birth and in roughly three developmental phases.

Are you ready?

Yeah.

Phase one, first 15 months of after birth, the phenomenon that she and sorry, Van Anders label gender sex is an intersubjective project and intersubjective project.

So it is between two subjects.

And those subjects are the infant and the caregiver.

The infant and the caregiver are co creating the infant's first understandings of their body and its parts and what all of those things mean, your body gets held and bathed, your diapers are changed, your vocalizations are responded to by people who have ideas about who you are likely to become based on the gender they assigned you when they looked at the shape of your genitals.

Does that make sense so far?

Yeah.

So if you are assigned the it's a boy category based on the shape of your genitals, then when you have a really loud protesting vocalization, you're being a boy.

And if you have the it's a girl shape of genitals, and you make a really loud protesting vocalization, you're being a bad girl.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Aren't you a bossy little baby?

As opposed to Oh, what a strong man boy, you're gonna be yeah.

A woman read come as you are.

She told me the story of watching her adult brother changing his baby daughter's diaper and she was all clean.

He reaches for the fresh diaper.

When he looks back at her, the little baby is touching her genitals and he goes, Don't touch that.

And this woman who had just read come as you are was like, I was thinking, what would he have said?

How would he have reacted if his baby had had a penis instead?

Yeah.

Like he might have been like, get out of there.

I gotta change your diaper.

But would he have scolded his child?

And don't we love it when our babies discover new parts of their bodies?

Don't we celebrate when a baby finds their feet?

Did you find your feet?

Are you a baby?

What would you tell us you woosies?

Right?

Yeah.

So that's the intersubjective project, the first year and a half approximately of a child's life, where your body is having its identity co created with the adult caregivers who hold your body and respond to your needs.

Yeah.

There's a short sort of like 15 to 18 months window that is sort of a transitional period of instability is what Anfosso Sterling calls it.

We are transitioning from the intersubjective phase to gender sex subjectivity.

So it's just like a massive transition that we don't really understand yet.

And eventually there'll be a calculus formula that explains the transition from phase one to phase three.

But phase three is the initial stabilization of the subjective sense of self.

This is we were talking last time about how like babies at first don't understand that they're different and separate from other people.

And then they're like, I could say no.

So the initial stabilization of the subjective sense of self comes along with the realization that this person is separate from other people 18 to three 18 months to the age of 336 months.

In this period, this little tiny human is getting their own sense of self.

And that includes their own sense of their gender sex.

The super short version is that you spend the first year and a half of your life being told over and over and over, you're a girl, you're a girl, you're a girl, and you're adult caregivers, whether you're a parent, they're a parent, they're an employee at an orphanage or whoever they are, they engage with your body in ways that are shaped by their understanding of what it means that you're a girl, you're a girl, you're a girl.

And you meet with all these other humans who are like children around you and adults, and they're all treated as boys or girls or men or women.

And all of this is teaching your body who you are in the context of your family and in your culture.

From then on, your identity is the product.

So that's now you're three.

And you have understood that you are a participant in this culture, that you are your girl, you're a girl, you're a girl, or you're a boy, you're a boy, you're a boy, you're learning by the way people treat you.

And by the way people in your category are treated, and people not in your category are treated, what that means about how you're supposed to behave.

Are you a strong boy?

Are you a sweet, pretty nice little girl?

I gotta say you just repeating you're a girl, you're a girl, you're a girl, it feels a little bit like you're poking me.

It feels a little uncomfortable.

I know you're not talking to me, but even just hearing it makes me like, yeah, exactly.

Now that I can hear my internal experience, because would you say something has changed within you?

Something is not the same.

Are you through playing by the rules of someone else's game?

I can't remember the next line.

Me either.

Um, I don't know.

I don't think it has changed.

There's a reason why Wicked is what, there's a reason why Cynthia Rivo is in there.

I don't think it has changed.

I think I am more attuned to my internal experience.

Yes, the thing that has changed within you is not your identity, it is your ability to recognize your internal experience.

Yeah, just yesterday I went to an opera and I asked somebody who was working there, where are the restrooms?

And he went, the ladies room was around the corner and I was like, oh, you're just gonna gender me like that, huh?

I mean, and I know, I know everything about me cries middle-aged lady.

I know that, but like the discomfort that comes of being told, I bet all the bathrooms were over there and it was just unnecessary for that person to say the ladies room.

No, it literally was the ladies room was over there and the men's room was like on the other wing.

Like, so he did have to specify.

Yeah.

Because he kind of outside said the ladies room is over here.

Yeah.

Oh dear.

Yeah.

So I mean, it just was like, and I get it, people are going to do that.

It's fine.

I get it.

But it was like, now that I'm aware of my own internal experience, I can feel how uncomfortable it is.

So that's important because though we don't have a solid model for how gender identity develops beyond the third year of life, because that's already so complex, what happens in those first three years.

Right.

But at a broad, I'm just going to sort of broadly describe what's happening inside the body of a human navigating the world.

Your identity develops as the product of a lifelong three parts.

You can think of it as like a jazz improvisation of three instruments between your nervous system, specifically your body in general and your environment, right?

So your nervous system knows things and it tells your body what to do about that knowledge.

And your body does the things that your nervous system tells it to.

And thus it engages with the world.

And the world gives feedback about what you did.

And the body receives that feedback and passes it on to the central nervous system, which teaches the brain.

Oh, the brain receives new information, which shapes what the brain tells the body to do next, which changes how the body behaves, which changes the feedback you get.

It's this constant ongoing loop.

So if you get the, it's a boy assignment, you're a boy, you're a boy, you're a boy.

Your brain is learning that affectionate cuddling with the parent feels good because that's just true.

So it tells the body to go seek some affectionate cuddling with an adult caregiver.

And the parent responds by telling the child to be a big boy and go play.

And the body conveys that feedback to the brain, which knows that acceptance from adult caregivers for children is literally a matter of life and death.

And so it learns that how it does not matter how nice affectionate cuddling feels.

It's not as important as being accepted by the adults in your life.

And so you got to find something else that feels good since affectionate cuddling is out of bounds.

Yeah.

But imagine, imagine a world where you live in a culture where there's more than two genders.

Let's just simply create three genders.

Okay.

So I'm going to use the phrase two spirit here, acknowledging that it is a compromise term that collapses indigenous American cultures into one term just to make it easier to talk about because across indigenous populations of North America, many different cultures had many different ways of constructing gender.

And like there's not a right number of gender identities.

Two isn't right.

Zero isn't right.

Five isn't right.

Four isn't right.

There's just different ways of constructing gender.

Yeah.

And the gender construction that exists in the culture of your life is going to shape how your body receives it.

So if you grow up in a culture where there's, say there's men and there's women and there's two spirit people, and you happen to be a young two spirit child, you were assigned probably girl or boy at birth, but you're going to wander through your culture, a family member to family member, meeting people who are men, meeting people who are men, meeting people who are two spirit.

And you learned that even if the adults treat them like you're a boy, you're a boy, you're a boy.

Also your brain is like, and these other people exist too, two spirit people.

And as you develop within that world, your brain learns that spaces filled with two spirit people are the places where you feel comfortable.

And so your nervous system is going to guide your body to those spaces where your body finds joy and comfort that it doesn't find in the, it's a girl spaces or the, it's a boy spaces.

And thus the identity evolves in response to accesses of those spaces.

Right?

Yeah.

So if you're a trans woman and you go to the grocery store and the person at the checkout interacts with you based on their perception of you as a woman, that feeds back to your brain and reinv it's, this is the reason why it's called gender affirming care is because it feeds back to the brain's understanding that you're a woman, you're a woman, you're a woman.

And this all follows a period of life when the world was reacting to her body with you're a boy, you're a boy, you're a boy.

And it felt that poke, that poke that you felt like that for every day, every moment for years.

And it feels so wrong.

And then you find out that transgender is a thing a person can be.

Yeah.

And you're like, Oh, I could fix this.

What if, what if I could fix this?

When I heard the term agender for the first time, I was like, because I, in my thirties, I kind of had an idea that I didn't identify quite okay, no, the first time the feedback loop failed me, that it wouldn't reward me for conforming to feminine ideals was in the ninth grade, Mrs.

Robinson assigned us a poem.

And the assignment was to write a poem that went, I am a adjective noun, and the noun would stay the same and the adjective would change.

So for example, I am a tall girl, I am a brown eyed girl, or whatever, and I could not bring myself to put I am a anything girl or anything woman I, they just felt just everything in me said no.

And so some boy I knew was taking French glass.

And he was like, how about you use femme?

That's the that's the French word.

And I guess the the word it was foreign enough to my brain, because I did not take French.

That like, so I ended up using I am a whatever femme in it.

And I there was no language about being like a femme boy, or that did not exist in 1991.

Like that, that was not part of the vocabulary then.

So it worked out, but that was the first time that I like my internal message was louder than the external message.

I remember it very clearly.

So in my 30s, when I was like in doctoral school, and I had people around me who were studying gender studies at the doctoral level, talking about gender identity and stuff.

I had the thought like my gender identity is boss ass bitch.

Because that felt truer than any like girl or woman or anything had ever felt.

Yeah.

And then I learned the term a gender and I was like, Oh, because I never felt I was male or female or masculine.

You didn't want to write I am a whatever boy.

No, that wasn't true.

That also didn't feel like and if I had known the term like non binary as if I have a gender, it's just not either one of these two.

It's a third thing, which is what I always perceive non binary to be is like some other option of gender.

Sure.

Like gender queer gender fluid, gender fluid.

These are sort of the opposite of a gender in a way, because it's like, yeah, whole bunch a lot of like a look who is this, like, spectacular poet, performer, comedian, brilliant, gender fluid person.

And if you're not familiar with the work of a local men on you should go find them everywhere.

Smell it.

Al okay.

Okay, is all you need.

And they just have like lots of gender expression.

They express a lot of gender in different ways.

Given the day, the idea that people feel gender is so weird to me.

It feels like like term does not apply to me.

Just none of that.

No, thank you.

No.

I didn't know there was a word for that.

Yeah.

Which is funny because my sister is one of the world's leading experts in gender and sex.

And I feel like you were kind of like I said the word.

But I mean, I would definitely not have like paused to define it.

No, because like so many people who have people in their lives under the trans umbrella, it didn't occur to me that I might have someone in my life in my like immediate family.

Yeah, you're twin.

It truly just didn't.

You might have identical genes to my identical twin would have a different gender identity.

Yeah.

And it's not that I feel like deeply woman.

Yeah.

It's that woman is better than anything else.

Yeah, he for sure doesn't feel good.

And this is like a simple way for people who identify as cisgender to like find their way into exploring their gender identity.

Yeah.

It's like how does each pronoun option feel to you?

Yeah.

Because sometimes people use they for me when they're not sure what gender is like, what pronouns I choose.

And it's a way of being polite.

Yeah.

And like it doesn't feel as good as she, she feels best.

Oh, yeah.

I, again, since high school, have been like baffled that people talk about me as she, they mean me.

I'm a she.

Okay, like I guess that's true.

And I've gotten used to it.

But like I had to get used to it.

I really definitely was like, she means me.

Whereas I had at almost exactly the same time, maybe a year later, I was in the school play, because of course, I was in the school play, of course you were.

It was the crucible.

As a matter of fact, I had a small role at four lines in the crucible.

And Mr.

Smith was I was stage crew for the crucible, just so we understand the roles we played.

Yeah.

And Mr.

Smith was giving direction.

And he pointed at me, and he pointed at the path I was supposed to travel.

And he's talking to a different actor on stage and says, she's gonna go from here, downstage to here.

And I had a little flutter of gender joy.

I really liked the feeling of being referred to as she at 15.

There is a part of me that is still one year old, assuming that everyone's experience of gender is the same as mine.

Because it really feels like I still have kind of the default feeling.

I know that this is wrong.

But I have the default feeling like people are only ever performing gender.

And I know that that's not true.

But it still feels confusing to me that people really do identify.

That I have an internal experience of being placed in the category of a gender and feeling good about it.

Yeah, that seems weird to me.

I kind of assumed that everyone was just performing gender, like me, like we all knew it was fake.

And we're all just following the rules.

And you're all just exactly like emotions.

Like that's how I felt about emotions.

Like in college, is people who are big and dramatic are just like, faking emotion, because they think that they're supposed to.

I know that that's not right or true.

Yeah.

And here I have this like, really clear memory.

Yeah.

Of feeling so affirmed.

Yeah.

By and there was no reason anybody would ever refer to me as anything other than she in 1992.

Oh, yeah.

So if you're like exploring your gender, start by exploring pronouns.

Yeah.

And if what you come to is, whoa.

Okay, so other pronouns feel different, then you might be somewhere under the transgender umbrella.

My thoughts about pronouns were very much flavored by our grammar conscious father upbringing.

Yeah.

Like we were quizzed on grammar at the dinner table.

And I was always very good at grammar.

I scored like my, my GRE score in verbal intelligence with people who are like, had master's degrees in writing and stuff.

Like I was in the top, top, top percentile for verbal.

Yeah.

I had the highest score.

So me, and also because I am a rules follower, I love grammar because the rules are so complicated and interesting and purposeful.

I mean, they do have interesting and complicated.

Yes.

I mean, no.

And like when you break a rule, it's purposeful and like, whether or not to, it does something to the meaning, it does something to the meaning and to know the rules and to break the rules on purpose has value.

Right.

So anyway, my, one of the hold backs I always had about non-he/she pronouns was the grammar of it felt like a, like it was so much, it was such a big ask of a person to use a different pronoun.

I don't feel that way now.

I understand now.

Yeah.

But that was, that was because I was a rules follower.

That was a thing that genuinely stopped me from feeling natural and comfortable with, with non-he/she pronouns.

Let the record show that in 2014, I had to fight through three grotesque copyedits of Come As You Are, where I insisted over and over again.

I don't care what your fucking grammatical style sheet, whatever, I'm going to use a singular they.

Yeah.

I'm not going to use he or she.

I'm not going to use S slash he.

We're using the singular they because the people that includes matter more than your goddamn stupid fucking rule.

For the record, three copyedits is way more copyedits than one is the usual number of copyedits.

Yeah.

It was disgusting.

I had to write a letter explaining that the human beings involved here matter more than the rules.

And I do believe that Come As You Are is the first book published by Simon and Schuster that intentionally uses singular they throughout.

Yeah.

And there was like, I had a hard...

Now there's no argument.

Now people know.

Within two years, the Chicago Manual style changed the rules to include the singular they.

And when we copyed burnout in 2018, 18, there was no fighting.

17?

There was no fight.

Yeah, no fight.

No.

So in some domains, things have changed.

The rules changed fast when people started fighting.

Yeah.

When like, just like huge numbers of people refused.

And I'm sure there were authors before me who fought, who fought hard.

Yeah.

And I happened to continue fighting hard enough because it mattered enough to me that I was like, and the thing is, it's so small.

It is this tiny change.

Yeah.

It is almost invisible, especially 10 years later.

It is an invisible reality that took up months of my life that I had to fight for that.

And this is me claiming credit for like the work I put in to make this tiny fucking change.

And that's the thing is that it takes all of us working as hard as we can, caring about the details of inclusion, to make tiny changes.

And this just goes to show the rigidity of the gender binary in society that we do value a grammar rule over the honoring of human identity.

And let's face it, we all fucking understand what singular they means.

We do.

But we were all also explicitly taught, do not use it or else.

That shit sits deep inside us.

Let me offer two, two experiences that I can name myself having because I have a degree of like expertise and legitimacy where that protects me from the judgment that might come from these two stories.

Story number one, the first day in my life that I ever had to talk about a non-binary person in the third person, I was talking to a student who was in a relationship with a non-binary person.

And it was the first time I'd ever had to do it.

This is 2008.

And it was a tongue twister, that first time.

And only that first time.

But let me acknowledge there's some friction, the first time you refer to an individual human with they and on purpose.

Do you think themselves?

Is it themself?

I think it's themself.

I use themself.

But yeah, no, it was like that first time I had to stop and think about it.

It used a little bit of cognitive load.

Yeah.

And I feel comfortable saying that out loud because it was just that one time and like you get over it.

Yeah.

New stuff is new.

And it does take a little extra thinking.

And you know what?

Does it take you so much effort that it's that you're not going to recognize that other person's human experience?

Right.

Exactly.

Like, obviously not.

So minuscule compared to, you know, the importance of being a respectful communicator.

Yeah.

And so that same year is the first time I heard the phrases people who get pregnant and people who menstruate.

Yeah.

And I was working at Smith College and I had been working with and around and for transgender people for many years at that point already.

And this was a new way of talking about reproductive roles.

Yeah.

And even though I 100 percent knew that it mattered because like, I'm not a person who menstruates.

I haven't had a period in a really long time because of my birth control.

And I recognize the value of having a term that described only the people who are included, only the people who have periods need to be talked about here.

But everybody who has a period needs to be talked about here regardless of what their gender identity is.

And we have already established that your gender identity is not constrained by your reproductive organs and their functioning.

Yeah.

And so, but I was working at a women's college and I was feeling the ways that women do not yet have all the things that they deserve.

Yeah.

And I had a moment.

I had a thing happen in my heart that was like, I want women to be able to take up space.

I want that for women because we still have in America a really shocking rate of maternal morbidity and mortality.

Yeah.

And we haven't fixed that.

And we're already going to transition into language that includes trans and non-binary people when even just cisgender women still have so much ground to cover to catch up to cisgender men.

Yeah.

Really?

Are we going to do that?

And I didn't talk about it online because I recognized that this was a me problem.

Yeah.

I talked about it with my therapist who also does work around like supporting trans students at every grade level.

And she could hear me say, I know that both of these things are true and I need a day to make space for it inside me.

Yeah.

And that was 2008 and I made space for it inside me.

Yeah.

And I did not fucking tweet my feelings because some feelings are feelings that you have inside, inside with your friends, with your helping professionals.

And some feelings are feelings that you put on the internet.

And the way you tell the difference between those two is, have you processed this privately first?

Yeah.

Have you looked at where your feeling is coming from?

Yeah.

And does that feeling matter more than the people who are included in this new language?

Yeah.

No.

Because when we create space for gender diversity, the people who are included, when we do that, it doesn't just make the world better for the people who are included in this new language.

It makes the world better for everyone.

And honestly, we all know that a lot of women are included in that.

Like the thing that TERFs complain about is that that kind of language erases women.

That's just bullshit.

There's so many of us.

We are not going to get erased.

And the thing is, I know when they say that that language erases women, I know that that is coming from their feeling that like, I have been erased.

Girl, I feel you.

I get that.

I get that feeling.

And imagine being fucking agender.

Yeah.

How erased is that?

Yeah.

Like, I'm a person who menstruates because I'm not on birth control.

But I really felt uncomfortable when that dude told me where the ladies room was.

And I don't know.

Because like, I don't know what the bathroom answer is for you.

It's the answer is the ladies room because it's much cleaner.

No, I would never go to a men's room.

Like, no, first of all, they smell worse.

I don't have the like, you know, you go into a stall, but they have fewer stalls.

They have fewer.

Like, no, and I have no interest in the men's room.

Like a men's room is not more comfortable to me than a women's room.

But it is cleaner.

The women's room.

It's cleaner.

There's more stalls.

Like, and nobody in there is going to assault you probably.

Right.

Nobody in there is going to assault me.

Like, yeah, it's and honestly, the problem in the bathroom is that usually if I'm using a public bathroom, I'm in a wheelchair.

And yeah, you know, yeah, is there only one accessible stall?

And is that still being used by someone who is in there?

Because they prefer a big stall using your wheelchair when you were directed to the ladies room?

I was.

And I don't suppose you could have asked for like, is there a specific accessible?

No, it was a very it was in Boston, Jordan Hall.

Yeah.

So like the building was 150 years old.

And like, there's only one elevator in the building.

Yeah.

It's very slow.

And like they have a separate entrance for people in a wheelchair.

Like it is a jerry-rigged ass backwards.

Yeah, disability accessibility is again another separate issue.

Yes, a different thing.

Okay, so we have covered why gender is important to talk about when we're fighting fascism.

We've talked about what gender kind of actually is and how it develops in infancy.

Right.

And then I've talked about some of my experience of like, coming to understand outside messages versus inside messages and discovering that like the word gender doesn't, I just don't, it doesn't apply to me.

And then you're like, cis experience of being like, yep, absolutely.

I want to talk for just a hot second about being non binary and autistic, because there is a very high correlation between trans and non binary people and autistic people like that, the overlap on that Venn diagram.

The ones like me who are not rule followers will like get to adolescence and be like, those rules don't have anything to do with anything.

That's all nonsense.

I'm not going to do it.

Yeah, of like being able to see that the rules are bullshit, and being like, oh, no, I'm not conforming, which is kind of why I have.

I do still have a feeling that there are more non binary people in the world who just, oh, yeah, again, this is me, assuming everyone is like me, but I can't help but think so there are more non binary people in the world that just haven't thrown off the shackles of the gender binary.

Actual 25 years ago, the GLBTA student group on the Indian University student campus, that's what it was called at the time, had a panel.

The GLBTA student group had a panel of bisexuals, and I volunteered to be on that panel.

Yeah.

And a guy in the audience, a gay boy in Indiana, God love him, raised his hand and said that I think that when gay people are more included, no one will identify as bisexual.

And I said, I think when gay people are more included, almost everyone will identify as bisexual.

I kind of feel the same way.

I'm like, bearing in mind that who you are attracted to is a separate thing from how you identify.

Yes.

How you identify as your gender identity, who you're attracted to as your sexual orientation, totally independent of each other.

So yeah, so we talked about why they're going to try and enforce the gender binary.

That is why trans people were at the target of so much hate and have been increasingly the target of so much hate for the last, God, close to 10 years.

We talked about the fact that the gender binary is a total illusion.

It's a mirage.

It looks real, just like any good mirage, but the closer you get to it and the more you know about it, the more it disappears.

Which is what we've been trying to do here is to help the mirage shimmer away and you're like, oh, there's no water there.

And the loud mouth people who say like, gender is basic science.

Yeah, it's basic science that you learned in middle school, but like, there's a reason that it's basic.

It's because it's incomplete.

Yes.

You know what?

I can tell you that triads are the only acceptable kind of harmony.

But like the minute you get into harmony 102, the second level, not even like the fifth level, not great, but like the second level of music theory, you learn how dissonance works and that you do it on purpose.

Right?

Right.

And the second level of gender is there's any number of genders.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's any number of biological sexes because you got to count gonads and chromosomes and anatomy in addition to the whole like gender identity piece of it that develops over the first several years of your life.

And then like there's the ways people mask their deep identity because they're so busy performing.

Yeah, because the feedback loop rewards conformity.

And if you have Netflix, go ahead and watch Will and Harper, which is about a road trip with Will Ferrell and his trans friend Harper.

And they go to like dive bars and stuff.

And I like Will Ferrell.

Good.

I'm gonna watch that.

Yeah, if you have Netflix, I don't have Netflix.

So I haven't seen it.

My therapist.

I got it just for this month so that I could watch something specific.

Another thing that we have done in this episode, this is the part where we summarize what we did.

We talked about the ways that you can begin to explore your own gender identity.

If the cis gender thing maybe is not working for you, begin with playing around with how it feels to be called certain pronouns.

Think about like what are times that you have felt really affirmed in your gender times that you have felt really uncomfortable and dissonant in your the gender that was assigned to you.

And if you're a person who's like, yeah, turns out cisgendered, like I just I just I'm a they told me I was a girl.

Turns out my girl.

Yeah, most people are like that.

Probably.

Yeah, most people are like that.

It's way less than 10% are something other.

But again, like as if you're autistic, it's almost half.

Yeah.

Because the rules.

So for a lot of people, it's going to turn out that your cisgender and your job is to one, create as much space in your brain as possible for the different experience of people under the transgender umbrella.

And you want to work really hard to dismantle the bullshit part of what you were assigned, because just because you're a woman doesn't mean you need to reproduce.

It doesn't mean you don't deserve an education.

It doesn't mean that you deserve to be submissive in a relationship, or that if you're that your closing choices can cause a man to stumble.

I, I want to talk about a thing right there about the because even though I was performing gender, always, I don't think I never I definitely never internalized femininity or womanhood.

So that when I in the eighth grade decided I wanted to be a conductor, and you know, people say, if you can't see it, you can't be it and representation matters.

Like I didn't need to have ever seen a woman conductor to be feel like I could be a conductor because I, I didn't know that I was supposed to can I didn't know that I was going to be a woman when I grew up.

All I knew was I was going to be a conductor when I grew up.

And I feel like that did free me to be a thing that otherwise I might never have occurred to me that I could be.

Yeah, no, I feel like autism has protected me from a lot of bullshit also.

Yeah.

But I also want to so in it.

So, if you get come together, I have these sections where I talk about like, what are the rules of the it's a boy people and what are the rules you're supposed to follow if you're an it's a girl person.

And you can just like read those sections and shoot like highlight the ones that feel like they match what you were told.

Cross out the ones that don't feel like they match what you were told.

Circle and highlight the things that feel like I have felt like I had to follow this rule and it has felt so wrong and bad and victimizing.

And if there are ones that feel empowering like highlight those like right figure out what the rules you've been following are and make choices about the rules that you want to follow.

And last tip as because you're going to need to do a whole bunch of work versus gender person who is new to building space in your body and your heart for the diversity of gender expression, then I'm going to ask you to write letters to an imaginary ancestor or maybe a real ancestor if you know of one who was denied something she wanted because of her gender.

Maybe you there's an ancestor you know of for sure or you can tell yourself a story about who wanted an education and couldn't get one.

She was a girl it was never even considered.

Maybe you have an ancestor who was transgender or lesbian like write a letter about the ways you're working to make the world that would create space for that ancestor.

And I want you to imagine a descendant or it could be a living descendant about the ways you are working to make the world better so that she does not have to work as hard as you do.

I feel like this would be a great exercise for trans people too.

I remember very they already done a lot of work like you go ahead.

I'm sure but okay I was talking to a trans student who had just come out and she was in my office talking about stuff and she has a beautiful singing voice right she got a lot of solos in choir and she was complaining she wanted to be like a soprano and have a much higher voice and I was like A your voice is beautiful the way it is and B I played her a recording of Isai Yat Barnwell who is a very low voiced I believe cis woman.

Wow I've met her in person and she anyway but she has never come out as anything other than a cis woman and her voice is also gorgeous and I was like this is another way to be a woman.

She also was like I want to be so much thinner than I am I feel like I'm too fat I'm like welcome to it just like every other woman I know.

Welcome to being a woman.

So I feel like if you're trans and like you're just like she had learned her whole thing the things that a woman should be and because she's trans and she wanted to be more to appear and to perform her femininity yeah a hundred percent all the way yeah she felt like she had to go I'm like there's so many more ways to be a woman.

One of the things I like about harp will and harper is that harper is making a choice right now not to change her voice that like her voice is the voice of a woman because she is a woman yeah and this is what her voice sounds like yeah so I mean we're gonna end up talking about this some more I have to go do therapy okay well I feel like we hit all the all the points we wanted to hit yeah and except that I think I'm gonna go by they/them pronouns from now on okay and I'm gonna work really hard the podcast is gonna get to hear all the ways that I fuck that up after 47 and a half years yeah yeah so yeah you get to learn by that it's okay to make mistakes by seeing me make mistakes and being forgiven big grudgingly not big grudgingly because I know how hard it is okay okay people are still listening to this and I'm amazed and actually feel very good about this opportunity good next week we'll talk about polyvagal theory 101 okay okay bye even even though we're both technically Dr.

Nogoski even though we're both technically Dr.

Nogoski

Emily Nagoski

Season 2, Episode 3: Gender: It Begins

Season 2, Episode 4: Polyvagal 101

Season 2, Episode 2: We're Stronger Than the Fire