intersex

Since gender has been a topic through some of the posts this week — and a topic we talk about frequently here at STACKED — let’s round out this week of contemporary YA with another post about gender. . . and about sex. Welcome to upcoming debut author I. W. Gregorio.

I. W. Gregorio is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above (Balzer & Bray / HarperCollins, 4/28/15). She is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books™ and serves as its VP of Development. A recovering ice hockey player, she lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children. Find her online at www.iwgregorio.com, and on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram at @iwgregorio.

Anyone who’s ever walked down the aisles of a toy store knows that the gender binary is a monolith that is almost impossible to topple, and I admit freely to being someone who’s tried and failed. For the first two years of my daughter’s life, I clothed her preferentially in non-pink clothing. I gave away onesies and bibs that had the word “princess” on it (once, I even took scissors to cut them out). Instead of dolls, I got her Thomas the Tank Engine trains and Legos.

Then she started preschool, and she’s now a princess-loving, pink-wearing girlie girl who is begging for an American Girl doll for Christmas. Which is fine, except that I fear that her internalization of stereotyped “girliness” won’t stop at toys and clothes.

The gender binary is insidious, impacting our everyday lives in countless ways. I struggle against its restrictions every day in both of my professions. As a female surgeon, I encounter it when my colleague makes an offhand comment about how he prefers it when I don’t wear scrubs (as they’re “so unflattering”). As an author, I see it on the shelves: books are divided into “girl books” and “boy books.”

Binary thinking does harm to both women and men. The stereotype of women as submissive, nurturing caretakers has caused generations of girls to grow up thinking that to be assertive is to be bossy, and that their education and employment is less important than that of their male counterparts. Likewise, damage is done to men who go through life being called “sissies” for showing emotion, or daring to like musicals or art or literature. The gender binary also contributes to homophobia, by dictating who people “should” love, and transphobia, by failing to recognize that one’s biological sex doesn’t always correlate to gender identity.

The truth is that men should be allowed to wear pink, and women shouldn’t have to fear being labeled “butch” for wanting to play football. Pigeonholing certain traits as masculine or feminine is self-defeating, and prevents all of us from being our truest and best selves.

Some people defend the gender binary by saying that it’s based on biology. If gender stereotypes were restricted to the fact that men need jockstraps and women require bras, I’d be fine with that. But there is no biological reason, for example, why girls should prefer the color pink or books with skinny girls wearing dresses on the cover. Indeed, studies have shown that the presence of personality traits like assertiveness, empathy, and interest in science don’t significantly differ between men and women.

The dagger to the heart of the gender binary, however, is the fact that most men and women have physical traits specific to one sex only, but not all. There’s an exception to every rule, and in this case it’s the existence of intersex conditions in which people are born with sexual characteristics that are neither wholly male or wholly female (PSA: In the old days, people used the term “hermaphrodite,” which is inaccurate and considered offensive by most of the intersex community). For a great primer on intersex, please read this FAQ from the Intersex Society of North America.

For a long time, intersex has been invisible in popular culture because of the fear and stigma surrounding it (one exception is Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex). But things are changing – MTV recently revealed that one of its main characters is intersex, and just last week the press reported on an intersex woman with a connection to Michael Phelps. I have conflicting feelings about the press coverage of the Phelps case, for reasons well articulated here, but I am encouraged by the increased visibility of intersex and transgender people in the media overall.

The gender binary isn’t going to disappear overnight. It can only be dismantled and undermined slowly, story by story. That’s where we have the responsibility as authors and readers to seek out literature that shows us that gender isn’t a binary – it’s a spectrum. Not everyone who is born with XX chromosomes is attracted to men, identifies as a woman, or has a uterus. To assume otherwise ignores the biological diversity of the human race.

In an essay for PEN/American, I wrote that the first gay person I ever met was in a book (Mercedes Lackey’s Magic’s Pawn). The same is true for the first intersex person (Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex), and the first gender-fluid person (Kristin Elizabeth Clark’s Freakboy). I am so grateful to all of these books for opening my mind to the spectrum of gender identity and sexual orientation. But the binary-busting books don’t stop there – they include novels about girl football players, like Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Dairy Queen, and picture books about little boys who love wearing dresses like Sara and Ian Hoffman’s Jacob’s New Dress.

To read about others is to know them. To know them is to expand your world. Here’s to reading books that show a world beyond the gender binary. Here’s to showing our kids that girls can have masculine traits and that boys can be feminine, too.

By the way: Recently my daughter started Tae Kwon Do lessons. Her favorite color is now black.