Be BRAVE and TRUE

There are an awful lot of ways to conceive gender.  It’s been a binary, a spectrum, a triangle, a coordinate plane.

But to me, gender is a constellation.

I imagine a scattering of stars, thrown across space, and each point of light is a little chunk of gender.  A star for every stereotype, every specific role, a star for all the words we have for gender and a star for all the ones we don’t (after all, space is infinite).

Here is a star called Cowgirl (orbiting with its sister-stars Cowboy and Ranch Hand), off to the north a star for the elfin child-gender of small boys around age six; there’s Androgynous Model and Volleyball Chick and Douche Who Wears Salmon.  There’s abstract gender-pieces like Void, and definable genders like American Apparel Customer and Legalize Marijuana Activist.  All these gender-stars come with rules for presentation and actions and inform how a person moves through the world.

Of course some little genders are grouped close together, and some are far-flung, and some look side-by-side from the ground but are actually a hundred billion light years apart.

But nobody’s gender is limited to one star.  Hirsute Gay Man isn’t a complete picture of a person, and neither is 50’s Housewife.  Most everyone has a whole collection of gender-stars.  Maybe more, maybe less, maybe mostly woman stars, or mostly man stars, perhaps generally androgyne or generally unmarked (which are two different things), or an eclectic mix.  There’s not a lot of rules; I believe even cis/binary people often have a diverse set.  You can pick up and discard stars over time, on purpose or not; they may be arranged in a tight cluster or span galaxies, they can be precious or incidental, meticulously studied or mysterious.

Each person takes their scattered handful of sparkling gender-bits and connects them up with bits of string, until they have a network of all the ways their particular gender fragments interact with each other.

Now, finally, one can step back and see their full gender.  It’s not the stars themselves, although those are important: it’s their shape in relation to each other.  From a distance, finally the constellation of one’s identity can be given a name.

No wonder it can take years to figure out.

The constellation may align in a satisfactory way with a simple, easy identifier (man, woman), or it may be fractious and demand a queer vocabulary.  It may be on friendly terms with the body, or it may battle the physical form in perpetuity, or both may be molded over time until they are in harmony.

I appreciate this model for its ability to encompass complexity in a single metaphor; the combination of granularity with a holistic view; and for the way it can make gender both absurd and describable.  Sometimes I see someone on the train and, wow, one of that person’s gender bits is Literal Voldemort, that’s an experience.  I laugh at myself when I look in the mirror and see Absentminded Professor staring brightly back at me.

There are other metaphors.  Someone’s gender may be a carefully tended garden.  It may be an ocean filled with small difficult fish.  Perhaps a wardrobe, perhaps a riot, perhaps a graduate thesis in gender mathematics, complete with footnotes and references.

For me, whether I am looking inwards or outwards, I see a field of stars.