Your Gender Questions, Answered
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In March, I had the honor of giving the keynote speech at a professional development conference in Washington state. The conference organizers wanted to use the keynote as an opportunity for participants – all of whom had track records of acting as champions of the LGBTQ+ community – to learn more about gender and how it impacts their work, specifically their interpersonal interactions with each other and the people they serve.
I had a blast! The participants were super engaged and asked thoughtful questions. I’m sharing three of their common questions and key takeaways here so that you can benefit from them, too:
Question 1:
I’m cisgender/straight/a man. So I should just be focused on allyship in this conversation, right?
Answer: Nope! All of our genders need and deserve our attention – no matter whether we’re cis or trans, men or women or nonbinary.
One of the tools I gave keynote attendees was the gender unicorn. By distinguishing between gender identity/expression, sex assigned at birth, and physical/emotional attraction, the unicorn gives us a framework both for understanding what gender is, and also what it isn’t. (We use the term “LGBTQ+ community” to describe a very big group of people with a lot of different identities – and sometimes folks outside the LBGTQ+ community forget that you also have genders and sexual orientations that need and deserve reflection.) It also helps us visualize what we mean when we refer to gender as a “spectrum” or even many spectra!
Keynote attendees really enjoyed working with the unicorn, and I was especially gratified when a cis woman remarked, “I’ve never thought before about how my gender impacts my day, because I’m cisgender so I take a lot of things for granted. But I’m realizing now that gender impacts most things I do every day.”
If you’re cisgender and/or heterosexual, I especially encourage you to take a stab at filling out a gender unicorn for yourself. Your identities are unique and deserve your attention so that you can better care for yourself and others!
Question 2:
What should I do when someone gets misgendered* in front of me?
Answer: In most cases, you should correct them! Responding when someone else gets misgendered isn’t always easy, but it can be pretty straightforward.
This question came up from several keynote attendees, and someone also asked it during the Ask Me Anything session I did about gender on my Instagram before the keynote. Here’s what I shared:
There’s no one correct way to call people in when they misgender someone in front of us. Doing so effectively requires that we take into consideration both the setting we’re in and the relationship we have with the other people in it. However, the following guidance usually applies:
When in doubt, do it.
If you know that someone’s gender and/or pronouns are public information and/or that they won’t be harmed if the person who misgendered them learns how to gender them correctly, it’s usually the right call to correct a misgendering. You’ll check in with them afterward (see below) so you can learn if you can improve for next time – or if they prefer that you skip it altogether.
Do it quickly.
Calling someone in, including around misgendering, is usually most effective when done as quickly as possible. (Like, as soon as someone finishes the sentence in which they misgendered someone.) This is especially important in a public setting, when making the correction quickly (in a way that anyone who heard the misgendering can also learn from) can mean that it doesn’t get repeated, hopefully minimizing additional harm. It’s also important because the longer we wait to call someone in, the more our anticipation and anxiety can build it up as a big, scary thing that we avoid doing. And then the person being corrected also feels worse because they know we’ve been sitting with it! So, get it over with!
Do it casually.
There’s no need to gear up for a big speech; correcting misgendering usually doesn’t require more than a few words. For example, if I have an established relationship with someone and I know that (a) they’ll know what I’m doing, and (b) that they care about talking about people respectfully, I might just interject with a quick, “they” right after they’ve incorrectly referred to someone as “she.” If I don’t have an established relationship with someone, I might gently say, “Jade’s pronouns are they/them, so they ate a sandwich,” after I hear them say, “She ate a sandwich,” when referring to Jade. If the other person has follow-up questions or doesn’t understand, then it can become a conversation – but depending on the cultural context, you may not need to go into it assuming that’s what will happen.
Check in afterwards.
After you make the correction, it’s great to follow-up (individually and privately) with the person who did the misgendering as well as with the person who was misgendered. In both instances, you can ask them some version of, “Did/do you have any needs that didn’t get met in that interaction?” And, “Is there any way I can do that differently next time to create a better environment for you?” Checking in like this, if you’re genuinely curious about their feedback, will often help you strengthen your relationships with these people – and of course, their answers will help you do better next time, whether with them or someone else.
Question 3:
Why is this important to talk about? My work isn’t about gender, and my office is super busy.
Answer: We have to talk about gender if we want to make our workplaces better.
I was sad but not surprised when participants (and folks on Instagram) shared that they sometimes get pushback when they try to bring up this topic. Colleagues challenge them, saying there are more important things to do at work than talk about gender. Here’s what I’d suggest sharing in response to that.
Our societal default is inequitable. The systems we operate inside of are designed to support some people and not others. For example, modern white collar workplaces and a lot of the infrastructure related to them were designed to work well for cisgender, able-bodied Christian white men whose wives take care of their home lives. (That’s one of the reasons why the workday ends at or after 5pm even though schools get out at 3pm, why healthcare is tied to employment, why many women have to keep a sweater on the back of their desk chair because office building temperatures are set to be more comfortable for men, etc.) It’s also a big part of why, until this year, there were more men named John than women on the list of Fortune 500 CEOs, and why there’s such a big gender pay gap.
Unless we actively create systems and structures that go against this societal default, we perpetuate it. So if we want to create workplaces where people are treated with dignity and respect across all identity groups, that requires using systems and structures to avoid operating according to this societal default. It’s impossible to do this without talking about it! So, if we want to create equitable workplaces, we have to talk about gender – and other aspects of demographic identity that are part of systemic oppression.
Keep in mind that if we only talk about gender – and don’t also talk about the ways in which sexism is experienced differently by people depending on our race, age, sexual orientation, religion, and more – we’re often going to cause more harm than good. Because all of these systems of oppression are interconnected, our methods for undoing them need to be interconnected, too.
Want to learn more or share these learnings with your team? Reach out if you want me to speak with your organization about gender. Click here to read about other topics I give keynotes and workshops about.
*Misgendering is when someone is referred to as an incorrect gender. For example, if you say, “He is a great DEI consultant,” when talking about me, that’s misgendering because my pronouns are they/she. So the correct way to gender me in that instance is to say either, “They are a great DEI consultant,” or, “She is a great DEI consultant.” Other examples of misgendering that aren’t related to using pronouns are when people get directed to the wrong restroom for them or referred to with a gendered honorific that doesn’t match their gender.