Gender Identity/Gender Roles

Tip for Facilitators: This section includes two graphics. Facilitators are encouraged to share these graphics with participants. Though it’s a lot of paper, printing and distributing these as handouts helps to encourage participants to keep and take home for their own further study and consideration, even to share with family and friends. This is a useful practice because many may come to discussions about gender with differing degrees of knowledge and experience which may lead to hesitation and disengagement.

Many of us have been raised within a binary framework that defines gender as “male” or “female.” From the moment we are born, this binary of male/female (or man/woman) is designated to us at birth when we are defined as “Boy” or “Girl” based on the appearance of our bodies. Even before birth, gender is commonly assigned and celebrated at gender “reveal” parties based on in utero screening results. These gender assignments are often accompanied by first lessons in how to perform gender as well. Though subtle, these lessons are consistent and can be seen, for instance, in the social determination of blue as a color for “boys” and pink as the color associated with “girls.”

However, there are (and have always been) people whose fundamental sense of themselves, who they know themselves to be, is a gender other than what was assigned to them when they were born. This experience is common for transgender people. A person who was labeled a boy at birth, but knows themselves to be a girl is transgender. As an adult, this person is a transwoman. Likewise, a person labeled a girl at birth, but knows themselves to be a boy is transgender - a transboy and later a transman. In contrast, someone who is labeled a girl at birth and continues to identity as a girl or woman, is cisgender, or a “ciswoman” for short. (Likewise for men; “cismen”). Regardless of the genders we are ascribed, our gender identity is the gender we know ourselves to be. It is self-assigned and comes to us from whatever source our markers of self come to us.

Gender expression is how we present our gender to the world; how we perform and convey our gender. Everyone has ways of expressing gender, regardless of whether they are cisgender or transgender. Put simply, our gender expression is commonly visible to others: it can be reflected by the clothes we wear, how we style our hair, or the makeup or jewelry we do or do not wear. On a more intimate level, it can be a part of our language, how we move our bodies, our hobbies, interests, and/or how we carry ourselves as gendered people in the world. Our gender expression can change by the day or the hour, and can be fluid - disregarding the binary of male/female. It is both intimate and public; our inner sense of self expressed outwardly, in public to the people around us.

While the gender binary is an established Western norm from which transpeople must break, many indigenous cultures around the world have always had multiple gender identities woven into their sense of selves and language. For such communities, the notion of two rigidly defined genders breaks with their understanding and definitions of gender. Some indigenous scholars argue that fluid definitions of gender are fundamentally indigenous. For example, in Mexico, the muxe of the Zapotec (centered in the state of Oaxaca) are one of the most well known “third gender” communities.

Like most remnants of colonization, gender expression exists as a dominant set of rules we were born into, and has established a prescribed code for how we “should” present ourselves and how to determine the gender of the people around us. Depending on our country, age, culture, and community there are likely specific clothing items and modes of adornment that are marked as masculine or feminine. These have also always evolved.

At present however, for many of us, the choices we make in how to dress, walk, talk, and look are some of the most fundamental we make in how we are perceived, and by extension - treated - by the people around us.To speak of gender, therefore, is also to speak of an intricate and inflexible set of rules of behavior and presentation. One might argue that these rules themselves are violent, in that to step outside of them is to become vulnerable to threats of all kinds, including physical. And yet, to follow them at the expense of one’s own sense of self, is to suffer an attack on one’s own capacity to live a life in true alignment with oneself. Such is the quiet ferocity of gender norms: these rules govern all of us, no matter our gender identity or expression.

LGBTQIA+ Identity in Mexico & Rural Communities

Historically, LGBTQIA+ communities have thrived in urban centers. New York, San Francisco, & Mexico City have all been centers of queer community. Cities often reflect more progressive politics than rural spaces, thereby creating safe conditions for LGBTQIA+ people to live and thrive. This, in turn, contributes to stronger systems of medical care, legal support, and the solidarity of a more expansive social network. However, queer people have always also chosen to make home in rural communities and continue to do so in increasing numbers today. Recent surveys and scholarship have suggested that the lack of structural support in smaller, more rural towns can be countered by the intimacy of being known, by being part of a community in which you may be a minority, but in which the fact of being an integral part of that space, forges (perhaps) unexpected acceptance. And finally, many gay and transpeople of color have long challenged the notion of gay enclaves as welcoming havens, citing their own experiences of being excluded from such spaces for their racial and ethnic identities.

Discussion of LGBTQIA+ life in Mexico also tends to be focused on the cities. This is especially true of representation and discussion of trans people. A 2020 survey by the Williams Institute (out of UCLA) set out to create the most comprehensive to date examination of Mexican beliefs and attitudes towards trans people. However, the authors of the study simultaneously acknowledged that though it tried to correct its findings accordingly, it’s reach did not extend into the campo, the huge swaths of Mexican culture that exist in the mountains, jungle, the coasts, far from metropolitan centers.

The Williams Study also highlighted the contrasts between laws, attitudes, and the lived experience of trans people in Mexico. According to the survey, attitudes towards transgender people in Mexico is largely accepting. And on paper, since early the early 2000’s Mexico has been steadily advancing in its legal recognition of gay and trans rights. Same sex marriage is legal, discrimination based on sexual orientation is illegal, transpeople have the right to change their name and gender on their legal documents.

And yet, in 2019 Mexico had the second highest murder rate of transwomen in the world (second to Brasil) and in 2020 violence against LGBTQ+ individuals continued to surge. The rate of violence is a painful reminder that laws do not govern attitudes and ideas. One compelling observation from the Williams Survey was that when a respondent cited knowing a trans person, all of that respondent’s answers skewed towards greater acceptance and embracing of trans rights. This correlation speaks to what many quuer folks in rural communities have named anecdotally; that the smallness of their towns means there is a familiarity that in turn creates acceptance.

In any consideration of trans identity and experience, we have to be mindful of moments of erasure. A so-called “lack of visibility” of trans people is - in reality - a refusal of others to see and recognize trans life around them. This erasure, or refusal to recognize transpeople, is evidenced in how difficult it can be to find articles, books, movies, lectures on any element of translife in Mexico other than the violence faced by transwomen in Mexico City and the enclave of muxe life of the Zapotec in Oaxaca. While a spectrum of experience is real, these representations only account for one side of a spectrum, and leave little space to witness, celebrate, and learn from the lived, daily experiences of people like Dayanara.

Living with Danger and Violence

Violence exists in many forms, all around us, all the time. In Things We Dare Not Do, we witness both the omnipresent threat of gun violence in Roblito (and Mexico) and the more quiet, though pervasive, violence embedded in the rules that govern gender identity and gender roles.

Importantly, violence always has a context: in 2006, Mexico began its “war on drugs” with encouragement and funding from the United States. The lived experience for the citizens of Mexico can be devastating. The homicide rate in Mexico has been rising since 2007, with a small reduction between 2010-2013, and then a steady rise since 2014. In 2020, the murder rate of 29 people per 100,000 (as opposed to 5 per 100,000 in the US.) However, in the states that border the US, the rates are much higher, an average of 70 per 100,000.

People identified as women in Mexico commonly bear the brunt of violence and lead the resistance to the government’s failures in dealing with that violence. “Femicide” is the murder of women becasue of their gender. (The term was coined by Mexican journalists in the 1990’s to address the high murder rate of women in the border city of Cuidad de Juarez.) As of 2020, 11 women were murdered every day in Mexico. 57 of those murders were of transwomen. That threat is magnified by the brutal phenomenon of disappeared persons, including children, in the country. Since the early 2000’s over 73,000 have gone missing. Usually, it is the mother of each of those people who take on the charge of trying to find their lost loved ones.

These are devastating statistics. But reliance on these numbers means that violence and suffering are what we are using to frame daily life in Mexico. Within that frame, is just one version of being Mexican in Mexico, but it is where our gaze is directed at the expense of all else that colors life. This is a potent example of how the gaze itself becomes violent, in that it begins to deny other forms of existence. This is also the powerful intervention that Things We Dare Not Do offers us: a representation of life that is not centered on violence and statistics.

The violence of normative frames of gender (i.e. the gender binary) is itself a system of framing that can do great harm. For instance, this rigid frame of boy/girl excludes anyone who does not fit neatly into those frames. In effect, the frame itself renders anyone who does not fit within it unrecognizable. This refusal to see a person as they are is another form of assault, one that plays out on both interpersonal and societal levels.

As mentioned in the previous section, the lack of diverse representation centering translife in Mexico contributes to more subtle forms of violation. If, when translife is reported in the news, the majority of those stories focus on the violence, often deadly, directed at trans people, trans women in particular - then we must wonder what narratives of the trans experience are being reflected. On the one hand, it is essential that these assaults are reported and the activism work of countless organizations must be applauded for making sure these numbers and names are known. However, when those are the only stories widely reported, it becomes its own form of assault, one that equates the lived experience of trans women with the rates of which they are attacked. When the only experiences deemed worthy of reporting are experiences of threat, what becomes of the everyday joys and mundane facts of life for trans people? What frames are being implemented through which we are able to recognize trans people's lives as simply, livable lives?

Bruno Santamaria Razo, the director of Things We Dare Not Do, noted that, “After almost four years of being close to those who wake up, work and sleep there, I began to feel and understand that the waves of violence in that town are awful, painful and traumatizing but everyone around is keeping up with their daily random routine.” In his work of both memoir and journalism, The Interior Circuit, writer Francisco Goldman, observed that to live in Mexico in these years is to live intimately with both loss and trauma and the simultaneous knowledge that there is no reliable governing body to step in and provide answers, retribution, or resolution. Every civilian who experiences a moment of violence knows that they must define for themselves what “justice” might be, what might provide a conclusion to their grieving or trauma. He writes also that many won’t ever find that conclusion and must find a path through that uncertain terrain on their own. Many women and transwomen in Mexico are now forging that path through activism, through an intergenerational and growing wave of protests that many are calling a revolution; a demand for an end to the current lived experience of violence through a transformation of the language, attitudes, and treatment of trans and cisgendered women in every aspect of their lives.