What is Gender Exploration?
(If you’re interested in gender exploration, please join me for Re-Envisioning Gender, a 4 week virtual gender exploration journey open to all! We will meet each Monday evening in June and will be diving deep into our bodies, intuitions, and and values to create a more aligned gender experience.)
I think folks are really, really afraid of gender exploration. And I don't just mean folks who lean politically conservative or who are actively working to harm trans people. I think that there are a lot of folks who consider themselves to be well-meaning, socially progressive, perhaps even folks who find themselves represented in the non-T letters of the LGBTQIA+ acronym who cannot imagine gender exploration as a possibility they could allow themselves to engage in. This distances them from exploring their own gender while creating a barrier for others who are exploring their gender, or who want to.
Many people who want to explore their gender will keep that desire a secret from their close friends, partner(s), or family. This happens in part because gender exploration is thought to be a sort of one-way trajectory - you come to some realization that your gender may be more complex than your sex assigned at birth, you engage in a lengthy and challenging course of questions and explorations, and you end up in a label like "trans" or "non-binary" or "genderqueer," etc. And while that narrative may be relatable to some, it also obscures the true benefits of gender exploration to folks of all gendered experiences.
Let's break it down.
We All Struggle With Gender
No matter who you are or how you identify, I am willing to bet that you have experienced some harm related to how your gender is perceived. Violent and harmful impacts of sexism against those perceived to be women are well documented and have been discussed, theorized about, and legislated around for many decades. It is also well established that those perceived to be men are often raised to suppress their emotions and devalue emotionally intimate relationships, as well as to take greater risks with their lives and health. This has lead to a country in which women are disproportionately targeted for gender-related violence, and men are disproportionately at risk for health issues and death by suicide. This barely scratches the surface of the issues with gender, and is merely a few examples in a sea of distressing statistics.
And that's for people who aren't even trans, gender non-conforming, non-binary, etc.! The point is that no one is getting through this gender thing unscathed, and that the modern culture (at least in the U.S., where I live and am writing from), we are all socialized to have a destructive relationship with gender to some degree.
This is further exacerbated by an ever-changing and largely subjective set of social rules around what it means to be [insert gender label here]. The social expectations of what it means to be one of the two dominant binary genders are also interwoven with race, ethnicity, class, religion, region, ability, career, and much more. Those goalposts are often shifted when necessary around dominant axes of power, like race and class (ex. The standards of femininity for Black women as opposed to those for white women). These expectations for the dominant binary genders come to bear on trans, non-binary, and other people in a variety of ways that are deeply impacted by every facet of identity and experience.
As if that were not enough complication, two people with the exact same demographics could experience their genders in entirely different ways based on the many aspects of life that demographics can't capture. So…gender is complicated! Extremely so. The idea that we could corral the whole thing into two (or even several) labels is ludicrous, yet here we are.
Gender Exploration is a Trans Technology
The complexity of one's relationship to gender is often more intense for trans and non-binary folks. In this modern culture, few of us are raised to feel joyous freedom around our gender. Few of us are offered models for what our gender could be that aren't based in cis, binary gender. So for most of us, there's a period of trying to figure out why we feel so wrong. At some point, we land on gender as the source (or one of the sources) of the issue.
Trans people have been exploring gender in some form since the beginning of human history. In modern Western history, many of us had to engage in this process in isolation and without a guide. There is a long and beautiful tradition of trans people helping other trans people to explore their gender and adjust their presentation in ways that felt affirming, but in order to even get that type of support, folks had to find other trans people in the first place.
Still, over time we have created groups, we have written books, we have tried desperately to educate cisgender therapists and doctors, and we have become therapists and doctors (and academics and historians and authors and poets and teachers and every other possible thing) in order to try to create something better. All the while, more and more people are exploring their gender, coming out as trans or non-binary or something else that isn't cis. And as this technology has reached more folks and become more "known" in the culture, many more folks have noticed. Folks who might never need or want to change their presentation or their pronoun, but who hear folks talking about not fitting neatly into the prescribed framework for their assigned sex and think, "But wait, that framework doesn't work for me, either."
When I first decided to become a gender doula, I imagined that my work would only have me really interacting with trans people. It wasn't until I started to do this work that I realized that all people, regardless of their gender, benefit from the technology of gender exploration. My main goal is still to work with trans people, non-binary people, and gender expansive people, but I now understand that it is vital to paint gender exploration with a much broader brush. By nature of my work with people on all sorts of journeys, I've honed my approach to gender exploration far beyond my own personal process and into something that I think is broadly applicable for all folks while deeply and unapologetically centering trans people.
Misconceptions About Gender Exploration
So folks see trans people and see that we are doing something that appeals to them. Yet, gender exploration is still seen as thing you only do when you want to change your label. It is seen as something that trans and non-binary people do only once - a one way street with a prescribed destination. At the very least, it is seen as a journey from one label to another, and generally, as a journey that ends once the new label is reached.
The fact is that there many different ways of exploring your gender that are popular on social media that I don't find to be particularly helpful for most folks I encounter. I'm not saying that no one has ever been helped by these strategies, but I know that many impeded my own process, and regularly impede my clients as well. One of the ones I have the biggest beef with is the process of asking yourself, "am I [label]?"
I think that using labels as a way of discovering your identity is, for most people, extremely unhelpful. I've written more extensively about this in the past but essentially, when you ask yourself, for example, "Am I trans?" you are evoking an entire framework of what "trans" means. Inevitably, there will be some things in that framework that fit you, and others that do not. Many folks tend to hyperfixate on the things that don't fit, and then imposter syndrome activates.
Another misconception is that gender exploration is a one-time thing, or a process that ends once you "discover" your authentic gender. I remember when I was a baby trans, seeing folks that went through all sorts of medical and social transition steps only to continue adjusting their pronouns, names, and/or presentations kind of worried me. I thought that maybe they just didn't know what they wanted, or that I would be different. Why would I fight so hard to be seen as male just to use they/them pronouns? But I see things much differently now, and thankfully so!
What I didn't realize then was that all gender exploration need not be harrowing and horrible. Gender exploration can be joyful and exciting, an unfolding of self that continues on throughout the lifespan. It's a commitment to yourself and your selfhood, to joy and satisfaction. Knowing yourself intimately and expressing yourself in ways that feel resonant and accurate is not only a gift to yourself; it also allows you to go deeper with your loved ones, to be more effective in community, and to be in better relationship with the earth.
So What Is Gender Exploration?
When I use gender exploration, I mean a process of getting in touch with your own body and intuition so that you cultivate a deeper understanding of who you are, what you value, and how you want to express yourself in the world. Instead of focusing on whether you do or do not conform to a particular label, you can instead focus on what feels good or right in your body or soul. A label may be helpful, but it can be something that you use as a shorthand for your experiences or a way to locate other like minded folks, rather than a wholesale explanation of who you are.
In this definition, gender exploration is a process you can dip in and out of, or even always sort of be in. It can be something that you use to get in deeper touch with yourself, to realign yourself with your values, and to show up to the people, places, and things that matter to you. It is a framework that can be used to question whether or not you are doing something specifically to appeal to others or if you are acting within your own values and desires. In this type of gender exploration, you may land on different labels at different times, you may change how you show up in the world in subtle or large ways more than once in your life. Its not a problem when you're moving more and more into the fullness of your selfhood.
The fact is that gender touches almost every part of our experiences. Our gender or the perception of our gender deeply effects our professional life, our relationships to others, our relationship to ourselves, and our whole experience in the world. And further, none of us fit cleanly into any gender box. Engaging in gender exploration is vital to heal our relationship to gender, regardless of where that gender exploration takes us.