(whooshing sound) (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Generation GRIT.

I'm your host, activist and musician, Carrie Joy.

On today's episode, we'll be exploring the idea of gender.

We'll be digging into questions like what is gender?

How does society affects our view of it, and how can we support youth as they learn more about their own identities?

Who better to chat with about these very important questions than our panelists, who not only have experienced these journeys we'll discuss first hand, but have a passion for helping others feel more comfortable in their own skin too?

Joining us today is Brinley.

Brinley is studying to be a journalist and believes that it's a journalist job to be the messenger for an issue or information.

Her aim is to help bridge any communication gaps between people about LGBTQ+ issues.

Welcome Brinley.

- Thank you.

- We're also joined by Oliver.

Oliver is a 17 year-old transgender anthropology major.

He likes hiking, collecting oddities and hanging out with his best friend, Bella.

Thanks for joining us, Oliver.

- Thank you.

- Both our panelists today are a part of a very important organization in Colorado Springs called Inside Out Youth Services.

Inside Out cultivates a community where LGBTQ+ youth are free to be themselves by providing leadership services, peer support and education.

Here's more on their mission.

(upbeat guitar music) - Welcome to Inside Out, where you belong, whether you are a youth who identifies as LGBTQ, somewhere on that spectrum, or you're an ally, if you walk into our space, you are going to receive a warm and hospitable welcome, and you'll know that you belong here.

- I belong.

I'm a peer advisor, so I help manage the space.

- Don't forget to sign in.

- They respect me and they treat me kindly, which just helps me feel like I'm not just someone who is left in the corner.

- I belong.

Being a mixed Chicana queer person, there isn't a lot of places that are set up specifically for me.

- This is about making sure that all of our youth have a safe place wherever they go in this community.

- Inside Out is a place that advocates for those people that aren't always heard.

- Before we dive into conversations today, let's get some definitions out of the way.

We recently stopped by CU Boulder to speak with Jax Gonzalez, a local educator, PhD candidate, sociologists, and queer educator.

Here they are with the one-on-one.

- So how do we learn about gender?

- It's a huge question.

And I've been studying this for around 10 years now, which is wild to think about.

We learn about gender in society as young as infancy.

We can think about how babies in hospitals are put into blue and pink blankets very early on.

Typically, this is aligned with whatever gender, the sex they were assigned at birth.

Female babies get pink blankets, male babies get blue blankets, and then they're taken home and parents will report to you, and report often in research, the first question you get, when you know you're having a baby, is it a boy or a girl?

We've decided in society that masculinity means anger and control and femininity means softness and nurturing and caring.

But those are not naturally occurring ideas.

Those are ideas that we've come up with as a society.

And those ideas have real impacts on people, right.

So like that's the hard part about explaining the social construction of gender, which is that it's both completely made up and also has drastic impacts on individual lives.

(upbeat music) Kids who were born assigned male at birth who identify as women, it can include children who were born assigned female at birth who can identify as men.

All of these people can identify as transgender as well as youth who identify outside the binary.

There's a lot of different terms that kids use today.

I identify as gender queer, which for me, is specifically a political identity that engages the rejection of what it means or the expectation to be masculine or feminine.

There's a proliferation of gender identities that kids are inventing everyday and I think that that is an incredible testament to the spaces that have been created by and for queer and trans youth to explore the possibility of gender identity.

- So Brin and Oliver, how do you define gender?

I'm gonna start with you, Brin.

- So I personally see it as the way that you see yourself.

When you think of yourself, just as a baseline of who am I, the first thing that comes into your head, because I feel like it both describes like who you are as a person, but at the same time, not really a whole lot, because it doesn't hold you to a certain standard.

It doesn't hold you to a certain standard like yourself, but other people will.

So I personally see that gender is a combination of how you view yourself, but also how the world sees you, which of course takes from a gender identity and gender expression.

So my definition of gender is the sum of those two terms, because it explains how you are viewed as both to yourself and to other people.

- Thank you for that.

You said a lot that really resonated with me, you know, as a black, queer woman, I feel like these constructs, right, that have been defined for us, a lot of times they have really, they have real consequences, but they have been created, right.

They're not necessarily real.

And so I appreciate that.

Thank you for sharing.

How about you, Oliver?

How do you define gender?

- Well, I feel like everyone has a very personal relationship with gender, so it's a bit different for everyone.

But I think that it's the way that you fit into the world and the way you want the world to see you as well as the way you see yourself.

So it's kind of a mixture of those three things.

And gender roles sort of play a bit in it, maybe in a good way, maybe in a bad way.

But really, for everyone, it's kind of just who you want to be, who you feel like, you know, who you are.

- Yeah, absolutely.

It sounds like the environment we're raised in has a huge impact on how we identify gender and how it applies to us.

What else informs our thoughts on these aspects of identity?

Here's Jax with more.

(slow upbeat music) - What's really interesting about the history of gender is that a lot of it is related to heterosexuality.

Historically, both what we construct as feminine and what we construct as masculine has shifted a lot.

I'm a really classic example that we'll bring up is in the Victorian era.

Men wore heels and ruffles and the color pink.

And what's important about that is that it's based in class as well.

So class position or socioeconomic status, the ability to shift between feminine and masculine was allowed because of that class position.

In our current society that we live in in the US have a very specific idea of gender that has not always existed.

And not only that, it's shifted a lot.

I think it's really cool and creative that today I enter a high school classroom and I say, I'm Jax.

I use they/them pronouns and my students are like, cool, cool.

And I have like four out of the 15 students also use they/them pronouns.

(upbeat music) Often when I work with teachers who wanna affirm their trans and queer students, they ask a lot about pronouns and bathrooms.

These are two arenas of support for queer and trans youth that are of course important and also tangible.

When you can use a student's pronouns, get them access to spaces that they feel affirmed in and safe in, that can be life-changing.

(slow upbeat music) Affirming queer and trans youth is really important to allowing them to continue to see possibility.

When we don't affirm and trans youths' identities, experiences, values, desires, we put walls up around what they think it's possible.

When I interact with trans youth in my classroom or trans youth in organizing events or spaces for queer and trans youth, I feel so much excitement about the fact that there are living in the body and identity that they wanna be in.

- Alright, I'm gonna start with you, Oliver.

What have you been taught about gender and gender roles in your life?

- Well, I've been lucky enough to be raised by my mom who was never super like strict with that sort of thing.

A lot of times older people will teach you, you know, that men have this role and women have this role.

And that's just how it is.

But my mom, she wasn't like that.

She was super great.

I was never put in a, well, you have to wear this pink dress and you have to play with these dolls when I was a kid.

I would go outside and I would play in the mud and catch totes.

So there were never super strict gender roles when I was growing up.

But as I got older and I accessed the internet, I would hear a lot of opinions about everything all of the time.

So I got to see all of these opinions about gender roles from all these different sorts of people, from like, well, men are the head of the family to is gender even real, sort of things.

So the whole spectrum, and I think being exposed to that sort of thing has really helped me shape my own critical opinion of how I feel.

- That's a beautiful thing, having that opportunity and that freedom to identify who you are.

Thank you.

Thank you for sharing.

What about, Brin?

- So growing up, I didn't, there weren't a lot of people around us, but the few people I was around were, it was usually my mom, her friends, and like my aunts who are all very strong women.

And so I, people would always be, people would always tell me that like, oh, no, the man's supposed to be the tough one, and the wife's supposed to be stays at home and takes care of the kids, but I never really saw that.

And so it never really, I never quite understood it or knew where to go from there.

And so it always, well, it didn't always remain nebulous to me, but for a while I knew these ideas, but I didn't know how to apply them because I'd never seen them applied before.

I mean, maybe like my friend's parents, but it was, I always, I was never able to know, it always, the idea that one person solely is supposed to be like the caretaker and the other person is supposed to solely be like the protector.

Never, I never quite understood that because even my, say like my friend's parents were like, even some of my friend's parents were like, well, maybe like the mom would go off and work while the father would stay home and they'll take care of the kids.

And so I'm very lucky to have those experiences and to be able to pick up like information and like knowledge from going through that, from like knowing my friends and from knowing my family and their friends, because it's just, because everybody's expected, everybody was expected to be tough and the protector.

And so it was interesting, especially as I got older, and as I started knowing like, like getting to know more people and moving to areas that had more people, because then all these people all of a sudden were sticking with what I was always been told, but I never understood it.

And so I never understood because I hadn't seen it before.

And it always felt so weird, it always felt so weird to me, like almost uncanny, because it was, I had heard all my life about this, about this one thing.

It's one thing that's supposed to be universal, almost like a universal truth that I had almost never seen before.

- Interesting.

- And so it, and then it's like, that helped shape my idea of maybe the entire concept is nebulous, maybe that entire field just doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you know?

And shortly after that, short after that I, of course I discovered the glory that is the internet.

And luckily I was more focused on just obtaining information more so than oh, hey, that looks interesting.

I was pretty much a sponge and so, pretty much a sponge.

And so then like all of a sudden, and so then all of a sudden, especially like middle school, I had the, like, I had the, like I saw people saying, oh, no, I'm non-binary or, oh, I'm transgender.

And so starting there, that was when I kinda realized, was I right?

Is this entire thing just nebulous?

Like, is this, and then going on from there, then here I am.

- Mm, that's beautiful.

I mean, I had a pretty stereotypical upbringing when it comes to gender identity.

I grew up in a strong Jamaican immigrant household.

And so, you know, the men carried the control and the women carried the strength, right.

The women carried the strength, very strong women in my household.

So thank you for sharing that.

There's a lot of unlearning that we had to do along the way, though, right.

So do you mind sharing with us quickly about some of the unlearning that you've had to do along your journeys?

- One of the big things that I had to learn was that just because, I feel like this goes for most topics, is that just because somebody either doesn't agree with you or is different from you, it doesn't mean that they're wrong or bad.

It just means that they're not the exact same as you, and no person is exactly the same.

So it should just be accepted that people will have different ideas.

People will have differing opinions about topics, but all we can do is just say, okay, can you tell me more?

Because that should be, because we, especially like when I was like younger, and like some of my friends who did have the, who did have like the oh, mother takes care of kids, father takes care of work, of course, I had never seen anything, like I had rarely seen anything like it.

And so instead of going, oh, well, you're wrong.

Oh, well, that you're different so I don't like you anymore, it all of a sudden hit me, well, I was just like, I need to know more.

Like, I need to figure out like what this is.

- Right, that's how we grow together.

- Yeah, of course.

- As people we grow from information.

We grow from learning.

Information can be experiences, opinions or just facts.

And that is how we do grow as people.

I mean, you can grow by just reading a book or by talking with people or by just absorbing information.

- Absolutely.

What about you, Oliver?

Talk about the unlearning process.

- Well, I feel like for any sort of topic, really, a lot of the unlearning is subconscious, you know.

You're not like thinking directly like this is this, and that's not true.

You know, a lot of it is just like growing, like you said, and learning to unlearn.

And, for example, you know, when I was raised I had the idea of male and female.

These are like polar opposites, you know, there's no overlap there.

It's like apples and oranges, you know, very different.

But in reality, you know, everyone's just people, you know, and it's not like this is so very different from this, you know.

Everyone has the same experiences, and, you know, we're all kind of just the same in the end.

- We're so much more alike than we are different, right.

But celebrating those differences that's the beauty in being human, right?

- Yeah.

- So let's talk a little bit about your inspirations, people that have inspired you to really take on this journey of owning yourself, claiming yourself.

Tell the people about some of your inspiration.

- So one of my biggest inspirations is my mother.

She is one of the strongest people I do know.

And she really, even at a young age, she helped guide my idea that people are just people.

There's no reason that we should dislike each other, especially growing up Southern Baptist.

It was, I'm very glad she did.

I'm very glad she told me like, people are different, but that's how we are because we are people, and in doing so we should learn more about each other instead of shutting each other off or shunning, or instead of even just saying, well, you're wrong because that is no way to either, because even if somebody is wrong about an idea, just saying, you're wrong, isn't gonna change them.

But it's also, we shut off so many ideas just because they're different.

We shut off so many opinions just because they're different and we shut out so many facts and information just because it's not what aligns perfectly with our brain.

And I, well I do think that it is okay to think differently than other people, of course, 'cause everybody has their own experiences, everybody has their own life.

And so people don't all think the same.

So I do think that it's okay to think different from other people, but I think that we should just learn from them.

And that's why I'm very glad I had my mom because she always like encouraged me to like learn more about people, to talk to them, to learn more about their ideas and like how they were as people.

And to me that, because I wasn't always able to make friends, it was always very difficult for me.

But also, of course, I didn't interact with people all too often when it came to like being friends, but I was still able to observe.

I was able to see, ah, they think that, that's really interesting.

I never thought of that before.

I never saw that way before.

- So shout out to strong moms with open minds, right.

- Yeah.

- It's a beautiful thing.

- Yeah.

We're gonna have to cut to our next video here real quick.

We've learned a lot about the role that history has played in gender roles.

So let's talk about taking power into our own hands, right.

And envisioning the future that we'd like to see.

In our ideal future what role will gender play in our day-to-day lives?

I'm gonna start with you, Oliver.

- Well, ideally I don't think gender should play a huge role in day-to-day life because in the end it doesn't really have much impact on anything.

And right now with the world has changed a lot from, say 50 years ago, but a lot of the time it's still the stay at home moms and the dads who go to work, and just still the very strict gender roles.

And ideally, I think that, you know, if you want to be a stay at home dad, then that's okay, no one questions that, you know.

It's also the norm, you know.

And then mom can go work and we are seeing a bit of that now, you know, but it's still kind of the outliers that do that, you know.

So I'd like to see much less of that.

You know, this is this and that is that.

- Yeah, I love that.

Thank you.

What about you, Brin?

- My hope for the future is that it will have absolutely no bearing because it really shouldn't, because it is only the way the world sees you and the way you see yourself, so why should have a bearing on who, on like what you do?

I, because like I know strong men and I know strong women, I know smart men, I know smart women.

And I know strongest more people outside of the gender spectrum.

And so it really does, it really does make me question why is there a point to this?

Why has this lasted this long?

And so my hope for the future is that it doesn't, is that there is no point to it.

It becomes kinda like your name.

It's just a part of you, you know.

It's, you know your name, yes, you have your experiences with your name.

Maybe somebody called you like the wrong name, I mispronounced your name before.

And maybe somebody mis-gendered you in the past, or maybe they just got mistaken, you know.

And so my hope for the future is that it becomes no different than your name and becomes another part of who you are, but that it has no bearing on anything else whatsoever.

- I love that, kinda tying into some of the things that we were talking about earlier in this session, how these are constructs, right.

You know, because I agree with you, I would love to be in a future where, you know, the first thing that people see when they look at me is me not that I'm a black person, not that I might be a woman, but they see me and they wanna get to know me for who am, right.

And so I'm hoping that we can operate outside of these constructs.

If we created them then we can undo them.

If we created these boxes that we have from the moment we were children, they check off these boxes of what we fit in and who we're supposed to be, then we can undo them.

So I look forward to that and I hopefully look forward to creating that with you guys.

All right, thank you so much.

The last thing that I wanted to ask you, 'cause I know there's a lot of people that are watching that may be in a similar situation to wanting to operate outside of these boxes, wanting to truly be themselves, if you could take 30 seconds to just send them a message and encourage them, what would you say?

- So it's just, you may not be right the first time.

You may not be right the second time, but I think that the path you take along the way to get to the destination is more important than the destination.

Because once you get there, once you figure out who you are, I mean, you'd only learn who you are, but that path it'll teach you so much more about yourself than just a word, you know, and that path might help other people learn.

And I just wanna say be resilient.

If people say anything about it, you're just, you're trying to learn about yourself, which I think that, I consider that a form of self-reflection, which is difficult, you know.

It's not a lot of people can do that.

And so, to me, I consider that try, try something, and try something, be resilient to what others say.

And just, you may not be right the first time, you may not be right the second time, but don't worry about being right, just focus on getting there, not the end result, but how you get there.

- Stay present on the journey.

- Yes.

- I appreciate that Brin.

What about you, Oliver?

- A lot with what you said about, it's okay to not know.

It's okay to be wrong, you know.

My journey with gender, it was long, it was hard.

And I finally got to where I am today and I'm happy with it.

But it's okay, you know, if they're never really is even a destination, you know.

A lot of people are very concerned with labels.

And if none of those fit you, if you don't want to use a label, that's okay.

You know, you don't have to.

And another thing is a lot of times you will meet people who don't support what you're doing with your life, you know.

And the important thing to remember, it's hard to, in the moment, but for every person standing in front of you saying you're wrong, you shouldn't be doing this, you know, there's 100 more behind you supporting you.

- I appreciate that so much, Oliver.

That's all the time we have for now.

Be sure to check out Generation GRIT every Friday at seven right here on PBS12 or if streaming is more up your alley.

You can find every episode at pbs12.org.

I'm Carrie Joy, and on behalf of all of us here at PBS12, thank you for joining us.

(upbeat music)