Hello!
My name is Lucy and I’m the deputy editor at Critic. My workmates and I have spent the last couple of weeks talking, arguing, and sometimes screaming at each other about gender roles in society. This week we have two features in Critic that examine some of the complications of traditional gender binary and how difficult it can be for members of society who don’t fit neatly into a category of “man” or “woman.”
In his feature “Pride in Prison?”, Nath B discusses the oppression experienced by transgender prisoners as a result of gender binaries. Often housed in the jail that does not match their gender, transgender prisoners have a daily experience of the violence that gender binaries can exert. Of particular concern are the trans women sentenced to time in men’s prisons who suffer the humiliation of having their bodies examined and their gender classified for them. These women are often subjected to further trauma from bullying and violence at the hands of staff and other inmates. Trans people in prison are more likely to attempt suicide than other prisoners, to be denied adequate and necessary medical care and be denied dignity and recognition of their gender. To take a quote from Nath’s article, “every day in a men’s prison is hell for a trans woman and every night worse”. There are women at this moment trapped and terrified in men’s prisons in New Zealand.
Classifying people’s sex by the appearance of their bodies gets complicated if your body doesn’t happen to fit what we expect a “man” or “woman” to look like. Mikayla Cahill’s feature “Girl Without a Womb” goes into some of the biological signals we use to label babies as belonging to one of two sexes, and how they can differ from the gender a person identifies as. Mikayla got the surprise of her life when she found out that although her body displays every sign of being female on the outside, she doesn’t have the baby-making gear inside. The womb is the organ that defines female fertility and has helped keep women bound to childrearing and domestic duties for thousands of years. Female emancipation in our country is tied to our ability to control our wombs, usually through decades of using contraception. What does it mean if this lump of meat is missing?
Talking to Mikayla and Nath over the past few weeks and reading their work has reminded me how much I take being a cisgender with a (presumably) functioning reproductive system for granted.
Gender is more than what someone tells you your chromosomes, your guts, your build, or your junk say you are. Gender is a personal identity, and nobody’s opinion or laws can change that.
Lucy Hunter
Critic co-editor