There is a difference between a “transgender,” “transsexual,” and a “non-gender conforming” individual. A transgender is a person whose self-identity differs from their ascribed status. To clarify, an ascribed status is something that is assigned to a person at birth which cannot be altered such as skin color— in this case— sex; meanwhile, a transsexual is a person who willingly undergoes plastic surgery to actually alter their birth sex. A non-gender conforming person is someone who does not abide from society’s stereotypical views of how they should appear or behave based on what their ascribed status was originally.
For example, in society the average female should appear as delicate as a porcelain doll with hair below shoulder length, pastel colored clothing, and Snow White’s rosy make-up look while behaving like the Virgin Mary. As for society’s expectations for males appearance should be with a black suit, a thick beard, and a male chauvinist behavior that says “I’m macho,” therefore, a non-gender conforming individual will reject these social expectations in order to be recognized as what they identify as.
To prevent non-conforming male students from being discriminated to encountering psychological obstacles, education needs to be further stimulated about non-gender conforming individuals to complete comprehensiveness and develop empathy they deserve as equal human beings. Before empathizing, people must know the categories that exist within LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer and/or questioning identities) students.
To clarify, a category is a group of people who share similar a common status but aren’t tied to one another in any way, in which case non-conforming male students are one whole category while transgenders and transsexuals are on a whole other. To further stimulate a person’s current educated level about non-gender conforming males, he or she must also have an interactionist perspective. Symbolic Interactionism or interactionism is the third perspective in sociology that is used for analyzing groups at a micro-level (narrower group) view (Introductory to Sociology, n. . , p. 117).
In the United States non-gender conforming has increased rapidly within America’s youth, mainly males. Youth who exhibit cross-gender characteristics become highly at risk for rejection from society, which is this case school peers and educators. As early as preschool years, children who behave in gender-atypical manners evoke dislike, bullying, and even physical aggression from their peers. Thesis: Non-gender conforming male students are at higher risk of undergoing social pressures at schools.
Educators and peers need to be completely educated or empathetic towards non-gender conforming male students because it can affect them by causing appearance discrimination, alienation, harassment, and psychological obstacles. First and foremost, appearance discrimination affects non-gender conforming male students. According to LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer and/or questioning identities), in the United States, 43. % out of 8,584 students were discriminated because of their gender expression and 24. 8% were male (National School Climate Survey, 2011). Within social institutions such as schools, the reality of appearance discrimination amongst non-gender conforming male students happens to be more enhanced because as the other youths develop more knowledge from preschool to college— they develop different notions and forms of empathy in which affect their expectations of others.
It is safe to mention that, “Each situation is a new scene, and individuals perform different roles depending on who is present (Goffman, 1959). ” However, non-gender conforming youth rebel against this belief in society, in hopes to be accepted how they choose to be. When non-gender conforming male students do not abide by society’s hegemony—the way society is produced by the dominant culture which dictates what is valid or invalid (e. g. boy not wearing/wearing lipstick)—they are most likely going to become appearance discriminated by others whose mentalities are incompletely educated that don’t fully comprehend the damage they are causing non-gender conforming male students and leads to the lack empathy; or, others whose empathy is incomplete because their educated minds are not complete to understand. Meanwhile, On March 12, 2015, a six-year-old non-gender conforming male, Ziya, went through a life changing experience which affected his entire family.
It was on the second day of kindergarten when the six-year-old child had been forced to fight because the other boys were surrounding him trying to get him to take off his pants to “prove” he was indeed a boy. The child’s mother, Faith Yewdall, did not know what had happened until the end of the week since her son began to act out at home to later found out that the boys in school were smacking Ziya’s rear-end and calling him “cutie,” meanwhile the older kids had forbidden him to enter the bathrooms. Yewdall spoke many times with the staff including the PTA and principal at the school, looking or a solution; yet, even though the principal said she was going to handle the issue, the bullying persisted daily to the point she had to withdraw Ziya from public school to homeschooling (Sopelsa, 2015).
It is unclear the principal’s reason to not have prioritized this issue for a beneficial solution—whether it was parents at the PTA meetings democratically influencing the rejection the matter as a whole or some other reason— it is clear that there is a lack of empathy because an educational gap is missing to completely comprehend that non-gender conforming individuals are not so different from what society considers “normal. This is the power of hegemony, the power of the dominant culture dictating what we see as valid and what must be seen as invalid. Secondly, non-gender conforming male students face alienation from their peers.
As peers appearance discriminate their non-gender conforming male classmates, alienation is likely to occur. According to Karl Marx, “alienation refers to the condition in which the individual is isolated and divorced from his or her society, work, or the sense of self” (Introduction To Sociology, 1848, p. 2). Marx developed four types of alienation: alienation from product, process, others, and self. Non-gender conforming male students develop a sense of alienation from others because once the “first lens” or the master status (the override of all other statuses and its affection, or the first judgement) in which other students perceive them as, they’ll begin to cast judgement on the non-gender conforming male students and from there spread rumors in which the affected students become alienated.
Additionally, non-gender conforming male pupils may feel disenchanted by the usage of the negative language other students may say such as “freak” or “it,” thus physically alienating them from any school in-groups or a group that an individual feels they belong to and believes it to be an integral part of who they are. The power of language is beyond physical power because words can cause more than physical wounds, it can cause a non-gender conforming individual to not only feel alienated from others but from themselves as well.
According to Amy Tan in her article “Mother Tongue,” she mentions that the power of language can evoke emotions; that said, non-gender conforming males can become alienated from themselves by peers and educators alienating them from who they identify themselves as by addressing the affected males with “He/Him” pronouns rather than what they prefer. Correspondingly, a similar harassment encounter happened to Alex Grubbs, a 14-year-old male living in Tallahassee, Florida.
Grubbs is a non-gender conforming male that does not categorize himself neither female nor male (Walton, 2015). His school does not have any form of uniform, so he decided to wear a dress. Unfortunately, the school “caught” him and threaten him to change his clothes immediately or he was going to be sent home. Grubbs refused to give up on the way he preferred to identify himself and was sent home, shortly he withdrew from his hegemony abiding school.
Thirdly, non-gender conforming males are also being harassed in their school environment. For example, in New York, the NYCLU (New York Civil Liberties Union) conducted a statewide analysis to show incidents of harassment related to a student’s sex, gender, or sexual orientation in which resulted mainly in public schools. New York schools reported 24,478 male harassment incidents by other students during the 2012-2013 school year in which 19 percent of those incidents were related to gender stereotypes (2015).
Furthermore, physical harassment by peers is another important matter to obtain awareness because, in accordance to The National Climate Survey (2011), almost 44. 7% (half) of LGBT students (majority males) had been physically harassed by being shoved or pushed at some point at school within a year. Not only are their peers harassing them, but also their educators are affecting them. For example, non-gender conforming males are frequently verbally harassed by getting pointed out for dress code “violations” in which is valid enough to take “disciplinary” action by their educators intentionally.
Many non-gender conforming students keep their status (a position in society) private to conceive their position in society from the expectations that are anticipated – it is one of the constitutional rights that is supposed to protect them—but it wasn’t the case when a New York educator used a non-gender conforming male student’s birth name when the student specifically asked his educator at the beginning of the year how he wanted to be respectfully addressed.
After calling the non-gender conforming male, his instructor later directed him as one of the girls to get his attention while talking to the group of girls he was involved, as a way to “prove a point” (2015). The educator violated a significant more which is a type of norm that violates moral significance (e. g. respect for other people’s preference is important). As a final point, non-gender conforming males face psychological obstacles. Psychological obstacles may include harassment trauma leading to suicidal thoughts or attempts. As demonstrated, the power of language has more impact than physicality.
According to the National School Climate Survey (2011), an overwhelming majority of 92. 3 percent reported being verbally harassed. Non-gender conforming males are not only verbally harassed by peers calling them names such as “tranny” or “sissy” for their gender expression, but they’re also being threatened and resulting in possible egotistic suicidal attempts or thoughts. Sociologist, Emile Durkheim, explained four types of suicides in which resulted in social integration and social regulation: Altruistic (too much integration), Egotistic (too little integration), Fatalistic (too much regulation), and Anomic (too little regulation).
Findings of National Transgender Discrimination Survey (2011), showed that 41 percent of non-gender conforming individuals questioned in the survey attempted suicide in their lifetimes… About 80 percent of respondents who had suffered physical or sexual violence at school attempted suicide” (Cavender, 2014). Durkheim further theorized that suicidal thoughts result in anomie, which is stated to be a sense of disconnection brought about changing conditions.
In this case, the changing conditions for non-gender conforming male students may indicate increased distress due to lack of their primary (familial) or secondary socializations (social supports) and the pressure of being seen by others different from the way they see themselves. Conclusively, overall non-gender conforming males are at higher risk of undergoing social pressures. Most non-gender conforming males suffer from appearance discrimination from school society, alienation from others and perhaps themselves, physical or verbal harassment, and psychological complications due to all the above.
It is critical to further stimulate a person’s educational comprehension of non-gender conforming individuals to fully empathize them and view them as equals by viewing them through an interactionist perspective. Herbert Blumer outlined, “these basic premises of symbolic interaction: humans interact with things based on meanings ascribed to those things; the ascribed meaning of things comes from our interactions with others and society; the meanings of things are interpreted by a person when dealing with things in specific circumstances” (Introduction To Sociology, n. d, p. 18).
One objective is for sure, everyone is different by the way they sound or live; although, everyone has one specific value that binds each other together—everyone bleeds, and everyone has mutual organs. Everyone is human and should be accepted for who they want to be or referred as regardless of sex. For those who decide to not accept human beings for who they are, there is a shoe that fits for them: light travels faster than sound, which is why people seem brighter until they speak. As a final controversial thought regarding non-gender conforming individuals: Are we so different?
