by Elijah Thornburg

Ian says that, “When I wear a mask, people constantly mistake me for a woman” – even though without a mask, no one hesitates to read him as male. His experience may be unusual, but Ian is transgender; among transmasculine people, getting misgendered while wearing a mask seems to be a rather common experience. The primary reason that folks cited for why wearing a mask increases their chances of getting misgendered is that masks cover facial hair, and, for many, their facial hair is their most prominent male-appearing feature. Calvin, a nonbinary transman, describes his facial hair as “my security blanket for passing as male,” and says that this is the reason he does not like wearing a mask. Alyx concurs – he says that he stopped getting misgendered as soon as he started growing facial hair several years ago, but that now, when he goes out with a mask on, he is “misgendered almost every time.” Misgendering can cause discomfort, frustration, and fear – and its consequences can range from minorly inconvenient to life-threatening. Of the folks I spoke with, a few discussed the implications of being misgendered while wearing a mask, with reflections ranging from “it has brought up some really negative feelings for me,” and “it makes me feel less hopeful,” to “I don’t usually fear for my life, but considering the fact that I have been attacked in a public restroom before after someone assumed I was a female in a men’s room, it’s stressful.”

As a trans person myself, I was especially interested to learn about how transmasculine people in the U.S. are experiencing the social distance we have all been asked to maintain in the midst of Covid-19. How does the ambiguity of gender presentation in public and of gender experience in private change in the midst of rigid rules for sociality and increased isolation? Do binary and nonbinary trans people experience social distancing differently? Through transmasculine-focused Facebook groups, I recruited 58 transmasculine people to answer open-ended questions about their gender experience during the pandemic. All names used here are pseudonyms, used with the interviewees’ consent. In this piece, I share some of the themes from their responses that leaped out at me first.

The volatility of gender perception – evidenced by the fact that something so small as a mask could dramatically change it – suggests some degree of ambiguity in gender presentation. While there are measurable biological realities involved in determining a person’s sex (which is mostly – but not entirely – a binary system), there are many indicators of many genders, very few of which are inherent. Starting as infants, individuals are saturated in their culture’s construction of what gender means and what it looks like; they learn how people of their gender are supposed to dress, groom, sit, walk, talk, bathe, flirt, eat, drive, and just about everything else. They learn to both embody their own gender, and to recognize the markers of other people’s gender. In other words, they learn the intricate “habitus” of genders, or deeply-engrained and culturally-bound set of gendered behaviors, so much so that it becomes a mostly unconscious part of their natural identity (Mauss 1973). These bodied behaviors come more easily to some than to others, but, for the most part, people live their entire lives comfortably embodying the habitus of the gender they were assigned. Transgender people, however, tend to feel immense discomfort with the entailments of the gender they have been assigned. This discomfort can live in both the public and the personal: feeling that how the world perceives them and interacts with them is wrong, or feeling that their relationship to their own body is wrong, or often a combination of both.

The current global pandemic strengthens the divide between public and personal, and creates new challenges and opportunities for transmasculine people in both. The immediate increase in misgendering when facial hair is covered by a mask is a new challenge in the public realm. It is not a question of how one feels about their own body, but rather about how other people see and interpret their body. Although the habitus of gender is an extensive system, it is quite ambiguous; very few rules are non-negotiable. Someone of any gender could have short or long hair, could wear boxy clothes or flowy clothes, could talk expressively or stoically, could be partnered with a man or with a woman. Even still, immediate judgments about strangers’ genders happen all the time, from determining whether someone belongs in the same public bathroom as you to choosing between “sir” and “ma’am” when addressing a customer. The mask problem that transmasculine people are encountering suggests that one of the most reliable indicators of gender is facial hair. If all other signifiers are ambiguous, the presence of a beard strongly indicates maleness. With the beard covered, the ambiguity returns.

While the public experience of misgendering was shared between transmasculine people with both binary identities (such as “male,” “female to male,” “trans man”) and nonbinary identities (such as “genderflux,” “genderfluid,” “agender”), their experiences of the personal realm during social distancing diverged. For many of the folks with more binary identities, their experience of the pandemic has been marked by having “too much” time alone, and using that time to dwell on their insecurities, perceived insufficiencies, and general discomforts about their own bodies and genders. For example, Joe, a trans male, says, “I hate my body. I hate how I have a female body very much. And during the pandemic and being home with so much time on my hands, I’ve had time to look at it and it’s made me feel very uncomfortable and upset.” Sometimes the increased discomfort is related to working from home, like for Bueller, a trans male, who says, “Being stuck home for more time and being stuck in my binder at work for longer hours has made me really self-conscious about my chest.” Sometimes it is related to the physical exercise many transmasculine people use for not only general physical health, but also for building a more masculine body shape. Luke, a trans man, spoke to this, saying, “I feel super dysphoric because I have been out of the gym, not physically active, and have gained weight in areas that make me feel feminine.”

These anecdotes suggest that, at least among the folks I spoke to, trans people with more binary identities may be more susceptible than their nonbinary peers to gender-related discomforts in the personal realm. This discrepancy also suggests a vulnerability, created by the pandemic, that may be specific to some subsets of the greater trans population. Health – including mental health – has a wide range of social determinants (Ansari 2020), and it appears that the isolation of social distancing may exacerbate the inequities in support and care that trans people receive. My research so far suggests that binary trans folks may be especially vulnerable to the negative outcomes of isolation.

The nonbinary people I heard from, however, generally had a much more positive experience of the increased focus on the personal realm during social distancing. Nonbinary trans people are usually at higher risk for a wide variety of harms, and are certainly less widely recognized than their binary trans peers, so their relative happiness during the pandemic may indicate an interesting break from the typical pattern.

Their descriptions of what it is like to be more isolated are best summed up by Nat, a nonbinary person, who says, “I’ve become less concerned with how to navigate and perform gender.” In the absence of constant interactions with strangers, the demand for well-executed gender presentation is absent, too. This may be an especially big relief for nonbinary folks, given that they have neither the ease of embodying the habitus they were assigned nor the more complicated but still prescribed task of adopting the other gender’s habitus. Nonbinary folks, almost by definition, often spend an exhausting amount of energy on a normal, pre-pandemic day presenting as a gender that may not align well with their experience, may take a great deal of effort, or may put them at higher risk of bodily harm. Having the chance during the pandemic to exist mostly free from other people’s interpretations of their body, then, may be an unusually affirming experience for them. Axel, a nonbinary person, describes their experience like this: “My dysphoria [since the pandemic] has been the lowest ever. I’m not interacting with strangers so there has been no chance for misgendering to occur. I’ve experienced more gender euphoria as I’m not being misgendered or my gender up for debate [sic]. The difference is wonderful and I can wear whatever clothing I want… I’m more comfortable in my body because it is not being perceived by others.”

The nonbinary folks who spoke to this newfound comfort are highlighting a way their gender is allowed to be ambiguous in ways it wasn’t before, which is rather different than the binary folks describing how their newly sharp awareness of their gender ambiguity made them unhappy and uncomfortable. While perhaps few people feel their gender experience has changed during the pandemic, for trans folks, social distancing means a different relationship to their own gender. In some cases, and perhaps especially for binary trans folks, this relationship can be fraught, painful, and highlighting the parts of their identity that already caused them suffering. In other cases, and perhaps more for nonbinary trans folks, this relationship can be full of new acceptance, new comfort, and relief at not having to constantly perform. However, for all trans people, their socially-distanced public interactions remain ambiguous, perhaps now even more so than ever.

 

Ansari, David. 2020. “Teaching the social determinants of health during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2020/teaching-social-determinants-health-covid19.html/

Mauss, Marcel. 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society, 2(1):70-88.