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The Gendered Freeze
Buckle up for a slightly longer one (apologies), we’ll get into the fun stuff after this.
The context is, however important… so let’s dive in:
Women
I’m using a really broad brush so that you can find your situation somewhere within this picture.
The Freeze can be said to be the result of millennia of cultural conditioning for women.
Let’s examine that conditioning so can speak and respond in those moments of Freeze.
Also, to recognise what’s happening, if you are inadvertently causing someone else to Freeze.
The Historical Context for Women:
In Gender Boxes, we looked at how things are right now, but for The Freeze, we need to look back a few generations.
To a time when, should a girl/woman behave in a certain way, then she would be actually outcast.
A women could be beaten, imprisoned or even put to death, physically, permanently ‘cancelled’.
In this country, the last witches that were put to death died in 1682.
That was 339 years ago, or 14 generations, which sounds a long time ago.
Your great grandmother’s,
great grandmother’s,
great grandmother’s,
great grandmother’s,
grandmother’s mother that could have been put to death, which doesn’t sound quite as ancient as all that.
She could have been put to death, (for example), for these things:
- having an extra nipple
- being bad at public speaking
- not having children
- being bitchy
- being of low financial status
- having an episode of bad luck
- being middle-aged and outspoken
- losing her temper
Anyone still alive after that filtration process?
Apart from the nipple thing, I rack up a pretty high score there.
Women of the 17th century had to behave a certain type of way, literally, to stay alive.
Her demeanour, what she wore, who she spoke to, where she went, what she did,
had to be exactly appropriate so as not to attract the kind of attention that could kill her.
Obviously, these things have changed, but they’ve changed in increments.
This is the important part:
That legacy was passed down from mother to daughter to keep them safe.
What our great grandparents even would have thought acceptable behaviour from their daughters was passed on to our grandparents.
They passed it down to our parents, who passed it to their daughters.
Eventually that arrived with us and we pass it on too.
And there it is.
That thread of ‘ways we should act’ that have travelled down the millennia to us and keep us behaving.
Even though the details change with the times – the thread is there.
There is still a legacy now in the 2020s, of judging women for dressing too provocatively, being overconfident, outspoken, too ‘basic’, too ‘chavvy’, too everything we’ve talked about so far.
It’s unacceptable, sexist and inappropriate.
Something we didn’t consider when we looked at Gender Boxes,
is the assumption – that ALL of this is coming from men.
Because it isn’t, entirely.
Although we are all well aware of patriarchal ideas – in practice, some of this pressure comes from other females too.
Passing on the knowledge is what our female ancestors did to stop their daughters from being raped or killed.
And while we don’t burn witches at the stake now, we do have a diluted legacy of that attitude amongst us.
So you could say that this legacy partly, in a slightly messed-up way… comes from a good place. Historically, at least.
We are the generation that gets to do something different.
Men:
As we’ve seen, ‘the box’ men are forced to inhabit, is pretty unforgiving too..
The Historical Context for men:
as we’ve seen, to be an Ideal Man this is how society expects you behave:
- not showing weakness
- hiding emotion
- being strong physically and mentally,
- doing manly jobs and pursuits,
- being sexually active and dominant,
- being able to take ‘the bants’
- providing financially for your woman
- being ‘successful’
Not displaying typically ‘female characteristics’ at all, not even slightly.
If you’re a man, the pressure can be to speak up, be dominant – to fit into that historical legacy of ‘manliness’.
But you can’t be too dominant, so you don’t make women feel uncomfortable.
Men report feeling that whatever they do, they’ve inadvertently tripped over another boundary; or run up against some seemingly arbitrary, ever-changing rule about how to behave around women.
The whole ‘typical man’ is still an insult. and we still even see it in advertising.
None of that’s good either.
Transgender/Gender Expansive (TGE) and Non-Binary people.
It’s important to note that if we were being really pedantic, we would say we are all nonbinary, since everyone’s personal experience of gender is fluid between their assigned gender another gender and no gender at all.
In March 2021, the Census 2021 in England and Wales found something pretty interesting. Out of the whopping 45.7 million people aged 16 and over who responded, 262,000 folks (that’s 0.5%) identified with a gender different from what was listed on their birth certificate.
This was actually the first time the census asked about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Among those who identified differently from their birth sex:
- 118,000 (that’s 0.24%) didn’t give a specific answer.
- 48,000 (0.10%) identified as a trans man.
- 48,000 (0.10%) identified as a trans woman.
- 30,000 (0.06%) identified as non-binary.
- 18,000 (0.04%) gave a different gender identity.
- 6.0% of people chose not to answer altogether.
The point of all this, is to show how diverse gender identities are in our population and why it’s important to recognise and respect that diversity in our conversations
In a YouGov study, only 2% of young men (aged 18-24) define themselves as totally masculine, compared to fully 56% of men over 65.
As we’ve touched on, non-binary people may identify with certain problems that typically are associated with the male and/or female experience.
There is a whole additional raft of additional, arguably much more difficult challenges, faced by non-binary people.
So if someone is watching or listening to this and identifies as nonbinary, I hope you can forgive me if I’m clumsy with this.
Obviously, as in the rest of life, take from this whatever feels useful and pertinent to your particular situation, as courtesy and respect should be applied to all genders and all people.
But however you identify, it’s useful to understand that these additional problems arise for Transgender/Gender Expansive (TGE) and Non-Binary people.
The Pew Institute/
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
These and other bodies have done fabulous work in highlighting some of these additional issues for Transgender/Gender Expansive (TGE) and Non-Binary people.
Here are just some of them:
- The inability to have their gender recorded correctly on medical, legal, educational, and other records – 41% hospitals, prisons, care homes, and other institutions failing to recognise their gender accurately.
- Lack of accessible public facilities like toilets, changing rooms, and sports facilities, which affects 32% of nonbinary individuals.
- Everyday misgendering by others in relation to pronouns, titles, and other everyday terms, affecting 32%.
- Everyday harassment, discrimination, and hate crime leading to feeling very unsafe indeed, with 25% of nonbinary people reporting this.
- Inability to access many NHS trans healthcare services due to lack of nonbinary provision, affecting 21%.
- Feeling forced to present as either male or female to be accepted to access work and make a living, affecting 18%.
- Intense school and/or workplace bullying due to gender expression, with 13% reporting this.
- Intense bullying leading to being labelled as difficult, dangerous, or unprofessional when being open about gender, impacting employment, salary, childcare, or just accessing services, with 6% experiencing this.
- Being forbidden in school or work settings from presenting as
Transgender/Gender Expansive (TGE) or Non-Binary without any legal recourse, affecting 4%.
Transgender/Gender Expansive (TGE) or Non-Binary people have very little in the way of recorded historical context, and report these issues of trying to navigate their way through where there’s no precedent.
We are at the very early stages of Transgender/Gender Expansive (TGE) and Non-Binary people being able to even identify themselves publicly, and still without many of the rights and support that others have.
Knowing the nuance of how things might be for other people helps give us more understanding of where they might be coming from.
It makes us better at dealing with interactions.
The Freeze is an issue for everyone, but for time and logistics, I’m going to look the exercises mainly from a largely female perspective.
So feel free to superimpose situations you face or are worried about facing or to explain that to people that you might teach these techniques to too.
That’s the ridiculously long-winder introduction – everything else will be much shorter from now, as head into the exercises..
Question 2:
- How do your attitudes towards ‘appropriate behaviour’ compare to those of your parents or grandparents?
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