How Not to Talk About Gender
By KENDELLE GRUBS ‘20
A frequent problem with Milton’s assemblies is the lack of topic diversity. As much as we all love Rodney Glasgow, having ten assemblies about not being racist tends to get repetitive, so the OMCD stepped up and decided to bring in Dr. Jennifer Bryan to discuss how to create gender inclusive spaces on campus. As a queer student on campus, you can imagine my excitement for an assembly that could break the mold.
That excitement was short lived. Dr. Bryan started off the assembly with the awkwardness of a Class IV talk. She delved into a childhood story about bikes and sexism, which could have been a great segway into how gender intersects with every aspect of our lives but seemed more like a poor attempt at humor than an actual aspect of her presentation. The assembly then shifted towards a misguided attempt at explaining what gender is and the importance of having discussions.
Dr. Bryan explored the need for students to have productive conversations without attacking one another. She showed a video explaining a project called “We Can” which involved students of different backgrounds discussing and learning from one another. This idea would be interesting to implement in Milton’s political climate and would allow for students to discuss their differing opinions in a safe space. Confusingly, however, the video wasn’t further discussed, which made me wonder the point of it especially since the video didn’t cover gender at all.
My confusion lasted for the whole assembly. It reached its peak when Dr. Bryan started discussing gender identity and sex. While the PowerPoint behind her explained in great detail the differences between the two, she herself lacked that clarity; she expressed the importance of knowing the difference between sex and gender identity, but neglected to explain either. What’s the point of acknowledging that the majority of freshman don’t know the difference if you’re not going to educate them?
Another aspect that hindered the assembly was the inaccuracy and superficiality of the talk. Though her speech supported the idea of gender being a spectrum, the diagrams she used to defend this point were wacky. The chart used to explain the spectrums of gender and sexuality resembled an outdated idea of identities; not only did the charts leave out agender (a person who does not identify with the traditional, binary sense of gender) and asexual (a person who feels little to no sexual attraction to others), but the charts also wrongly depicted identities that fall out of the binary. Even though nonbinary is an identity for someone who falls outside the gender identity, the scale depicted it as an identity that leaned more towards male.
Additionally, Dr. Bryan’s discussion of transgender issues missed the mark. For one, her presentation largely relied on a two minute NBC video about growing up transgender. She herself couldn’t elaborate on the message of the video and basically reaffirmed the message that trans people are real. She still spoke of transgenderism in a binary way. In the LGBTQ+ community, trans* is an umbrella for all the various identities that fall inside the idea being transgender. This idea includes non binary folk, but Dr. Bryan’s idea of trans people didn’t. She spoke of transgender people only as FtM (female to male) or MtF (male to female), which excludes trans people who fall off the binary. Are people who identify as genderqueer not valid?
The only highlight of the assembly was the end when Tris Wideman ’20 spoke about her experience as trans girl—the power in her words rang truer than the entirety of Dr. Bryan’s work. Tris had the personal experience that Dr. Bryan’s presentation ultimately lacked. While we can listen to someone lecture us about the importance of gender identity, there is more power in talking to real people and understanding their stories.
The assembly tackled a topic that Milton students need to understand, yet it failed to actually explain anything. I was left more confused after the assembly than when I came in. As a head of GASP and one of Milton’s LGBTQ+ affinity spaces, helping people understand gender identity is a crucial part of my life, but when we get half-baked assemblies like this one, it makes the educating process even harder.•
