Ms. Gendered

Story time!

Back in 2014, I had the opportunity to participate in the Japan-East Asia Network of Exchange for Students and Youths aka JENESYS, a project by the Japanese government where they invite hundreds of students (mostly college and grad students in my experience) for a week-long immersive experience in certain areas of the country.

At the time, I needed to renew my passport ASAP if I were to be accepted in the program.

I got a little help, thanks to a little network of connections that allowed me to have my renewal expedited which, by the way, is typical for some folks in situations where there is an urgency to renew their passport (but that’s not really part of the story).

Now, what I’m about to share isn’t exactly a unique personal experience—it’s happened so much in my life and that’s precisely why I’m talking about it now—but this one particular experience is one that’s always stuck with me.

Look, I’m pretty aware that I have a unique name—Pryce Environ. I have a first name that’s typically a surname and a second name that I’ve never seen in a human name—which is to say, it’s definitely a noun but rarely used to name a person.

My name is also quite… ambiguous. Androgynous, even. It’s neither feminine nor masculine (to me, at least).

But, apparently, based on this not-at-all unique personal experience back in 2014, some strangers who’ve never met me in person tend to interpret my name as masculine. Therefore, they tend to assume I’m a dude.

That’s exactly what the person helping us that day assumed about my identity because prior to arriving at the DFA in Pasay, I sent a copy of my birthday certificate in advance. So, when she saw me in person, she couldn’t connect the dots. It was an Error 404 moment for her. (But, I mean, didn’t she check my birth certificate properly?

Her assumptions were complicated by the sight of my old passport (like, the really old Philippine passports that were green and handwritten).

Granted, when I was a kid, I look more androgynous.

I had my hair kept short, the cut arguably a little more masculine—and I admit that the haircut I had in that old passport was mothereffing ugly.

In other words, I had an ugly ass bowl cut.

She was convinced I was male—like, my apparently masculine-sounding name wasn’t evidence enough then my old passport photo was the smoking gun.

The experience was a little embarrassing, I must admit, fellow Feminists in Progress. Here’s this stranger whose help I needed, but I was having my gender identity questioned. That’s why I still remember that moment to this day, seven years later.

Of course, I couldn’t sass and tell her off. She was in a position of power. I needed something from her that day.

Besides, objectively speaking, she wasn’t being malicious just ignorant, I guess. The way she went about it was just really uncalled for.

As I’ve said, this isn’t a unique personal experience. That is, I have had countless experiences where assumptions are made about my gender identity based on my name alone.

Immediately, there is an assumption that it is a masculine name and, therefore, I must be a man. Well, if that were the case, I’d like some of that male privilege, please.

Sans a photo of me or a gendered title like “Ms.”, people typically assume I am male—the HR of one of my workplaces when I first applied there, the bank that insisted on using the title Mr. on my name (even though I clearly ticked off my gender identity in my account application), moderators of a webinar (even though my profile photo displays my face).

And these are just the ones that I can remember.

But the moment they see me in person—a female assigned at birth with a feminine gender expression and is therefore signifying that she is a woman—there’s that quick short circuit moment of embarrassment and slight confusion when they realize there’s a disparity between their assumption and the person they see before them.

Because somehow the unspoken rule is “If you were born a girl, you need to have a girl’s name, and you have to dress and act like a girl. Why? Because that’s convenient.”

I suppose I could psychoanalyze myself and say that by the time I got to my late teens to early 20s, I assumed a more feminine gender expression than my androgynous gender expression as a kid precisely because of all those assumptions about my gender when I was kid and the lack of gender expression that more neatly aligned to my assigned gender at birth. (Sheesh, that’s a lot of ‘gender’ for one line of thought.)

Is my current feminine gender expression an overcompensation for my lack of femininity as a kid, a time in my life when things like socially-imposed gender roles and traits were the least of my worries?

Or is it because the older I got the more these gender roles and traits were imposed on me or the more I internalized them?

Which then leads me to the question: are these gender traits and roles inherent or inherited?

As a kid, I may not have been the most feminine—as a matter of fact, I sort of rejected it, found it frivolous (even though kid version of me didn’t know what “frivolous” meant).

I was shy about wearing clothes deemed feminine—like dresses and the color pink. I felt like I would end up drawing attention to myself.

But I still liked things deemed feminine—I owned several Barbies throughout my childhood, loved playing the role of the teacher when I played with the neighborhood kids, enjoyed playing Chinese garter with other girls, worshipped Britney Spears and swooned over boybands, cried when my parents told me that we couldn’t buy a Britney Spears doll at the time, and emulated Hilary Duff’s iconic character Lizzie McGuire (as a matter of fact, in sixth grade, every Friday was a uniform-free day at school and I wore my outfits to resemble Lizzie’s—this was the first moment in my adolescence when I felt comfortable enough to embrace my femininity).

By the time I got to high school, I was a bit more tomboy-ish for the first three years. When I got to senior year, I embraced my inner punk rock princess.

So, I ask again: are our ideas about gender and the way we execute these ideas inherent or inherited?

Our names—specifically, our forenames—can be a gendered process, Jane Pilcher argues. This is especially apparent when newborns are given forenames, when transgender people choose forenames for themselves, when heterosexual women marry, and
when children are given surnames.

It’s the first one—the giving of forenames to newborns—that I want to focus on in this episode, both to just narrow things down and because it’s one I can speak on based on experience.

But, if you’re interested in reading Pilcher’s paper, I’ve left a link to it in the description.

In a lot of cultures, it is typical to give newborns a gender-specific forename. “Boy” names for boys and “girl” names for girls.

Androgynous or gender-neutral forenames are rare (hence, my aforementioned experiences).

Books for baby names even tend to segregate names for boys from names for girls.

Before or after we are born—well, usually, after we have been classified based on our sex characteristics—the next step in the gender game is to be given a first name.

So, the way it goes, typically, is that: “This baby has a vagina. That means it is female. She will then have a girl’s name.”

A name further functions in the management of gender conduct appropriate to sex category—that is, you will know that this baby is a girl not only because of what we choose to dress her with and the name we gave her without having to determine her sex category based on her genitals.

Our first name, therefore, is supposed to function as a tool in our repeated categorization as male or female throughout our life.

In a way, my very existence is an example of R.W. Connell’s concept of “contradictory embodiment.”

Which is to say, my existence breaches the normative expectations about the coincidences of bodies, sex category, gender, and forenames.

My body, sex category, and gender identity and expression all align, but my forename apparently does not.

In Pilcher’s paper, she cited studies that suggest that girls with forenames typically meant for boys may gain some advantage from their contradictory embodiment since it may mean, for example, an increase likelihood of studying science and mathematics.

Another study cited by Pilcher suggests that, for girls and women, having a forename that is recognizably typical for their sex category and gender can be disadvantageous in some circumstances.

In a study of gender bias among science faculty staff seeking to hire a laboratory manager, scholars Moss-Racusin and colleagues showed that, in otherwise identical job applications, candidates with the sex-typed forename of John were rated more highly than were candidates with the sex-typed forename of Jennifer.

Based on that, Pilcher argues that forenames are important in the doing of gender in terms of maintaining a gender hierarchy in which masculinities are routinely ranked over and above femininities.

If you think about it, it’s easy to perceive first names as mere labels we apply to individuals in order to identify them. First names individualize us; humanize us, even. But rarely do we think of how gendered our first names can be.

That’s because at birth, a child is typically given a forename which is normatively appropriate for the sex categorization attributed to their body.

Studies show that the choice of androgynous or sex/gender-neutral forenames, which might serve to disrupt the gender order, remain a rarity.

So, going against the flow of the gender game by giving more gender-neutral forenames or naming them with a forename typically associated with a different gender (for example, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds naming one of their daughters James) isn’t going to change the world anytime soon. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

I think what could end up happening is what’s always been happening—a name is just going to swing to the other side of the pendulum of the gender binary, this name may be considered masculine now but eventually it will be considered feminine instead of the eradication of the idea that names are gendered.

There are still going to be people like me who’ll go through the inconveniences of being misgendered—and I know using the term “misgendered” can come across as tone-deaf especially since the experience of misgendering is much worse, much more harmful and dysphoric for transgender people.

I suppose, my point is: the undoing of inherited ideas about gender takes a lot of work.

These ideas we inherited about gender are now taken to be common sense ideas; so, we don’t think about them that much to do anything to change them.

And as Pilcher herself wrote in the conclusion of her study, “far from being even and equal, forename practices and their consequences are heavily sex- and gender-typed and provide evidence of the continued valuing of masculinities over femininities.”

Whenever people mistake me for a man based on my first name, I typically have a negative reaction to it.

I feel negated, as though my femininity, my womanhood was invalidated. It feels like a part of myself has been rendered invisible.

I am a woman. And I am damn proud to be one.

It just so happens that the name I was given at birth—a unique one at that—doesn’t fit in to your idea of what you think a woman should have as a first name.

At some point I thought about adapting a nickname—something a little more feminine—just to make things easier for me.

But, would I really be making things easier for myself? Or would I be making things easier for others so that they can easily align my name with my gender identity?

Why should I have to make accommodations for others who find more comfort in knowing that a person’s body, gender identity, gender expression, and forename all align to one gender/sex category?

On a different but important note, I do my best to normalize introducing myself with my pronouns even if I am not trans because I want to show people that gender expression is not always equal to gender identity.

I see the point of normalizing expression of pronouns because a lot of people I encounter still hold on to old ideas about names and gender.

My gender expression is almost always feminine, which means that it aligns with my gender identity, but that isn’t always the case for everyone. Somebody may be feminine, but identify as a man.

So, I don’t know… maybe stop making assumptions about people’s gender identity based on their gender expression? Or maybe stop assuming that one’s gender expression has to align with their gender identity? Or maybe throw out the idea that forenames are inherently gendered—that you can make a value judgment on someone based on whether their name is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and that the two are in some hierarchical order?

Try to check your gender baggage.