Episode 4: Gender Identity

What even is gender?

In this episode, we unpack our struggle with understanding gender identity and how that intersects with living in a world where gender presentation has a tremendous impact on our lived experience.

While Doug has found himself asking, "what does it even mean to be a man?" Vanessa has found herself asking, "what kind of woman do I want to be?" How are these questions different? In what ways are they shaped by the genders we were assigned at birth and the social expectations placed upon us to conform to those genders?

In this episode, we wrestle with questions ranging from romantic attraction to sexism to the gender binary to male-presenting privilege to the good old "nature vs nurture" debate, along with a few tangents thrown in for good measure.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

[TRIGGER WARNINGS: mental illness, gender dysphoria, sexism, mansplaining, transphobia, gaslighting, and bisexual erasure]

Show Notes

We kicked the episode off with a brief sidebar on Borderline Personality Disorder. Doug, again, recommended the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to Vanessa--and she has since started watching! Even if you don't watch the entire series, the song "Diagnosis" from Season 3 is worth watching in its own right for anyone whose ever had trouble figuring out "what's wrong" with them in terms of their mental health issues.

We talk briefly about the romantic/aromantic spectrum without really qualifying what this is. Here's a quick primer.

Doug mentions that he identifies as agender and, more specifically, demiguy.

Doug refers to a podcast in which someone says something akin to "if you don't know what romance is, that probably means your aromantic." That's from this episode of the AOK Podcast.

The quote Doug reads about the "cisgender/transgender binary" is from Transgender History by Susan Stryker.

The quote Doug reads about the "gender landscape" is from Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe.

The YouTube video Vanessa mentions by Alayna Joy is called "The wedding is off. | Coming out again."

Talking about feminism and cultural tropes, Vanessa mentions the YouTube channel The Take and Doug mentions the YouTube channel Feminist Frequency.

Our Blog Things quiz for this week was "What Kind of Fabric Are You?"

This episode was recorded on May 28, 2020.