Talking about gender

On the weekend, Olympic athlete and reality TV star Bruce Jenner sat down with the ABC’s Diane Sawyer to talk about gender.

Jenner was once hailed as the “greatest athlete in the world”. Looking at photos from that time, Jenner says he sees “a confused person at that time, running away from my life, running away from who I was.” He says for all intents and purposes, he’s a women.

“People look at me differently. They see you as this macho male, but my heart and my soul and everything that I do in life -- it is part of me,” Jenner, 65, said. “That female side is part of me. That’s who I am.”

How to talk about gender can be confusing, witnessed by Sawyer’s discomfort as she tries to figure out the change in Jenner’s – who has been married three times – sexuality. “You’re going back to the sex thing, and it’s apples and oranges,” he says. “There’s two different things here. Sexuality is who you’re personally attracted to, who turns you on…But gender identity is to do with who you are as a person, and your soul, who you identify with inside.

Even the pronouns can be confusing – GLAAD prepared a handy tip sheet on how to refer to Jenner. That’s something Aych McArdle is familiar with.

Aych identifies with non-binary gender identity, preferring a gender-neutral name, Aych explains, “My birth name is a Hebrew name that starts with the letter ‘H’ and my family for most of my life just referred to me as H, and my Granddad wrote it down spelt ‘Aych’ one year in a Christmas card and it just stuck.”

While working on their Master’s thesis investigating gender and storytelling, Aych found a new use for their unique moniker, “I wanted to reduce the bias that someone might be bringing [to my work] as they read it. As I sat with my own gender identity and I felt that the binary didn’t really work for me, I felt much more comfortable [publishing] in a gender neutral space.”

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If you’re reading this and are confused by Aych’s pronouns, fear not, the philosophy behind gender-neutral pronouns is something they are ready to explain, “If we look back two or three hundred years ago a massive debate erupted between grammaticians, one group said, ‘We need to institute a gender-neutral pronoun, we need to use ‘they and their and them’ and the other half said, ‘But Patriarchy! We need to use words like He and him and his, ‘Mankind’ rather than ‘Humankind.’”

“With the wave of new feminism in the nineteen eighties came a re-examination of the conventional wisdom,” Aych says. “I think we’re coming to a really interesting new point in language now where we’ve forgotten the generic ‘he’ and are starting to make some traction in how we refer to [gender-alternative] peoples in our society.”

As the Education Director of Rainbow Youth, Aych McArdle is a force in the world of local social justice advocacy. Aych delights in frank conversation about the state of LGBTQ community, excited to offer their nuanced take on the issues facing queer youth in New Zealand today.

Aych is a primary representative for Rainbow Youth, an organisation based in Auckland City, “We’re all about the acceptance of the diversity of sexuality and gender identity in Aotearoa, New Zealand.” With satellite centres throughout the country, the organisation offers several key opportunities for queer advocacy.

“We run an education program in high schools, we go in and teach sexuality and gender 101 lessons and we run professional development workshops for teachers and anyone supporting young people. We’ve also got a series of social groups that meet all across [the country] where young people can meet others like themselves in a drug and alcohol free space, in a peer support environment.”

It may seem as though there’s more trans* visibility than ever. But Aych says it’s not, really.

“I think for people who are actually doing the work in the community, we say, ‘Well, you’re just listening now!’ I think it’s important to note that the increased visibility of queer and gender diverse people in our media and legalisation still comes from a place of privilege.”

“Legislation that’s going through Parliament is about marriage. The mainstream narrative about our community is pre-packaged and palatable. It’s the ‘nice’ version. We’re not talking about youth homelessness or access to health care for our trans brothers and sisters.”

You can hear more from Aych in On The Dial. 
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