On the Meg-John and Justin podcast this time we spoke with Alex Iantaffi who was over from the States to launch the book they’ve written with Meg-John: How to Understand Your Gender. It was exciting for Justin to meet his metamauthor, and for the three of us to get to talk gender together.
On the Meg-John and Justin podcast this time we spoke with Alex Iantaffi who was over from the States to launch the book they’ve written with Meg-John: How to Understand Your Gender. It was exciting for Justin to meet his metamauthor, and for the three of us to get to talk gender together.
How to Understand Your Gender takes a similar approach to the one we took to sex in Enjoy Sex (How When and IF You Want to). It unpacks the whole idea of gender and where it comes from, taking the starting point that cultural pressures around gender are a big part of many of the difficulties we experience. It also helps the reader to think about their own gender through a series of activities and reflections, as well as some ‘multiple experiences’ sections which give examples of diverse ways of experiencing, identifying, and expressing gender.
In the same way that Enjoy Sex includes diverse sexual – and asexual – experiences, How to Understand Your Gender isn’t aimed at people of any particular gender – or agender – identity. Rather it provides a route-map for anybody who is thinking about their own gender, or struggling to navigate the constantly shifting terrain of gender out there in the world.
In the past month gender has continued been in the news so many times. The BBC show No More Boys and Girls showed just how gendered schools and families are, and how that results in kids as young as seven believing that ‘boys are better’, that girls should be pretty and can’t be successful, and that boys shouldn’t show any emotions except anger. Robert Webb publicised his book How Not To Be a Boy about how dominant ideals of masculinity damaged him growing up. John Lewis announced that it was ceasing labelling children’s clothes ‘for boys’ and ‘for girls’ and faced a huge backlash. Some parents were interviewed in the media because they threatened to sue their kid’s school for allowing a kid who was assigned male at birth to wear dresses. Talk show host James O’Brien responded spectacularly to both these news stories. L’Oreal’s first trans model Munroe Bergdorff was fired for pointing out white privilege and structural racism #IStandWithMunroe. And Piers Morgan continued his ongoing campaign against non-binary and gender fluidity in his conversation with Julian Clary.
With its intersectional approach to how gender is interwoven with race, culture, class, age, generation, disability and more, hopefully How to Understand Your Gender will provide some helpful signposts for how to thinking through these kinds of stories, and the ways the issues they raise resonate through our own lives.
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