A friend of mine had a baby not too long ago. So when I had a chance to meet this baby, I did what one does, I went to a store to buy a baby gift. A clerk asks me if I need help. And I say I'm looking for something for a four month old. Boy or girl? The clerk asks. The clerks always ask that when I go to buy a baby gift. Boy or girl? And it always catches me short. Because really, why is that question relevant? Does an infant care if it wears pink or blue? Who is so eager to classify and mark

more »

... bies by gender? And why? These might seem like ridiculous questions. Gender seems so obvious and automatic. It's the first thing they say about us when we're born. And people sing about it in just about in a gazillion songs in any genre you can think of --from Broadway musicals to rap songs, to rock operas, like in The Who's Tommy, [TAPE] The Who: "It's a boy" But part of our job as journalists is to ask questions about the things that have come to seem natural, because often they aren't. And we miss important pieces of the story if we get the underlying questions wrong. Our brains seem to make instant calculations when we meet someone. We hear their name, the pitch of their voice, we observe their hair, their clothes, their posture, demeanor. And without even thinking about it, we put them in one gender box or the other. And if we're speaking a language other than English, the adjectives someone might use to describe you indicate whether you are male or female. [TAPE] Ella es alta // she is tall El es alto // he is tall Scholars call this the gender binary. It's the idea that there are two options and two options only and that they are polar opposites. And more; that these opposites and only these opposites attract. In other words, that being a man or a woman is fixed, a hardwired identity. And that sexually and romantically men should be attracted to women, and vice versa. That might be how it feels for a majority of people. But science, along with real people's lived experience, tell us that this description is way too simple. Humans are more variable. Still, that rigid binary persists, and anyone who challenges it can be met with furious, even violent, backlash. Around America right now, states are passing laws aiming to restrict gender to this narrow, polarized idea. [TAPE] 00:00 the Kansas Senate has passed a bill banning transgender athletes from girls and womens' sports. :00 The Utah House passes a plan banning transgender athletes from girls' high school sports Today, I will be signing Senate Bill 2536, the Mississippi Fairness Act The Mississippi Fairness Act would bar biological men from competing in women's sports in Mississippi Public Schools. That was Tate Reeves, the governor of Mississippi. His is just one of at least 33 states that's trying to prevent trans kids from participating in school sports, or from accessing gender affirming medical care. At last count, there were 127 anti trans bills pending or recently passed in state houses this year. What do journalists need to understand to cover these initiatives? Why do these issues rile people so much? I'm Alisa Solomon. I'm a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Among other things, I've written about issues related to gender and sexuality in articles for newspapers and magazines and in books over the last several decades. This is How We Got Here, a podcast that takes a step back to look at unexamined assumptions about issues like race, class, immigration, and gender that can get in the way of good journalism. It's a podcast that offers some background and context beneath the stories that seem to be breaking around these concepts. Because the issues we cover aren't snapshots. They're more like a movie that starts in the past and rolls forward to today, and keeps going. As journalists, we like to say we're writing the first draft of history. But if we don't know the history behind what we're covering, we run the risk of misinterpreting what we see in the present. What we hear. Of not being able to connect the dots. This is Episode Six, Gender and Sexuality. Or, let's make that plural, genders and sexualities. Because there are lots of both. I invited two perfect people to help us get to the bottom of questions about genders and sexualities, and why they matter to journalists. Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies and English here at Columbia. Jack is the author of seven books and counting. They include Female Masculinity; In a Queer Time and Place; Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal; The Queer Art of Failure and Trans asterisk, a quick and quirky account of gender variance. Welcome, Jack. JACK HALBERSTAM Thank you. AS Zach Stafford is an award winning journalist who recently served as editor at large at BuzzFeed. He was the first black editor in chief of the Advocate, the oldest national gay magazine in the US, and he worked as an investigative reporter at The Guardian. He's currently a columnist for MSNBC. Hi Zach. ZACH STAFFORD Hello. AS Jack and Zach, we want to understand how we got here. Why is there all this legislation about trans issues when there's so many pressing needs around the country? Why the fixation on this? To understand that I think we need to start by defining our terms. And I know we could spend all day just on this question. But Jack, I'm gonna ask you anyway, would you unpack these words for us briefly? Sex, gender, sexuality? What the heck are they? JH Okay, that's so you're easing me into the show with the easy questions I take it. (laughs) Sex, gender and sexuality are a sort of a set of nested concepts that describe the body in seemingly obvious ways in relationship to what we have considered to be natural orientations of the body. But like everything else in human life, sex, gender, and sexuality are all cultural productions that are mapped onto bodies that then filter into everyday life and are verified through various kinds of institutional powers as real. So while we do see people around us and make attributions of male and female to them, in actuality, there are very many sexes and very many genders in the world that we live in. Similarly, sexuality is something that has been filtered through a binary that emerged at the end of the 19th century, the homo-hetero binary. And it still seems to be somewhat intact. But I think in recent years, under the pressure of multiple kinds of sexual cultures. The homo-hetero binary has also sort of worn thin as an explanatory concept. That said, sexuality is some combination of bodily desire, orientation to an object of desire, orientation to objects and ways of interacting with the world that are based upon bodily desires. Erotics. AS So you mentioned the 19th century, and the way that we talk about sex, gender, and sexuality is grounded in a 19th century European drive to classify everything. And when it came to humans, that meant sex, gender, and also the concurrent emerging concept of race. How did those ideas overlap at their origin? And why is it important to understand that connection now? JH Well, I mean, again, like at the end of the 19th century, under the conditions of colonial expansion, colonial powers made it their mission to explain the