When the topic of gender comes up, cis people (people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth) often weaponize science to justify the validity of the gender binary. They claim sex is biological and you can’t dispute that because science = fact. Alok touches on this in Beyond the Gender Binary and highlights a great point that “Societal beliefs about sex affect what questions scientists ask and the knowledge they gain. Scientific knowledge is not fixed-it shifts as cultural prejudice is revealed and challenged”. Scientific discoveries are made by humans, humans have biases, humans make mistakes, therefore science is flawed. Science has said white people are intellectually superior, and that Black women don’t feel pain, are these facts or white supremacist rhetoric inserted into the scientific field to push a prejudiced narrative? What makes this science argument even more invalid is the fact that science erases intersex people. Intersex anatomy is not shown in science textbooks, but intersex people are IN FACT real. Science is not the end all be all; stop invalidating nonconforming identities with invalid arguments.

             Another thing that upset me is the idea that feminine expression belongs to women and masculine expression belongs to men, along with the gendering of clothes. I am a cisgender woman, and even I find gender norms to be exhausting and uncomfortable, so I can only imagine how much worse it is for non-cisgender people. I don’t like being feminine in appearance, I don’t like getting my nails done, I don’t like tight fitting clothes, I don’t like high heels, I don’t like anything glam. Femininity feels like a performance to me, I know other women find it empowering, but to me, it feels oppressive. My gender expression leans more on the side of masculinity, but I still identify as a woman. I don’t need to look hyperfeminine to identify as such, that shouldn’t be an expectation of any woman cis or trans. I’m still woman even in “tomboy” attire. Jasmin H’s Snapshot 2 stood out to me because it said, “clothes have no gender” and I want the masses to realize that. All clothing is gender neutral.

            The last thing I want to touch on, and I’m borrowing from the term “white fragility” here, is cis-fragility. Society programmed into us the idea that there’s only two genders and they should each act a certain way and that conditioning has cis people by the necks. We’ve been fed the idea of the gender binary for so long that we’ve convinced ourselves that we came to this conclusion on our own. Cis people defend the gender binary as if we are being erases from existence, when we are the ones doing the erasing. Too often cis gendered people flip the script and play victim, Alok talks about this in their book. Cis people need to decenter themselves and listen to other people for a change. Gender is a social construct; so, if there’s a societal need for this concept to be more fluid then that need should be accommodated.