Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Raissa Mendes
Each body tells many stories, and they don't all begin with biology.
Now, I know this statement goes against everything that has defined our existence.
We've been very comfortable splitting the world into two safe gender boxes,
male and female,
announcing to the world what to expect from us,
but I want to take a moment and let us think from a humanity perspective.
We can no longer presume testes versus ovaries tell us much about a person,
or say that a woman naturally gravitates towards certain roles
simply because she has ovaries and estrogen,
or say a person with more testosterone is more equipped to run a nation.
(Laughter)
(Applause) (Cheers)
Gender, the understanding of it and the expression of it,
is tied to cultural allowances and restrictions:
who are we allowed to be, who are we not allowed to be.
I've recently come to a major conclusion,
and that conclusion is: gender is obsolete.
I'd even go so far as to say -
(Applause)
that our biological sex is no longer a fact.
Let me take you back a minute, I mean, tell you a little bit about myself.
I'm 45 years old, a native New Yorker and a mother of six.
Uh, or five.
(Laughter)
It's unclear.
(Laughter)
I've led a very diverse career in publishing, music, fashion, beauty.
I was even in the circus as an acrobat.
So, you can say that I lead a slightly bohemian lifestyle.
But, in 2000, when I met my husband,
we fell directly and very comfortably into tradition,
doing what I'd seen my parents do year after year,
where men and women are always in position,
operating from either a male perspective or a female perspective.
I became the moral compass of our family, and my husband became the provider.
Even though I've had a robust career,
I thought myself more equipped to understand the emotions,
so that became my territory,
and I thought my husband more equipped to understand our bottom line
and our numbers, so he became our CFO.
The world seemed to reinforce this. It liked what we were doing.
The more I drilled down as a woman and the more he drilled down as a man,
it seemed to me we could do more, achieve more, and receive more.
So, we birthed beautiful children, we launched companies,
and we were able to fill our home with love.
It seemed that dividing and conquering was working for us,
until our third child was born and it all fell apart.
Penelope was born, anatomically speaking,
perfectly female,
chubby, bouncy, curious, smiley,
but, within the first year, Penelope became very angry:
excessive nail-biting until fingers were bloody,
uncontrollable temper,
and this reoccurring nightmare that happened every night,
over and over again.
By the second year,
my perfect child was more problematic than anything else.
I didn't know what to do.
So, I took a novel approach and sat my child down,
and asked directly, "What's wrong? Why are you so angry?"
And Penelope said,
"Well, Mama, because everyone thinks I'm a girl, and I'm not."
So, immediately, I wanted to convey unconditional love and support,
and so I said, "However you feel on the inside is fine.
It's what's on the inside that counts."
And Penelope, without missing a beat, said,
"No, Mama, I don't feel like a boy. I am a boy."
Those words shook me.
I thought maybe I had done something wrong as a parent.
Had I forgotten to do something? Had I forgotten to teach self-pride?
What about all the women that have done so much for the world?
Billie Jean King, Shirley Chisholm, Nina Simone?
Had I forgotten to teach feminism? Was my own child rejecting feminism?
No, no.
This was about identity.
Penelope was conveying knowledge of self.
This was not about sexual orientation or preference.
It wasn't even about the body.
This was being, not feeling.
Full stop.
In that moment when I was sitting with my kid on the floor,
I realized I knew nothing of Penelope's world, right?
Up until that point, I hadn't thought about gender,
I didn't really have a position on gender.
It was simply the pervasive lens
from which I thought, spoke and saw the entire world.
But going forward, I was on a gender tirade.
I could only think about gender, like, "What is a man?" and "What is a woman?,"
these big questions circling in my head.
Now, you know, of course my marriage suffered,
as you can imagine, with these questions,
and all my other children no longer had my undivided attention.
I was forced to pick apart, tear apart the world, piece by piece,
trying to make sense of it all.
I'd like us to put a pause on gender.
What does it tell us anyway about a person?
How does a man really think?
I ask myself this question when I look at my husband,
"What is he thinking?"
I'm sure many of us in the room ask this of the male spouse,
"What is he thinking about?"
And you can also ask, "How does a woman really behave?"
What I find to be more telling about a person are the particulars.
So, for example, I like salami after my meals, instead of dessert.
I'm more savory than sweet.
I make my bed five minutes after I wake up in the morning.
I love for men to open the door for me, but I insist on carrying my own luggage.
What does this tell you? Am I gay or straight? Single or married?
Fem or masculine? A stay-at-home mom or a CFO?
Unclear.
What's most likely to pop into your mind is,
"I kind of like her. Yeah, I vibe with her."
Or, "I really don't like her."
The particulars, more so than race and gender,
help us to understand each other.
They tell us if we can inter-be, if we can get along.
They're kind of like the how and the why we tick.
Another one of my little particulars:
hair is love.
So, years ago, my grandmother taught me to brush my hair, actually,
one hundred times each night, before going to bed,
and my mama taught me to cornrow it in the morning.
So, in my family, hair is love.
It's, you know, about family, and connectedness, and history.
Years later, my determined toddler, in the pink dress that I'd chosen,
and this gorgeous blond Afro, marches up to me and says,
"Mama, I want you to cut it all off into a Mohawk, like papa's."
(Laughter)
So, I froze, thinking, "Hair is love."
But then, we decided to cut Penelope's hair -
you know, why not? - into a tiny Afro,
and in that moment I realized it is my job as a parent
to create the exact environment where happiness can grow.
It's also my job to clear any obstacle out of the way
that stands between my kid and happiness, so that's what I was trying to do.
And it transformed the whole family
because we saw Penelope standing up taller and smiling.
(Applause)
But it didn't just stop at hair.
Penelope became a merciless judge of clothing,
noticing the difference between boy things and girl things,
and again, I tried to do whatever it took to make Penelope happy.
I tossed out the shiny Mary Janes and brought in the Timberland boots.
I threw away the toothbrushes with princesses on them
and brought in the ones with Spider-Man and Superman,
all the superheros,
simply because I was noticing the ways in which we teach gender to our kids,
every single day: through the tools we touch.
Gender is a construct.
The way we package it, describe it, sell it, it's all designed.
There's nothing naturally feminine about pink,
and blue doesn't intrinsically connote strength.
We, humans, put labels on things,
and then those labels become doctrine, or truth.
But I was learning a new truth with my Penelope.
At nine years old, he is athletic, determined, mathematical,
creative, open.
Most of all, Penelope is very, very happy.
Penelope is a boy with a vagina.
(Mic falls down to the ground offscreen)
I know.
(Laughter)
Right. Drops mic.
(Laughter)
It's crude, but true.
And I have to say it out loud, we all have to say it out loud,
because it's not a phenomenon, or an anomaly, or a special case.
This is human life.
Now, I say this today with a lot of confidence,
and I can stand up here and talk to you onstage about it,
but just a few years ago, I didn't know what transgender meant. No idea.
Oftentimes, our kids are on paths to which we have zero reference.
Yet and still, we have to rise to the occasion
and be with them on that path.
Gender is cultural.
So, my children's grandfather is from Ghana, West Africa.
He's highly educated.
He's an eye surgeon and well-traveled.
He's also culturally very African, very traditional, and very religious.
So, we struggled to figure out ways to explain this situation,
that his granddaughter is actually his grandson,
that Penelope is boy.
I didn't think he was going to support Penelope as boy.
So, we took the idea that we'd keep it very simple:
we'd never mention the word "transgender,"
we'd never talk about the brain, and we'd never talk about the body.
So, we just very politely said, "Grandpa G.,
could you please just change your language?
Could you use 'he' and 'him' instead of 'she' and 'her'?"
And then, we waited, crossed our fingers, waited for the best,
and Grandpa G. said, "Sure!
Because, in my language of Twi, we don't use gender pronouns.
So, I rarely understand them, anyway."
(Laughter)
Language is cultural.
If we can learn to speak a new language, we can learn to see the world in new ways.
Now, I know that language can be a debilitating lens.
I think, in my opinion, humans want the world to be safe and small,
and so our language oftentimes reflects that.
We reduce it to the simplest form.
But if we can learn a new form, we can communicate past gender
and past many of the constructs that divide us.
Removing the lens of gender has been a blessing for my entire family.
So, my teenage daughter, who's in the audience,
she learned courage to break the molds set by many of the people in our family.
Many of us have gone to historic black colleges.
That's because in America,
historically we've been excluded from some of the mainstream institutions.
So, we formed our own,
and black colleges are a sense of pride and education for us.
So, my daughter comes up to me once again, another one of my children,
and says, "I'm not going to Spelman College
where you went, Mama.
And I'm not going to any black college for that matter."
So, it felt like a stab to my heart,
because what better experience than the one I had?
But, eventually, I had to let Georgia to find female blackness for herself
and then support it.
For my other boys, this experience has given them flexibility of thought.
Not everyone in my house agrees on the topic of gender,
and I allow for that.
I call our house "the lab," where we lab out ideas,
we explore where our truths take us.
So, here's an example.
Cassius, our ten-year-old science geeky says,
"Penelope, you know, anatomically speaking,
I mean, you're female.
And I respect you, but transgender is not scientifically proven."
And then Penelope says, "Well, it's not science and it's not an opinion.
This is the way God made me."
And then Cassius says, "Well, you know what?
I don't really believe in God either."
(Laughter)
So, they go back and forth, debating gender, God,
and anything that pops into their mind.
My family is a small representation of the larger society,
with lots of different ideas and truths,
and not everyone in my family, or in this room, or in the world,
agrees with what I'm saying,
but if we can put everything on the table, put our ideas on the table,
and explore them, lab it out, we'll be better off.
I've learned, I'm trying to learn
that it's important to discuss, debate, and disagree, without being rattled.
And we do this in the safe space of our home.
But, obviously, society is not always safe,
and people die for thinking and being differently.
But imagine, if we had more safe spaces, how many more ideas we could communicate.
I'd like us to put a pause on gender
and reimagine the world much wider than ever before,
reimagining the "I" in the widest sense of "we."
As a woman, as a black person, I know what it's like to be mislabelled.
It attempts to destroy us.
We can never ask someone to be who they're not,
and we can never ask someone to hide who they naturally are.
We've been hiding behind gender.
I heard a quote that I really like:
"We need to let people feel the weight of who we are,
and then let them deal with it."
This form of self-actualization can happen at any age:
(Laughter)
40, like it did for me; 50, 60;
or three, like it did for my Penelope.
I tell myself, "Jodie, go beyond gender.
Go beyond what you've been taught to be as a woman,
and be anything or everything."
And then you may ask, "Well, if we go beyond gender,
where will we end up as a society, as a community, as individuals,
in this genderless society?"
And so, I would say, "Well, most likely, if we take the name tags off
that are dangling from our necks with pronouns
announcing to the world what to expect from us,
if we got rid of the language that divided us,
we probably would be in a place of darkness and confusion, for a moment,
because language helps us to understand the world
and place experiences into stories that are familiar.
But what if there are new stories to be told and new experiences to be had
that didn't fall into familiar?"
I think until we learn this new language, until we become fluent in it,
it will be uncomfortable, but then, over time, like those who speak Twi,
we won't feel the need to announce gender in everything we do.
We'll be able to imagine beyond.
So, just a few years after understanding Penelope as boy,
I asked a very naive question:
"Baby, would you like to change your name to something more boyish,
something that can allow people to understand you?"
And Penelope said, "Well, Mom, I mean, I like my name.
I was named after my grandmother and I love her,
but if it makes others more uncomfortable,
maybe they can call me Jack."
(Laughter)
And then he winked because, obviously, Penelope is already imagining beyond.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)