genderpolicing

When I was a kid, I wore T-shirts and long shorts and a baseball cap to hide my hair in. Everyone thought it was cute I was such a tomboy. Once, my disguise worked and a man mistook me for a boy. He apologized, but I beamed up at the stranger.

Don’t worry, my mom assured him, that’s what she wanted to happen.

That used to be a charming story about a girl who probably idolized her big brother too much, eager to dress and act like him. But today, as Republicans have adopted anti-transgender hysteria into their platform, a girl dressing as a boy isn’t something to smile about. It’s something to correct.

Rigid ideas about — and enforcement of — gender is integral to anti-trans rhetoric. According to a Jan. 20 executive order from President Donald Trump, there are only two biological sexes and thus, only two genders. This argument is presented as purely scientific (while lacking any nuance about intersex people), but it encroaches into the social sphere.

“The sex you’re assigned is supposed to dictate the behaviors you have, clothing you wear, activities you engage in — that’s all dictated based on one’s genitalia,” Tate Johanek, a visiting instructor of UNC’s gender studies department, said. “In trying to link [sex and gender] together, the purpose is to maintain a specific power structure that gives power to people who meet those idealized norms.”

Conservatives frame this dogma as if it’s beneficial to women. According to Trump’s January order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism,” unlinking sex and gender deprives women of their dignity and safety.

Almost a decade ago, Republican rhetoric argued that allowing transgender people to use their bathroom of choice endangers women. That attitude has expanded from bathrooms to sports.

On Feb. 5, Trump signed an order called “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” surrounded by over two dozen little girls smiling for the camera, grateful to be shielded from the scary gender-nonconformists.

“Cisgender women get recruited to attack trans women,” Johanek said, “because the framework they’re presented is ‘These people are a threat to your understanding of womanhood, don’t you want to protect women?’”

But Americans, particularly women, must recognize that anti-transgender sentiment, which inherently promotes gender-policing, does not protect women. It harms them.

It emboldens people to shame women — even cisgender ones — who fall short of feminine perfection. Because despite the argument that being a woman is purely biological and therefore inarguable, somehow, we are still doing it wrong.

I wore a dress to my cousin’s wedding last fall. I wore high heels and pearls. I wasn’t, God forbid, one of those girls who don suits instead.

But as my family got ready in our hotel room, I could hear my parents talking in low, urgent voices. Which meant they were talking about me.

My suspicion was confirmed when my mom, with artificial casualness, asked, wouldn’t I like to use some of her makeup?

No, I said.

I knew my dad had made her ask, thinking she may have more luck convincing me. But my answer was the same as it always was, to my parents or my friends or well-meaning acquaintances who think I’d look so pretty if only I wore makeup.

If only I wore cuter tops. If only I pierced my ears and wore jewelry. If only I changed everything about my appearance to fit the girly mold.

When my family arrived at the wedding venue, my mom split off to hug and cry with my aunts while placing menus on tables. I hung back with my dad, brother and uncles to give the sisters their space. We exchanged pleasantries. Then, my dad glanced over at me.

Don’t you think you should go help the women?

That’s what he asked me. What he was really saying was that I had no place in the men’s club, and I should attend to my womanly duties. Men could stand around and chat. Women had to keep house, even at a wedding we were guests at.

It was the same dynamic I’d seen all my life. And it was the same line I’d been fed: why wasn’t I helping my poor mother? My brother is never asked this. He’s never nagged about his appearance, except when my dad thinks his hair is too long.

That’s because wearing makeup isn’t about respecting the formality of a wedding, and keeping house isn’t about being helpful. It’s about women acting womanly — and the American definition of that is pretty and docile.

I’m far from the only woman who has been shamed for not meeting these standards. For more examples, we only need to look to the Republican battlegrounds for anti-transgender legislation and rhetoric: bathrooms and sports.

In 2016, Aimee Toms of Connecticut and Jessica Rush of Texas were both accosted for using the women’s restroom by people who believed they were transgender.

But they weren’t.

They were cisgender women with short hair and androgynous clothes, socially punished for their nonconformist appearance.

“The existence of these laws creates a standard where anyone’s gender can be policed,” Johanek said. “It causes us to try to hold standards with one another for how we’re allowed to perform gender.”

In 2024, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif drew the same accusation as Toms and Rush. After Khelif handedly defeated an opponent in the Paris Olympics, Trump shared a video of the fight on Truth Social with the caption, “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” But Khelif isn’t a man. She’s a woman deemed unfeminine in her skill and physique.

It doesn’t matter that we’re women, only that we aren’t acceptable women — just as transgender people aren’t acceptable. Republicans hide their transphobia behind a shield of protecting women’s dignity and safety, but they aren’t.

They’re reinforcing gender roles and denying nonconformists a place in society. Americans have more to gain by moving past the rigid stereotypes that have belittled, restricted and inaccurately defined us.