A transgender flag and a progress pride flag stand outside of the Campus Center food court. Photo by Olivia Reid / Photography Editor.
UMass Boston prides itself on being diverse and inclusive, but unfortunately, the government’s work tends to feel more like demeanor than like responsibility. It’s real for how they’ve handled Israel-Palestine, the Africana Studies Department and, externally, gender identity and trans individuals. UMass Boston seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of sex, gender and sexuality—something that the existence of the Queer Student Center alone can’t fix.
My issues here as a transgender man, fortunately, have been comparatively slight, mainly because I had previously transitioned prior to coming to UMass Boston. Certain aspects and platforms mix up sex and gender. Just in the past couple of months, UMass Boston’s public merit award application asks you to type your sex, then displays this as identity. On the Housing website, earlier in the year when I applied to live on-campus, the same thing happened: Despite my gender being listed as man, it displayed my gender as female for my roommates because my legal sex at the time was feminine. UMass Boston even falls into the all-too-common trap of listing “transgender male” and “male” as two separate genders, as if my being transgender makes me a completely separate, never-quite-male man. Interestingly, I know other transgender individuals have had it significantly worse.
Sex and gender are two of the most confused concepts in conversations about queer people—sometimes consciously so—and assigned-sex-at-birth language was invented to aid with this distinction. Gender is a person’s physical sexual characteristics, and sex, a complex mixture of identification and presentation, is something completely different. To say someone is “assigned female” or “assigned male” at birth is usually to discuss what sex characteristics they were (outwardly) born with: If someone is assigned male at birth and their gender is male, they are cisgender, and if someone is assigned male at birth but their gender is female, they’re a transgender woman.
Simple enough, but people aren’t that simple, of course. In addition to the numerous intersex conditions and intersex genders that make it difficult to categorize basic categories, assigned-sexes-at-birth language frequently conflates gender and sexuality in the same way. People defy classification, particularly those who are by definition nonbinary and trans. There are times when these types are helpful. For instance, it’s helpful to talk about how trans women are referred to as “scary people” who break into bathrooms or how they are mocked for being “confused girls.” But, that conversation takes place in a setting that is completely different from the DMV or admissions office.
You don’t need to be aware of my assigned sex unless you are my doctor or we are in a relationship. Apply the medical term for anything you need to if the circumstances call for it; otherwise, it’s none of your business. For any number of reasons, confusing gender and sex can be a real problem, and most of the time, the person asking doesn’t even need to know either. More than anything else, the subliminal, widespread notion that trans people aren’t “actually” their identity or are “choosing” to be so is aided by the blending of sex and gender and even the use of assigned-gender at birth language. One of the oldest methods in the book is the assumption that transgender individuals are “lying” or “tricking” people, and whether on purpose or not, UMass Boston is stoking that fire.
Folks will always do whatever they want with their gender and, yes, their sex, whether they like it or not. It is noisy, difficult, and ultimately pointless to try to identify one based on their birth’s assigned sex—or, to be more precise, their perception at birth. UMass Boston has a responsibility to provide for their transgender individuals as best they can given that states across the nation have passed dozens of anti-transvestite laws. The bare minimum is just insufficient, despite the fact that it is unquestionably superior to Florida.
