Travelling While Gender Non-Conforming

Travelling and seeing new places can be expensive, but the biggest obstacle between me and seeing the world isn’t time or money. It’s gender.

Let’s lay some groundwork. I’m a gender non-conforming woman. Although my gender identity coincides with the one I was assigned at birth*, the clothing I wear, my personal grooming, and the way I present myself are not conventionally associated with femininity. In addition, many of the visible aspects of my body are often read as masculine: I’m almost six feet tall, my voice is contralto, and I have less prominent secondary sex characteristics such as boobs and hips.

I’m often mistaken for a man.** Most people I encounter, regardless of their assumptions about my gender, read me as queer, whether or not I’m with my husband.*** If we’re showing conventional “couple” body language such as holding hands, etc., plenty of strangers initially identify us as a gay male couple.

In terms of identity, I’m OK with that. I am queer, and happening to have found love in a heterosexual relationship doesn’t change that. I know my way of being a woman isn’t conventional in my culture. I know the people who matter (see: aforementioned husband) find me attractive the way I am. What trips me up isn’t how I feel about being identified, whether mistakenly or correctly; it’s how other people act on that identification.

Their reactions can make even familiar gendered places in my home country daunting for me; for example, even after working at the same place on the same floor with the same people at a left-leaning workplace that explicitly supports all gender identifications and expressions, it can still be difficult to use the single-gendered washrooms right outside our offices. Again, I’m lucky that what feels difficult is the 50-50 chance of a stranger gaping at me in fright or surprise, not the threat of violence or hostile confrontation. I’m very lucky that the most common follow-up reaction is an embarrassed apology.

Likewise, I hate the moment when I first meet a new group of people in a space that’s conventionally gendered.**** I hate having to figure out the change-room situation on the first day of hockey or going into the locker room at a new gym or swimming pool. I hate when someone I barely know announces “OK, guys to the left, girls on the right!” in a roomful of strangers. I hate when a lecturer or performer looks around specifically for a man or a woman to select from the audience, and I hate when I have to be in a religious space where men and women must act differently. I know that will require acting with bravado confidence I don’t feel and loudly proclaiming verbally and non-verbally that I belong, even if all I want to do is play the damn game or watch the flipping magic show.

If your gender presentation, your gender identity, and your body all match a single traditional Western binary gender category, you may not notice most of the times every day you’re asked to sort yourself or change your behaviour according to gender. And that’s wonderful! It would be stressful if you did!

But because it is usually stressful for me, I do notice. And I can tell you: gender plays a big role throughout our daily lives.

That’s not to say everywhere is always stressful all the time: for instance, I love when businesses offer safe and clean all-gender washrooms. I love when my workplace posts gentle reminder signs in the single-gender bathrooms that affirm the right of anyone who identifies as that gender to use that space. I love when the librarians at my local branch make effort not to assume people’s genders when discussing patrons and when people guide their friends away from being gender police so I don’t have to confront them and when my own friends recognize, affirm, and help out when some experiences we share aren’t the same for both of us.

And every place has spaces and people like that who make gender non-conforming people feel safe and welcome. Plenty of non-Western nations have long traditions of what Westerners might call transgender and all-gender acceptance.

But when I’m at home, I’ve learned from experience what those safe spaces are and where I can find safe people. I can read cultural cues such as body language and word-choice connotation, and I know what process to expect in bad scenarios (who is in charge, what evidence will they probably respect, etc.). I can communicate fluently. I know what’s polite and what’s rude.

When I travel, a lot of these things that keep me safe and relatively comfortable at home are no longer present–the guard rails are gone.

I don’t have to be travelling far from home to flounder, but the farther I get, the more difficult it can be.

For example, in some languages I speak, I have to identify my own gender when I talk about myself by choosing the gender of verbs and/or adjectives. Gender was everywhere before, but suddenly, it’s EVERYWHERE everywhere, and I’m forced to disclose (and maybe argue) or actively lie if I don’t feel safe. The people I’m with have to make the same choices for me or avoid talking about me at all.

Travelling means different cultural attitudes toward sexuality and gender presentation (and different levels of understanding that they aren’t the same thing), whether I’m travelling from a more liberal city to a more conservative one within a country or travelling between countries. It means I might have to judge whether it’s safer to be seen as a butch lesbian woman or a slightly effeminate man.

When I’m on the road, unless there are all-gender bathrooms, the only toilet I feel 100% comfortable using is the one in our hotel room. More than once, I’ve bought more typically feminine clothing, which I usually don’t like wearing, specifically to be able to use public bathrooms during a trip (spoiler: it usually doesn’t work, because my gender presentation is about who I am, not what I’m wearing, and changing outfits isn’t a magic “fix”).

Sometimes, the local norms are against me: for example, travelling in Japan with my husband for our honeymoon, I freaked out a lot of locals and East Asian tourists whenever I used the women’s room. And I absolutely understand why–the average Japanese woman is about two inches shorter than the average Canadian woman, and I’m already half a foot taller than the average Canadian woman. Heck, I’m about three inches taller than the average Japanese man. If my size and those of the women I startled had been reversed, I surely would have had the same nervous reaction.

And, yeah, OK, I can understand why some might consider being perceived as a man to be safer, considering how often women are warned of the dangers of travelling alone.***** But being mistaken for a man isn’t the same as being a man–I don’t feel safe just because I might not catch the eye of someone looking for a feminine-presenting woman.

Overall, travelling means running into the same presentation issues I encounter at home but without the tools I have at home to navigate or mitigate them. And sometimes that makes what should be a restful vacation humiliating, uncomfortable, or, at worst, scary.

*  i.e., I have the cis-privilege that my official IDs and private body are considered to match my gender identity, which makes plenty of situations easier for me than they’d be for some transgender folks.

** Or boy… sometimes I still get carded, but usually only when I’m dressed particularly masculine.

*** I acknowledge that I have some straight privilege here in that my official IDs and documentation “prove” that I’m in a conventional heterosexual marriage, and people who might not listen to me will often accept the word of my husband.

**** Although I dislike this gendering for my own reasons, I’ve also got to point out that it’s ignorant of and excluding/erasing non-binary and agender folks. Again, I benefit from the privilege of having an identity that “fits” in to one of the categories of the widespread assumed gender binary.

***** Whether or not all those dangers are accurate is another story.