Digital Gender
Mamma mia, the kids, they’re all trans
If you’ve picked up TikTok since march 2020, and you’re some flavour of queer, you may have noticed what appears to be an uptick in gender non conformity and exploration. There’s much of the same expression we’ve seen in some form or another, finding new symbols and trends and attaching them as signifiers to identity, journeys from the closet to out, and increasingly less and less comprehensible reasons for defining something as “gay” both as a joke and as a serious reclamation of the ability to define what that word means.
However, the pandemic and social isolation is a new variable being thrown into an old formula. Gender is complex, and many faceted, but it can be said that a large part of it is performance and observation. Thanks to quarantine, many of us have had our primary audience for gender performance removed. We see people in neck up video conferences and masked selfies, we work from home or from 6 feet away behind plexiglass and PPE. For many of us, the sole audience to our day to day performance of identity and gender is ourselves and our housemates.
So how do we perform gender without an audience? Some are using this time to experiment, others to reject the performance all together. People are removing bras and shaving from their daily routine, shaving their heads because “no ones gonna see anyway”, and impulse purchases driven by isolation are adding new accessories and wardrobe items to our daily rotations. A reclamation of the Bimbo identity as a leftist expression of self identification has led to the creation of new terms, such as “himbo” and “thembo” .
Social media also allows people who care to look to see the inherent performativity of gender. Gender can be something that you apply, or put on, for the short zoom meeting, or to take a fun tiktok, and then remove afterwards. It's more comfortable to wear the baggy sweats and take off the makeup and the jewellery, or the clothes, or even the wigs. And sometimes the gender application process can take hours to perfect, to meet a certains standard, before being wiped off and thrown in the trash. Many a thinkpieces has been written about how the culture of beauty gurus, makeup artists and influencers has changed how youth are interacting with makeup, and increased expectations for the skill and time people are meant to devote to their appearance. It’s a powerful thing to reckon with, when you can throw your gender into the trash on the back of a wet wipe, after spending 2 hours getting your fake freckles, overdrawn lip and nose blush just right.
Of course, this could be a reflection of more socially accepting times on an app mostly popularized by youth. While the southern united states bans trans youth from participating in team sports, the olympics singles out black women with “abnormal testosterone levels”, and canada argues over whether it should ban conversion therapy, cis men on tiktok are praised for donning skirts and maid outfits, and women openly speak about their desire o be “feminine in the way that boys are”. And we must take into account that apps like Tiktok use algorithms to curate a feed of content that will appeal specifically based on your personal likes and dislikes, browsing history, and what movies your roommate mentioned yesterday. All of these observations, like any observation on the nature of gender, could be more of an insight into my personal views on gender than any greater trend. Perhaps in another few years, when the dust has settled and we are (hopefully) all vaccinated, we can look back with more clarity at this time and the effect of isolation on gender outside of a children's social media app.
