Gender Matters: The Not-Necessarily Invisible Experience of Being Queer

By Steph M. Anderson

I remember first learning about the psychology of sexual orientation in the early 2000s while a college undergraduate student. Starved for any information that could help me understand my budding queerness, I felt relieved upon learning that sexual orientation was as an “invisible” identity: unless I decided to disclose my sexual orientation, the research attested, no one would know. While this offered initial intellectual comfort, it didn’t match my lived experience: verbally “coming out” was often met with confusion regarding why I was telling them something so obvious; when I cut my hair short and embraced a masculine clothing aesthetic, using public women’s restrooms became fraught and filled with prolonged stares and questions about if I were in the “right” bathroom. Clearly, my sexual orientation wasn’t invisible, but psychological research hadn’t yet fully theorized how and why gender expression seemed to matter.

Fast forward twenty years. As a social psychologist, I currently research how LGBTQ+ individuals navigate the visibility of their queer identities and interpret discriminatory encounters when they occur. Within the United States, the stereotype that gay men are effeminate and lesbian women are masculine affects people of all genders, regardless of their sexual orientation. This stereotype reveals how gender expression – how we “do” gender through our clothing, hair style, accouterments, and body movements – is the basis upon which not only our gender identities are perceived (e.g., as a man, woman, nonbinary person) but also our sexual orientation (e.g., as straight, gay, lesbian). This stereotype also prescribes an expected relationship between our birth-assigned sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation: to be male/female is to identify as a man/woman, is to embody masculinity/femininity, is to be heterosexual and therefore socially acceptable.

Given this centrality of gender and sexual orientation, in a recent study, I asked cisgender and transgender LGBQ people to narrate experiences of discrimination and to reflect upon how their gender expression shaped their encounters. In their stories, participants described a range of negative experiences, both overt (e.g., use of gay epithets, objectifying commentary, physical and sexual violence) and covert (e.g., poor service, dirty looks). Overwhelmingly, for all participants gender expression served as a “first stop” for how they believed others perceived them and was the lens through which they explained the resulting discrimination.

In instances where gender expression concealed queerness (i.e., individuals were perceived as “straight”), LGBQ participants described freedom from the cognitive and emotional weight of publicly navigating their non-heterosexuality. When negative encounters did occur, many characterized their gender conformity as a type of protection (e.g., “It would have been worse to be visibly queer.”). Such experiences of “passing” privilege, however, were often temporary and context-dependent. As a double-edged sword, these participants were more likely to be subject to anti-queer attitudes from their friends, family, and coworkers (e.g., “They felt safe sharing their judgments because they thought I was straight like them,”) and to have their sexual identities be invalidated by other individuals for not being “queer enough.”  

In contrast, gender nonconformity LGBQ participants described that their gender transgressions revealed their queerness and catalyzed discriminatory encounters. These stories more commonly involved strangers and occurred in public spaces (e.g., “I was stereotyped as queer…”). Although gender transgression was the impetus for discrimination in all stories, how LGBQ participants explained their maltreatment varied. Some interpreted assailants’ homophobia as the cause, while others concluded that it was their gender nonconformity was what others “had a problem with.” Still some felt unable to point to any one aspect of themselves. These experiences of ambiguity – of constantly “questioning themselves” – frequently caused participants to ruminate long after the experiences ended.

Regardless of whether their gender expression revealed or concealed their queerness, for all LGBQ participants, gender—in its performance and perception by others—was an indelible factor within their lives. Instead of conceptualizing sexual orientation as an “invisible” identity, findings from my research suggest that sexual orientation can exist both as a conspicuous and concealable social identity and that the extent to which one’s sexual orientation is perceivable is tenuous, context- dependent, and an inter-relational.

These findings also highlight the inherently gendered nature of anti-queer discrimination. Stated differently, anti-queer discrimination in all of its forms serves to reinforce gender norm expectations. This conceptualization helps explain why although social acceptance of homosexuality has increased within recent years, transgender identities and gender nonconformity remain socially stigmatized. In effect, the right to be queer may have increased, but not the right to look or act queer (Wilchins, 2004). As such, advocacy efforts aimed at redress anti-queer discrimination must devote greater attention to challenging gender norm ideologies, in particular gender binaries.   

References:
Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S. L. (1990). A continuum model of impression formation: From category-based to individuating responses. Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 1–74). Academic Press.
Wilchins, R. A. (2004). Queer theory, gender theory: An instant primer. Alyson Books.

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