Gender Identity, Gendered Spaces, and Figuring Out What You Love

Three years ago, as my fortieth birthday disappeared into the far distance in my rearview mirror, driven by a combination of vanity and fear of my own mortality and decrepitude, I committed to getting in shape.

I’ve always been fairly active: I have always walked a lot, commuted by bike when that was plausible, avoided driving whenever possible, and just generally been high energy. But a childhood full of failure at team sports and a lack of innate gifts in the coordination department scared me off for decades from formal physical activity. Indeed, I was convinced that I hated working out—that I would always hate it, no matter what, and that it would always take a tremendous and ongoing act of sheer will power to do it.

For as long as I can remember, I have been deeply uncomfortable in spaces that are specifically gendered female. “Girls’ nights out,” dedicated women’s fitness activities, get-togethers for women faculty at the university, or other such single gender events are excruciatingly awkward for me. I suspect that single gender men’s spaces and activities would also be uncomfortable for me, but I will never know since my presence will always make them something other than that. That little puzzle aside, I experience women’s spaces as deeply uncanny; in them, I am acutely not at home in my own gender, body, and identity. Female dominated and women only events and spaces make me feel, quite vividly, as though I am in drag, like I am putting on an uncomfortable and alien costume, where the costume happens to be a room or an activity rather than an item of clothing.

While I prefer events with a diverse mix of people, both as a matter of principle and for my visceral comfort level, I am generally most at home in male-dominated spaces. Philosophy, as a discipline, has done a lot of self-examination in the last few years; together, we have realized the extent to which the institution is not merely male dominated as a matter of contingent demographics, but in fundamental, institutionally structured and supported ways. Like many of my fellow feminist colleagues, I take it as an important goal to create an inclusive and diverse disciplinary space. But frankly, as a matter of personal preference and comfort level, the masculine gendering of philosophy spaces has always made me more rather than less comfortable.

Even more acutely, it turns out, I prefer physical activities that are generally gendered male, and I am more comfortable training with and around a preponderance of men. This was a life changing discovery for me, and one that I have had to think through on a theoretical, political, and personal level.

As a feminist, I felt shame about my preference for male spaces for many years, which seemed to me to be a betrayal of my values. While I never thought that feminist commitments required any kind of rejection or denigration of men or masculinity, I did have it deeply ingrained in me that I was somehow supposed to value the company of women especially. I also believed that I was supposed to feel more comfortable in female-dominated spaces and in spaces specially designed to be outlets for femininity. I understood that bodies were normalized into feminine and masculine forms when it came to gesture, clothing, posture, voice, pacing, and so forth. Accordingly, I was comfortable with the idea that all women were free to dress how we want, shave whatever bits we did or didn’t want, speak loudly and take up intellectual and social space, and so on. That is, at the level of individual bodies, I understood that we ought to be able to perform our gender however we saw fit. But somehow I inchoately separated my understanding of the multiple, gender queering ways that my own body could perform identity as a woman from the ways I could inhabit gendered social and material spaces.

But identity doesn’t end at the skin. Just as...