The Whiplash Decade
The Decade Gender Was Revealed
With the binary shattered, millions of people are now able to define themselves on their own terms
This piece is part of the The Whiplash Decade, a package on the wild ride that was the 2010s.
For centuries in the United States, gender was largely simple, imposed, and compulsory. Even as indigenous people have recognized multiple genders for millennia, and black and brown urban communities have enacted rebellions against prevailing gender norms, the standard, white-driven U.S. cultural assumption was that there were men and there were women — no one had a choice in the matter. Even those of us who ultimately left the gender we were assigned at birth could only transition with the understanding that we had once properly belonged to the other gender, and that we would hew to the norms of our new gender. Those of us with the ability to seamlessly blend in would try to erase all signs of our previous history.
No one could have predicted that an entire generation would upend these assumptions in the span of a decade. Even as we revel in the visual spectacle of fabulous streaming and social media products that interrogate and rebel against binary gender — from the wild popularity of trans-driven shows like FX’s Pose and…
