Raising Gender Capital

How can marketers move beyond the gender binary?

Before a baby is born, the first information we receive and celebrate is the baby’s so-called “gender.” It is the first inkling that the mass of cells developing into a small human will, in fact, become a human. It is the first personification; the first opportunity to fantasize about what this baby might do, love, and experience. In the U.S., it is also the first target market a baby might fall into: blue for a baby boy, and pink for a baby girl. Despite the fact that many intersex babies do not even fall into the categories of “male” and “female,” we pretend these two categories are naturally binary, fixed in place, and prophecies for a baby’s future. As a non-binary person, I have attended a few gender reveal parties, and the joy felt by the parents is extremely contagious. With that joy, though, is an often deep and wordless grief for the nebulous now-gendered child.

It isn’t just at these celebrations that I feel on the margins. In a world divided into two constructs, being in between is often paired with the feeling of not existing. I was not born in the wrong body. I was born into a culture with the wrong notions about gender.

Earlier this month, I was with some other transgender friends in my apartment in Bushwick, all of us on the brink, in the midst, or beyond the concept of some kind of gender shift. We reflected on who we were taught to become. For me, it wasn’t quite as much my parents who pushed a rigid sense of girlhood on me, but the media and advertising that surrounded me and my peers. From Barbies to rom-coms, I was shown a very specific role of what a young girl should be, desire, and embody. Gender was not a choice, it was a compulsory destiny with rules. The way marketers spoke to me on the Disney Channel, from the aisles of Target, and in ballet classes at the YMCA was clear.

The instruction manual of gender didn’t just reinforce that I was a “girl”, but also communicated what kind of girl I needed to be in order to grow up to be the right…

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