Questioning in Quarantine
Suba Senthil
Graphic by Juliana Kulak
There are numerous things we do and feel in private that we haven’t told another soul about, yet somehow others still experience the same or similar things. The way that gender unfolded in the midst of Covid is a story like that, when many felt it was the right time to explore their relationships with their gender. Throughout the pandemic, it seemed that more and more people started coming out as queer and gender-nonconforming. Perhaps this was no coincidence, but was rather a collective phenomenon of more time in the private sphere translating to performance in the public. I wanted to hear from people from the NYU community who did exactly that and to hear first-hand how Covid shaped (or reshaped) people’s explorations with gender and their personal connections with the concept. These experiences in isolation, which individually somehow became collective, are a beautiful phenomenon that really speak to the connectivity of humankind. We were forced to be physically apart, leaving room for many to feel more connected with their own selves than before.
I want to focus on collecting pieces of stories, not wholes. By showcasing different voices and experiences from a handful of different people, I want to show how, while these people are very different, their experiences intertwine. Leaving out their names and their NYU schools and majors humanizes these conversations more than just assigning some additional defining characteristics, and really opens up our discussions of gender more. Being able to discuss gender anonymously helps people be more honest in their feelings and brings a greater relatability to those maybe still questioning. These conversations reflect casual conversations you have with friends over coffee or at the park. Just like that, I sat down with some friends who decided they wanted to share pieces of their stories and reflect on such an integral time of their lives redefining their relationships with gender. Gender is very much something felt on an individual level, but oftentimes many find relatability in others’ experiences with the subject. This piece is in no way meant to speak for any single person, or to universalize any experiences, but rather to showcase experiences from those around us. These excerpts of quotes are entirely individual and personal experiences, yet it’s been so interesting to see how these fragments shape into telling a bigger picture story about gender as a performance.
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How did the shift in time from highschool to Covid affect your relationship with gender?
“We get so caught up in how others think about us, Covid was a real reality check. I mean, I was a junior in high school. My social life was my whole life. I didn’t have time to question my pronouns. I was in the closet and too busy with football games (they laugh). So, yeah, having a forced break, having the forced time alone, was a catalyst.”
“I never went to school where people were greeted and asked for both their names and pronouns like we do in college classes. If you used a different set of pronouns than those assumed by your teacher, it would be because of a separate conversation you’d be forced to have with that educator. And that puts the responsibility on the kid and singles them out.”
“There was, like, one out trans kid at my entire school. I’m sure there were a ton of closeted people, but just thinking about that versus everyone I know here [at NYU] is wild.”
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Tell me a little bit about feeling isolated in your journey with gender, and if/how that’s changed
“I go through all of these feelings and I’m caught up in this individuality complex where I’m like, ‘No way other people feel like this.’ Then I go on the internet and every other person’s questioning using she/they or he/they pronouns? And then quarantine happens and half my friends come out? When all middle and highschool I am thinking I’m stuck, being the only one experiencing any of this?”
“I literally sat there staring at the edit page on Instagram debating using she/her or she/they. Like, I feel connected to the gender identity of being a woman, but not necessarily to the sole use of those pronouns, you know?”
“And then it was just the whole perception thing. What would my family think? It’s hard to explain they/them pronouns to immigrant parents.”
“I think after figuring out my sexuality, I totally just wanted to procrastinate the whole gender thing. And then Covid happened, and all I had was time and it [was] hard to procrastinate it when I had nothing else to do.”
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What further changes would you like to see, on a societal scale, when it comes to gender and gender norms?
“Less of boy vs girl, more of on a scale of feminine to masculine”
“People dressing in whatever they want to. Even if it’s ugly (laughs), just being undeniably themselves”
Me: “And definitely like disassociating gender and their clothing, I think is what you’re going for?”
“Yes, yep. Exactly”
“Gender is honestly something I would rather not address or, like, have to constantly explain. Like, ‘Hi my name is [redacted] and these are my pronouns. End of conversation.’ That’s just how it is now.”
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What important changes have you noticed?
“We saw [during the pandemic] men in skirts, we saw men painting their nails, in crop tops, whatever. Whether they were just these mini micro-trends or performative doesn’t matter. Each little bit was a step in helping, societally, for people to stop gendering random things that have to do with appearances.”
“I saw a TikTok of this guy and he was like, ‘We care so much about what people wear, but it’s all socially constructed. There’s no reason why men today don’t wear dresses, it’s just how fashion fell into place. It could just have easily been the other way around, butterfly effect, men wear hoop skirts as black ties. Stop taking things so seriously, it's not that deep.’”
People stopped taking themselves so seriously because of the time they had in isolation. They realized that maybe public perception doesn’t have to be more important than personal. The idea of gender has come a long way and continues to stay ever-evolving as more people become more comfortable with the fluidity of their identities.
It is also hard to feel comfortable in your own skin, in your own identities, and labels have a lot to do with that. Many people feel constrained by labels and that they have to act or dress a certain way; however, that defeats the entire purpose of freedom of gender identity in the first place. A reason to label oneself may be to find a community or to feel safe in a certain identity through an attachment to the words— not to dictate any other facet of life. The societal idea that gender is innate (rather than constructed) creates a misleading narrative. As society begins to view gender as more than something “assigned at birth”––and instead as something which is performed–– we enable more complex understandings of gender and its spectrum of expression. Among many other things, Covid also provided many with an opportunity to take advantage of the additional time on their hands to explore gender identities.
Many have experienced a very distinct shift in people’s openness to discussing queerness and gender-nonconformity in the shift from K-12 education to college life. This shift, specifically at NYU, has allowed many to feel more freedom in how they express themselves. The push to not equate clothing, pronouns, makeup/jewelry, and other external features to certain identities is a great entryway to creating safe spaces for people to explore who they are without feeling constrained by a label. There were obviously people pushing for freedom of expression, not relating these sorts of things to gender pre-Covid, but quarantine is when these ideas really started to percolate through Gen Z and become more widespread and accessible concepts. This idea of quarantined time serving as a catalyst— that this time advances people’s journey’s in gender exploration— is a powerful concept. In a linear timeline, people have distractions in their external lives that obstruct their internal self-reflection; however, because of Covid, many found themselves faced with this time alone that perhaps accelerated this process.