This article was written by The Line Creative Hub member Cameron H.
When I think about what gender means to me, I think about booting up The Sims and being met with a blank character creation screen.
You choose the hair, the clothes, the voice, the little details that make this person.
You can make someone who looks like you, someone you know, or someone who has only ever existed in your imagination.
Sometimes, you create a character that feels nothing like you, just to try out a new persona.
But real life doesn't quite work like that.
You grow up with a body, a name, and a set of expectations about how that body should look and behave.
You learn which clothes you're supposed to wear and how you're supposed to act.
Eventually, you start policing yourself.
As a cisgender man, I've caught myself thinking ‘that's too feminine,’ or ‘that's not masculine enough.’
But I think gender feels clearest to me when I stop holding myself to some impossible standard.
Gender is playful
Role-playing is one of the first ways we learn to imagine ourselves as someone else.
As children playing together, or in games, you can become a goblin archer, a superhero, an alien robot.
There is no need to justify why.
You can simply put on the costume and start playing.
As we get older, we're encouraged to leave that imaginative world behind.
But how are you supposed to know who you are without the space to imagine who you could be?
We experiment with ourselves all the time: we change our hair, we put on an outfit, we go somewhere nobody knows us and behave differently when nobody has a pre-existing idea of who we are.
It’s all a joyful experimentation of ourselves in our daily lives.
Sometimes the things we dismiss as ‘pretend’ are the things that bring us closer to a more authentic version of ourselves.
The version of ourselves we call an alter ego, the one we create online or who comes out at a party, can be the version that gets to exist when the usual rules aren't watching.
These experiments help us work out what feels authentic.
For a lot of people (including many trans and gender-diverse people) what you find by experimenting isn't only a costume you take off at the end of the day, but an identity that reflects a truer sense of who they are.
It's also worth noting that the rules about gender aren't applied evenly; they shift with class, race, sexuality, and more, and they're enforced more harshly on women and gender-diverse people, who can face real hostility for crossing them.
I get to play with this fairly safely. Loosening the rules is important so that everyone gets to experiment with their gender.
And maybe that's why gender can be so difficult to put into words.
We are trying to describe something complicated with language that doesn't quite capture it.
If any of this feels heavier than playful, that's worth talking through with someone you trust, so you don't have to work it out alone.
When I think about what gender means to me, I recognise that I'll never pin down a permanent definition.
I think about that blank screen: all the versions of myself I could still turn out to be.
I'm a character I haven't quite finished making.
There's no right answer waiting to be discovered, no deadline to meet, and nothing to get wrong.
Only the imagination to keep asking, and the room to keep exploring.
