A person holds a smartphone as TikTok logo is displayed behind their silhouette. Source Reuters.com

TikTok (once the home to lip-syncing and musical.ly challenges) has become a dominant social force that dictates the latest trends and facilitates societal norms for Millenials and Gen Z. This change was brought about during Covid-19 quarantine. Sitting at home and not being able to interact with, well anybody, left society depending on social media like never before. During quarantine, the dormant state of society provided time and space for individuals to explore and express their identities without the harsh constant eye of society. Individuals turned to TikTok to share their newfound identity expressions, thus creating a collective community of queer exploration. 

As quarantine got longer, and people kept protesting masks, people had more time to interpret and change the codes of previous gender norms and share their knowledge. People watched hours of TikToks including constantly (subconsciously) absorbing gender codes around them. Gender is created through a series of codes enacted by how we dress, talk, gesture, and all aspects of our identity reflect gender somehow. As Judith Butler would say ‘Gender is always active,’ one cannot escape or dismantle gender. Since gender is always active, then as individuals we are constantly producing and generating the idea of gender. Gender moves through us when we start talking, dressing, moving about, and reinforcing codes of gender. So when new vocabularies of gender were being formed and shared on social media, gender started to become a collective experience. 

TikTok is life-changing in many ways (exhibit A: taking a 16-year-old dancer and making them a soon-to-be millionaire) but over quarantine, TikTok allowed for millions of homebodies to enact gender at a societal level. A brand new gender cannot just be formed out of thin air. Instead, new meanings are given to gender using vocabulary that already exists. So when people on TikTok saw different forms of gender being repeated, they were able to not only create their own expressions as an individual but also share and learn as a society. It is hard to ultimately say if gender is enacted by an individual or together in society. However, the conclusion that can be made is that with social media platforms like TikTok giving access to an exploration of ideas and norms at a global level then gender will change in an individual because of the society living at our fingertips.  

TikTok still image of Alex Renee (@stapleyourmouthshut) saying things they get asked as a Gender Fluid person. Source @stapleyourmouthshut TikTok page.

The cover of the first edition of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s groundbreaking 1969 book The Left Hand of Darkness, the people who live on the planet Gethen are androgynous, and don’t identify with a specific gender except during a period called kemmer when they become fertile and can have children. Despite this novel view of gender and gender roles, LeGuin uses the pronoun “he” as a neutral pronoun to describe the people on Gethen. Seemingly in response to LeGuin’s book and responding to the history of using “he” as an assumed neutral pronoun, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice features a major intergalactic civilization whose language has no concept of gender or gendered pronouns. Leckie chooses to use the pronoun “she” as the default neutral pronoun as she writes about this civilization. The Radch empire considers their ungendered language a mark of civilization, and characters often commit social gaffes when they visit other planets and make guesses at the genders of the people around them.

The cover for Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.

Both of these science fiction novels attempt to describe civilizations that have moved beyond our human perception of gender and gender roles. However, in doing so, they are constrained by the language, tools, and perceptions of gender that already exist. These authors can’t invent a new gender in a vacuum, so they are forced to use our current understandings of gender as a reference point. Though they are trying to invent new genders and ways to understand gender on their own, their imaginations can’t move beyond societal iterations of gender. Even as they deliberately try to take gender out of the picture, these books prove that gender is something we do – even when we’re deliberately trying not to.

Do we enact gender alone or together? Gender in one aspect, highly individual. Feminist and trans* activism has made respecting the autonomy of one’s gender a key political act. Under this paradigm, we each present gender based on how we intuitively feel about ourselves and express those feelings outward through clothing, gesture, voice, etc. But gender is also incredibly social. We don’t invent gender spontaneously, but rather rehash it through codes that are given to us. Our set of gender intelligibility is limited by the citations of previous gender norms and how we interpret them. To what extent, then, is gender something we have, something we are, or something we do? How do we contend with the “forcible citation of the norm” (Butler 1993), as something that both breaks us and makes us?