Luces Encendidas #8: El Binario/The Binary
Back in my “normal” life, one of the projects I was working on was a seminar on data literacy. I’ve spent a fair amount of time considering the best ways to explain qualitative variables, which at their most basic are ways of putting things into categories. In data analysis, it’s particularly important to recognize that there are multiple kinds of variables: Some are binary, which means each item you’re observing has only two possible options. (Is the light on or off? Is the student present or absent?) Some are nominal, which means they represent more than two categories that are qualitatively different.* (Is this shape round or square or jagged, etc.? Is this area forested or desert or urban, or what? Is this adult currently working from home, at a workspace, retired, not able to work, in school…?) This difference is meaningful for all sorts of reasons, in science and statistics and policy.
*[There are other kinds of variables, but let’s keep this simple.]
Then we come to gender. Socially (that is, for society at large), I believe we’re rightly coming around to the idea that it’s a nominal variable — there’s some fluidity to it, and not everyone fits neatly into one of two groups. Here on the army base though, I find myself part of a massive effort to enforce the gender binary.
The topic goes unspoken when the environment is determinedly single-sex. (For the kids, that is: the staff was pretty evenly divided male/female.) In San Antonio, it was easy to take for granted that most of the kids had roughly similar needs since they were all more-or-less healthy boys, mostly from the same region.** They were issued the same clothes and toiletries, used the same showers, and could all mix and mingle without too much staff attention.***
**[Of course, there were exceptions. There was one kid with autism who needed a full-time attendant to keep him from getting bullied. (Happy note: He did get placed with family before I left.) There was one kid with albinism, who would always stand out in the crowd but was otherwise unremarkable. A few had injuries (mostly knee/ankle problems from playing soccer indoors in cheap shoes) that required temporary use of a wheelchair. A few had dietary/medical needs and a few didn’t speak Spanish. But they weren’t separated out except for a few discreet moments.]
***[We were cautioned along the way to be alert to a handful of gang signifiers — flagging certain colors, raised sweatpant legs, tagged items — but I never saw evidence or heard reports of rivalries or confrontations.]
By contrast, the scene in El Paso is explicitly gendered. Boys and girls are kept separate, not only residing in segregated structures, but having separate mealtimes and different rules for which staff could supervise them. (Men can only go into the boys’ dorm, while women are allowed in either.) Even though they’re ostensibly kept apart, the boys and girls march past each other’s dorms on the way to mealtimes and act as typically hormonal teenagers do.# Some of it is no doubt acting (in the theatrical sense) due to the great boredom of life here, but it adds a palpable charge to the environment. It is perhaps not coincidental that pregnancy tests are part of the menu of health services offered here, but that is also what we in data analysis call a lagging indicator.
#[I recently had a front-row view of the boys’ antics while heading to dinner: as they passed the doorway to the girls’ living area, they hopped, waved, bird-called, and contorted themselves to see inside. The girls looked back at them impassively, their hair up in nets while they waited to be screened for lice.]
Gender performance extends beyond the relations between the sexes, to extremes of policing within each cohort. A couple of nights ago, my colleagues and I plodded through repacking some few hundred unisex toiletry kits with “male” and “female” items in response to negative feedback from the kids. Boys had been getting bullied for washing with pink and purple loofahs, so they could only now receive ones that were blue or green. Hairbrushes in “pretty” colors (i.e., anything but black) could only go to girls.## Conversely, girls were only to be given bar soap because the over-scented (Axe-knockoff) body wash the boys used was reportedly irritating their skin. On and on, Speed Stick for him, Secret for her, please color within your assigned lines, etc.
##[Combs are disallowed from distribution, since they can be sharpened.]
Of course, sex differences exist. We only hand out sports bras and menstrual pads to half of the kids because only about half the kids need them. But otherwise, they all get t-shirts, shorts, and sweatsuits because they’re easier to purchase in bulk, they’re durable, and anyone can make do with them. Practical.
And it’s likewise for practical reasons (stemming from socialization to outside scrutiny to the overt abnormality of this situation and the lack of any kind of parental figures) that sex-segregation and gender-differentiation are the only real option here. In my more hopeful moments, I imagine the kids see this stage of their journey as an involuntary stint in Shitty Summer Camp and they know they’ll be on their way soon enough. I just hope it doesn’t reinforce too many unexamined ideas of How Girls Are and What Boys Do. The data on such binary thinking indicates that it doesn’t yield great outcomes.
