How Mic Thinks and Talks About Gender

By Kaitlyn Jakola

Mic has a reputation for keeping its eye on marginalized communities and covering those communities’ stories with care, and a large part of that comes in the language we use to tell them. A few weeks ago, I sent the following note to the editorial staff as part of my daily style guide email. It started as a note about a single story on medical conditions that affect certain genitals, and turned into a really useful conversation on how we should confront gendering, both conscious and unconscious, in all our stories — including those not explicitly centered on gender. This is a conversation many publications are having, of course, and it doesn’t cover every possibility. But Mic grows by using its voice in new spaces, and it’s important to me that we speak in this one.

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I want to talk for a second about gender, because it’s something Mic has done a lot of really great reporting on, and I want to make sure we continue that. Society has done a number on us, and we consciously and unconsciously gender things that don’t need to be gendered all the time. Similarly, many people will insist that certain things have always been gendered, and that allowing inanimate objects and brainless body parts to remain gendered as such is much more important than respecting those who live in defiance of that gendering, who are actively hurt by it.

Saying “You can’t be a woman because you have a penis” is no less terrible than saying “You can’t be a woman because you’re fat,” or “hairy,” or “tall,” or any of the other things Mic rails against every day.

So what’s my point? Well, we do a good job on the conscious front, pointing out transphobia and confronting gender stereotypes. But there are still less obvious ways that we gender the topics we cover, from health care to relationships to entertainment. We have to do things like remember that people who aren’t women have vaginas and uteruses, and they menstruate and get abortions, or refer to legal unions between men and women not as “opposite-sex marriages,” but “different-sex” ones, or say “people” instead of “men and women,” or, hell, just ask all of our sources what pronouns to use for them. (Mathew Rodriguez is an expert at working this into an interview, if you’re worried it can’t be done with grace.)

At the very least, we should all be working to separate ourselves from the ideas that man = penis and woman = vagina. And we should do this across all of Mic, not just on Identities or when we’re interviewing a trans person about a trans experience.

This doesn’t mean you have to become an expert overnight, but it does mean you should start asking questions. You can ask them of me, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll help you find it. The GLAAD media reference guide is a good place to start.

If you have any concerns about how we’re doing on this, please come to me so we can talk about it. I try to keep my eyes on as much as possible, but I do miss things. And thank you all for your help in working to make Mic’s voice the best one in the room.