When #MeToo Celebrities Fail Trans Women

If celebrities are going to profit off of being the figureheads for our collective traumas, then we have the right to demand they do it right.

Trans people are sexually victimized at a sadly high rate. All victims of sexual harms deserve to be respected and represented by those treated as the spokespeople of the #MeToo movement. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I want to speak out about a nasty case of ally fail that took place this week, when a presumed spokesperson for abuse victims shouted down a trans woman.

This is Rose McGowan. You probably know who she is, but if you don't, she's best known as an actor playing one of the attractive witch sisters on the aughties show Charmed. Recently, what she's been famous for is being one of the victims of sexual assaults by Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein kept the story of his assault of McGowan quiet for a decade through a combination of paying her settlement money and hiring agents to keep the story out of the press. That McGowan was sexually assaulted was horrible. That Weinstein could get away with it, appalling. McGowan was victimized and she has my complete empathy for that.

When the news that Weinstein had assaulted and sexually harassed at least 8 women finally broke last October, McGowan initially refused to comment. But after a few days, she became part of the breaking wave of celebrity women speaking out about having been sexually assaulted or harassed by powerful Hollywood men. This was the start of the #MeToo movement. Rose McGowan became a hero of the movement on Twitter, when her account was suspended for 12 hours for allegedly violating Twitter's privacy policy, in the midst of her sending a flurry of tweets about Weinstein. This led to mass outrage about the silencing of victims of sexual abuse. McGowan's actions were one element triggering the birth of #MeToo, and I respect that.

The #MeToo movement detonated by the Weinstein news coverage quickly swelled and spread. Celebrities and scientists and political aides and grad students and masses of ordinary people--a majority of them women, but including men and others--joined in calling out their abusers. People told their stories, to reporters, on social media, in classrooms and face to face. It was an important moment of mass disclosure and mass confrontation.

The #MeToo movement continues to have social influence, and as one of the innumerable victims of sexual assault, that is very important to me. But there is an issue that arises in our contemporary world dominated by media, for-profit and social, and that is the issue of representation. Whose voices get amplified? Who is the face of the movement, and how is that person chosen? Who gets to profit off of their victimization, and who instead pays a steep price for speaking out? Will the person who gets to speak for us represent us well? Represent us all? Or will they actually kick some of us in the teeth while being celebrated as heroes?

Rose McGowan has become a key face of the #MeToo movement. She just published a memoir, Brave, about her experiences with Harvey Weinstein. A five-part E! documentary about her experience has also just started to screen. She's doing the full tour of news and entertainment shows to promote her book and talk about what happened to her and what she did about it.

McGowan is a victim, but she's also someone who is getting a whole lot of profit out of telling her story--both in the direct form of the money she's being paid for her book, documentary, etc., and in the form of revived and amplified celebrity. I don't have a problem with that, in principle. Imagine a world in which every one of us who has been abused received karmic retribution in our own lifetimes, and became rich and powerful, while those who harmed us made to apologize on national media. That would be cool.

That's not going to happen, unfortunately. A sadly small percentage of the victims of sexual harassment or assault will ever see any justice. Just a tiny handful will become rich and famous as the media faces of our collective suffering. Ideally, those fortunate few would be selected for a good reason. Perhaps they suffered the ghastliest abuse. Maybe they worked for years to directly aid abuse victims. Perhaps they are excellent spokespeople who have put in years studying people's experiences, and know how power and marginalization and abuse work, how they play out differently according to class, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and the full range of social statuses--and can explain this to people.

This being America, though, usually the people selected to profit by being spokespeople are celebrities. Like Rose McGowan. That's not fair, but that's the way our culture currently works. We ordinary people will rarely become the media face of a movement. But we can at least demand that the celebrities chosen to represent us do that: represent us.

The problem, of course, is that celebrity relates to social privilege. One of the earliest aims of the #MeToo movement was to call out men's dominance of the entertainment industry and abuse of that power. We live in a world of #OscarsSoWhite. The underrepresentation of people from marginalized groups among our media figures is pervasive. And so we wind up with spokespeople like Rose McGowan: a white cisgender woman who this week shouted down a trans woman, in the process making transphobic comments and spewing out colorblind racism.

Here's how that went down. McGowan was speaking at a book release party for her memoir, Brave. People from the audience were asking her questions. And a trans woman pointed out that trans women suffer extreme rates of sexual and physical violence, and asked McGowan to speak to that. Her motivation for asking McGowan this undoubtedly came out of statements McGowan made in an interview by RuPaul last summer, in which McGowan framed trans women as really men who have no idea what real women go through.

McGowan's response was to deny that trans women face more victimization than cis women, then to put a happy face on that by calling the trans woman "sister" and saying "we're the same"--a gesture, I take it, of McGowan's positioning herself as a good spokesperson for trans women victims of sexual violence.

The woman who asked the question was not happy with the response, and she and McGowan spoke and then yelled over one another. The trans woman was removed by security, chanting "white cis feminism" all the while. And then McGowan proceeded to yell and rant at the audience. She was outraged at being called cisgender and at having her whiteness pointed out. She screamed,

"Don’t label me, sister. Don’t put your labels on me. Don’t you fucking do that. Do not put your labels on me. I don’t come from your planet. Leave me alone. I do not subscribe to your rules. I do not subscribe to your language.

"You will not put labels on me or anybody. Step the fuck back. What I do for the fucking world and you should be fucking grateful. Shut the fuck up. Get off my back. . . I didn’t agree to your cis fucking world. Ok? Fuck off. . .

"I’m fucking mad with the lies. I’m mad that you put shit on me because I have a fucking vagina and I’m white or I’m black or I’m yellow or I’m purple. Fuck off. All of us want to say it. I just do. . .

"There’s not a network here devoted to your fucking death. There’s not advertisers advertising tampons with a camera lovingly going up a girl’s body as she’s being lovingly raped and strangled. Piss off. And until you can collect that fucking check, back up. My name is Rose McGowan and I am obviously fucking brave.”

What this rant presents is in fact a Top Hits of white feminist colorblind racism, trans-exclusionary feminism, and self-aggrandizing bad allyship. Shut up and be grateful, trans woman. Terrible things happen to cis white girls! I don't experience cis privilege or white privilege. You're attacking me because I have a vagina and for the color of my skin. I don't care if people are black or white or purple, and by bringing up my whiteness you are the real racist. (But I do care about what genitals people have, oh yes, and make presumptions about what is in your pants! And I refuse to call myself a cis woman, because that's a trans imposition, more proof that trans women are really men trying to control the real women.) I'm so brave I'm willing to shout down a trans woman, something everyone wishes they could do, but is too afraid!

Ugh.

Herein lies the main problem of the spokespeople of contemporary social movements being, not the most qualified person, but the most famous one. You wind up with somebody who has little awareness of their own privileges. You wind up with someone who is below the 101-level of understanding how privilege works. They still see it as an on/off switch. "I've been victimized, so I am not an oppressor." They haven't yet learned to see that all of us have dozens of social statuses, and enjoy privilege along some and endure marginalization along others. They haven't yet done the work to examine how they themselves are benefitting from the marginalization of others. You get people speaking for a social justice movement who are themselves bigots. You get transmisogynists who paint trans women as a sexual threat rather than as sexual victims. You get the familiar, specious argument that as victims of sexual assault by cis men, because they frame their bias against trans women in terms of fear of assault, cis women's transmisogyny should be validated rather than decried.

You get people who frame as personal attacks on them calls for them to recognize how being a person of color or trans or otherwise socially marginalized makes victimization worse. You get people who present those who critique their inadequate spokespersonship as the supposed problem with progressives today. You know: the complaint of a "circular firing squad."

Attacking one's allies because their choice of terms is anything other than 100% perfect is bad, to be sure. But this is something else. This is calling out transmisogyny and colorblind racism on the part of someone who is supposed to be the public voice of #MeToo. You cannot be the voice of people who deal with so much worse crap than you do, as a white cis celebrity, if you are in denial about your privileges, or worse, actively voicing bigotry.

This was #MeToo fail. And we all have the right, and the responsibility, to call on our media spokespeople to stop failing us.

Rose McGowan, you have my complete sympathy and solidarity with regard to your having been sexually assaulted. But you are harming my family, my communitymembers who are not cis white women, and I demand you do better in exchange for your profiting as our figurehead.

Dear U.N. Ambassador: Gender Identity is Not a Sexuality

All around the world, people are being maltreated because they are born intersex, or they are trans, or they have a sexual orientation or identity that is in the minority. And LGBTI+ rights have become a battleground in international law. Representatives of nations including the influential Russia have been fighting at the U.N. against the idea that gender and sexual minorities should be protected, and continue to criminalize same-sex activity, gender transgression, and attempts to gender transition. It's important that the U.S. fight for the rights of sex, gender and sexual minorities.

So I was glad to hear today that the U.S. delegation to the U.N. is going to do this. Deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Richard Erdman announced U.S."support for the rights and dignity of all individuals regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity," even where those rights have not been recognized in international law. (Bans on "sodomy" are now against international law, but international law doesn't protect gender identity, nor does it recognize a right to same-gender marriage.)

It's great that the U.S. delegation to the U.N. is taking some action. What's not great at all is the language that has been chosen. The "U.S. government says it will begin using the term 'sexual rights' in discussions of human rights and global development" to refer to the rights of sex, gender and sexually marginalized people, and to the right to protection of "sexual and reproductive health."

I have to say, as an intersex trans person, this is highly problematic. Being trans is not about sexuality. (Neither is being intersex; unfortunately the U.S. government hasn't gotten around to considering the idea that intersex people have a right to physical autonomy.) 

I'm all for sexual and reproductive health. Sexual orientation should be protected. These issues can certainly be linked together under the banner of sexual rights. But sticking trans people in there as a sort of afterthought actually does us damage. It winds up further entrenching damaging beliefs about us: that people gender transition due to some sort of sexual kink, and that how we have sex and thus the status of our genitalia is what defines who we "really are."

We've been explaining for years that gender identity is not a sexuality, but even people who are trying to act as allies seem only to half-hear us. It's good to hear our U.N. deputy ambassador use the phrase "sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity". . . but then that gets collapsed into "sexual rights," which is not good to hear at all.

One more time, people: gender identity and sexuality are different things.

Gender Stereotypes: A Trans Dilemma

I went to law school long before I transitioned. At Harvard Law, the setting of One L and The Paper Chase, the large lecture halls were the scene of verbal hazings, where self-confidence in argument and an unwillingness to back down when challenged by professors or peers were at least as important as legal reasoning in securing one's intellectual reputation. This goes far in explaining the fact that while everyone who got into Harvard Law entered with a stellar academic record, women quickly fell toward the bottom of the grade curve. Women in the U.S. are expected to be pleasantly deferential to powerful male authority figures and to avoid confrontation. When verbally interrupted, they're trained to be patient and let a powerful man have his say, then gently suggest why their position might be a reasonable alternative to his.

In the masculine realm of lawyerly identity, these women look weak. They cave; they lack confidence; they're judged mediocre students by their professors. But they're also seen as nice, as feminine, as sweet--and when skewered by an argument, as victims to be pitied. What makes someone a good woman worthy of protection also makes her a bad lawyer. (This interested me so much I eventually studied the phenomenon as a sociologist and wrote a book about it, Professional Identity Crisis.)

Back at law school, I was living as a woman. I looked like one, I dressed like one. But I didn't argue like one--I was cocky, assertive, and would not allow my line of argument to be derailed by peer or professor interrupting me as I laid it out. I did very well at law school as a result, but there's a social cost to being perceived as a woman with balls. Being who I am, it didn't bother me at all to be seen as unfeminine. I had no interest in being perceived as a sweet woman, as the material for a suitable feminine wife, as a "real woman" at all. So I could be as incisive and as intimidating as I liked.

It's odd, but now that I've gender transitioned, I have had to soften up. If I argue as aggressively and cuttingly as I did in the past, I tend to trigger competitive alpha-male reactions from men in authority, and come across as a bully to people with less social power. While this is true for any verbally assertive man, there's more to it for me as a trans man: my argument style, once gender-transgressive, is now seen as a gender stereotype, and comes across to people as forced--as me being a hyperaggressive, hypermasculine jerk to try to convince people I'm a "real man."

My spouse has to deal with this issue in reverse, and it's a worse problem for her. I don't think she was ever the aggressive, self-assured debater I was, and law school would not have been her thing. But she spent some years being perceived as a young white man, and that means that when she spoke, people at least listened to what she had to say, which is something everyone deserves. I can see that one of the things that is hard on her now--one of the things that would drive me totally nuts were I in her position--is that as a woman, she gets interrupted and talked over a lot by men. And like the women at Harvard Law School, she is caught in a real double bind. If she just lets men talk over her, she is treated dismissively and feels patronized. But if she refuses to let a man talk over her, and pushes back, then while she may protect her intellectual reputation and self-esteem, she's seen as unfeminine. And for her, that can be downright dangerous.

When someone is a cis (not trans) woman and acts in a clearly unfeminine manner, she is seen as a "woman with balls"--a difficult but powerful woman. But when a trans woman acts this way, she's just seen as a man. The first situation may be uncomfortable for cis women, but the latter situation is terribly painful for a trans woman, and in some cases leaves her open to transphobic violence. And so my spouse generally just has to let men talk over her and patronize her and mansplain to her things like computer hardware about which she knows much more than they. And if she complains about having to do this when chatting with other women, cis women often tsk tsk and tell her to be a good feminist and let the men have what's coming to them. But they don't get it. The costs for her are much, much higher than they are for cis women when they refuse to conform to gender expectations.

So here you see laid out the horns of the trans dilemma when it comes to gender norms: if we as trans people conform to them, we're often seen as walking gender stereotypes: "Oh, all those trans men with their regressive masculinity, wearing their hair in crew cuts and talking over you! And the trans women are even worse, wearing makeup and heels to the grocery store and letting men talk over them as if feminism were never invented!" But if we transgress the norms of our identified genders, we may pay the terrible price of having our gender identities denied and mocked. "He's a freak--an asshole dude in a skirt who doesn't even know how real women act."

We as trans people are caught in a Catch-22 by cissexism. If we gender-conform, we're stereotyped dupes, but if we gender-transgress, we're not who we say we are, and deserve to be mocked and mispronouned, disdained and harassed. And this is where our friends and allies come in to the picture. We need your help to escape the horns of this dilemma. If you hear someone denying that we're "really" men or women because we don't "look like a real man" or "act like a real woman," please speak up and question why someone would think trans people need to be walking gender stereotypes to have their gender identities respected. And if you hear someone complaining conversely that trans people are too stereotyped in our appearance or behavior, point out to them that we're forced into this awkward position by a transphobic society that will use any excuse to say "Aha! That's really a man/woman." Because like anyone else we just want the space to be full, complex human beings. And we all need to help one another along toward that goal. Most of us are privileged in some ways and marginalized in others, and we need to have one another's backs--so I share with you a dilemma that presses on my trans family in the hope that it will help you help me and mine along. I try to do my best to return the favor when I'm the privileged one in the room.

Sex and Gender Terminology

[The following is a handout I use in the courses I teach. Feel free to make use of it yourself--just credit me, Cary Gabriel Costello.]

In order to gain expertise in a field, you need to learn the terms that are used by people who are knowledgeable about it. The more of the terminology you know, the more sophisticated you can be in discussing the field, which is empowering. For example, if you know nothing about how a car works, and you open up the hood, you may just see a bunch of unidentifiable chunks of metal and wire, and call it all “the engine.” If your car isn’t working well, you can’t do much about it. If you learn to identify a couple of basic things—say, the dipstick so you can check your oil, and the battery so you can jump-start your car—you’ll have some minimal competence to deal with common automotive issues, but you still won’t know how a car works. But if you are taught to identify the ignition system, the engine block and valves, the cooling system, the transmission, the fuel system, and how the components interrelate, you can have intelligent conversations about cars and car maintenance that will stand you in good stead if you need to buy or repair a car.

When laypeople don’t know a lot about a field and hear people with expertise use the field’s terms of art, the laypeople may consider the terms overly precise, obfuscatory, or simply irritating. Laypeople may snort when winetasters talk about the wine having a “nose,” a “shoulder,” or a “finish.” Those unfamiliar with American football may laugh at positions like “tight end” and “nose guard.” To the cooking novice, it may seem silly to distinguish between sautéing and searing, or roasting and braising. But if you want to learn to appreciate wine, follow a football game, or cook good food from scratch, you will find that the terms of art are actually very important.

In studying sex and gender, you will come to use language that is a lot more complex and precise than that used in ordinary streetcorner conversation. At first, the terminology may strike you as confusing, or making tiny distinctions that seem unnecessary. But as you move through the course and learn more, you’ll find the terms allow you to have much more sophisticated discussions.

That said, below you’ll find a guide to the terminology that will be employed in this course.

1. Sex Spectrum: an array of physical differences, defined by:

1. Primary sexual characteristics: those sexual differences present at birth:
   1. Genital characteristics: differentiation of the fetal phalloclitoris into penis/scrotum or clitoris/labia. The degree of differentiation varies.
   2. Gonadal characteristics: differentiation of the fetal ovotestes into testes or ovaries (which occasionally does not occur).

2. Secondary sexual characteristics: differentiation of the body under the influence of the sex steroid hormones (testosterone, estrogen, progesterone), typically at puberty. The body normally produces both masculinizing (testosterone) and feminizing (estrogen, progesterone) hormones—the ratio of these determines the relative masculinization/feminization of the body as follows:
   1. Testosterone effects: growth of bodily hair, growth of facial hair, increase in upper body width, increased muscle mass, growth of the larynx leading the voice to lower, fat deposition in abdomen, increased size of penis/clitoris, increase in libido, production of semen/lubrication, increase in sweat and oil production, increase in size of testes and sperm production, irritability.
   2. Estrogen/Progesterone effects: growth of nipples and breast tissue, increase in pelvic width, softened skin and ligaments, increase in subcutaneous fat, fluid retention, cholesterol regulation, fat deposition in hips and thighs, proper spermatogenesis/ovulation, regulation of menstrual cycle, irritability.

2. Sex Categories: a manner of dividing the sex spectrum into socially-recognized units. In Western societies, there are three sex categories, defined under the authority of medical science as follows:

1. Female: a person ideally possessing a vagina, labia, a clitoris of less that 0.5 cm at birth, ovaries, a uterus, XX chromosomes, and an estrogen-dominant hormone profile.
2. Male: a person ideally possessing a penis of length greater than 2 cm at birth, scrotum, testes residing in the scrotum, a prostate, XY chromosomes, and a testosterone-dominant hormone profile.
3. Intersex: a person whose intermediate position on the sex spectrum fits neither the ideal male or female category, including:
   1. those with intermediate phalloclitoral genitalia;
   2. those with internally ambiguous gonads and/or reproductive anatomy;
   3. those with chromosomal variation (e.g., XY individuals with ovaries, vagina, clitoris; those with atypical sex chromosomes such as XXY or Xo); and
   4. those whose hormone-dominance causes their secondary sexual characteristics to contrast with their primary sexual characteristics.

3. Social Sex Assignment: the assignment of an individual to a particular socially validated sex, usually at birth.
   1. Dyadic sex assignment: in Western societies, all infants must be categorized as either male or female on their birth certificates. Those classified as belonging to the intersex category must receive either a male or female assignment.
   2. Other sex assignment systems: other societies have nondaydic social sex assignment systems, such as triadic systems (male, female, other) and quadratic systems (male, female, both, neither).

4. Gender Roles: cultural norms applied to people of different assigned sexes in a given society, including occupational roles, appearance standards (clothing, grooming, cosmetics), emotional norms, and interests. Gender roles are categorized as:

1. Masculine: the collection of norms for male-assigned people in a given society
2. Feminine: the collection of norms for female-assigned people in a given society
3. Additional gender roles: neutral or additional gender roles specific to a given society

5. Gender Identity: the subjective experience of identifying with a gender role—the internal knowledge that one is a man, a woman, or a member of an alternative gender.

1. Cis gender identity: gender identity that matches one’s primary sex characteristics (e.g., a person born with vulva, ovaries and uterus who identifies as a woman)
2. Ipso gender identity: gender identity that matches one's social sex assignment at birth, when this differs from one's primary sex characteristics (e.g., a person born with intermediate genitalia who is assigned to the female social sex category at birth and grows up to identify as a woman)
3. Trans gender identity: gender identity that does not match one’s social sex assignment at birth (e.g., a person born with phallus and testes who identifies as agender, genderqueer, a woman, etc.), which may lead to:
   1. Gender transition: to move from following one set of gender roles to another, changing characteristics such as clothing, grooming, cosmetics, and pronoun used; sometimes accompanied by:
   2. Sex transition: to move from one social sex assignment to another through medical treatment with hormonal alteration of secondary sex characteristics, and/or surgical alteration of anatomic sex characteristics (chest, genital, gonadal, laryngeal, etc.)

6. Gender Expression: individual self-presentation as a member of a given gender, including:

1. Gender-conforming expression: self-presentation that is strongly in accord with the normative gender role expectations of one’s society;
2. Androgynous expression: self-presentation which does not align strongly with polarized male or female roles; and
3. Gender-transgressive expression: self-presentation that defies the traditional expectations for a person of a given gender identity (e.g. feminine men, masculine women).

7. Sexual Identity: the sex or gender alignment of partners in sexual attraction, including:

1. Dyadic sexual orientation frames: in which one must know the binary sex/gender of both individuals in order to classify them as:
   1. Heterosexual: being attracted to a person whose sex and gender are dyadically opposite of one’s own
   2. Homosexual: being attracted to a person whose sex and gender are the same as one’s own (i.e., gay men and lesbian women)
   3. Bisexual: being attracted to  both dyadic sexes
2. Directional sexual orientation frames: under which one need only know the gender of the person desired to assign the desiring person as:
   1. Androphilic: being attracted to people of male gender
   2. Gynephilic: being attracted to people of female gender
   3. Androgynephilic: being attracted to people who are androgynously gendered or intermediately sexed
   4. Pansexual: being attracted to people independent of any particular sex or gender status or identity

Initially, the number of categories employed in sex/gender scholarship may seem overlarge to you. After all, you may reason, most people are born girls or boys, pronounced so at birth, identify as such, and generally follow their assigned gender role. In fact, however, the variance is wide, and the terms we’ll use will help us to describe varieties of different experience.

I will illustrate using myself as a guinea pig. One of the reasons I developed an academic interest in sex and gender is that I am among those with quite variant experience. I was born intersex, with atypical anatomy; since that anatomy included an ovotestis I am medically classified as "True Gonadal Intersex.” So, my sex category is intersex, but our American society practices dyadic sex assignment, and I was given a female sex assignment at birth. My gender identity, however, did not develop to match that sex assignment, being male. Although I had a trans gender identity, I continued to live within my assigned sex for decades before I began to gender transition, and later sex transition. My gender expression was androgynously feminine when I lived in my assigned female sex, and is androgynously masculine now that I have transitioned to male. As an intersex person, my sexual identity cannot be understood through the dyadic sexual orientation frame (how can a person who is of neither the male nor the female sex be either straight or gay?). Under the directional sexual orientation frame, I am classified as pansexual. My spouse is an intersex person who identifies as female.

Practice using this system of terms now by considering where your body falls on the sex spectrum, listing your sex category, sex assignment, and gender identity, considering social sex roles and characterizing your gender expression as conforming, transgressive or androgynous (along what dimensions of gender norm expectations do you conform or transgress?), and listing your sexual identity.

A Note on Pronouns

English contains three common gender pronouns: “he,” “she” and “it.”  Note that English-speaking society grants personhood through dyadic gender: people are called “he” or “she,” and only objects called “it.”  To call a person “it” is often considered insulting.  

 Note that many other world languages do not use gendered pronouns (including Polynesian languages, Farsi, Turkic languages, Bengali, Armenian, and many others).  Speakers of these languages do not face the difficulty of having to specify a person's gender in order to speak of that person.  

In the past, when a person's gender was not known, the English rule was to call the unknown person “he.”  This is now considered gender-biased.  Formal English writing typically uses “s/he” instead: “A child must be given the opportunity to tie his/her shoes by himself/herself so that s/he can learn.”  This formal solution is quite awkward.  In practical speech, Americans often use the gender-neutral plural pronoun “they” as a singular pronoun instead: “A kid needs the chance to tie their shoes if they're going to learn.”  This is often deemed ungrammatical and frowned upon in formal writing, but was in fact common in Shakespeare's day.  Grammar is always in flux, and the use of the singular “they” should be respected in its revived usage.

For those personally or grammatically uncomfortable with the singular “they,” gender-neutral pronouns have been introduced in English.  There are several alternatives now in use, such as ze/zir/zim instead of he/his/him or she/hers/her.  I will use ze/zir/zim at times in this course: “A child must be allowed to tie zir own shoes so that ze can learn.”

I encourage you to try using ze/zir/zim in your course writing when you speak of a person of unknown gender, to gain practice using alternative pronouns.