New York Times: Rebecca Minor (SSW’15) Featured in Op-Ed, ‘How Do I Define My Gender if No One Is Watching Me?’
The New York Times featured BUSSW alum Rebecca Minor (SSW’15), a licensed clinical social worker who works with trans youth, in an opinion piece bfocused on defining gender during a pandemic lockdown.
Excerpted from “How Do I Define My Gender if No One Is Watching Me? Without a public eye, who are we?” (The New York Times) by
With the gender binary all but gone, what did it mean to be nonbinary? How do I define my gender when I — accustomed to how visible my gender usually makes me — am no longer being watched?
Wanting to understand how others were adjusting to the pandemic change, I reached out to Rebecca Minor, a licensed clinical social worker who works with trans youth. “What’s really struck me,” she told me, “is that removing the peer gaze has allowed for more gender experimentation.”
Ms. Minor is in private practice and estimates that 85 percent of her clients are transgender. She works with teenagers, who are at an age when they spend endless hours watching and being watched. Thanks to Zoom school, she told me, “the peer gaze isn’t entirely gone” — but now it can be controlled. “It removes that feeling that someone sitting in the row behind me might be snickering or looking at what I’m wearing,” she said. It removes, in other words, the policing of gender.
To be sure, Ms. Minor’s clients, who are predominantly white, have resources that have protected them in the pandemic. They have supportive families, health care and economic stability. I, too, am white and thus privileged. Like them, I live in the liberal Northeast. For them, as for me, the time at home has been something of a reprieve.