Panel Voices: In what ways do you break from traditional gender roles?

Karen Scarpella, Jen LaBarbera and Keo Frazier weigh in on this week’s question.

Keo Frazier

All of us fall in some gray area on the gender scale. It would be odd if gender was simply polarized as black and white. Perhaps Kinsey framed it best to suggest that we all fall on a bisexuality scale and we either display more straight, more gay or somewhere in between.

I am very feminine on the outside in my mannerisms, speech and dress. However, those who know me will retort that I am quite masculine in thought process and emotional intelligence. I believe the best way for any human to be is both. It is important for you to find where you fit and flourish wherever that might be.

The most successful people are able to move fluidly in and out of their masculinity and femininity depending on the conversation, situation and role they play in that moment. The most successful people are able to see duality in every person and relate to both masculine and feminine aspects in all people, because that is what makes us the most diverse — and at the same time, the most similar.

The bottom line for me is that I display both masculine and feminine roles, and I dance between that duality across many things that I do in my business world and personal life — and it allows me to relate to many and celebrate the differences of humankind.

Keo Frazier is the fearless leader and founder of KEOS Marketing Group.

Karen Scarpella

I identify as a heterosexual cisgender woman, raised in a very traditional home in the ’60s. My parents insisted that I attend college, but never talked about me having a career — college was where women find a better-quality husband!

But I’ve never been one to comply with assigned expectations, and my female gender role is no exception. I hate to cook, only wear makeup when I have to, and prefer to wear pants and comfortable shoes. It has been an interesting experience to feel social pressure while working with the transgender community to model “femininity” for the trans* women who have often looked to me as a representative for their target gender role.

Now that the Gender Identity Center of Colorado has so many younger cisgender interns, I have relaxed my anxiety over my less-than-feminine attributes. I finally found a husband, but much later in life. He does all the cooking and I prefer to be the one to clean up and take out the garbage. Gender roles and expectations have changed and relaxed over the last several decades, so it seems that today’s trans* person has much less to worry about when it comes to social gender norms.

Karen Scarpella, PhD, LCSW, is a licensed social worker and the Program Director at The Gender Identity Center of Colorado.

* Why is there an asterisk on the word trans*? It’s not a typo! Find out what it means here. 

Jen LaBarbera

When I think of “traditional” gender roles, my first thought jumps to the “traditional” (and here I also mean “privileged”) gender roles in the queer communities of women that I’ve surrounded myself with since coming out 10 years ago.

When I came out at 17, I jumped headfirst into the kind of queer identity I thought I needed to embody to be a lady who slept with ladies — I bought men’s clothes, cut my hair into a dykey pixie, and pierced my eyebrow. I was trying on masculinity not because I was comfortable in it, but because that was what was expected. For me, trying to fit into that somewhat masculine dykey ideal felt like trying to fit into heterosexuality — I could make it work if I tried, but not comfortably, and not well.

I bought my first dress again at 22, and have slowly broken through those traditional dyke–gender roles to find myself here, a place that I’ll categorize as “tomboy/mountain femme.” At my friend’s (straight) wedding in Maine this fall, I’ll wear a button-down shirt and a bow tie, but at another recent (queer) wedding, I wore a very cute cleavage-enhancing dress.

Breaking traditional gender roles is something that we do within our queer communities as much as in the larger (straighter) world. Masculinity holds a privileged place in queer spaces, particularly queer women’s spaces, and in these spaces, embracing femininity can be a powerful way of challenging those queer gender norms.

Jen LaBarbera is a 20-something queer woman of color in Denver, grad student, ex-pat of the progressive nonprofit world and big fan of her two cats.