What Its Like To Be Gender Nonconforming In A Male-Dominated Office

What Its Like To Be Gender Nonconforming In A Male-Dominated Office Rain Dove turned a lot of heads when she emerged in 2015 walking in New Yorks Fashion Week for both womenswear and menswear.The handsome, 6-foot-2, gender nonconformist and activist says she models as male, female, and everything in between as all genders, as a human being. Dove is more than a clothing rack shes at the forefront of the revolution and, because of it, has loads of work under zu sich belt, including a recent Sisley campaign in collaboration withVogueItalia and current work with Illamasqua and KMS, among otherbeibei brands. This is all on top of producing activist films for issues like But prior to her successful modeling career, which she fell into only after losing a bet on a Cleveland Browns football game, Dove welches a firefighter with a genetic engineering and civil law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She and her crew would hike or be airlifted to remote parts of the forest whe re theyd cut down dead trees and protect water and other resources so that, if a fire were to break out, it wouldnt affect water sources or harm the animals. Dove welches, in short, a gender-noncoforming person in a male-dominated industry.It welches intense, she says, especially because her crew welches convinced she was another man.Our crew wasnt allowed to drink at the time, but we all snuck some whiskey and were drinking around a fire in Grand Junction, Colorado, on this red sandstone cliff side, she recalled. And this one person said something that was just the most manly thing Id ever heard in my life clich, stereotypical, and societally male. He was like, If I die, you have to promise me that youre going to go back to the place that you belastung saw me and scoop up some of my ashes to send them home to my mom. And we were all like, Okay? And we cheers-ed. And then no one said they were going to do this, but it just happened like a nature special Everyone just got up, walked to the edge of this cliff and pissed off the edge of this cliff.Laughing now at the ridiculousness of the situation, Dove says shed been worried at the time because shed never urinated in front of her crew before in fact, shed spent her whole time as a firefighter actively avoiding it because it wasnt something shed figured out yet. But everyone was pissing together this time, and there was no way around it.I went to the edge of the cliff and I put my hand down my pants and I put my other hand down to try to splash the urine away from my body, but it was running all down my pants, she recalls. It was warm in my hands, and it was everywhere.Somehow, she convinced them.She was surprised to have been mistaken as male all that time because, growing up in Vermont, no one was ever confused by her identity. Rather, she says she felt like an ugly woman, with the nickname Tranny Danny that followed her throughout high school.But she went with it because there were only a handful of other fe male firefighters, and it just didnt seem necessary to correct them at the time.In fact, Dove didnt even realize that her crew thought she was male until they were all sitting around, joking about which women they would and wouldnt want as part of their crew. They told her, Hey, man, come have a seat. And they asked her for her opinion.I was lesbian-identifying at the time I didnt identify as queer until later but at first, for a second, I was like, this is awesome that I can be open with these people, she remembers. I just answered, That one over there is for sure someone Im attracted to, but I cant say who I dont want on my team because I think thats kind of rude. And they were like, Bro, dont be a pussy.That was her aha moment, though she didnt know what to say.I decided, Im just going to go with it for as long as I can, and if its an hour, if its a day, if its a week, Im going to play along with it, she said. The longer I went, the harder it became to tell the truth.She didnt want to be either the ugly girl in the situation or the queer one. Instead, she realized that the only way to be likeable by her crew, though not necessarily attractive on their terms, was to show up every day and work hard. She thought that if she could show them she was one of the dudes, then no one would be concerned with naming her gender identity.And she was right until something unexpected happened.Toward the end of her stint as a firefighter, Dove was injured after being caught in a fire with a couple of crewmates. Shewas airlifted to the hospital, and thats when a paramedic outed her. Shed spent 11 months working with her crew before this happened.When she was outed, her crew called the paramedics disrespectful. They said, You shouldnt talk about Rain like that. And they also continued to insist that she was mostly definitely not a woman.Everyone kept calling me by male pronouns when I came back, and I think its because Id spent a lot of time with them, so they thought, He might be transgender and, even if hes trans, were not going to disrespect him, she recalled. (They thought) If he wants to be called she, then he will tell us that he wants to be called she, butuntil then, well continue calling him by he because thats what we know to call him. I thought that was really nice, because I came back and everyone called me by male pronouns.To Dove, pronouns are just words thus, she responds to whatever pronouns people around her choose to use, so long as their intentions are pure.I think that words, while extremely liberating in allowing us to have this conversation right now and be able to talk about complex thoughts, are also a prison, she explained. Its one of the first prisons that were born into its a prison of rules, history, and sounds. We rely very heavily on those but, sometimes, when it comes to complex issues, there is just no sound with a history to explain what youre trying to say.Though Dove added that she doesnt mind if people apply pronou ns to her because she wants them to feel comfortable, to her, pronouns are largely unnecessary. If someone uses a pronoun to describe Dove in a derogatory way, however, she combats it in a way that she deems fit. Her Instagram, for example, boasts 162k followers, and she regularly shares videos and stories regarding her campaigns to break binary sexpectations and stereotypes.For example, during a recent gender-free campaign for KMS, Dove chose to share one of the photos on Instagram in which shes appearing as societally male. The caption? F on that Birth Certificate if for ForgetAboutIt.