Understanding the Gender Fluid Experience

In Episode 1, we spoke with Matheus Thais Coura. Through our interview with Thais, we learned about the experience of gender fluidity. This can be a difficult concept to understand if you do not have that experience yourself. However, representation in media can make a difference.

For example, seeing gender fluid characters in books, TV shows, and movies can help spread awareness and understanding of the gender fluid experience. One example is Neal Shusterman's The Toll. In this book, a character named Jerico, or Jeri, shares, “I identify as a woman in the sun and under clear skies, and as a man under the cover of the clouds.”

While many of us do not have firsthand experience with what it means to be gender fluid, we likely do feel different from one situation, group of people, or landscape to another. Those times in which our demeanor changes or an innate inside feeling comes over us and makes us feel whole. A moment in which we say, “This is my identity, although I may not always reveal this side of me.”

We’ll leave you with this piece of Sunset Clarity: “We do not have to experience something within our own identity to respect someone else’s experience of theirs. They know themselves better than we do. They know what makes them whole. It’s our job to love them exactly as they are in the moment.”

As Jeri says, “People are vessels. They hold whatever’s poured into them.”

Let us take a moment to admire and appreciate all that has been poured into our fellow man, woman, and non-binary individual, including their understanding of their own gender.