CALL ME AUDREY
Meet Audrey Mason-Hyde: a non-binary teenager who doesn’t identify as a girl or a boy and who, along with her filmmaker parents, is helping to break down gender identity perceptions, writes Sophie Tedmanson.
Meet Audrey Mason-Hyde: a non-binary teenager who doesn’t identify as a girl or a boy and who is helping to break down gender identity perceptions.
In many respects, Audrey Mason-Hyde is a typical 13-year-old: bubbly, excitable, whip-smart and funny – her conversation is littered with “likes” and her face lights up when talking about her favourite YouTube stars or a poetry slam contest she’s to perform at.
But halfway through lunch, Audrey needs to go to the bathroom. Her eyes dart over to the cafe’s toilets and a nervous hesitation crosses her face, all confidence drained in an instant. She watches the women’s door for a minute, wondering if there is anyone inside.
For when it comes to going to the bathroom in public, Audrey is no typical teenager. Audrey was born biologically female, but doesn’t typically identify as one, nor does she identify as a boy. Non-binary, gender fluid, gender neutral, gender queer – label it what you will – Audrey shrugs her shoulders when asked what moniker she prefers: “I guess I identify as non-binary, or just Audrey, you know?”
Just Audrey. Just Audrey is just right – after all, as she says, “why is it your business whether I’m a boy or a girl?” It was this exact question Audrey posited at a TED Talk in her home town of Adelaide last year – the extraordinary child (she was 12 at the time) bravely standing solo on stage in front of hundreds of people discussing “toilets, bow-ties, gender and me”.
Audrey is one of many atypical teens coming to terms with their identity in this modern era of fluid gender and sexuality. It is an era in which we’ve finally seen gay rights being widely accepted, and recently witnessed transgender becoming publicly acknowledged – thanks to the high profiles of Caitlin Jenner, Laverne Cox and our own Andreja Pejić (who made history as the first transgender model to grace the cover of Vogue Australia last April). And it is now a time in which the term ‘gender fluid’ has also entered the vernacular, thanks to celebrities such as Ruby Rose and YouTube vloggers such as Miles McKenna [of Miles Chronicles] openly discussing their struggles with not conforming to either standard gender, in turn becoming important role models for LGBTQI teenagers coming to terms with their own identities.
For the first time, just two years ago, the Australian Census allowed individuals to select ‘other’ as their gender in place of male or female for its 2016 survey, with some 1,260 people (out of 23.4 million) recording a sex/gender diverse response. While in the US, recent studies have found more teenagers are identifying themselves with non-traditional gender labels such as transgender or gender fluid than ever before.
According to the Oxford dictionary, the term gender fluid denotes a person who does not identify as having a fixed gender, while nonbinary denotes a gender or sexual identity that is ‘not defined in terms of traditional binary oppositions such as male and female or homosexual and heterosexual’ – identities outside cisnormativity.
As gender fluidity becomes more acknowledged, we are also seeing more representation on TV and films – recent storylines of the popular TV shows Billions and Younger have featured non-binary characters who don’t identify as either gender, and use the pronoun ‘they’.
But while the public perception is more open in pop culture, in real life there are still many hurdles to overcome. Like going to the bathroom when there is no unisex option.
Audrey – who is happy to be addressed as ‘she’: “it’s just easier” – dresses in what you might say is a boyish manner: short cropped curly hair, pants and sneakers and always a fabulous bow tie (she has 27 of them) – which makes some people raise questions when they see her in the women’s toilets. The first time this happened was when Audrey began primary school, aged five.
“One of my first days [at school], someone called me a boy in the toilets and I was really taken aback, like: ‘What?’” Audrey says, her animated face mocking confusion. “I didn’t get it at all, because my parents didn’t really instil in me what was boys’ clothes or what was girls’ clothes: they sort of just let me dress however I liked, which was good. Before I went to school, I didn’t get the whole social constructs of gender, so I was just like, yeah, I can wear whatever. But from that [point] it happened more and more often and it was hard for the majority of the time.”
“Still is, huh?” Audrey’s mum, Sophie Hyde, offers with a comforting smile. “Still is, yep. I feel weird,” Audrey says, looking back over to the toilet door. “So I always go to the disabled or, if I can’t, I just go to the female toilets and deal with it … but I get really nervous coming out of the cubicle, like if there’s going to be another person in the loo, I think: ‘Oh, no, I’ve gotta wait until they get out before I can get out of the toilet.’
“I was always quite strong in who I was and I would go into bathrooms and people would go: ‘Oh, look, there’s a boy in here, what are you doing in here?’ and for a long time I would just be like: ‘No, I’m a girl,’ but I think at one point … I think it was when Mum showed me photos of people who were non-binary and gender fluid and I sort of thought about it a bit and it felt more right than a boy or girl. So I stopped saying: ‘No, I’m a girl, and my style … I just refused to change it for people – so then having an androgynous style also represented that [experience of gender]; it’s also sort of like intertwined.
“Realising I didn’t just have to wear boys’ or girls’ clothes, and like I could wear make-up with boys’ clothes or I could wear Spandex pants with sparkles all over them with boys’ clothes, and just be whatever I wanted to be … from that I think came my sense of identity.
“I think it was like when I first found out that that could be a thing, that I could be not just a boy or a girl, that felt right.”
Hyde says Audrey started dressing in ‘boys’ clothes’ at the age of five, just before she started school, and evolved into a more androgynous style about three years later. Hyde and her partner, Audrey’s father, Bryan Mason, decided to let Audrey’s individualism develop into whatever she wanted, providing a loving, nurturing and, most importantly, supportive home environment for their child, who was obviously different to others from an early age.
Hyde says Audrey was always a confident child, and her response when people mistook her for a boy was to not conform. “Some kids respond in the other way: they would become really feminised, like they would like grow their hair long and try to show all the signs and symbols of being a female, and that would be how they would get through in life,” Hyde says. “It’s just been interesting watching her not do things, like she doesn’t identify as tomboy or anything.”
Audrey screws her nose up at the word tomboy. “I think for a long time I thought I was a tomboy and that was so the opposite of what people thought I was – a girl,” she says. “It was basically being a boy.
“Like, for a long time, I thought that meant I can’t wear pink – I don’t like pink, I hate pink, can’t wear frills. No frills, nothing, like, just
“When I first found out that that could be a thing, that I could be not just a boy or a girl, that felt right”
nothing … anything girlie was like I’m betraying myself. But I guess that’s why non-binary felt so right, because I can wear anything, I can do anything and I’m just still me. Like, I don’t have to be a tomboy or a girlie girl or whatever it was; I felt stifled by it. A lot of younger kids ask me [about it] and I try to explain myself and my gender to them. They’re like: ‘So you’re a tomboy,’ and I’m like: ‘No, not a tomboy, I just don’t identify as either gender.’”
Audrey will move to high school next year, and while she admits to being nervous starting all over again with a new peer group, she is excited about attending a progressive school that has an LGBT students’ club she is already keen to join.
“I’m excited for that, but I’m also worried … it’s nerveracking, high school in general,” she says. “But for me having a whole bunch of new kids who I haven’t grown up with and wondering how they’re going to react to my gender is gonna be interesting.”
The TED Talk stage is not the first time Audrey has spoken in public – her parents are award-winning filmmakers and Audrey has featured in many of their productions, including the film-festival hit 52 Tuesdays and, most recently, Fucking Adelaide (both of which deal with gender-identity issues), currently on ABC iView, in which Audrey plays a gender-fluid child. Growing up on film sets, surrounded by a community of creative artists, and in an extremely openminded family, helped Audrey find confidence in herself and accept her identity with minimal trauma. But it has not always been smooth sailing, even for her parents. Hyde says watching Audrey come to terms with her gender identity has helped her and Mason understand how much gender plays a role in society.
“For all of us during the writing and making of the films, Audrey’s experience of gender has really illuminated things,” says Hyde. “When you’re creators, you’re always looking at the world and trying to understand it, and watching Audrey have this experience and seeing people deal with her really made us understand gender differently.
“And that’s what been really interesting, seeing Audrey so early going: ‘Okay, maybe I do like make-up or maybe I’m interested in more flamboyant things within this’ – that it’s not about the rejection necessarily of all the ideas of femaleness, it’s the rejection of the idea that these two – female and male – are distinct and separate and that they come naturally to everybody.
“There’s nothing like having a child who doesn’t like to identify, or there’s confusion around other people’s vision of them,” Hyde says. “It does show you how gendered everything is. Everyone just wants you to explain – is it a girl or a boy? Constantly, everyone, every conversation is a question about whether someone’s a girl or a boy. And then when you’re talking about someone, it’s almost impossible to do so without using pronouns. I try … I say ‘my child’, but I’m not always good at it. Sometimes I will slip up and Audrey knows that.
“I used to say I have a daughter and now I’m like, no, okay, that doesn’t mean anything anymore … if I call her my child, usually people assume she’s a boy.”
Audrey interjects: “Mum will say ‘my child’, and they will be like ‘your son?’ I mean, you try to use language like … ‘Audrey is doing blah blah’ and not use pronouns. It’s so hard, and that means that you are constantly just being asked to explain what gender you are. Why does that matter? I don’t want to think that I have to give over my gender every time someone knows anything about me.”
On a more personal note, Hyde admits it has been a difficult yet enlightening experience as a mother coming to terms with having a child who didn’t necessarily want to be a girl. “It was kind of tough for me at the beginning, because I wanted to believe that I raised a child who was a strong female and was able to be anything she wanted inside that label,” she says. “I wanted to teach her that inside it wasn’t about any other preconceived ideas about womanhood, but as you start to see how Audrey experiences life, you realise, oh, it still is.
“So I’m still restricted and confined by the idea of my gender as well, and Bryan too. But we are quite a feminist family, really, or at least we are quite comfortable in questioning the idea of gender. Like I’m a woman, you know, it’s like a strong statement. And I think from my point of view it was quite hard [to realise] for Audrey – oh, right, okay, um, so you are not a woman; you are not a girl.
“And I think in some ways I always just thought of you as Audrey, so it was always quite a comfortable thing that you didn’t identify in some ways as a ‘girl’.”
While Audrey is proud of who she is, and hopes to help other teens going through identity issues, she admits it is exhausting having people question her gender. Even simple things like playing sports at school when someone suggests choosing teams based on boys versus girls, or going to the bathroom, brings up anxiety.
“Yeah, that’s really exhausting,” she says. “It’s like I feel in bathrooms – so trapped. If I sit out of the sports game, I am making a point, like I don’t want to play this sports game because of choosing a gender side. And if I go on the girls’ side, it’s giving up, or it’s conceding to them or something. So it’s a feared situation, and it’s the same in bathrooms.
“I would love to say: ‘Oh, I’m just so free being me’ and identify as a girl, but it’s the social construct of what a girl is and the social expectation that is uncomfortable and doesn’t fit, but neither does ‘boy’. Now, being non-binary, I feel so comfortable to just be that, and so uncomfortable to be a girl or a boy – it’s just not who I am.”
Audrey admits she doesn’t rule out possibly changing her mind in the future and shifting the way she identifies, but for now she is happy within herself identifying as non-binary. “Ultimately, I just want to be Audrey – why does it matter if I’m, like, Audrey the girl or Audrey the boy? Why does that mean something to people whether they see me one way or the other? Why can’t I just be Audrey?”