Couric goes on the road to explore gender roles
Nat Geo documentary looks beyond societal norms
If you have questions about gender identity, a topic that’s increasingly part of the public conversation, Katie Couric understands. She does, too.
Couric takes her journalism skills on the road in Gender Revolution: A Journey With Katie
Couric, a two-hour National Geographic Channel special (Monday, 9 ET/PT), meeting sex and gender experts, trans men and women and college students whose identities go beyond binary gender roles.
The documentary ties into a larger effort by National Geographic, which devoted its magazine’s January issue to the topic.
“I hope I have provided the tools and the terms for people to have a conversation about gender in society and learn the stories of people who are maybe struggling with this issue or dealing with it firsthand,” she says. Couric, who anchored NBC’s
Today and the CBS Evening News and now serves as Yahoo’s global news anchor, approached the topic with “respectful curiosity. I tried to be the Everyperson and ask the kind of questions that those who are not very familiar with the topic would ask: How does a child know with certainty that he or she is different than the gender they were assigned at birth? How can the partner of someone who transitions stay with that partner even though they’re now a different gender identity? What are the biological underpinnings? It’s a lot for people to wrap their heads around.”
In Revolution, Couric talks with experts about identity, ge- netics and brain chemistry but also meets with people dealing with non-traditional gender situations, including a family raising a 5-year-old trans girl and a longtime married couple in which the husband is now a trans woman.
Couric credits Caitlyn Jenner for increasing the visibility of transgender people, but says it helps to meet a broader swath of that population.
“We’ve often viewed gender non-conforming people in a way that sees them as such anomalies that we’ve other-ized them,” she says. “We all know that when you know someone that may not conform to whatever the norm is, it’s much easier to accept them as just people with the same hopes and dreams that all of us have.”
The gender non-conforming population is small — about one in 1,500 to 2,000 babies is born with intersex traits, or sexual characteristics not fitting traditional definitions of male or female, the documentary says, citing estimates — but Couric says it’s hard to put a specific number on it.
“Many people live their lives in secrecy or never really act on their feelings of gender identity, so I don’t really know if we know their true number,” she says.
The historical rejection of people who are different in that way has led to higher rates of suicide still evident today.
Revolution explores the societal conflict brought on by evolving gender identities and roles, as Couric visits Gavin Grimm, a Virginia trans teen whose use of the high-school boys’ bathroom resulted in a school-board prohibition and then a lawsuit by Grimm that is heading to the Supreme Court.
Couric acknowledges a backlash — “a natural ebb and flow of social change” — and that people can be afraid of what they don’t understand. She says she hopes the documentary, with its explanation of terms and expert commentary, will help people become more comfortable talking about the topic.