Gender Attachments, for Stuck and for Looser

Sometimes I think I’m my own best evidence of how stuck people can be around gender ideas and identities, even when we know better, have other evidence coming in, or even feel differently. I like to be the one in the skirt: Although that hardly describes my daily attire, I’ve used that quip repeatedly to describe everything from claiming a queer femme identity to assuring local women’s hockey players that I really do love figure skating. They often kindly invited me to join them, presuming that I would have chosen their less twirly sport given more opportunity in younger days for girls and women to play. Nope, I would explain, the twirly factor entices me.

I’ve sometimes had to explain that to other figure skaters, too. It is not only Anna’s gender, or our illegally paired gender markers, that make us a gender-nonconforming pairs team. I depart from the sport’s feminine norms in numerous ways: my open queerness, not expected of women skaters; my sometimes garishly colored hair, also too short for a bun or ponytail; my black skates, violating a norm so dominant that changing skate color often features in trans narratives of coming into authentic gender expression; and my aversion to those skating costumes with the flared skirts. Besides feeling like they’re too flouncy for my personal style, I suspect that their popularity has something to do with how they hide muscles that interfere with performing ethereal femininity. Skaters can only fake white-girl butt; we need those muscles in every stroke across the ice. An extra deviation occurs if I pair my black skates with another staple of racialized femininity, skin-color-approximating tights. I then forego the balletic leg line that white or tan skates are prized for facilitating—a device, you will notice, that only works for light-skinned people, who also never have to fight for tights or skates in some ballpark of our skin color.

It took Anna’s gentle nudging—Ooh, look at that pair’s costumes! How should we deal with this performance?—to make me realize that our gender presentations together would not always involve me being the one in the skirt. Once I finally got it, I was ashamed to have needed the nudge. For one thing, everything is wrong about a creative process for pairs that revolves around one partner, all the worse when it involves the nontrans person staying where (they think) they have always been while the trans person adapts. In addition to being literally cis-centric, it participates in the widespread phenomenon across many power divides of protecting the comfort of people already trained to be comfortable at the expense of others. Think of classy-white-person dialect taught as “proper” English.

For another, how limiting it is—as identity, performance, or general stance—to put a premium on standing still. This is not to diminish grooving on stable identities or expressions of them. It can be profoundly satisfying, sometimes lifesaving, to find and live what feels true to you. People around you should support that, whether your gender appears consistent or variable from one day to the next. Yet stable and stuck are different things.

And for me to be stuck on a fixed gender contrast, queered up or not, limited our expressive vocabulary, even if it does help us be legible as a pair, given the widespread familiarity with butch/femme as a queer romantic/erotic formation, along with expectations that pairs routines enact gender contrast. We tried to work that legibility in 2021, for example, when we got to perform a pairs trick called a pivot figure (prequel to a death spiral!) within a holiday number we skated in as part of Ice Dance International’s adult-skater performance ensemble. Given two costume options, Anna and I took the pants and skirt, respectively, out of a desire to signal “pair,” as opposed to any two people doing a step-out.

Yet this legibility, like the legibility of “cisgender” that I talked about earlier, comes at a cost. The common interpretation of butch/femme as “lesbian gender” feeds into the frequent description of open-gender partnering as “same-sex” partnering, dropping nonbinary, agender, and genderqueer athletes out of the picture yet again. If we line up butch and femme with lifter and lifted, we echo the typical practice in pairs—which does not help the cause of opening up partnering—of loading gender meaning onto physical differences. Anna lifts and throws because they are a lot taller than I am, not because I have a consistently feminine identity, although I do, or because Anna has a consistently masculine identity, which they don’t.

We can’t really loosen up our gender signaling by switching out the lifter and thrower roles, although a coach had us experiment a bit at first, not least because training in each configuration is hard. For example, to do a loop lift, where Anna lifts me from behind, we need to bend our ankles different amounts, so that Anna, holding me at my hips, can do a lot of the lifting work with their legs. We coordinate our arm positions so that I can contribute to going higher up by pushing off from Anna’s forearms. Getting workable positions and timing requires coaching, experimentation, and practice. Even if size didn’t matter, we don’t have the skill base, time, or resources to train those tricks both ways if we want to meet our array of aspirations: learn other skills, skate to music, perform, compete, break down barriers.

But a lot in pairs skating is more malleable. Start with costumes and music. I love the costumes we put together for our pairs program to Queen Latifah’s version of “I Put a Spell on You” (2004). We wore matching black jeans and black tops, with Anna’s open bright pink button-down shirt over their black one cued to the color of my hair at the time and half-hidden spaghetti straps. If the contrast in tops suggests a bit of that butch/femme thing, our skate color (Anna wears the white ones) suggests the reverse. Plus, who’s putting the spell on whom? We have interpretive options, and more possibilities ahead of us as we move on to new programs, gender-involved or not.

In addition, plenty of adjustments in traditional physical roles are more within reach than each learning all the lift and throw jobs. Here’s a conversation we had on the ice about one of those: Anna was showing me a fancy knee-slide and lunge combination. They love to work those. Frontward to backward! Diagonal to sideways! Down, around, and up! All beyond my particular braveries and the state of my knees. I responded with something like, “Wow! When you do that in a program, I think I’ll just be going ‘tada!’” I meant it as light-hearted and admiring, until their response made me pause. That would be a nice change, they pointed out, because ordinarily they “tada” me.

Wow, yes. One product of the gender traditionalism embedded in pairs is the notion, still taught by some as the reigning concept, that in partnered skating the gentleman features the lady, functioning, in still common metaphor, as the stem to the flower or the frame to the picture. Look at her: That one-directional flourish belongs to the brand of chivalry where only men ever hold doors open, and to a visual regime where women, in particular white women, are most importantly objects of display. Men are strong; women are pretty. Partnered skating acts that out in numerous ways, sometimes to ridiculous extents. Gabriella Papadakis, 2022 Olympic Ice Dance Champion with her skating partner Guillaume Cizeron, talked with Anna on their podcast about her indignation, which had gone viral, that women had to attend competition-day practices in full competition make-up, often requiring a 3AM wake-up (while their partners slept), even if they were competing at night. Anna noted in response, from their experience as a figure-skating reporter, that disparate make-up requirements follow skating partners into the Mixed Zone, where athletes meet the media right after competing. Frequently, reporters see men wiping off sweat while the women, still protecting their make-up, effectively camouflage their own demanding physical labor, dramatizing pretty versus strong to the press (Kellar 2024b, 44:58–50:54; read also Papadakis 2025).

A shift in guiding gender concepts can transform attitudes, appearance, and motion. For example, one coach has been teaching us to generate more power by sending and receiving it across our hand-holding arms. When we take laps around the rink hand in hand, a routine part of training and warm-up, that power exchange works best down the long access when we skate directly side by side. But the gentleman-features-the-lady model has “the lady” a bit in front. That changes the options.

It also changes the overall vibe, a point driven home to me when I take occasional laps around the rink with a male ice-dancer friend who has received more old-fashioned coaching. Our early miscues in synching up owe a lot to rarely skating together. When Anna and I take the corner smoothly it’s because we’ve done it, and been coached on it, repeatedly for years—and we still don’t always get it right. But more durable have been conflicting expectations that initially had me wondering why someone with strong, longer legs seemingly couldn’t keep up with me, and him holding back even more when I slowed down for him to catch up. He was basically presenting me, in sort of a nonstop “tada.” It’s not that I think power exchange, look-at-my-partner! flourishes, or anything else requires nonstop back-and-forthing. As with sex, that rigid calculus hardly suits every partnering situation. But you open up a lot of possibilities for thought, connection, and movement if you stop pregendering the positions.

Giving up always being “the one in the skirt” affected me in all sorts of ways beyond in pairing with Anna. It opened up my own gender explorations. Hey, maybe I should skate to “(I Could be a Better) Boyfriend (Than Him),” versus my first idea when the song grabbed me of pitching it as our next pairs routine to (an unenthusiastic) Anna. It helped me deal with the grief that had been my primary reaction to bodily changes of aging, especially how menopause redistributed fat from my hips to stomach. I had experienced that as my body stealing my tools for gender expression. Now I could finally take up a friend’s suggestion that I might instead expand the toolbox.

I also reckoned more deeply with the cis-sexism and ableism implicit in loading so much value into my own protruding hips. We don’t have more authentic femininity if our hips stick out. We have what I elsewhere call cis-skeletal privilege: a bone structure and/or other physical features that facilitate expressing our gender assigned at birth in cisnormative ways (Rand 2021, 12). We don’t have more authentic gender expression if we can move our hips to suit culturally prescribed gender norms. Instead, we have training—imbibed, explicit, consensual, and/or forced—and normative abilities. Eli Clare writes that “the mannerisms that help define gender—the way in which people walk, swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes when they talk, take up space—are all based upon how nondisabled people move. A woman who walks with crutches does not walk like a ‘woman’; a man who uses a wheelchair and a ventilator does not move like a ‘man’” (2015, 130). That’s one reason Sobchack found the “cadenced and graceful ‘swing through’” she experienced on one leg and two crutches an unexpected delight. After an earlier life of bungling through Feminine Gracefulness 101—ballet class, teen dances, Jazzercise—it was all the more surprising to find that gracefulness under circumstances expected to impede it (2017, 56).

Eric Stanley proposes that we think of gender self-determination not as a personal goal but as a collective project to “create the most space for people to express whatever genders they choose at any given moment” (2015, 15). Unsticking givens about my own gender expression helped me participate in that collective project both off the ice and in various roles on the ice, including as a group-lessons coach and, of course, skating in a pair. Pairs skating illustrates in microcosm that we make gender in relation to others. The pair girl can fake delicacy better with the pair boy in hero mode. Anna and I can decide together how and whether to tell stories about, against, or playing with gender contrast, without a preset plan about who represents what and how.

That’s been one important aspect of developing the pleasure of pairs. It’s only one, as I talk about next.