The brilliant writer, humorist, and essayist Mark Twain called on us to liberate ourselves with his dictum: “Sing like no one is listening, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like no one is watching, and live like it is Heaven on earth.”
And this is exactly what Gus Walz, 17-year-old son of Ohio Gov. Tim Walz and Gwen Walz, showed at the recent Democratic National Convention on Wednesday, August 21 as his father stood atop the stage and accepted his party’s nomination to become the next vice president of the United States.
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Gus, with heavy tears of joy running freely down his cheeks, seemed somehow uplifted from his seat by a fantastical force as he repeatedly announced to all assembled, “That’s my dad. That’s my dad.”
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The contagion of the moment reverberated throughout the hall and became a moment seen around the world, a moment of free and loving expression against the goliath of patriarchal constraints held against people who are assigned “male” at birth.
Gus has received near universal support for his joyful exuberance, though some, largely right-wing detractors, attempted to shame him. Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, for example, posted an article on X about Gus’s reaction with the caption: “Talk about weird…”
Coulter eventually deleted her post when she discovered that Gus has been diagnosed as neurodivergent with a nonverbal learning disorder, ADHD, and an anxiety disorder, which his proud parents Tim and Gwen called his “secret power.”
“We love our Gus,” Tim and Gwen Walz expressed to People magazine in August 2024. “We are proud of the man he’s growing into, and we are so excited to have him with us on this journey.”
I believe the “secret power” Gus’s parents alluded to was his ability to be himself, to “Sing like no one is listening, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like no one is watching, and live like it is heaven on earth.”
The confinement and pain of strict, binary gender scripts
Rev. Sean Harris of Berean Baptist Church of Fayetteville, North Carolina loudly and vehemently lectured during his Sunday sermon on April 29, 2012 that parents must enforce strict gender role behaviors, a duty before their God, on their children.
“Dads,” Harris commanded, “the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and you crack that wrist. Man up! Give him a good punch.”
He directed fathers to say to their sons, “Okay? You’re not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.” He also told parents that they should be “squashing that like a cockroach.” He warned that “the word of God makes it clear that effeminate behavior is ungodly.”
And to parents directing their daughters, Harris shouted and flailed, “When your daughter starts acting too butch, you rein her in, and you say, ‘Oh, no. oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you’re going to act like a girl, and walk like a girl, and talk like a girl, and smell like a girl, and that means you’re going to be beautiful. You’re going to be attractive. You’re going to dress yourself up!’”
Though he later retracted and apologized for the tenor of his arguments, he reiterated his basic premise “that parents have a responsibility to maintain the gender distinction that God created in them.” This, he said, is a message for which he will never apologize.
Though extreme in language and tone, Harris promotes what most of us have been very consciously and carefully taught throughout our lives. Gender roles (sometimes called “sex roles”) include a set of socially defined roles and behaviors connected to the sex we are assigned at birth.
This can and does vary from culture to culture. Our society recognizes basically two distinct gender roles. One is the “masculine,” having the qualities and characteristics attributed to males. The other is the “feminine,” having the qualities and characteristics attributed to females. A third gender role, rarely condoned in our society, at least for those assigned “male” at birth, is an “androgyny” combining assumed male (andro) and female (gyne) qualities.
“Gender” is constructed as a verb (a repeated action), according to social theorist Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
“The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene,” Butler wrote. “Hence, gender is an act, which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.”
Paradoxically, while Rev. Sean Harris attests to “gender distinctions” as God-given, he betrays his own assertion by demanding that parents break their children early of any forms of gender transgression. Harris clearly demonstrates his role as director of this drama by inadvertently highlighting the social construction of gender roles and how we as social actors need to continually pass on the roles and scripts, using applause or jeers, to future generations.
Gender roles maintain the sexist structures of society, and heterosexism reinforces those roles, for example, by casting such epithets as “fa***t,” “dyke,” “homo,” (“Talk about weird…”) at anyone who steps outside their designated gender roles regardless of their actual sexual identities.
Society flings these symbolic spears at the heart of anyone who violates established and socially constructed norms of behavior, attacking those which society often considers traitors to their sex.
All people in our society, no matter our assigned sex designation, are saddled with the heavy burden — yes, burden — on the “masculine / feminine” binary. Concepts of masculinity and femininity promote the domination of men over women and reinforce the identification of maleness with power.
People assigned a male gender at birth are encouraged to be independent, competitive, goal-oriented, and unemotional, to value physical and mental courage and toughness. People assigned a female gender at birth, on the other hand, are taught to be nurturing, emotional, sensitive, and expressive, to be caretakers of others while disregarding their own needs.
Society mandates that males must be “in control.” They cannot get too close to their feelings, and if they do, they certainly cannot allow them to show. They must “keep it all together” and to “suck it up.” They cannot show vulnerability, awkwardness, or doubts. They must be “on top,” in bed and out.
Within the male/masculine conflation, society maintains a rigidly controlled hierarchy: On top is found the so-called “Alpha Male,” characterized as the leader(s) with inflated confidence and mental and physical toughness. They are highly competitive with the goal of winning being more important than whatever is contested.
They see the following things as weaknesses: intellectualism, empathy, and showing strong emotions (except anger and rage). They have a presence (take up the space they inhabit; being seen as physically dominant and virile). Signs of tenderness or vulnerability are only allowed for other team members in the arena of gladiators, when inebriated, and during the heat of sex.
The so-called Beta Male, on the other hand, are seen by the Alphas as the followers: unremarkable, lacking confidence, avoiding risk and confrontation, lacking physical presence and charisma, and making emotional public displays.
Though ultimately unattainable for all males, the deceptive rabbit of masculinity circulates around their track of life on patriarchal wires that offer the alluringly tasty rewards of control, security, and independence, but only to encourage perpetual competition in the race, leaving all men sprinting after that elusive rabbit.
Some boys and men internalize this socially mandated illusion of masculinity to the extreme, within a self-destructive and toxic hyper-masculinity. As they run and run and run around the course, they invariably stumble, hurting themselves and others along the way.
They build and accumulate frustration, turning to resentment and then to anger and often rage, because they can never truly reach, grasp, and consume the promised patriarchal bait.
For those men and boys who survive, the societal masters dispose of them as dog trainers dispose of the overworked greyhounds. They are stalked, controlled, used, wasted, and ultimately slaughtered.
Girls and women, who also grow up in a patriarchal system of domination, are certainly not immune to internalizing these messages and thereby, they often collude in pressuring males to join and remain in the race.
Compulsory masculinity, when it reaches the level of toxic hyper-masculinity and even beforehand, demands that all boys and men surrender their critical reasoning by never challenging the system. They lose their individuality, their moral and ethical compasses, their emotions, and their very integrity and humanity for some promise of security, support, and sense of camaraderie as well as for the privileges that automatically accrue to followers of the patriarchal system of domination and control.
Taken to extremes, this often results in violence. On the international scale, it results in wars.
Fortunately, a new generation of assigned males, assigned females, assigned intersex people, and also trans people are challenging the system by revolutionizing the former conceptualization of gender identity and expression. They are shaking up traditionally dichotomous binary notions of male/female, masculine/feminine, and gay/straight.
They are courageously calling into question this social myth of gender normativity and heteronationalism, the boxes society places us into as it imposes its gender scripts upon us all. They have opened the boxes for all of us to ultimately obliterate the gender status quo of binary oppositions by demonstrating the visible ways, the options to express ourselves upon an enormous gender continuum, one that does not depend upon a sex assigned to us, an assignment that is imposed and forced upon us by others.
Their stories and experiences have great potential to bring us into a future — a future in which anyone and everyone on the gender spectrum everywhere will live freely, unencumbered by social taboos and cultural norms of gender. It is a future in which our unrestrained expressions can live and prosper in us all.
We are all born with a similar “special power” as Gus Walz, but, unfortunately, in many of us, our society literally or figuratively beats it out of us early in life.
Gus Walz and Tim and Gwen’s combined parenting style has something very valuable to teach us all: that the sex we are assigned at birth has nothing to do with our physical and emotional expressiveness, that the gender scripts we are handed when we enter life were written long before our birth and hold little relevance to who we are and to our humanness.
Thank you, Walz family, for modeling the possibilities of transcending and rewriting the gender scripts to liberate us all.
