Erik Dierks Policing Gender Lines

In her piece, “Policing Gender Lines”, Ritchie discusses the ways in which law enforcement continue to enforce racially constructed gender norms, as well as police harassment and brutality against women and gender nonconforming people of color. Some of the ways police have and continue to police gender that Ritchie focused on is by the clothing a person is wearing, as well as physical traits.

Ritchie first discusses how something as simple as clothing plays a huge role in the way police brutality happens and how police enforce gender norms. She gives various examples of the horrible treatment women, trans, and gender nonconforming people of color have faced through the laws about clothing that police enforce on civilians. Despite it being over one hundred years since some of the examples given by Ritchie, this still happens today. Though there are no longer any laws, that I know of, stating what is illegal for a person to wear based on their gender, stereotypes of ways certain clothes are adorned cause profiling (racial or otherwise), harassment and brutality. These stereotypes come from the ideals/beliefs that have been put in place in our society due to the westernized and binary view of gender.

 The same can still be seen happening today when also discussing how police us physical traits in order to gender a person such as facial hair, hand size, broad shoulders, hair length etc. When someone who expresses their gender outside of the traditional westernized gender binary system, this then immediately puts them at a higher risk when interacting with law enforcement who see the need to police or correct this expression in order to maintain said systems of oppression.

Reading this reminded me of the #SayHerName movement that started in 2015. This piece made me think of this hashtag/movement because of how often women of color are excluded from discussions of police brutality, which Ritchie specifically mentions at the beginning of her piece. During her TedTalk, Kimberle Crenshaw asks the audience to stand up and participate in an activity. Whenever she lists a name an audience member doesn’t know or recognize, they are asked to sit down. The first couple names she says are black men that were killed by police such as Tamir Rice or Freddie Gray. Once she finished listing the names of the males, a majority of the audience remained standing. However, once she starts listing female names (who were murdered by police and black) most of the audience is sitting after the second name.

http://www.aapf.org/sayhername/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOe5-UsQ2o (First 3 minutes shows Kimberle Crenshaw’s activity for the #SayHerName movement)

I’d like to further discuss ways in which we could create a system that doesn’t need to rely on police as the main means of protection. Since that would be a drastic step from the current system we have now, I’d also be interested in discussing ways in which we could reform the current system in order to protect women, trans, and gender non-conforming people of color.