Finding Yourself One Dot at a Time: Tegan and Sara and the Gender Unicorn

If you’ve read Tegan and Sara Quin’s Junior High, you know how much of that story is about figuring out who you are (the crushes, the questions, the stuff that’s hard to say out loud). In this post, you’ll read about a tool called the Gender Unicorn that can help you explore those same questions in your own life and at your own pace.

You probably know way more about Tegan and Sara Quin than I do, especially if you follow their indie pop music, have watched the TV series High School (based on their memoir), or have read and re-read their graphic novel Junior High. It’s not my style to pretend I know more than I do. I look forward to hearing what others have to say about Tegan and Sara.

What draws me in is the way Junior High captures emotions on shuffle and a social scene with no map, which come with being a teen. When I first heard “Faded Like a Feeling” on YouTube, I stopped whatever I was doing to pay attention to the lyrics. It reminded me of the Cranberries, to whom I used to listen a lot. I also appreciated Tegan’s comment on 5 Questions with Dan Schawbel that high school was terribly boring, and that this taught her how to make things interesting for herself. It struck a chord with me because as a DBT and CBT therapist I believe that all of our emotions are valid and important, even the not so easy ones to have like being bored. Most of all, I’m grateful that Tegan has talked openly about her struggles with her mood as a teen and made a comment on 5 Questions with Dan Schawbel about how no matter how terrible she felt, she always kept people in the loop about her feelings.

As you may know, part of what made junior high so complicated for Tegan and Sara was that both of them were working out their gay identity. This brings me to a tool I use with my clients in therapy: the Gender Unicorn (Trans Student Educational Resources, 2015, transstudent.org/gender). It helps teens think through gender identity, gender expression, and emotional and physical attraction.

The Gender Unicorn is a picture that helps you consider different parts of who you are. The nice thing is that each part gets its own separate line. There’s a line for your gender identity (who you know yourself to be on the inside), one for gender expression (how you like to show yourself through things like clothes or hair), and one for the sex a doctor assigned you at birth. There are also two lines about attraction: who you might have crushes on physically, and who you feel romantically drawn to … and yes, those can be different! Instead of ticking boxes, you place a dot anywhere along each line, so there’s room for “somewhere in the middle,” “a little of both,” or “not really any.”

There are no right or wrong answers, and your dots can move as you learn more about yourself. The Gender Unicorn is not a test. It’s just a tool to help you put words (or dots) to things that can be hard to explain.

If you want to give the Gender Unicorn a try on your own, this could be a good start. Doing it with a therapist like me means you have someone to help you sort through the feelings or questions that come up, especially the confusing or complicated ones. I can also help you figure out what your answers mean for your everyday life, like how to talk to family or friends, without any pressure to have everything figured out right away.