From the day you’re born, nay, even before then, from the time your mother receives her first sonogram and receives that ever-anticipated declaration of “it’s a girl,” or “it’s a boy,” without having been consulted personally at all, you will undergo one of the most complex and delicate portions of your development as a human...and you’ll have little to no say in the matter. Scary isn’t it? Scarier still is the fact that once you have matured to a point of being considered competent at making your own decisions, so many will have already been made for you that it will be next to impossible to alter your course of growth without huge amounts of upset and financial setback. Not to mention society at large will collectively frown upon you while ensuring you that there’s clearly something the matter with you for not just accepting the what they’ve given you is good enough. This process of restricted developmental agency is so typical in contemporary America that it has become accepted as completely natural and appropriate. The facts of the matter are based on indisputable scientific physicality: once an infant is independent of the mother’s functional somatic support, that infant is to be revered as independent of the mother’s control. And that concept is the very core of this debate: control. Society at large has fostered and proliferated very carefully crafted constructs surrounding the notions of physical sex, gender, and sexuality and the reason they continue to affect the minds and behaviors of said society’s population is because they are equivalent to fences built to hold back the broiling masses from the assumed chaos that would ensue in the case of a non-binary gender-based social hegemony. Social constructs are observed because they are assumed to be the key to keeping the peace, to keeping the hoi polloi feng shui, to keeping control. But what good are peace and order without the freedom to enjoy them?
According to Leslie Feinberg, “each person should have the right to choose between pink or blue tinted gender categories, as well as all of the other hues of the palette,” (Feinberg, 1). Leslie’s statement raises an additionally thought-provoking point: there are more than two simple, solid colors of pink and blue on the gender line. And yet while I leave the consideration of the multi-faceted nature of human gender to stew for a bit, allow me to address the assumption prompting this statement: the binary system of gender.
Since the written history of mankind there have been languages, cultures, and haberdashery constructed with built-in reminders of human anatomical variety. However, over the millennia the width of that acknowledgement has condensed considerably, leaving in its wake a limp and patchy portrayal of just how much complexity is intrinsic to humans with regard to the relationship between physiological sex (as a vagina/uterus woman or a penis/testicles man) and mental/emotional gender (the outward behavioral expression of one’s cognitive identity). I’m reminded of the SMYRC training’s first discussion of the gender Gumby and most especially of when Mehera relayed her personal preferences of wearing mostly men’s clothing as an acknowledged physiological female. And there was nothing upsetting or willfully disruptive about it! She was simply comfortable expressing herself as a person of both male and female gender traits. It was comforting and even inspiring to observe someone with such self-awareness and self-possession confidently making a statement about the diversity found even within each individual.
The social constructs surrounding what it is to be “woman” and what it is to be “man” are separated by an additionally socially constructed chasm of impassable discrimination. At birth, a doctor examines a newborn in search of a penis. If one is present (and not considered “too small” by arbitrarily-set industry standards and thus genetically aberrant) the infant is declared a boy. However, if the elusive penis is not present (and the clitoral tissue isn’t too large by industry standards) then the infant is inferred to be a girl. And as referenced before, so begins a lifelong tour through being instructed on how to behave, how to dress, what to play with, how to speak, and even more specifically, how not to act in order to claim irrefutable membership to your medically declared sex. And the truth of the matter is that we’ve all been subjected to this ubiquitous social instructional even in direct relation to the words we take for granted in daily language. Alex G writes,
We automatically assume boys will be boys, and girls will be girls, as the old saying goes. For instance, what comes into your mind when you hear the word “Boy”? What about “Girl”? Most people have entirely different images, built on memories and experiences, which make them treat boys and girls very differently, (G, 1).
These constructs have been engrained into the culture in which we all reside to the point that to avoid being at all affected by them is quite impossible. We’ve been audience to a lifelong story telling of bold and strong knights rescuing beautiful and dainty princesses...who are then banished to the kitchen with no shoes and a gingham apron. These are excellent examples of the gender roles that exist in today’s culture: men = rugged, physical, aggressive and assertive, women = passive, pretty, weak and emotional. In no ways are these descriptions accurate, much less in any relationship to a given individual’s gender identity. As we have discusses on multiple occasions in class, gender identity is the cognitive understanding a person has about their gender. Taking the discussion a step further, I think of when Jen from TransActive pulled up Rae and Liz as the contrasting examples of a gender expression. Liz’s more predominantly female gender identity was clearly seen in feminine gender expression (what people perceive as her gender) while Rae’s more fluid gender identity was additionally clear in her more intentionally ambiguous gender expression.
Our society is so hungry for categories and neat little boxes that it is rather resistant to the idea of a less cut and dried system of thinking. We have to define everyone as female, male, gay or straight. Only in recent years has the chic of (solely female) bisexuality become a topic appropriate in the generally accepted forum for discussion. And that stems from a socially-constructed masculine desire to see two women sexually gratifying each other so that he might reap the sensational rewards for the sexual efforts he no longer has to make. Implicit in the gender binary system is the idea that there is a declension amongst the hierarchically arranged boxes of individual definition. Men are superior to women. Gays are inferior to straights. But gay men are right about on par with women (if not a little above) while gay women are flexible depending upon whether or not their gender expression threatens or arouses the straight men. It’s a ridiculous mindset and yet it has been known to be the foundation for huge amounts of exclusion and pain.
Take Emily from In The Life, for example. A girl with talent, intelligence, piety, and kindness. Until she came out to her small community as a homosexual female, she was seen as worthy of great amounts of attention and even celebration. And then her position within the “straight female” box was rattled loose and she suddenly found herself in the “gay female” box where there was much less understanding and positive response. The same is true for men who come out as gay. Whether or not they’re laudable individuals with exceeding popularity and social acclaim, their shifting from one box (straight male) to another (gay male) is a process that tends to dismantle a large portion of their positive social reception.
The solution to all of this mess is rather simple, really: do away with the boxes! As a society, it makes no sense for us to try so desperately to universalize every aspect of our populace. We’re not homogenous and it’s foolhardy to expect everyone to be just the same in behavior and expectation. It would be like assuming that everyone would be allergic to the same foods just because they’re human when in fact, everyone’s immune systems and tolerances are different across the board. And no amount of social conditioning is going to save a person with Celiac’s from reacting to gluten, it’s just not the way they’re put together! The same might be said for physiological women who identify as partially or totally male; no amount of social conditioning is going to change their true identity. Rather their expression of said identity will perhaps shift slightly (or drastically depending on the pressure) but their inward understanding of who they are apart from the social standard is immutable. It’s a hardwired aspect of their chemical and physical composition.
And on the point of social conditioning, there is research to support the notion that our current schema for qualifying gender and gender-based processing is not as concrete as the contemporary mystique might hope. According to Christopher Kilmartin, in his book, “The Masculine Self”,
Sandra Bem (1981b; 1985; 1987; 1993) constructed a theory of gender-dependent information processing with an important emphasis on cultural factors. Bem believes that cognitive development and gender role development are parallel in some regards. She also argues that gender-typed information processing is taught to children by a culture that emphasizes sex differences for virtually every domain of behavior. If our culture were not so gender-typed, children would learn to use other categories to organize their experiences, (Kilmartin, 81-82).
Kilmartin’s description of Bem’s gender-dependence theory presents a fantastic alternative to the currently held beliefs surrounding the necessity for establishing absolute masculinity or absolute femininity. And reminding of my point just prior, the boxes we as a society so desperately cling to are not really as assisting as we’d perhaps like to think.
In considering the basis for these ills one cannot help but look additionally to the social quandary that is transgender. Because the concept of transsex falls completely outside of any of the currently available categorical boxes it is not only viewed as aberrant but threatening. Its novelty is not welcomed with excitement and celebration but cringed away from with criticism, fear, and disgust. Well what do we have to be afraid of? How is transex harmful? This address of a much larger issue of social discrimination could be expounded upon for greater length of a three-volume novel and thus I’ll elect to curtail it for now with a pointed acknowledgement of its huge injustice and social mistreatment.
Leslie Feinberg marries all of the aforementioned points of discussion in stating:
Our struggle will also help expose some of the harmful myths about what it means to be a woman or a man that have compartmentalized and distorted your life, as well as mine. Trans liberation has meaning for you- no matter how you define or express your sex or your gender, (Feinberg, 5).
In order to address the social wrongs resulting from the hasty and typically insufficient definitions and flash judgments surrounding individual sex and gender there must be a juggernaut effort to alter the collective mindset with regard to the concepts of sex separate from gender. The two are not the same and yet society paints them to appear as one. We must stand against that assumption by ending the silence that has muted the voices of so many throughout the years. End the silence by confidently and openly discussing these topics in all social forums: religious, political, commercial. They are all just as saturated with the misinformation we’ve all been fed and thus they are all in need of reformation. That reformation can only happen if their is willful dissemination of truth. And that is where every voice raises together in constant, vigilant fervor. Don’t let shame overpower your just right to freedom. And in this nation where we are said to have human rights for all, claim those rights by being unstoppably vocal and demonstrative. Start discussions. Change the verbiage. Make a change. And once it’s been made,
keep it.
