Genderbender: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity

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Okay, I have a question. It’s always seemed to me that gender expression is socially constructed—how men and women act, dress, display emotions, and so on are based upon arbitrary cultural norms that are learned from infancy. To say you were born male but, because you identify with the female cultural repertoire, you therefore are female seems kind of essentialist to me—its reinforcing these arbitrary gender norms rather than challenging them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say that you’re a man (by virtue of biology) but that you present in ways that our culture traditionally associates with women? Wouldn’t this make it easier for people to just be themselves without having to choose between two arbitrary social categories?

And, just to be clear, I respect people’s right to live and identify however they choose, but I feel like there’s something I’m just not getting here and maybe somebody can explain it to me.

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What is it you’re not getting? Why people choose to live and identify in the ways that they do?

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43

You might be interested in the start of the conversation I posted above.

Sex = biology
Sexuality = sexual preference
Gender = identity

So, yes, you can say that your sex is male (by virtue of biology) but that your gender is female.

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44

But, why would you? The problem seems to be that “male” and “female” simply aren’t useful terms outside of biology. They don’t correspond to sex; they’re based upon arbitrary, fluid and ill-defined cultural norms; and it’s not clear how useful they really are. Why create (or reinforce) a dichotomy that is ill-suited to describe what is really more of a spectrum?

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45

The concept of gender, really (see above). Why not dispense with it entirely?

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46

I think that’s asking for people everywhere to discard the concepts of “male” and “female” and think of gender as constantly fluid, which is a rather tall order.

A good example of what you’re talking about, more or less, is Eddie Izzard. He’s a man who often presents as female, wearing full makeup, female clothes, nails, heels, etc, but doesn’t modify his speech to be less male; he’s heterosexual but has said sometimes he feels more like a woman (his “lesbian” side, as he puts it) and sometimes more like a man. His identity is fluid.

Most people don’t have the luxury or confidence to present differently day-to-day. Society is full of gender norms and at some point in many people’s lives they realize they’re much more comfortable and confident identifying one way versus the other. I think the majority of people are more comfortable fitting into one category or the other rather than thinking of themselves as “3/4 male but 1/4 female, except today, when I’m 1/2 female”. They’d rather go all-in.

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If you watch the video and put comments below that, Stephanie will answer you about these questions. There is a conversation happening about how we define gender @Haystack and Stephanie has a lot of information about what the current thoughts on whether we need gender definitions at all or not.

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48

What you are describing sounds closer to the performative model of gender. That your gender is whatever you are acting like. Essentialism tends to refer to biology, since roles and norms are dependent upon time, place, culture, etc. Who exactly gets to say which culture is “ours”, and what its norms and roles might be? And what happens as even biology becomes recognized as being a continuum of traits, rather than simple polar opposites?

That’s not an uncommon outlook with queer and agender people. Those who identify as non-binary tend to not find those social categories very relevant or applicable. Especially when having socialized into a multicultural environment where they cannot assume one specific set of traditions.

It is a lot easier to simply say that I am genderqueer, rather than always explain how I do/don’t jive with the gender constructs I have encountered within my specific milieu.

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Doesn’t it seem like that’s where we’re headed, though?

To me it seems to confuse the issue to say that there are male and female genders that exist separately and in addition to male and female sexes. If I were talking to some rural Indiana Republican, it would be easier for me to sell the idea that someone with a penis should be allowed to express themselves in ways that are traditionally ascribed to people with vaginas, and vice versa. Once you start bringing gender pronouns into it then it seems that you usually end up sidetracked by semantics.

Of course, if it’s easier for someone to just say “My sex is female and my gender is male,” then of course I’ll respect that. But the concept of gender identity as separate from sex seems like a stepping stone to just discarding the concept of gender altogether. It’s easy for me to imagine Eddie Izzard as an average person of the 22nd century.

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Biology is not limited to two options either. So there is not much common shorthand to easily describe a person with, for instance, male genitals and female neurology. I grew up knowing with utter certainty that all people are hermaphroditic/intersex to varying degrees. Except for those who are neither.

For example, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system

Humans, as well as some other organisms, can have a chromosomal arrangement that is contrary to their phenotypic sex; for example, XX males or XY females (see androgen insensitivity syndrome). Additionally, an abnormal number of sex chromosomes (aneuploidy) may be present, such as Turner’s syndrome, in which a single X chromosome is present, and Klinefelter’s syndrome, in which two X chromosomes and a Y chromosome are present, XYY syndrome and XXYY syndrome.[2] Other less common chromosomal arrangements include: triple X syndrome, 48, XXXX, and 49, XXXXX.

And even with “normal” XX females and XY males, there are processes of expressing or inhibiting existing genes and their associated characteristics. Like with other physical traits, there is a fair amount of variety here as well.

As a child, my most mischievous response to sexism was hoping to design several new biological sexes of human. So I have always considered the biology of sex to be only slightly less plastic than the social constructions of gender.

But as for the categories of gender, they still get used and recontextualized because many find meaning in them, so they aren’t going anywhere. So it is easier and more productive to make more than to eliminate the existing ones. Fairness I think lies with not imposing those categories upon others for one’s own convenience. As a queer person, I don’t take the masculine/feminine binary seriously, but I try to respect and acknowledge those who do.

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It’s a construct, created basically as a filing system. Just like everything else, we humans have to “name” things so we can remember what they are. Or something like that.

I dunno, is it that once language was invented, folks went around naming things?

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  1. Cultural expectations aren’t entirely rational.
  2. Identity – in other words, how a person feels inside their own consciousness – isn’t entirely rational either.

I identify as nonbinary. but I don’t have a strong pronoun preference (I like they but default to he/him in almost every situation), I have a male body and a masculine name and wear generally masculine clothes (with few exceptions, to borrow a phrase) and very little physical dysphoria. There’s no advantage whatsoever in identifying as nonbinary, and it seems like an arbirary and nearly meaningless distinction from the outside, but from in here I’ve felt it was important to acknowledge. I went through the other possible descriptions that would fit how I feel, behave, present myself, and so on, and this is the one that feels right.

Expectations about gender – performance, appearance etc. – are certainly culturally constructed. But the self has a role too; it usually finds its place within that context, points to a spot on the map and says “here is where I belong.” Sometimes, that point isn’t where others expect it to be. Sometimes the self waves vaguely at a wide area, or points to two or more specific places, or says “this map is wrong, where am I?” or “I am not in a place.”

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That’s understandable, I would say. But what I think gets confusing is that these categories and labels change much more slowly than accurate models of the world do. It can get difficult to even discuss these developments when people require the concession of using models which are thousands of years old to even talk to you. This gets more difficult when they assert/demand to be members of the same society or culture as oneself, despite a lack of common conceptual frameworks.

Sometimes, what it takes is to affirm that “You can have that if you want” with the proviso that “but you represent a different culture than the one I/we exist in.” For what is nominally a multicultural world, people seem to have lost the understanding of other peoples, other traditions, and even become more easily threatened by the idea. For a functionally diverse ecosystem of social structures, we need to establish more separate cultures, rather than assimilate and mainstream what are often fundamentally disparate models of even basic personal interaction.

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Freedom!
Mrs. Thatcher wanted to get people out of social housing and into buying houses because they would then be too fearful of missing a mortgage payment to take industrial action. Same evil principle.

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This seems actually to be less of a problem in gendered languages because it’s obvious that the gender of words is somewhat arbitrary, whereas in English it is only a few pronouns, which leads to the idea that they have a special meaning in relation to people. Often the gender of words relates to their history, folk usage or even the form of the word.
Russian and French get into a fearful tangle because some verb tenses are gendered and some are not. Saying “I was born” in Russian audibly requires you to choose a gender - ya rodil’sya or ya rodilas - and in French requires a written but inaudible (for most speakers) gender - je suis né(e). But it really contributes nothing to meaning. English has dropped it. Perhaps it will drop gendered pronouns too - there is so little to drop - and we can chalk one more up to enlightenment.

Think of those societies where it’s the men who wear bright clothes and the women who wear black. In 17th century England upper class men dressed very much the way some women do today - high heels, tights to show off legs, split skirts, makeup and long haired wigs.

I was also amused today in an outdoor shop to see an elastic headscarf being modeled in a video by very macho men with some of the ways of wearing it looking precisely like a hijab and face veil.

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Yes, that; humans, for the most part, are not rational.

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Right-o. High heels were invented for men to show off their sexy, sexy calves.

Rawr!

image.jpg2000×2783 1.3 MB

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Good article, puts a lot of stuff in context. The only thing she doesn’t mention is the practical benefit of high heels for duelling with rapiers, where additional height is beneficial. High heels tilt the body back when balanced, giving more space for a lunge. Or so I’m told; fencing has never appealed to me.

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I have gender dysphoria, which I first expressed when my speech developed enough for me to ask when was I going to become a girl (and apparently I asked most of my female relatives). Puberty was a nightmare, I don’t know how many times I attempted suicide as my body developed in the wrong way. There is a good reason why it is listed by TV Tropes as an example of real life body horror.

As far as gender expression goes, I can dress however I like (except for makeup, I gave up on finding any that didn’t irritate my skin) but I still will identify as female because I have never identified as anything else.

I consider gender dysphoria as a form of intersex, but for historical and practical reasons it is part of transgender.

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Butch women and femme men are categories that exist, and each can be either trans or cis. I know a trans woman who presents extremely butch, but is still naturally perceived as a butch woman (rather than a man) because of hormones and details of her gender expression. Gender identity has nothing to do with liking traditionally masculine or feminine activities or presentation. I like how Serano’s term “subconscious sex” better illuminates how some trans people experience what is often called “gender identity” in a very visceral, physical way, rather than anything related to culture.

(I mean, I literally left society altogether for half a year, and still identified as female, despite my best efforts.)

Anyway, there’s a few problems with our practice of defining male and female as the genitals a doctor observed a person to have when they were born, which is how this is typically done in practice – almost no one takes a karyotype to determine what chromosomes you have, or does a detailed analysis to determine if you’ll actually produce gametes at some point in the future. If you think about it, it’s just weird to assign so much significance to a baby’s genitals, even decades after the fact. But the main issue is that these categories are not treated as private medical information, but are culturally assumed to be public knowledge.

If male/female categorization really was culturally considered private & medical, as most other human biological (mis)functions are, needed to be shared only with your doctor, your partner, and a few friends, it would be totally fine to do so! But that’s not the way it is. How would you feel if you had to reveal an embarrassing medical condition every time you filled out a form, every time you bought alcohol, every time you checked into a hotel or rented a car, and so on? Why do I need to be continually reminded that baby enceladus had a penis? Why do so many random strangers need to know this?

There is way too much cultural inertia around these categories as being public for them to function as purely biological, non-cultural definitions. Even in these somewhat more enlightened times, forms still ask for “male, female, or other,” not, “man, woman, or other,” regardless of medical significance. And frankly, most cis people don’t understand how trans bodies medically function; my body, running on estrogen, reacts in a typically female range to drugs, diet, exercise, and so on – everything that isn’t directly related to having a uterus – so even in a medical context, categorizing my body as “female” will usually result in more accurate diagnosis and prescription than “male.”

The construction of phrases “trans female,” “cis male,” etc work a lot better to separate the assumed culturally public part (male/female) from the potentially private part (cis/trans). Trans people for a long time have also used the acronyms “AMAB” and “AFAB” – assigned male/female at birth – to categorize what you’re trying to call male & female here, but these terms more accurately reflect that this is just a beginning of a story.

I’m a trans woman, I’m not, like, in denial of the reality of that situation. I realize I’m not a cis woman and differ in certain ways in body and life experiences. I don’t even completely hide this information in my day-to-day life. But there are too many connotations and assumptions around the word “male” for that to really work. Calling me male entails all manner of wrong assumptions about both my social identity and biological body. Calling me male saddles me with the expectation that I have to frequently reveal this information to people who might be surprised or disturbed by the fact. Calling me male only confuses the purpose of identifying me or providing me medical care. I don’t think it’s possible to separate these words from millennia of cultural connotations. You could call me AMAB or invent some other new term to describe what you want about my biology, but you better be really careful that the word is actually accurate rather than relying on any culturally-informed assumptions. In practice that is hard to do.

Anyway, and I apologize, but I may need to mute this thread, not because I’m afraid of these conversations, but I have to have them all the time IRL and also having them in online spaces I frequent is draining, both emotionally, and in terms of time. It’s like an open sore I just have to pick at. I really should develop a web site explaining my gender experience/perspective so I can just, link there, instead of having to churn through this all the time. This isn’t like, a neutral academic discussion for me.

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