Do you notice this inconsistency?
People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
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