Do we want to rid the world of gender, that evil conformity-demanding set of constraints, or do we like gender, as long as we don’t get the wrong one shoved down our throats? This is a recurrent discussion within my Facebook groups and other support environments. Some of us have gone to a lot of trouble and expense to package our presentation so as to receive the altercast gender-identity from others that matches how we think of ourselves; others among us have gone to a similar degree of effort and hassle to get out of the gender-cage that we’ve felt trapped in.
I’m not neutral in this debate, although I try to remain open-minded. I’m a gendered person. I have a gender atypical for my physical sex, but it’s a real gender and not just the lack of the typical, expected one. I’m a femme, one of the girlish sort; I spent my life seeking approval of, competing with, and otherwise evaluating myself against the girls and, later, women that I saw as people who were like me.
Some people contest my identification of myself as genderqueer, stating that “genderqueer” is for people who want to subvert and undermine the world’s evil gender system, throwing their metaphorical sabots into the cultural gender-machinery. Is gender inherently evil?
Gender is social, not biological. But that doesn’t mean gender was arbitrarily invented or that it’s entirely capricious and meaningless. I think of gender as having two components: generalization and ideology. At the level of generalization, gender is that set of descriptions and attributes that, in general, are more true of one sex than the other, and hence are associated with it. Then, stirred into the mixture, there’s ideology, a sort of propaganda that isn’t about how people actually are but instead is prescriptive, how the system wants people to be. The system in question is patriarchy, and therefore a lot of the ideological part of gender has to do with how a patriarchal system “wants” people to behave a certain way. For example, the patriarchal system wants men to have authority over women, so servility gets built into femininity for propaganda reasons.
The handling of exceptions to the general rule is also tainted by ideology. A generalization by itself doesn’t become prescriptive; if we generalize that roses are red, that by itself doesn’t lead us to go around chopping down rosebushes that sprout yellow or white or purple roses instead. We may in fact prize the exceptions for their rarity and regard them as special. But our social system positions the sexes against each other, perhaps so that they’ll expend lots and lots of energy trying to gain the upper hand instead of joining forces, or perhaps that’s the invariable result of inequality. But it does polarize the two identities into opposites, exaggerating differences and encouraging us to think of the other category as other and foreign and very different. And that creates an ideological hostility towards the exceptions.
What world will we be able to have if we successfully dismantle the ideology? If it is no longer socially unacceptable for the male-bodied people to exhibit the traits and behaviors associated with the female folks and vice versa, will we end up with a world that has no notion of “feminine” and “masculine”, no notion of gender remaining? Or will there continue to be a sense of general differences?
In the 1970s, the mainstream feminism of the times created the notion of “unisex”, a humanistic and egalitarian belief that everyone should be treated with identical expectations instead of sexist different standards. Nowadays you mostly only see the word “unisex” in the windows of hair salons. Meanwhile, we’ve come to recognize that the sex of one’s birth should not and does not define one’s gender, and we speak of transgender as well as cisgender women, transgender as well as cisgender men. Will gender itself wither away and die, so that in years to come no one will be either trans or cis, feminine or masculine?
I don’t know. Give us fairness and social flexibility to be the selves that we find most affirming and I guess we’ll find out!
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