Carol Hanisch said "the personal is political" and feminism embraced that. Radical feminism looked not only at the big structural elements of oppression and the institutionalized unfairnesses that were ensconced in laws and policies, but at individual personality characteristics and the behaviors that go with them. The value systems and priorities that come directly out of a person's way of being in the world, a person's most fundamental personality attributes. And they said that masculinity was a political problem, the political problem, that being a man at the local individual level meant supporting patriarchy inside of every interpersonal interaction.
There are, of course, readers who are wanting to fling their hands in the air and protest, "No, you mean toxic masculinity. Not all masculinity is toxic!"
And they're right. We need to avoid oversimplification. There are many butch women whose trajectory in life has been a "yeah, so?" response whenever accused of acting masculine, butch women who found identify and validation there. There are transgender men as well who embrace masculinity as the best mirror of who they legitimately are. There are cis men who accept the mantle of what's expected of them but spend their lives contemplating how to be a good man in the modern world. So yes, there are people aligned with masculinity who value courage and willingness to risk, and the willingness to not be defined by the pack even if it means being a socially cut-off isolated individual, and a cut-to-the-chase raw honesty.
But whether toxic masculinity is just the extreme "turn it up to 11" overdose of masculinity or if it is a specific emphasis on the most antagonistic elements, toxic masculinity exists.
We live in the interesting times of long-wave culture wars coming to a decisive turning point: these are the last gasps of patriarchal hegemony, with patriarchal value systems's claims to legitimacy pushed back against the social ropes. And at the moment, the patriarchy's values are personally embodied to the hilt in one Donald Trump. This election, like the one before it in 2016, is all about patriarchy versus its opponents, and it is raw and undisguised, and we've had four years of seeing that on display.
It is because patriarchy is on the ropes that the masks are off. It is because they are on the losing side of history that they have given up on the middle and along with it the pretentions to debonair chivalry, the gestures of "we will take care of you, we are compassionate in our authority and power".
The Specifics
• Belligerence — masculinity values fighting, being aggressive, the notion that you get your way with other people by intimidating them with the threat of attacking them, and backing that up with actual violence when need be. Our nation has tried to cast itself on the world stage as a "good citizen" country that doesn't invade and conquer, but we've barged into several countries with tanks bombs and soldiers, and have more secretively toppled the duly elected leaders of others, and so we've exhibited plenty of belligerence. Donald Trump's entire way of interacting with everyone, domestic and foreign, official politics or unofficial interpersonal interaction, is belligerent; he is the personification of the notion that you get things done by intimidating ohters
• Defensive Fragility I: making mistakes or ever being wrong -- masculinity values absolute certainty and decisiveness, the attitude that there is something weak and ineffectual about considering alternative possibilities or remaining aware of your own fallibility. Our nation has a long tradition of believing itself to be anointed by God, American exceptionalism, that our way of doing things is guaranteed to to correct. We've made legitimate overtures to the rest of the world to come together respectfully and work out our differences peacefully -- the US is most directly responsible for the existence of the UN -- but a lot of our nation's behavior has had a wide streak of "we are giving the rest of you the opportunity to follow our lead and do things just like us". And we don't take kindly to criticism. Donald Trump is the quintessential stereotype of a person who can't ever consider the possibility that he is, or was, wrong. He will never apologize and will stick to his guns no matter how often he's shot his own foot off with them.
• Defensive Fragility II: needing others or ever being dependent on others -- masculinity is all about "going your own way" and "attending to my needs myself", and if the non-toxic form of that is about stepping up and doing what needs doing instead of waiting for someone else to do so, the toxic form exhibits utter contempt for anyone who ever needs anyone else for anything. As a nation we've become increasingly toxic in our insistence that we don't need the blessing or agreement of any other nation or people, we're going to do whatever we want and the rest of the world can go fuck themselves. We had the sympathies and compassionate regard of the overwhelming majority of the world after the 9/11 World Trade attacks, but squandered it as casually as tossing a piece of trash into the waste bin, attacking Iraq with no provocation and no coherent explanation. Donald Trump is very vocal about not needing anybody and not caring if his actions do not need with their approval. The Republicans in Congress and in his own administration found that out, often to their dismay: he doesn't need them, or believes that he doesn't and behaves as if he doesn't.
• All Differences are Superior/Inferior -- masculinity has a tendency to see every distinction as one in which one possible kind is better than the other, that there's always a "right way to be" or a "right kind to buy" or "best form of it to use". This is an outgrowth of the belligerence and the tendency to see everything in terms of the potential for competition and conflict. Feminists highlight this as "othering" and show how this tendency spreads oppression by encouraging people to see folks different from them as inferior and then use that to justify taking advantage of them whenever the possibility exists. Our nation began with a lot of lofty lip service about equality, and as a nation we've valued equality in principle, but parallel to that has been the long history of ways in which we've treated categories of people as less worthy, less human, as subordinate or substandard, or pathological and evil and in need of being eliminated by whatever means necessary. Donald Trump has made a career of disparaging the different, and tailoring his appeal to those who view themselves as "normal" and who also resent anyone who isn't "like us" who dare to demand their rights as fully human beings.
• Coercion and Control -- masculinity, again as an outgrowth of the belligerent anticipaton of conflict, tends to value winning more than any other goal, to the point of losing track of what goal made winning in this or that case important in the first place. This also goes hand-in-hand with the defensive fragility about ever considering the possibility of having made a mistake. The US became the poster child for this kind of masculine manifestion in the Vietnam War, where there was less and less clarity on what we were there for or what our goals were, but where nevertheless our leaders pursued winning the war as the first and most important consideration. Donald Trump epitomizes the spirit of "winning isn't the best thing, it's the only thing", and it means there is nothing he considers off-limits if it facilitates him winning.
• Polarization -- masculinity tends to carry the attitude into any confrontational argument or dissent that "you're either with me or you're against me". This, too, is an attitude that carries over from imagining being in a fight. In direct physical conflict, nuances of perspective and opinion aren't relevant, it's all about whether you're someone else representing a risk that I should attack lest I be attacked or I can count on you to fight on my side. Our nation has often played the polarization game outside of wartime, doing its best to force nations to take sides and divide the world-map into US and THEM factions. It was our behavior all throughout the cold war. We've never been very open to a multifaceted way of viewing international economic or political configurations, preferring the either/or and pressuring everyone else into buying into that. Donald Trump is the polarizer-in-chief, doing more to divide us internally than anyone else who has ever occupied the office. There is to be no forgiveness, no consideration of understandable reasons why someone would do something we would not ourselves do, nor any willingness to think of alliances as complex and shifting things. Everything becomes "us versus them".
• Oversimplification -- masculinity, with a military focus on quick decision and operating in fear and opportunistic aggression, tends not to trust complex thought in general. This feeds the notion that everything is actually quite simple and that anyone who claims to see complexity is weak and indecisive and wrong by definition. As a nation we've shifted from a faith in science (although one that automatically rejected any critical questions of how the science was put to use) to a sort of pride in not thinking too much. We still have good universities and educated people, but culturally we value them less, and have shifted to a shorter attention span that doesn't easily get immersed in complex explanations. Donald Trump has made denseness a virtue and continually exhibits the utmost contempt for actual thinking, insisting that everything worth thinking about has immediate and obvious answers.
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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Showing posts with label patriarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label patriarchy. Show all posts
Sunday, November 1, 2020
Saturday, July 4, 2020
Femininity in Contrast to Femaleness
Femininity and womanhood are gender identity terms, but more fundamentally than that, they are socially shared notions, and what they are notions about, historically speaking, are female people.
I have male parts (or at least the parts that led my mom's obstetrician to put "male" on my birth certificate—and for the record I call them male parts myself). But I'm definitely a femme, and I'm happy to be living in 2020 where gender identity has been somewhat split off from physical bodily architecture.
But it doesn't avail us anything to pretend that the feminine gender identities don't have diddly squat to do with physical femaleness. The socially shared concepts and roles, and the accompanying notions about a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on, didn't originate independently and then somehow get ideologically and artificially attached to the female physical morphology. The notions were originally notions about female people. They may not have correctly or adequately described female people in general, and they certainly did not correctly or adequatly describe all female people; and because this has long been a patriarchy, this human society of ours, there may indeed have been ideological content stirred into the pot along with the generalizations. But the gender identity is social; it exists as a bundle of shared concepts, and the subject matter that the concepts were originally and historically concepts about were people who had vaginas and ovaries and fallopian tubes, the biological females of our species.
Now, even as increasing numbers of us find personal validation in gender identities that don't correspond to the physical morphology to which those identities were originally and historically attached, some of that past still haunts us.
You'll recall that I said this society has historically been a patriarchy. One thing that means is that the most established socially shared notions about pretty much anything are men's ideas. To be more specific, cisgender heterosexual men's ideas. Because the viewpoints of other people weren't being spoken in public, weren't being published. So views and attitudes that were really only the views and attitudes of these men got put out there as default views and attitudes. That applies to a lot of subjects, but at the moment let's focus on the definition of women.
Top of the list: sexual attractiveness, the desirability quotient, one's value as a sexual commodity. These days we refer to it as the "male gaze" but it used to be discussed as if women's sexual appeal was intrinsic to the women and men were just noticing it. Because "attractive to cis het men" was defaulted, universalized into "attractive". Because women's usefulness in patriarchy was largely constrained to their usefulness as mates to men.
Women may have meant more to each other, and to themselves, but their opinions weren't being enshrined. I wrote earlier of a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on — all components of her gender identity as a woman. Those are all aspects of the self that a woman may find validation in, may take pride in, but all that has tended to be overshadowed by the focus on sexual desirability, aka sexual desirability as determined by an audience of cis het male people and their appetites.
Why is this relevant to today's gender identity discussion? Because sexual attraction often tends to be "to a body structure". (And that, too, has been culturally emphasized.) In short, sexual orientation has been geared not so much towards what we speak of as gender identity, but to the physical morphology, to shape and contour. So the most emphasized, the most underlined, aspect of what it means to be a woman is to have female curves and contours and the relevant female organs. That shoves beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes, etc, into the background.
Someone in a Facebook group posted a meme stating "It's not sex change, it's gender-affirming surgery". Well, that's wrong. It's not gender-affirming surgery, its SEX-affirming surgery. If a person's gender identity as a woman is 100% valid whether they have a penis or a vagina, then obtaining surgical services to modify their physical structure so that any visual observers will assign it "vagina" doesn't affirm their gender. It affirms their SEX, as female.
Of course, being attractive to the heterosexual male gaze really is central to some people's sense of their feminine identity. It's what's most emotionally important to them about being a woman, as opposed to singing alto arias or becoming a really good seamstress or something. Nothing wrong with that.
But not everyone who identifies as woman or femme or girl is primarily concerned with appealing to the male gaze. Of having a sexually desirable appearance as filtered through the fakely universalized male gaze.
The centrality of the whole "do you look sexy, can you compete with the sexy women of the world in sexy appearance?" question is often used to invalidate feminine people. It is used to invalidate many cis women for whom it simply isn't the end-all and be-all of their self-worth. It is used to invalidate many trans women for whom being evaluated in terms of how well they "pass" as a sexually desirable specimen gets to be old and tiresome.
Well, it is also used to invalidate the identity of people like me, who definitively do not identify as female, who do not transition, who do not attempt to present as female-bodied people, who distinguish between physical sex and gender and identify as male women, male femmes, male girls.
I get a lot of pushback about it. People who say "It's nobody's business what you got in your underpants" when what they really mean is "You've got no business having that attitude of 'yeah I'm male, so what', that's the wrong attitude about your male parts, we're all supposed to be going around saying 'it doesn't matter'". But what actually doesn't matter to me is being found sexy in that sense. Sexy to the falsely universal male gaze. I am male. Sure I want to be found sexy... to people who specifically like the male physical morphology. Since that's the morphology I've got. And I'm a male girl. My gender-atypical identity doesn't have a damn thing to do with claiming femaleness, regardless of whether yours does or not.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, November 30, 2019
The Amazon's Brother
I've uploaded my 1982-vintage unpublished book, The Amazon's Brother, to my theory web pages.
This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.
Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.
The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.
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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.
Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.
The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.
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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Thursday, August 8, 2019
To Gender or Not To Gender?
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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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!
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, June 8, 2019
Split Identity
I suggest we split what we call "identity" into two components. I apologize if I’m repeating myself; my thoughts keep returning to this notion the way a tongue seeks out a sore tooth. I’m talking about a simple split here – not like the myriad aspects of identity portrayed in the Genderbread Person and other such formulations (useful though they may also be at times). I’m suggesting the usefulness of distinguishing simply, between self-chosen identity and identity that is assigned to us by others (which I refer to as altercast identity). I have my reasons for proposing this, which I’d like to go into. You see what you think, OK?
A Lesson from the Workplace
I’m currently working at the NYC Dept of Health, assisting in the coding of data from survey forms that track Naloxone distribution. So on a day-in, day-out basis I’m staring at a lot of survey forms, and one of the questions asked of respondents is their race. Respondents are asked to tick off any categories that apply (they can select multiple answers): White, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Don’t Know, or Other. Or that was the original set of choices; "Hispanic or Latino/a" was added to later editions of the form. Why? Well, originally, "Hispanic" (yes/no) was a separate question from race. But enormous numbers of respondents were checking the "Other" box on race and writing in "Latino" or "Hispanic". Clearly, they experienced being Hispanic as a race, something that (more often than not) they identified as instead of white or black, not in addition to it.
But it doesn’t stop there. On both the old forms and the new forms, people check "Other" and identify as "Puerto Rican", "Dominican", "Cuban", "Mexican", "Salvadorean", "Chilean". Nor is this trend by any means confined to folks from Spanish-language cultures. People are selecting "Other" and self-identifying their race as "Irish", "Czech", "Russian", "Iranian", "Mixteca", "Filipino", "Ethiopian", "Jewish", and so on.
On the one hand, -- hey that’s interesting, the social construct of "race" appears to be converging with what we would have called "ethnicity" or even "country of origin", and given the lethally poisonous history of the ideology of race, that could be viewed as a healthy and positive development.
On the other hand, the original thinking behind asking people their race included a concern for whether or not our services were reaching populations that have historically been underserved. And when you look at it in that light, the intention is not so much "how do you identify yourself, race-wise?" but more "how would other people most often categorize you and regard you?" – because the latter is the factor that most directly shapes how people are treated (or mistreated or neglected in the offering of treatment and so forth).
Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise
A few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Why I am Not a Lesbian". It was controversial; it upset several people, most commonly transgender women who identify as lesbians. In retrospect, perhaps I should have titled the post "Why I am Not a Lesbian and Also Not a Heterosexual Man". I kind of thought the latter portion of that was sufficiently well-developed in the essay, but I guess I didn’t give it as much emphasis. I did state that being in possession of a penis and associated physical structures does not define me as a man and therefore doesn’t define my attraction to female people as heterosexuality.
But the part that lit the controversy-fire was saying that my identification as a femme, a feminine person, a girl, does not define my attraction to female people as lesbianism either. I was talking about myself, about my identity, but my assertion was taken as if I were saying that what is true for me should be considered true of anyone else who has the kind of physical plumbing that is traditionally and typically considered male. In other words, as if I had said "I am not a lesbian because although I have a woman or girl gender identity, I have a male body, and hey, you over there, you aren’t a lesbian either, you silly AMAB!"
(I found this frustrating; I thought I had been quite clear that the problem is that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are insufficient terms, because they assume that sex and gender are the same thing or have the same value, and so they don’t have a socket for someone who identifies as a male girl, as I do)
I present as male, or, at least, make no effort to change my presentation so as to elicit an altercast categorization by other people as female, and so I am viewed as male. In this culture that is coterminous with being viewed as a man. I don’t really make an effort to package my appearance so as to be viewed as a male, but I have a physical body such that, were I to go to a nude beach and be seen from a distance by a thousand complete strangers who know nothing of how I identify, I would be overwhelmingly categorized as a male person. If I show up at the local lesbian bar, I will be perceived there also as a male person. And not as a lesbian. And that is significantly a part of my identity experience.
An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude
I have a respected acquaintance and political ally who, if someone were to call her a TERF ("Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist"), isn’t a person on whose metaphorical feet I could honestly say the shoe does not fit. She reads this blog. I am not going to defend all of her positions, and indeed I’m about to attack some of them. But not all of them.
I do think it is relevant to organize around social experience that people have in common. When feminists come together politically, they often wish to join with other people who have also had a lifetime, ongoing experience of being seen as, viewed as, treated as a woman. As with the intention behind the race question on the surveys, this isn’t about how one self-identifies. It’s about how other people have altercast one, how other people have categorized one with or without one’s concurrence or dissent from those assumptions.
Raise your hand if you remember Rachel Dolezal. Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying as a black person if you happen to be the pale-skinned descendant of European ancestors? I think not; I certainly don’t take issue with it (although it's not my call to make). But Rachel Dolezal occupied a position that was intended to be staffed by a person who had the relevant political social experience, the experience of being perceived as and treated as black, and that was not, in fact, her experience. And that is why we regard her has having done a Bad Thing. For purposes of evaluating her appropriateness for that position, it’s not about her self-chosen identity as black, it’s about having been (or not having been) on the receiving end of being altercast by others as black and treated accordingly.
Some lesbians are "political lesbians", not in the sense of being lesbians who are also political people, or even who are also political about being lesbians, but in the specific sense of choosing to constrain their sexuality so as to express it only with other people who have been in the political situation of being altercast all their lives as girls and women. I’m not saying they do not also find the female form to be physically attractive, or to find the womanly character traits and personality attributes to be romantically desirable in and of themselves, but a fundamental reason to them for being lesbians is to not give their erotic energies over to anyone except other people who have been in that political situation, the altercast identity of being female and woman in a patriarchal society.
In light of their existence within the larger lesbian community, I personally would find it arrogant and inappropriate for me to identify as a lesbian. Your mileage may vary. I do not speak for you. But whether I like it or not, whether I prefer it or abhor it, I am perceived as a male, a man, and treated accordingly, and as a consequence of that I do not have their experience, the one they define themselves by. I would like it if they were to listen to me for who I am, and for the experiences that I have had as a sissy male who rejected masculinity and was proud of being a sissy male, because my story is also relevant to patriarchy and feminism; and I would like to be with female people who do not wish or need their interactions with male-bodied people to revolve around assumed differences. Around me "being a man". I’m not one. I’d like lesbians to understand that. But I do not opt to call myself a lesbian, nonetheless.
My colleague has a reprehensible habit of referring to transgender women only in the dismissive, not listening to anything they might have to say aside from their identification of themselves as women, and she rejects that. She doesn’t reject it with nuance and she does not carefully split the matter of identity and then explain the ways in which a transgender woman isn’t what she means when she says "woman". It is hostile and it is contemptuous, what she is doing, and it is wrong, and I may have to part company with her over it. Splitting identity factors as I am suggesting here would be a useful tactical tool for her, and she could do so and thereby cease negating the identity of transgender women as women while still being able to say "we do not, however, welcome you at our separatist feminist enclave, which is for women who have been treated as girls or women for a lifetime". She could do so and then also participate in (or even host) other meetings which do not exclude transgender women. And which could, incidentally, include me as well.
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A Lesson from the Workplace
I’m currently working at the NYC Dept of Health, assisting in the coding of data from survey forms that track Naloxone distribution. So on a day-in, day-out basis I’m staring at a lot of survey forms, and one of the questions asked of respondents is their race. Respondents are asked to tick off any categories that apply (they can select multiple answers): White, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Don’t Know, or Other. Or that was the original set of choices; "Hispanic or Latino/a" was added to later editions of the form. Why? Well, originally, "Hispanic" (yes/no) was a separate question from race. But enormous numbers of respondents were checking the "Other" box on race and writing in "Latino" or "Hispanic". Clearly, they experienced being Hispanic as a race, something that (more often than not) they identified as instead of white or black, not in addition to it.
But it doesn’t stop there. On both the old forms and the new forms, people check "Other" and identify as "Puerto Rican", "Dominican", "Cuban", "Mexican", "Salvadorean", "Chilean". Nor is this trend by any means confined to folks from Spanish-language cultures. People are selecting "Other" and self-identifying their race as "Irish", "Czech", "Russian", "Iranian", "Mixteca", "Filipino", "Ethiopian", "Jewish", and so on.
On the one hand, -- hey that’s interesting, the social construct of "race" appears to be converging with what we would have called "ethnicity" or even "country of origin", and given the lethally poisonous history of the ideology of race, that could be viewed as a healthy and positive development.
On the other hand, the original thinking behind asking people their race included a concern for whether or not our services were reaching populations that have historically been underserved. And when you look at it in that light, the intention is not so much "how do you identify yourself, race-wise?" but more "how would other people most often categorize you and regard you?" – because the latter is the factor that most directly shapes how people are treated (or mistreated or neglected in the offering of treatment and so forth).
Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise
A few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Why I am Not a Lesbian". It was controversial; it upset several people, most commonly transgender women who identify as lesbians. In retrospect, perhaps I should have titled the post "Why I am Not a Lesbian and Also Not a Heterosexual Man". I kind of thought the latter portion of that was sufficiently well-developed in the essay, but I guess I didn’t give it as much emphasis. I did state that being in possession of a penis and associated physical structures does not define me as a man and therefore doesn’t define my attraction to female people as heterosexuality.
But the part that lit the controversy-fire was saying that my identification as a femme, a feminine person, a girl, does not define my attraction to female people as lesbianism either. I was talking about myself, about my identity, but my assertion was taken as if I were saying that what is true for me should be considered true of anyone else who has the kind of physical plumbing that is traditionally and typically considered male. In other words, as if I had said "I am not a lesbian because although I have a woman or girl gender identity, I have a male body, and hey, you over there, you aren’t a lesbian either, you silly AMAB!"
(I found this frustrating; I thought I had been quite clear that the problem is that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are insufficient terms, because they assume that sex and gender are the same thing or have the same value, and so they don’t have a socket for someone who identifies as a male girl, as I do)
I present as male, or, at least, make no effort to change my presentation so as to elicit an altercast categorization by other people as female, and so I am viewed as male. In this culture that is coterminous with being viewed as a man. I don’t really make an effort to package my appearance so as to be viewed as a male, but I have a physical body such that, were I to go to a nude beach and be seen from a distance by a thousand complete strangers who know nothing of how I identify, I would be overwhelmingly categorized as a male person. If I show up at the local lesbian bar, I will be perceived there also as a male person. And not as a lesbian. And that is significantly a part of my identity experience.
An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude
I have a respected acquaintance and political ally who, if someone were to call her a TERF ("Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist"), isn’t a person on whose metaphorical feet I could honestly say the shoe does not fit. She reads this blog. I am not going to defend all of her positions, and indeed I’m about to attack some of them. But not all of them.
I do think it is relevant to organize around social experience that people have in common. When feminists come together politically, they often wish to join with other people who have also had a lifetime, ongoing experience of being seen as, viewed as, treated as a woman. As with the intention behind the race question on the surveys, this isn’t about how one self-identifies. It’s about how other people have altercast one, how other people have categorized one with or without one’s concurrence or dissent from those assumptions.
Raise your hand if you remember Rachel Dolezal. Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying as a black person if you happen to be the pale-skinned descendant of European ancestors? I think not; I certainly don’t take issue with it (although it's not my call to make). But Rachel Dolezal occupied a position that was intended to be staffed by a person who had the relevant political social experience, the experience of being perceived as and treated as black, and that was not, in fact, her experience. And that is why we regard her has having done a Bad Thing. For purposes of evaluating her appropriateness for that position, it’s not about her self-chosen identity as black, it’s about having been (or not having been) on the receiving end of being altercast by others as black and treated accordingly.
Some lesbians are "political lesbians", not in the sense of being lesbians who are also political people, or even who are also political about being lesbians, but in the specific sense of choosing to constrain their sexuality so as to express it only with other people who have been in the political situation of being altercast all their lives as girls and women. I’m not saying they do not also find the female form to be physically attractive, or to find the womanly character traits and personality attributes to be romantically desirable in and of themselves, but a fundamental reason to them for being lesbians is to not give their erotic energies over to anyone except other people who have been in that political situation, the altercast identity of being female and woman in a patriarchal society.
In light of their existence within the larger lesbian community, I personally would find it arrogant and inappropriate for me to identify as a lesbian. Your mileage may vary. I do not speak for you. But whether I like it or not, whether I prefer it or abhor it, I am perceived as a male, a man, and treated accordingly, and as a consequence of that I do not have their experience, the one they define themselves by. I would like it if they were to listen to me for who I am, and for the experiences that I have had as a sissy male who rejected masculinity and was proud of being a sissy male, because my story is also relevant to patriarchy and feminism; and I would like to be with female people who do not wish or need their interactions with male-bodied people to revolve around assumed differences. Around me "being a man". I’m not one. I’d like lesbians to understand that. But I do not opt to call myself a lesbian, nonetheless.
My colleague has a reprehensible habit of referring to transgender women only in the dismissive, not listening to anything they might have to say aside from their identification of themselves as women, and she rejects that. She doesn’t reject it with nuance and she does not carefully split the matter of identity and then explain the ways in which a transgender woman isn’t what she means when she says "woman". It is hostile and it is contemptuous, what she is doing, and it is wrong, and I may have to part company with her over it. Splitting identity factors as I am suggesting here would be a useful tactical tool for her, and she could do so and thereby cease negating the identity of transgender women as women while still being able to say "we do not, however, welcome you at our separatist feminist enclave, which is for women who have been treated as girls or women for a lifetime". She could do so and then also participate in (or even host) other meetings which do not exclude transgender women. And which could, incidentally, include me as well.
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Sunday, October 7, 2018
Gender and Sex and Cognitive Dissonance
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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