Gendered Expectations

When I was born, I was categorized based on visual inspection of my parts, and designated male.

You've heard all this before, over and over. I don't need to repeat objections that you could recite as easily as I could. Let's do something more interesting... let's dive into the head of the people who don't understand what we're objecting to.

I'm picking this guy, let's call him Sammy. He says that as far as he's concerned, the designation and categorization mean exactly the same thing as the parts themselves. "Penis means you're male. I ain't saying that makes you Rambo. Maybe you're into ballet, or you want to be Earth Mom. I don't care if you paint your room pink or blue or you play with dolls or fire engines, you hear what I'm sayin'? Male just means you got a penis and we figure you're gonna grow hair and so on because that's what usually happens."

Sammy is effectively making the claim that he — and most of the rest of the world — doesn't attach any additional meaning to being male.

He is wrong. He does it all the time, I've seen him do it over and over. In a discussion of evolutionary pressures and social status, he said the high status males will naturally be the ones who have sex with the most females, while the highest status females will be the ones who only have sex with a few carefully selected males. That's attaching a significance to "male" that goes far beyond "has a penis". And in discussions of romantic comedy movies, he described a character played by Katharine Hepburn as having "won" against the male lead when he ends up proposing marriage to her — "she got him, he's captured". Sammy can protest all he wants about how he isn't projecting pink versus blue expectations and roles onto people and attaching those things to what sex he considers them to be, but he's definitely doing it, and the society that surrounds us is definitely doing it.

It's hard to know what to say to someone who insists that they are only seeing and thinking in terms of physical body structure when they clearly show that they assume different priorities, different values, different behavioral patterns, different personality characteristics... and different roles that interact with other, equally sex-specific roles.

Maybe it's a good thing to aspire to. Maybe we should all be trying not to assume anything whatsoever about how a person will behave or what's important to them in life based on whether we perceive their bodies to be male, or female instead. Maybe we should all be trying not to interpret the same behavior as meaning a different thing depending on whether we perceive the person to be female or to be male. But pretending that nobody does that any more except for transgender and genderqueer and nonbinary people, as if the rest of the world doesn't attach any meaning to being a man or being a woman other than the physical? Give me a break!

That's not to say that it isn't useful to think of, and speak of, the physical architecture separately from the identity, the gendered self that we have come to believe is not defined by our sexual plumbing. If being born with a clitoris and vagina does not make one a girl or a woman, then you don't need to have a clitoris and a vagina in order to be one, nor to present and pass as a person who has that kind of physical architecture. If your gender identity is valid, then it's valid on the nude beach or the doctor's examining room. It's valid when you're wearing the garments that are typically worn by the people who have the same physical body structure instead of the garments typically worn by the people who have the same gender identity.

Trans people often say "Trans women don't owe you femininity". Well, I don't owe you the need to be thought of as physically female.

There are other people — some of my trans brothers and sisters — whose situation is different from mine. Some of them do need to do a medical transition. And I support them and their rights and their need for social and medical accommodations.

But me, I don't need false breasts. I don't need real breasts. I don't need brassieres. I have no interest in lipstick or rouge, I don't own a single pair of high heels, and I don't paint my fingernails. My face grows hair because of my hormones, and I don't shave it off, nor do I pluck it. It grows there naturally. I don't owe you femaleness. I'm femme. You'll discover who I am soon enough if you interact with me.



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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

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The Future (or Lack Thereof) of Gender

What do you think gender will look like in the future? Fifteen years from now? Twenty-five or fifty years?

A lot of people agree that the characteristics of a person's physical body shouldn't be used by society to attribute gender to them.

"A person's gender identity is valid", someone will say, "regardless of whether they have a penis or a vagina".

"Oh", says another person, "not just that, but whether they have a beard or not. Or breasts or no breasts. Or whether they have wide hips or wide shoulders. People shouldn't go around telling people their body isn't right for their gender identity!"

A smaller minority -- some nonbinary transgender, gender-critical feminists, genderqueer, gender-outlaw activists, etc -- explicitly want gender to utterly disappear:

"Gender doesn't exist except as harmful sexist propaganda about what it means if you have a certain kind of body", says one feminist.

An activist in a t-shirt that says FUCK GENDER says, "I don't see the point of being 'genderfluid', really. Having a gender is all about limitations, so what's the point of bouncing around from one set of limitations to another set when you can just be outside of all that?"



This question is for the rest of you, the ones who don't think gender itself is a bad thing, but don't want it to be connected to any specific physical body configuration: how do you think gender will survive being split off from an essentially physical anchor?

Let's review how gender has traditionally worked in human society. It was believed that people come in two (usually; occasionally more than two) essential types, which were different from each other in physical ways which was how you knew which type you were dealing with; and that each of these types were fundamentally different in other, less immediately visible ways. Personality differences. Differences in attitude towards what they want out of life. Different ways of behaving. Different ways of signalling what they want, both consciously and unconsciously, which meant differences in how you, the observer, should interpet behaviors. Different ways of experiencing sex and sexuality. Different values, different priorities, different obligations, different purposes in life.

So now, we're saying we're not going to attribute all that stuff to a person based on their bodies. Instead we're going to open up all those identities, and also add a bunch more that people have started identifying as, and establish throughout society that anyone can be any of these gender identities regardless of what body they were born with. So let's assume that really does happen. That people cease to see a person's physical body and mentally paste a batch of expectations of what that person is like.

Well, if it's not based on the body, what one (or three, or six) feature(s) of a person's dress or behavior determines which other expectations society ought to glue onto them?

If no expectations are being glued on from a handful of initial observations, how is that different from a world that doesn't have gender identities? If you don't have expectations from having mentally categorized a person, that person might do or be absolutely anything next. We aren't thinking of them as being "like" other people in that category and "different" from people who are in other categories.

So if you don't think gender will evaporate once we get rid of body-based stereotyped expectations, why wouldn't it? What's your theory on how gendered identities will persist? Will we preserve historically established identities, along with their roles and expected traits? Will we keep the traditional "man" and "woman"? How about the others, like "demigirl" and "demiboy" and "bigender" and "genderfluid" and so on, will we keep those too? Is there an upper limit to how many gender identities we'll believe people fit into, or will it expand to almost infinite numbers of identities?

Or maybe we won't impose expectations on others as part of understanding and accepting someone else's gender identity, but instead wait for them to explain to us how they want us to see them. But if we don't have any preformed notions in our heads, like "what it means to be a man" or "what women are like" or whatever, won't they be in the same situation they'd be in in a world without genders, where each person exists as a unique individual and as "one more person" not not as part of any divisional category?

What are your thoughts?

———————

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 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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Diminishing Returns

My transgender woman friend is replying to a comment that she finds annoying. Somebody has said that they have nothing against transgender women, "but why do you embrace all of the most phony and stereotypical trappings of restrictive femininity? It's all pink lipstick and false eyelashes and nylons and pointy shoes with you. Don't you see how that comes across to us cis women? It's like you think that's what being a woman is all about!"

My friend finds the comment annoying because she feels like she keeps answering it over and over, it's a reoccurring theme and she's tired of it. She writes, "We don't like being misgendered. I happen to be tall for a woman, with more narrow hips and a more angular jaw. I grew up before puberty blockers. Many of us need to send as many signals as possible or we run the risk of being addressed as 'sir' or 'mister'. Why is that hard for you to understand?"

She uses socially recognized indicators of gender. Things that men don't do, things that men don't wear. That only works as long as men, in general, don't do those things, don't wear those items.

Meanwhile, we cheer when we hear stories of boys in preschool who aren't chased away from the fairy princess costumes. We celebrate the decline in rigid notions of what boys can do, what girls can do. We agree that the body with which one is born should not artificially limit one's choices, that people should have the maximum freedom to be and do any of the things that other people get to be and do in our society.

Many nonbinary and agender people say they would be glad to see gender disappear entirely: just treat people for who they are, don't categorize people as genders at all. But at the same time, many of them continue to be assigned to a gender by the people who encounter them. The assignment tends to be the same assignment they were given at birth--not because of actual genitalia, necessarily, but assorted visibly discernable physical characteristics that are the product of our sex hormones and the effects they have on our bodies. The same things that my transgender friend has to work against to avoid being misgendered. So it happens with nonbinary and agender people, too, they get misgendered and to try to keep that from happening, they, too, make use of garments and grooming styles to "look more masc" or "look more femme", to offset those traits.

I could identify as transgender or as nonbinary, but mostly I don't. I don't seek to be perceived as a female person, and I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female. I most often call myself genderqueer instead, and explain to people that I am a gender invert, a male girl (or male femme if you prefer), that I have a body and I have a personality, a sex and a gender, and what makes me genderqueer is that they are a mixed bag, an apparent mismatch.

Like the transgender and the nonbinary people, I, too, use some signals to convey visually a bit of who I am. I wear my hair long, I wear some jewelry that's not typical for males to wear, and I wear some apparel that isn't considered men's clothes (especially skirts). Since I present (nevertheless) as a male person (the facial hair being a pretty distinctive marker, and a prominent male larynx also makes that statement), it's a mixed signal, which is more or less as good as I can accomplish in the absense of a widespread social expectation that there are such people as male girls out there.

If there were a lot of other male people doing that, though, using items that socially symbolize femininity without attempting to be perceived as physically female, wouldn't it just dilute and eventually erase the perception of those items as feminine? Or is there a way to create the identity "male girl" and be recognized as a feminine male instead of being seen as a longhaired man in a skirt?

And is it a problem anyway? If the world had not insisted on a bunch of rigid notions about how girls and boys are supposed to be different from each other, would I have ever pushed away from the "boy" identity and decided I was more like one of the girls?

Maybe. Maybe not. I think the answer to that depends on whether males in general have different traits (other than the physical, I mean) from females in general. If there are such differences at the generalization level, I might still have come to see myself as an exception, even without the excessively rigid and proscriptive attitudes I grew up with.

People might want to hold on to artificial signals, signals that have historically said "feminine" or "masculine", not to gild the lily of their body's own physical manifestations but to signal where on the spectrum of masculinity to femininity they consider themselves to belong. There's no innate reason for most of these markers to convey the meaning that they currently convey, but that's true of the sounds that constitute our language and yet we continue to use language to communicate.

But if, on the other hand, there are no real non-physical-body differences between the sexes, it does seem like gender would disappear if there were no ideology propping it up. So notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" might fade away, along with any possible signals to convey them.


———————

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 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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False Dichotomy

There’s a false dichotomy between “born this way” and “choice”. We encounter it in the MOGII communities, where there’s a rapid embrace of the notion of inherent genetic and brain differences, first for gay and lesbian people and, more recently, for trans folks.

That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.

In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.

So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.

Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???

Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?

It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.

I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.

Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.

Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.



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A Diagnosis of Dysphoria

When I was 38, my girlfriend broke up with me. She indicated that her life had become too complicated to maintain a relationship – too many other demands on her time and energy. And Iw as obviously just casually involved, enjoying the connection for the sex and fun. She knew it wasn’t serious for me because I hadn’t tried to restrict her from dating other guys and, besides, I was a guy. Things are different for guys, she said. It might hurt now but within a month or so I’d be dating someone else.

The combination of this characterization and the horrifying prospect of trying to flirt and date again kept me sidelined for over a year in hurt and anger, and then drove me into a more specific despair. I felt alien, unknowable.

I had come to New York City 12 years earlier, to find support and understanding and community as a male who felt and thought differently than other males; I’d come to New York as a would-be activist heterosexual sissy. But I hadn’t found others like me or an identity-community to be an activist within.

Since I had counseling services covered by my employer-issued health plan, I made some calls, wanting someone to talk to.

“Oh, yes, there’s term for that now, and a lot of literature about it, it’s called gender identity dysphoria. Can I schedule you for next Tuesday?”

That snapped-in, over-the-phone diagnosis was partially correct. I was in serious distress, I was feeling very poorly understood in all my available social environments; I felt trapped and imprisoned within the set of beliefs and assumptions that I was a Man. But the diagnosis was partially incorrect as well: I did not have any issue with my body or with how my body per se was categorized by the people around me.

My real complaint lies not with the specific inaccuracy of the diagnosis, but with the mindset behind it, the tendency to medicalize differences, to define them as pathological. I was, as I said, in distress, but my difference was not and is not an ailment. Even if the distress would not have been occurring if it weren’t for my difference, the difference wasn’t and isn’t the location of the malady.

This was not the worst offense of this nature that I’ve experienced. In 1979, I had gone to the university medical clinic’s walk-in therapy facility to talk about feeling like I was more of a girl than I was kin to the other boys, only to be told “We know what causes that now” and prescribed Stelazine, an antipsychotic neuroleptic drug.

Medicalizing, or “psychiatrizing”, people’s differences – such as being gender-atypical – defines the problem as residing in the suffering person’s own self, when in cases like these the problem actually resides in society and its shared systems of beliefs and understandings. Or lack of understandings, if you prefer.

This mindset, this clinical behavior on the part of therapists and therapeutic practices, is an outgrowth of our western medical tradition, where patients are subdivided up into systems and organs and thought of as ailments to which the correct medical intervention merely needs to be applied. The right pill, the appropriate intervention. The tendency is exacerbated by the insurance companies, which pay for the treatment of ailments (“please provide the diagnostic code on line 7”), and medical malpractice law, which sees culpability for anything going wrong when a specific medical malady is not addressed with the established protocol.

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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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Workplace Acceptance

I get to show up at work in a skirt when I feel like it. I've been hired to do data entry at NYC's Department of Health. It's a job I'm eminently qualified for (I'm fast at typing and data entry). The option of working skirted isn't due to my proficiency (although it contributes to my confidence in exercising the option), it's because it's DOH, and that's just how they are. There are required new-hire orientation videos in which gender and sexual orientation variations are explained, complete with video footage of people discussing their identity or that of their child. The new employee is taught that it is an offense that can get you dismissed from your job to question or challenge whether someone's presence in the bathroom is appropriate for their gender. People include their pronouns of choice in their email signatures. There are gender neutral bathrooms on some floors and prominent signs directing people to them.

There's a similar orientation about race and ethnicity and why it is wrong to have a set of standards for things like hair style and clothing that are derived from white eurocentric culture but promote them for everyone in the name of "professionalism".

DOH is committed to being in the forefront of efforts to address racism and heterosexism and other institutional systems of oppression, and they focus on it internally. I've already attended two workshops where I was being paid on company time to discuss such matters with my coworkers. (I like this job. Does it show?)



I've had a skirt or two in my wardrobe ever since I plucked up the first one in a Salvation Army thrift store 30-someodd years ago. I've worn them out and about on the sidewalks of the city, to grocery stores in the suburbs, on mass transit, on college campus as student and as a grad student teaching the class, but until now not to the workplace as an employee.

It makes more difference than you might think. There's nothing intrinsically feminine about a skirt; it's a piece of apparel that fits and functions well on bodies male and female alike, and is only designated as female apparel for cultural and historical reasons; in other cultures and at other times, garments that were essentially skirts have been worn by male people. And so when I say I was born a girl, I certainly don't mean I was born with a need to wear this item (or paint my nails or wear shoes with pointy tips or whatever).

But they are signifiers, tools of communication, precisely because they convey a femininity message in this particular society. I like skirts in part because I just do (in a way that I don't like, for example, those pointy-tipped high heeled dress shoes), but I've embraced them because of their symbolic value. I don't have to wear one every day; being seen in one once or twice can have a permanent impact on people. It shapes how I'm seen and reacted to.

In previous places of employment, I've often been out about being differently gendered. I've brought it into conversations and talked to coworkers and employers about it whenever the topic seemed to come up. But long abstract complicated conversations are often less effective than a good visual, you know?

I was introduced to a new colleague by my supervisor on Friday, and the supervisor used "their" and "they" in reference to me. (Those are not pronouns that I've chosen for myself but that's entirely OK. It reflects the perception that I'm differently gendered. I don't need the details to be precisely accurate; just noting that there's a difference here is sufficient to keep people from making the usual assumptions!)

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Sex Versus Gender

Marie, a transgender woman, does not like my distinction between sex and gender.

I identify as a person who has both a sex and a gender, the first of which ("male") I explain as my physiological or morphological physical structure and the second ("sissy" or "femme" or "girl") is who I am as a person, which isn't defined by my body or its parts.

Marie objects to the way I speak about physiological sex. She considers herself to be both wholly a woman and fully female, but has not sought out bottom surgery and says that if I establish that my sex is male on the basis of having physical male parts, that language could be used to say that she is male because she has a penis.

Is there room for us both?


"Biological sex is ALSO a social construct"

Marie says that "biological sex" is a social construct, just as gender is. She brings up the existence of intersex people to illustrate how the notion that there are two biological sexes is not an empirical physical fact at all. She says all this as a prelude to dismissing sex as different from gender: if they're both social constructs, and gender is defined as social, sex isn't a different thing, it's all gender. (And hers, she says, is all female; she goes on to state that I sound confused about what I am; I don't consider myself confused at all though).

What does it mean when we say something is a social construct? It means that we are relying on definitions that we've learned socially in order to interpret the thing, whatever the thing may be, so our interpretations have those socially learned definitions stirred into them, they aren't just inherently there in the "thing in itself". The implication of saying that something is a "social construct" is that it could be constructed differently — that whatever inherent characteristics may be attached to the "thing in itself" could be interpreted different if we had different socially learned definitions to apply to that thing.

In the 1950s our culture had many shared beliefs about gender differences that by 1970 had been brought into question, most centrally by the feminist movement. So here we have elements of femininity (and masculinity) that were originally seen as built-in but later seen as socially constructed, and the possibility that they could be constructed quite differently was widely recognized.

Are our notions of "biological sex" as loosely tied to anything that isn't similarly flexible and arbitrary?

I personally don't think so. I can't know for sure, since I can't magically get my head outside of socially learned concepts, and this is an important point, this lack of certaintly, but my strong suspicion is that if we could indeed magically "reset" social beliefs about sex over and over again in random ways and then have the resulting culture try to describe human bodies, we'd end up with descriptions that we would recognize as "male" and "female", with the changes mostly around the handling of variations and exceptions. In other words, I do think our culture's insistent shoehorning of people into two categories and denying variations and exceptions is a social construct, but I don't think it's likely that any of those alternative-reality resets would fail to come up with the observation that for the most part people tend to fall into two primary categories based exclusively on their physical morphology.

The descriptions and terms might be different but we'd still recognize them as descriptions of the human body and the sexes that we know about. Perhaps they would speak of whether the urethra comes down the barrel of the tingly erogenous tissue or instead comes to a separate opening farther below, and with that as the initial distinction they would note that most (although not all) of the people with the separate urethral opening have a comparatively small tingly-erogenous-tissue organ with much of it embedded below the surface of the pelvic muscles, and that most (but not all) of the people with the urethra-down-the-barrel configuration have two glandular masses at the base surrounded by a loose envelope of tissue, whereas the majority (albeit not all) of those with the separate opening have similar glandular masses internally located and significantly higher up, and so on and so forth.

Scientists often use what they call a "double blind" test, which means neither the researchers nor the participants know how previous participants have categorized or classified something. I believe that, within the limitations of different words and terms being used or created, human observers stripped of all our current cultural beliefs about what the sexes are would describe two (not five, not fourteen) primary structural configurations as the main pattern, plus a double handful of variations and exceptions. And those two primary patterns would be quite recognizable to us as what we call "sex".

Gender is different. Almost any component of gender is arguble as to whether it would reliably show up again and again if we did these magic "resets": aggression and adversarial tendencies? nurturing and caregiving behaviors? attention span differences? verbal fluency? math skills? social awareness and facilitation of the social peace? visual-spatial skills? visual sexual erotic responsiveness? We don't know whether these would necessarily be observed to be sex-linked differences or if our culture's beliefs about them have more to do with history and various ideologies and prescriptive attitudes. That is why we call these things gender and distinguish them from sex, which is the "thing" to which they are attached by social definition and connotation and so forth.



The Female Penis

I do see why Marie wouldn't appreciate being told that insofar as her body includes a penis, it is a male body. Marie says she is female, therefore this is a female penis. "There have been enough gatekeepers going around saying I don't count as trans unless I intend to have bottom surgery, and I don't see how all that gatekeeping is making things better for anyone", she says.

Suzanne interrupts to explain that she is the proud owner of a clitoris, not a penis. It was incorrectly described as a penis when she was born, and some people might still call it that if they didn't know any better, but it's a clitoris; it's hers and she's female. She has a friend, Malcolm, a transgender man, who has a mangina. "The identity of a person's body parts is a matter for the person to decide. Defining something as a vagina or a penis or whatever, that's socially constructed along with everything else, OK?"

It does seem like it would be useful when considering questions like "what sex is this person?" or "what organ is that?" to ask the question "according to whom?" That would enable me to say that I am male, not because my body is inherently male but because I have classified it that way myself, without imposing an unwanted definition on Marie, who is female, who classifies her body in that fashion.

It also lets us reference altercasting, of which I have spoken before. Altercasting is the assignment of identity by other people. Transgender people tend to speak in terms of having been "assigned male at birth" (AMAB) or "assigned female at birth" (AFAB). That's actually not a process that occurs just once (when someone is born); instead people continue to assign other people to a sex (and to other identity-factors). When some (or most) other people tend to altercast a person in a way that contradicts the identity that they claim for themselves, that creates a tension, usually an unpleasant one, whether we designate it as "dysphoria" or not, whether we identify as "transgender" or not.

Intersex people have tended to get altercast as one of the two binary sexes, and then their physical divergence or variations from the norm for that sex become treated as something wrong and in need of fixing. This coercive and invasive practice destroys physically healthy tissue for the sake of imposing an altercast physical identity on people without their consent, perhaps the ultimate form of this tension. But any of us may have reason to interpret our physical morphology in a way different from how others have done. I'm not trying to take that away from any of us.

The tension I experienced in my lifetime has not been because I disputed the categorization of my body as male, but because I was at odds with the additional meanings that are culturally associated with maleness. Gender. I was being misgendered but without being mis-sexed.


A New Color in the Spectrum

I don't identify as transgender. I don't consider myself to be a female person who was incorrectly identified as a male person. I consider myself to be a male person who has correctly been recognized as a male person.

But there is a huge component of characteristics, behaviors, personality attributes, priorities and choices and stuff, that are assumed about a person who is perceived as male. These were wrong. My constellation of attributes and characteristics were recognized by others as being more like what tends to be assumed about people who are classified as female. They said so. I saw it myself, I clearly fit in with the girls, not the boys. These traits had far more to do with who I was, as a person, than my biological plumbing did. Other people made an issue of it, it wasn't "normal". Meanwhile, whenever I was treated as self-evidently one of the boys, I experienced it as being misgendered, that's not who I was. So I, too, made an issue of my difference.

It's not the same situation that Marie is in. Similar, but not the same. It's something else. I'm a gender invert. I'm an authentic person. I have authentic political and social concerns. They are different concerns than those of Marie and other transgender women, although we have things in common and should be supportive of each other. Clearly we're in the greater LGBTQIA (or MOGII *) spectrum together and should be allies.

But I will not be silenced as the price of Marie's comfort level.


* MOGII = "minority orientation, gender identity, and intersex"


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If You Could Be...

So I was casting about for a topic to blog on. (I don't usually have difficulty coming up with something, but given that I try to pump these things out once a week I guess it's inevitable that sooner or later I'd have nothing in particular in mind when the time came, right?) I mentioned this to my partner and she joked that I could borrow a page from those silly corporate exercises and ask my readers "If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?".

Hmm, well... perhaps an appropriate variation of that.

If you could be any GENDER you wanted, which one would you be?

The conventional modern understanding of what it means to be a transgender woman is along these lines: The world consists of men and women; a transgender woman is a person who was born male but wants to be a woman, and transitions.

Trans women themselves would probably be more likely to say: Although I was born with a body that was assigned male initially by others, I *am* a woman. Transitioning is either to correct the body to make it correspond with a person's identity or else to shift the perceptions of other people.

I myself am not a transitioner, and my answer would be like this: The world consists predominantly of male men and female women, but there are also male women and female men, and folks in-between, and others. Just like transgender people, I am already the gender I want to be: a male woman

I want to change people's perceptions (i.e., I want to be seen as and treated as who I am), but I have no interest in changing myself.



What does it mean to "be a woman", though? There are all the attributes and characteristics, behaviors and roles and so on, but interspersed with that is the notion of a correspondence to some degree with the social construct called "biological femaleness" — breasts, vagina, menses, uterus, pregnancy. And it's all wrapped together as a package deal. Even among people who mentally distinguish between femininity (or "the sex role expectation of femininity", if you prefer) and biological female morphology, there are often many things that are thought of, consciously or unconsciously, as part of biological femaleness that someone else would classify differently: sexual positioning and mate selection strategies, the question of desirability or attractiveness, the gatekeeper role as the person who gives or withholds consent, and nurturance and other related manifestations of hormonal states, social interaction patterns determined by having a smaller size and less physical strength, and so on. So while it is highly useful to distinguish intellectually between sex and gender, between biological femaleness (social construct though it may be) and the complex constellation of things we call femininity, there still isn't a consensus about which is which, or which contains which elements, if you see what I mean.

What if we teased it apart into a sort of checklist, then? For those who wish to (continue to) be a woman, what do you mean when you say you are a woman? For instance (keeping in mind that for cisgender women as well as anyone else identifying as a woman, not all of these will apply)...

[ ] Demeanor and behavior, that yours matches the overall pattern exhibited by women in general

[ ] Perception and interpretation of your demeanor and behavior by others as feminine

[ ] Perception and interpretation of your body: being viewed by others as morphologically female

[ ] The experience of being a sex object, a target of the sexual appetite of those people who are of the sex and/or gender you wish to be sexy to, especially to the extent that this is a different experience for women

[ ] Having the personality and holding the priorities and values and overall perspective and viewpoints that women have more of a tendency to hold than men do

[ ] Others' perception and interpretation of you as having such a personality and being likely to hold such values and priorities etc

[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature

[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy

[ ] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life

[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life


To do this right, we'd need a fill-in-the-blank line after each item to add a comment as need be.

Now, I can readily imagine some people rejecting this sliced-up deconstruction. I've encountered that in a few discussions, in fact, the notion that something gets killed or ignored when you divide the concept up in this fashion, and that "woman" (or "man" for that matter) is an entire package and that to be what it is and retain its meaning it has to continue to be that way.

But I'm not fond of that, since that attitude erases me. It's as reductionistic as the attitude of some of the people on Facebook who post things like "If you got a dick yer a man".

I definitely need to order a la carte. Here's my own response, checks for what I would place an order for and x's for the ones that already apply:


[x] Demeanor and behavior I've got that already

[√] Perception and interpretation of my behavior as feminine Yeah, that's what I want

[ ] Perception and interpretation of my body as morphologically female No thank you

[√] The experience of being a sex object / to those of the sex or gender to which I want to be attractive well yes, actually

[x] Personality and priorities and values and overall perspective I already have that too

[√] Perceived by others as having that personality and priorities etc This is important

[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature Umm, no, I'm fine with the factory installed parts

[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy Neither need nor have any of those

[x] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life I have that, too, actually

[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life I don't have that but I'd be a different person if I had


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Beyond the OTHER Binary

Binary thinking is either/or thinking. In our own gender-variant subculture, when we say "nonbinary" or "binary" we're referring to the gender binary, of course--the notion that either you are male, and hence a man, or you are female, and therefore a woman.

But I've encountered a lot of rigid binary thinking among people who ought to know better, binary thinking that isn't necessarily the same familiar gender binary but still rooted in that same kind of either/or, and that's what I want to write about today.

To get started, let me relate to you a pair of conversations.

Conversation One

X: That's a nice jacket patch you've got there. 'Radical feminist'. Is that your sister's jacket you're wearing?

W: Thanks! No, it's mine.

X: Well, men can't be feminists. They can be pro-feminist, or feminist supporters but feminist voices and feminist actions and the faces of feminism, well, that has to be women, speaking for ourselves.

W: I don't identify as a man. I'm male but I'm not a man.

X: Well, that's good. Reject that identity. But you still can't speak as a feminist as a male person. Our oppression is oppression as female, and feminists need to be female. Because when a feminist opinion is represented, if a male spokesman gets to do that representing, it isn't feminism any more.

W: Across campus is Dr. Thorensen. He lectures and writes books for a living and he drives a BMW and lives in an impressively big house. He identifies as a Marxist, a socialist. I wouldn't say he's working class.

X: That may be a legitimate point, but that doesn't mean feminism has to follow that route. You are male, you are treated as male, therefore you are privileged as male.

W: Well, I'm not trying to do a chivalry thing here. Patriarchy as a social structure prohibits me from stepping outside of what it defines as masculinity. Behaviors and personality traits are demanded of me that aren't who I am, and as a person who doesn't fit that, I'm oppressed. I see what you're saying about the voice and face of feminism needing to be female, but what do we call it when I'm doing this for my own political reasons?

X: But that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. You're not oppressed as a man. Patriarchy is the oppression of women, by men.

W: Well, what am I oppressed as? A sissy femme? If I was gay I could talk about homophobia. Should I call it femmeophobia?

X: I'm saying you shouldn't call yourself a feminist.

W: When I start explaining my situation to people, I'm going to end up using concepts that feminists put into words. If I use their terms, "feminism" is what they call this perspective and this politics. If I invent my own terms, it's going to be like I'm stealing feminists' ideas and not giving them credit, isn't it?

X: You shouldn't do that either. Feminism is ours. Go find your own cause, you can be supportive of feminism but you can't really be a full-fledged participant.

W: But this is my cause.


Conversation Two

Z: That's an interesting jacket patch you've got there. 'Radical feminist'. Why would you want to have anything to do with them?

W: Radical feminists were first in challenging biological essentialist ideas about males and females being fundamentally different and having automatically built-in sex roles they were supposed to conform to.

Z: Are you kidding? They're the ones who won't let trans women into their midst. They say trans women aren't real women. If that's not biologically essentialist, what is?

W: Some of them have that attitude. Most radical feminists have a more complicated view of transgender women, though. It's not that they don't recognize that a trans woman's identity is woman, and female, it's that they're saying trans women's experience isn't the same as the experience that they're organizing around.

Z: No, they say we're not women. They say "hey everybody, we're organizing as women" and then they say "no, not you, you're not welcome".

W: Well, if they said they were organizing as people who were female at birth, would you be more OK with them saying you don't really belong at their meeting?

Z: I've always been female. When I was born I was assigned male, but that's because the cisgender world has an ideology to support. We need to get past focusing on the ideology of there being two body types that define gender. And that's what those radical feminists are doing, they're making everything be about the binary.

W: OK, so if they said they were organizing as people who were assigned female at birth, you'd be more OK with them saying you aren't really welcome at their meetings?

X: But that's personal information, and it's no one's business. There shouldn't be any distinction between whether you're trans or cis. You're a woman and that's what counts.

W: Well, aren't you organizing as transgender men and women to form support groups and hold rallies for your rights?



In both conversations, there are participants who get caught up in the notion that there is a Category and either you're in it or you're not. Either/or. Binary.

If we value being able to get past the familiar binary of gender, we should examine other binaries when we encounter them and see if we can get past that kind of either/or thinking. Rather than a person being or not being a woman or a feminist or whatever, acknowledge the ways in which a person is and the ways in which that same person isn't, accept and embrace the contradictions and the fragility of definitions.

This is a real-world concern. Just the other day, a new member joined one of the Facebook "Nonbinary and Genderqueer" groups that I participate in. This person had never come out, had never put a name to the felt sense of difference and the confusing and peculiar sense of identity, and bounced in introducing themself and asking questions: "It's like this for me, is it like that for some of you other people in here too?" This person used some terms like "heterosexual" and "lesbian" and referenced their own physical configuration to explain what they meant, and quickly a barrage of posts from the group's existing membership came in to correct them. "If you're saying a person who doesn't have that configuration isn't heterosexual you're using binary thinking and that's offensive in here and maybe you don't belong here". The new person asked questions and made additional explanations, more or less like the two conversations I recounted above, but the response continued to be "You are saying bad things, things that are wrong. You're using categories in a bad way and you need to learn better or leave". So the new person left.

Our spaces aren't the safe spaces we pretend that they are. Too often we have enshrined a set of definitions and terms and become very rigid, very binary, in how we react to other people's language and how they express themselves. Too often we aren't listening, we're just litmus-testing people to see if anything they're saying is reminiscent of a politically incorrect belief or attitude that we've already decided is unwelcome here.

I don't think that's at all a good thing. I think we need to prioritize communication, and a good way to do so is to say "There are some ways in which what you just said is problematic for people in here, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways in which it makes an important point. Let's discuss both".

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Physical Morphology, Assigned Sex, and the Binary

The transgender community isn't quite monolithic but in general, within trans groups there's not much welcome for a lot of focus (prurient or otherwise) on a person's physical sex. Sexual morphology. Plumbing. Whatever you want to call it.

Within recent months I've been in conversations where trans (and occasionally nonbinary) folks have said:

• Sex is a social construct. The notion that it exists as something separate from gender identity is mostly bullshit. If your identity is that you are a woman, then your body is female.

• The only relevant way to designate the difference between a transgender person and a cisgender person is that in the case of a transgender person a misidentification was made, assigning them to the wrong sex instead of getting it right, back when they were born: assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth.

• Anyone who would consider another person's genital configuration a dealbreaker in dating or sex is prejudiced and all wrapped up in transphobic thinking; there's no defensible legitimate reason to make an issue of that, or to want to know their date's erogenous-zone plumbing in advance, or to express a preference.

I'm not on board with all that and sometimes I feel erased by it. This LGBTQ rainbow is supposed to accommodate variation and diversity, and some of this "party line" on physical morphology isn't accommodating me worth a shit, and I'm theoretically part of this rainbow, dammit. Can we talk?

OK, you want to talk about social constructs, let's examine the social construct of clothing, and the ubiquitous use of it. No, I don't mean dresses versus arrow shirts and suit jackets, I mean clothes period, as opposed to not wearing them. Ever been to a naturist enclave? Yeah, that's the environment formerly known as a "nudist camp". Imagine one. Lots of people, no clothings.

Let's watch some other things getting socially constructed in this environment. Starting with me, upon my arrival. And you, upon yours, if you're willing.

"Assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth" make it sound like all the assigning is done by an OB/GYN doctor who makes a pronouncement between clamping off the umbilical cord and recording the Apgar score, and then wraps the identifying merchandise in a diaper and from then on no one does any assigning, they just rely on the original that the doctor made in the delivery-room pronouncement.

But that's not how it works, and it's certainly not what's happening now as we step forth into the naturist preserve. One thousand sighted naturists take a glance and make an assessment. Just like folks out there in the clothed world, they assign most of the people they encounter to the category "male" or to the category "female". This isn't gender identity. This is assigned sex. They haven't asked you about your pronouns yet. They dont' know if you conceptualize yourself as a man, a woman, or something else. They're assigning you in their heads based on what they can see. Unlike the folks in the clothed world, they're relying directly on your physical morphology. Basics.

Yes it's social. Yes, they're relying on categories they learned from the society surrounding them. But their assessment relies on a generalization, and at the level of generalization a two-value categorical system works for the overwhelming majority of folks who walk in this door. Let's take a step back. How'd they get this categorical system they're using? They just soaked it up from our culture, right? Well, let's pretend they didn't, and start them off from scratch, no preconceived notions about the existence of sexes. What's going to happen?

Generalization's going to happen. It's how our minds work; we're good at it. We categorize stuff. Generalization isn't politically evil -- despicable shitty attitudes towards the exceptions to the rule are entirely optional and not an inherent part of generalizing.

I don't think it's inevitable that they'll develop a two-category system. For example, they might create a four-category system, based on the physical differences between prepubescent people and adults as well as the penis versus vagina thing, for instance. But I think a two-category system is probably more likely than anything else. After awhile the naturists are going to notice some of the exceptions, the people whose morphological configuration doesn't categorize simply and easily into either of those two groups -- and in the absense of clothing to hide it and make it stay hidden, there would come the recognition of intersex people. (Not that all intersex people are visually identifiable even in a naturist setting, but some would be).

And into this environment strolls a transgender person. A visual assessment is made and along with it an assignment. Regardless of outcome, our naturist population is not "getting it wrong" when they do this: we're talking about assigned sex, not gender identity. That which is attributed to us by others is a part of our experience, and each attributor is not merely imposing a value, they're recognizing the value most likely imposed by a huge host of other people and realizing you've been perceived as such.

A binary transgender person who pursues the stereotypical path of transitioning is a person who seeks morphological reassignment in order to obtain categorical reassignment. Such a person changes their body, which changes its visual aspects and causes the naturists to categorize them differently.

In the clothed world, there are more options for how to present in such a way as to be categorically assigned differently, but the underlying premise is the same.

So what's all this about? What's the color and shape of the axe I brought to this grinding wheel?

I'm a gender invert. Male girl person. My gender identity is entirely feminine. I wasn't a boy. I'm not a man. You can understand a lot about me simply by assuming I'm a woman and treating me accordingly. In general I would say to the world: I wish you would. But the world has not done so because the world harbors notions about what my male body means, and projects those notions onto me. They're wrong, but the fact that they've done so all my life has given me a different set of experiences. A lot of those experiences have been vividly unpleasant, which is why I would opt to talk about them, to make an issue of them, a social issue, a political issue. But I can't do that if I can only identify myself as a woman. They aren't the experiences of a woman, generally speaking. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a person who perpetually gets assigned by others as male, because of my physical morphology. Meanwhile, they also aren't the experiences of a male, generally speaking, either. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a femme, a sissyboy, a girlyboy, someone markedly different from the other males.

I can't talk about my stuff if I'm in a social environment where I'm not supposed to refer to my body parts, my physical morphology (and the resulting assigned sex that people foist onto me) as relevant parts of my identity and experience. I am silenced if transgender people insist that "male" is identity, not morphology, that "penis" is what you choose to designate whatever morphological part you wish to identify as such with no morphological definition to constrain it, that no one has any business rummaging around between the legs of people rhetorically and categorically because none of that is anyone's damn business. It silences me and erases me and prevents me from speaking from my own experience as a genderqueer person, an LGBTQ person with my own concerns and considerations.

I don't think intersex people find it welcoming to be told that a person's morphology isn't politically or socially relevant, either, and many of them have told me so and given me support on this, and I appreciate that. They, too, get silenced and subsumed in dialogs about gender and physical sex and operations and choice and so on. But they're probably sick and tired of people who aren't them who point to them to make a rhetorical point, as if they were an interesting concept instead of real people and so on, so I shouldn't dwell further on that aside from recommending that you listen to them too.

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Theybies

"Is it possible to raise your child entirely without gender from birth?"

The question is the title of an article by Alex Morris, a contributing editor for New York Magazine and Rolling Stone. It's not a question of his own posing, though; he's reporting on the fact that some parents have been contemplating that question, and how they're approaching the matter.

It's not a brand-new notion. I remember reading a reprint of Lois Gould's "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" when I was in my 20s and it was already nearly ten years old by then. Of course, that was fiction. The parents described in Morris's article aren't fictional.

In the actual world, parents who have worried about the effects of sex role socialization on their children have mostly tried to raise their children in a cheerfully agender "Free to Be You and Me" permissive world that didn't include a bunch of insistences that boys had to play with boy toys and wear boy clothes and display boy personality-characteristics while girls were pushed towards playing with girl toys and girl clothes and feminine attributes.

The parents in Morris's article decided that as long as people knew the children's sex, they would still project expectations upon them even when they were trying not to, and that many people would not see any problem with having gendered expectations or with treating kids differently based on what sex they were —

...society’s gender troubles cannot be solved by giving all children dolls and trucks to play with or dressing them all in the color beige

... and they decided to go the full Lois Gould / Baby X route and keep the sex of their children a secret. These are the so-called "theybies parents" (author Morris's term).



There is, of course, a predictable loud outcry of critical people who say this is bad, an irresponsibly destructive piece of social experimentation that not only won't work as hoped for but will do damage to the children involved. You can see some of these replies in the comments below Morris's article and you can find others if you do an internet search on "Morris" + "raise your child entirely without gender".

The critics' argument isn't a single argument, though, so much as it's a set of different arguments that all end up in the same conclusion-area. Even if we end up dismissing all of those arguments, I think it's worth looking at them in clusters (if not necessarily on a one at a time basis) and giving them separate consideration.

There are some people who are opposed to what the "theybies parents" are doing because they think it is natural and important for children to get gendered — to be treated as either boys or girls and to learn what it means to be a boy or a girl. The people making this argument are taking the diametrically opposite viewpoint from the "theybies parents". They're defending the gender binary as something critical to healthy development, and I don't see any difference between them and the people who would be horrified if their son were to wear a skirt. I'm dismissing them from further consideration.

But there are also people who are opposed to this because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant of their own biological classification, growing up in a world where other children are not having this information kept from them. In other words "we know what's best for you, your ignorance is a blessing, so we're going to keep you uninformed about gender for your own good".

I can see where that would be a matter of some concern if that was in fact what the "theybies parents" were proposing. But it doesn't seem to be:

Parents do not shy away from describing body parts, but are quick to let children know that “some people with penises aren’t boys, and some people with vaginas aren’t girls,” as one mom told me.

The parents do not appear to be trying to keep their children from being aware of their own biological equipment. It's slightly less clear whether they intend on informing their children that most people fit into one or the other of two primary biological sex categories. It would, actually, be a more accurate and more truthful explanation if they were told that some people do not, in fact, fit into either of those physical categories.

The main focus of the parents' intent appears to be running some interference with how other people will perceive and treat their children. In a social/cultural context where there are a boatload of assumptions and interpretations foisted onto people based on their biological sexual equipment, where people altercast other people into identities based on their perceived sex, then the only obvious way to avoid that unwanted foisting is to keep the biological sex unknown.

Some critics point out that the whole rejection of biological essentialism kind of revolves around it not mattering what you've got betwixt your legs. If it doesn't matter, then it need not be kept a secret. But there's a gap between what matters in and of itself and what makes a difference in a social context. Keeping the children's sex secret is sort of like affirmative action: it's a patch, a temporary fix that only makes sense in the context of something already, historically, being wrong.


Finally, though, there are people who are concerned about children being raised this way because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant and unexposed to the social fact that most people are indeed treated differently depending on their sex. This is a more complicated and nuanced area than trying to keep kids oblivious about their biological classification.

It reminds me of the question of whether minority parents should raise their kids as blissfully unaware of racism and bigotry as possible, so that they aren't tainted by it, or if they should raise their kids to be savvy of the world's racist bigoted nastiness so that they aren't caught unprepared and vulnerable when they finally have to confront it.

Would we be setting up the children for a rude awakening? Would they feel they had been lied to, in the form of lies of omission, if they were not warned that the world tends to believe in sexual differences and has different expectations and treatments of people based on whether they're male or female in body?


I totally approve of the motives of the parents. I understand what they're trying to do here. And I loved "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" and thought it was totally cute. But I notice that both the situation described in the Morris article and the situation described in the Lois Gould short story all involve babies and very young children. When I do a fast-forward in my own mind and imagine older children, I see the control of whether or not to let the surrounding world know their sex shifting from the parents to the children themselves. If they were to continue to preserve that state of affairs, doing so would depend on a lot of body coverage. I mean, you can't do this and also live in a naturist community, if you see what I mean. In fact, you'd end up needing gunnysacks and burqas. It would be difficult to keep the project from being tainted by body-shame and the notion that this physical secret was somehow sinful or socially unmentionable or taboo.

I said earlier that keeping the children's sex secret in this manner is a patch, a fix to a social problem. I think it is also fair to say that doing this is a tactic. It's not a goal in and of itself. The goal behind all this is to someday have a world in which people knowing the sex of your children (or of you, yourself for that matter) would make no difference in how folks behaved towards them, would have no influence in expectations or how your behavior gets interpreted, any of that. But as a tactic, keeping the biological sex a secret works better as a thought experiment than as an actual endeavor, in my opinion. Secrecy is seldom a liberating experience.


I am not a parent and I suppose it is easy to say "Well if I were a parent I would do such-and-such" when you don't have to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. But if I were, I would attempt to teach my children...

• That most (but not all) people fall into one of two biological sex categories, male and female;

• That people have ideas and notions about what it means to be male or female, and these ideas have been around for a long long time, and lots of people don't like those ideas;

• That some of those ideas and notions do seem to be true in general, but there are exceptions to the rule and always have been, and that there have been particularly mean and nasty attitudes about the people who are the exceptions, but it's changing, it's getting better;

• That it is brave to be and do what comes natural to you instead of letting other people's attitudes and expectations shape you from the outside;

• That the body they were born with is beautiful and good as it is, regardless of anything else, and that no one has to have a certain kind of body in order to be a certain kind of person.


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