On a general-purpose, socially-progressive message board, someone posted to ask about the wide array of gender identity terms now in use, citing the available gender choices for one’s FaceBook profile:
The list includes these choices: Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transsexual Male, and Transsexual Man. Do these terms describe different genders? Or do these terms all define the same gender and are personal preferences for what people wish to call their gender?
Pretty quickly, someone else replied:
Those aren’t distinct “genders”. They’re phrases representing various preferred ways for people to describe their gender identity.
I replied directly under that:
^^^ This. Don’t think of the genders the way you think of the elements on the periodic table of the elements, or the nutritional components of the human diet. Think of genders as each being one or more person’s articulation of their gender identity as a response to our society, which presented them with a Problem. The Problem was (and still is) that society divides people into male and female and treats the male people as all, indistinguishably, having a box of characteristics in common — let’s call it the Boy Box, later to evolve (for all the males, in the same predetermined way) into the Man Box. The female people get the Girl Box / Woman Box. The reason it’s a Problem is a) It’s a generalization, and then the exceptions are treated like we’re wrong, evil, sick, pathetic, and/or unsexy and heterosexually ineligible in particular; b) It hits people on an intensely personal level and is very hurtful to the exceptions to the rule, which sucks, and it isn’t really a lot of fun even for the people who do (mostly) fit the original description; it’s very depersonalizing about something that’s intensely personal, and it’s limiting; c) It isn’t just a generalization even to start with. There’s a large dose of “prescriptive” stuff that never fit anyone of any conceivable sex, so much as it represents what our social structure would like people to be like for manipulative and exploitative reasons. (I’m personalizing social structure as if it had “likes” but it’s a useful way of thinking of it anyhow).
That’s my thumbnail sketch version of what gender (and gender variant people) is all about.
Not everyone here on the LGBTQIA+ rainbow would endorse that view, though. Most centrally, not everyone agrees that gender is social and that it’s all about personality and behavior and all that. Some people think of gender as a built-in characteristic that exists independent of social beliefs and concepts.
For instance, in a different but similar context, a participant in a FaceBook LGBTQ group wrote:
Hey, gender is real. We’re born with it. You should read what Julia Serano wrote in Whipping Girl, we’re born with a wiring diagram in our brains that tells us what gender we are, and for some of us it’s in conflict with what society considers us to be. If it were all social, we’d all just go along with what society says.
Well, I did read what Serano said, thank you very much, it’s right here on my bookshelf. First off, she says we should not think of this as gender. She’s talking about a wiring diagram that sometimes says the body we are born with isn’t the one we were designed to inhabit:
It seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female…brain sex may override both socialization and genital sex…I have experienced it as being rather exclusively about my phyisical sex…for me this subconscious desire to be female has existed independently of the social phenomena commonly associated with the word “gender”.
Other people, however, are more emphatic that they realy do mean gender when they talk about something hardwired into their brains. They will describe a range of things that I consider to be socially attached to a given sex — like whether you wish to adorn yourself with cosmetics and dress yourself in a skirt, or whether you’d rather play pool and drink beer all evening than sip cosmopolitans and giggle about the latest episode of Sex and the City — as being caused by some kind of coding in the brain, perhaps genetic, perhaps induced by prenatal hormones.
I don’t know about that. I see a problem with that notion.
One of my LiveJournal friends recently wrote on the topic:
Isn’t it OK to categorize myself in order to present a somewhat-accurate description of who I am? Like identifying as an introvert or an extrovert? But we don’t call “introvert” a type of “gender” or “race”. Introversion is a personality characteristic — would you rather have a lot of friends or a few close friends, do you derive energy from social interactions or do they wear you out?
Let me riff on that notion. Let’s suppose that after a sufficient number of years of successful gender activism we reach the point that none of these characteristics are associated any more with whether you have a penis, a vagina, or some other biological merchandise. Well, at that point the gender identities are free-floating; each of them represents a certain way of “being in the world”, a batch of personality traits and behavioral tendencies, but now that they are no longer in any way anchored in any particular physical body structure, they aren’t appreciably different from notions such as being an introvert or being an extrovert.
There would no longer exist such a thing as a cisgender person. Nobody would assign you any identity at birth based on what you pee from. And with no cisgender people, there would also be no transgender people either, or genderqueer, nonbinary, or any other identity category of that nature.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It’s a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
genderkitten 