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.


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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.

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I am pro-choice for moral reasons. You get one kind of social reality when women can control their reproductive situation, and hence their sexual one as well. You get a vastly different one when they can’t, and I consider the latter to be morally abhorrent.

Many of my female colleagues would prefer the entire matter be left up to them. There's no reason people without ovaries need to know about any of this, and it concerns a situation we don't face and have no experience of. But like many other self-important people with a high opinion of my opinions, I'm going to add a few more lines anyhow.

When I've made the point about the immorality of interfering with female control of female reproductive functionalities, I've obtained the response "The argument that you are making is that it is greater evil to force someone to carry a child to term against their will, than to allow them to kill that child. In other words, that this is a case of justifiable homicide?"

Not quite. It is greater evil to force a whole lot of somebodies – to the point of defining what it means to be that particular kind of somebody – to carry a child against their wills, hence categoricallly oppressing that entire category of somebody – than to allow them, collectively, to decide whether or not to abort. Those who are appalled usually aren't generally opposed to all cases in which humans intentionally end a human life. They'll reconcile themselves to the necessity of war and the military, even though the enemy soldier isn't often out there by choice. They'll say it's okay for people to kill in self-defense or in defense of others. Many have no problem with capital punishment. But they apparently have problems with moms doing what a mom's got to do on occasion. Doesn't mesh with their idea of motherhood and femininity, I guess.

Some folks tend to think of abortion as modern and technological and hence a departure from what's natural. But 12,000 years ago when Gina the hunter-gatherer reached puberty, she may not have had access to abortion but she also wasn’t going to be expected to raise any babies all on her own (it was the entire tribe’s responsiblity) nor was she a minor dependent on the largesse of adults but instead a regular contributor like any other adult. So pregnancy had vastly different consequences. It certainly wasn't shameful and didn't constitute a threat to social viability or a barrier to subsequent choices.

Some rank and file right-to-lifers actually do find abortion itself an upsetting idea, but their leadership is transparently motivated by a desire to return sexuality to the adversarial polarized patriarchal format, and that's the be-all and end-all of their purpose.

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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. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

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What does it *mean* to say something is socially constructed or that it gets its meaning from a social context?


When I selected a panel to discuss my book GenderQueer, one of the panelists I picked was Ann Menasche, who at one point said

... I think it's better to challenge directly the hierarchical social construction of gender roles... that put both sexes into boxes... rather than create a new minority that we call genderqueer.

The main character Derek doesn't deny his sex... he does distinguish between sex and gender which I think is important.

...and I also picked Rachel Lange, who argued that

social construct doesn't just mean society created it, it's a social thing... to pick and choose how one walks in the world

I want to go back and unpack some of the important differences between the notion that "socially constructed" means "it is artificial, not real" and the viewpoint that "socially constructed" means "it could be constructed differently". I think it's an important distinction.

Both viewpoints are opposed to the idea that the thing in question is built in, that it is inevitable and unchangeable and permanently the way that we see it today. This is also an important thing to understand, because sometimes the folks who think of "socially constructed" as the same thing as "artificial" seem to think that anyone who doesn't dismiss it as an artificial fake belief must believe it is permanent and forever.

We have a long history of seeing a commonly believed idea or attitude and deciding that the only reason most folks ascribe to it is because they're surrounded by other folks who ascribe to it, and there's pressure to go along with it. People used to believe that it was evil to be left-handed, that sex was sinful unless you got married, that royalty and nobility was made up of people with a different built-in character than the impoverished masses, that there were witches amongst us who did evil on behalf of the devil, that women were less intelligent and had less character than men, that there is a God who will judge us when we die, that having a window open at night put your health at risk from the miasmas of noctural air, that homosexuality is sinful and wrong, that if you have a vulva and clitoris you are a girl or woman and will exhibit feminine traits, that you are motivated by women's priorities and will ascribe to women's value systems and exhibit womanly nuances, virtues, and tastes. Or that if you don't, you're doing things all wrong because you're supposed to.

You can still find people who believe any one of these things but it is no longer socially unacceptable to not believe them all, and we recognize that there is truth in the notion that at least most of the people in the past who believed all these things did so for social reasons. They believed them because they were surrounded by other people who believed them. They believed them because everyone around them expected them to believe them. They believed them because they rarely if ever encountered anyone who believed something different. They believed them because to believe otherwise would make a person behave differently and think differently and such a person would not fit in.

It is easy from our 21st century 2021 vantage point to roll our eyes a bit at these beliefs. But perhaps we embrace and use social constructs of our own day with the same nearly-automatic compliance that folks back then gave to these old concepts. And if we can see through some of them intellectually, we still have to interact socially. To walk in the world, as Rachel Lange put it.

We use language; presumably you read, speak, and do much of your conscious thinking in English, since you're reading this. We know that these sounds and syllables don't have any intrinsic meaning, that they only have meaning that is socially constructed. We know this because we have encountered folks who speak other languages instead, folks to whom the sounds and sentences of English don't convey any meaning. But consider for a moment how difficult it would be to wrap your head around that awareness if there were only one surviving human language. I remember exactly that experience from early childhood, in fact: the first time I encountered the idea of a different language, I couldn't grasp it. (Our words mean what they mean, why would someone use something else?)

Heterosexuality is a social construct. There is a set of courting and flirting behaviors, a set of ways to signal sexual-romantic interest. Like the syllables of the English language, they don't simply "mean what they mean" and they vary between cultures and eras. We learn them from being surrounded by people who engage in them; in our era we learn them from movies, books, theatre, and popular songs. Heterosexuality as we know it is gender-polarized. What a person does means something different depending on whether they do it as a man or do it as a woman. Gendered behaviors become eroticized for us: high heels and stockings and red lipstick are feminine mostly because we have learned them to be feminine. And so it is with femininity and masculinity in their entirety. They are social constructs.

But while that does mean that they could be configured differently, that doesn't mean that the aware and cognizant person realizes that they are artificial and dismisses them successfully with a wave of the hand and can easily go forth and interact with all those unfounded ungrounded notions dismissed from their thoughts and feelings. The English language is a social construct but you need a language to function. And we tend to need a gender language because that's the world into which we were born.

Not everyone is heterosexual. Meaning (since hetersexuality is a social construct, as you'll recall) that some people situate their identities outside instead of inside that particular dance. That doesn't mean they aren't largely defined by it. Gay people interact with gendered expectations too, sometimes embracing sometimes negating, but affected by those notions and roles and how behaviors are interpreted. Gay and lesbian identities are also socially constructed. Sexuality, in the complete sense of what we know to be sexual, what we know to be sexy, what behaviors are marked off as sexual behaviors, not to mention all the notions of love, being in love, romantic love, sex with love, sex without love, all that is a set of social constructs. Stuff that could be set up very differently. Did you know that there were once no gay people? I don't mean people of a given sex never got it on with other folks of that same sex — they did, of course — but they weren't conceived of as "being gay". You could not have come out as gay in that era regardless of how brave you are, because no one would have been able to comprehend what you were talking about. Or if you were really determined to do so, you would have to invent your own terms and spend a lot of time and energy explaining their meaning to people who had never encountered such concepts. And most of them would dismiss you as crazy: because most of us are resistant to new ideas until we hear them put into words by a critical mass of other people.

I get to call myself "genderqueer" because there's a word for it now. If you recognize me as male of body but think of me as one of the women, with assumptions and expectations and interpretations applied accordingly, you would be stereotyping me, oversimplifying who I am, but you'd be on the right track. If instead I said you should not harbor any sexist expectations of me and expect anything based on me being male that you wouldn't expect if I'd been female, you're less likely to suspend expectations and beliefs you're probably not fully aware that you have.

Social reality interacts with physical reality (biological and otherwise) in sort of the same way that a computer's operating system and programs interact with the hardware. The software can't do absolutely anything — the hardware really does exist and it imposes some limits; and for any given part of the hardware to be used, we can assume that there has to be some software ("drivers") that deal with it somehow. But most of the experience we associate with "using my computer" is about the specifics of the software that runs on it. That's an analogy, of course, and like all analogies has its own limitations, but I think it's a good one. I consider my body to have a physical sex. Gender is the driver. Mine is queer.



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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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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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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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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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

———————

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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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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"If it's 'transgender' and not 'transsexual' now, why isn't it 'heterogender' instead of 'heterosexual'?"

This was on a message board post and I wasn't sure if the person who posted it was serious or trolling. The people posting replies so far seemed to be treating it as the latter.

But I'm often inclined to consider an idea even when I don't much care for the person who spoke it, and I think this is actually a useful and thought-provoking question.

The difference between gender and sex is usually explained more or less like this: sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears; sex is the physical body, your plumbing, whereas gender is your identity; sex is biological, gender is social.

It's an oversimplification of sorts, because in order for sex to be perceived, it has to be recognized, and that recognition invokes social processes too.

Still, it's a useful starting point and the distinction is a useful one as well. Sex is whatever is embedded in our (mostly) dimorphic physiology as either male or female (or the variants that don't fit the dimorphic dyadic categories), whether we are able to perceive sex without social constructs interfering in our perception or not; and gender is the complex set of concepts, ideas, expectations, roles, rules, behaviors, priorities, personality characteristics, beliefs, and affiliated paraphernalia like clothing and segregated activities and whatnot, all the social stuff that we attach to sex but which isn't intrinsicallly really built in to sex -- whether we can successfully isolate gender from sex or not.

In order to comprehend that a person could have the kind of physical morphology that would cause everyone else to categorize them as "female" but could have an identity as "boy" or "man", and not deem that person factually wrong, we had to recognize gender and realize it wasn't identical to sex.

Not that transgender people were the first or the only people to have this awareness: feminists pointed out that an immense amount of social baggage is attached to the biological sexes, and that nearly all of it is artificially confining, restricting behaviors and expressions of self to narrowly channelled masculinity and femininity, and that it is unfair, in particular stripping women of human self-determination and the opportunities for self-realization, subordinating women to men as an inferior class. That's gender. Feminist analysis gave us an awareness of sexism and patriarchy and male chauvinism and stuck a pry bar between sex and gender. Anything that was OK for one sex should be OK for the other; all double standards were now suspect.

People originally said "transsexual" because of the focus on surgical modification of the body; most people's first encounter with the notion of a person whose body had been categorized as male but who identified as a woman involved solving that discrepancy by modifying the body to bring it into agreement with the gender identity. "Transsexual" was coined from "trans" in the sense of crossing from one thing to another (as in "transfer" or "translate") and "sexual" referring not to sexuality but to the sex of the body. The move towards the more modern term "transgender" took the focus off the sex and emphasized that there had been a discrepancy between the gender that a person was socially categorized and perceived as and the actual gender that that same person had as their identity. Such a person could indeed choose to deal with the situation by opting for surgery, but now we were using an identity term that focused on identity instead of one that reiterated the bond between identity and body.

(It also enabled a wider inclusiveness, reaching out to people who cannot afford a surgical transition, or are quite satisfied with presenting to the world in such a way as to be perceived as the sex they desire to be perceived as without a medical procedure, or whose medical interventions of choice do not involve surgery, or indeed anyone who was originally considered to be of a sex that does not correspond to their current gender identity).

But, as with pronouns (discussed in last week's blog post), our cultural discussions about being transgender continue to treat sex and gender in ways that reduce them to being one and the same. We've shifted the location of that "same" far more to the social and away from the biological in how we conceive of it, but we retain the notion that a person's sex should correspond to their gender. If the individual person is not in error and in need of correction, it must be the surrounding observers, but correspondence is assumed to be the intrinsically desirable outcome. And if we've rejected the reductionist notion that "if you got a dick yer a man, if you have a vag instead yer a woman, end of story", we've supplanted it with "if you identify as a man, you're male, if you identify as a woman, you're female, anything else is misgendering". Not so much because we're philosophically opposed to someone identify as a woman while considering themselves male but more because it hasn't been put out there as a proposition. People just assume they should correspond.

(This is something that I'm in a position to see clearly. I am that person. My physical body is male. My gender identity is girl or woman. I'm a gender invert. My sex and gender are not one of the the expected combinations. This is a concept that has proven intractably difficult to explain to people, despite being very simple at its core).

So what does all this have to do with being--or not being--a lesbian?

Our vocabulary for sexual orientations is, like everything else, rooted in the notion that sex and gender will correspond. Lesbians are women loving women. But by women we mean female people. That's what it has always meant up until now when we say "women" because we assume sex and gender correspond. It's only when they are unbolted from each other and each can vary independent of the other that we are faced with the question: is being a lesbian about attraction on the basis of gender or is it all about attraction on the basis of physical sex?

The same problem, of course, occurs for "heterosexual". A heterosexual male has always been a man who is attracted to women, by which we mean female women of course. Because once again, correspondence between sex and gender is assumed. I'm male but I'm one of the girls. I'm not a man who is attracted to women. It's not just nomenclature, it works completely differently; the mating dance of heterosexuality is an extremely gendered interaction, a game composed of boy moves and girl moves, densely overlaid with gendered assumptions about what he wants and what she wants, what it means if he does this or she says that. This entire mating dance is as far as you can get from gender-blind or gender-neutral. It was, in fact, my failure to successfully negotiate heterosexuality that eventually provoked my coming out as a differently gendered male.

The prospect of a lesbian flirting and courting and dating opportunity certainly has its attractions: to be able to interact with female women who are potentially sexually interested in me and not have to have, imposed on either of us, any assumptions whatsoever about who does what or that it means something different if she does it or I do it based on gender because, hey, we are of the same gender.

But as the poet Robert Frost once said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Lesbians do not take me in. They wish for female people to date and court and connect with. I can hardly complain about the unfairness and injustice of that when I am attracted exclusively to female people myself. I'm not heterogender, sexually attracted to women on the basis of their gender identity; I'm heterosexual, if by heterosexual we mean the attaction is on the basis of physical morphology. As a matter of fact, I have a bit of a preference for female people whose gender characteristics would get them considered masculine or butch at times.


Neither "lesbian" nor "heterosexual" works for me as an identifier in this world because of the correspondence issue though. Instead, I'm left reiterating what has become my slogan: "It's something else".


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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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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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"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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