More thoughts on gender and identity
Jan. 10th, 2020 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
entanglingbriarsGender as performative
Continuing my thoughts on gender from yesterday, the Western gender binary model assumes the ontological reality of gender; the most common models of trans identity share that underpinning while disagreeing with the conclusions the WGB model pulls from that assumption. But by doing so, it centers cis identities; all gender is related to cisness and to one's assigned gender at birth.
Fundamentally, I don't think there's a way to preserve the ontological reality of gender without centering gender on and around cis people's gender identities. At least not within a Western cultural context.
We are assigned our genders at birth, or even before, which in Althuserian terms means we're hailed* before birth by our genders and enact our genders unless we make an active choice not to. But those genders have no ontological reality. Cis men are men because they enact masculinity, not because they are men. Trans men are men because they enact masculinity, not because they are men. The notion of being a gender is absurd because identities are never ontological, they're always socially constructed roles we enact because we are (or wish to be) hailed by them.
*Roughly speaking, to be "hailed" means to be recognized as something and called that thing.
I am hailed as gay, male, white, and Jewish. I can choose to enact those identities or not, and to some extent my choices may result in my being hailed differently. But my control is limited. For some people, the fact that I enact Jewishness precludes me from being white. (Oddly, there are both white supremacists and Jews who feel this way.) To some of those people, my actions are incapable of allowing me to escape being hailed as Jewish because they see my Jewishness as ontological. My request, should I make it, to be hailed otherwise, will be ignored.
On the other hand, if I were to take HRT, dress and present femininely, get electrolysis, and (given the progression of my baldness) wear a wig, I could convince a lot of people, including people who deny trans identity, to hail me as female. Many of them would cease to hail me as female as soon as they learned that I was assigned the gender "male" at birth. My control exists, but again it is limited.
And that's a problem with a purely performative model of gender identity; it requires the participation of others to be fully enacted. It's the reason, I think, that so many trans people and allies try to twist the Western gender binary model to include trans people rather than try to overturn it. It also makes trans identities more palatable to cis people. Under an ontological model, cis people's gender identities are not inherently challenged by the existence of trans people. A performative model implies that cis gender identity exists only so long as it is enacted and accepted by others.
But the reality is that cis people do get misgendered. Especially in places where trans identities are known to exist. Cis butch women get mistaken for men and are thrown out of bathrooms. Cis women are thrown in men's prisons because they're taking supplemental estrogen. In performative model of gender, where gender is both enacted and hailed, misgendering occurs when the gender someone enacts is not the gender they are hailed as don't match.
Which leaves the question of why someone would want to perform a gender that they aren't automatically hailed as. This is something the ontological model of gender handles quite nicely and the performative model appears to struggle with. But in the performative model, identity is always already something the person chooses to enact. All identities, including those assigned to us at birth. The fact that an identity is difficult to perform does not say anything about the desirability of performing it. The fact that trans identities are difficult to perform is, in the end, irrelevant. The desire and choice to enact the identity are what matter on the actor's end; the recognition and choice to hail that identity are what matter on the hailer's end.
And why should someone hail someone by the identity they enact (or are trying to enact) and not the one they think they ought to be hailed as? This is where Rachel Dolezal usually comes in, because almost everyone agrees that she should be hailed as white despite her desire to enact, and for many years her success in enacting, blackness. Or, to use an example closer to home, why don't I hail Messianic Jews as Jews? And to be honest, I don't have a firm answer to that.
Maybe the performative model is also wrong. Maybe Rachel Dolezal is black and Messianic Jews are Jewish. Maybe the comparison is wrong-headed and gender is fundamentally different from racial and religious identities. Maybe the difference is simply consensus. I really don't know.
Continuing my thoughts on gender from yesterday, the Western gender binary model assumes the ontological reality of gender; the most common models of trans identity share that underpinning while disagreeing with the conclusions the WGB model pulls from that assumption. But by doing so, it centers cis identities; all gender is related to cisness and to one's assigned gender at birth.
Fundamentally, I don't think there's a way to preserve the ontological reality of gender without centering gender on and around cis people's gender identities. At least not within a Western cultural context.
We are assigned our genders at birth, or even before, which in Althuserian terms means we're hailed* before birth by our genders and enact our genders unless we make an active choice not to. But those genders have no ontological reality. Cis men are men because they enact masculinity, not because they are men. Trans men are men because they enact masculinity, not because they are men. The notion of being a gender is absurd because identities are never ontological, they're always socially constructed roles we enact because we are (or wish to be) hailed by them.
*Roughly speaking, to be "hailed" means to be recognized as something and called that thing.
I am hailed as gay, male, white, and Jewish. I can choose to enact those identities or not, and to some extent my choices may result in my being hailed differently. But my control is limited. For some people, the fact that I enact Jewishness precludes me from being white. (Oddly, there are both white supremacists and Jews who feel this way.) To some of those people, my actions are incapable of allowing me to escape being hailed as Jewish because they see my Jewishness as ontological. My request, should I make it, to be hailed otherwise, will be ignored.
On the other hand, if I were to take HRT, dress and present femininely, get electrolysis, and (given the progression of my baldness) wear a wig, I could convince a lot of people, including people who deny trans identity, to hail me as female. Many of them would cease to hail me as female as soon as they learned that I was assigned the gender "male" at birth. My control exists, but again it is limited.
And that's a problem with a purely performative model of gender identity; it requires the participation of others to be fully enacted. It's the reason, I think, that so many trans people and allies try to twist the Western gender binary model to include trans people rather than try to overturn it. It also makes trans identities more palatable to cis people. Under an ontological model, cis people's gender identities are not inherently challenged by the existence of trans people. A performative model implies that cis gender identity exists only so long as it is enacted and accepted by others.
But the reality is that cis people do get misgendered. Especially in places where trans identities are known to exist. Cis butch women get mistaken for men and are thrown out of bathrooms. Cis women are thrown in men's prisons because they're taking supplemental estrogen. In performative model of gender, where gender is both enacted and hailed, misgendering occurs when the gender someone enacts is not the gender they are hailed as don't match.
Which leaves the question of why someone would want to perform a gender that they aren't automatically hailed as. This is something the ontological model of gender handles quite nicely and the performative model appears to struggle with. But in the performative model, identity is always already something the person chooses to enact. All identities, including those assigned to us at birth. The fact that an identity is difficult to perform does not say anything about the desirability of performing it. The fact that trans identities are difficult to perform is, in the end, irrelevant. The desire and choice to enact the identity are what matter on the actor's end; the recognition and choice to hail that identity are what matter on the hailer's end.
And why should someone hail someone by the identity they enact (or are trying to enact) and not the one they think they ought to be hailed as? This is where Rachel Dolezal usually comes in, because almost everyone agrees that she should be hailed as white despite her desire to enact, and for many years her success in enacting, blackness. Or, to use an example closer to home, why don't I hail Messianic Jews as Jews? And to be honest, I don't have a firm answer to that.
Maybe the performative model is also wrong. Maybe Rachel Dolezal is black and Messianic Jews are Jewish. Maybe the comparison is wrong-headed and gender is fundamentally different from racial and religious identities. Maybe the difference is simply consensus. I really don't know.
