Abject gender failure
Jun. 19th, 2020 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
entanglingbriarsGender exists in part to sort things: People, virtues, personality traits, aesthetics, animals, colors, genitals, etc. That's one of its main functions and most of its other functions follow after that. You can't have patriarchy until you've established some people as male and other as female. You can't have conformity and deviation to assigned gender at birth without assigning different genders to people at birth.
In the standard Western Gender Binary model, sex and gender are assigned at birth and retained through life. The assignment is seen as fundamentally not arbitrary in either the choice of which to select or in how, once selected, it should be enacted. The fact that intersex people exist is an anomaly to this model, but intersex people are rare enough that they can be safely ignored. In this model, both gender and sex are ontologically real and important; further, they are inextricably linked.
In what I might term the Standard Western Trans model, sex is assigned at birth and gender is revealed by age. A baby is too young to have a gender because the baby has no means to express* that gender. As the baby grows up, they will have a desire to express a particular gender (and that gender is by no means limited to a male/female binary), and that desire will be accommodated or thwarted. Depending on the interrelationship between their assigned sex at birth and the gender they express, people will be either cis or trans. In this model, gender is ontologically real but sex, while still real, ceases to have the strong ontological significance it did in the the WGB model. It is determinant primarily of body parts and reproductive abilities, not of who someone is as a person.
*I use the term "express" here with a lot of hesitation. This essay is, in part, about my fundamental inability to understand what gender means in the Standard Western Trans model and so the choice of verb is difficult. I could have gone with "perform," but I could also have gone with "be."
The SWT model expects me to want to express a gender. It places no limits on what that gender is, but the expectation is there. It expects there to be, at my core, something that conforms to its notion that I have a gender to be revealed. I’m honestly really unsure as to what that thing is because I have absolutely no internal sense of having a gender. I experience gender as something imposed externally and exclusively as imposed externally.
By contrast, the WGB model doesn’t care what I want. It simply notes that I deviate deviate from my assigned sex/gender at birth (because in WGB the sex/gender distinction is almost impossible to make) inasmuch as I am gay and do not perform typically masculine roles nor express typically masculine traits. However, my deviation doesn’t change the fact that I’m male, it just means that I’m doing male wrong.
In many ways, I’m actually far more comfortable with my gender under the WGB model than under the SWT model. If I tell the average cis person that I’m a man, I’m expressing something very different to what I express if I say the same thing to someone who operates under the SWT model. The WGB person, when they ask my gender, is basically asking “Do you have a dick?” I can answer that question. I have no clue what the SWT person is asking.
I’ve tried to understand the question from an SWT perspective. I can say, “My aesthetic is fairly masculine in that I don’t wear dresses or put on makeup. I do wear pink sometimes and both my ears are pierced.” But that isn’t an answer to the question. The SWT model is clear that I can present however I like without it necessarily saying something about my gender. I can say, “I don’t perform the gender roles typically associated with men.” But that also isn’t an answer to the question. Again the SWT is clear that gender is not the same thing as gender roles. Most SWT people think that gender roles are bad, but that gender is something to be celebrated.
“Well,” I think to myself, “maybe they mean personality traits.” But the only personality traits that feel masculine or feminine to me are the toxic ones, the behaviors and attitudes ingrained by the WGB model that harm WGB people’s ability to relate to other people (of any gender) in healthy ways. If courage is masculine, does that mean brave women are unfeminine? If liking to knit is feminine, does knitting emasculate mean who knit?
I know that, to someone who groks the SWT model, those questions are ridiculous. But no matter how many times I’ve attempted to get answers to those questions, I’ve never understood the answers. The SWT model came about in response to the inadequacies and anomalies that the WGB model faced, its purpose was to protect and affirm those who deviated too significantly from the WGB model. But I deviate more from the SWT model than I do from the WGB model. And I already deviate quite a bit from the WGB model.
All of which is to say that, if you’re the sort of person who means something beyond “Do you have a dick?” when you ask me if I’m male, the answer is “No.” And if you are that sort of person, I’d prefer you to use they/them pronouns when referring to me. Equally, if all you mean is “Do you have a dick?” he/him pronouns are fine.
In the standard Western Gender Binary model, sex and gender are assigned at birth and retained through life. The assignment is seen as fundamentally not arbitrary in either the choice of which to select or in how, once selected, it should be enacted. The fact that intersex people exist is an anomaly to this model, but intersex people are rare enough that they can be safely ignored. In this model, both gender and sex are ontologically real and important; further, they are inextricably linked.
In what I might term the Standard Western Trans model, sex is assigned at birth and gender is revealed by age. A baby is too young to have a gender because the baby has no means to express* that gender. As the baby grows up, they will have a desire to express a particular gender (and that gender is by no means limited to a male/female binary), and that desire will be accommodated or thwarted. Depending on the interrelationship between their assigned sex at birth and the gender they express, people will be either cis or trans. In this model, gender is ontologically real but sex, while still real, ceases to have the strong ontological significance it did in the the WGB model. It is determinant primarily of body parts and reproductive abilities, not of who someone is as a person.
*I use the term "express" here with a lot of hesitation. This essay is, in part, about my fundamental inability to understand what gender means in the Standard Western Trans model and so the choice of verb is difficult. I could have gone with "perform," but I could also have gone with "be."
The SWT model expects me to want to express a gender. It places no limits on what that gender is, but the expectation is there. It expects there to be, at my core, something that conforms to its notion that I have a gender to be revealed. I’m honestly really unsure as to what that thing is because I have absolutely no internal sense of having a gender. I experience gender as something imposed externally and exclusively as imposed externally.
By contrast, the WGB model doesn’t care what I want. It simply notes that I deviate deviate from my assigned sex/gender at birth (because in WGB the sex/gender distinction is almost impossible to make) inasmuch as I am gay and do not perform typically masculine roles nor express typically masculine traits. However, my deviation doesn’t change the fact that I’m male, it just means that I’m doing male wrong.
In many ways, I’m actually far more comfortable with my gender under the WGB model than under the SWT model. If I tell the average cis person that I’m a man, I’m expressing something very different to what I express if I say the same thing to someone who operates under the SWT model. The WGB person, when they ask my gender, is basically asking “Do you have a dick?” I can answer that question. I have no clue what the SWT person is asking.
I’ve tried to understand the question from an SWT perspective. I can say, “My aesthetic is fairly masculine in that I don’t wear dresses or put on makeup. I do wear pink sometimes and both my ears are pierced.” But that isn’t an answer to the question. The SWT model is clear that I can present however I like without it necessarily saying something about my gender. I can say, “I don’t perform the gender roles typically associated with men.” But that also isn’t an answer to the question. Again the SWT is clear that gender is not the same thing as gender roles. Most SWT people think that gender roles are bad, but that gender is something to be celebrated.
“Well,” I think to myself, “maybe they mean personality traits.” But the only personality traits that feel masculine or feminine to me are the toxic ones, the behaviors and attitudes ingrained by the WGB model that harm WGB people’s ability to relate to other people (of any gender) in healthy ways. If courage is masculine, does that mean brave women are unfeminine? If liking to knit is feminine, does knitting emasculate mean who knit?
I know that, to someone who groks the SWT model, those questions are ridiculous. But no matter how many times I’ve attempted to get answers to those questions, I’ve never understood the answers. The SWT model came about in response to the inadequacies and anomalies that the WGB model faced, its purpose was to protect and affirm those who deviated too significantly from the WGB model. But I deviate more from the SWT model than I do from the WGB model. And I already deviate quite a bit from the WGB model.
All of which is to say that, if you’re the sort of person who means something beyond “Do you have a dick?” when you ask me if I’m male, the answer is “No.” And if you are that sort of person, I’d prefer you to use they/them pronouns when referring to me. Equally, if all you mean is “Do you have a dick?” he/him pronouns are fine.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 01:10 am (UTC)no, they're not
though also I may not be someone who groks the SWT model, because as you describe it, there is no place in this model for not having gender. No "Gender? No thank you, I had some earlier"; no "They tried to assign me a gender but I yeeted it"; no "This space intentionally left blank". and if the SWT model doesn't have room for agender people, then fuck the SWT model; it's an improvement on the WGB but it still excludes me.
anyway in this tumblr thread about cis people figuring out what being trans means, sounds like you identify most with
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-23 11:35 pm (UTC)1) Western Gender Binary (WGB), in which sex and gender are assumed to be the same thing and are assumed to be enormously significant to what sort of person you are. Boys like blue and play with trucks, girls like pink and play with dolls, and differences like this are assumed to be biologically inherent. WGB justifies prescriptive gender roles with the belief that they reflect biologically inherent sex differences. In this gender ontology, gender-nonconforming people are seen not simply as nonconformists but as freaks of nature, as something akin to intersex people. In other cultures with similar gender ontologies this sometimes got as far as creating third/fourth genders that smushed together what SWT calls gays, gender-nonconforming cis people, and trans people. WGB didn't go that far, but you can definitely see that kind of thinking in e.g. common stereotypes of gay men.
2) Let's call this Social Constructionist Gender Theory (SCGT). This is a reaction against the "WGB justifies prescriptive gender roles with the belief that they reflect biologically inherent sex differences" thing. SCGT argues that gender is basically something that's arbitrarily assigned like race and then taught like religion. "Femininity" and "masculinity" are real in the way "U.S. Asian diaspora culture" and "U.S. white culture" are real; it has a physical basis, but the physical basis is fundamentally arbitrary, and it's basically just a culture that people are socialized into. The "boys like blue and trucks and girls like pink and dolls" ideas of WGB are as silly as suggesting that Chinese people are genetically programmed to eat with chop-sticks and white people are genetically programmed to eat with forks and knives.
3) Standard Western Trans model (SWT), which you've talked about.
WGB-style gender ontologies, well, if you're charitable to them they reflect and reinforce a gender system that made sense for pre-industrial agricultural cultures, if you're uncharitable to them they reflect and reinforce a gender system that served the class interests of the elite classes of those cultures. SCGT is basically a culture war weapon against WGB-style gender ontologies; it says that actually all that gender stuff is just culture and it's as fundamentally malleable as clothing fashions or table manners and the present system of gender relations can be changed just like the present political system or prevailing religion can be changed. My impression is in the '60s it looked like the culture war over gender was going to be WGB against SCGT; SCGT is what radical feminists claim to believe (though I suspect actually a lot of them are misandristic gender essentialists with beliefs closer to WGB).
Of course you've probably noticed (especially mentioning radical feminism in this context) that SCGT does not deal very well with trans people existing (and it especially doesn't deal well with people like "trans butch lesbians" existing). SCGT says gender is just socialization, so it can only e.g. interpret trans women as basically femininity weeaboos. This isn't incompatible with sympathy for trans people, you could have a trans-sympathetic SCGT that says being trans is kinda like converting to a religion and/or culture you weren't born into and is just as legitimate as e.g. converting to Judaism (and hormone treatments, sex-reassignment surgeries, etc. are a legitimate part of assimilation to the trans person's new gender), but trans activism and SCGT gender ontology is a bit of an awkward fit, and SCGT is very compatible with transphobia (see: SCGT is what TERFs claim to believe). Also … common trans narratives just don't sound the way I'd expect them to sound in a world where SCGT is true, and people notice this, though you can argue about the direction of causation there (in our world the "born in the wrong body" narrative is the most widely legible and accepted, and that influences how trans people talk about themselves - maybe in a world where the coalitions worked out to trans-friendly SCGT being the mainstream liberal gender ontology common trans narratives would be very different).
So, I think something that's important here is, I think SWT is a way to reconcile the "born in the wrong body/I was always a boy/girl" trans narrative with a liberal/feminist gender politics in which SCGT would otherwise be a better fit. You explicitly or implicitly admit that some sort of inborn gender exists, because a lot of trans narratives only really make sense if such a thing exists, but you create the most SCGT-like gender ontology you can while making that concession. Sure, innate gender exists, but it isn't the same thing as sex! And it isn't the same thing as being conventionally masculine or feminine! And it has nothing to do with sexual orientation or whether you prefer topping or bottoming! It's just this … ineffable feeling that creates powerful feelings and motivations but can look totally different in different people! I think it may be helpful to you here to think of SWT not as a self-contained gender ontology but as a sort of implicit political compromise (note: this is probably true of many ideologies, e.g. there's probably thousands of years worth of cultural spaghetti code in WGB).
I sound cynical about SWT when I say this, I think I'd fit better into a SCGT culture so that probably influences my perspective. "I'm a man cause I have male genitals and I'm OK-ish with the caste I've been assigned" (SCGT) is a much more comfortable and true-feeling self-understanding for me than "I'm a man cause I'm profoundly and fundamentally suffused with an ineffable essence of masculinity" (SWT) or "I'm a man because my Y chromosome somehow radically shapes my whole personality from my relationship to the concept of violence to what colors I like" (WGB). Even my possible trans feels are SCGT feeling; like I remember reading that Medieval Sufis identified with women because they were non-combatants and were often victims of worldly society and I was like "yeah, I can relate to that." But I think SWT probably is … well, I'm not sure if it's the best we can do, but certainly a lot of the obvious alternatives are probably worse. I appreciate that it's trying to leave as much room as possible for different personalities and genders and experiences.
Sorry this is so long, I'm a wordy person!
Given what I've just said, what pronouns do you want me to use for you (no pressure to answer this question, I understand if you don't want to)?