Clothing, behavior, and personal appearance
Speaking of identity – some of my friends have been trying to pin down exactly what “gender identity” is supposed to mean: whether there is a universally accepted, objective meaning for the term, and whether it makes any sense.
One elucidation that was offered is from Planned Parenthood, and it sounded odd, so I took a look.
PP elucidates on its Gender/Gender Identity page.
What Is Gender? What Is Gender Identity?
Each person has a sex, a gender, and a gender identity. These are all aspects of your sexuality. They are all about who you are, and they are all different, but related.
Sex is biological. It includes our genetic makeup, our hormones, and our body parts, especially our sex and reproductive organs.
Gender refers to society’s expectations about how we should think and act as girls and boys, and women and men. It is our biological, social, and legal status as women and men.
Gender identity is how we feel about and express our gender and gender roles — clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It is a feeling that we have as early as age two or three.
Those last two don’t make any sense in combination. They say two opposing things.
The first says, correctly, that gender is imposed on us from the outside: it’s society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male.
The second says, nonsensically, that gender identity is how we feel about and express society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male. Is it?! Isn’t it more how we do or don’t comply with society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male?
I don’t emote about society’s expectations about how I should think and act as female; I tell them to go fuck themselves. Is my “gender identity” therefore “go fuck yourselves”?
This is bullshit. They’re trying to have it both ways. They’re trying to combine two things that don’t combine. On the one hand yes gender is imposed on us, but on the other hand now that it’s been imposed on us let’s pretend it’s a big fun package and spend the rest of our lives playing with it.
I suppose they fell into this trap because they didn’t dare point out that society’s expectations about how we should think and act as female or male are systematically unequal; that females are supposed to think and act as submissive and subordinate to males; that males are supposed to think and act as dominant and superior to females. Oops. If they’d included that part, maybe they wouldn’t have talked the absurd bullshit about how we feel about and express our gender and gender roles — clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. But then that might have gotten them into trouble.
And aren’t the expectations that society imposes on us based on how we express our “gender identity,” via “clothing, behavior, and personal appearance”?
By which I mean: if a trans man can “pass” for (society’s expectations of) a man, then does that mean that society expects him to think and act and look like a man, and therefore his gender is male? And if so, does he cease to be “trans” since his “gender” and “gender identity” now match?
Well, if I am forced to have a gender identity, telling society’s expectations to go fuck themselves is as good as any that I can think of!
*SO* tempted to make my gender identity of Facebook “Go Fuck Yourself” now that one can write one’s own.
Settled for “No one’s business” as being more polite.
Careful, Ophelia and Theo. There are a lot of gofuckyourselfophobes out there.
Btw, how do the trans women who dress in menswear, don’t shave, etc express their gender identity through how they dress? It seems like “butch trans lesbian” is exactly the same as “straight cis male” by these definitions.
Which is kind of how most people see that.
Samantha #3,
You can do that? How? I’m totally doing that.
They seem to be claiming that gender identity is the individuals judgment on how well they perform the gender roles of that particular society. On the good kitty/bad kitty spectrum. Brilliant really because it totes doesn’t matter how well you actually comply with the social mores, or the gender hierarchy, so long as you judge yourself a success you are one. This is how serial killers become nice family men in the corporate media I guess. He was a great guy, (except for the body count).
From the outside looking in I don’t see how you could look at it any other way…
So, our gender identity is (in part) “how we feel about our gender roles”?
Put me in the “huh?” camp. How I feel about gender roles (they’re unfair, they don’t encourage people to be their best) is a part of my gender identity?
Huh?
So I’m a gofuckyourselfophobeophobe. You can call me Recursive for short.
“I’m a gofuckyourselfophobeophobe” — say, that’s a brilliant identity! But what about genericgendericityidentity? I don’t see where that comes in, at all. So, finally I AM OPPRESSED! … yay.
No, just kidding. And in bad taste too.
Fair warning: this is going to be one of those long “thinking aloud” comments, with no clear conclusions.
Evidently, neither Ophelia nor the commenters are enthralled with this attempt at a definition of “gender identity” :) What I’m trying to do is to understand your exact *reasons* for this dissatisfaction.
The first objection is that the definition
As I take it, this is mainly about phrasing. The basic idea of the definition is that gender identity has two components: internal (feeling) and external (behavior). In effect, it states that one’s gender identity is determined by how you feel about the social expectations and in what way (to what degree) you comply with them. The phrasing might have been ill chosen, but that’s the idea, isn’t it?
The second objection is that
As I understand the proposed definition, the “emotional” aspect does not have to be that simple. It’s not about one’s *general* reaction to (opinion of?) the society’s expectations. A more piecemeal approach, anyone?
Imagine a questionnaire – maybe 50 questions or so. How do you feel when using women’s toilets? Comfortable, uneasy, or “go fuck yourselves”? How do you/would you feel wearing male underpants – comfortable, uneasy or “go fuck yourselves”? How about make-up – comfortable, uneasy or “go fuck yourself”? How would you feel wearing a loose dress on the beach in the summer – comfortable, uneasy or “go fuck yourself”? And so on, and so on. Go through the questionnaire, calculate the score, and voila – the emotional aspect of your gender identity emerges – perhaps with the answer “undetermined” (if you choose “go and fuck yourself” often enough). If this is their idea – as I think it is – then what’s so terribly wrong with this?
But “expressing” is only a part of the definition. You omitted the subjective aspect – see above, the remarks about the questionnaire.
These are your opinions about gender roles. Opinions are not the part of the definition. See above, the remarks about the questionnaire.
Frankly, at the moment I have no idea how useful – and how operational – such a notion of “gender identity” can become. But I also do not fully understand your critical reaction. (Yes, I’m aware of the context, but at the moment I’m concentrating on *reasons*, not on politics.)
I object to it because it’s sloppy and fuzzy and incoherent, and because it obscures the fact that gender is the social system that makes women subordinate to men. It’s not about underpants, it’s about dominance and subordination. PP took that out, and what’s left makes no sense. (Except to people who think “gender” is personality.)
Ariel,
I don’t think the objections here are about phrasing or other semantic issues.
The issue, or one of the issues I have, is that their definitions take society’s expectations as fixed and define “gender identity” in relation to that. So if your physical sex is female, and you prefer to wear slacks, short hair, and no makeup, and want to practice medicine, your “gender identity” might also be female in 21st century America, but would have been male in 18th century America, or modern-day Saudi Arabia.
The implication of which is that, if your desires don’t conform to society’s expectations for women, then instead of saying “I’m a woman, and I demand the same rights as men!” you should abandon any claim to being a woman, and say that those expectations may be just fine for “women,” but you personally are male/transgendered/agendered/thirdgendered/genderqueer/whatever and you personally should be exempt from those rules for women.
In other words, it’s a philosophy that says: don’t complain about the existence of pigeonholes, just try to get yourself relocated to a more comfortable one.
I imagine that it wouldn’t measure what you want it to. For example, there’s no way to explain exactly what in those scenarios would be causing the comfort or unease. Maybe I love to wear loose dresses, but hate going to the beach – there’s no way to make that distinction in my answer.
I’m sure I would feel physically “comfortable” wearing men’s underpants, because they’re obviously designed to be as comfortable as possible, while I might feel uncomfortable with other people knowing I was wearing them, for social reasons. Neither feeling is based on how I “identify” myself.
Valid psychological assessment tests are very hard to construct. I get that you’re just saying “imagine we had a test that accurately reveals one’s gender identity,” but we don’t. And we never will unless we can coherently define what “gender identity” is in the first place. And no one seems to be able to do that.
To second what Ophelia and Screechy Monkey said – I think the problem is not which box we are in, but why we have boxes at all. “Gender Identity” just shuffles the boxes, and moves from one to another, without questioning why we’re in a box at all.
And some of us are getting tired of being told that we are “privileged” by being brought up in the gender we identify as. If that’s the case, I would have to identify as trans, because I have little in common with the gender I was brought up as, and was made to feel quite bad about not being right. I was obviously not male by birth, so I wasn’t able to do any of those cool things male children get to do. I didn’t want to do a lot of those things that girl children were required to do, like take Home Ec and build a hope chest. Does that make me trans? No. Does that make me gender confused? No. It just means that gender is bullshit that was forced on me.
The problem is gender, period.
What OB and SM said. And imagining answering that questionnaire, I come to the conclusion that my gender identity is I honestly don’t care one way or another and it definitely isn’t something I consider part of my identity.
Of course it’s fuzzy. And of course good tests are hard to construct. But in this respects, is the proposed concept of gender identity really that much different from a plethora of other psychological and sociological concepts (“personality”, “social expectations”, “privilege” – just to quote the three used in this thread)? Having an imperfect general characterisation plus some partial criteria is not abnormal. Quite on the contrary. We use such concepts in everyday communication; we systematically try to improve them (constructing better tests and better criteria) when doing science. What’s so special here?
“Incoherence” and “making no sense” are different and more serious accusations, but I still don’t see the justfication for them.
Screechy Monkey and iknklast: yes, *I know*. On a small scale, this is for me like the quandary described in one of Ophelia’s OPs: what should you do when speaking your mind “plays into the hands” of groups which you do not support? Well, what should you do?
I don’t have a good general answer. In this special case, I find some consolation in the thought that the real problem is *not* about whether a given concept makes sense – no, not at all. It is even *not* about whether we should abolish pigeonholes or create new ones. See, it just seems to me that the adherents of both approaches have enough goals in common to abstain from no-platforming each other and from accusing each other of being “privileged oppressors”. Of course, that’s not what they do and here lies the most conspicuous symptom of the real problem. Something is evidently rotten and it is my conviction that the rot goes deep – that the real trouble is neither this or that fuzzy concept, nor this or that concrete aspect of someone’s social programme. This conversation merely scratches the surface – and that’s my (rather sad) consolation right in front of you, in the open.
I think you answered your own question. “What’s so special here” is that this fuzzy incoherent term is being used to undermine a lot of the gains made by feminism, that’s what. The understanding of gender as the system that makes women subordinate to men is being concealed and lost, that’s what. We’ve gone from trying to do away with that system to embracing it with sobs of joyous affection, that’s what.