Guest post: Gender is the expected, coerced, and enforced default
Originally a comment by Rob on But let’s talk about precarity, replying to iknklast’s “If we didn’t think our body should be A, B, and C, we wouldn’t be disturbed when our body wasn’t A, B, and C.”
That’s certainly how I understand it and feel personally. When I was a young teen in the mid ’70s I wore a lot of homemade and hand-me-down clothes. Nothing was fashionable and some of it was decade old sixties stuff. In the socially staid and conservative town in the (at the time) socially staid and conservative NZ, the heights of young male fashion was a grey, brown, blue or green sweatshirt, worn with blue jeans of just the right leg width and a pair of sneakers or nomads. Anything else much got you branded a poof, weirdo, or both with consequential ostracism, hazing and occasionally beatings. At that age I didn’t understand why this should be so. I knew I wasn’t gay. I also knew I didn’t fit the stereotype, although my god I wanted to just to make the punishment stop. By the time I was at University I’d earned money to be able to afford three changes of acceptable clothing, had become physically imposing enough to deter casual aggressors and removed myself from a good chunk of the social fuckwit circle. I remember lamenting to a female friend that it was unfair that men faced shit in their lives if they wore bright, colourful or flamboyant clothes. Ah well, I soon learned not be oblivious to the shit in women’s lives.
I’ve never had any problem with my biological sex. I briefly, consciously, examined my sexuality and decided I’m into women. I have always hated, and continue to hate, the way gender is the expected, coerced, and enforced default in society. I don’t think the trans movement, if you can call it that, does anything at all to weaken gender stereotypes. On the one hand they actually reinforce the regressive idea that certain modes of dress, makeup and behaviour are innately male and female; and on the other they treat it like a toy or performance to be played with. All the while we observers are told we must accept what they, the brave trans, say about gender in general and their gender identity specifically, while we must shut up about our own views and experiences because we’re not special.
As others have noted more eloquently and with greater intellectual rigour, it’s shit.
As a young teenager in the early 1970s in the U.S., I decided that no one, included myself, should be expected to live up to whatever role society expected of them. In the wake of the 1960s that much was clear, and back then I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
As I’ve seen propagated (though not originated) by Colin Wright on Twitter, here paraphrased:
1. Sexism: women do the dishes
2. Feminism: men and women should do the dishes
3. Genderism: A woman is one who does the dishes
It’s a pretty good precis.
When “Contrapoints” did a video about “Gender Critical” (without mentioning the crucial safety from men issue once) there was a moment when stereotypical dress and behaviour came up. I don’t intend to watch the video again but the performance of over-the-top, stereotypical female mannerisms was, I believe, defended as “throwing as much glitter at the wall” in the hopes that some of it would stick, to overcome the perceptions of others that the person standing in front of them was a man.
Which doesn’t really address the criticism that these are gender stereotypes.
I lived through teenagehood in New Zealand at about the same time as Rob, in a fairly staid and conservative town (Hamilton – Rob where was yours?). I hung out with the hippies and drug takers so our clothing was a bit wilder – though it was mostly scruffy jeans and t-shirts for the blokes. But they did branch out into tie-dying and Indian muslin shirts. I have always thought it sad that blokes can’t wear colour in our society except on their ties, unlike their ancestors who at least could wear coloured waistcoats.
“Clothes maketh the man” – that quotation has changed its meaning now.
Gender expectations put incredible demands on our behavior, and I don’t find it surprising that the resulting dysphoria has been identified. What dismays me is that most of society has come to accept the idea that bodies must be altered to resolve the issue in place of working with the person to find ways to overcome the problem. With the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse becoming more apparent seemingly every day, it hardly seems surprising that children and teens are trying to find a way to work through, and here comes social media to tell them there is a “fix” that will align their gender to their bodies – by altering and disfiguring their bodies to look like the other sex.
I was known as a “pussy” in my small midwestern town because I was risk averse and didn’t see the point in scuffling to have fun, and I wasn’t athletic and our family hunted gophers, squirrels, and rabbits rather than big game such as deer and bears. There were a lot of boy skills I just didn’t have, and I got along great with girls as friends. But, I leaned how to fake it as I grew and eventually came to be comfortable with who I am. And, being straight, my experience with making friends with girls as girls rather than objects, certainly helped me in my sexual relationships.
This early intervention in puberty may seem kind in one sense, but I do believe it serves to prevent human development as an adult. Telling kids that they were born wrong and that the solution is to “pause” puberty until they can decide if they are really boys or girls inside deflects some of the pain of being gender non-conforming because it is an answer and for the rest of society it certainly makes things easier. We can forget about addressing the problems that gender stratification causes if all we need to do is medicate our kids to accommodate it.
Plus, there’s always the parents so bored with Indigo Children they have moved onto transing their kids.
And when the kids grow and realize that they still have the pain of having been mistreated, molested, or sexually abused since they never had true help, well, then, that’s not our problem anymore.
We have these bad stats on suicides by teens who don’t get, as Chase so deceptively calls it, “trans healthcare,” but do we have any stats on the suicides of those who want to detransition but find the road so hopeless that they commit suicide?
For me the trans movement is all about reinforcing gender stereotypes. I read an article in the Guardian a few years ago about gender fluid people which basically amounted to: when I do maths I’m masculine and when I want to arrange flowers I’m feminine. Replace masculine with a man and feminine with a women according to taste. As an over 60 year old gay man I was horrified. L&G communities (I know others as well) were working overtime to overcome such stereotypes about sissy men and butch girls amongst other things when I was an activist. I find that the trans movement has nothing in common with the L&G, which makes the position of Stonewall, at the very least, surprising (use of English understatement …)
[…] a comment by Michael Haubrich on Gender is the expected, coerced, and enforced […]
KBPlayer, Christchurch. A few years ago I was standing beside an architect of considerable renown, looking at a new building in Christchurch’s square (this was just weeks before the earthquakes). This building was white. After a few moments contemplation he turned to me and said “What’s wrong with a good sober gray?” He made his name in the 70’s and 80’s.
Der Durchwanderer #2
That’s a nice one. Illustrates the point beautifully.
We keep bumping up against the difference between:
• Talking about the same things vs. using the same words.
• What things are vs. what they’re called.
• Words vs. contents.
• Signifier vs. signified.
• Names/labels/signs/symbols vs. the things/concepts/ideas/phenomena they point to.
etc.
There’s an essential difference between talking about:
• biological females, whatever you prefer to call them.
• people called “women”, who-/whatever they happen to be.
There’s an equally essential difference between talking about:
• a movement that fights for the rights and interests of biological females, whatever you prefer to call it.
• a movement called “feminism”, whatever it happens to stand for.
One useful way of putting it might be to say that in the first case we are treating the content as constant while the labels are variables (e.g. “Frau”, “femme” etc. are neither more nor less “correct” names for the same group of people) whereas in the second case the label itself is a constant while the content is allowed to vary without limit. And here we may have a solution to what might seem like a paradox of cognitive dissonance theory. After all cognitive dissonance is routinely invoked to explain why people are so reluctant to give up deeply held beliefs. Leon Festinger himself (who coined the term “cognitive dissonance”) famously observed that “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” On the other hand the very same mechanism is supposed to explain the most dramatic changes in attitudes and behavior, and how easily people can be persuaded to turn against everything they used to value. Isn’t this having your cake and eating it too? E.g. I have previously used cognitive dissonance theory to explain the transformations of:
• “Feminists” who used to fight explicitly for the rights and interests of biological females, but have since gone on to deny that biological females even exist as an identifiable group, let alone have any issues worth addressing in their own right.
• “LGBT” activists who used to fight for increased acceptance of same-sex attraction but have since gone on to argue that same sex-attraction (as opposed to attraction to people who think or feel in certain ways best left unspecified, call themselves by certain names, use certain pronouns etc.) is the pinnacle of bigotry and evil.
But suppose we reframe the issue in terms of constant labels rather than constant content. Now you can claim to have been perfectly consistent all along and never betrayed your principles:
• I supported the rights and interests of people called “women”/”lesbians”/”gays” then, and I support the rights and interests of people called “women”/”lesbians”/”gays” now.
• I supported what was called “feminism”/”the LGBT movement”/”the Left” then, and I support what’s called “feminism”/”the LGBT movement”/”the Left” now.
• I opposed what the people in my ingroup called “oppression”/”bigotry”/”hate” then, and I oppose what the people in my ingroup call “oppression”/”bigotry”/”hate” now.
• Etc. etc.
There is obviously one hell of a bait-and-switch going on here. But most people are not careful thinkers anyway, and given how frequently even philosophers will debate totally unrelated things called “God” or “free will” as if they were talking about the same thing, your average lay-person is unlikely to notice the switch as long as the vocabulary remains the same.