Gender is not a binary of equals, it is a hierarchy
From The New Backlash, Introduction:
Now, the dialog around “transgender” issues is dense and confusing and emotional and often downright abusive. Transgender identity politickers cloud the issues on purpose, but feminists can also fail to express ourselves clearly when we are 1) grounded in decades of theory most people have not read and/or 2) feeling defensive due to the endless attempts of anti-feminists to vilify/silence us.
So, first some clarification on my part: for several decades now, feminist theorists have been using the word gender to refer to the social and psychological expectations thrust upon women and men, otherwise referred to as sex stereotypes or sex roles. However, feminists and pro-feminists outside of academic circles may use the word gender to mean “biological category of male or female” (in contrast with the act of sexual intercourse) – and that’s understandable because we need words for all these things. However, to add to the confusion, transgender identity politickers use the term gender or gender identity to mean an innate-but-undefinable inner feeling that overrides and in fact determines biological sex. When discussing gender, always stay alert to the multiple possible definitions of the term, and ask for clarification when needed.
Next: sex v gender:
Gender: a socially constructed, oppressive hierarchy
Sperm producer = male. Ova producer = female. This is simple biological classification.
Male = masculine/dominant. Female = feminine/submissive. This is gender, as the word is used by feminist theorists.
Based on the (sexist) notion that sex determines personality and thus should determine social role and status, gender is a social tool to naturalize women’s dependence on men, and thereby ensure men’s access to women’s emotional, sexual, domestic and reproductive labor. It’s about power, not individual expression.
This is why feminists find chatter about “gender identity” so grating and wrongheaded. It’s like talking about “slave identity” or “camp inmate identity.” Gender isn’t a party, it isn’t looking hot in that tiny little dress, it isn’t walking so that your bum is shown off to advantage.
If this isn’t clear from the above, gender is not a binary of equals, it is a hierarchy. For millennia women were the legal property of men. Globally, women are still subject to female genital mutilation, child marriage, bride burning and sex trafficking. Luckier women are merely subject to lifelong discrimination in the family, school, and workplace; sexist medical care; constant street harassment; online misogyny; daily reminders that males are people and females are other; a persistent wage gap; legislative attacks on bodily autonomy; physical intimidation and physical violence – all of which tend to worsen along lines of race/ethnicity and economic class – and all of which is meant to keep us in our (supposed) place.
Gender is a hierarchy, and talking about one’s “hierarchy identity” is fatuous.
It has seemed to me for some time that the trans activists, like many people before them, are determined to rearrange the social hierarchy to improve their position in it. Feminism, of course, is determined to abolish the gender hierarchy. We have no common ground.
I am referring here to actual trans activists and not the MRAs or the fetishists who demand that everyone participate in their fetish.
Surely the biological category, the term that might otherwise be sexual intercourse, is sex, rather than gender? Typo?
Or is this my ignorance showing? Does anyone use ‘gender’ to mean ‘sexual intercourse’?
@mef
Look up “female penis” and you’ll see that it’s no typo…
mef, no, she means people use “gender” for the biological category instead of “sex” in order not to sound as if they’re talking about sexual intercourse when they’re talking about the biological category. I used to do the same thing for the same reason until all this got so complicated. The word “sex” is annoyingly ambiguous that way. I stumbled on it when writing something just yesterday.
If you see what I mean? This could get very “who’s on first”…
The thing is, unless someone uses “sex” as a verb to mean “determine the sex of an animal”, which is a legit use, there is no genuine cause to be confused about what sex means in context. People cross out “male, female” options and write in “yes, please” or “not often enough” because they are jokers, not because they are confused.
But there’s a kind of false delicacy, that “gender” is a more genteel way to talk about what sex someone is. Which has actually, I think, helped muddy the issue of what is biological reality and what is some kind of nebulous, non-anatomical difference between men and women.
This is all good, but we shouldn’t pretend that the degree to which sex determines gender is completely agreed or understood. Transsexuality seems like a challenge to earlier feminist ideas that gender is entirely socially constructed, which is where all the heat is coming from.
Samantha @ 7 – that’s actually not true. It can be unclear. There are plenty of contexts where it could mean either one, and plenty more where one makes somewhat more sense but you have to stop and think about it – which writers tend to want to avoid.
‘… transgender identity politickers use the term gender or gender identity to mean an innate-but-undefinable inner feeling that overrides and in fact determines biological sex.’
DETERMINES biological sex? So if we all believe in Tinkerbell we can change our chromosomes?
No matter how determined we are to do otherwise, corrupt notions of gender are still the hidden background for any discussion we attempt. The subjective feelings of trans-folks are real, and deserve recognition, but the attendant political and social notions can’t be allowed to float free from empirically accessible reality.
The same thing happened to the term ‘intercourse’. It shifted from meaning interactions between people to sexual intercourse exclusively. I do think much of the misunderstanding is willful.
Well, on the plus side, the word “fuck” has made the opposite journey, to meaning whatever you need at the moment to express emphasis and/or outrage, as well as SeXual InTerCourse. I’d be lost without it in its all-purpose meaning.
‘Ejaculation’ is another one of those words that has evolved, from also meaning a sudden verbal outburst to solely being read as relating to sexual climax, though I don’t know if this was for similar reasons as the change in use of ‘intercourse’. Sorry to derail the conversation further away from the main post focus and into language more generally, but it is interesting how people stop using the same word for different things because of one particular meaning isn’t it?
My pet hate is when I occasionally read someone complaining that they can’t use the word ‘gay’ to mean happy anymore, because of its use as a synonym for homosexual, as though there was ever anyone stopping people using the older meaning and avoidance wasn’t based in anything other than bigotry (my hackles are raised further if I read a variation of the horribly Othering ‘can we have our word back?’).
@pinkeen I don’t think transsexuality is a challenge to the feminist analysis of gender at all. The social construct of gender – specifically, telling young people their personality should not exist in their body, because that personality *somehow doesn’t MATCH THEIR SEX – *causes* transsexuality (sex dysmorphia). To use one particularly painful result of sexist socialization as proof that sexist socialization isn’t the problem boggles my mind. It’s like saying the existence of anorexia proves women should take up as little space as possible.