Guest post: Sex is still real. Gender is still bullshit.
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Fake confusion.
The truth is that sex and gender aren’t so easily divided.
Sure they are. Sex is real, gender is bullshit. But if you’re being paid by the word, succinctness is a liability. Stirring the pot and feigning bafflement is more lucrative.
One appears to be grounded in hard biological facts, while the other rests on the seemingly slippery notion of identity.
One is grounded in hard biological facts, and the other on social structures intended to restrict the sexes (particularly women) in what they may or may not do. It might very well be true that most, if not all cultures have had socially enforced sexual divisions of labour, but the labour apportioned to each sex as their “natural” lot varied from culture to culture. Warfare and hunting might be the closest you might come to finding a universally “male” occupation (via many of the same rmale physiological advantages that have, until recently, barred men from women’s sports), but even then there have been exceptions to this “rule.” (Hi Joan!) With other trades and occupations, it’s not so easy. Weaving, pottery, healing, farming, and fishing might be practiced solely by one sex in a given society, but there would be no way to determine in advance, based on the activity alone, which sex, without visiting. With these trades and pursuits, there’s nothing apart from tradition, social convention or taboo, that preferentially bars or favours one sex over another in their practice. In our own society, there was never anything other than the unjust, wasteful enforcement of restrictive, gendered sex-roles that prevented women from being pilots, surgeons, astronauts or bank managers. Or from even voting. Sure, there were “arguments” and “reasons,” but if any of them had been true, then women would have turned out to have been incapable of doing these things because of their “lady brains.” We still have a long way to go to fully liberate the wasted human potential of the female half of Earth’s human inhabitants.
That some people embrace and internalize those wasteful, destructive, sexist social strictures, reifying them into something that they call “gender identity,” does not actually make the definition of the sexes any more difficult or problematic than it was until very recently. Nor does it make “gender” any more “real” than it was when it was the pretext for the enforcement of confining, stereotypical, sex-role pigeonholes. Sex is still real. Gender is still bullshit. Does Shavisi not see the irony and contradiction inherent in trans-identified-males wielding stereotypical male entitlement and aggression in their demands that everyone recognize, respect, and validate their “lady brains?”
I’m getting to the point where I’m thinking of completely eliminating the word “gender” when discussing trans issues.
We have a sex; some people claim they have a sex “identity” that is different than their actual sex. These people call themselves trans-sexuals. Sex identities are based on culturally-constructed sex stereotypes.. Nobody is born with an innate sex stereotype. Trans-sexuals sometimes use cross-sex surgeries or hormones to mimic the other sex. Some trans-sexuals who insist they have no sex might want their sex organs cut off, or altered. In both cases, they’re either focusing on sex stereotypes as if they were innate to sex or believe that they’ll be treated better if they weren’t their sex, or perceived as their sex.
It still works, I think.
I agree 100% with YNNB and with Sastra’s comment.
We have two sexes. We have norms and stereotypes associated with those sexes. We as a society have made some progress in not blindly following those norms and stereotypes.
As for gender, to 95% of the population “gender” is just a synonym for “sex”. Giving it an different academic meaning where it makes those norms and stereotypes into something real and important was a big mistake.
The resulting confusion where “woman” can describe an actual woman or anyone embracing the female “gender” has been unhelpful.
I’ll note that gender roles not only change between cultures, but also within a single culture, over time. The best example we have of this is computer programming. When it was a low-paying job and viewed as almost menial labor, it was “women’s work”. Once it became a lucrative career, programming magically transformed into a Boy’s Club activity.
Scene: Psychiatrist’s Office
Man: Doc, you gotta help my uncle. He thinks he’s a woman!
Doctor: How long has he been thinking that?
Man: About four years now.
Doctor: Four years? Why didn’t you come to me sooner??
Man: We needed the eggs.
Sastra @#1:
I keep ‘gender’ in reserve for learned discussions with grammarians. There have only ever been two (2) biological sexes, male and female; not males at one end of a continuous spectrum with females at the other over a far distant horizon, and with numberless intermediaries between. As Hamlet said, the rest is bullshit.
In the car yesterday we were listening to an NPR story from The Daily that was a rerun from a few years back. It was about a girl who wanted to join the Boy Scouts because she wanted the chance to do all the fun stuff they do. The girl was intelligent and articulate, talking about for example how ads for Nerf guns only feature boys, and the leader of her local troop let her participate (although technically she couldn’t join). Such a great story, and hope for the future.
Anyway, you can probably guess where this is going. The story hadn’t finished when we arrived at our destination, but my wife had heard it before, and so she told me how it ends: the girl later decided that she was trans.
I try to avoid using the single words “sex” and “gender” by themselves now and instead say “biological sex” and “gender identity” (or in some contexts “gender role” (externally imposed), or perhaps “performative gender” (as personally expressed)). This goes a long time towards preventing the conflation of terms and the dishonest slippery sliding back and forth between meanings for rhetorical advantage. Yes, I will happily acknowledge that the correlation between sex chromosome configurations, visible external genitalia, and internal sex organs is not always perfect (I have a cousin with Turner’s Syndrome), but 2 categories for sex do cover an extremely high percentage of human beings and are clearly relevant to human reproduction.
I often wonder how much of this mess could have been avoided if discussions of gender identity had simply taken a cue from grammar and used the words “masculine” and “feminine” to distinguish between genders instead of “male” and “female”, thus making it clearer when one is discussing gender instead of sex. I would have had no problem with being characterized as, say, a hypomasculine male, as long as people (i.e. other males) didn’t threaten to beat me up for it (which unfortunately was the case with almost all of the other boys when I was a child).