Pink and Blue
So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we know what gender we are, and why it makes a difference.
Of course, for most people, the obvious answer to both questions is: Well, DUH! The word for that is “cisgender” (pronounced “sis-gender”). You are Cisgender if you’ve never had cause to seriously question your gender identity. Your assigned sex (i.e., the one on your birth certificate) feels reasonably congruent with your inner sense of who you are, and always has.
Clearly, for some of us, it’s more complicated than that. But what exactly is it that clues us in - that causes those incredibly frustrating feelings of misplacement, of wrongness, for Transgender persons, and that sense of rightness (or at least good-enoughness) for Cisgender persons?
Part of what makes me wonder is that my own story doesn’t really fit the mold. The “typical” trans-male child is a roughhousing tomboy/jock who simply can’t settle down as Good Little Girls should. In other words: rebelliously, insistently, and stereotypically masculine, functioning near the extreme male end of the gender spectrum in terms of behavior and preferences.
And me? I was a quiet, studious, science geek with my nose perpetually in a book - generally either an Asimov novel or an astronomy text - and one eye more-or-less glued to a telescope eyepiece. (Mostly those small, cheap, department-store refractors that promise way more magnification than their aperture could ever useably support... but let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve managed to lock onto the Gallilean moons in a Tasco 50mm with a hysterically shaky tripod and bad slow-motion controls on a freezing winter night!)
Of course, there are plenty of nerdy Cisgender males who spent their childhoods in similar ways, so there’s nothing there that’s inconsistent with a male identity. In fact, the nerdy little boy is just another male stereotype - but it’s an outsider role, not an insider role. It doesn’t exactly exude masculinity in the traditional sense. This begs the question of what exactly feeds that sense of male identity in nerdy little boys (and nerdy little girls who are really little boys on the inside). Lacking the more obvious aspects of what society sees as masculine, what else is there?
Possibly a lot, though none of it reeking spectacularly of testosterone. In my case, it’s the patterns of communication (including nonverbal communication) and interpersonal engagement that have always felt most seriously “off”... a much more subtle note, but deeply jarring nonetheless. As a kid, I didn’t function well in the society of girls, and as an adult I’ve never functioned well in the society of women. Don’t get me wrong, now - this doesn’t mean that I don’t cherish my female friends! But the way groups of women tend to relate to one another, that complex and deep but casual emotional web that seems to be built on comfortable chat and small shared domestic interests... I can understand it academically, and even appreciate the beauty of it, but it’s just not part of my personality. And the quieter nature of this disjunction may help to explain why it took so long for me to get to the point of real recognition - not just the ever-increasing discomfort, which I’ve been long aware of, but the eventual absolute roaring certainty of being stuck in an incorrect classification.
The more I ponder this and other related problems, the more I find that I have an unpleasant confession to make: these days, I’m finding myself forced to admit that gender is more significant, the differences more deeply rooted, than I'd originally convinced myself - and let me tell you, that’s seriously messing with my world!
Because at the same time, I know that it’s those “standard” gender roles and expectations that make life so miserable for anyone who either can’t fit the mold or doesn’t want to - not just Transgender individuals like me, but also plenty of Cisgender folks who just want to express nontraditional aspects of themselves.
It seems to me that what we really need is not just a different concept of what gender is all about, but a deeper one - more layered, and with more moving parts.
It’s common these days to look at gender identity as a spectrum, from stereotypically feminine at one end to stereotypically masculine at the other; real people tend to fall somewhere in between those extremes. Now, that’s certainly an improvement on the old simple dichotomy! But the spectrum is more of a metaphor than a measuring tool. It simply can’t take into account all of the significant levels of difference that people can experience.
For instance, some gender-related differences seem to be inborn and others are learned, whether from direct instruction or from social pressures. The spectrum view has no easy way of making that dimension clear. Then, too, some differences are physical, some are emotional, and some are intellectual; it would take multiple spectra to cover all of these aspects - and that still wouldn’t depict how complicatedly they intertwine!
And, while I have realized that my own place on the gender spectrum is much more clearly defined than I’d originally thought it was, I’m still not convinced that this is necessarily true for everyone. After all, if it’s possible to be born with genitalia that have tried to develop in both directions simultaneously (a condition medically known as being Intersexed), why assume that the same might not be true of brain development? We’ve become somewhat accustomed to the idea that the brain and the body can each develop in different directions, gender-wise... but the full range of possible developmental variations may be far more complicated than that!
And meanwhile, the questions being raised on both sides - by the gender traditionalists and the gender rebels - are important. They’re not just mindless adherence to the traditional versus mindless reaction to it; both views are needed to see how gender, and our perception and understanding of gender, shapes our experience of life on many levels.
For instance, I recently read a book whose author suggested, among other things, that the typical classroom is far more oriented toward female learning styles than male learning styles, which causes boys to have much greater difficulty really engaging with the learning process. From what I’ve seen, both in my own school days and during the time I spent working in classrooms, I think this may be a concept worth exploring. (In fact, I strongly suspect that this was one of the things that helped to obscure my gender-variance as a kid; on the surface, my easy success in the classroom definitely seemed more female than male. True, I wasn’t comfortable in the company of the girls - but at least I wasn’t one of those “stupid” boys!)
And yet - knowing how societies tend to like simple answers best - how do we keep an idea like that from becoming a rigidly prescriptive understanding? One which would result in, say, the idea that classrooms should be segregated by sex (which is, in fact, exactly what that author advocates)? The assumption being that, as a person of type A, one is assumed to have learning style A... in fact, should have learning style A... with no option to find out whether learning style B might fit better, or whether a style C even exists. And of course, if such options did exist, they would automatically mark that student as an outsider, a gender-aberrant individual!
*sigh*
It was easier by far, I must admit, to think of gender as a sort of finger-painting, freestyle, with relatively little inherent shape except for the ones that we give it. (I always knew there had to be some real differences; I just didn’t think of them as terribly important.) But now, having come to this difficult realization of the deep significance of gender in my own life, I can no longer so easily ascribe to that view. There do seem to be certain meaningful shapes within it that exist on their own, that are not merely imagined (or socially created) and need to be recognized.
But, having once recognized them... what the hell do we DO with them?
In the past, we have treated them like the Word Of God, telling us what we’re “supposed” to be.
It’s taken us centuries to reach a point where we can even begin to recognize and value that rainbow of alternative possibilities - all the different, richly colorful, and genuine ways of being human... of being men and women (and everything in between) together.
Now where do we go from here?
Of course, for most people, the obvious answer to both questions is: Well, DUH! The word for that is “cisgender” (pronounced “sis-gender”). You are Cisgender if you’ve never had cause to seriously question your gender identity. Your assigned sex (i.e., the one on your birth certificate) feels reasonably congruent with your inner sense of who you are, and always has.
Clearly, for some of us, it’s more complicated than that. But what exactly is it that clues us in - that causes those incredibly frustrating feelings of misplacement, of wrongness, for Transgender persons, and that sense of rightness (or at least good-enoughness) for Cisgender persons?
Part of what makes me wonder is that my own story doesn’t really fit the mold. The “typical” trans-male child is a roughhousing tomboy/jock who simply can’t settle down as Good Little Girls should. In other words: rebelliously, insistently, and stereotypically masculine, functioning near the extreme male end of the gender spectrum in terms of behavior and preferences.
And me? I was a quiet, studious, science geek with my nose perpetually in a book - generally either an Asimov novel or an astronomy text - and one eye more-or-less glued to a telescope eyepiece. (Mostly those small, cheap, department-store refractors that promise way more magnification than their aperture could ever useably support... but let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve managed to lock onto the Gallilean moons in a Tasco 50mm with a hysterically shaky tripod and bad slow-motion controls on a freezing winter night!)
Of course, there are plenty of nerdy Cisgender males who spent their childhoods in similar ways, so there’s nothing there that’s inconsistent with a male identity. In fact, the nerdy little boy is just another male stereotype - but it’s an outsider role, not an insider role. It doesn’t exactly exude masculinity in the traditional sense. This begs the question of what exactly feeds that sense of male identity in nerdy little boys (and nerdy little girls who are really little boys on the inside). Lacking the more obvious aspects of what society sees as masculine, what else is there?
Possibly a lot, though none of it reeking spectacularly of testosterone. In my case, it’s the patterns of communication (including nonverbal communication) and interpersonal engagement that have always felt most seriously “off”... a much more subtle note, but deeply jarring nonetheless. As a kid, I didn’t function well in the society of girls, and as an adult I’ve never functioned well in the society of women. Don’t get me wrong, now - this doesn’t mean that I don’t cherish my female friends! But the way groups of women tend to relate to one another, that complex and deep but casual emotional web that seems to be built on comfortable chat and small shared domestic interests... I can understand it academically, and even appreciate the beauty of it, but it’s just not part of my personality. And the quieter nature of this disjunction may help to explain why it took so long for me to get to the point of real recognition - not just the ever-increasing discomfort, which I’ve been long aware of, but the eventual absolute roaring certainty of being stuck in an incorrect classification.
The more I ponder this and other related problems, the more I find that I have an unpleasant confession to make: these days, I’m finding myself forced to admit that gender is more significant, the differences more deeply rooted, than I'd originally convinced myself - and let me tell you, that’s seriously messing with my world!
Because at the same time, I know that it’s those “standard” gender roles and expectations that make life so miserable for anyone who either can’t fit the mold or doesn’t want to - not just Transgender individuals like me, but also plenty of Cisgender folks who just want to express nontraditional aspects of themselves.
It seems to me that what we really need is not just a different concept of what gender is all about, but a deeper one - more layered, and with more moving parts.
It’s common these days to look at gender identity as a spectrum, from stereotypically feminine at one end to stereotypically masculine at the other; real people tend to fall somewhere in between those extremes. Now, that’s certainly an improvement on the old simple dichotomy! But the spectrum is more of a metaphor than a measuring tool. It simply can’t take into account all of the significant levels of difference that people can experience.
For instance, some gender-related differences seem to be inborn and others are learned, whether from direct instruction or from social pressures. The spectrum view has no easy way of making that dimension clear. Then, too, some differences are physical, some are emotional, and some are intellectual; it would take multiple spectra to cover all of these aspects - and that still wouldn’t depict how complicatedly they intertwine!
And, while I have realized that my own place on the gender spectrum is much more clearly defined than I’d originally thought it was, I’m still not convinced that this is necessarily true for everyone. After all, if it’s possible to be born with genitalia that have tried to develop in both directions simultaneously (a condition medically known as being Intersexed), why assume that the same might not be true of brain development? We’ve become somewhat accustomed to the idea that the brain and the body can each develop in different directions, gender-wise... but the full range of possible developmental variations may be far more complicated than that!
And meanwhile, the questions being raised on both sides - by the gender traditionalists and the gender rebels - are important. They’re not just mindless adherence to the traditional versus mindless reaction to it; both views are needed to see how gender, and our perception and understanding of gender, shapes our experience of life on many levels.
For instance, I recently read a book whose author suggested, among other things, that the typical classroom is far more oriented toward female learning styles than male learning styles, which causes boys to have much greater difficulty really engaging with the learning process. From what I’ve seen, both in my own school days and during the time I spent working in classrooms, I think this may be a concept worth exploring. (In fact, I strongly suspect that this was one of the things that helped to obscure my gender-variance as a kid; on the surface, my easy success in the classroom definitely seemed more female than male. True, I wasn’t comfortable in the company of the girls - but at least I wasn’t one of those “stupid” boys!)
And yet - knowing how societies tend to like simple answers best - how do we keep an idea like that from becoming a rigidly prescriptive understanding? One which would result in, say, the idea that classrooms should be segregated by sex (which is, in fact, exactly what that author advocates)? The assumption being that, as a person of type A, one is assumed to have learning style A... in fact, should have learning style A... with no option to find out whether learning style B might fit better, or whether a style C even exists. And of course, if such options did exist, they would automatically mark that student as an outsider, a gender-aberrant individual!
*sigh*
It was easier by far, I must admit, to think of gender as a sort of finger-painting, freestyle, with relatively little inherent shape except for the ones that we give it. (I always knew there had to be some real differences; I just didn’t think of them as terribly important.) But now, having come to this difficult realization of the deep significance of gender in my own life, I can no longer so easily ascribe to that view. There do seem to be certain meaningful shapes within it that exist on their own, that are not merely imagined (or socially created) and need to be recognized.
But, having once recognized them... what the hell do we DO with them?
In the past, we have treated them like the Word Of God, telling us what we’re “supposed” to be.
It’s taken us centuries to reach a point where we can even begin to recognize and value that rainbow of alternative possibilities - all the different, richly colorful, and genuine ways of being human... of being men and women (and everything in between) together.
Now where do we go from here?
~Phoenix, 8/2/2014
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