This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007. It was reprinted in Julia Serano’s book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Communities More Inclusive which everyone should buy, damn it. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance” I think I am going to strangle them. What’s most annoying about that sound-bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn’t” sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that every person in this room should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another and with the external expectations that other people place on us.
Sure, I can perform gender if I want. I can curtsy or throw like a girl or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why some behaviors and ways of being come more naturally to me than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes I experienced when I hormonally shifted from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same — wore the same t-shirts, jeans and sneakers that I always had — yet once people started reading me as female they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, it seems to me that we let the audience — with all of their interpretations, prejudices and assumptions — completely off the hook.
I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like “all gender is performance”, “all gender is drag” and “gender is just a construct”. They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations. And of course, this is a convenient strategy, provided that you are not a trans woman who lacks the means to have her legal sex changed to female, and who thus runs the real risk of being locked up in an all male jail cell. Provided that you’re not a trans man who has to navigate the discrepancy between his male identity and female history during job interviews and first dates. Whenever I hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance, it always reminds me of that Stephen Colbert gag where he insists that he doesn’t see race. It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you are not fully in touch with all of the ways in which you are privileged by it.
Almost every day of my life I deal with people who insist on seeing my femaleness as fake. People who make a point of calling me effeminate rather than feminine. People who slip up my pronouns only after they find out that I’m trans, but never beforehand. People who insist on third-sexing me with labels like MTF, boy-girl, he-she, she-male, ze & hir — anything but simply female. Because I’m transsexual, I am sometimes accused of impersonation or deception when I am simply being myself. So it seems to me that this strategy of fictionalizing gender will only ever serve to marginalize me further.
So I ask you: Can’t we find new ways of speaking? Shouldn’t we be championing new slogans that empower all of us, whether trans or non-trans, queer or straight, female and/or male and/or none of the above?
Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let’s recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it. It’s an amalgamation of bodies, identities and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others of which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of arguing that gender is any one single thing, let’s start describing it as a holistic experience.
Instead of dismissing all gender as performance, let’s admit that sometimes gender is an act, and other times it isn’t. And since we can’t get inside one another’s minds, we have no way of knowing whether any given person’s gender is sincere or contrived. Let’s fess up to the fact that when we make judgments about other people’s genders, we’re typically basing it on our own assumptions (and we all know what happens when you assume, right?)
Let’s stop claiming that certain genders and sexualities reinforce the gender binary. In the past, that tactic has been used to dismiss butches and femmes, bisexuals, trans people and our partners, and feminine people of every persuasion. Gender is not simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let’s stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.
Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let’s talk about all of the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn’t feel like drag when you’re a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn’t feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you finally feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn’t feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let’s stop trying to deconstruct gender into non-existence and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound and intricate.
So don’t dare dismiss my gender as a construct, drag or a performance, because my gender is a work of non-fiction.
You know, I disagree with this entirely. Gender is a performance, not in the sense that it’s “contrived” or “an act”, but in the sense that it is something that is taught to us by society, and that we relay back to society through our behaviors and attitudes (whether by conforming or defying). It’s entirely possible that Ms. Serano would still have identified as a woman in a culture that defined male-ness and female-ness as the exact opposite of our culture’s expectations, but how she would have expressed that, what she would have found comfortable or uncomfortable or “things that resonate with [her]”, would probably have been completely different.
We don’t have more than the faintest clue how gender identity is determined in the individual, although we do have good empirical evidence that once gender identity has set, it is immutable. But we also have very good evidence that gender identity is a function of culture rather than biology. For pretty much any gendered trait you can think of, somewhere or somewhen there is/has been a culture that expected the opposite. The list of gendered traits that have strong evidence for being entirely innate is very, very short.
Gender is real in that it is an enormously powerful cultural force, on individuals and on society. But it is also fake, in that it is something that we made up, collectively and historically; nothing about our definitions of gender had to be that way. The sooner we come to grips with that, the happier we will all be, including those of us who are trans.
You might check out Excluded? Julia actually has some more thoughts on this. I think it’s absolutely true that gender has cultural elements always…but as a biologist and a trans woman, Julia I think is pretty well positioned to talk about the way that it also has biological aspects. Hormones makes you react to things differently; they even affect color sense. That doesn’t mean, women are this way, men are that way, but it does mean that there are some pretty strong biological roots to the way people interact with their gender.
Julia talks about it in terms of complex traits. That is, gender is a complex trait, which has biological and social components which are too complex and intertwined to pull apart.
So I’m sure Julia would agree that seeing gender as entirely innate is wrong. But the push by queer studies post Judith Butler to see gender as entirely performative has serious problems for folks who identify very strongly as one gender or the other (whether those folks be cis or trans.) And it’s just not true that in every case people are made happier by an insitence that gender is culturally determined. Trans women are just relentleslly accused of fakeness and artificiality; insisting that their gender performance be seen as fake first and everything else second isn’t especially helpful in that circumstance, it seems like (or at least, that certainly seems to be the experience Julia is talking about here.)
You’re a biologist too, right JRB?
I’ve read Whipping Girl but I’m not sure if I’ve read Excluded, which means I probably should read/reread it.
I’m a biologist myself, and although I have never worked on gender I have an interest in it and follow the literature (in a desultory way; there’s enough reading I have to do to keep up with my own field), and I stand by my opinion.
“Hormones makes you react to things differently; they even affect color sense.”
Almost all descriptions of the psychological effects of hormones, whether anecdotal or clinical, come from people who knew that they were taking androgens or estrogens and who consequently had expectations on what they “should” experience. I don’t know offhand of any double-blind study of people given opposite-sex hormones, which I’m sure is in part because they have obvious physical consequences (which creates an ethical issue if they’re not being given as a specific treatment, plus an experimental issue as it’s relatively easy to tell if you’re getting a placebo).
“Trans women are just relentleslly accused of fakeness and artificiality”
I think you’re missing my point. For an individual, embedded in society, gender is profoundly important. As I said, we have excellent support for the idea that once gender identity is set (which seems to happen around 18 months), it is set in stone. A trans woman’s gender is not fake; it’s the way that cultural gender expectations are conceived in the first place that is not real. Most women (cis or trans) want to be womanly, meaning whatever their culture defines as womanly, and that feeling is authentic (and vice versa for men). But what is defined as womanly in a given culture isn’t universal, and the vast majority of it isn’t remotely biological either; there’s absolutely no innate reason men shouldn’t wear long hair and dresses or women wear crew-cuts and tuxedos. Gender identity is real, but the gendered traits that that identity is built of are overwhelmingly arbitrary cultural artifacts that are meaningless in and of themselves. That’s the point we need society to accept.
First of all, I think the piece is wonderful — essential reading! But JRB, I find your counterargument and its terms confusing.
First, you seem to be eliding a difference between gender identity and gender expression. The former — identity — usually refers to a deep-set sense of oneself as, say, a man or a woman — and, by extension, as being like “these people” over here or “those people” over there. (I’m not sure one could have a gender identity without that sense of gender identification.)
The latter — expression — is how one’s identity is made manifest, enacted, displayed, etc. These are the kinds of things you are talking about when you list “wearing dresses” or having crew cuts. This latter vision clearly has a high degree of cultural variability.
But I see no reason to conflate the two — as you do when you say that gender identity is “built” out of “traits” of gender expression. That is, you give conceptual and developmental priority to the expressive traits and say that identity is merely a complex conglomeration of these traits.
However, the story that you tell about gender identity (not expression) seems to lean in the other direction. It is established early and, in your words, immutably. Forms of expression, however, do not share those qualities. They are highly changeable over time and over the lifetime of an individual — even when that individual’s sense of gender identity does not change.
Second, I find it odd that you hold your assertions of gender construction and its sources to such different standards of evidence when you are comparing biological and performative (social constructionist) theories. You seem to be under the impression that for a trait to have a biological underpinning, then it must be universal — that is, showing up in the same way and the same forms in all times and places. This is not the case for any argument in favor of a biological component to gender or any aspect of human behavior. Claiming that a trait something is “innate” cannot be dismissed simply because “somewhere, somewhen” someone acted differently.
Further, you suggest that for any biological claim to be accepted, it must stand up to the rigor of double-blind studies, or else we just don’t know. I accept the proposal — but then ask whether we are willing to submit sociological theories to the same rule. I don’t know of any studies where subjects were placed in opposite-culture environments. (Except of course, when we do have such experiments, in the form of twin studies.)
Overall, it seems to me that if we have lots of evidence that gender expression is culturally variable and arbitrary (and even that assertion has its limits), we also have lots of similarly strong evidence that gender identity — and other aspects of gender identity, like sexual preference — is not. Or at least that it is not only arbitrary in that way. The lived subjective experiences of men and women, trans and cis, gay and straight constitute part of that evidence.
Saying that Ms. Serrano would have wanted to express her gender in different ways had she been born in a different century does not eliminate the centrality of her feeling that being a woman, being female, is part of who she is. And if you are willing to believe that that sense of herself as female was there, set in stone, by 18 months, I find it difficult state with any level of certainty that “culture” put it there.
Sorry that went on so long. I could and should have made it in half the length.
So instead of the above, JRB, let me ask a more generous question. When you say that gender identity is set in stone by 18 months, is this merely stating an outer limit to the process? Are you saying that gender identity could be set in stone much sooner (12 month? 6 months?), but that we just don’t know until infants are old enough to show us X, Y, or Z?
Or do you mean that before 18 months — the set-in-stone date — that we have some (or any) reason to believe that gender identity is fluid and flexible. Are you stating that before some Date X, one’s maleness or femaleness has yet to be determined, presumably by the environment?
“Most women (cis or trans) want to be womanly, meaning whatever their culture defines as womanly, and that feeling is authentic (and vice versa for men).”
I don’t think that’s right…or I guess I feel like it elides the work that “most” is doing for you.
Lots of women and men feel quite certain that they are women (or men) but do not want to do the thing that is womanly or manly. A woman may be interested in sports; a man may read romance novels; a woman may not want to wear dresses; a man may want to do that. A woman may want to have sex with women; a man may want to have sex with men. When you conflate gender expression and gender identity, it becomes impossible to make sense of this very common behavior, it seems to me.
In terms of the political point, I’m not really convinced we’d all be better off if we saw gender as constructed. Serano at least is arguing here that the use of the ideology, “gender is performance” is oppressive to her sense of self, and is used against her consistently and with malice. So whatever the truth of your factual point (and I don’t believe it’s true for the reasons Peter explains) the additional argument — if we all believed as you do, we’d be better off — really does not seem to be the case. Serano is arguing in part that the claim to authenticity, the insistence that one’s identity is *not* constructed, does real political and ideological work. And I think that that is actually a major political issue for Judith Butler in general; if you wave your wand and make (say) women disappear into cultural noise, it’s difficult to find a place from which to ground feminism. (This is not an uncommon criticism of Butler.)
Oh, and the fact that people know what hormones are supposed to do — at that point you’re basically saying that people are so in thrall to cultural gender identity that they can’t even report accurately on the feelings of their own bodies. That’s a pretty extreme argument from false consciousness…and where is the evidence for it? If you’re unwilling to accept people’s testimony about their own physical experience, it seems like there’s no way to present any evidence at all which would lead you to think that gender is natural in any way. You’re argument seems irrefutable…and if it’s irrefutable, it’s not about evidence or the lack thereof. I mean, what evidence are you sidelining people’s bodily testimony in favor of? What science provides such surety about culture that you can disregard people’s experiences of their selves?
Again, I think it’s more useful to see gender (and sexuality) as a complicated blend of biology and culture, which varies widely for different people, and indeed can vary over someone’s life (I just heard a talk from someone who felt she should have been a boy when she was a kid, but who now identifies as cis and female.)
Do you think sexuality is entirely culturally determined, JRB? Gay people are gay because of social conditioning? Why would sexuality be different from gender here? What you desire is biological, but what you are is cultural? That doesn’t seem like it makes sense.
I realize that this is ridiculously belated, but Real Life interfered with a timely response. I did however want to come back and address Peter and Noah’s points, because this is an issue on which I feel strongly. *scowls, pounds table*
@ Peter:
“First, you seem to be eliding a difference between gender identity and gender expression. [snip] But I see no reason to conflate the two — as you do when you say that gender identity is “built” out of “traits” of gender expression.”
I suppose I was not clear enough, but I agree that gender identity and gender expression are separable. My argument is that, regardless of whether gender identity is innate, not only is gender expression a function of culture, but our entire schema of gender itself is also a function of culture, with little if any relevance to any actual innate differences.
As an analogy, consider race. It’s an extremely powerful cultural force that has tremendous influence on the lives of individuals. Being black or white, and having other people categorize you as black or white, is one of the most consequential distinctions our culture currently draws. But at the same time, race is completely fictitious; there is no biologically meaningful way to draw a circle around “black” people that separates them from “not black” people. All of the so-called racial differences in ability, achievement, and behavior that certain classes of people like to draw attention to are purely culturally mediated, in deeply embedded and pervasive ways.
What it is to be black, what it is to be white, how your blackness or whiteness is embodied in your self-identity and made manifest to others, and how those others respond to it, is dictated by how we are socialized into race, not by biology. If there were no such cultural influences, it might be possible to have being dark-skinned as a part of your self-image, without either yourself or others attaching any particular expectations to that fact.
Similarly, how we experience and express being male or female, and how we process other people’s maleness and femaleness, is dictated by culture. If we had no expectations about gender it might be possible to have male/female as a part of your self-image without linking that to any particular way of being or being seen.
“You seem to be under the impression that for a trait to have a biological underpinning, then it must be universal — that is, showing up in the same way and the same forms in all times and places.”
Dissecting biology versus culture among humans is always very complicated. As you note, we cannot perform the same kinds of experiments with babies that we can if we were asking this question about, say, mice. The best we can do, in most cases, is to compare different cultures; but this can still give us useful information. If one culture expects that women will be X, and most women in that culture are indeed X, whereas another culture has the opposite expectation and the opposite outcome, we can at least say that whatever innate bias towards or against X-ness women may have, culture is able to override it. Furthermore, the more variability we see between cultures in the gendered nature of a given trait, the more evidence we have that that trait is not biological. Most of the traits that 21st century America regards as being innately male or female are differently gendered or ungendered in other cultures (and, for many of them, within our own culture in other eras), which suggests that they are not, in fact, innate.
“Saying that Ms. Serrano would have wanted to express her gender in different ways had she been born in a different century does not eliminate the centrality of her feeling that being a woman, being female, is part of who she is.”
Yes, I agree. But that could be true whether or not gender identity is biologically dictated. (See above re race.)
“And if you are willing to believe that that sense of herself as female was there, set in stone, by 18 months, I find it difficult state with any level of certainty that “culture” put it there.”
I’m willing to consider the proposition that gender identity is biological (although I suspect otherwise); what I don’t believe is that the sets of traits that we consider gendered are biological consequences of either gender identity or biological sex. Children are inculturated into gender incredibly early; they know broad cultural expectations before 18 months, including ideas, like “pink” and “dolls”, which are certainly not innate. Our culture treats gender as the single most fundamental division between individuals, and expects that it will dictate how you will behave and how others will interact with you starting from birth. If we didn’t do that I’m pretty sure that gender, as a collection of traits, attitudes and behaviors, would not exist, even if gender identity still did.
“When you say that gender identity is set in stone by 18 months, is this merely stating an outer limit to the process? [snip] Or do you mean that before 18 months — the set-in-stone date — that we have some (or any) reason to believe that gender identity is fluid and flexible.”
There are probably idiosyncratic differences in when gender identity gets set; I don’t think anyone can speculate as to how much since the useful data is sparse and it’s hard to analyze self-identity in preverbal / early-verbal infants. 18 months seems to be roughly around when it typically happens, so far as we can tell (and yes, there are lots of qualifiers in that sentence).
But there is some evidence to support the idea that in very young infants, gender identity is malleable; how the child is identified by the parents and how they are treated by others is apparently enough to set a gender identity opposite to biological sex in some (possibly large) fraction of children. This malleability appears to depend on the age of the child (under 6 months appears to have the best chance) and the degree to which the parents are committed to maintaining the “new” gender; but again the data is sparse so we don’t have more than a hint at the parameters. The existence of trans people of course suggests that adult expectations are not always enough, but trans identity is quite rare so that’s hardly compelling evidence for simple innateness.
There are a number of nonspecialist books on the science of gender that cover these sorts of issues; if you are interested I suggest Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot, which has a special focus on demolishing neuroscientific arguments, and Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine, which puts a bit more emphasis on analyzing social influences.
@ Noah:
“Lots of women and men feel quite certain that they are women (or men) but do not want to do the thing that is womanly or manly. […] When you conflate gender expression and gender identity, it becomes impossible to make sense of this very common behavior, it seems to me.”
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. What I mean is that most women want to be identified, recognized and accepted by others as women, and most men want to be identified, recognized and accepted by others as men. The fraction of women who identify firmly as women but don’t care if other people consider them not-women is small, and the fraction of men who identify firmly as men but don’t care if other people consider them not-men is very small.
But what social signals it takes to be recognized and accepted as a given gender differs by culture, so what an individual will do, in order to make their identity manifest, also varies by culture. Most people are acculturated into our gender so early and so thoroughly we don’t even have to think about this; it’s fully internalized and thus feels “natural”. But if you visit another culture that has a different gender schema you will become “unnatural” unless you make a special effort to learn the new schema and reshape your signals. (And of course many trans people have to display overdetermined social signals to avoid being misgendered by initial impressions of their build/facial structure/etc., whether they would prefer to or not.)
“Serano at least is arguing here that the use of the ideology, “gender is performance” is oppressive to her sense of self, and is used against her consistently and with malice. […] Serano is arguing in part that the claim to authenticity, the insistence that one’s identity is *not* constructed, does real political and ideological work.”
First of all, I’m not saying that identity is inauthentic, I’m saying that gender is constructed. Cultural categories of identity can be authentic and important to individuals without having any empirical input to their construction. (See the comparison to race above). Secondly, I understand that some people accuse trans women of faking female-ness, but connecting that to the performativity of gender is a misunderstanding of the latter, whether by Serano or her attackers or (probably) both. Saying that identity is constructed doesn’t mean that it’s a fabrication or a deception; people largely frame their identity in terms of traits and categories that have culturally encoded meanings, not those they create out of whole cloth, and the traits and categories that are most central to our identity (especially race and gender) are enculturated extremely young, before we can consciously analyze them.
And all identity is performative, at least when communicating it to others; if you don’t have the same social script as the person you are interacting with, and neither of you understand the other’s script, you won’t be able to transmit your identity, or at least not without considerable explanatory effort.
“And I think that that is actually a major political issue for Judith Butler in general; if you wave your wand and make (say) women disappear into cultural noise, it’s difficult to find a place from which to ground feminism.”
This is kind of an odd objection; you seem to be assuming that getting rid of gender will take us back to male-default? I disagree entirely. If we can accept, as a culture, that being female is equally as good as being male and that being feminine is equally as good as being masculine, once “masculine” is no longer opposite to and mutually exclusive with “feminine” and once both are delinked from which set of squishy bits you happen to have been born with or which gender you identify with, we will no longer have to “ground” feminism anywhere because it will be as normative as sexism is now.
“Oh, and the fact that people know what hormones are supposed to do — at that point you’re basically saying that people are so in thrall to cultural gender identity that they can’t even report accurately on the feelings of their own bodies. That’s a pretty extreme argument from false consciousness…and where is the evidence for it?”
It’s called the placebo effect; it’s not specific to gender and it has nothing to do with false consciousness. Humans in general are highly suggestible, prone to confirmation bias and attention bias, and not very good at interpreting their own subjective states; psychosomatic effects crop up in all kinds of places.
Any drug or therapy or treatment that wants FDA approval has to go through testing to prove that the intervention actually has an effect, rather than the expectation of an effect having the effect. (Which can be non-trivial, especially for treatments that aren’t drugs.) And de-blinding through noticing the effect of the real drug (in which case the patient is subject to the placebo effect by virtue of not having been given the placebo) is an active issue in medical testing. Even in double-blind studies, if the real medicine has a perceptible effect but the placebo doesn’t, that can distort the results of the trial; thus, many people are pushing for the use of “active placebos”, that mimics the perceptible effects but are not expected to affect the condition being treated.
“Do you think sexuality is entirely culturally determined, JRB?”
No. There is pretty solid evidence that sexual orientation is largely innate, and probably at least in part genetic. (Some of it comes from the same studies of opposite-sex-reared people that suggest that gender identity is not innate.) There is cultural influence at least at the level of behavior, as attested by those cultures that require male same-sex practices to confer adult manhood (I don’t know of any that require female same-sex practices…).
“Why would sexuality be different from gender here?”
Why would you expect them to be similar?
We don’t know how sexual orientation is determined (some weak genetic associations have been tentatively identified, but why those genes would affect orientation we have no clue). So far we have no reason to think it has anything to do with gender or gender identity; being attracted to men or women appears to be delinked from being male or female. Our best-guess at the moment is that gender and orientation are separate phenomena with separate etiologies.
[Off-topic: I don’t know if you have any control over this, but the automatic appending of the site URL to any snippet copy-pasted from the post is really annoying. I understand its use in advertising the site, but still, annoying.]
I think the admission that gender identity may be biological is a pretty big deal. Similarly, allowing that sexual preference is biological seems like you’d end up having to admit that a fairly central portion of individual experience of gender/sex could be biological.
Serano points out that biology is actually importantly influenced by environment too (even environment in the womb, for example). Vice versa, it seems that culture is affected strongly by biology; as Shulamith Firestone argues (I think correctly) many of the ways men and women are and have historically been treated differently by culture is linked to who bears children. That doesn’t mean that all cultures treat childbearing the same way (they don’t) but that cultures are not entirely arbitrary; they are affected by, and work off of, biology, to some degree at least.
It just seems (a) simplistic, and (b) fundamentally unknowable to argue for a maximal cultural argument. It doesn’t seem especially politically useful either, given the fact that some degree of biological determinism is pretty central to the movement for gay rights; too much, maybe, I’ve argued, but that doesn’t mean throwing the concept out altogether is the way to go. Anyway, given the unknowability, the fact that there seems little to gain politically, individual testimony about hormones, and clear evidence for some biological differences between individuals in relation to gender identity, it seems a lot more reasonable to say, “there seems like there’s some biology here and some culture, and we can’t really separate them, so maybe we shouldn’t use either ‘it’s biology’ or ‘it’s culture’ as an excuse to tell people that they don’t understand their own gender experience, and/or to tell them how their gender should be expressed.” (Always presuming that gender expression doesn’t hurt others; pedophiles and rapists are not okay, no matter how the nature/nurture debate is resolved.)
Oh…when you ask why should the fact that sexuality is biological affect the fact that gender is biological. The answer is that sexuality is pretty closely involved with gender. In some cultures, they aren’t even seen as separable. But, for example, when people transition, or take hormones, their sexuality not infrequently changes (Julia Serano’s did.) Moreover, it just seems statistically across cultures fairly obvious that gender has something to do with sexuality, because most people are heterosexual, right? That’s a more or less cross-cultural truth, which seems pretty strongly to indicate that the biologically gendered body you’re in has some not necessarily determinative but nonetheless statistically significant effect on the gender of the person you’re attracted to.
I’d also argue pretty strongly that sexuality is not entirely biological. There’s a lot of evidence that it changes for some people in some ways depending on various cultural and environmental factors. And of course what you identify as is cultural decision…though one influenced by biology.
I still find Julia Serano’s argument that both gender and sexuality are related to each other, and that both are determined by biology and culture in complicated ways that aren’t easy to parse out. And I still think it’s pretty aggressive to take people’s experience of their bodies (with hormones) and on the basis of no evidence (we don’t have double-blind studies here, right?) say that all those effects are entirely useless. (That is a false consciousness argument, too. Placebos may suggest that there’s some basis for a false consciousness argument, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a false consciousness argument.)
Oh, and I think the comparison to race isn’t super useful. Genetic differences in skin tone and eye shape and so forth are a ton less important and consequential than the biological differences between men and women, both in terms of physical bits and in terms of hormonal make up. Race really is compeltely socially constructed, just about. I think extrapolating that to gender is not convincing, at least to me.
On biological inputs to orientation vs. gender:
Both you and Peter raised orientation as an argument that gender is biological, but I think you are conflating sex with gender. There’s three attributes involved here: biological sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Conceptually, sex and orientation don’t have to be linked, and there is some tentative evidence that they are not linked; i.e., that sexual orientation is programmed as “attracted to men” or “attracted to women” (or both in some ratio) rather than “attracted to the same sex” vs “attracted to the opposite sex”. In this case, the fact that most people are heterosexual suggests that the biological state of female-ness normally directly dictates an “attracted to men” setting (and vice versa), rather than feeding into an orientation module that assesses your sex and outputs “attracted to [opposite of what you are]”.
How the gender identity of the individual affects this is not clear; the amount of existing quantitative research on sexual orientation in trans people could be put into a hat, and there is next to nothing studying the influence of hormonal treatment specifically. Anecdotally, yes, some trans people report a change in orientation after transitioning. Some don’t. Some have always identified as bisexual or queer.
But as I mentioned, there is a modicum of data from opposite-sex-reared patients that gender identity is more flexible than orientation: a proportion of biologically male infants raised as girls have grown into female-identified and psychologically normal women (their gender identity has been changed), but these women have vastly increased prevalence of lesbian or bisexual orientation (their female-desiring sexuality has not). Now these individuals were almost all castrated at a young age and given estrogens at puberty, but orientation appears to be set well before puberty so we can’t attribute this difference solely to the pubertal hormonal milieu. The number of opposite-sex-reared patients is small enough that these studies aren’t definitive (and most are in the MtF direction, so we can be even less certain about gender and orientation malleability in biological females), but this is an area where data of any kind is extremely limited.
“so maybe we shouldn’t use either ‘it’s biology’ or ‘it’s culture’ as an excuse to tell people that they don’t understand their own gender experience, and/or to tell them how their gender should be expressed.”
I’m not telling anyone how they specifically should express their gender. I’m saying that the lines in the scripts that we use to interpret gender, express our gender and assess other’s gender expression are coming from culture, not de novo expression of innate sex-linked traits, and we should acknowledge that.
“Always presuming that gender expression doesn’t hurt others; pedophiles and rapists are not okay, no matter how the nature/nurture debate is resolved.”
What? Neither of those things has anything whatsoever to do with gender or with gender expression.
“as Shulamith Firestone argues (I think correctly) many of the ways men and women are and have historically been treated differently by culture is linked to who bears children. […] cultures are not entirely arbitrary; they are affected by, and work off of, biology, to some degree at least.”
Shulamith Firestone was not an anthropologist or even an evolutionary psychologist. I’ve only read very superficial summaries of her arguments, so I’m going to make a very generic response: Firstly, whatever practical advantage a given division of labor conferred in times past has been largely obviated by contraception and mechanization, but culture hasn’t kept up. Secondly, and more importantly, the majority of gender assumptions and restrictions in any culture, including hunter-gatherers, are not predicated on the actual abilities of men or women as a class. (For example, most cultures do not expect (or allow, in some cases) women to hunt, even though women in hunter-gatherer cultures are equally as good at catching small game as men are, and female hunting, when allowed, can substantially increase protein intake; most cultures do not expect men to care for infants or cook, even when those men have no other obligations that would prevent them from doing so.) Studies of real children do not support the idea that boys are naturally more competitive or girls naturally more nurturing; they do support the idea that most boys and girls will grow into the roles that their culture instills, whether that calls for male competitiveness or female competitiveness.
“(That is a false consciousness argument, too. Placebos may suggest that there’s some basis for a false consciousness argument, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a false consciousness argument.)”
Really? The placebo effect doesn’t seem anything like the Marxist definition of “false consciousness”…
“Genetic differences in skin tone and eye shape and so forth are a ton less important and consequential than the biological differences between men and women, both in terms of physical bits and in terms of hormonal make up.”
Maybe, when you have a spare couple of hours, you might read Pink Brain, Blue Brain, one of the books I suggested to Peter. The meaningful biological differences in question are a lot weaker, a lot more variable, and significantly fewer than most people believe. We see the obvious differences (height, musculature, squishy bits), and assume that perception, cognition and personality will have similarly obvious and consequential biological differences, but really this doesn’t seem to be true.
Hey JRB. I’m not actually assuming that perception, cognition, and personality will necessarily have much relationship to anything. But you don’t need to think that to think that physical differences provide a basis for biological differentiation of gender that is a lot firmer than biological differences on the basis of race.
I certainly don’t believe sex discrimination is built on real differences or possibilities. I do think that Firestone is onto something when she says that biological differences form the basis for cultural differences, even though those biological differences don’t actually provide a justification for cultural differences…especially given humans’ ability to make technical advances in areas like (for example) birth control. One of the things about humans is that we can change biology a lot…which is one reason among many why drawing hard lines between biology and culture doesn’t make a ton of sense. Birth control really changes human biology in pretty profound ways, I think, as just one example.
Your claim about hormones and gender is a lot more complicated than just the placebo effect. You’re saying people are so brainwashed by their culture that they can’t understand their own gendered experience of their bodies. That’s a sweeping false consciousness argument, it seems like to me.
There is a ton of anecdotal evidence that sexuality is variable for people over time, and that particular experiences cause shifts in sexuality. Also that sexuality is very culturally determined. In fact, the hard and fast binary you have there between sexuality and gender *is itself culturally determined.* People didn’t used to separate sexuality and gender out that way; instead they used categories like “invert” which had elements of both.
I’ll try reading Pink Brain when I get a chance. You should read Excluded when you have a moment; it addresses most of your points, I think.