genderiffic with the emporer
5 Mar 2010 02:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigou[Heh, easier: if new, read this first. Okay, easier for me, but there it is.]
Awhile back during the LLF debacle, I recall one of the earliest speakers identified herself as being transgender. While I'm vaguely aware that "transsexual" has fallen out of favor, with "transgender" replacing it, the use always throws me. Perhaps it's because I first learned the terminology in the academic world (and specifically in the study of feminist existentialism), but I've always found it handiest to use the finer granulations of the words, with 'sex' as one's biological state of two legs or three, and 'gender' being one's social construct related to that sex. In other words, one can be born male, remain male, and adopt feminine-gendered aspects into one's self while remaining cis-sexed and heterosexual, just as much as one may be born male but feel it should have been 'female', in which case one is likely to also adopt the socially constructed gender that correlates with the body's sex (be that given or taken).
Which may seem like common sense, but it's undone when I see a term like "transgender" -- because to me, with finer-tuned definitions at my fingertips, to be saying that one's sex is cis, but one's preferred social construct is non-cis. More simply, it's saying, "I'm biologically female, but I'm not feminine as this society/culture defines it."
And the problem with that is that I can only think of, uhm, maybe two or three women I've known in my entire life who could really say they fit the laundry list of all the US/Western society defines as "feminine". For that matter, I've known about the same rare number of men who could do the same on the masculinity list. Not a lot of actual, real live, honest-to-goodness people -- because frankly, those gender definitions are highly nuanced, contradictory, often ambiguous, frequently lagging compared to the real world and remarkably fluid all the same (that is, changeable via social pressures but just really slow to get around to it).
The result is that when someone says they're transgender, I don't read that as "and I'm going to have an operation to bring my biological sex in alignment with the social construct that feels 'right' to me", I read that as "I don't fit societal notions of the behaviors/beliefs most commonly associated with my sex". And that, to me, seems like such a big fat duh: because those societal notions are insane. No real person can fit into them, and no real person should be expected to have to put up the crazy-making that's the trying.
Before anyone jumps, I don't mean I dismiss in a sense of saying the person doesn't know what they're talking about, or is wrong-headed in some way. It just seems a bit redundant or obvious (especially when one's sex is not at issue); admittedly my response becomes considerably more sarcastic when the self-label is trotted out (as it was in the LLF debacle) as though it's some kind of street cred. Then I really want to snark: what do you want, a fucking cookie?
Because if you take the finer-tuned definition of gender as a social construct, to lay claim to 'transgender' or 'crossgender' means you're continuing to buy into the social construct. It's like the genderiffic version of satanism: sure, you're saying you worship the world upside-down from the mainstream, but your reverse process has, as its very root, the existence of that mainstream. You can't be a Satanist in the absence of Christianity, because you're not worshiping a distinct deity, you're worshiping the opposite of someone else's deity. To declare oneself 'transgender', then, relies on continuation of the dual-gender game: it's a definition that requires the dual-gender system exist so that you can declare yourself opposite the definition society would hand you by virtue of biology.
And I guess I see social constructs as, well, just that: constructed by people. Gender has its value (setting aside whether this is a 'good' value or 'bad' value) in that it's half of how we identify other people in the sexuality game. I'm thinking of the men I've known who were just so damn good at cross-dressing that you really couldn't identify them as biologically 'male' because the clues were hidden so well: adam's apple, a bulge at the groin, facial hair, etc. Identifying someone cross-dressing gets considerably harder when the person's made concerted study of the social constructs around 'Being a Woman' or 'Being a Man', and learned to give off the behavioral signals that mean 'feminine' or 'masculine'. It's the way a person walks, the speech one uses, even the way one reacts to, say, kittens versus violent contact sports.
When I meet friends who are working to adapt gender (usually as part of their crossover from one sex to the other), I'm reminded of meeting new immigrants to this country. The little rules we take for granted are sources of strong, sometimes near-obsessive, scrutiny and anxiety: what gift to give, how to compliment someone, how to reciprocate on overtures of friendship, even when to laugh and when to just smile. More attention is paid to language, on many levels, like careful mimicry of American accents, or noting slang that I sift through and ignore without a second thought.
That attention to the minutiae of existence is what you have to do when you lack a lifetime of acculturation -- be that of nation or of gender -- and thus are a stranger in a strange land. With gender roles being so difficult to grasp even for us born to it, I don't hold it against anyone new to the gender role working double-time to out-feminize (or out-Americanize) the natives to compensate for lacking a lifetime's firsthand experience.
Outside that exception, I've seen all sorts of self-labels, like co-gendered and cross-gendered and pan-gendered, and various other intriguing variations on a theme. I have to say I've reached a point where I just ignore all of it. It all pivots off an assumption that there are two genders, and that these social notions of feminine and masculine are immutable, or near-immutable, and thus one can 'move away' or 'bridge' them.
That would be great if you could, but what exactly are you moving away from? I'm not saying there isn't masculine, and I'm not saying there isn't feminine -- these are loosely-defined, fluid, ambiguous, hardly mutually exclusive, and often contradictory sets of behaviors and beliefs grouped under each label. They're handy in the same way that it's handy to be able to say "motorcycle" instead of "large bicycle with engine attached but not the kind you have to pedal," which would be really a mouthful and not nearly as much fun as saying you ride a Fat Boy.
It's like in identifying with a gender (or a reverse gender), you're saying, "and I also believe the moon is not made of cheese." That illustration is silly, but it does capture the sense of the ridiculous -- maybe even a bit of the absurd -- that I can feel bubbling up when someone self-labels as one gender or the other, regardless of biological sex. Because the moon is not made of green cheese, so why should the people with the good sense to realize this have to waste the breath to clarify? Isn't it the ones running around who continue to believe moon+cheese who should be justifying themselves?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that it's not possible to be born one sex and realize that one is, emotionally or psychologically, the other sex. That's a completely different situation, I think, from turning over a social construct and saying, "y'know, this whole girls-wear-dresses and boys-like-baseball crap is, well, full of crap." Gender is socially constructed, and as part of society, it's not just that we can construct our own interpretation of 'gender', but that we do -- and I mean that for all of us, yes, even cis-gendered, cis-sexed, heterosexual anglo-saxon default generic person inserted here.
Self-construction is the guy who feels comfortable considering himself masculine, but who still cries when his parent dies, or gets all mushy when he adopts a puppy, or splurges on flowers just because he likes seeing his partner smile. That kind of nurturing, loving, affectionate behavior isn't usually on the broad list of masculine. Yet "protective" and "parental" (as well as "filial") are considered masculine behaviors, and who's to say that one can't be a good family man if one would cry when one's child is severely ill? Self-construction is the woman who would never doubt for a second that she's female, and feminine, but who also knows how to change a tire, can be hard-nosed at work when needed, is in charge of the family finances, and doesn't own eighty pairs of high heels: for every feminine quality one could say is deducted by these behaviors, I could name two other stereotypical 'feminine' traits that would encompass them.
We all self-construct, perhaps from the very beginning, even if we're not consciously aware of it. We pick and choose, according to our familial upbringing like parental expectations and older (or younger) sibling behaviors, according to our personalities and our growing interests, our skills and our innate talents. And sometimes, we pick and choose based with a fair dose of self-awareness -- which, in adolescent years, most often seems to be based on what we don't like.
Me, for instance, discarded a very specific set of feminine attributes my freshman year in high school, and all because of a girl with naturally curly hair.
Our crew (rowing) team was tiny, my freshman year, with about twenty-five guys and five girls. Stroke (Four-seat) was a senior, with a mannish style but sweet and soft-spoken, who always wore earrings to practice (but never makeup). Three-seat was a junior, and everyone's friend, the girl-next-door who listened to Christian music and remarkably had an on-again, off-again thing going with a senior on the team who was one of the best-looking guys in the school. (I never did figure out what she had that turned the heads, because she was all Mary Ann and no Ginger.) And then there was Two-seat, a sophomore who was, for lack of a better descriptive phrase, built like a brick shithouse. Really. The girl was stacked. The problem was that she knew it -- and with our cox busy being a punk rocker, and Stroke keeping to herself, and Three-seat already wearing someone's class ring, Two-seat had the attention of twenty-four guys -- and sometimes even the twenty-fifth who was purportedly dating Three-seat.
Now, this wasn't exactly something I was all pressed on, since the last thing on my priority list was Find A Boyfriend. I'm not saying I was a social pariah; there were several seniors that year who asked me out that year, but it always ended in disaster. Most amusing example: the one who waylaid me in the hallway between class and asked me if I wanted to go out sometime. (Talk about vague.) I managed a cheerful, if startled, reply of, "sure! any time!" -- and then I ran away. Really, really fast. (The poor guy actually chased me, so I hid in the bathroom until the bell rang. Yes, I was a dork, but I could barely interact with classmates as a person -- interacting as a sexual being was a level I just wasn't at, not yet.) I was bookish, not much with the fashion, and unaware of any reason I should care -- so, for the most part, Miss Two-Seat tossing her naturally-curly hair at the boys was something I viewed with slight amusement, when it occurred to me to even care.
There were two times, every day, though, that her head-tossing strongly-feminine-gendered behavior really got on my nerves: carrying the shell to the dock, and bringing the shell in at night.
So we're clear on what this means, with us being an entire girl's team of a coxed four, we used the team's Kaschper four-with. It was a wooden shell, not the new-fangled fiberglass (and even the then-new fiberglass is a fair bit heavier than the incredibly light shells you can get from Kaschper these days) -- so, fully rigged, the damn thing probably weighed in the neighborhood of a little over 200 pounds. Yeah, so fifty pounds per person might not sound like a lot -- especially since, by the time spring rolled around, I could leg-press double my own weight and didn't even break a sweat at the notion of a hundred pull-ups -- but you need to also be aware just how we each carried our share of fifty pounds.
TL;DR version: imagine a piece of wood only a half-inch thick, that weighs fifty pounds. Once you've managed to wrench the boat out of the water (or heft it out of the racks), you raise it over your head bring it down to rest on your shoulder. Then you walk the boat to or from the boathouse, about 150 feet, and go through the opposite maneuver -- onto the water, or into the racks.
Normally, as bow [FYI: say it like the verb 'to bow' in 'to bow to a king'], I'd be looking at three-seat's back, as starboard rowers come down on one side, and port on the other side (so you're carrying the boat opposite your own rigger). But for reasons of height, our coach had us carrying the boat out of seat order -- which put me a rigger's stretch behind Miss Two-Seat.
Being a girl with naturally curly hair, big hips, and a generous chest, who also had an eye for all the boys and a certain determination to bring all of them to her yard, this meant I would've gotten an eyeful each trip, if I'd cared. But no, I was too busy trying to think of some way to knee-cap her while not jeopardizing the team (since it wasn't like we had a replacement for any of us).
Why, you ask? Think about how a woman walks who's playing the sexualized feminine card: it's all swinging hips. Knees aren't really bent, because you want as much height as possible so that when you bring your weight down on the forward foot, the shift downwards happens in the hip rather than the knee. It's an off-balance movement, though, which means the natural instinct is to counter this by throwing weight off on the other side in an equal amount. Less abstract version: when the hip goes down one side, the opposite shoulder goes down an equal amount.
You know what that means? Every other step Miss Two-Seat took, her shoulder would drop below the gunwale's shared height -- and what had been a fifty-pound share for me suddenly became a hundred pounds as our entire side of the shell came down on my shoulder. We'd walk the boat down, and my left shoulder got pummeled; we'd walk the boat up after practice, and it was my right shoulder's turn. Every goddamn step, and there's only so much padding a sweatshirt can provide when it's that much weight shoving down on you.
I didn't actually care about her as a person, one way or another. I loathed what her behavior said to me, though: it said she was so focused on putting on as much of a sexualized show as possible for the boys that she couldn't be arsed to see how her actions were making things that much harder on the women around her. It's not like I was alone in this; my teammates each said something to her as well, when it was their turn to take the brunt of her shoulder-dipping action. Walk straighter, they'd say; stop letting the boat drop like that. She'd ignore them, and the message I got was that if I wanted to be feminine, I'd be doing so at the cost of my compatriots. To mangle Gore Vidal, it is not enough to be sexy; one must also endeavor to make other women un-sexy -- and that was a price I wasn't willing to pay.
With a bit of practice I mastered the art of walking with even shoulders -- well, basically, I studied how the guys walked and mimicked it until I had a perfectly steady gunwale. The rest of my high school career, and throughout my crew-time in college, I always ended up compensating for at least one girl on the team who'd hip-sway. The ones who adjusted their stride when called on it, I liked; the ones who couldn't see why we'd be fussed, I disliked intensely.
Incidentally, when I lived in DC, a girlfriend tried to teach me The Proper Way to Strut in Boots, but despite her best coaching, I never really got it. Even knowing I wasn't forcing someone else to take unexpected additional weight as a result of my own sexualized showing-off, I still couldn't do it without a great deal of self-consciousness. Casting it purposefully aside also made me acutely aware of how much that lazy hip-drop sway signals "available" to any onlooking men -- and that in its absence, there are very few other behaviors you can use that turn heads even half as much.
What, exactly, I learned to do as replacement is beside the point (and besides, this is enough for one night!) -- but I do find it ironic that years later, in turning this stuff over in my head, I realized that the movements I'd adapted to become my substitute 'feminine' markers were, in fact, masculine.
Imagine that -- and then you can imagine how it is that I see gender as amusing, sometimes informative, yet mostly hollow all the same. It's a whole lot of the Emperor's new (or old) gender: everyone's running around obsessed with the details, but the social construct is an illusion. For all the noise and admiration (or criticism) of the onlooking public, the joke's on them as much as it is on the person peacocked out in the gender garments. There just isn't anything there.
[later edits]
When I say "the social construct is an illusion," that doesn't mean the construct doesn't exist, only that it's a false representation of reality. Like a good trompe l'oeil, there's something there -- it's just not as solid or real as the impression you get from eyeballs alone.
When I think of social constructs, I think of Barbie -- yes, the doll. If you've ever seen the critique of Barbie's figure, you're aware it's pretty damn unrealistic, even with the slightly-thicker waistline she got in '00. Generally speaking, we can say "Barbie is a representation of X," and it's true, she is a representation -- but she's constructed as an ideal, and as such, she's freaking idealistic (and begging the question of whose ideal, anyway).
So I'm not saying that a part of one's identity as gender-defined -- that is, adhering (or not) to a set of gender ideals based on one's biological sex -- carries an automatic value judgment. Nor am I saying that it doesn't exist at all. I'm saying it's an illusion. It's a handy set of reference-points, social and cultural in origin, and since none of us want to bother with saying "a two-wheeled vehicle propelled by a combustion engine" when we could just say "motorcycle," we get used to the language of what-is-masculine and what-is-feminine.
At least with Barbie, we can say, "this is a Barbie," and there it is -- but with masculine and feminine, there isn't even a discreet thing that we can say, "here, if you're ever wondering, this is the pinnacle of this -inity" -- because one society's pinnacle is another culture's reject. That's another part of what makes these -initys illusions: they're ambiguous at the best of times, tenuous and changeable just by travelling a few hundred miles. Taking the metaphorical language of the social construct and attempting to treat it as a legitimate, separate, near-tangible (or at least somewhat immutable) thing is a fool's quest and can only end in tears.
My point isn't that gender-definitions don't exist, per se, but that cleaving to them as though they're written in stone -- and judging oneself or others by these nebulous unrealistic targets -- is just a fast-track to either shaming one's compatriots, or hating oneself for failing to meet these illusory targets. It's like beating yourself up because you can't quite seem to become a Real Barbie, and I'm saying that we need a little less drawing the lines between who's-a-Barbie and who's-a-Ken and a little more awareness that, come on, people, it's a goddamn doll. These gender definitions are a construct, and letting those constructs -- especially as damaging and sexist as they've been for so long -- define you, in toto, is taking the handy basket of culturally-grouped terminology and turning it into a ball and chain.
As for the issue of whether I should have anything to say about what a group of people prefer to call themselves, well, there's that -- but I have no issue with anyone's right to use this term or that. I'm only clarifying how this particular term has specific, additional baggage ladled onto it (although it's not like its forerunner, 'transsexual', is winning any awards in the baggage-free category). And, no surprise here, I'm once again coming to a conclusion that what we need is a better word -- because 'sex' has a concrete meaning, and there's so much good we can do (for society in general) to put a border around 'gender' as a social construct outside one's biological (physical or psychological) sex -- but that, like folks have mentioned in comments, there's a lot more going on in the situation than just those two concepts.
Like the very duality that 'transgender' is trying to bridge (or perhaps surpass), the two-point definition is limiting -- this is what my body is, and this is how society expects me to behave per the body I have. But in some ways, the terms 'transsexual' and 'transgender' both give rise in me to the same quiet critique I mentioned in re a woman with a male gender-identity but a female sex-identity: it's using the same words, the same two-way, binary system, and when youse only got two words, you're gonna be pretty limited in just how many different sentences you can create.
It was bell hooks who said the famous words that you cannot construct a new house using the master's tools, and I think the basic argument applies here, too: to be trans -- of sex or gender or sexuality -- and to maintain that binary state is to deny, in and of itself, the experience of being trans. It's accepting life in a shoebox, willfully looking away from the fact that life itself (in all its permutations) transcends the simple binary of the socially constructed shoebox. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't like the idea of anyone forced to live in a shoebox.
If I'm right, and language is the leading edge of the wave of any change -- that the words we use will quietly and subtly shift our understanding -- then, yeah, there's got to be a better word, be that for sex, or for gender, or for something that represents the unique way the two can collide in a single person.
See comments for further clarifications, since that seems easier than continuing to edit this post, when I've got the followup on the GFY trope still bubbling in my head.
Awhile back during the LLF debacle, I recall one of the earliest speakers identified herself as being transgender. While I'm vaguely aware that "transsexual" has fallen out of favor, with "transgender" replacing it, the use always throws me. Perhaps it's because I first learned the terminology in the academic world (and specifically in the study of feminist existentialism), but I've always found it handiest to use the finer granulations of the words, with 'sex' as one's biological state of two legs or three, and 'gender' being one's social construct related to that sex. In other words, one can be born male, remain male, and adopt feminine-gendered aspects into one's self while remaining cis-sexed and heterosexual, just as much as one may be born male but feel it should have been 'female', in which case one is likely to also adopt the socially constructed gender that correlates with the body's sex (be that given or taken).
Which may seem like common sense, but it's undone when I see a term like "transgender" -- because to me, with finer-tuned definitions at my fingertips, to be saying that one's sex is cis, but one's preferred social construct is non-cis. More simply, it's saying, "I'm biologically female, but I'm not feminine as this society/culture defines it."
And the problem with that is that I can only think of, uhm, maybe two or three women I've known in my entire life who could really say they fit the laundry list of all the US/Western society defines as "feminine". For that matter, I've known about the same rare number of men who could do the same on the masculinity list. Not a lot of actual, real live, honest-to-goodness people -- because frankly, those gender definitions are highly nuanced, contradictory, often ambiguous, frequently lagging compared to the real world and remarkably fluid all the same (that is, changeable via social pressures but just really slow to get around to it).
The result is that when someone says they're transgender, I don't read that as "and I'm going to have an operation to bring my biological sex in alignment with the social construct that feels 'right' to me", I read that as "I don't fit societal notions of the behaviors/beliefs most commonly associated with my sex". And that, to me, seems like such a big fat duh: because those societal notions are insane. No real person can fit into them, and no real person should be expected to have to put up the crazy-making that's the trying.
Before anyone jumps, I don't mean I dismiss in a sense of saying the person doesn't know what they're talking about, or is wrong-headed in some way. It just seems a bit redundant or obvious (especially when one's sex is not at issue); admittedly my response becomes considerably more sarcastic when the self-label is trotted out (as it was in the LLF debacle) as though it's some kind of street cred. Then I really want to snark: what do you want, a fucking cookie?
Because if you take the finer-tuned definition of gender as a social construct, to lay claim to 'transgender' or 'crossgender' means you're continuing to buy into the social construct. It's like the genderiffic version of satanism: sure, you're saying you worship the world upside-down from the mainstream, but your reverse process has, as its very root, the existence of that mainstream. You can't be a Satanist in the absence of Christianity, because you're not worshiping a distinct deity, you're worshiping the opposite of someone else's deity. To declare oneself 'transgender', then, relies on continuation of the dual-gender game: it's a definition that requires the dual-gender system exist so that you can declare yourself opposite the definition society would hand you by virtue of biology.
And I guess I see social constructs as, well, just that: constructed by people. Gender has its value (setting aside whether this is a 'good' value or 'bad' value) in that it's half of how we identify other people in the sexuality game. I'm thinking of the men I've known who were just so damn good at cross-dressing that you really couldn't identify them as biologically 'male' because the clues were hidden so well: adam's apple, a bulge at the groin, facial hair, etc. Identifying someone cross-dressing gets considerably harder when the person's made concerted study of the social constructs around 'Being a Woman' or 'Being a Man', and learned to give off the behavioral signals that mean 'feminine' or 'masculine'. It's the way a person walks, the speech one uses, even the way one reacts to, say, kittens versus violent contact sports.
When I meet friends who are working to adapt gender (usually as part of their crossover from one sex to the other), I'm reminded of meeting new immigrants to this country. The little rules we take for granted are sources of strong, sometimes near-obsessive, scrutiny and anxiety: what gift to give, how to compliment someone, how to reciprocate on overtures of friendship, even when to laugh and when to just smile. More attention is paid to language, on many levels, like careful mimicry of American accents, or noting slang that I sift through and ignore without a second thought.
That attention to the minutiae of existence is what you have to do when you lack a lifetime of acculturation -- be that of nation or of gender -- and thus are a stranger in a strange land. With gender roles being so difficult to grasp even for us born to it, I don't hold it against anyone new to the gender role working double-time to out-feminize (or out-Americanize) the natives to compensate for lacking a lifetime's firsthand experience.
Outside that exception, I've seen all sorts of self-labels, like co-gendered and cross-gendered and pan-gendered, and various other intriguing variations on a theme. I have to say I've reached a point where I just ignore all of it. It all pivots off an assumption that there are two genders, and that these social notions of feminine and masculine are immutable, or near-immutable, and thus one can 'move away' or 'bridge' them.
That would be great if you could, but what exactly are you moving away from? I'm not saying there isn't masculine, and I'm not saying there isn't feminine -- these are loosely-defined, fluid, ambiguous, hardly mutually exclusive, and often contradictory sets of behaviors and beliefs grouped under each label. They're handy in the same way that it's handy to be able to say "motorcycle" instead of "large bicycle with engine attached but not the kind you have to pedal," which would be really a mouthful and not nearly as much fun as saying you ride a Fat Boy.
It's like in identifying with a gender (or a reverse gender), you're saying, "and I also believe the moon is not made of cheese." That illustration is silly, but it does capture the sense of the ridiculous -- maybe even a bit of the absurd -- that I can feel bubbling up when someone self-labels as one gender or the other, regardless of biological sex. Because the moon is not made of green cheese, so why should the people with the good sense to realize this have to waste the breath to clarify? Isn't it the ones running around who continue to believe moon+cheese who should be justifying themselves?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that it's not possible to be born one sex and realize that one is, emotionally or psychologically, the other sex. That's a completely different situation, I think, from turning over a social construct and saying, "y'know, this whole girls-wear-dresses and boys-like-baseball crap is, well, full of crap." Gender is socially constructed, and as part of society, it's not just that we can construct our own interpretation of 'gender', but that we do -- and I mean that for all of us, yes, even cis-gendered, cis-sexed, heterosexual anglo-saxon default generic person inserted here.
Self-construction is the guy who feels comfortable considering himself masculine, but who still cries when his parent dies, or gets all mushy when he adopts a puppy, or splurges on flowers just because he likes seeing his partner smile. That kind of nurturing, loving, affectionate behavior isn't usually on the broad list of masculine. Yet "protective" and "parental" (as well as "filial") are considered masculine behaviors, and who's to say that one can't be a good family man if one would cry when one's child is severely ill? Self-construction is the woman who would never doubt for a second that she's female, and feminine, but who also knows how to change a tire, can be hard-nosed at work when needed, is in charge of the family finances, and doesn't own eighty pairs of high heels: for every feminine quality one could say is deducted by these behaviors, I could name two other stereotypical 'feminine' traits that would encompass them.
We all self-construct, perhaps from the very beginning, even if we're not consciously aware of it. We pick and choose, according to our familial upbringing like parental expectations and older (or younger) sibling behaviors, according to our personalities and our growing interests, our skills and our innate talents. And sometimes, we pick and choose based with a fair dose of self-awareness -- which, in adolescent years, most often seems to be based on what we don't like.
Me, for instance, discarded a very specific set of feminine attributes my freshman year in high school, and all because of a girl with naturally curly hair.
Our crew (rowing) team was tiny, my freshman year, with about twenty-five guys and five girls. Stroke (Four-seat) was a senior, with a mannish style but sweet and soft-spoken, who always wore earrings to practice (but never makeup). Three-seat was a junior, and everyone's friend, the girl-next-door who listened to Christian music and remarkably had an on-again, off-again thing going with a senior on the team who was one of the best-looking guys in the school. (I never did figure out what she had that turned the heads, because she was all Mary Ann and no Ginger.) And then there was Two-seat, a sophomore who was, for lack of a better descriptive phrase, built like a brick shithouse. Really. The girl was stacked. The problem was that she knew it -- and with our cox busy being a punk rocker, and Stroke keeping to herself, and Three-seat already wearing someone's class ring, Two-seat had the attention of twenty-four guys -- and sometimes even the twenty-fifth who was purportedly dating Three-seat.
Now, this wasn't exactly something I was all pressed on, since the last thing on my priority list was Find A Boyfriend. I'm not saying I was a social pariah; there were several seniors that year who asked me out that year, but it always ended in disaster. Most amusing example: the one who waylaid me in the hallway between class and asked me if I wanted to go out sometime. (Talk about vague.) I managed a cheerful, if startled, reply of, "sure! any time!" -- and then I ran away. Really, really fast. (The poor guy actually chased me, so I hid in the bathroom until the bell rang. Yes, I was a dork, but I could barely interact with classmates as a person -- interacting as a sexual being was a level I just wasn't at, not yet.) I was bookish, not much with the fashion, and unaware of any reason I should care -- so, for the most part, Miss Two-Seat tossing her naturally-curly hair at the boys was something I viewed with slight amusement, when it occurred to me to even care.
There were two times, every day, though, that her head-tossing strongly-feminine-gendered behavior really got on my nerves: carrying the shell to the dock, and bringing the shell in at night.
So we're clear on what this means, with us being an entire girl's team of a coxed four, we used the team's Kaschper four-with. It was a wooden shell, not the new-fangled fiberglass (and even the then-new fiberglass is a fair bit heavier than the incredibly light shells you can get from Kaschper these days) -- so, fully rigged, the damn thing probably weighed in the neighborhood of a little over 200 pounds. Yeah, so fifty pounds per person might not sound like a lot -- especially since, by the time spring rolled around, I could leg-press double my own weight and didn't even break a sweat at the notion of a hundred pull-ups -- but you need to also be aware just how we each carried our share of fifty pounds.
TL;DR version: imagine a piece of wood only a half-inch thick, that weighs fifty pounds. Once you've managed to wrench the boat out of the water (or heft it out of the racks), you raise it over your head bring it down to rest on your shoulder. Then you walk the boat to or from the boathouse, about 150 feet, and go through the opposite maneuver -- onto the water, or into the racks.
Normally, as bow [FYI: say it like the verb 'to bow' in 'to bow to a king'], I'd be looking at three-seat's back, as starboard rowers come down on one side, and port on the other side (so you're carrying the boat opposite your own rigger). But for reasons of height, our coach had us carrying the boat out of seat order -- which put me a rigger's stretch behind Miss Two-Seat.
Being a girl with naturally curly hair, big hips, and a generous chest, who also had an eye for all the boys and a certain determination to bring all of them to her yard, this meant I would've gotten an eyeful each trip, if I'd cared. But no, I was too busy trying to think of some way to knee-cap her while not jeopardizing the team (since it wasn't like we had a replacement for any of us).
Why, you ask? Think about how a woman walks who's playing the sexualized feminine card: it's all swinging hips. Knees aren't really bent, because you want as much height as possible so that when you bring your weight down on the forward foot, the shift downwards happens in the hip rather than the knee. It's an off-balance movement, though, which means the natural instinct is to counter this by throwing weight off on the other side in an equal amount. Less abstract version: when the hip goes down one side, the opposite shoulder goes down an equal amount.
You know what that means? Every other step Miss Two-Seat took, her shoulder would drop below the gunwale's shared height -- and what had been a fifty-pound share for me suddenly became a hundred pounds as our entire side of the shell came down on my shoulder. We'd walk the boat down, and my left shoulder got pummeled; we'd walk the boat up after practice, and it was my right shoulder's turn. Every goddamn step, and there's only so much padding a sweatshirt can provide when it's that much weight shoving down on you.
I didn't actually care about her as a person, one way or another. I loathed what her behavior said to me, though: it said she was so focused on putting on as much of a sexualized show as possible for the boys that she couldn't be arsed to see how her actions were making things that much harder on the women around her. It's not like I was alone in this; my teammates each said something to her as well, when it was their turn to take the brunt of her shoulder-dipping action. Walk straighter, they'd say; stop letting the boat drop like that. She'd ignore them, and the message I got was that if I wanted to be feminine, I'd be doing so at the cost of my compatriots. To mangle Gore Vidal, it is not enough to be sexy; one must also endeavor to make other women un-sexy -- and that was a price I wasn't willing to pay.
With a bit of practice I mastered the art of walking with even shoulders -- well, basically, I studied how the guys walked and mimicked it until I had a perfectly steady gunwale. The rest of my high school career, and throughout my crew-time in college, I always ended up compensating for at least one girl on the team who'd hip-sway. The ones who adjusted their stride when called on it, I liked; the ones who couldn't see why we'd be fussed, I disliked intensely.
Incidentally, when I lived in DC, a girlfriend tried to teach me The Proper Way to Strut in Boots, but despite her best coaching, I never really got it. Even knowing I wasn't forcing someone else to take unexpected additional weight as a result of my own sexualized showing-off, I still couldn't do it without a great deal of self-consciousness. Casting it purposefully aside also made me acutely aware of how much that lazy hip-drop sway signals "available" to any onlooking men -- and that in its absence, there are very few other behaviors you can use that turn heads even half as much.
What, exactly, I learned to do as replacement is beside the point (and besides, this is enough for one night!) -- but I do find it ironic that years later, in turning this stuff over in my head, I realized that the movements I'd adapted to become my substitute 'feminine' markers were, in fact, masculine.
Imagine that -- and then you can imagine how it is that I see gender as amusing, sometimes informative, yet mostly hollow all the same. It's a whole lot of the Emperor's new (or old) gender: everyone's running around obsessed with the details, but the social construct is an illusion. For all the noise and admiration (or criticism) of the onlooking public, the joke's on them as much as it is on the person peacocked out in the gender garments. There just isn't anything there.
[later edits]
When I say "the social construct is an illusion," that doesn't mean the construct doesn't exist, only that it's a false representation of reality. Like a good trompe l'oeil, there's something there -- it's just not as solid or real as the impression you get from eyeballs alone.
When I think of social constructs, I think of Barbie -- yes, the doll. If you've ever seen the critique of Barbie's figure, you're aware it's pretty damn unrealistic, even with the slightly-thicker waistline she got in '00. Generally speaking, we can say "Barbie is a representation of X," and it's true, she is a representation -- but she's constructed as an ideal, and as such, she's freaking idealistic (and begging the question of whose ideal, anyway).
So I'm not saying that a part of one's identity as gender-defined -- that is, adhering (or not) to a set of gender ideals based on one's biological sex -- carries an automatic value judgment. Nor am I saying that it doesn't exist at all. I'm saying it's an illusion. It's a handy set of reference-points, social and cultural in origin, and since none of us want to bother with saying "a two-wheeled vehicle propelled by a combustion engine" when we could just say "motorcycle," we get used to the language of what-is-masculine and what-is-feminine.
At least with Barbie, we can say, "this is a Barbie," and there it is -- but with masculine and feminine, there isn't even a discreet thing that we can say, "here, if you're ever wondering, this is the pinnacle of this -inity" -- because one society's pinnacle is another culture's reject. That's another part of what makes these -initys illusions: they're ambiguous at the best of times, tenuous and changeable just by travelling a few hundred miles. Taking the metaphorical language of the social construct and attempting to treat it as a legitimate, separate, near-tangible (or at least somewhat immutable) thing is a fool's quest and can only end in tears.
My point isn't that gender-definitions don't exist, per se, but that cleaving to them as though they're written in stone -- and judging oneself or others by these nebulous unrealistic targets -- is just a fast-track to either shaming one's compatriots, or hating oneself for failing to meet these illusory targets. It's like beating yourself up because you can't quite seem to become a Real Barbie, and I'm saying that we need a little less drawing the lines between who's-a-Barbie and who's-a-Ken and a little more awareness that, come on, people, it's a goddamn doll. These gender definitions are a construct, and letting those constructs -- especially as damaging and sexist as they've been for so long -- define you, in toto, is taking the handy basket of culturally-grouped terminology and turning it into a ball and chain.
As for the issue of whether I should have anything to say about what a group of people prefer to call themselves, well, there's that -- but I have no issue with anyone's right to use this term or that. I'm only clarifying how this particular term has specific, additional baggage ladled onto it (although it's not like its forerunner, 'transsexual', is winning any awards in the baggage-free category). And, no surprise here, I'm once again coming to a conclusion that what we need is a better word -- because 'sex' has a concrete meaning, and there's so much good we can do (for society in general) to put a border around 'gender' as a social construct outside one's biological (physical or psychological) sex -- but that, like folks have mentioned in comments, there's a lot more going on in the situation than just those two concepts.
Like the very duality that 'transgender' is trying to bridge (or perhaps surpass), the two-point definition is limiting -- this is what my body is, and this is how society expects me to behave per the body I have. But in some ways, the terms 'transsexual' and 'transgender' both give rise in me to the same quiet critique I mentioned in re a woman with a male gender-identity but a female sex-identity: it's using the same words, the same two-way, binary system, and when youse only got two words, you're gonna be pretty limited in just how many different sentences you can create.
It was bell hooks who said the famous words that you cannot construct a new house using the master's tools, and I think the basic argument applies here, too: to be trans -- of sex or gender or sexuality -- and to maintain that binary state is to deny, in and of itself, the experience of being trans. It's accepting life in a shoebox, willfully looking away from the fact that life itself (in all its permutations) transcends the simple binary of the socially constructed shoebox. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't like the idea of anyone forced to live in a shoebox.
If I'm right, and language is the leading edge of the wave of any change -- that the words we use will quietly and subtly shift our understanding -- then, yeah, there's got to be a better word, be that for sex, or for gender, or for something that represents the unique way the two can collide in a single person.
See comments for further clarifications, since that seems easier than continuing to edit this post, when I've got the followup on the GFY trope still bubbling in my head.
no subject
Date: 5 Mar 2010 09:04 pm (UTC)I hope you don’t mind me throwing in my two cents as someone who identifies as genderqueer but who agrees entirely with your post re: gender as a social construct.
Semantic messiness seems to be a plague on gender/sex discussions in general – transsexual vs. transgender aside (which at least has a useful social function in defining those who intend to surgically alter their bodies and those who don’t), there’s a very harmful tendency to confuse sex, gender, and gendered behaviors. If gendered behaviors were gender, as some seem to take them as, everyone would be crossgender (or whatever term they preferred); which rather muddies the waters for those who experience their sex as dissonant but nonbinary, like myself, and thus want to label our genders – the social category based upon physical sex – as non-cis but also non-trans.
... In fact, now that you make the semantic issue explicit, I’m wondering if I really shouldn’t identify myself as “sexqueer”. Hmmm. Except that sounds like something the handkerchief code has a color for, eheh.
no subject
Date: 5 Mar 2010 09:21 pm (UTC)If gendered behaviors were gender...
The thing is, when you start deconstructing "what is femininity" and "what is masculinity", what you end up with is a pile of, well, behaviors. There are simply too many variations on physical theme for one to say that "broad shoulders makes one masculine" or "having large breasts means you're feminine" -- so in practical application, it's behaviors and modes of being. Being "feminine" means wearing dresses, or liking makeup, or owning way too many shoes; it means speaking softly, being complimented when a man asks you out even if he is a jerk, wanting to have babies, wanting to get married, not wanting to crush all one's coworkers in a single blow... and so on.
Actually, come to think of it, that stupid book "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" was one of the hallmarks in my attitudes towards the so-called gender divide and the social behaviors. A friend had picked the book up and was devouring it, telling me repeatedly that it explained everything about her communication difficulties with her husband. Being polite (and baffled), I asked, and she regaled me with things from the lists -- what men do vs what women do. Every single bleeding example she gave me of "what men do", I also do. Every single bleeding example of "what women do" prompted a reaction from me of, "I'd freaking shoot myself before I pulled that shit." Even on the stupid things, like asking for directions -- I don't -- and liking fast cars and power tools -- I do -- or enjoying wearing pretty clothes -- I could care less -- or having a natural affinity for caring for babies -- like hell.
I ended up sitting there saying, "what, does this mean I'm secretly a guy? what the hell? the fact that I do everything that's on the From-Mars list doesn't make me less of who I am, biologically, and do I want to be reduced to nothing more than biology, anyway? Does anyone? who wrote this crap?"
Which is also the source of my oft-repeated phrase that I'm secretly a boy. Not because I dislike or don't feel comfortable in my own skin -- I do, even if I get annoyed at not being as strong or sturdy as I once was -- but because in terms of gender, I fall hard on the Mars side, and tend to look at the Venus side totally askance, the majority of the time. Yet I wouldn't say I'm masculine, nor would I say I'm non-feminine. Mostly I just skip that question altogether and consider it irrelevant.
(Oh, and I never mind two cents, especially when it's well-argued and civil. Hell, I welcome five cents and even ten cents, if you're ever that inspired. Discourse is good!)
no subject
Date: 5 Mar 2010 11:00 pm (UTC)But! I feel as if there’s a difference between how the word “gender” would be used in a feminist conversation vs. a trans/genderqueer one.
Given that there are people who feel uncomfortable with their sex (whether for biological, psychological, or socially-driven reasons), and given that there needs to be a term for “the sex I feel myself to have regardless of my biological sex”, I think that the term “gender” can be useful – and, further, only has value so long as it is not assumed to predict behavior. I’d personally separate “one’s sense of sex” and “one’s sense of how to behave as it is informed by gendered expectations, one’s sense of sex, and one’s decisions to ignore or accept these things” into two separate boxes, and I think one of the huge flaws in trans discussions is that these two things are not kept separate.
Of course, that separation is much easier to do so long as we are talking about a sex binary, in which there are males and females (and men and woman who might fit into either of those biological boxes); I think your issue is with crossgender/genderqueer/etc. people, though, who feel they fall between the sexes?
I am, in fact, puzzled and uncomfortable with those who label themselves as crossgender or genderqueer or transgender but don’t have issue with their biological sex – because that does grant gender-as-gendered-behavior an existence that is harmful. No woman should have to claim genderqueerness to like power tools; on the other side of the coin, a genderqueer female person shouldn’t feel obligated to like them, either.
(Thank you for providing the opportunity to have civil discourse! But wow, do I ever need to brush up on my conversational skills; to clarify, because I don't think I'm managing my tone perfectly, here: I don't think there's anything like The Truth in this particular discussion, where it's all social constructions and subjective experience. Just differing experiences of those social constructs.)
no subject
Date: 6 Mar 2010 12:15 am (UTC)yes, and thank you-- this is what I am seeing here.
no subject
Date: 6 Mar 2010 12:32 am (UTC)Shorter version, though: yes, we have 'sex' for biology, and 'gender' for behavior, which is a useful dissection when you're trying to deconstruct where one begins and the other ends, and how they impact each other. What those two words cannot do, however, is capture the unique state that results where sex and gender meet in a person (as I just said in the big honking edited-added part, but I'm used to repeating myself).
I'm pretty presumptuous (on bad days, just plain ornery), so I've no problem carrying that forth and saying that this third word would be one that represents our point where the x-axis of 'sex' meets the y-axis of 'gender'.
no subject
Date: 6 Mar 2010 02:22 am (UTC)Also, a million times "yes" to the cake-baking analogy and the need for a thorough raking-over of our current modes of thought and the language we use in talking about sex, gender, and their meeting point (the sexus? eheh). In my experience, even where some attempt has been made towards a critical examination of the issue, it’s still like cooking in someone else’s kitchen.
no subject
Date: 6 Mar 2010 05:27 am (UTC)I wasn't aware the issues aren't separate, which is why I've been continually confused by the 'transgender' label -- because for a long time, I thought it was in distinction to being 'transexual', and just couldn't grasp why anyone would bother. I mean, it's behaviors. It's not at all at the level of changing one's sex.
Of course, that separation is much easier to do so long as we are talking about a sex binary...
But is that really true? I mean, if we say "sex" and we mean it as "the state of your biology" then wouldn't we already have a non-binary system anyway? I mean, it kinda raises the question of how we define what qualifies as a "sex". If you have an extra chromosone? If you were born with rudimentary organs of the opposite sex? It's already a messy question, if you really deconstruct it under society's simplistic answers, which are usually for the sake of not having to see the messiness underneath -- but that's why we have philosophers and artists, to ask the messy questions anyway.
Anyway, snark about artists aside, I can see that the mainstream western culture presumes "male or female," but this isn't true for all cultures, nor, I would argue, is it a biological truth. So I guess I fail to see the good in going along with societal simplifications that it's just a shoebox when that shoebox, in other lights, is an entire mansion. Although perhaps this may be segueing into the whole 'take-back-the-words' kind of thing that it seems every subculture goes through at some point, in some way.
I am, in fact, puzzled and uncomfortable with those who label themselves as crossgender or genderqueer or transgender but don’t have issue with their biological sex – because that does grant gender-as-gendered-behavior an existence that is harmful.
I actually find it duplicitous, depending on the use or apparent intent. I have that reaction (and it is partially what prompted this post in the first place) when it feels like the person is claiming cross-gender (but without cross-sex issue) for the sake of saying they're equally oppressed. I try to be supportive (or at least refrain from bursting out in mocking laughter on the person's journal), but come on. The fact that you prefer to wear jeans and know how to change a tire may make you unconventional in your femininity per the more narrow-minded among our culture, but it does not freaking make you an object of oppression. Maybe sometimes a bit of pressure to be less mechanically-inclined, but that's just not the same at all as someone living in a skin that doesn't fit them, and I resent anyone who tries to play on my sympathies as though the two were equivalent.
[And when I feel very snarky, I want to say: yes, and last week I went to the drug store and they had NO ORANGE FINGERNAIL POLISH. They're discriminating against redheads who can't wear pink tones. BAHSTAHDS! I'M BEING OPPRESSED! ...because that's about as seriously as I can take the claim when my spidey sense tells me someone's jerking my chain solely for the purposes of winning a spot in the oppression olympics.]
no subject
Date: 6 Mar 2010 06:01 am (UTC)Nope, it’s not, which is what I meant – that is, when I said "if we're talking about a sex binary", the "we" was "mainstream culture" and the "ease" was in conceptualizing trans experience from a cis (gender and sex) perspective; I wasn’t sure if you were simplifying past intersexed individuals and non-Western views of gender, and was trying to get a feel for where you were taking issue with the transgender label. I think we might have been having two different conversations – yours about terminology, and mine about experience (and you are clearly not taking issue with experience, as seen re: dharma_slut).
no subject
Date: 6 Mar 2010 06:36 am (UTC)hah! I went into that entire answer because I was thinking, hmm, what if this person hasn't gotten past the only-two-sexes into seeing the whole scope of human behavior?
ehehe, no, I think we're on the same page now, or pretty close.
no subject
Date: 8 Mar 2010 08:53 am (UTC)I'm pretty stereotypically girly, but at 18 I used to really notice the way /Cleo/ and /Cosmo/ both seemed to think I was a guy -- not in look, but in relationship behaviour. The idea that women might find long-term commitment scary just seemed completely out of their world-views.
no subject
Date: 8 Mar 2010 08:56 am (UTC)I hated that assumption. I still hate that assumption. Then again, I'm still kinda baffled as to the fact that I'm actually in a long-term commitment. Still not exactly sure how that happened...
no subject
Date: 8 Mar 2010 09:27 pm (UTC)The only bit of that I ever really saw as a goal was the enormous party and the pretty dress, which I didn't really see as relating to the marriage bit too closely anyway. (My theory was that when I hit 30 single I'd have a 'wedding' party for myself where I got to wear a ball gown and had a huge formal dinner event with speeches.) But I found myself in a permanent relationship, and we wanted somewhere to live that we could alter to suit what we wanted, and I really didn't like the idea of growing old without people round who understood my family culture (that one's a bit of a long shot, I know, since there's no guarantee that having kids will ensure it -- it's just that not having them kind of ensures I won't get it).
What has always bugged me is the idea that 'this goes with that'. I've always been drawn to the bits of 'femininity' that were actions, rather than inactions (dressing up and painting the skin, dancing, singing, pretty accessories, and so on), but I've also always felt insecure in my identification as 'female' because I'm not very good at the bits where one *doesn't* do things because one's female. I talk a lot (which, contrary to popular culture, is a thing men tend to do more than women in our society), I read sci-fi and comics, I like combat sports more than other sports (fencing, judo, and kung fu), and so on.
My partner has made a couple of posts in his blog recently that really rocked me. I hadn't realised how much my self-image has been limited by this issue really until I read his post about our daughter being called a tomboy at her preschool.
I was initially pleased, because 'tomboy' to me (and from what I can tell, to the teacher) meant 'girl who has social approval for being strong, healthy, and active', which is something I want for my child. He saw it as a suggestion that she wasn't a normal girl and therefore needed a label to explain her oddness, and his post held me up as a model -- a woman who sees being herself as normal behaviour for her gender, including being strong, healthy, and active. I wish I did.
I'm glad I'm co-parenting with someone who honestly believes that if a girl does something happy and healthy, then it's good, *girlish* behaviour, whether that's fighting her cousin with a light-sabre or playing tea-parties.
I think the thing with white picket fences and so on is that they get treated like signs of success, which suggests gender is a competition.