As a foreword, to make sure folks know where I’m coming from here: I’m a steadfast feminist and have been for many years. I consider it self-evident that the gender system is complex, cutting in multiple directions and intersecting with racism, classism, ablism, heterosexism, and other oppressions. I think it’s clear that the gender system is one of male dominance; I think it’s equally clear that men, like women, are profoundly damaged by it, that this arrangement is good for no one (that is to say, that we would all be much better off with open, egalitarian gender).

Also, if you are reading this as a gender-conforming person, and you think I’m making no sense, please consider that some parts of the gender system may not be apparent to you, in the same way that white people (like myself) sometimes say, in sincere but nonetheless damaging ignorance, that they “don’t see color.”

Introduction

Since I started getting heavily involved in feminism, I’ve had many different takes on gender and sexism. I’ve felt, at different times and to varying degrees, that gender itself is the problem — that this whole business of differentiating between men and women, between femininity and masculinity, is, at best, unnecessary, and at worst, catastrophically damaging. I no longer feel this way. While sexism and oppression are poisons to human happiness, I’ve come to see gender as a critically important part of identity and culture.

I do not know anyone to whom her gender is not a significant, meaningful part of how she sees herself. What that gender is varies widely, from masculine men and feminine women, to masculine women and feminine men, to something in between, to something that changes, to something outside of that, and more. Regardless of what someone’s gender identity is, regardless of whether it conforms to the dominant culture or not, people seem to strongly identify with their own. Gender is a very significant part of most of our senses of self — even those of us who are feminists or otherwise anti-sexism, and/or who don’t fit well into the gender system.

If you’ve ever had someone misread your gender, you probably have a very strong sense of what I’m talking about here. I’m a lesbian, the kind people can spot, and, as a I recently explained here (and do read that post; it’s very much relevant to this one), I sometimes feel like I’m lost in a quagmire between typical feminine presentation and identity and butch presentation and identity. I’m not butch, but I often don’t feel like a “real” girl, and I’ve sometimes had people tell me as much. I’m very happy being female and being read as female, but my queer identity is also very important to me. This ambiguity makes for a lot of misreading, which seems to scatter about equally between people misreading me as butch and people misreading me as straight and/or (for lack of a better word) femme. (Apologies for conflating gender and sexual orientation… They are, of course, often intertwined.) When this happens, in either direction, my heart sinks: I feel like I’ve failed at gender presentation. If it happens intensely, I start to feel sick, and start experiencing something like dysphoria. I get dizzy and nauseated, and begin to panic, losing my grip on my sense of self. “Who am I? Where am I?”

It’s an awful, awful feeling to have someone misunderstand your gender. So, I think that people all over and outside of the gender spectrum need cultural acknowledgment of their genders — not just tolerance, but recognition and affirmation. With this in mind, it is my sense that we can make a bigger, better impact on sexism and gender-based oppression by proactively creating more options, more gender designations, and working to make those accepted, than we can by only trying to tear down gender as it currently exists. A truly just gender culture is not a culture without gender, but a culture with respectful and non-coercive gender.

So, what would a just gender culture look like? What would it mean to have gender without gender oppression?

A Just Gender Culture Has More Than Two Boxes

Thanks to generations of work by feminists, womanists, and queer rights activists of every stripe, gender has opened greatly here in the US and in many other places. At a fundamental level, though, I think that our society still largely assumes that everyone does (or should) fit into two very narrow categories: male-assigned at birth/man/masculine/attracted to women (the culture conflates all these things) and female assigned at birth/woman/feminine/attracted to men. (Male-assigned at birth = MAAB; female-assigned at birth = FAAB). People get punished for any variance from those categories.

We are starting to have some real room for a few more options, for example, MAAB/man/masculine/attracted to men, FAAB/woman/masculine/attracted to women, and FAAB/woman/feminine/attracted to men and women — that is, for non-heterosexual people, whose gender may or may not deviate from the two categories above. We’re also starting to have room for transsexual people, for example, MAAB/woman/feminine/attracted to men.

One commonality between these alternative gender packages, which are slowly gaining varying degrees of social acceptance, is that they have one, maybe two deviations from the starting categories. I’d like to see social space for every possible combination, and for combinations that can’t be rendered in that simplifying framework. I think a lot of people — me for one — would find themselves writing “in between,” “both,” or “neither” for one or more of those fields, which is a sign that that tool is inadequate.

A just gender culture would need an absolute minimum of five categories: masculine man, masculine woman, feminine man, feminine woman, and people who don’t identify as women or men, with sexual orientation completely divorced from those categories (so, for example, it would seem normal for a feminine man to be hetero-, homo- or bisexual), and with broad respect for trans people (so, for example, a trans man would be as accepted as a man as a cis man). Some other very important categories would be ones for people who don’t identify as women or men but who are feminine or masculine, and for women and men who are genderqueer, gender neutral, in between, or something else.

I should say at this point that I think “masculine” and “feminine” are basically subjective, cultural things. I do think humans probably want/need to have some sense of “masculinity” and “femininity” (since most people feel like either women or men, and as I said earlier, feel that that is an important and meaningful part of their identity), but I think there’s a big range in terms of what a given culture codes as one or the other. The existence of some observable differences between women and men (that are probably biological in origin) at the large scale doesn’t negate this. (And, about that, I should say that, obviously, the fact that women are X% more likely to display trait Y is totally meaningless when you’re dealing with an individual woman who doesn’t display Y; that’s why we need more gender categories.)

What I’m talking about is divorcing all those things the culture conflates — sex assigned at birth with gender identity with gender presentation with sexual orientation — so that people can recombine them in whatever way fits. I’d also like to see all those categories nuanced and broadened, and the option to leave out axes and/or add new ones. I do think it would work best to have boxes — that is, understood roles, the kind that get their own noun, for people to select and reject. This is because of what I said earlier about people needing more than tolerance; gender is so important that people need outright affirmation. I mentioned earlier the experience of having one’s gender misunderstood or undermined — having one’s gender actively comprehended and embraced is a really powerful experience, too. As someone who’s gender is often misconstrued, it is not an exaggeration to say that some of the happiest moments of my life are those in which I felt my community and my peers really saw, understood, and accepted my gender. It makes me really sad to think about how rare those moments are, and about how much rarer they are for many other people.

A Just Gender Culture Is Non-Hierarchical

Another critically important piece is, of course, that all genders are valued equally. A just gender culture doesn’t connect gender to power or to inherent worth as a human; a just gender culture respects and values all permutations of gender and all sexualities.* This means that women and men are respected equally, and so are people who don’t fit into either of those groups. It means that the identities of trans people are considered just as valid as the identities of cissexual people.

Creating more boxes — more gender designations — is useless if they’re not respectful. So the work of combatting sexism, misogyny, misandry,** heterosexism and transphobia is equally important. And there is, of course, a lot of badly needed reform of the gender categories we already have.

A Just Gender Culture Is Meaningful Without Being Sexist

This is, by far, the trickiest item. Obviously, there needs to be a cultural sense of what “masculine” and “feminine” mean in order for gender to play its role as an important part of identity — that is, gender has to be meaningful. But, in order to be just, it also can’t be overly narrow or constricting, nor can it be unfair — it wouldn’t be just, obviously, if femininity were defined as “goodness” and masculinity as “evilness.” It would be unjust to define one as “strength” across the board, and the other as “weakness,” or to have one signify righteousness and the other sin.

I think this part of the equation is one to be undertaken at the smallest scale, as we each ponder what it means for us personally to feel feminine or masculine, to be whatever gender we are, to inhabit the identity we do. If we do this with an eye toward fairness and compassion, and with a resolute rejection of misogyny, misandry, and all gender oppression, I’m sure we will develop many beautiful ways of being who we are. And in conversations with our communities, we can compare ideas and experiences, validate and acknowledge one another, and build alternatives within our own (sub-)cultures.

This is, of course, something that many queer people are already doing and have been doing for a long a time. I strongly believe, though, that it’s an important task for all of us to undertake. Whether we feel comfortable in the dominant gender system or not (and I think we all feel both comfortable and uneasy in some ways), it’s an incredibly damaging system. People suffer and suffocate in here. People do terrible violence to themselves and others. We all have a stake in this. A lot of real change could come as a result of straight, gender-conforming cissexual folks seriously thinking about what gender means to them, embracing the parts that work and rejecting those that don’t, and, perhaps most important having the conversation — participating in the dialogue about the ways in which our gender system fails and succeeds, and in the process of imagining new possibilities.

Conclusion

Finally, in order to have a healthy gender ecosystem, we need rich, thriving gender biodiviersity.

These ideas are new for me (though certainly not for everyone); I’m still at the phase of exploring and figuring things out, so I hope that you — my fellow fighters against gender oppression — will join me in testing these waters. I’d love to hear other takes on what a just gender culture would look like, and what gender means to you.

* Referring, of course, only to sexualities that involve consensual acts between adults.

** A note about my use of the word misandry: unlike some other folks, I do think misandry very much exists in our culture. However, I hope it’s clear that I, as a hairy-legged dyke, don’t buy into the “man hating feminist” trope; there are some misandrist feminist out there (feminists are people, too — people raised in a sexist culture), but the vast majority of man-hating comes from the dominant culture and gender traditionalists.

Posted under Culture, Sexuality