Drawing Gender Lines

After years of frustration as I think of gender, modes of gender definition, and how the modes interact, I think I may finally have come to some conclusions and I hope that if you read what I think I think, you'll be patient and keep my purpose in mind, which is to arrive at a "working" truth - a paradigm by which I can have and spread peace.

I have encountered three modes of gender definition, and it isn't always easy to tell them apart. The first mode is the common-culture mode I encountered in public school that divides maturing children carefully into "male" and "female," prescribing and attributing behaviors to each, and punishing transgression with bullying, and descriptors like "tomboy" and "sissy." The policing of gendered behaviors continues for most people well into adulthood, and these divisions can sometimes seem arbitrary when you stand on the wrong side of them (a man who likes the convenience of carrying a handbag, for instance, or a woman who adjusts herself in public). This mode of gender division seems more and more cultural and therefore arbitrary, especially as its proponents become more insistent that women should act and dress like "women" and men should act and dress like "men."

But it's the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, which is begging the question. The logic of this mode builds on itself, and lacks any consistent foundation. Clothes do not make gender, and cross-cultural studies prove that. Genders in all cultures may constantly differ from each other in clothing styles, but which gender wears dresses, which wears makeup, and which wears high heeled shoes has changed from era to era, and from people to people. This kind of gender mode is a culture-specific performance connected, I suspect, to mating and marriage customs. Identifying your gender is an important part of attracting the appropriate gender for your marriage customs.

The second mode I encountered was contextualized as a reaction to the first, and often sets itself up in opposition to it, which risks collapse because the first mode had no foundation. The second mode recognizes the arbitrary nature of defining gender by its cultural self, and turns to reason instead. It finds that while culture generally only accepts two genders, exceptions exist, biologically and psychologically. Bodies are born genderless, or with multiple genders. Human chromosomes are not universally either XY or XX, and exceptions cast doubt on binary division. In other species, gender is fluid. Frog populations change gender to optimize reproduction, and there are differences between what gender one "feels" and what your body says about you. Posthuman body modification reduces the power of the body in the mind/body/culture dynamic, allowing a person to change xyr body for any number of reasons, including bringing it into alignment with psychological or cultural identity. This does not as yet, but may certainly in the near future, include changes in the binary structure of reproductive biology.

Gender Studies fields may not tell this story of themselves, but it's one way of thinking about how they reached their conclusion, which was that gender is not a simple male/female binary, but a complex constellation of sliding scales of behavior, performance, attraction, and biological and psychological identity. And yet these sliding scales still rely on cultural definitions of gendered behavior, because that has become the only language of gender. A person may perform masculinity, feel female, be attracted to performed femininity but in a biological male, and what does any of that have to do with anything? And how much of it is influenced by inter-gender politics - the way that a gender is default or not-the-default? Powerful or subordinate? It still uses the language and cultural definitions of binary gender identity. Language also moves toward the gender spectrum.

The third mode is one I have struggled to locate through the politics of the second mode, and the fundamental omnipresence of the first. My religion and beliefs define gender as an essential part of divine and eternal human identity, and acknowledge only binary gender when viewing the eternal journey/progression of the human soul. If gender is Essential, then how does difference manifest? How reliable an indicator is biology? These questions have beset me for years, and I search scripture and experience for answers. And I'm running out of room in this post.

Drawing Gender Lines, part II: The Gendered Soul will be forthcoming.