Tag: gender

Gender and philosophy

Although I’m not a philosopher, I was trained in philosophy. So when I hear arguments, I tend to want to ask some questions about any given argument. What’s the origin of this argument — is it a perennial argument, or did it begin at some point in time? What’s the purpose of this argument? Since most arguments do not reduce to Boolean logic, what are some of the diverse positions taken in this argument?

Currently, there are arguments in pop culture about sex and gender. Pop culture usually reduces these arguments to a simple binary: traditionalists vs. progressives. But even a cursory examination shows that the so-called “progressive” camp includes a diversity of opinions.

I found a useful essay that surveys these diverse opinions on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender” by Mari Mikkola (18 Jan 2022 revision) gives a summary of some of the more prominent issues.

Especially useful are the tidbits of intellectual history scattered through this essay. Take, for example, the origin of the current distinction between sex and gender, which dates only to the 1960s:

“…Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match. Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable….” [Section 1.2]

So “gender” is a relatively recent concept. But our concept of “sex” is also fairly recent:

“…Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly [sic], those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context…. It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism.” [Section 3.2; emphasis is mine]

Thus, our current understanding of “biological sex” is not an ageless, universal concept. To use Theodore Parker’s terminology, “sex” and “gender,” then, are transient concepts rather than permanent concepts. All this is useful to know when someone tells you, with great sincerity, that a certain definition of “sex” or “gender” is the one true and correct definition. That may be true at this moment, but it was not necessarily true in the past, and it won’t necessarily be true in the future.

None of this should distract us from the very real injustices that stem from widely-held concepts of “sex” and “gender.” But this may helps explain why we humans seem to take such a long time to achieve justice. Remember what Parker said about justice:

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Indeed, our eye reaches but a little ways along the arc of the moral universe. And nor can we yet “calculate the curve.”

This has been going on for a while

The whole nonbinary gender thing is new and different, right? I mean, that’s why old people are so worked up about transgender and nonbinary, because it’s so new. Right?

Well, no. Now that I’m officially past the age of sixty, I qualify as old people (you can’t call me middle-aged, that’s for sure). And to me, non-binary gender seems normal. It doesn’t feel new at all. So how come an old guy like me feels that way?

Russell Arben Fox has been doing a series on pop music from 1983 at his blog In Media Res. I’ve been following his series in a desultory fashion, and I finally tumbled to one of his main point — that a lot of pop music from the early 1980s bent or broke gender norms. David Bowie was especially well-known for androgyny. I remember a friend, someone we’d now call nonbinary gender, commenting on how great it was that Bowie was so publicly gender non-conforming. Prince came along a bit after Bowie, became far more famous, and was just as androgynous. Among less well known musicians, Annie Lenox, the lead singer of Eurythmics, frequently wore androgynous clothing. In the New Wave band The Human league, singers Philip Oakey, Susan Ann Sulley, and Joanne Catherall, wore the same makeup. The list goes on….

Two androgynous singers from The Human League in a side-by-side comparison showing their identical makeup.
Catherall (l) and Oakey (r) of The Human League, from the video “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”

You can find a lot of androgyny in early 1980s pop music. It was the logical extension of cultural trends that began in the 1960s — guys with long hair and big Afros, the feminist revolution challenging gender roles, and so on. By the early 1980s, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex felt no need to play the role of a sexy girlie lead singer — she could just be herself without being forced into someone else’s (mis)conception of what it meant to be female. Nor was it just the musicians — that’s what people going to clubs, or just listening to the music, were doing, too.

That historic moment didn’t last long. The Reagan revolution rolled back progress in gender. The Clinton years cemented the regression. In this century, everyone seems to have forgotten that nonbinary gender was a thing, before it was even called nonbinary gender. I’d forgotten about it until I started looking at those old music videos from that era. But it did happen. For a few years, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, androgyny was socially acceptable (in the big cities, anyway). As a product of that era, no wonder I’m much more comfortable with nonbinary gender than with the strict gender roles and gender norms that came later.

Personally, I’m glad nonbinary gender is back. I feel it’s much easier than everyone being crammed into the same tiny little gender boxes. Sigh. Too bad Ron DeSantis and the Florida state legislature don’t feel the same way.

Gender-balanced kids’ book of Bible stories

An interesting new children’s book of Bible stories is being funded on Kickstarter. The goal: a kid’s book that’s gender-balanced. Why? Because for the majority of children’s Bible story books, “female characters are vastly underrepresented in both the stories and the illustrations.” The illustrations are also going to show racially diverse characters. Admirable, and I look forward to seeing the book — which sadly won’t be published till 2023.

The old Unitarian Universalist “Timeless Themes” stories, while not completely gender-balanced, had pretty good representation of women. It would be fun to update that with some multi-racial illustrations. And wouldn’t it be nice if we had a UU children’s book of Bible stories that recognizes that God is non-binary gender? Uh huh, that’s what it says in Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Ignore the pronouns (nobody remembers ask ask God what their pronouns are), and it’s pretty clear that all genders are created in God’s image.

Transgracial

“Transgracial” — that’s not a typographical error. Rebecca Tuvel, professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, explores the implications of a “transgracial,” or combined transgender and transracial identity, in a post to the American Philosophy Association (APA) “Black Issues in Philosophy” blog. In this post, Tuvel argues that transracial identity is analogous to transgender identity, where “analogous to” doesn’t mean “identical to.” When she first published these ideas in 2017, apparently some people were outraged. But I think Tuvel’s proposed analogy is less interesting than an essay she refers to written by Ronnie Gladden, who presents as a black man but who identifies as a white woman.

This essay, published in 2015 in Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies is titled “TRANSgressive Talk: An Introduction to the Meaning of Transgracial Identity.” The author, at that time a doctoral student in education at Northern Kentucky University, identifies their names as both Ronnie Gladden and Rachael Greenberg, so I’ll refer to them as Gladden/Greenberg. (For reference, it appears in 2021 that they identify simply as Ronnie Gladden.) In 2015, Gladden/Greenberg began their essay by saying:

“My confrontation with my internalized racial unrest, along with a growing awareness of my authentic gender identity, has been prompted, in part, by two socio-political shifts: 1) the escalating tensions belying the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, and 2) the increased visibility of transgender individuals in a myriad of public spaces. Increasingly, I feel an urgency to be forthcoming about my true identity in an era where transparency is not just encouraged; it is demanded. In spite of presenting as outwardly black and male — by and large I view myself as white and female….”

Gladden/Greenberg writes about an intersectional identity that I hadn’t thought about before. They describe tensions in their life that I wouldn’t have thought about. At the same time, claiming a transracial identity in the U.S. today may not seem possible, given the way we understand race in our society. But a 2014 article in Georgetown Law Journal by Camille Gear Rich, Gould School of Law at USC, titled “Elective Race: Recognizing Race Discrimination in the Era of Racial Self-Identification”, referred to in Tuvel’s blog post, may help to think further about the question of transracial identities. In this article, Rich writes:

“[W]e are in a key moment of discursive and ideological transition, an era in which the model of elective race is ascending, poised to become one of the dominant frameworks for understanding race in the United States. Because we are in a period of transition, many Americans still are wedded to fairly traditional attitudes about race. For these Americans, race is still an objective, easily ascertainable fact determined by the process of involuntary racial ascription — how one’s physical traits are racially categorized by third parties. The elective-race framework will challenge these Americans to recognize other ways in which people experience race, including acts of voluntary affiliation as well as selective and conditional affiliations.”

Rich acknowledges that this new elective model of race poses distinct challenges: “The elective-race framework rejects claims about the obdurate, all-encompassing nature of white privilege and the need for racial passing” (p. 1506). Rich isn’t denying that white privilege is real, but at the same time different individuals may navigate white privilege in different ways. Rich also points out that “neither lay understandings nor institutional understandings of elective race are fully developed”; I’m finding Rich’s article to be an excellent resource as I develop my own understanding of elective race.

Given that a significant number of people — let’s say, a growing number of people — accept the evolving concept of elective race, it should be no surprise to find people who identify as living at the intersection of transracial and transgender identities. I imagine that will be a difficult intersection at which to live. I wonder how Unitarian Universalism (and other religions, for that matter) will respond to the persons living at that intersection.

What does it mean to be cisgender?

In article on Feminist Current, a Canadian Web site, Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the Univ. of Texas Austin, questions his assignment into the category of cisgender:

“…Sex is a question of biologically determined male and female, gender of socially determined masculinity and femininity. The dominant conception of masculinity in U.S. culture asserts that men are naturally competitive and aggressive, and that being a ‘real man’ means struggling for control, conquest, and domination. A man looks at the world, sees what he wants, and takes it. This is sometimes labeled ‘toxic masculinity,’ which implies it is an aberration from some ‘normal’ masculinity. But this understanding of masculinity-as-seeking-dominance is the default setting for most males growing up in patriarchy, especially through the glorification of aggression in the military, sports, and business.

“All that definitional work [Jensen continues] is necessary to explain why I am not cisgender. As a male human, this patriarchal conception of masculinity is not my ‘chosen’ identity, nor do I believe it is my fate. As a short, skinny, effeminate child … I never felt very masculine. As an adult with feminist politics, I reject and struggle to overcome the masculinity norms in patriarchy. If we were someday to transcend patriarchy, would I feel more ‘like a man’? That would depend on how the term was defined, but in the world in which I live, I refuse to embrace the patriarchal gender identity handed to me….

“So [Jensen concludes], I’m not cisgender and I’m not transgender. I am not gender fluid, non-binary, or multi-gender. I self-identify as an adult biological XY male who rejects patriarchal gender norms and works from a radical feminist perspective to eliminate patriarchy….”

While it has some problematic moments, I think Jensen’s essay offers a small but useful addition to the ongoing debate about the term “cisgender.” If you haven’t been following that debate, some have argued that “cisgender” is analogous to the introduction of “heterosexual” as the opposite of “homosexual”; similarly, “cisgender” can help non-trans people realize the extent to which they have the privilege of not having to articulate their gender; therefore it is a necessary term. Arguments against the term include the possibility that setting up such a strong distinction between transgender and cisgender may actually work against a widespread acceptance of transgender as normal; others claim that transgender and cisgender are Western cultural concepts that don’t apply cross-culturally (e.g., Native Americans who reject the identification of the Two-Spirit tradition with transgender).

What Jensen offers to this debate is his personal experience of gender. He does not see himself as typically masculine; therefore, he does not see that his biological sex matches society’s expectations about the gender role he should take on. Yet he does not consider himself transgender, either. There’s an argument to be made that Jensen has cisgender privilege because he’s non-trans, and thus the term is useful; however, I’m not convinced that biological men and boys who are not masculine, but also non-trans, get the same level of privilege as a stereotypically masculine biological male since (depending on how effeminate you are) a straight non-trans non-masculine man will tend to experience some level of bullying and teasing.

The word “cisgender” is not going to go away, and I feel it remains useful in many settings. What Jensen makes me realize is that we should be careful in how we use the term: we shouldn’t use the term “cisgender” in such a way that it reinforces gender stereotypes. For example, we wouldn’t want to reinforce gender stereotypes of masculinity by grouping Robert Jensen together with Donald Trump under the rubric “cisgender men”; Trump is constantly enacting stereotypes of a hyper-masculine gender role (marrying a woman much younger than he, asserting his virility in various ways, putting success above everything else, etc.); Jensen is taking on a significantly different gender role.

So I’ll continue to use “cisgender” as a term for larger groups of people. But I’m going to be disinclined to apply it to a individuals, aware of its cultural assumptions, and careful not to turn it into yet another binary division.