It's a girl!
It’s a girl, they cry! They deduce this from my lack of penis. I could have been a boy, given a tiny slip of spermy fate. I could have been something else entirely. An XXY, XYY, XX or even just an X. I don’t know what they would have called me then. Intersex, probably.
The nurse closest to my mother leans down and takes something out of the freezer beside the bed. A white box about the size of my head. She digs into the box with a long metal thing and then she swings the metal thing towards me, prizes open my lips and slides in my first scoop. Vanilla.
I swallow. I don’t have much say in the matter, but then again, I won’t have much say in matters for the next decade or so of my life. Best not to complain too much, I figure. Best to suck it up. All that vanilla. Scoops keep appearing in front of me and I swallow them unthinkingly. Everyone else is doing it.
Apart from “it’s still alive!” the most important information relayed at my birth is my sex. It’s a girl. So much is contained in that statement. My parents can begin to calculate all the ways in which I will be me over the course of my life. How my hair will grow long, how I’ll probably like certain colours over others and certain activities over others, how I’ll start menstruating at some point and have to get a bra, how I’ll wear skirts and dresses, how it’ll be important for me to be pretty to attract men (because presumably I’m straight), how I should be especially wary of male strangers and probably not walk alone at night, how I’ll get pregnant (hopefully not too young, nor too old) and how I’ll eventually outlive my male counterparts.
Some of these expectations are biological. But most of them are cultural. Most of them have something to do with my gender, which, it is assumed at my birth, will correlate with my biological sex.
Just going to pop in my definition of gender from the first Vanilla.
gender
If biological sex pertains to certain things about your body that can be seen or measured, gender is more about how you use your body, as well as the clothes you wear, how you behave socially, the name you are called by and so on. All these factors can (but probably shouldn’t) be linked to being female or male, which is why some people confuse biological sex and gender.
Not everything is about gender, a friend reminds me.
She is right, of course. Gender is everywhere, but not everything is about gender in the sense that gender is not to blame for everything that is wrong in the world, or in my little life. Inequalities exist for plenty of other reasons. Race, class, nationality, age and physical ability being some of the obvious ones. Or, more generally, due to different lives lived. It could easily be argued that I am more inclined to cook and clean up the kitchen than the person I live with because I have worked in kitchens and bars and he hasn’t, not because I’m a woman and he’s a man.
But it could just as easily be argued that I care more about cooking and cleaning because I’m a woman and I’ve been socialised to care about those things. And the mere fact that a gender stereotype could be the reason I do something is enough to put the thought into my head. Whereas, a man cooking and cleaning is unlikely to think to himself: here I am fulfilling my gender role. Although he might think that if he finds himself driving cars, paying bills at restaurants, or drilling holes in walls, significantly more than his woman partner does. This is especially true when the activity in question is thought of as one of “the shit things”. We tend not to notice as much when gender stereotypes serve us.
If you find yourself doing a thing that also happens to fulfil a gender stereotype, it’s hard to extricate the stereotype from your self, the person. Which is why I often fantasise being in a relationship with another woman, where I could finally find out if I do the things I do because I am “the woman” in the relationship or because I am me. But even this dynamic would depend enormously on who she, my imagined woman partner, was. If she wasn’t inclined to drive cars or drill holes, I’d probably end up doing those things and be equally confused as to whether I was doing them because I wanted to or because I was fulfilling my new role as “the man”.
Which brings me to an interesting point. It would seem that such roles are dependent on our relationships—who we interact with and how—and they are only gendered because we have an old fashioned understanding of gender that is either man or women.
I’m as guilty of binary gender talk and thought as the next man (ho ho). And although it can be useful to talk gender binary when trying to fix things that were created by gender binary thinking (i.e. women not applying for jobs they’re qualified for or men being less likely to admit to depression) it can also be a massive fucking distraction to life.
For example, once upon a time in a yoga class (back in the days when I went to yoga classes) a man did an enormous sigh and I was like, well I’d do an enormous sigh too, but I’m probably holding it in because I’m a woman and deep down I don’t want to draw attention to myself and make others feel uncomfortable, nor do I want to publicly reveal that I have anything that could possibly be interpreted as a sexuality. In another yoga class, a woman did an enormous sigh and I was like, good for you, it must take guts to have the confidence to dominate the room like that with your enormous sigh. But maybe their enormous sighs had anything to do with their gender. Maybe, sometimes, for various reasons, some people are more likely to dominate the room with enormous sighs than others.
Another friend told me that she sometimes gets angry at her boyfriend for not doing a particular thing and she thinks “it’s because he’s a man, a stupid man” and then she finds out later it’s because when he was a kid they always left the washing up until the next morning, or something. He’s just a person, a different person.
I wish I could stop seeing gender. It would make life a lot easier, a lot less overanalysed. I might be able to make dinner for the man I live with and not, somewhere deep in the depths of my mind, be questioning whether I am doing this because it’s expected of my gender? Or sit in a meeting full of men and not feel that every time I speak they’re all thinking, now the woman is talking, best to pretend to take her seriously. These things may be in my head. I may be encouraging continued gender stereotyping by thinking these things, but they are still there, in my head. I cannot stop seeing gender until gender stops being a thing that results in us treating people so differently.
I want to pretend that I live in a future utopia where gender/race/class/age/height/etc. doesn’t matter, in the hope that if we all pretend for long enough, we’ll get to the point where it doesn’t actually matter. But, whilst it still does matter and has real life consequences for real people, to pretend that it doesn’t matter feels more ignorant than woke.
To fix issues with gender, we still have to name gender, somehow. This it where it gets really confusing. Rather than loosen our definition of gender—as I want it to be, just a fluid thing, effectively a synonym for “personality”—we’re inventing more and more labels to put people into more and more boxes. People born male can identify as women and people born female can identify as men, which, according to political correctness means that the word “woman” no longer refers to a cisgender woman. If you want to talk about a cisgender woman these days you’re supposed to say person with a vagina, womb and breasts with the capacity to generate milk who also identifies as a woman. A mouthful. Meanwhile, there’s a new trend of writing “womxn”, replacing the “e/a” of “-men/man” with the female “x” chromosome. But how the fuck do you pronounce that? And what difference does it make anyway? It’s still a gender.
Rather than more labels, why don’t we get rid of some of the ones we already have? Or invent more gender-neutral words. I love the Danish language for its neutralisation of the word “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”. Both are “kæreste”, at least until you get married, then you become man and wife just like in English. But in the non-religious space, I am able to refer my kæreste in conversation without anyone having to know whether it’s a he or a she. Sweden have also introduced a gender-neutral pronoun, “hen”, to replace “he” and “her”.
I read with interest several articles about Elliot (formerly, Ellen) Page recently. And I could identify with a lot of what they felt, growing up as a girl who wanted to be a boy. That feeling of not quite fitting the mould we’re supposed to fit, is common to many of us. For me, the answer is not to become a boy, I don’t want to be a boy any more than I want to be a girl. I want to do away with the whole concept of binary gender, of boy or girl, entirely. We can still be born with a biological sex that affects certain hormones, bodily developments and reproductive possibilities, but let that be it. Let us not put thousands of other things on top of biological sex that dictate how we will be and what we will do over the course of our lives.
It seems so ridiculous that we have to “come out” as gay or transgender, when straight and cisgender are just concepts that we invented. Of course I understand the need to come out—we do, after all, live in heteronormative cisgender societies—but I wish we could rebel against the concepts of binary gender and fixed sexual orientation instead. Then we wouldn’t be forced to choose, one or the other, boy or girl, straight or gay. If we were freer to be who we wanted to be in the first place, we wouldn’t need to drastically come out of, or be stuck forever in, the closet.
Optional toppings
🐍 The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain “translates” the old origin story, and explores the possible evolution of binary gender
🧠 How They See Us on Hidden Brain podcast is a fascinating discussion about how negative stereotyping (i.e. Women are worse at maths) sits within the psychology of the person who is being stereotyped and how the extra energy expended on awareness of internalised stereotypes often results in actually reinforcing them (i.e. Women worrying about being worse at maths making them actually worse at maths in a situation where competing against equally-talented-at-maths men)
💇🏻Elliot Page Is Ready for This Moment in TIME is is the first interview Elliot (formerly Ellen—star of Juno and Inception) has given since he announced that he is transgender
🐥 You're a hen, I'm a hen: gender-neutral pronoun gains ground in Sweden, reports The Globe and Mail
🎙 @manwhohasitall on Twitter
That’s enough for now, I’m all gendered out.
— H. E.