Gender Beyond Binaries

I'll be blunt, gender comes in more than 2 flavors. The stupid doctrine that there are exactly two genders - male and female, is the root of much hardship and suffering for me personally and for many people within western culture. It's probably even hurting you right now, whether you realize it or not. For one thing, there are the somewhat rare cases like me, who don't fit into either the category male or the category female. But a more common problem is that different women are female in different ways. Trying to have a unified view or ideal of all women is hopeless and counter-productive. And men likewise are male in different styles and flavors. Trying to imagine a single ideal male, for all males to strive toward being, is hogwash and the root of much suffering. There are other ways to arrange a culture besides a rigid gender binary and trans and non-binary folk like me are in the process of trying to improve how our culture deals with gender for everybody.

So let's talk about folk outside the binaries first. Gender is a complex philosophical idea, and I could spend a long time just on it. But I like to think of gender as having three main components: gender identity, gender presentation, and biological sex. Sexual orientation is tricky issue to, it isn't exactly the same as any of these three terms, and both sorta is, and sorta isn't part of gender. Ok, so gender identity is how you think about yourself, how you self-identify, who you are to yourself when you are alone. Gender presentation is how you perform or display your gender through actions and choices: clothing, word choice, mannerisms, vocal tones, postures, dozens and dozens of conscious and unconscious details. Gender presentation is social and cultural, but it's about presenting yourself to others. Biological sex is about your actual body and its physical details.

The next thing to understand, is that biological sex doesn't always line up neatly as male or female either. Humans have a dozen or more sex-linked biological traits. Chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, gonadal sex, wolffian-mullerian structure sex, outer genital sex, and so on. And they usually line up well. Perhaps as much as 99% of the human population will be female according to all these biological criteria, or male on all these criteria, before we even think about culture or social identity or self-understanding. But many people DON'T line up, straight down the line, even at the level of biology. Intersex people and transgender people especially often don't fully line up, but even other people can fail to code the same way for every biological sex trait. Sometime, one falls outside of the criteria, or sometimes in-between. An intersex person with Klinefelder's Syndrome, for example, has 47 chromosomes in most cells, including 2 X's and a Y. We call them XXY, and they chromosomally aren't male or female exactly, although they often self-identify and appear socially as males. Someone with AIS (androgen insensitivity syndrome), might be chromosomally XY (male), yet have good female looking genitalia at birth and be raised as a female, undergo a seemingly normal female puberty, and have no clue they are not fully female biologically, unless infertility examinations as an adult reveal they lack a uterus and are chromosomally male. A transgender person might be female bodied by every biological standard we can measure yet (other than self-identity) when young, but seek and receive hormonal and surgical alterations so that as an adult they are male shaped, have male hair patterns, male musculature and scent, male genitals, and yet still be female chromosomally and still have a uterus. Even at the level of biological sex, such a person isn't really female anymore. In my case, I was pretty male bodied, as far as we know, most of my life, but probably had far less male hormones than the norm most of my life, and I have a fairly female hormone profile now (and my scent and fat distribution and such are currently shifting to a more feminine pattern).

So how common is it to fall outside of the gender binary in terms of one's self identity? It's hard to say. There are 2 main groups that do - intersex people and transgender people. Both are tricky to define, but basically an intersex person is someone that has a biological condition, other than just in the brain or self-identity, that makes them seem biologically non-binary, and a transgender person is someone whose current gender identity does not match the gender identity they were assigned at birth (and have often, but not always, sought to medically change their bodies through hormones or surgery). Something around 1 in 1000 babies appear ambiguous or unclear in gender at birth, many of whom wind up as intersex to varying degrees (and other intersex conditions don't reveal themselves until puberty or adulthood). Something around 2 or 3 people per 1000 come to self-identify as transgender over the course of their lifetime. Now, many transgender people don't think of themselves as outside the gender binary, they just think they were put on the wrong side of it at birth. A transwoman, say my friend Rachel, may well think that she is completely female, and that she deserves to be on the female side of the binary, rather than outside of the binary, even though she was assigned the gender male at birth, and may have some male biological traits left (like XY chromosomes). Similarly, an intersex person may have been ambiguous in gender at birth, but now think of themselves as a normal male, and want to be included on the male side of the binary, rather than be thought of as outside the binary or in-between male and female or anything like that. Still, estimates are that nowadays about 25% of transgender people self-identify as non-binary (as I do), and a good chunk of intersex people do too. So probably a rough and ready estimate is that somewhere around 1 person per 1000 think of themselves as neither male nor female, in modern Western cultures. (Evidence and anecdotes both suggest such people are highly likely to move to large cities, so the numbers are higher in cities, and lower in more rural areas). And of course, there are many different ways to be non-binary in gender. I think of myself as “androgyne” or somewhere “in between” male and female, mixing both. Some folk think of themselves as “third gender,” other in gender from male or female, but not necessarily in-between. Others describe themselves as “agender” feeling like gender just doesn't apply to them, or that they lack both male and female traits.

I won't try to speak much for intersex people, since I'm not one. But I have certainly read their stories of suffering because society wanted to put them into a male box or a female box rather than letting them be as they are. What is the first question most people ask about a new baby? Even before “Are they healthy?” Yup “boy or girl?” And woe to the parent that answers “neither” or “time will tell.” Many a parent was talked into disasterous genital surgery for their infant by experts assuring them it was for the best ... If you want to read more about intersex folk, see for example, “Full Frontal Activism: Intersex and Awesome."

But I do self-identify as transgender and as non-binary, so I can tell my story. I knew that I never really fit as a male, and it was a struggle from as young as I can remember. But I was close. Close enough to say to myself “eh” and try to be male. I used to say that I “rounded-off to male.” I knew I wanted to be more feminine, but I knew I couldn't “really” be female. I had no conception of a possibility of an in-between space, nor had I ever met anyone openly in-between, or seen it portrayed on in the media. I remember assuming that David Bowie was “pretending” for “style-points” rather than that he was genuinely trying to express who he thought he was. I never really considered myself transgender until a few years ago, because I thought that meant I would have to be “all-the-way a woman,” and I strongly suspected that wasn't me. I often wanted to be a woman. I often burned with envy for women. But I didn't think I could pull it off. Maybe in my next life. Biology was destiny right? But the thoughts and issues wouldn't go away for long either.

Males police other males for masculinity relentlessly. Any hints of femininity are shamed, and usually assimulated to homosexuality. Most people thought I was gay growing up, even though I showed attraction to females and little to males, simply because I couldn't really hide how feminine I was, and that was the only social category available for seemingly feminine males. I remember dressing a little too feminine as a teen, getting crap for it, and over-compensating to very safe and neutral all-black boring wardrobe. By the time I was in college, I understood that any hints of iffy male gender would doom my career (I wound up in grad school as a philosopher, easily the most male-dominated of the humanities, up there with engineering on the male/female graduation ratios …). So I repressed. A lot. There was no space in the culture for any gender ambiguities unless you were a rock star or wannabe, so I tried to allow none. I wasn't anti-social exactly, but I had no way to be myself around people, or even really by myself. I retreated into fantasy. I became joyless, and then depressed. In the end, my career was destroyed by the effort and depression of repressing my gender identity, just as it would probably have been by being open about it. Transgender people and non-binary people have much higher unemployment rates than the general population, and lack the legal protections against discrimination that many other groups enjoy. If I had a job here in Indiana, I could legally be fired from it just for being non-binary.

Now that I have been openly transgender and non-binary for a few months, I am surprised how little direct conflict it has caused so far. But it causes many little problems, because the culture doesn't know how to cope with me. I make people uncomfortable simply by being around. If I am eating dinner with my family at a restaurant, everyone else will sneak glances and try not to get caught doing so. Store clerks that were warm and friendly when I was passably male, are careful and polite instead, now that I am harder to code. Surveys and paperwork routinely ask me to check a box for male or female and have no other options. I can use gender neutral language for myself on many many things, but there isn't a gender neutral term in-between “ma'am” and “sir” yet in English, so people always stumble there. My preferred pronouns (ze, hir, hirs) are uncommon enough to sound really weird to people. But, as with many trans people, it's public bathrooms that are the worst social minefield. Occasionally, somewhere will have a gender-neutral toilet (often labeled a family toilet, or a handicap toilet), and I'll use those where possible. But often, I have to pee and my only options are the men's room or the women's room. Hmm, which one am I more likely to get beaten up in? Or to make others uncomfortable in? Or to have security called on me in? I haven't gotten beaten up yet, and I'm white, but statistically it happens a lot to trans folk, especially trans folk of color, so be sure I'm thinking about it. Similarly, there hasn't been a real case of a trans person assaulting someone else in the bathroom in the US yet, although there have been several hoaxes. I'm in much worse danger from others than they are from me. Trans people get murdered a lot more than non-trans folk too .... I've known trans folks that were kicked out of their families or got far more social rejection than I have. I suffered inside a lot when I had no categories for what I was. I suffered some, the 6 months I was cleared for female hormones by my therapist, but was unable to cajole the medical system into letting me have them (and I am sooo much happier now that I am on estrogen and t-blockers). But now, for me, it's more annoyances, and incomprehensions, and sadly making others uncomfortable, and routine little hassles, than actual suffering.

But the problems with the western gender binary are not limited to the rare folks that don't fit into it. The binary is a terrible mistake for most cisgender folk too (people who have always been identified with the gender they identify with now, that is most people). It assumes that it is somehow helpful to lump all women together. As if there were a single unified experience of womanhood that unites all women as “sisters.” As if all men were somehow men in the same way, so that the most salient fact about them is that they are “men.” This plays out in all kind of destructive and twisted ways emotionally and socially. I know women who don't feel like they are “real” women, because they put too much emphasis on career, or not enough, because they are infertile, or even because they delivered their children by c-section instead of vaginally. Women of many body-types feel the “ideal” woman is not of their body type. Heck famously, even the supermodels cannot meet the standards of idealized feminine beauty without extensive photoshopping. But part of the root of the problem here is the assumption that all women are to be held to the same standard, the same ideal (or to hold themselves to it), that women are women in the same way. But some women are tomboys and some women are fashionistas. Some women are dedicated careerists and some women nurturing homebodies. Some women love singing and some women love dancing. Singing is no more feminine than dancing, the two are just feminine in different ways. But we use these ridiculous ideals of gender to torture ourselves and each other for failing to achieve. “Women should all strive to be women in the same way” is just as much of a terrible and hurtful error as “Male and female are the only options.” 

 

 

Just as I had to struggle to be the androgyne I am, instead of the man that some nebulous abstraction like “society” thought I should try to be, if you are a woman, you have to struggle to be the woman or you are instead of the woman society thinks you should be. Your experience of your own gendered self is over-policed by normative social expectations for your gender identity. I'm not saying it's bad to have ideals, or to strive, but strive to be feminine in your own way, strive to create your own personal flavor of feminine, rather than imagining there to be one true way to be female. Similarly, this means that some styles of Feminism are actually counter-productive. Healthy philosophies of Feminism, need to be intersectional, and embracing of diversity of the feminine, rather than over-emphasizing the shared experiences that aren't really as shared as one might think. If we try to hold all women to the standard of the ideal, well-off, white, educated, careerist, fertile, healthy, cis, straight woman, our so-called Feminism is likely to do more harm than good. There are many ways to be a woman, and that is OK.

Similar points apply on the male end of the binary. Over-emphasis on male unity winds up pitting jocks against geeks, rich against poor, the hairy against the clean-shaven, the straight against the gay. It imagines that there is a single right way to be masculine (probably involving military experience and business success), instead of many different ways to be masculine. Once we give up on the “one true way to be male” many problems become less sticky. Homosexual masculinity doesn't have to be nearly as threatening to heterosexual masculinity, as long as they aren't competing for the heart of masculinity itself. Stupid dominance games can be less obtrusive when we admit frankly that IT and Sales can both be manly in different ways. Sure, if you are a man, maybe you can be more manly than you are now, but do it by striving to be like the men you admire most, not just the ones that code as mostly clearly some kind of generically ideal male. Is Sean Connery or David Bowie or maybe Isaac Hayes more your style, 'cause trust me I know ladies (and guys for that matter) that dig each of them, but if you try to be like Connery and Bowie and Hayes all at the same time, you'll only get heartache and self hatred. Most people understand that the media portrays an impossible standard of feminine beauty, that many women torture themselves in various ways trying and failing to live up to it. This happens to men too, but it's better hidden, and usually revolves around notions of coolness rather than beauty. In video games and porn, men can be the action heroes, rock stars, or players that they try and fail to be in real life.

Many other cultures throughout history have had more nuanced views of gender than the so-called western binary, that seems normative in the US at the moment. Modern Indian society famously has a very active “third gender” called hijras in Hindi, (or tritiya prakriti in Sanskrit, often even “eunuchs” in English), and in practice there are many sub-varieties, and local differences of culture within it. The “kathoeys” or “ladyboys” of Thailand, similarly seem like a simple 3^rd category besides male or female at first, but in practice have far more complicated gender identities (kathoey literally means “non-male” but some identify as “a second kind of woman” (sao praphet song), others as just plain women, others as “a third gender,” and so on). Native American cultures frequently had and have categories of gender besides just male and female, and while “two-spirits” are the most well-known and widespread example, you can find cultures that had 4 or 5 gender categories, or that subdivided male and female into several sub-varieties, with several non-binary types as well. Even Western culture is not so devoid of ambiguities here as it is often portrayed - Italian castrati and feminnellos, the sworn virgins of the Balkans, the mollies of 18^th century England, and so on. Even the Bible has some terminology for exceptional gender identities that many translations try to cover over. People struggling to live their own complex and nuanced gender identities, despite the over-intrusive expectations of society, is a story that repeats in different ways in all cultures and time periods.

Gender, and even sex, are not binary. They aren't even really a spectrum. They are dozens of spectrums and variables in a complex tapestry of possibilities. Yeah, there are two main camps, and most people fall someone into one one of them. But not everybody, and there are plenty of important internal differences within each camp. Don't police other people's genders so much. Admire what you like, but allow that there are many types of people in the world. Strive to embody the gender you feel is yours in your own personal way, but take lots of inspiration from others in the process. Don't hold yourself or others to impossible ideals, incoherent ideals, self-contradictory ideals, one-size-fits-all ideals, but encourage growth where you can.

Dress as you want to dress. I used to be confused about whether to say I was crossdressing or not. I'm usually wearing a mix of male and female clothing, and if I'm in-between what is “cross?” Then I saw the term “freedressing.” Yup, that's what we should all be doing. Want to display your ambition in the business world even when you are off the clock? Go for it. Wanna make a cutesty hip cultural reference with your t-shirt? OK. Wanna wear a light flowery sundress? OK. Clothes have a lot of different functions, utilitarian, social, but also emotional. They help us feel the way we want to feel, and display what is important to us to others. Feel dumb in a skirt, and far more comfortable in pants? Then don't wear a skirt unless you have some other really good reason to wear one anyway. Freedressing starts with not over-policing ourselves, but then extends to not over-policing others. Is that male rapper wearing a dress? Ok, why? Is he just trying to get attention, or does he like the frisson of the conflict, or did he lose a bet, or does he just feel better in a dress? Is that male-ish looking person wearing an overly pastel color top? OK why? Are they trying to display that they are gay? Are they displaying allegiance with an 80s Miami-Vice style? Or do they just think it looks good with that particular tie? We can't not notice other people's clothing choices, or our own, but we can be charitable, and suspend judgment a bit, and wait for further information before deciding for sure why someone is doing what they are doing, instead of leaping straight to attacking a perceived transgression.

The gender binary is hurtful to all of us. We have two main ways of fighting it. First, we need to look at it, see it, understand it. The more we see of its failings, the more we see its connections with various problems in our lives, the easier it is to get past it. But, second, we have to stop re-enforcing it. The gender binary is re-built day to day, by thousands of little social interactions. Mostly those involve policing other people's gender presentation, and our own. It is easy and tempting to make little micro-aggressions against other people for being the wrong kind of woman or man. Try to resist. Don't slut-shame women for dressing more provocatively than you like. Don't frump-shame women for dressing more timidly than you like. Don't attack a man for being sissy or macho. These tactics often win little battles, people often back down, but they make the overall climate of our culture a little more uncomfortable and hurtful for all of us. We want gender to be a comfy home to live in, not an armed camp where we are always trying to defend ourselves. Try to be yourself, and try to let others be themselves too, and slowly the gender binary will loosen and become less thorny for all of us.

Dr. B. P. Morton – May 2014

 

 

B.P. is a full-time housewife and dad of 2 kids, 9 and 12, but otherwise ze uses gender neutral terms for hirself. Ze is an androgyne in early transition. Hir Ph. D is in philosophy, and ze was a professor of philosophy and sometimes religion, at various universities for a number of years. BP lives in Terre Haute, IN, with hir wonderful and accomplished wife, who works for an organic farm/charity owned by environmentalist nuns. Ze likes role-playing games, computer games, board games, running, and poetry.