Out and About
Lately I’ve been editing a guide to colleges for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, and allied individuals.Whew! That’s a mouthful.
I’ve learned a few interesting things from it. Apparently “intersex” is the correct term for “hermaphrodite,” which some consider an insult. I don’t know why it’s an insult—Hermaphroditus was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who apparently merged with a nymph at some point and thus had two sexes—but that’s what I read. I don’t know much about the history of that term as applied to people who have something other than one simple set of genitalia, or gonads, or chromosomes. You know, the people who get “fixed” at birth so they can fit into one side of the dichotomy or the other? Not that having a mixed set would be simple in this world…
“Transgender,” on the other hand, refers to people who don’t accept the male-female dichotomy. Yesterday I read this quote from a student: “My current math professor is comfortable using masculine pronouns with me (I use both masculine and feminine pronouns to describe myself).” I’d like to sit down and have a good long talk with such a person, especially about the intersection of genitalia and gender.
I don’t believe that certain things—like war—are masculine and certain things—like flower arranging—are feminine. It depends on who’s doing them. If a woman does something, anything, it’s feminine. If a man does something, it’s masculine. If a man and a woman are doing the same thing—say, murdering an enemy—at the same time, then it’s both masculine and feminine at the same time.
That’s pretty simple to get your mind around, I think. But it’s still a dichotomy.
But what I find it hard to get my mind around is what it feels like to describe yourself with both male and female pronouns. I want to know: how does your body lead you to describe yourself that way? Or is there some kind of disconnect, and what caused it? What does “genderqueer” really mean?
Does this massive edifice we call “gender” really have much to do with our bodies, anyway? Maybe our bodies are just the excuse.
posted by Price of Silence @ 12:09 AM
5 Comments:
Sexual dimorphism for reproduction is a powerful thing, and over the millenia people have found many generalizations about mommies & daddies that are generally correct.
That lead us to a communication system to control reproduction & child rearing we call gender. Every studied culture has some kind of gender structure, though they aren't all as simple as outie == man, innie == woman, the system we call the heterosexist one.
That system may have generally generalized certain things as masculine & feminine (and if you were writing in a romance language, those assigments would be clearer), but you are right: it's not the things themselves but rather the way we approach them that carries gender.
Very few women have ever built armies, marched on other countries and killed them. But lots of women have poisoned people they don't like, leading to the same killing.
Transgender isn't rejecting male and female, at least not to me. To me, it's moving beyond complusory gender, accepting indvidual essence and choice over generalized rules about what males and females SHOULD do.
But that's me.
I think about this some, because the people who know me best think I've got a pretty healthy balance of male/female characteristics. Unfortunately they manifest themselves not in the best that each sex has to offer, but the worst: I'm unemotional, detached, like big cars, and I worry too much about my makeup and clothes and if that hot guy is looking at me.
Compulsory gender is an interesting idea. I like the notion of a society without it, but I also appreciate the differences between the sexes. Without them I fear we'd have no reason to try to know each other at all.
I agree.
I love gender, not just because it's fun, but also because it has practical uses, like socializing adults and creating rules for parent roles that protect children.
Gender isn't the problem. Compulsory gender is.
Well said, Callan. If only we could come up with a system for recognizing people who don't quite fit the norm and encourage them to explore it further. Seems like we'd learn a lot.
I finally wrote about your question about how it feels to be both...
http://callan.wordpress.com/
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