in-between or highly-gendered

Mmm, insomnia!

A bit over a week ago i posted about the controversy over a 15-minute film scheduled to be shown at a GLBT film festival titled "The Gendercator." At the end of a vibrant and fascinating conversation akaiyume wrote this:

Sometimes I think maybe highly gendered people don't really get the in betweens. And this could be a bit of a stretch maybe, but I'm thinking to go through all the troubles and risks associated with transistioning a person has to be pretty highly gendered. By the same token, maybe inbetweens don't get gendered people.

I've been pondering this since. I think there's a lot of meaning in that paragraph, and it goes a long way towards explaining a considerable amount of misunderstanding that goes on in the communities i belong to.

Among feminists and gender-studies scholars there's a fair bit of attention given to the question of, "what is gender?" Many feminists argue that gender is functional -- that is, it exists to serve a social function -- rather than essential -- that is, that gender 'just is' a fundamental essential aspect of the human condition.

Each of us experiences our own gender in some way. Most people don't really question it. I mean, they might question what it is to be a man, or to be a woman, or what it is like to be either, or what makes someone one or the other, and so on. But it seems like many, or most, people have a more or less a priori sense of their own individual gender.

Consider the case of David Reimer. His circumcision was botched, and his parents and doctors decided that the most compassionate thing to do was to amputate what was left of his penis and raise him as a girl. David however never accepted this, never felt like a girl, and at 15 started to live as a boy. There was something about the way David saw himself that could not be changed, no matter what efforts the people around him put into changing him.

I could say something similar. I mean, during my whole childhood and much of my adulthood there was a concerted effort to make a man of me. It didn't work. The image of myself as fundamentally female was not affected by all the socialization or pressure in the world.

What all this points to is, i think, that there is something 'more' to gender than social function. It is not simply a caste system or a cultural artifact.

But i think that when we say this we also have to recognize that there are people for whom there isn't a strong gender identity. That is they are, as akaiyume put it, in between. And it's time i recognized that someone without a strong gender identity could easily believe that gender is entirely a cultural artifact; and that such a person would rebel against gender roles for different reasons from someone who is transgender; and that someone who feels that way could easily interpret transgenderism as "a program of enforcement of the gender-binary paradigm" rather than "a reflection of innate gender identity."

Recently i learned that among young women today, particularly in the lesbian community, some have reported that they are under pressure to be transsexual. When i first heard this, it kind of reminded me of the pressure bisexual people are given to "just pick one already." IOW there are many people who accept homosexuality as a sexual orientation just as valid as heterosexuality, but who cannot comprehend that some people fall in between. Similarly there is an increased acceptance of transsexuality as valid, and along with this has come, apparently, pressure on in-between "fence sitters." It seems that for increasing numbers of people it is more transgressive to be genderqueer or androgynous than to be transsexual.

This explains a lot. The director of the film in question, Catharine Crouch, recently said: "My anxiety is about the amount of women I see transitioning into men and how fast it seems to be happening. I wonder about this sudden escalation. They are women, or they were women, and now they are not. They seem like me, so I am not understanding what is the difference between them and me."

Crouch, who is a butch lesbian, seems to be coming from the in-between point of view. So she feels this pressure to "pick a gender identity, even if it be trans"; she sees many of her friends from the lesbian community coming out as transmen, and, drawing from her experience of gender as something that is not inherent in the way she sees herself, finds transsexualism to be indistinguishable from other factors in society which corral people into normative gender behavior.

In her movie, set 40 years in the future, transsexual surgery is mandated by the ruling Christian government for people who cannot fit into their birth gender. Only someone who is in-between could postulate this scenario as feasible, not because most Christians today strongly oppose transsexual surgery, but because they do not understand the experience of feeling your gender as an innate part of you. To an in-between, gender, all gender, even transgender, seems like brainwashing because that's what's been attempted on them, and that is how they experience gender.

Transsexuals do not want sex reassignment because we're brainwashed -- brainwashing didn't work on us. No part of gender brainwashing involves someone saying at some point, "Oh, well, okay then, if that doesn't work for you, just go ahead and switch to option B." We have an inherent experience of our gender that differs from the way our bodies are seen, and no socialization worked to undo it. If going androgynous or genderqueer was sufficient to resolve the dilemma, than we'd have stopped there because, as observed above, sex reassignment is a tremendous amount of trouble to go through. Sex reassignment is not something the medical community readily and easily hands out, even after almost 60 years of clinical research and treatment of gender dysphoria. Sex reassignment is not, will never be, can never be, a tool of gender caste enforcers; but rather it exists in spite of sexual stratification. It is an option that was granted us only after great reluctance and much lobbying.