Sex, Gender, Biology, Society
Irradiated by LabRat
A post over at Quizzical Pussy (NSFW, good for discussion) on… I’m not even sure what I’d nutshell it as, maybe transphobia, maybe gender issues in general, maybe I-don’t-even seems to have provoked minor kerfluffle, as for some reasons such subjects often do. I’d actually go over there and read it if you want to talk about it*.
Couple of comments:
1) On “YOU CAN’T DENY BIOLOGY YOU CRAZY SOCIAL CONSTRUCT LIBERAL BIOLOGY DENIER”. My instinctive response is “bitch, you don’t even know how weird biology gets, and this is tame as hell by comparison”.
My constructive response is that sex, as in male vs. female has a very straightforward definition in biology, and gender has a separate, much less straightforward definition, and even outside of we’re-just-talking-about-mating-fish it gets much weirder in human society.
Sex goes like this: If you belong to a species in which gametes are differently sized, and almost all species are anisogamous (the fancy word for “gametes differently sized”) because the numbers seem to work out a lot better for both participants that way, then the individual with the big gametes is female and the individual with the small gametes is male. Every other detail is elaboration, and the elaboration is not even remotely uniform. Some species pack both in one, to have gametes for every occasion, and they are hermaphroditic. Some species change sex depending on circumstance or age, which is much easier when the hardware for your gametes remains similar between sexes. (Many fish handle sex this way.)
Gender goes like this in biology, which really isn’t the same thing as in human society: It’s still complicated as hell and currently the subject of a genteel firefight. The thing is that, in anthropology and until relatively recently the rest of biology agreed, animals don’t have gender, just sex, because animals don’t have culture and gender is culturally constructed. However, some animals seem to have more than one concrete and consistent way to be male or female, and these animals definitely don’t have culture. How you will see this described in the literature varies a great deal; sometimes it’s referred to as “alternate mating strategies” (although lots of other animals have multiple mating strategies that are chosen on the fly as seems advantageous rather than having their mating strategy and life history linked to obvious physical forms), sometimes they’re referred to as “morphs” (even though most physical variations we refer to as morphs in other species aren’t linked to behavior and life history), sometimes it’s both at once. Some biologists have suggested that maybe “gender” is a pretty useful concept to describe critters that have more than one physically distinct mating strategy and life history per sex, but this is far from broadly accepted- but then, no single way to frame such problems really has broad acceptance.
With humans, everything gets much more complicated. Not even sex is completely and totally straightforward, given that there are enough of us for just about every biological intersex condition under the sun to have appeared, been documented, and caused some kind of legal problem. Gender goes along culturally constructed lines depending on the culture born into- but consider that for humans, very nearly everything, no matter how biological, has some degree of cultural construction; the way we eat and what we eat has a huge cultural component, and even the way we poop does as well. How many genders, and how gender is defined or assigned, varies from culture to culture.
What fascinates me on a personal level is how close to the bone gender seems to be for most people, and how entitled they seem to feel in a fish-have-no-words-for-water sort of way to other people’s. If you choose not to advertise your religious or political affiliation no one will make an issue of it, but if you choose not to advertise your gender identity very clearly some people get aggressive about it. Nature has taken care of secondary sex characteristics for me with no ambiguity unless I catch a cold and wear a camping tent for clothing, but when I wore my hair very short I’d get the occasional “Are you a BOY or a GIRL?” from total strangers, and the occasional outright hostile “Sir“. The latter fascinated me more than insulting me, mostly by the clear intent to insult that was always behind it.
What makes it yet more interesting to me the longer I think about it is that typically the same factions I hear “male and female are ironclad biological constructs anyone is foolish to deny” from are the ones that also believe in enforcing the boundaries thereof with a great deal of applied cultural force. Nobody has to be taught to poop (although they do have to be taught where it’s appropriate to do so and how to clean themselves afterward in their own cultural fashion), but the training and rules for properly expressing one’s gender start at birth and have been a subject of obsession for parents since the beginning of written history. Schools have been founded around it, entire fields of study have been founded around it, religions usually have a great deal to say about it; learning how to be a man/woman, as well as NOT to be a man/woman, is one of the most intense acculturation experiences on Earth. It’s also a pretty big source of culture clash.
I’m not trying to say that gender is pure and entire social construction either, because I don’t think it is; if so social constructs for additional genders per sex would probably not be necessary, nor would the existence of a diagnosed “gender dysphoria” in societies where gender is very strictly binary, even after permissible roles for women and men have loosened to the point where you can be a man or a woman with some pleasures and behaviors from the opposite gender, and have that be unremarkable. Most of human life is things from our biology mediated and shaped by culture, not a nature-nurture dichotomy.
I AM trying to say that neither the biology nor the sociology is crystal clear here, and that if there’s a whole lot more going on for animals that are no brighter than a lizard or fish and have no culture whatsoever… who are we to assume that “biology” makes gender simple?
*This took me all damn weekend plus a big chunk of today to write. It was one of those “one sentence requires twenty minutes of research, revision, and mind-changing” things. After I hit post I’m going back to searching YouTube for Beyonslay highlights.
March 26th, 2012 at 4:21 pm
I’d be willing to bet that 90%-95% of this is just cognitive dissonance making people act like dicks (“This person’s acting in a way that doesn’t affirm my world-view; SHITCOCK”), but it seems like part of it could be, for lack of a better metaphor, an externalized cost of not fitting gender norms. If I’m walking around with a strong and obvious gender identity, odds are that my peer group is going to judge me based on how I and my gender identity interact with other people and theirs. If you’re presenting an ambiguous gender identity and I can’t figure out a safe way to interact with it, I could be setting myself up for trouble. (This is similar to the high-school gym class “Quick, everyone act super-straight” phenomenon.)
I don’t mean to get all victim-blamey here (regardless of how my peer group’s going to react, it’s still my job to Not Be A Dick); I’m just curious about why hostile assholes behave the way they do, and I doubt it’s just because they’re being horrible people, always and everywhere.
March 26th, 2012 at 4:46 pm
Thing is, Blunt, my gender identity isn’t at all ambiguous, at least not in terms of being actually possible to confuse me for male or for a woman trying actively to present as male. It’s impossible to mistake me for a man unless you can’t see me and can only hear my voice after an upper respiratory virus has dropped it two octaves. Being a C cup by 15 and a D by now will do that, and the rest of my body doesn’t exactly scream “masculine!” either. (Short and damn near the model of the gynecoid pattern.)
I only got the comments when I chopped my hair to a close crop, and they stopped when I let it grow long again. My experience matches with some other women I know who fit the same profile- obviously feminine face and body, short hair and gender-neutral dress.
I don’t think it’s all about assholes being assy because they are assholes, but I do think the general cultural expectation of entitlement to a very clearly marked gender expression on the part of other people is a strange phenomenon. Even obviously masculine men, even some with full beards, seem to get the same treatment over long hair and earrings.
March 26th, 2012 at 6:20 pm
BTW, Positive Ape Index has moved to:
http://positiveapeindex.wordpress.com/
He got offended by blogger’s warning messages, AFAICT.
March 26th, 2012 at 7:53 pm
Good post and lots of good research LabRat, now you’re making me go back and re-read things…LOL I think a LOT of the issues surround those not fitting the ‘gender norms’ of particular groups, or maybe not fitting the ‘ideologies’ of those groups… Just my .02 worth!
March 26th, 2012 at 8:17 pm
@blunt,
I think it’s expectation. People expect the genders to present certain ways, and when they meet an example that doesn’t present that way, they react very oddly.
I almost want to say that gender-presentation is internalized from the culture of the parents at a young age. It becomes a piece of tribal/family identity. Meeting a counterexample to the tribal assumptions about gender is an experience that hits a big mental barrier.
It’s my culture doesn’t work that way mental barrier that is hard to describe.
An example that comes to mind:
Years ago, another blogger mentioned being a guy with a ponytail. In some parts of the country, he seemed to always get a “can I help you, miss?” from behind, and an odd look when he turned around. It happened at least once per business trip to that region. He claimed that he was tall, broad-shouldered, and well-built, which made the effect seem even odder.
In other parts of the country, he rarely even got a second look.
(I’m pretty sure it was this guy. Wish I could find the exact link, but his blog hasn’t been updated in 2 years, and is acting as if the archives have been purged…)
Another example:
I can remember my first run-in with a woman who did not present herself as distinctively female.
The big item was attitude, the next was hair-cut, third was that she wore jeans and a sweater in a gender-neutral way. Once I looked past the cropped hair, the mannerisms, and the clothes, I could detect the female-shaped body. But she hadn’t acted/walked/responded in a way that tripped my internal ‘person-is-female’ sensor. That plus the hair and clothes caused me to assume ‘person-is-male’.
It was a little unnerving, but not in a way that I could explain easily. (I tried to be polite…I think I succeeded.)
It’s a narrow data-set, but that’s why I think that the response is tribal to the point of feeling instinctive.
March 26th, 2012 at 8:51 pm
LabRat: “Ambiguous” was pretty much the most misleading adjective I could possibly have chosen for the point I was actually trying to make. Sorry ’bout that.
karrde:
This fits with my intuition. I’d guess that most people who’re socialized into strong gender-identity norms have mental models for how to interact with masculine men, and how to interact with feminine women, and when presented with (say) a feminine man — or even one who doesn’t really fit an unambiguously masculine model — some of them/us get confused and resentful. “Who do you think you are, taking me out of my comfort zone and denying me a predictable set of assumptions for this social interaction?”
March 26th, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Interesting and thought provoking article! (I did a bit of navel gazing).
Your experiences, with short hair, seem almost unbelievable here (UK). Short hair and an almost androgynous look is the norm in certain sub-cultures for both genders and is entirely unremarkable in all (the equivalent would be to comment on a woman wearing trousers - just not going to happen, I think you’d have to go back to the 50’s for it to be so). Short hair for women was at one time quite a fashion necessity even (late nineties) whilst men had longer hair. As such I’d say such a negative reaction is almost certainly a local cultural phenomena. Also to pick a single, and atypical, characteristic on which to base a judgement seems extreme.
My own view is that gender is a spectrum characteristic within very broad culturally defined limits (as such I wouldn’t list a gay man or woman as having a separate gender identity, but simply a different place on the spectrum. I came to this conclusion because as a nurse I have many colleagues who are straight, gay, bi, trans, etc. etc. and even within these, stereotypically presented, homogeneous groups the variation in expression and ‘taste’ is massive). I do believe there is a major biological defined component (not necessarily defined by gametogenesis, my own inclination is towards variations in neurochemistry), but that a significant portion is related to identity, self-expression, personal taste (what we find attractive) and peer group acceptance in addition to cultural programming.
I guess what I am trying, badly, to say is that I suspect the negative reaction you experienced probably had more to do with attempts to curry favour with peer groups (saying what he thought, they thought he should say) and trying to present a public face which fits their self-image. My personal experience is that those who react in a negative way towards my friends and colleagues only do so when in a ‘public’ environment, privately they, almost without exception, act what appears entirely normally. Why? I can only guess.
In other words I think these particular “assholes (were) being assy because (they were) assholes”
Just sayin’ YMMV
March 27th, 2012 at 6:17 am
…but the training and rules for properly expressing one’s gender start at birth and have been a subject of obsession for parents since the beginning of written history.
I’ve been reading a lot of Roman primary sources, and they’re _obsessed_ with masculinity, effeminacy, and who expresses what aspects of which, where and when. When attempting to discredit a man, the first resort is to imply that he’s effeminate. A woman can be praised for behaving in some masculine ways that involve obligations, but has to tread much more carefully where masculine liberties are concerned.
Some of this is obviously because theirs was, at least through most of the Republic, a martial culture that relied on the strength of its men to survive, but the extent of the obsession goes far beyond cases where “effeminacy” indicates a man’s lack of martial preparedness. There’s a saying of Cicero preserved in Macrobius, in which he mocks Julius Caesar for the way he draped his toga. Its hem touched the ground when he walked, and thus the man who subjugated Gaul was effeminate.
March 27th, 2012 at 7:59 am
@Able,
I said it was expectation, and I suspect it’s also tied to cultural background.
I think the thing I was getting at is that there is a grouping of cultural symbols for Masculine/Feminine. These symbols are usually internalized along with a handful of other social rules before the child learns to think as a rational person.
Thus, the reaction occurs in what I would call the pre-rational mind. The that-expression-of-gender-is-wrong response feels like instinct. The person splutters, expostulates with a ‘that is wrong!’, and when pressed, can’t give a good reason.
March 27th, 2012 at 9:59 am
I think Karrde and Blunt do have it about right, but it still remains fascinating to me that this is such a thing where so many other cultural norms exist, but people don’t react in such a profound way to.
Especially in the “men and women are innately biologically different in consistent ways, which is why we have to put tremendous effort into making sure no one ever transgresses their gender norms” paradigm.
March 27th, 2012 at 10:23 am
Yeah, I think gender is both a social construct and a biological thing. My experience of gender dysphoria* is real and I had it long before I actually had words for it, as far back as I can remember. But if I had been born forty years earlier I’d just be a butch woman**, and if I had been born in a place without a thriving queer community and/or the Internet I probably would have been vaguely uncomfortable with my gender and not know why.
Also, my gender dysphoria may be biological, but the things I do to convey my gender to the cis public are the subject of a LOT of overthinking, practice, and experimentation in trying to figure out how to make social constructs work in my favor. For some reason, purple hoodies and guys’ skinny jeans give me the effect I want, but if I got the effect I wanted through wearing a sundress and combat boots, that’s what I’d be out there wearing, you know?
I sometimes think the “all of gender is biological, women like pink because BERRIES!” people figured out how to make their genders work for them early enough in life that they forgot that it’s a thing you learn.
*Weirdass nonbinary person.
**Actually there is some discussion of “butch flight,” which is the phenomenon of people who would have been butches in an earlier generation now being trans men instead, and/or people who identified as butches for a while transitioning to male.
March 27th, 2012 at 1:20 pm
@Karrde
I’m not sure I agree that it is that ingrained or occurs that early. If it were so then such issues would arise in primary schools, if not kindergartens. My, admittedly limited and outsiders viewpoint, suggests that these issues arise at puberty (whilst they may exist earlier they don’t, in general, become a ‘problem’ until later), the beginning of the sexual component of relationships arising.
I suspect all relationships (with those subconsciously perceived as being potential partners) have a ‘sexual’ component (the meme that men and women cannot JUST be friends has some basis at least) and rely heavily on the non-verbal cues we receive from any, self-perceived, potential partner. Witness the discontinuity experienced when cues cause an attraction response to someone from a group we subsequently learn (consciously perceive) to be inappropriate to react this way to (a man seeing a nice butt and then realising it is another man, common enough to be humourously used in film etc.).
I suspect the showing of explicit traits perceived by some to be exclusively of one gender (ie ponytail on a man, short hair on a woman) or seen as representing belonging to another gender role elicits a reaction along the lines of ‘Nyah, nyah - I never fancied you anyway’ because the alternative threatens their self-image of their own sexuality (a man seeing short-hair on a woman, assumes she is ‘butch’ and therefore somehow less ‘feminine’ which because she remains patently a woman with other traits eliciting attraction it threatens his masculinity). That these traits are almost entirely cultural, and variable over time, is plain and speaks to a learned response rather than one ingrained from childhood, doesn’t it?
As such I don’t think it’s that “The person splutters, expostulates with a ‘that is wrong!’, and when pressed, can’t give a good reason.” but that they won’t give response which would be an admission that their sexuality was, to them, questioned. Why is this not an issue for the gay etc. person? Because as a relatively smaller percentage the experience is more common, and therefore less shocking, for them (that and the fact that they will have been forced to question their sexuality by societal ‘norms’ so they will have become, generally, more secure in that sexuality).
So I think negative reactions are more about personal insecurities (as well as interpreted peer group expectations) rather than ingrained culturally defined behaviours.
March 27th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
While I do think you’re at least half right, Able, you’ve really never seen gender-role policing of or by very young children? Strangers on the street feel entitled to know whether an infant is a girl or a boy; kindergarteners will give other kids crap over whether they’re playing with girl-toys or boy-toys, as well as, once again, their hair or the color of their clothes. This is presexual stuff that adults do to children, and the children mirror back because they are, after all, learning what their appropriate roles within their culture are.
Plus bear in mind this isn’t even about sexuality or transgenderism entire. Adults do worry about children who persistently transgress gender norms growing up to be gay, but they also worry as much if not more about their kids not being masculine or feminine, period.
March 27th, 2012 at 4:17 pm
I’m probably overthinking it again:
You know how I occasionally rant on my blog about how, if we were to suddenly somehow make all wealth inequality go away by magic, humans would just find other ways to stratify themselves in status/dominance/social hierarchies? I wonder if this isn’t the same sort of thing: Most people don’t react at all strongly to most other cultural norms because gender-presentation norms already fill the role. I’m not sure what role they fill, although my first guess is “quick way to pigeon-hole superficial social interactions”, but the Law of Conservation of Drama makes me wonder whether gender presentation is a tool, rather than an end in itself.
March 27th, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Now that’s an interesting thought, which I need more time to chew over.
March 27th, 2012 at 11:11 pm
@Labrat
“you’ve really never seen gender-role policing of or by very young children?”. I really can’t say I have as such. I understand what you are saying but I think I disagree to an extent.
I have the experience of my own children and their friends, but also as a nurse being required to work in a nursery for a period (limited I’ll admit but still a reasonable level of experience, which is probably more than most males are allowed in todays PC society).
What I did observe was not a ‘girl-toy boy-toy’ definition but a general difference in the games played by the different genders using the same toys (eg boys using dolls to play war games) pointing to a, perhaps biologically defined, difference in ‘mentality’ (?).
There was a recent case here in which a young boy (7 or 8) was reported and faced discipline because he had asked a school friend whether, because he was black, he was from Africa (seriously! parents called to school, informed they had to sign a letter stating he had acted in a racist manner, child facing exclusion).
Was the boy racist? Of course not! He was young, had perhaps seen some TV programme and asked a question of a friend related to a difference to himself (to equate adult explanations to young childrens behaviour is a fallacious concept at best). Childrens reactions around clothing, hair etc. tend to be like that, in my experience. Searching for similarities and differences be they in appearance, behaviour or interests. Gender isn’t even an issue except in how the aforementioned differences appear to be gender specific (my sons group of friends include two girls who, like the rest, enjoy being ‘Jedi’. Their being girls is irrelevant to him, being interested in lightsabre fighting techniques isn’t).
I agree bluntobjects proposal is an interesting idea but I wonder if it could be replaced. Why? If I asked you to describe/define yourself, how would you answer? I would begin ‘I am a man…’. I would not begin with the physical, class, status, nationality, ethnicity, education but with… gender. It is a defining characteristic in our self-image (perhaps the primary one) and as such I think it will always be of overriding importance in any social interaction. As to its role? I think the ‘pigeon-hole’ (first approximation) idea is sound! (I just wish I had the brains to think of it
)
March 28th, 2012 at 2:56 am
Glad that you posted this. I have been watching the Norwegian documentary series “Hjernevask” (Brainwashing) which revolves around gender differences, equality and biology so I’m currently quite interested in anything relating to gender.
The documentary was the main reason that the Norwegian government suspended women’s studies and gender studies funding because it revealed some very strong biases in the scientific community in Norway.
Here’s a Wikipedia article which has links to the episodes with english subtitles. Fun, although it admittedly has it in for the more liberal Norwegian academics :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing_%28TV-program%29
March 28th, 2012 at 12:30 pm
I always figured gender was like a busy street: the lanes are wide and a lot of drivers kind of wander — some even make U-turns. But the ones who insist on driving right down the dividing line tend to get hit from both directions.
It’s not about being fair, polite or even nice. It’s just physics.
March 28th, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Able- I think the differences we’ve seen (I was a little girl that played with the boys, but I was definitely swimming hard against the tide in many cases) may be again for the same reason we’ve seen differences in reactions to more mundane gender-neutral dress and hair. If the genders as we understand them now in the West are in fact primarily culturally constructed, than a society with less gender policing at the top will probably see less of it between kindergarteners as well.
I’ll also add that in my experience gender ISN’T the primary or even a major identifier for everyone. I would be equally as unlikely to mention “woman” first unless gender were the topic and “from my perspective as…” were important as you would be to start off from man. I suffer no gender dysphoria at all, but I don’t fit well in my box either from the cultural perspective, and I don’t see it as informative. And I’ve learned from some experience that even transgendered people don’t necessarily experience a powerful innate sense of which sex they are as I do.
Pun- will check it out.
Roberta- true, and that applies across our ape society, which doesnt’ mean the means and mores that cause the crashes aren’t worth the look.
March 28th, 2012 at 5:43 pm
Like I said, Interesting and thought provoking!
I suspect I’ll be trying to articulate my own understanding of my own thoughts for some time as well as considering perspectives I hadn’t considered before.
It’s been an unutterable pleasure! (reasoned discussion seems to be a culturally declining commodity, here at least).
March 28th, 2012 at 6:48 pm
“which doesnt’ mean the means and mores that cause the crashes aren’t worth the look.”
I wonder. I mean, did either side in the tranny lesbian/radfem lesbian debate really come away with anything they didn’t bring? Did us outgroup onlookers get anything other than what the people who gawp at car wrecks get? I mean, sure, “Wow, who knew some pixies really hate poltergeists/who knew some poltergeists think pixies owe them affection,” is kinda interesting but it’s not gonna change me being normally polite if they’re running the register at the supermarket.