Last page I wrote about some views that consider gender to be part of or identital to biological sex. But now it's time to jump into some actual views on gender itself! These are all binary views--binary meaning two options, no more, no less.
Innate Gender:
It's a common belief that even if gender is different from sex, it's still innate in a similar way. Unfortunately, this is usually communicated through corny witticisms: men are from mars and women are from venus, men have waffle brains while women have spaghetti brains, etc. In this viewpoint, we're not (always) as hardline that Men are Men and Women are Women. Maybe some women were born with engineer brains, and some mens' heads are stuffed full of noodles. In the most extreme of cases we might find a woman with a man's brain, or a man with a woman's brain, and say that they were born in the wrong bodies. In this way, innate views of gender can make room for the existence of transwomen and transmen.
Note that the line between this view and biological essentialism is blurry. Previously I made the joke that some forms of biological essentialism are more so spiritual essentialism than anything to do with biology. Innate gender is, basically, just that. For all the blowing about brain scans of men and women (and transmen and transwomen) and demographics of employment and whatnot, the idea that gender is innate lends itself more often to the Auras of Womanhood and Manhood than any science. We walk around with this view talking about things "As A Woman," or "As A Man," or about the Masculine and Feminine Energies that peple give off. But that's not always true of an innate, binary view on gender, and while I figure there is enough difference between the two to talk about them uniquely, I'd be hardpressed to do so without mentioning the other.
If gender is innate, it (generally) is given the weight of Universality: everything has always been this way, everywhere, and always. This is something I take issue with. It will come up. Frequently. Unfortuantely. But I digress: if gender is innate and therefore universal, then it must be something that all women (including transwomen) share with other women, and all men (including transmen) share with other men. Or maybe it would be better to work from a lack of something, and instead say that the experiences of all women will never be had by any man, and that the experiences of all men will never be had by any woman. Again, men are from mars, and women are from venus.
A focus on the disparity between men and women, women and men, rather than the similarities between women and women, men and men, is common for these views. And that's the point, isn't it? While gender abolitionists are trying to stir up an almost nationalistic feeling of fervor between others of the same sex, innate gender views are more likely to spend time keeping everything ordered in their own little boxes. There's a sort of contentment to an innate gender binary: no need to make any waves, no need to change anything, no need to be angry or upset, no need to feel strongly about things, and no need for the exclusion of trans people either, so long as they can be boxed up along with the rest. Men are from mars, women are from venus.
But how real is that sense of calm?
If you start to ask, "is gender really universal," or, "isn't the waffle-brain, spaghetti-brain thing pretty much debunked," or even, "have you ever read that one Deborah Cameron book," that calm doesn't seem to go very far.
And it doesn't seem very adept at giving answers either.
Somewhere In The Grey: Nihilism Towards Sexism
While I have made reference to sexism, it hasn't been by name yet, which is shocking given that sexism and other discriminations on the basis of gender (and/or sex) are A Big Fucking Part of what we talk about when we talk about gender. I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, and some of this will make more sense by the end of the page, so bear with me.
There's a certain train of thought that says that gender, and the roles that come with it, are entirely culturally defined rather than being innate, but that because bigotry is so deeply envgrained in the human conscious, we will never be able to socially construct something outside of Man = Good, Woman = Bad or Woman = Good, Man = Bad, let alone change our ideas about gender as a whole. So we're stuck. Gender is constructed, at least in theory, but by all practical means it is innate. Unchangeable.
As always, views can and do overlap. For some folks, belief in an innate gender comes from exactly this. For other folks, this sort of nihilism about sexism and gender leads them towards biological essentialism and gender abolition.
Personally, I don't like this view.
I understand it. I understand where it comes from, be it the daily grind or a trauma or the weariness that comes from trying for years on end with what feels like little to no progress. And besides, throwing oneself to the ground and saying, "I'm beat, it's hopeless, I can't do it," is incredibly cathartic and a lot of fun.
But I can't help but think the situation isn't quite that dire. History tells a different story, and while 'a decade ago' still brings up thoughts of the 90s, a lot has changed from 1990 to 2023.
What's that saying, the work will never be done but that doesn't mean you can't stop doing it? You don't have to finish the work but you still have to show up?
Social Constructs (Binary)
Here it is, folks, at long fucking last: social constructs. Gender is usually defined as a social construct. This means (at least theoretically) that it is not innate, nor biological, nor static through the decades. Usually, we start with social construct theory when talking about gender. But given the myriad of beliefs people have outside it, I figured a better place might be the less fluid, possibly more familiar theories a lot of us grew up with.
Alright, so gender as a social construct: it clearly changes from culture to culture and from then to now, and we can actively change it! Consider the good housewife propaganda of the 1920s and onwards, and how many products were marketed towards making The Good Housewife Life plausible for middle and lower class women that otherwise wouldn't have been able to follow the ideal, and may, if they had become fed up enough, turned their backs on it entirely. Boxed cake mixes could have included powdered milk, eggs, etc., and only required a little water, mixing, and an oven. But by adding some eggs or a half cup of oil, the wife too busy taking care of everything else could suddenly avoid the shame of having to buy a cake from the store. Suddenly, she could be the ideal woman: The Good Fucking Housewife. Advertising became a way to ensure this new invention of the Golden Housewife that hadn't really existed before could stick around. And boy howdy, it fucking did! Even if the Housewife hasn't stuck around as the normal, it's still held as an ideal by plenty of people. Or consider in a similar line of things the changes made in the last century thanks to feminist movements. Or the ways feminism, anti-rascism, and body positivity/neutrality movements have impacted who and what we see on the silver screen.
In all of those cases, society changed, and gender went and changed along with it. Getting the hang of things? Good!
"But wait!" some one has probably been relentlessly yelling since reading the heading of this section, "The beauty of gender as a social construct is that we don't need a gender binary anymore!"
And they'd be right!
But there are plenty of folks out there that view gender as a social construct and as a binary still, so cool your heels and stop jumping ahead. Or do jump ahead, I'm not writing this for you.
The existence of binary trans folks is a little different through social contstructs than in something like an innate gender binary. There are still plenty of people that might resonate with the idea that they were born in the wrong body, or that their brain/soul/whathaveyou and body are mismatched, but when viewed through social construction, being trans is less about whether you have a man's body and a woman's brain, and more about learning to live like and/or naturually leaning towards one social category over the other. And just like we might talk about speech patterns, dress, and socialization when it comes to a trans person "passing" for their new gender, a non-trans (cis) person's gender may be impacted by those things too. Or maybe not! What makes a man a man, and a woman a woman, is entirely socially constructed!
And this is where binary social construction starts to get funky. Because even if we're open to messing around with what men are and what women are, there's still this lingering sentiment that Men and Women exist as innate categories. The details of gender can change--being a woman might now mean also wearing blue jeans and owning property and having a degree and running for president, for example--but gender itself cannot. Otherwise, we would have to be open to this idea that there might, just maybe, be more outside of Men and Women.
And this can get weird, even solely within this point of view. Consider for example Masculinity and Femininity, which are often treated as being both innate to humans, and fluid across time. So femininity is usually anything we expect from or associate with women, which might be changed, and masculinity is anything we expect from or associate with men, which also might be changed. But androgyny isn't that which we could expect from anyone, or associate with anyone. So then does androgyny simply not exist within a binary social construct theory? Or consider the idea of masculine women and feminine men (♫ which is the rooster and which is the hen ♫), which are not always conceptualized as Women Acting Like Men and Men Acting Like Women even to folks with this viewpoint, but sometimes instead as their own third things.
So things start to feel fuzzy. We start asking questions like, if what makes up gender can be changed, then what if gender itself can be changed? We start scratching our heads over whether these categories of Men and Women are as discrete as we've been treating them when it seems like the people we know can share so many similarities across gender lines.
There's a thread that's loose on our metaphorical socks here.
We start asking these kinds of questions, we start pulling on that thread.
And things start to unravel.