Racial Impurity and Gender Confusion

Here's a speculation. I'm reading John McWhorter's new book What Language Is (Gotham Books, 2011), which begins with a lengthy discussion of the difference in complexity among languages. Some have intricate systems of case, gender, or counting; others don't. This much I knew already. McWhorter argues, though, with numerous examples, that the "simpler" languages are usually the result of a sudden influx of speakers trying to learn them as adults. Infants acquiring their first language can, and do, master complex grammars effortlessly. After about the age of fifteen, this ability shrivels up, and few adults can learn new language with any fluency. Therefore they tend to simplify the new language, stripping away verb conjugations, noun cases, genders, and expressive particles. Their children learn the simplified version, and if there's a critical mass of such new speakers, they may affect the language as a whole: "over generations," as McWhorter says, "the very essence of what [a language] is starts to change. Namely, it gets simpler" (24). His first example is ancient Persian, but English went through a similar process.

English, like Persian, was stunted by too many adults learning it for an extended period of time. In this case it was the Scandinavian Vikings who invaded, starting in the eighth-century A.D., and stayed on to marry local women and knit themselves into English society. As new waves of Vikings kept blowing in over generations, children grew up hearing as much "funny" English as native: that is, without gender, using here instead of hither, chucking the difference between has seen and is departed, and so on. Scribes kept writing Old English more or less as if this wasn't happening, but then ... the Norman Conquest put written English on pause.



For two centuries, the written language of England was French, and when English started being used on paper [parchment and vellum, more likely] again, it was "middle" in the same way as Persian when it came back to light -- slimmed down and more user-friendly [27-28].

How do languages become complex in the first place? McWhorter argues that this a consequence of what he calls "ingrown" languages, where a population is relatively isolated, and so has the time and freedom to elaborate its language.

Even if we are aware that what is unusual is when a language is less complicated rather than when it is extremely complicated, a temptation always looms to attribute the complexity of language to some kind of utility. The idea that it is due to something as wan as drift or incremental habit formation sits awkwardly in the mind, especially for speakers of a moderately complex a language as English. Surely, we may think, all of that machinery in a language like Pashto must be for something. It couldn't just be buildup, like some ring in a bathtub [55].

McWhorter thinks that language complexity is just buildup, and gives plenty of reasons for believing that the complications "vastly overshoot anything that would be of any use to a child getting a grip on the system."

Languages are complicated because they can be. They complicate as a natural result of millennia of habits developed by people using them quickly and unconsciously. Because babies can pick languages up despite the massive accretion of complexity this yield, languages stay complex -- unless something intervenes, such as grown-ups learning them [59].

So, on to my speculation. McWhorter's discussion reminded me of gender, which after all relates to language. English is a relatively ungendered language compared to many others, such as French or German or Spanish. But in such languages, which randomly assign genders to inanimate objects, such as la mesa (how do you tell whether a table is masculine or feminine?), there are also contradictions.

German has a suffix, -chen, that makes things dear and small ... and it has neuter case. That means it takes the article das instead of the masculine der or feminine die. ... But once that suffix exists, you just know that somewhere along along the line, -chen will be applied, quite logically, to a woman to create a word meaning something like girly or maiden. It was: Mädchen. But that meant, automatically, an irregularity -- das Mädchen is a neuter word even though it refers to something clearly female [71].

In Spanish, -o is a masculine ending, but the word for hand is feminine: la mano. And so on.



Anyway, this got me to thinking about the way young children assign gender to objects in the world around them, as described by Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender (Norton, 2010).

At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male and female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa. This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already starting to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There's some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup, and so on are intended before their second birthday. And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong [211].

But even as they are forming themselves into little gender cops, they can be fooled, because so many of their gender categories are as arbitrary and fanciful as the notion that a hand is feminine or a girl is neuter:

Indeed, so powerful are these metaphorical gender cues that five-year-old children will confidently declare that a spiky brown tea set and an angry-looking baby doll dressed in rough black clothing are for boys, while a smiling yellow truck adorned with hearts and a yellow hammer strewn with ribbons are for girls [224].

So this makes me wonder if the elaboration of such cues might be connected to the elaboration of linguistic categories, both of which seem to be congenial to children, but which can be and sometimes have to be abandoned. In the case of gender, the fanciful imposition of rigid categories, the insistence that everything has to be crammed into one or the other box, doesn't work for most adults. There's a popular tendency to blame bigotry on adult indoctrination of children, but I don't believe it's always so. I think a lot of it is invented by children trying to make sense of the world, who find it difficult and painful to break down the walls they set up at an early age, especially since our minds "harden" as we get older. Just a thought, though.

Racial Impurity and Gender Confusion

Here's a speculation. I'm reading John McWhorter's new book What Language Is (Gotham Books, 2011), which begins with a lengthy discussion of the difference in complexity among languages. Some have intricate systems of case, gender, or counting; others don't. This much I knew already. McWhorter argues, though, with numerous examples, that the "simpler" languages are usually the result of a sudden influx of speakers trying to learn them as adults. Infants acquiring their first language can, and do, master complex grammars effortlessly. After about the age of fifteen, this ability shrivels up, and few adults can learn new language with any fluency. Therefore they tend to simplify the new language, stripping away verb conjugations, noun cases, genders, and expressive particles. Their children learn the simplified version, and if there's a critical mass of such new speakers, they may affect the language as a whole: "over generations," as McWhorter says, "the very essence of what [a language] is starts to change. Namely, it gets simpler" (24). His first example is ancient Persian, but English went through a similar process.

English, like Persian, was stunted by too many adults learning it for an extended period of time. In this case it was the Scandinavian Vikings who invaded, starting in the eighth-century A.D., and stayed on to marry local women and knit themselves into English society. As new waves of Vikings kept blowing in over generations, children grew up hearing as much "funny" English as native: that is, without gender, using here instead of hither, chucking the difference between has seen and is departed, and so on. Scribes kept writing Old English more or less as if this wasn't happening, but then ... the Norman Conquest put written English on pause.



For two centuries, the written language of England was French, and when English started being used on paper [parchment and vellum, more likely] again, it was "middle" in the same way as Persian when it came back to light -- slimmed down and more user-friendly [27-28].

How do languages become complex in the first place? McWhorter argues that this a consequence of what he calls "ingrown" languages, where a population is relatively isolated, and so has the time and freedom to elaborate its language.

Even if we are aware that what is unusual is when a language is less complicated rather than when it is extremely complicated, a temptation always looms to attribute the complexity of language to some kind of utility. The idea that it is due to something as wan as drift or incremental habit formation sits awkwardly in the mind, especially for speakers of a moderately complex a language as English. Surely, we may think, all of that machinery in a language like Pashto must be for something. It couldn't just be buildup, like some ring in a bathtub [55].

McWhorter thinks that language complexity is just buildup, and gives plenty of reasons for believing that the complications "vastly overshoot anything that would be of any use to a child getting a grip on the system."

Languages are complicated because they can be. They complicate as a natural result of millennia of habits developed by people using them quickly and unconsciously. Because babies can pick languages up despite the massive accretion of complexity this yield, languages stay complex -- unless something intervenes, such as grown-ups learning them [59].

So, on to my speculation. McWhorter's discussion reminded me of gender, which after all relates to language. English is a relatively ungendered language compared to many others, such as French or German or Spanish. But in such languages, which randomly assign genders to inanimate objects, such as la mesa (how do you tell whether a table is masculine or feminine?), there are also contradictions.

German has a suffix, -chen, that makes things dear and small ... and it has neuter case. That means it takes the article das instead of the masculine der or feminine die. ... But once that suffix exists, you just know that somewhere along along the line, -chen will be applied, quite logically, to a woman to create a word meaning something like girly or maiden. It was: Mädchen. But that meant, automatically, an irregularity -- das Mädchen is a neuter word even though it refers to something clearly female [71].

In Spanish, -o is a masculine ending, but the word for hand is feminine: la mano. And so on.



Anyway, this got me to thinking about the way young children assign gender to objects in the world around them, as described by Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender (Norton, 2010).

At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male and female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa. This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already starting to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There's some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup, and so on are intended before their second birthday. And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong [211].

But even as they are forming themselves into little gender cops, they can be fooled, because so many of their gender categories are as arbitrary and fanciful as the notion that a hand is feminine or a girl is neuter:

Indeed, so powerful are these metaphorical gender cues that five-year-old children will confidently declare that a spiky brown tea set and an angry-looking baby doll dressed in rough black clothing are for boys, while a smiling yellow truck adorned with hearts and a yellow hammer strewn with ribbons are for girls [224].

So this makes me wonder if the elaboration of such cues might be connected to the elaboration of linguistic categories, both of which seem to be congenial to children, but which can be and sometimes have to be abandoned. In the case of gender, the fanciful imposition of rigid categories, the insistence that everything has to be crammed into one or the other box, doesn't work for most adults. There's a popular tendency to blame bigotry on adult indoctrination of children, but I don't believe it's always so. I think a lot of it is invented by children trying to make sense of the world, who find it difficult and painful to break down the walls they set up at an early age, especially since our minds "harden" as we get older. Just a thought, though.

"Your Mama's a Bulldagger!": Some Notes on Gender

Here are some quotations that have had a strong effect on how I think about gender. I was talking to a friend the other day and dug out some books I'd been meaning to look at again for a long time.

Phyllis Burke's third (and so far her last) book was Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male & Female (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996). In the preface she tells about questions she was asked on the book tours for Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son (Random House, 1993).

... no matter where I went, the most impassioned and inevitable question was always: Who is going to teach him to be a man? I found myself telling the interviewers, in an apologetic tone, that there were men in his life. Yet the questioner would persist: Who would teach him to lay baseball, or football? I assured them that someone would, without telling them that a number of women had already taken care of that, but after a while, their questions began to dig inside of me. I began to wonder if there would be things that no woman would be able to do for Jesse [xv].

By the second book tour Burke was on the ropes, until she had "an experience of tough love from a very wise elder at a Unitarian church gathering."

An elderly gentleman stood and said that he felt there was a problem with not providing a man in the house for a boy. He had been to the home of a single woman friend, and the children were running wild. He explained that this would not happen with a man in the house, and furthermore, that the experience of the deep masculine, as dictated by the work of Robert Bly, would not be possible for my son. ... I nodded and assured the man that I would provide Jesse with men as the need arose, and that I appreciated his comments.

It was then that an elder of the congregation, a usually reserved woman well into her sixties, slammed her hand down upon the table and demanded of me from across the room, "What is wrong with you?" I braced myself. "When I was married," she said, "and I was married for fifteen years, I played housewife, and I did the roles I was expected to do. But when my husband died, I learned the hard way that there had never been a single thing that he did that I could not have done. I raised my sons, and there's nothing wrong with them, because I used all the parts of me to do it. What kind of a mother can you be, if you think because you are a woman that you are incapable of raising your own child?" The elderly gentleman challenged her: "What about Robert Bly? What about the deep masculine, and Iron John?" The woman looked him straight in the eye and said, "The heck with Iron John" [xvii]

I'd put it more strongly myself, and call me dirty-minded, but I can't help suspecting that that "elderly gentleman" would be all too willing to introduce the "deep masculine" deep into young men in private counseling sessions. But the elder was absolutely right.

Rereading this story the other day, though, it reminded me of something I'd read in William Pollack, Ph.D.'s Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (Random House, 1998), a book that was attacked by right-wing feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, though for all the wrong reasons. Pollack, Ph.D. allowed that single mothers of sons mostly "have excellent instincts about what to say and do -- and about when to ask others for help -- to ensure that their sons will grow into healthy young men" (92-3), and gave this example of knowing when to ask others for help:

Olivia found there was really only one time she needed to call on her ex-husband for help with George, now fourteen years old:

"I remember calling my husband when George was still toilet-training and saying, 'When you're up here, can you show George how to stand over the toilet and pee? He's getting to the age when he can do that, but he's never seen a man naked, so how is he supposed to know how?'" [93]

I'd like to introduce Olivia to that Unitarian elder, who would probably have dope-slapped her a good one. I wonder how many boys with "intact" families, as they're so delicately called, learned to pee standing up from their fathers, especially in the good old days when Dad was away at work all day. Probably their moms taught them, as I suspect my mom did. ("Try to hold it till Daddy gets home from the office, dear" just doesn't work well with a two-year-old.) In fairness, though, Olivia appears to be rather a twit, as shown by her wish that when George was thirteen and needed That Talk, "I could have just gone off and made dinner and said, 'Dear, you handle this. You know how to handle boys.' But I couldn't," so she bit the bullet and "got through it" (ibid.).

Next story, from the chapter "Mama" in lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt's wonderful book S/He (Firebrand, 1995):

When she comes for a visit, after I've moved to D.C., my dyke neighbors ask us over for dessert. I attend to how she gets through a social situation I'm sure she's never faced, an evening at home with an African-American butch and an Iraqi femme. As we four lean toward each other over hazelnut coffee, I wonder if she's ever sat down to eat in an interracial group. But my friends are interested in something else: "We expected a little white lady in gloves. You didn't tell us your mama's a bulldagger!"

She has been the woman who sat at the grey kitchen table with me and my father, her child and her husband. She was always the one next to the stove, within reach of the pot of field peas, more cornbread. I'm so used to this that I saw her hands simply as feminine, though they are huge, capable with iron mattock or steel knitting needles. I'm so used to her height and bulk, her sneakers and windbreaker, her taciturnity and her ease with women, that I've never noticed how much she looks like the white-headed coach of a women's softball team [54].

Which reminds me, it was my tiny mother who (years after I'd refused to learn to catch a ball from my poor father) played softball in the yard with me and my brothers after we'd moved to the country.

Last story, from the preface to Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard, 2010).

For instance, when I talk to people about the idea that people are born with a male brain or a female brain, I almost always end up hearing about their experiences with children. A few people relate tales of unexpected flexibility or gender-bending, but most relay their experiences with boys who practically radiate "boyness" from some deep space within (interestingly, I hear many fewer stories about girls who are sugar and spice and everything nice). Recently, my mother happened to be present for one of these conversations, and she very matter-of-factly presented what is considered these days to be a radical idea. Before relaying her idea, let me explain that my mother is a lovely southern lady who has raised an impressive number of children: four boys and four girls of her own, in addition to playing a major role in raising some half dozen of her more than two score grandchildren and great-grandchildren (I think she's drawing the line at great-great-grandchildren). When my friend talked about her girl being so different from her younger brother, who is "all boy," my mother literally snorted. "That's because you have only two," she said. Mama went on to explain that with just a couple of children, gender looms large -- it's the most obvious explanation for every difference you see between them, and unless your children are really unusual, it's going to be easiest to see their personalities as "boy" versus "girl." But when you have a lot of children, you begin to notice that they all come with personalities of their own, and they are all quite different from one another. Gender recedes in importance [xiii].

"Of course," Jordan-Young continues, "that doesn't mean that gender isn't real." But it's a different kind of "real" than most people believe.

"Your Mama's a Bulldagger!": Some Notes on Gender

Here are some quotations that have had a strong effect on how I think about gender. I was talking to a friend the other day and dug out some books I'd been meaning to look at again for a long time.

Phyllis Burke's third (and so far her last) book was Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male & Female (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996). In the preface she tells about questions she was asked on the book tours for Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son (Random House, 1993).

... no matter where I went, the most impassioned and inevitable question was always: Who is going to teach him to be a man? I found myself telling the interviewers, in an apologetic tone, that there were men in his life. Yet the questioner would persist: Who would teach him to lay baseball, or football? I assured them that someone would, without telling them that a number of women had already taken care of that, but after a while, their questions began to dig inside of me. I began to wonder if there would be things that no woman would be able to do for Jesse [xv].

By the second book tour Burke was on the ropes, until she had "an experience of tough love from a very wise elder at a Unitarian church gathering."

An elderly gentleman stood and said that he felt there was a problem with not providing a man in the house for a boy. He had been to the home of a single woman friend, and the children were running wild. He explained that this would not happen with a man in the house, and furthermore, that the experience of the deep masculine, as dictated by the work of Robert Bly, would not be possible for my son. ... I nodded and assured the man that I would provide Jesse with men as the need arose, and that I appreciated his comments.

It was then that an elder of the congregation, a usually reserved woman well into her sixties, slammed her hand down upon the table and demanded of me from across the room, "What is wrong with you?" I braced myself. "When I was married," she said, "and I was married for fifteen years, I played housewife, and I did the roles I was expected to do. But when my husband died, I learned the hard way that there had never been a single thing that he did that I could not have done. I raised my sons, and there's nothing wrong with them, because I used all the parts of me to do it. What kind of a mother can you be, if you think because you are a woman that you are incapable of raising your own child?" The elderly gentleman challenged her: "What about Robert Bly? What about the deep masculine, and Iron John?" The woman looked him straight in the eye and said, "The heck with Iron John" [xvii]

I'd put it more strongly myself, and call me dirty-minded, but I can't help suspecting that that "elderly gentleman" would be all too willing to introduce the "deep masculine" deep into young men in private counseling sessions. But the elder was absolutely right.

Rereading this story the other day, though, it reminded me of something I'd read in William Pollack, Ph.D.'s Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (Random House, 1998), a book that was attacked by right-wing feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, though for all the wrong reasons. Pollack, Ph.D. allowed that single mothers of sons mostly "have excellent instincts about what to say and do -- and about when to ask others for help -- to ensure that their sons will grow into healthy young men" (92-3), and gave this example of knowing when to ask others for help:

Olivia found there was really only one time she needed to call on her ex-husband for help with George, now fourteen years old:

"I remember calling my husband when George was still toilet-training and saying, 'When you're up here, can you show George how to stand over the toilet and pee? He's getting to the age when he can do that, but he's never seen a man naked, so how is he supposed to know how?'" [93]

I'd like to introduce Olivia to that Unitarian elder, who would probably have dope-slapped her a good one. I wonder how many boys with "intact" families, as they're so delicately called, learned to pee standing up from their fathers, especially in the good old days when Dad was away at work all day. Probably their moms taught them, as I suspect my mom did. ("Try to hold it till Daddy gets home from the office, dear" just doesn't work well with a two-year-old.) In fairness, though, Olivia appears to be rather a twit, as shown by her wish that when George was thirteen and needed That Talk, "I could have just gone off and made dinner and said, 'Dear, you handle this. You know how to handle boys.' But I couldn't," so she bit the bullet and "got through it" (ibid.).

Next story, from the chapter "Mama" in lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt's wonderful book S/He (Firebrand, 1995):

When she comes for a visit, after I've moved to D.C., my dyke neighbors ask us over for dessert. I attend to how she gets through a social situation I'm sure she's never faced, an evening at home with an African-American butch and an Iraqi femme. As we four lean toward each other over hazelnut coffee, I wonder if she's ever sat down to eat in an interracial group. But my friends are interested in something else: "We expected a little white lady in gloves. You didn't tell us your mama's a bulldagger!"

She has been the woman who sat at the grey kitchen table with me and my father, her child and her husband. She was always the one next to the stove, within reach of the pot of field peas, more cornbread. I'm so used to this that I saw her hands simply as feminine, though they are huge, capable with iron mattock or steel knitting needles. I'm so used to her height and bulk, her sneakers and windbreaker, her taciturnity and her ease with women, that I've never noticed how much she looks like the white-headed coach of a women's softball team [54].

Which reminds me, it was my tiny mother who (years after I'd refused to learn to catch a ball from my poor father) played softball in the yard with me and my brothers after we'd moved to the country.

Last story, from the preface to Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard, 2010).

For instance, when I talk to people about the idea that people are born with a male brain or a female brain, I almost always end up hearing about their experiences with children. A few people relate tales of unexpected flexibility or gender-bending, but most relay their experiences with boys who practically radiate "boyness" from some deep space within (interestingly, I hear many fewer stories about girls who are sugar and spice and everything nice). Recently, my mother happened to be present for one of these conversations, and she very matter-of-factly presented what is considered these days to be a radical idea. Before relaying her idea, let me explain that my mother is a lovely southern lady who has raised an impressive number of children: four boys and four girls of her own, in addition to playing a major role in raising some half dozen of her more than two score grandchildren and great-grandchildren (I think she's drawing the line at great-great-grandchildren). When my friend talked about her girl being so different from her younger brother, who is "all boy," my mother literally snorted. "That's because you have only two," she said. Mama went on to explain that with just a couple of children, gender looms large -- it's the most obvious explanation for every difference you see between them, and unless your children are really unusual, it's going to be easiest to see their personalities as "boy" versus "girl." But when you have a lot of children, you begin to notice that they all come with personalities of their own, and they are all quite different from one another. Gender recedes in importance [xiii].

"Of course," Jordan-Young continues, "that doesn't mean that gender isn't real." But it's a different kind of "real" than most people believe.

And Even Thee's a Little Diverse

Along with my coworkers, I went to a training session on diversity on Thursday. Both of the presenters (a man and a woman) were gay, which may be why they spent so much time on sexual orientation and "gender." That wasn't such a good idea, because those issues were the ones they were most confused about. (Not only those, I admit: the male presenter claimed that Sunni and Shi'a are "ethnicities" as well as religious sects, which is like calling Roman Catholicism an ethnicity.)

First the presenter began by distinguishing between "sex" and "gender," and in good 1960s Second Wave Feminist fashion she defined these in terms of biology/physiology/external genitals ("sex") and behavior/dress/job appropriateness ("gender"). Having done so, though, she kept equivocating, especially about "gender." For example, she defined "gender identity" as a person's sense of whether they are male or female. But "male" and "female" are sexes, not genders; the proper words would be "masculine" and "feminine," but they aren't identities. I understand why "gender identity" is used this way, of course: "sexual identity" was already being used for a person's sense of their sexual orientation, though that's also problematic too. Does it mean what someone knows inwardly about his or her desires, or does it mean one's publicly declared identity? The latter would mean that a closet case's "sexual identity" is heterosexual, because that's the mask he or she wears, so it seems an odd waste of the term.

Personally, I don't seem to have a "gender identity": I know that I'm male, but subjectively, inside myself, I don't feel that I'm either male or female. This makes me wonder about transsexuals: what does it mean, I wonder, to feel that one is the 'wrong' sex? The closest I could come to something like that is the shock I feel when I look in the mirror each morning and an old man looks back at me; but I've never much liked my own appearance, so it's not much of a change. (What am I rejecting in my reflection -- my "gender," my age, or my looks?) Nor do I feel masculine or feminine, though like many people I've often worried about how other people perceive me. Self-image is notoriously unreliable, but is that what's meant by "identity"? Sometimes it seems to be, and it should be obvious how problematic it would be to equate one's identity with one's sense of self: my "identity" is that of a fat person, but I'm actually skinny (or vice versa); I "identify" as a young person, but I'm 70 years old; everybody thinks I'm a manly man, but inside me is a little girl who wants to sit in Daddy's lap; and so on. These discrepancies are surely interesting psychology, but are they identities? What is an identity, anyway?

But back to "gender." The presenter stuck to the older sense of the word when she talked about transsexuals who get a sex change; they're not the same as the transgendered, who may not conform to local social norms about gender, and may seek to modify their bodies to some extent (just as the cisgendered do), but don't want to alter their genital organs. ("Sex" used to be used to refer to those organs: caught without clothing, he tried to conceal his sex.) But how far can you fail to fit the norm without being "transgendered"? After all, I fall short of masculine norms in various ways (such as my lack of interest in sports), but no one would call me transgendered. Does it count if you violate the norms but see them as part of normal variation? It often seems to me that the advocates of transgender equivocate between seeing it as an identity -- a label one applies to oneself -- and seeing it as a description that can be applied by others, at least as long the others are sympathetic. Joan of Arc, who cut her hair short and took up the military as a career, is often called transgendered nowadays, but she certainly never thought of herself that way.

It also seems to me that many (not all) transgendered people have a very conservative, restrictive view of gender: they are trans because they don't fit the norms, but they never question the norms. If a little boy plays with dolls, should adults assume he is transgendered? Or should they consider that little boys often like to play with dolls? I get nervous for children's sake when adults (who often have no expert knowledge at all, for what little that is worth) jump to conclusions about their future gender or sexuality on the basis of such crude stereotypes, which I'd thought had been challenged effectively but seem to be making a comeback -- and often among the same people who were supposed to be challenging them.

And Even Thee's a Little Diverse

Along with my coworkers, I went to a training session on diversity on Thursday. Both of the presenters (a man and a woman) were gay, which may be why they spent so much time on sexual orientation and "gender." That wasn't such a good idea, because those issues were the ones they were most confused about. (Not only those, I admit: the male presenter claimed that Sunni and Shi'a are "ethnicities" as well as religious sects, which is like calling Roman Catholicism an ethnicity.)

First the presenter began by distinguishing between "sex" and "gender," and in good 1960s Second Wave Feminist fashion she defined these in terms of biology/physiology/external genitals ("sex") and behavior/dress/job appropriateness ("gender"). Having done so, though, she kept equivocating, especially about "gender." For example, she defined "gender identity" as a person's sense of whether they are male or female. But "male" and "female" are sexes, not genders; the proper words would be "masculine" and "feminine," but they aren't identities. I understand why "gender identity" is used this way, of course: "sexual identity" was already being used for a person's sense of their sexual orientation, though that's also problematic too. Does it mean what someone knows inwardly about his or her desires, or does it mean one's publicly declared identity? The latter would mean that a closet case's "sexual identity" is heterosexual, because that's the mask he or she wears, so it seems an odd waste of the term.

Personally, I don't seem to have a "gender identity": I know that I'm male, but subjectively, inside myself, I don't feel that I'm either male or female. This makes me wonder about transsexuals: what does it mean, I wonder, to feel that one is the 'wrong' sex? The closest I could come to something like that is the shock I feel when I look in the mirror each morning and an old man looks back at me; but I've never much liked my own appearance, so it's not much of a change. (What am I rejecting in my reflection -- my "gender," my age, or my looks?) Nor do I feel masculine or feminine, though like many people I've often worried about how other people perceive me. Self-image is notoriously unreliable, but is that what's meant by "identity"? Sometimes it seems to be, and it should be obvious how problematic it would be to equate one's identity with one's sense of self: my "identity" is that of a fat person, but I'm actually skinny (or vice versa); I "identify" as a young person, but I'm 70 years old; everybody thinks I'm a manly man, but inside me is a little girl who wants to sit in Daddy's lap; and so on. These discrepancies are surely interesting psychology, but are they identities? What is an identity, anyway?

But back to "gender." The presenter stuck to the older sense of the word when she talked about transsexuals who get a sex change; they're not the same as the transgendered, who may not conform to local social norms about gender, and may seek to modify their bodies to some extent (just as the cisgendered do), but don't want to alter their genital organs. ("Sex" used to be used to refer to those organs: caught without clothing, he tried to conceal his sex.) But how far can you fail to fit the norm without being "transgendered"? After all, I fall short of masculine norms in various ways (such as my lack of interest in sports), but no one would call me transgendered. Does it count if you violate the norms but see them as part of normal variation? It often seems to me that the advocates of transgender equivocate between seeing it as an identity -- a label one applies to oneself -- and seeing it as a description that can be applied by others, at least as long the others are sympathetic. Joan of Arc, who cut her hair short and took up the military as a career, is often called transgendered nowadays, but she certainly never thought of herself that way.

It also seems to me that many (not all) transgendered people have a very conservative, restrictive view of gender: they are trans because they don't fit the norms, but they never question the norms. If a little boy plays with dolls, should adults assume he is transgendered? Or should they consider that little boys often like to play with dolls? I get nervous for children's sake when adults (who often have no expert knowledge at all, for what little that is worth) jump to conclusions about their future gender or sexuality on the basis of such crude stereotypes, which I'd thought had been challenged effectively but seem to be making a comeback -- and often among the same people who were supposed to be challenging them.

If Nobody Else Jumped Off a Bridge, Would You?

One of the pitfalls of promiscuous reading is the multiple contacts. You read one book, it leads you to another, and another. Thousands of contacts in a lifetime, Dr. Kinsey! And sometimes you feel cheap and used afterwards. I picked up Sandra Lipsitz Bem’s The lenses of gender: transforming the debate on sexual inequality (Yale University Press, 1993) because I’d seen it cited here and there, and it sounded interesting and useful. But from her opening pages Bem made some strange assumptions:

I was recently asked to write a brief essay for Feminism and Psychology on “how my heterosexuality has contributed to my feminist politics.” That essay turned out to be rather different from what the editors expected because, although I have lived monogamously with a man I love for over twenty-seven years, I am not now and never have been a “heterosexual.” But neither have I ever been a “lesbian” or a “bisexual.” What I am – and have been for as long as I can remember – is someone whose sexuality and gender have never seemed to mesh with the available cultural categories, and that – rather than my presumed heterosexuality – is what has most profoundly informed not only my feminist politics but also the theoretical analysis of this book.

When I say that my sexuality does not mesh with the available cultural categories, I mean that the sex-of-partner dimension implicit in the three categories of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual seems irrelevant to my own particular pattern of erotic attractions and sexual experiences. Although some of the (very few) individuals to whom I have been attracted during my forty-eight years have been men and some have been women, what those individuals have in common has nothing to do with either their biological sex or mine – from which I conclude, not that I am attracted to both sexes, but that my sexuality is organized around dimensions other than sex [vii].

I detect a note of smugness here, especially in the “(very few)” aside. How dreary for you, Professor Bem. But what bothers me is how stupid some of these statements are. To say that someone is “bisexual” is not to say that her sexuality (whatever that is) is organized around a sexual dimension, whatever that means. Rather, it means that someone, the person using the term, is looking at the sexual “dimension”, for lack of a better word, of a person’s life. It need not be supposed to define every aspect of the person, any more than height or weight or eye color does. If I say that I am five feet, eight inches tall, would Bem say that I am organized around a dimension of height? For that matter, if I were to say that I’m a Methodist, would I be saying that I was organized around a dimension of religion? I might be, but I would as likely be simply describing that dimension, one of many that could be adduced. If anything, Bem reveals here that she is thoroughly invested in essentializing these traits.

A “bisexual” is someone whose sexual experiences (which can include attractions not acted on) have encompassed people of both sexes. Bisexuals (which in this sense includes people who don’t identify themselves, even inwardly, by that term) respond erotically in a wide range of manners, or styles. Some want basically the same things from their partners regardless of their sex, others want one thing from males and another from females. Many say, as Bem does, that they are attracted to the person and not the sex. According to the usage of some self-identified “bisexuals,” then, Bem does fit into that category, so she’s either inexcusably ignorant for a psychologist writing on this topic, or she’s disingenuous.

Granted, many people ignore these differences, but a prominent psychologist should know better. Bem’s certainly not the only one who makes this mistake. What is really alarming is the way she adopts a very popular but dishonest defensive stance, defining her term narrowly and unrealistically so that it conveniently and oh so coincidentally doesn’t include her case. (I’m not gay, even though I’ve had sex with thousands of men and no women, because I don’t do drag, or see the same guy more than once, or because I believe in marriage and most gays are just a bunch of sluts, or because I am only a top [my partners are queer, not me!], or only a bottom [see, I never get an erection – men don’t turn me on!], or because I’ll do anything but kiss [kissing’s queer, cowboys don’t kiss!]. And so on, and on. You’re not fat, Eric – you’re big-boned!)

A monosexual will respond differently to different desired individuals of her own preferred sex. Identity doesn’t necessarily agree with practice: many people who consider themselves heterosexual (or, more likely, as not-gay or not-queer or not-that-way) or homosexuals have a considerable amount of erotic experiences with people of both sexes. I don’t experience my own sexuality as “organized around [the male] sex”, or as my being attracted to a “sex.” Rather, I find that my desires and emotions, and later practices, that are generally classified as sexual occur only in relation to males. I have had a good deal of interaction with women, including very dear friends, but never have been stirred erotically by them. I have no idea why this is, but to say that my “sexuality” is organized around sex would seem to me to be pretending to know more than I or anyone knows about the roots of sexual desire and practice. (More likely it’s circular, like saying that opium puts you to sleep because of its Dormative Quality.)

Many people assume that terms like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” and “bisexual” encode a particular model of sexual organization; but this assumption is usually made on the basis of little or no evidence. Despite the work of Kinsey and many others who resisted the siren call of essentialism, such things continue to be widely assumed, even by avowedly anti-essentialist writers and scholars. Bem seems to imply that maybe some other people are “attracted to both sexes” and their sexuality is organized purely around a sexual dimension or dimensions. Those people really are bisexuals, but not her! I’m not sure there is any good reason to believe so, but perhaps Bem will provide some evidence as I read further.

On the other hand, she speaks of these “categories” as though she doesn’t think they refer to real entities in the real world, so maybe there are no bisexuals; but in that case she’s as much a bisexual as anyone else. On the next page she writes:

In the early 1970s, I focused almost exclusively on the concept of androgyny … because that concept seemed to challenge the traditional categories of masculine and female as nothing before had ever done. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, I had begun to see that the concept of androgyny inevitably focuses so much more attention on the individual’s being both masculine and feminine than on the culture’s having created that concepts of masculinity and femininity in the first place that it can legitimately be said to reproduce precisely the gender polarization that it seeks to undercut. Accordingly, I moved on to the concept of gender schematicity because it enabled me to argue even more forcefully that masculinity and femininity are merely the construction of a cultural schema – or lens – that polarizes gender.

Notice how she dwells on the word “concept”, as though concepts were unproblematically tied to words, and their ramifications were mystically packed into concept and word, so that they need only be unpacked by the intrepid theorist. This is, I think, precisely what is meant by “essentialism.” If I disagree with that notion strongly, it’s not because I believe that words can mean anything arbitrarily, and that the question is simply who is to be the master. Words do carry meanings with them, as historically and culturally shaped constructions, and of course the theorist brings her own baggage with her. But though words and concepts are culturally constructed (as is the theorist), it is impossible to find a word that by its nature stands outside of history and culture, enabling the theorist to take a Goddess’ eye view of humanity without reproducing the assumptions she seeks to undercut. (I’ll be looking soon at Thomas Nagel’s discussion of “objectivity,” The View from Nowhere. I expect it to be as entertaining as The Lens of Gender.)

In pursuit of this Holy Grail, people go from word to word, concept to concept, in quest of the one that will magically free them from the chains of culture. Queer came into use a few years after The Lens of Gender was published; I wonder if Bem jumped onto that bandwagon too. But a look at the succeeding literature showed that it too failed. Usually unaware of what they were doing, opponents of binary thinking fell into a queer / not-queer binary. Critical of the time-bound connotations of “homosexual,” queer theorists smeared the word over all times and cultures. Some thought it was preferable to the innocuous “gay,” relishing the supposed transgressive possibilities of “queer” as they sought advancement in the conformist halls of academe, as though the word itself could automatically turn their formulaic dissertations and papers into something dangerous. (If you get a Ph.D. by using it, dears, it can’t be too transgressive.) And while queer theorists weren’t watching, “gay” became a pejorative (as in “That Is So Gay”). Many younger gay people especially began to reject “gay” as something analogous to “nigger,” a nasty word that we shouldn’t use of ourselves. Words and concepts are inescapably unstable, slippery and indeterminate. A theorist’s job, it seems to me, is to try to tease out certain possibilities and implications of a word or concept, and for the length of an article or book, pin it down to one meaning. “Androgyny” will do as well for Bem’s project as any other term she can appropriate; the hard part is not to avoid being limited by it, but to avoid being sidetracked by all the other possibilities one has tried to exclude.

Another telling blunder is Bem’s dismissal of “masculinity and femininity” as “merely the constructions of a social schema”. (My italics.) It isn’t only opponents of social constructionism who think, mistakenly, that a social construction is something illusory and arbitrary, invented out of thin air to confuse and control people: far too many social constructionists believe it too. Theory is also one of the constructions of a social milieu, as are those concepts and terms in whose coils theorists struggle, Laocoon-like. A word is very much a social construction, but you cannot ignore or change its meaning arbitrarily. A text is a social construction, but not just any meaning can be assigned to it. A social construction is built partly from immaterial ideas, and partly from human bodies; “race” and “sex” are examples of such constructions.

The word “tree” has no inherent connection to the object it refers to. It could just as easily be “arbol” or “나무” or “mti”. The connection is socially constructed, but it’s not an arbitrary construction: if you want to be understood by a speaker of English, “tree” is the sound-meaning construction you must use. (The example of language generally shows that social constructions are not mere illusions that we could see through and overcome by an act of will. You can’t learn a new language by recognizing that your old one is merely a social construction; it takes long hard work.) “Bisexual” has its limitations as a description of people’s sexuality, but it’s more useful, In My Hubristic Opinion, to point out and clarify those limitations rather than to refuse to use it where it applies. People who claim they don’t like to use labels are usually strongly attached to the use of the label “label.”

It seems to me that many theorists and critics (mathematicians and scientists too) feel smothered by the world: by their gross material bodies, by the constraints of history and culture and sociality generally. They forget, or never learned, that these constraints are what give us the possibilities of thought and choice to begin with. In this they remind me of religious (not only Christian) ascetics who hoped to escape the illusions of Maya, the Cave, the Flesh, to fly free in a realm of pure asocial spirit. The very difficulty they have in getting free of those “mere” social constructions suggests how powerful social constructions are, how bound by them we are despite these folks' insistence that they are Not Of This World, or at least, of This Cultural Schema. Dismissing them so lightly is a sort of sleight of hand to distract the audience from the “mere” constructionism that is going on in the classroom or on the page. (Just as essentialists’ or absolutists’ appeal to Nature aims to distract you from the historical and cultural in their performance.)

Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day. Prefaces and introductions often don't connect well with what follows, and many writers theorize badly but do good research. Maybe the rest of The lenses of gender will be more useful.

If Nobody Else Jumped Off a Bridge, Would You?

One of the pitfalls of promiscuous reading is the multiple contacts. You read one book, it leads you to another, and another. Thousands of contacts in a lifetime, Dr. Kinsey! And sometimes you feel cheap and used afterwards. I picked up Sandra Lipsitz Bem’s The lenses of gender: transforming the debate on sexual inequality (Yale University Press, 1993) because I’d seen it cited here and there, and it sounded interesting and useful. But from her opening pages Bem made some strange assumptions:

I was recently asked to write a brief essay for Feminism and Psychology on “how my heterosexuality has contributed to my feminist politics.” That essay turned out to be rather different from what the editors expected because, although I have lived monogamously with a man I love for over twenty-seven years, I am not now and never have been a “heterosexual.” But neither have I ever been a “lesbian” or a “bisexual.” What I am – and have been for as long as I can remember – is someone whose sexuality and gender have never seemed to mesh with the available cultural categories, and that – rather than my presumed heterosexuality – is what has most profoundly informed not only my feminist politics but also the theoretical analysis of this book.

When I say that my sexuality does not mesh with the available cultural categories, I mean that the sex-of-partner dimension implicit in the three categories of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual seems irrelevant to my own particular pattern of erotic attractions and sexual experiences. Although some of the (very few) individuals to whom I have been attracted during my forty-eight years have been men and some have been women, what those individuals have in common has nothing to do with either their biological sex or mine – from which I conclude, not that I am attracted to both sexes, but that my sexuality is organized around dimensions other than sex [vii].

I detect a note of smugness here, especially in the “(very few)” aside. How dreary for you, Professor Bem. But what bothers me is how stupid some of these statements are. To say that someone is “bisexual” is not to say that her sexuality (whatever that is) is organized around a sexual dimension, whatever that means. Rather, it means that someone, the person using the term, is looking at the sexual “dimension”, for lack of a better word, of a person’s life. It need not be supposed to define every aspect of the person, any more than height or weight or eye color does. If I say that I am five feet, eight inches tall, would Bem say that I am organized around a dimension of height? For that matter, if I were to say that I’m a Methodist, would I be saying that I was organized around a dimension of religion? I might be, but I would as likely be simply describing that dimension, one of many that could be adduced. If anything, Bem reveals here that she is thoroughly invested in essentializing these traits.

A “bisexual” is someone whose sexual experiences (which can include attractions not acted on) have encompassed people of both sexes. Bisexuals (which in this sense includes people who don’t identify themselves, even inwardly, by that term) respond erotically in a wide range of manners, or styles. Some want basically the same things from their partners regardless of their sex, others want one thing from males and another from females. Many say, as Bem does, that they are attracted to the person and not the sex. According to the usage of some self-identified “bisexuals,” then, Bem does fit into that category, so she’s either inexcusably ignorant for a psychologist writing on this topic, or she’s disingenuous.

Granted, many people ignore these differences, but a prominent psychologist should know better. Bem’s certainly not the only one who makes this mistake. What is really alarming is the way she adopts a very popular but dishonest defensive stance, defining her term narrowly and unrealistically so that it conveniently and oh so coincidentally doesn’t include her case. (I’m not gay, even though I’ve had sex with thousands of men and no women, because I don’t do drag, or see the same guy more than once, or because I believe in marriage and most gays are just a bunch of sluts, or because I am only a top [my partners are queer, not me!], or only a bottom [see, I never get an erection – men don’t turn me on!], or because I’ll do anything but kiss [kissing’s queer, cowboys don’t kiss!]. And so on, and on. You’re not fat, Eric – you’re big-boned!)

A monosexual will respond differently to different desired individuals of her own preferred sex. Identity doesn’t necessarily agree with practice: many people who consider themselves heterosexual (or, more likely, as not-gay or not-queer or not-that-way) or homosexuals have a considerable amount of erotic experiences with people of both sexes. I don’t experience my own sexuality as “organized around [the male] sex”, or as my being attracted to a “sex.” Rather, I find that my desires and emotions, and later practices, that are generally classified as sexual occur only in relation to males. I have had a good deal of interaction with women, including very dear friends, but never have been stirred erotically by them. I have no idea why this is, but to say that my “sexuality” is organized around sex would seem to me to be pretending to know more than I or anyone knows about the roots of sexual desire and practice. (More likely it’s circular, like saying that opium puts you to sleep because of its Dormative Quality.)

Many people assume that terms like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” and “bisexual” encode a particular model of sexual organization; but this assumption is usually made on the basis of little or no evidence. Despite the work of Kinsey and many others who resisted the siren call of essentialism, such things continue to be widely assumed, even by avowedly anti-essentialist writers and scholars. Bem seems to imply that maybe some other people are “attracted to both sexes” and their sexuality is organized purely around a sexual dimension or dimensions. Those people really are bisexuals, but not her! I’m not sure there is any good reason to believe so, but perhaps Bem will provide some evidence as I read further.

On the other hand, she speaks of these “categories” as though she doesn’t think they refer to real entities in the real world, so maybe there are no bisexuals; but in that case she’s as much a bisexual as anyone else. On the next page she writes:

In the early 1970s, I focused almost exclusively on the concept of androgyny … because that concept seemed to challenge the traditional categories of masculine and female as nothing before had ever done. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, I had begun to see that the concept of androgyny inevitably focuses so much more attention on the individual’s being both masculine and feminine than on the culture’s having created that concepts of masculinity and femininity in the first place that it can legitimately be said to reproduce precisely the gender polarization that it seeks to undercut. Accordingly, I moved on to the concept of gender schematicity because it enabled me to argue even more forcefully that masculinity and femininity are merely the construction of a cultural schema – or lens – that polarizes gender.

Notice how she dwells on the word “concept”, as though concepts were unproblematically tied to words, and their ramifications were mystically packed into concept and word, so that they need only be unpacked by the intrepid theorist. This is, I think, precisely what is meant by “essentialism.” If I disagree with that notion strongly, it’s not because I believe that words can mean anything arbitrarily, and that the question is simply who is to be the master. Words do carry meanings with them, as historically and culturally shaped constructions, and of course the theorist brings her own baggage with her. But though words and concepts are culturally constructed (as is the theorist), it is impossible to find a word that by its nature stands outside of history and culture, enabling the theorist to take a Goddess’ eye view of humanity without reproducing the assumptions she seeks to undercut. (I’ll be looking soon at Thomas Nagel’s discussion of “objectivity,” The View from Nowhere. I expect it to be as entertaining as The Lens of Gender.)

In pursuit of this Holy Grail, people go from word to word, concept to concept, in quest of the one that will magically free them from the chains of culture. Queer came into use a few years after The Lens of Gender was published; I wonder if Bem jumped onto that bandwagon too. But a look at the succeeding literature showed that it too failed. Usually unaware of what they were doing, opponents of binary thinking fell into a queer / not-queer binary. Critical of the time-bound connotations of “homosexual,” queer theorists smeared the word over all times and cultures. Some thought it was preferable to the innocuous “gay,” relishing the supposed transgressive possibilities of “queer” as they sought advancement in the conformist halls of academe, as though the word itself could automatically turn their formulaic dissertations and papers into something dangerous. (If you get a Ph.D. by using it, dears, it can’t be too transgressive.) And while queer theorists weren’t watching, “gay” became a pejorative (as in “That Is So Gay”). Many younger gay people especially began to reject “gay” as something analogous to “nigger,” a nasty word that we shouldn’t use of ourselves. Words and concepts are inescapably unstable, slippery and indeterminate. A theorist’s job, it seems to me, is to try to tease out certain possibilities and implications of a word or concept, and for the length of an article or book, pin it down to one meaning. “Androgyny” will do as well for Bem’s project as any other term she can appropriate; the hard part is not to avoid being limited by it, but to avoid being sidetracked by all the other possibilities one has tried to exclude.

Another telling blunder is Bem’s dismissal of “masculinity and femininity” as “merely the constructions of a social schema”. (My italics.) It isn’t only opponents of social constructionism who think, mistakenly, that a social construction is something illusory and arbitrary, invented out of thin air to confuse and control people: far too many social constructionists believe it too. Theory is also one of the constructions of a social milieu, as are those concepts and terms in whose coils theorists struggle, Laocoon-like. A word is very much a social construction, but you cannot ignore or change its meaning arbitrarily. A text is a social construction, but not just any meaning can be assigned to it. A social construction is built partly from immaterial ideas, and partly from human bodies; “race” and “sex” are examples of such constructions.

The word “tree” has no inherent connection to the object it refers to. It could just as easily be “arbol” or “나무” or “mti”. The connection is socially constructed, but it’s not an arbitrary construction: if you want to be understood by a speaker of English, “tree” is the sound-meaning construction you must use. (The example of language generally shows that social constructions are not mere illusions that we could see through and overcome by an act of will. You can’t learn a new language by recognizing that your old one is merely a social construction; it takes long hard work.) “Bisexual” has its limitations as a description of people’s sexuality, but it’s more useful, In My Hubristic Opinion, to point out and clarify those limitations rather than to refuse to use it where it applies. People who claim they don’t like to use labels are usually strongly attached to the use of the label “label.”

It seems to me that many theorists and critics (mathematicians and scientists too) feel smothered by the world: by their gross material bodies, by the constraints of history and culture and sociality generally. They forget, or never learned, that these constraints are what give us the possibilities of thought and choice to begin with. In this they remind me of religious (not only Christian) ascetics who hoped to escape the illusions of Maya, the Cave, the Flesh, to fly free in a realm of pure asocial spirit. The very difficulty they have in getting free of those “mere” social constructions suggests how powerful social constructions are, how bound by them we are despite these folks' insistence that they are Not Of This World, or at least, of This Cultural Schema. Dismissing them so lightly is a sort of sleight of hand to distract the audience from the “mere” constructionism that is going on in the classroom or on the page. (Just as essentialists’ or absolutists’ appeal to Nature aims to distract you from the historical and cultural in their performance.)

Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day. Prefaces and introductions often don't connect well with what follows, and many writers theorize badly but do good research. Maybe the rest of The lenses of gender will be more useful.