The “Traditional” Liberal Concept Of Gender Seems Worth Saving. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

10 - 13 minutes

Greetings from Berlin. One of many amazing things about this city is that the weather is wonderfully mild in the summer, by swampy New York standards. 

I mean, look at this. . . 

. . . isn’t that perfect? I understand that some contrarian heterodox weather pundits would have you believe that the point of summer is for it to get hot, but come on — this temperature range really is a wonderful sweet spot. And an average high of 76° means there are plenty of days when it climbs into the 80s, which is fine in a city that has approximately 150,000 lakes within shouting distance, some of them accessible by public transit.

This is all a long-winded way for me to complain: today, the day I’m writing this, Saturday, the high is going to be 95°. Luckily the Germans are enthusiasts for high ceilings and ventilation, so things aren’t that bad where I am now. But still, I feel cheated. Everybody feel sorry for me!

***

Let’s talk gender. This will be a random post, but there’s been some stuff rattling around in my head lately. My understanding of the “traditional,” liberal sex/gender divide is that sex is your physical body, and gender is the expectations, mores, assumptions, and other cultural stuff you encounter as a result of being seen as male or female.

I’ve complained about this before, but the present discourse about sex and gender and gender identity absolutely butchers these and other definitions. It’s a conversation in which carefully crafted, shared definitions should be seen as vital, and yet academics and pundits seem almost gleeful in the sloppy way they say sex when they mean gender, or gender when they mean gender identity, or gender when they mean sex, and on and on and on. If you haven’t noticed this before, you will now — I promise. 

In some cases this definitional sloppiness isn’t the end of the world; like, if someone says “birth gender,” I wince and die a little on the inside, but I know that they mean “birth sex.” But in other instances, it matters a great deal. And it feels like there’s a pattern here: “gender identity” has, in many ways, consumed or supplanted “gender.”

What I mean is this: it’s now routine to see people use the term “gender” to mean “what someone feels they are.” So when you see an argument about someone’s “true gender,” really what that means is their gender identity. “Kids know their gender,” for example, is just a way of saying kids feel a certain way about their gender identity, and this indicates who they really are and therefore how they should be treated by everyone else (though the idea of really being a gender is rarely explored with much thought or depth).

I don’t know exactly why this shift has occurred, but I think it’s part of the broader activist project of discounting the relevance of biological sex and elevating the concept of gender identity above all else. If the goal is for trans people to be treated as what they say they are, then it makes sense to treat gender identity as the fundamental determinant of that. And the way “gender” has colonized “gender identity” is useful for this purpose, in a — sorry to go this route, but it’s true! — Orwellian way, because if you lack the term to describe something, that makes it harder to talk about.

But in much the same way biological sex is important, and we should be able to openly talk about it and the way it interacts with and/or sometimes conflicts with gender identity, the same is true of gender.

I’m not relying on any fancy theory here — rather, I want to talk about gender in a commonsense way that I think most people would endorse, regardless of their thoughts on the bigger, broader battles going on in this space.

I’ve always understood gender to mostly be something that is imposed on you. When someone looks at me and sees that I’m male, they’ll likely expect me to act in certain ways and to not act in other ways. Over time, moving through the world as a male, I become aware of these expectations and adopt some of them, reject others, become stressed out by still others, and so on.

I spent two years, in middle school, at a really awful prep school. I just hated it. We had to do sports, I chose football, and it was just a miserable experience. I was doughy and unathletic, playing with a lot of kids who were both more athletic and further along in puberty than I was. Part of the culture was that my teammates loved — or said they loved — both hitting (tackling) other players and getting hit themselves. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t, but it was a norm during practices and games: the physical contact was awesome. It was clearly a way to prove your macho credentials, to talk about this and to hurl yourself at others — oftentimes headfirst (!!!) — as aggressively as possible. I didn’t like it and didn’t see how anyone could. What was fun about colliding violently with someone and getting slammed to the ground? 

I find this to be a useful example of how gender works. You’re a guy, so you’re supposed to embrace aggression, and if you don’t, something is wrong with you. I still see this today when I play basketball, a sport I suck at significantly less than I sucked at football, and the younger the guys you are playing with, the more likely it is to manifest: there’s often a premium on overly aggressive behavior, shit-talking, and so on. It’s impressed on you, early on, that that’s how you’re supposed to play and carry yourself on the court.

Obviously girls and women are subjected to their own versions of this, to their own pressures. To overgeneralize a bit, they’re socialized to be less aggressive and more “pleasant” in general. All these messages are delivered, in subtle and explicit ways, from a young age. There’s a lot of unreadable dreck in gender studies, but of course there’s a very real sense in which people “become” men or women, in the sense of learning how to perform these roles properly. 

I think a lot of this gender stuff is quite harmful. I’m very bad at talking openly about difficult feelings with other people, and for a long time I barely did at all. Of course I think part of that is biology; I’m a Carole Hooven fan and, taking a cue from her book, think that the amount of testosterone flowing through my body affects my ability to express emotion. But it seems undeniable that, whatever biological predispositions we have, culture reinforces certain tendencies. It can both be true that men are, at a fundamental biological level we can never really observe in isolation because it’s impossible to live outside a culture, more aggressive than women, but also that culture nudges men further one way, and women further the other. As a guy, you’re definitely taught to be stoic and to not express too much emotion.

It’s interesting to think about how deeply ingrained these feelings are, even in those of us who pride ourselves on being gender-egalitarian progressives. If I’m being honest with myself, I simply react differently when I come across a man crying versus a woman crying. There’s a small, embarrassing part of me that views a man crying as a bit shameful or melodramatic, whereas a woman crying feels more normal. Again, I’m not endorsing any of this! It’s bad, and it’s affected me personally, because it’s harmful to live life with your feelings bottled up inside you. But I didn’t choose to believe any of this — I really think it was instilled in me from a young age, even despite my having been raised in a very progressive household and city.

Contemporary gender discourse doesn’t discuss any of this much. It’s much less “what is imposed on me?” and much more “how do I feel on the inside, and how do I get the world to notice and respect that?” And especially when it comes to young people, it feels misguided and fraught to ignore all the gender signals that society shoots at you, especially around puberty. It’s actually bizarre, when you think about it, that the concept of “feeling like a boy” or “feeling like a girl” is now so divorced from gender, in the traditionally understood liberal sense of the word. Instead, much of the liberal world has embraced this bizarre idea that all there really is to gender is your internal feelings, ignoring the fact that of course your internal feelings are affected by the signals you get from society. In fact, it’s hard to even understand what “feeling like a girl” means unless you are aware of how girls are supposed to feel. Things get circular and incoherent, fast, when you sever gender identity from gender, or attempt to colonize the latter with the former.

Ignoring the traditional liberal understanding of gender also makes it more difficult to talk about trade-offs. When I walk down the street, I am gendered as male. That’s how people see me. I may well feel differently on the inside, but if I look like any other male, that isn’t really going to change how people see me — how could it? So a mature discussion of all of this would acknowledge that someone’s gender doesn’t magically flip as soon as they announce it to be something new; they might still look and be seen as male (say). As a large male, I recognize that if, say, I pass a woman on the street at night, she’s going to view me differently from how she would view a woman. Men are seen as somewhat more threatening, and this isn’t some sort of unfair, out-of-thin-air stereotype: men are, in fact, much more violent than women.

So a mature understanding of gender identity and gender and the way the two must interact would probably allow for some compromise in the middle. If I, presenting in the world as I do, as a large male, identify as a woman, it would be profoundly unfair, not to mention a bit coercive, for me to then insist that women see me as female because of how I feel. That’s not how gender — or anything — really works. And yet that is the view that has won out: a fairly mystical one that doesn’t take into account the obvious social fact that identities are (at least most of the time) socially negotiated. There aren’t a lot of them you can simply opt in to.

I should probably end this post by being slightly defensive and emphasizing (not for the first time) that I actually think in most cases, self-ID can win out without it causing much trouble or complication. But I also don’t like the fact that gender is getting shuffled off to the side — I don’t think it helps anyone to pretend gender doesn’t matter, and I think it’s particularly harmful to young people. The world simply is more complicated than “You are what you say you are,” and it doesn’t help young people to pretend otherwise, or to discourage them (!) from understanding that their identities are, in part, determined by powerful external forces and expectations. 

Questions? Comments? Rampant and indiscriminate gendering? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. Image: “Teens having fun together” via Getty.