Originally published on Medium on March 23, 2018
We’re learning that gender is a lot more complicated than we use to think. Perhaps the most challenging thing to those of us raised to reject traditional gender stereotypes (and rightly so!): gender does matter.
First, and I wish this went without saying, the most important reason we need greater acceptance and awareness of transgender individuals and the challenges they face is to ensure that they receive the liberties and equal treatment we all deserve. That said, a greater awareness of transgender individuals also points a much needed spotlight at how little we know about gender.
First off, a caveat. I am not even a well informed amateur on the topic of what it means to be transgender. A few years ago, as issues of trans rights were gaining awareness, I probably would have said I was skeptical of a biological basis of gender identity. I still supported trans rights — who was I to judge how others lived — but I would likely have said it was a choice. My perspective has changed. Not, I will openly admit, because I have done research. Rather, my perspective is primarily informed by learning about the lived experiences of others. This includes experiences I have read about but, more importantly, it includes the experiences of my friends who are transgender. They have, through their lived example, shown me that there is something deeply inherent about their gender despite the fact that it does not match the sex they were born with. (And they are awesome people, like my friends generally are.)
So what I am not going to do today is try to explain how gender works. I do not know. And although they know more than me, academics and researchers in various fields that study gender do not know, activists do not know. What we do know, at this point, is that this is all much more complicated than has traditionally been assumed. Biological sex, gender, sexuality are highly correlated but not fully determinate of each other — and none of them are as simple as simple binaries would have us believe.
The lived experience of transgender people challenges the traditional view that gender, sex, and sexuality are all the same thing. Like homosexuality did for sexuality, transgender people show us that gender and biological sex are separable. Furthermore, since these are not co-determined, the visions of gender that we are socialized to believe are not nearly flexible enough to describe reality.
If you run in more progressive circles, all of that is taken as a given. The challenge to the liberal view raised by transgender people is that gender does mean something. It is not merely a social construct. Gender is not a fluid idea that we can buy into or not. The specifics of how gender is expressed is a social construct. When individuals feel that they have a gender, however, they are not just falling prey to the stereotypes of society. They are expressing something that is deeply a part of what they are.
The previous paragraph should not be taken to mean that gender is a binary. Another thing transgender people are teaching us is that gender is much more complicated than male and female. Rather, the lesson is that nonbinary gender is not the same as our being neutral slates that society writes upon. This is something that progressives are still struggling with. For example, an occasional topic in parenting newsletters is gender neutral parenting. At its heart, this is the laudable idea that we should avoid gender stereotypes when raising children. However, sometimes it is presented as a way to try to neutralize the concept of gender expression, especially in children’s appearance and play. These same articles often discuss how such a parenting style can help children discover their true gender identity. Yet if gender is a fundamental part of us, then learning how it is expressed is an important part of our development (even if that expression is largely an arbitrary cultural artifact).
We cannot just blow away the concept of gender and attain a world where everyone is equal. Instead, we have to learn how to create a world where gender can meaningful but where it is not used as a proxy for ability or opportunity. This is a much harder problem. One where I feel, we have much to learn from our fellow humans who have been forced to figure out what this all means because the default settings were not the right ones for them.
(Note: “!=” is programmer speak for “not equal”.)