Gender and shopping
The second part of the Boston Globe’s series on a Somerville doctor who got a male-to-female sex change begins thusly:
At age 52, Deborah Bershel made her first trip to the mall. It lasted nine hours. It was July 2006, and there was barely a rack of clothes in the Burlington Mall that she didn’t comb through. The next day she headed to the Natick Mall and logged another five hours shopping. She was making up for lost time. In each store, her approach was usually the same. She’d march up to a salesclerk and explain, “I’m a transsexual, so I’m new to this.” Then she’d ask her particular question, whether it be which cut of jeans would cover the top of her panties or which type of fabrics wouldn’t cling to her arms. “I have questions that no 50-year-old woman should have,” she said.
My wife inferred from this anecdote that Bershel had no female friends, because otherwise, she would be asking those friends for advice, not sales clerks. Women, she said, shop in groups as a social activity; men shop for the purpose of getting something. (The standard “all generalizations are false” disclaimer applies.)
I suggested that she put that observation in her LJ, but she asked me to put it here, since it connects with my previous comments regarding transwomen and platonic female friendship.
The agenda
A few weeks ago, teacher/author/blogger Kathy Sierra announced that she had received death threats as comments on some blogs run by other prominent figures in the tech-blogging community. (The blogs were soon shut down. The fellow who posted the comments that Kathy1 interpreted as death threats has denied any malicious intent.) This led to an outpouring of sympathy from her readers, fellow-bloggers, and other people in the IT field.
One thing that surprised me about the response was the number of other women bloggers who said that they, too, had received death threats. (See, for example, Reclusive Leftist, Min Jung Kim, and apophenia.)
At any rate, most of the follow-up postings on IT blogs that I read shifted focus from the assault against Kathy to the general issue of “civility”, or the lack thereof, in blogs. Credible threats to commit murder and rape were subsumed in a more general category, one which included hyperbole, personal insults, and general bad language.
Then Tim O’Reilly, Kathy’s friend and publisher, drafted a Blogger’s Code of Conduct, posting it just in time for the New York Times to write about it. In the Times article, Tim gets first mentioned in the third paragraph; likewise for Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Kathy, “a high-tech book author from Boulder County, Colo., and a friend of Mr. O’Reilly”, makes her debut in the eleventh paragraph, as a member of “the insular community of dedicated technology bloggers2”.
And since then, I’ve seen just scads and scads of commentary on Tim’s proposed code. Meanwhile, Kathy is no longer doing speaking engagements and is wondering what she can do to attract less negative attention.
One of the less-obvious signs of social privilege is the ability to set the agenda. Even the bloggers who have fervently denounced the very concept of a Blogger’s Code of Conduct have, by posting their criticisms, accepted the agenda that Tim set.
I don’t want to impugn Tim’s integrity and I don’t doubt his good intentions. But notice how this is no longer a discussion of online threats to murder, maim, or rape, which (as previously noted) seem to predominantly be issued by men against women. It’s a discussion of online incivility, defined to include a wide range of peccadilloes that both men and women commit. It’s no longer a story about Kathy; it’s a story about Tim. Indeed, in his most recent blog posting on the subject, Tim remarked: “It concerns me that Kathy Sierra, whose bad experience triggered this discussion, thinks that a code of conduct such as I proposed would do no good.”
The agenda has been reset. That’s the patriarchy in action.
Fortunately, there are some people interested in re-resetting the agenda. April 28 will be the day for a…
Take Back the Blog! Blogswarm in support of the rights of women to participate fully in all aspects of our society, including specifically online in the world of blogging but indeed everywhere and at all times, day and night, without fear of harassment, intimidation, sexual harassment, online stalking and slander, predation or violence of any sort.
Sounds good to me.
Amid all the other commentary sparked by what happened to Kathy, I was pleased to discover siderea’s comparison of misogyny with Martians-are-out-to-get-me psychosis, Seth Godin on misogynous bullying by a New York Times author, Liz Henry’s call to action, and…hell, I can’t keep track of them all. So I’m glad there’s a chance for people to write more on this subject and a place where it can all be brought together.
1 Are all bloggers, even those who have never met, on a first-name basis with one another?
2 Insular? What are we, Amish? When the Times manages to write about blogs without status anxiety dripping from the paper, the same issue will have a banner headline on page one saying “MESSIAH ANOINTED IN JERUSALEM”.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
While reading Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent’s story of spending a year and a half passing for male, I came across an analysis of how men in a bowling league she joined would try to help her with her game. She recounted how, as a female athlete, she got back-stabbing and catty remarks from other women; by contrast, the men in “Ned”’s league, even the men from opposing teams, kept trying to give “him” practical advice.
...[T]hey seemed to have a competitive stake in my doing well and helping me to do well, as if beating a man who wasn’t at his best wasn’t satisfying. They wanted you to be good and then they wanted to beat you on their own merits.
When I first read that, I thought, Oh, that’s an interesting insight into the difference between men and women. But the next day, mulling over what I had read, I realized that it had no connection to my own experience as a man dealing with other men. OK, I’ve never belonged to an athletic league, but I’ve been a member of a writers’ workshop; I’ve volunteered for various political organizations; I was a gabbai and board member at a synagogue. When it comes to helping me be a more competent member of these organizations (or not), I don’t notice a difference between how my male and female co-volunteers have treated me. Certainly I don’t see the drastic contrast that Vincent saw between one group of working-class middle-aged men at a bowling alley and another group of upper-class teenage girls at a tennis camp. Maybe this attitude is confined to all-male sports teams—but I know I’m not the only guy who avoids team sports.
And that, in a nutshell, is my reaction to Self-Made Man. Based on her experience among men in some of the most stereotypically male environments (e.g., a bowling league, a Catholic monastery, and a Glengarry Glen Ross—style sales job), she has drawn sweeping conclusions about The Inner Lives of Men, many of whom don’t want to be in such environments. (League bowling is so unpopular these days that a book on the decline of American communities uses it as a case in point. The Catholic Church in America is having trouble finding young men willing to become parish priests, let alone monks. The sales job that Vincent took had such a high turnover that managers were constantly interviewing new candidates.)
One notable weakness of Vincent’s research is her lack of investigation into how men behave and feel as husbands. She observes them in all-male environments where they are taking a recess from their marriages, so to speak (such as the bowling league), or not married at all (such as the monastery). The closest she comes to a mixed environment is when she investigates the heterosexual dating scene. When she remarks on how reluctant men are to share their emotions, and speculates on how this may be wounding them psychologically, I want to shout at her through the page: “Well, duh! Men are reluctant to share their emotions with other men. They depend on the women they’re intimate with for emotional support. That’s why, for example, men are more likely than women to get depressed following a divorce!”
Given how often men and women see one another as members of an alien species, it’s nice to have books that help people of one gender understand the feelings of the other. But the information conveyed by this book only describes a part of the male population—how large a part, I don’t know—and I worry about female readers who apply it to the rest of the gender.
There. Now I’ve shared my feelings.
Don't try this at home (or in the maternity ward)
Some artist with his finger on the pulse of American taste has made a sculpture of Britney Spears, nude, giving birth (NVSFW)—a sculpture which “reveals the crowning of baby Sean’s head” and “also acknowledges the pop-diva’s pin-up past by showing Spears seductively posed on all fours atop a bearskin rug with back arched, pelvis thrust upward, as she clutches the bear’s ears…”
Free advice to any pregnant women out there who might take a statue of Ms. Spears as a role model: in the early stages of labor, if your baby is sunny-side up, this posture can make you more comfortable and maybe convince the kid to roll over. Once the baby is ready to come out, all-fours can be a good position to push from, but not with your pelvis in the air like a bitch in heat. Unless, of course, you are enjoying the contractions so much that you want to push the baby against the force of gravity.
P.S.: According to Wikipedia, the actual Spears baby was delivered by an elective C-section.
via jwz
see other pregnancy snark from the mother of my sunny-side-up pre-schooler
We're men and friends until the end / and none of us are sissies...
There’s a certain genre of conservative essay, lamenting how today’s society prevents little boys from growing into real men. I think I’ve finally realized why these essays always set my teeth on edge.
When I was in middle school, I had to endure a lot of malicious teasing from my peers, because I fell way short of twelve-year-old boys’ standards of masculinity: I had no talent for sports, I cried easily, I was introverted, etc., etc. Through four and a half years of college with other geeks, I managed to find a niche in a social network of people kinda like myself, and within that network I developed enough social skills that I can deal with people who are not so much like myself.
These authors are telling me that the boys who made my childhood miserable actually were closer to the masculine ideal than I was:
The ancient Greeks in particular had ideas about manliness that Mansfield considers instructive for the contemporary mind. Both Plato and Aristotle described an element in the human soul called thumos, a kind of animal spiritedness or “bristling” that vies with our reason, especially in men. Thumos, Mansfield observes, has “no natural end beyond itself.” It is an impulse that must be tamed and trained, channeled into the virtue of manly courage. Even while recognizing the danger of men’s natural assertiveness, the philosophers understood that a good society had to “give it its due.”
From this theory, we can infer that:
- If a boy lacks this unreasonable animal spirit, his peers have a right to insult his masculinity. Real Men have thumos.
- If a boy applies his thumos to, say, throwing a younger boy in a locker room and soaking him in the showers, this is not good, but boys will be boys, and we can’t do too much to change them.
Compared with some of the stories I’ve heard, my treatment in middle school was mild. At least I always felt that the adults around me were on my side. The folks who whinge about The Decline Of True Manhood, by contrast, stand with the bullies.
via Nancy Lebovitz
Family-values news of the day
- Gainesville, Georgia — A 37-year-old woman who married her son’s 15-year-old friend, and who gave birth to a boy earlier this month, pleaded not guilty to charges of statutory rape, child molestation and enticing a minor. (The minimum age for marriage in Georgia is 16, unless the bride is pregnant.) The marriage occurred a few days before the woman’s arrest; the young husband’s grandmother claims he is seeking a divorce.
- Laurens, South Carolina — An elementary-school teacher was arrested on two counts of criminal sexual misconduct with a minor after a parent accused her of having sex with an 11-year-old boy at the school.
I just love how you wave your hands
Today’s New York Times gives us the lowdown on girl crushes. A girl crush, if you’re too lazy to read the article, is what happens when a straight woman has feelings of infatuation, completely nonsexual feelings, mind you, for another woman, and you shouldn’t think that she’s a lesbian for having these feelings. One of the women quoted in the article used the word “sexy” twice to describe her admiration for a colleague, but she must be regarding her co-worker as sexy in a strictly Platonic sense.
What struck me about the article—aside from the author’s apparent hangups—was this line: “Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women’s nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively.”
Scene: Somewhere in Africa, 100,000 years ago. Two women are digging for yams.
Uggah: Hey, umm, Squeak, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while.
Squeak: What?
Uggah: I just want you to know how much I really like you. When you were picking berries a few days ago, I was really impressed by how confident you were about which ones were ready to pick and which ones weren’t ripe, and I looked at how your fingers were holding the berries and—you know—like—I think you’re a really cool person and I want to be your friend.
Pause.
Squeak: Uggah, that’s really sweet of you.
Uggah: I mean I want to be your friend in a totally non-sexual kind of way. I don’t want you to think I’m a dyke or anything.
Squeak: No, I don’t think that at all. I want to be your friend, too.
Uggah smiles shyly and returns to her digging. Squeak looks out to the horizon and sees a band of mightily thewed single male hunters, dragging a carcass behind them.
Squeak: Hey, Ug? Can you do me a favor?
Uggah: Sure. What?
Squeak: It’s starting to get cold here. Can you run back to my hut and get a couple of blankets?
Uggah: I’d be glad to.
Squeak: I’d do it myself, but we’re so far from camp, and I have such a sore back from all this—
Uggah: It’s no problem. Really.
Squeak watches Uggah until the other woman is a few hundred yards away. Then Squeak brushes back her hair, faces the approaching hunters, and watches them as she digs, leaning forward to show them her cleavage.
Pop quiz for aspiring evolutionary psychologists: which character in this drama is going to leave more copies of her genome behind?
via rm
Gender and friendship: follow-up file
In a posting last year, I remarked that women and men have remarkably different relationships with their same-sex platonic friends, but biographies of transsexuals don’t reveal much about their platonic friendships. I was intrigued, therefore, to come across a certain passage in As Nature Made Him, John Colapinto’s book about Bruce a.k.a. Brenda a.k.a. David Reimer.
For those unfamiliar with the case: when Bruce Reimer was eight months old, most of his penis was burned off in a botched circumcision. Following the advice of the famed psychologist John Money, they renamed the child Brenda and tried to raise her as a girl. Brenda had emotional problems throughout her childhood, rebelling against everything associated with girlhood, and when she found out about her medical history as a teenager, she insisted on being reassigned as male.
During her childhood as Brenda, one of Reimer’s few friends was a classmate named Heather Legarry. Colapinto reports:
Heather…valued Brenda as a girl devoid of the duplicity and backstabbing that had poisoned so many of her relations with girls in the past and that even threatened the harmony of her current clique of tomboys. “Brenda didn’t speak much,” Heather says, “but when she did she was never vindictive or false. She was very honest. If she told me something was black or white, it was.” (p. 125; link added)
As transsexuals go, Reimer is hardly typical, but I’ll take my data points wherever I can get them.
see also these comments from lyonesse, who worked in Prof. Money’s lab, on Reimer
How to understand gay-marriage opposition
Imagine if, back when desegregation was the controversy of the day, someone had proposed: “Let’s compromise. Let’s let the black kids into our schools, with all the duties and privileges of the white students, and give them diplomas that give them exactly the same legal recognition as the white graduates’ diplomas … but don’t call them ‘students.’ Call them, umm, ‘civil learners.’” Nobody, on either side of the integration wars, would have taken this idea seriously. But when the controversy of the day is gay marriage, one out of every four Americans opposes gay marriage and supports gay civil unions. And President Bush, Senator Kerry, and the Massachusetts state legislature all take these folks seriously. What’s going on here?
One of the most common arguments against same-sex marriage seems to be the claim that letting same-sex couples marry will “dilute” the institution of marriage. The claim is easy to mock, and as far as I’m concerned makes no rational sense, but if tens of millions of Americans would grant gay couples all the legal benefits of marriage except for the name, perhaps we should try to understand why this name has such power. I would suggest that gender identity is the culprit here.
As I discussed earlier, a person’s gender identity is his or her desire to be recognized as a man or as a woman. So, for example, Diane Wilson begins an essay by saying “Imagine that you are the person you are right now, but only on the inside. On the outside, you have the body of a person of a different gender.” We can translate that as “Imagine that you wish, on the inside, that people treat you as the person you are now. But on the outside, you have the body of a person of a different gender, and everybody treats you as such.”
(Colt Illicit argues, based on his own experience and observations, that “sex identity,” the desire to have a certain set of genitals, is psychologically distinct from gender identity. I’ll accept the argument, but it seems to me that even for sex identity, there’s some psycho-social component. I’ve never heard of anyone having a burning desire to remove an uninfected set of tonsils, or otherwise change a healthy body part that nobody else will ever see.)
Now, if you care about other people treating you as a member of a certain gender, you have to do something to respect their desires. (If I went around telling my friends and co-workers, “I’d like you to think of me as a woman,” and did nothing to change my appearance or behavior, I wouldn’t get much cooperation. At the very least, I would get better results if I shaved.) So people learn, from a very early age, what signals men and women use to announce their respective genders.
And a number of these signals are tied up with heterosexual marriage. If a person says “I am this woman’s husband,” or even “I’m looking for a wife,” that person is sending out an “I am male” signal. Those people who care about their gender identities, and who are used to relying on marriage-related signals to communicate their genders, are not going to appreciate this kind of noise in their communications channel, so to speak.
Of course, even if all of these marriage-related signals became unreliable, people could still use other signals to communicate their genders. So what? If half of all stop signs were suddenly painted blue, people would still recognize their message from the signs’ shape and wording…but most drivers would not be happy about the change.
(One could argue that the people who are made uncomfortable by gay marriage will just have to deal with it, and it’s better to make them uncomfortable than to settle for civil unions. Since civil unions really would carry the same rights and privileges as heterosexual marriage—unlike Jim Crow segregated institutions, where separate facilities were almost never equal—I’m not sure whether or not I agree with this argument.)
The pink and blue highlighters in your brain
Why would so many people sacrifice money, effort, and social respectability, even risking their lives, defying rules that society has laid down for members of their sex…so they can follow rules that society has laid down for members of the other sex? I mean, if you’re going to get yourself in trouble with the Gender Police, why not be straightforward in your rebellion?
People who answer this question use clinical terms like “gender identity,” or clichés like “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Kosse Phillip Feral, an FTM transsexual, told a filmmaker: “The way I explained it to [his children] was I’ve always felt like a boy on the inside and the outside didn’t match the inside… They’re just little kids so they can relate to I’ve always felt like a boy or I’ve always felt like a girl.”
Statements like this are obviously directed to an audience that includes non-trans people, and they imply that everyone in the audience, trans or not, adult or child, has a gender identity. I’m expected to read Feral’s remark and think: Ah, yes, I feel like I’m a man, and I’d be pretty damn distressed if, given that feeling, I had breasts and a vagina and people kept referring to me as a woman. Therefore, I can understand how someone who is in that situation is a human being deserving of sympathy and respect, not a pathological weirdo.
Here’s my problem, though: I agree with the “human being deserving of sympathy and respect” part, but everything that comes before it trips me up. I know what it feels like to have a penis. I know what it feels like to spend my childhood with other boys indoctrinating me into Appropriate Masculine Behavior. I know what it feels like to be told that it’s good for me to go into elementary education, because I’d be providing little kids with a “male role model” in the classroom, and then discover that without a spouse making substantially more than myself, I can’t make enough as a teacher to pay off my student loans and live in Boston. (Not that I’m, y’know, bitter.) I know what it feels like to think, well, a sundress would probably be a lot more comfortable than pants in this 90° weather, but I’ll never know, because if I go out dressed like that I would be risking my job security if not my physical safety.
But I don’t know what it feels like to be a man. Or, for that matter, a woman. At least, I think not. Do I have the emotion that Feral talks about, but label it with different words? Am I like one of those incredibly closeted people who call themselves “asexual” to avoid labelling themselves as “gay”? Or am I the pathological weirdo here—not because of my gender identity, but because my lack of gender identity? To sort out these questions, I have been on a quest to isolate this mysterious “gender identity” that so many people take for granted.
Mommy, this strange man is deconstructing me
So what is gender identity, in terms that an AI, an alien, or a cripple like myself can understand? It can’t be the desire to have a penis or vagina, since some trans people are content to keep the genitals they were born with. It can’t be the desire to conform to a male or female gender stereotype; as Colt Illicit points out, you can be an FTM trans and enjoy all sorts of non-“masculine” pastimes.
C.I. suggests that there is a spectrum of gender identity, similar to the Kinsey scale of sexual orientation, in which most people are somewhere in the middle. With all due respect, I think he’s fallen into a taxonomic trap: confusing gender identity with conformance to a gender role. If you look at how well people conform to the stereotypes of their gender, you’ll see a pretty wide distributions. But when people are asked what sex they are, they almost always choose one side or the other, not a point on a continuum. C.I. has “met many ftm men…who enjoy doing female drag,” but he calls them “ftm men”, not “80%-men-20%-women”.
We need to disentangle gender identity from gender role-conformance. How?
The curious incident of the girlfriend in the bio
Typically, a woman’s intimate, platonic friendships with her “girlfriends” are important parts of her emotional life. These friendships are radically different from anything that most men have experienced; when I read Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, the women there, in the ways they manipulated one another, might as well have been aliens from one of those “sociological” science fiction novels.
I am led to wonder: do MTF transwomen have these kinds of relationships with other women, especially non-trans women? Do they not feel any need to form such relationships? Do all of their close friends know their medical history, changing the dynamics of the relationship? Even after reading a number of autobiographies (near the bottom of Lynn Conway’s “Successes” page, there are a few dozen links), I have no clue; the topic just doesn’t seem to come up.
This absence of information is, in itself, informative. I assume that the people who write these autobiographies value their non-trans female friends, and put a lot of effort into maintaining those friendships, but they must not consider the friendships relevant to their lives as trans people. By contrast, descriptions of the physical and emotional effects of hormones are standard components of this genre. And this is a demographic group that is willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars for various medical procedures not covered by insurance, not to mention the thousands of hours they devote to learning how to “pass.” So why isn’t friendship with women part of the standard “MTF trans success” story? As they say in the Talmud, mai nafka mina, what’s the difference between them?
Here’s the difference: the unwritten rules of how to be a girlfriend are specific to women, but getting recognized as a woman does not depend on following them. Suppose that Alice and Barbara are girlfriends, and Barbara, unbenownst to Alice, is a transwoman. If Barbara violates Alice’s expectations of how a girlfriend should act, Alice might consider her less of a friend, or wonder at her poor social skills, but Alice is not going to suddenly realize, or even suspect, anything about Barbara’s gender.
In my arrogant opinion
Here’s my theory: gender identity is the desire, as an end in itself, to pass: that is, to be recognized by other people, even toddlers, as unambiguously belonging to a certain gender, for most of your day-to-day life. (I say “as an end in itself” to exclude, say, a 19th-century woman who dresses as a man so she can join the army.)
I think this theory fits what I have been looking for in my quest. It reflects the fact that most people, trans or not, seem to know what their internal gender is. The theory doesn’t make identity depend on genitalia, since most people who see you will decide your gender without looking at your crotch. The theory doesn’t make identity depend on role conformance: you can break every standard of Proper Femininity you ever learned, but as long as you want people to recognize you as a woman, you clearly have a female gender identity. The theory marks me as a pathological weirdo, but hey, I’m weird for all sorts of reasons, no harm in adding one more.
(A corollary is that if we lived in a culture where a child could change his or her social gender without stigma, hardly anyone would seek sexual reassignment surgery. I realize that this corollary is both controversial and unprovable.)
I think this theory has some interesting political and sociological applications, but before I go on to those, I need a reality check. All of you readers who do feel like you have a “gender identity,” whether or not it matches your physical body: how well does the description in my words connect with what you feel in your guts?
