When you hear the word Gender, really start thinking, “set of expectations about social role.” When someone tells you that their gender is something other than you figured it would be, understand that what they’re telling you is, “This is a more accurate set of expectations for you to have about me than the set that visuals alone might lead you to assign me.”
It’s not a weird sex thing. They’re not asking you to abandon your religion or your common sense or to make an exception. They’re giving you a piece of information that will help prevent confusion.
Let me open that one up.
But where exactly is the failure?
Is it in her for liking the wrong things, having the wrong aptitudes and strengths, wearing the wrong clothes – basically being bad at lining up with common ideas of what people whose bodies are able to make babies are supposed to also take for granted?
Or is it assumption, doing its thing, making asses…
A gender is a set of assumptions. How many times have you boiled down yourself or somebody else as “too feminine” or “not feminine enough,” or similarly for traits that “go with men?” That’s what we’re talking about here. Because we just assume that social expectations ALWAYS pair perfectly with what’s in our pants, as if a penis is required to play Rugby, but would get in the way in the process of learning how to dance… “Trevor, your form is excellent, and your timing is totally on-point, but your penis keeps throwing off your balance and knocking you over. Ballet really just isn’t for men.”
You can do your own Rugby example. I’m sure it’ll be more eyebrow-raising than anything I write here.
What if, just for a second, we entertained the notion that having only two one-size-fits-nobody-especially-well sets of social expectations to fit into, wasn’t good for anybody? What if – regardless of your feelings on other unrelated topics like whether men can marry men, or have a sex change operation – we entertained the thought that all the rugby-playing women who like beer and sports and don’t care about lipstick, aren’t actually bad at being women. What if we were holding them to the wrong set of expectations. No, that doesn’t mean we ought to think of men who rock a mean tap-dance as women. It means we might be oversimplifying something, along the way, and that there might be other totally viable sets of expectations for a human.
Unless you really think that bro-fella at the gym is really all there is to masculinity – the only kind, and the only way to be appropriate, if you were born with balls. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve got too attached to the idea that plumbing dictates tastes, and chores, and talents, and that liking the wrong stuff, or being even ‘failing’ to be shaped ‘right’ is a letdown or a sexual perversion. We’ve got 80 kinds of people, give or take, and only 2 that we deem valid for the plumbing that they have.
I think there’s more to life than emotionally-inarticulate quarterbacks and playmate head cheerleaders.
I think you probably don’t even know anybody who fits either of those concepts of what man or woman are “supposed” to be. Maybe we stop pretending everyone we know is some degree of failure based in deviation from Platonic Forms of male and female. But maybe there’s one more dimension to this that we don’t often admit. Maybe it’s about an obligation.
Do we owe it to ourselves and to the world, as some propose, to kill our natures in the service of a social duty to conform? Is the failure to like tanks or princesses, some kind of flouting of the basic social contract we all signed by being born? For this, we’re going to need to go to France. The term well-heeled is French-derived, and came about because the high-heeled shoe that we’re familiar with began in France, for men. Not as a deviance from manliness, but like a high-top sneaker in the 80’s in America – the way to show virility and style. Well-heeled still means someone who’s got an enviable income, but that used to be inseparable from men in high-heeled shoes. Now the same taste, across the Atlantic, is looked at as a dangerous perversion and a deviance from norms. So is it the tastes? Is it the shoe? Or is the crime of liking the wrong things really about failing to conform? So I ask again. If you couldn’t be manly in 1580’s France without high-heels and you couldn’t be manly in 1980’s America with them…
Then we have to accept that these expectations aren’t just cultural, but they’re also arbitrary.
So, somewhere along the line (thank Plato), we decided that of all the human types and nearly infinite configurations of traits, tastes, psyches and talents, that made humanity flexible, adaptable, and unstoppable across the ages, that only two constellations of interests and attributes, one for people with penises, and one for people without, can ever be viable at a time, thanks to the idea that there is a Form called Man and one called Woman, and all people based on plumbing are just failures to a great or lesser extent to live up to them absolutely. It should be noted here that the torch of rigid gender conformity is currently being carried by the Christian right, which starts to look pretty funny, given the way that Philosophers like Plato who originated the theory that underwrites them, were widely characterized as heretical and dangerous and wrong by earlier generations of the church. They even have their very own circle of hell in Dante. But hey, no one reads Plato anymore, and so his worst ideas need to live on through someone. Why not through the contemporary incarnation of his former critics?
Still… Every now and then, as centuries come and go, we have to stop and ask ourselves why we assume the things we take for granted are in any way authoritative. Especially when the way they’re shaped leaves everyone at one point or another – from the bro-types at the gym afraid to tell their friends they also enjoy cooking, to the middle school girls who’d rather watch the game than do their nails – feeling inadequate or weird or somehow broken for the ways they don’t conform. Mull it over.
One last thing. A common criticism of the current aimless-generation, who’s divorced themselves from social expectations, is that none of them are happy. That this freedom to express their inner beings hasn’t brought them any joy, and suicide rates bear out ugly consequences of a world where all the landmarks are removed. That isn’t wholly misguided. Of course, there’s two ways we can think about that, too. One is, not having any guideposts or clear roles makes it impossible to know if you’re succeeding or a failure. That anxiety is real and can’t be minimized at all. The solve for that is one I’m sure the right is going to hate. It’s not an end of gender roles that may deliver real-world satisfaction after all, but recognition that there’s more than one right way to have a penis. Or some other parts. You can name them all, I’m sure. What this might look like is heap of viable definitions, like the cliques in middle school, which in-and-of-themselves are just experiments with figuring out roles. A slew of ways to know that you’re not just bad at being a girl, but that you’re probably a hybrid of This set of expectations and That one, both of which are just fine to embody.
We’ve got a generation smart enough and brave enough to take some baby steps out of conformity, who still live in a culture built around strict gender norms. It makes the news when boys in Texas join the cheer squad. These kids live in a world where not only do they live without the safety net of easy definitions of what boy and girl should be, to measure themselves against, but also one that still insists that rigid definitions they will never themselves live up to still apply.
There is no social yardstick yet to measure them a Win, but they’ve got old folk telling them they’re losing at games they don’t even play.
There’s no social capital allotted yet to tell them if they’re acceptable versions of what they actually are. We’ve still only got two identities that offer any rewards, and failing to be adequately subservient to them is still treated as a cause for penalty. That guitar kid with the skinny jeans, who’s brave enough to try and like himself despite not being built for Rugby, and the girl who’s built for Rugby and is proud to tell her family that she’ll just never be the debutante who wants to be in pageants, still get told they’re failing miserably by everybody older. It’s a world built for two genders – two sets of social expectations – not just one built for two sexes. The sexes are just the excuse. It has no idea what to do with people it can’t stereotype and pidgeonhole based on their parts, besides compare them to the one ‘right’ Man or Woman, and score how badly they ‘fail.’ That world is us. We’re both its victims and its agents. And we’re the one thing we can change.
We can crush kids for their courage, and demand they feel like shit for questioning Plato on the idea that there’s only Two ideals and that the cliffnotes to which one they’re failing to live up to can be found inside their pants, or maybe not. Maybe we’ve learned a thing or two in twenty-five hundred years about the human experience that one smart dude in Greece might just have missed.
The Thinking Orc 