I don’t get gender. I fully acknowledge this is a me-thing as most people seem very wedded to their gender, but let me break this down. And I mean this is the most real, non-sarcastic way. I know how it sounds and that it may seem like I’m throwing jabs. I truly am not.
Here’s the thing. As I understand it, gender is currently not predicated on genitalia, but on how you (general you) identify, gender-wise. For trans people, this seems to be that you don’t identify with the gender into which you were born, but the other (binary). But some people also think that being nonbinary is also being trans.
At any rate, one of the tenets of feminism is that you can be anything you want as a woman. You don’t have to be stereotypically feminine, but you also don’t have to reject things that are stereotypically feminine. I actually have a quibble with this because it has gotten to the point that anything done by a woman is a feminist act, and I am not down with that. You can decide not to fight the sexism in an individual situation, but that doesn’t mean some things aren’t objectively sexist.
That’s not the point of this post, though, so I am going to move on with difficulty.
Well, no I’m not. Because it’s part of the point. I don’t understand why we have to use genders at all. K and I have talked about this at length. She thhinks that within our lifetime, we will resort to using they/them for everyone. And within her kids’ (the ones she teaches) lifetime, gender will be done away with completely. Her kids think that in her lifetime they/them wil be used for everyone, but not the latter.
I think they/them might become the default, but probably not in my lifetime. Then again, marriage equality took much less time than I thought it would. I remember roughly five years before it happened, I was saying to K that it would happen in my lifetime, but probably not for another twenty years. Then, after intense debate, it suddenly happened in a very short amount of time. Frankly, my head was spinning at how quickly it happened beacuse I was hunkered down for a knock down, dragged out, kick-you-around fig9ht.
I’m reminded of those early days with gender identity and how fast it’s been evolving. I was reading a post on Ask A Manager* from 2019 that had to do with gender and sexism. Basically, an older woman was tired of being called ‘young lady’. She politely told a service worker why she did not want to be called that (sexism as part of the reason), and the comments were wild. I don’t want to get into them too deeply because the wildness is not why I’m musing on this post.
Here’s the point I want to hone in on. In talking about what to call people (a polite honorific), people were discussing the problems with the “ma’am/miss” dichotomy for women. A few hardy souls said that there was no need to use honorificts at all (I’m in this camp, by the way.) Not many people even acknowledged that there were people outside of the binary.
I have an online friend who is a queer trans woman, and we joked about how many women discovered they were queer during the pandemic. It’s a joke, but I do think many people (more women than men for reasons I’m not going to get into, either) did some reflection during the pandemic that led to some significant realizations.
For me, I thought a lot about my gender during the pandemic. I have thought about it on and off all my life, but before the pandemic, it was more about what did being a woman mean to me. Even though I didn’t feel like a woman. During the pandemic, the ‘don’t feel like a woman’ bit really stuck with me. So I started thinking about if my gender was even ‘woman’. I went through nonbinary (nope), genderfluid (nope), and a few others before reluctantly settling on genderqueer. Just because I like the word queer. It described me in so many different ways. But, just like queer has come to mean gay (sigh), so has genderqueer come to mean nonbinary.
None of this fit me. Labels usually don’t. I don’t fit the heuristics, and I never will. Is that a humblebrag? No, but I can see why it might seem like it. It definitely has ‘special snowflake’ energy to it. But I just don’t feel like any of the labels fit me. I choose the ones that’s closest, which was what I did with agender.
Here’s the thing about my gender. I don’t see how it has anything to do with anything I do. I love my body, so it’s not that. I don’t want a different body. It got me through death, twice! Big boobs are great! Impractical, but great. Now that I’m slowly building up an ass, I’m no longer griping about that part of my body.
I can empathize with women and their experiences because I’ve gone through many similar expperiences because I look like a woman. I would call myself woman-adjacent, but that’s as far as I would go.
Here’s the ugly part, though. When it comes to the micrcotransgressions about gender, the vast majority of them were perpetuated by women (at me). The patriarchy cannot be upheld if there aren’t enough women doing the work of upholding it. If it were just the men, then, it would be much easier to dismantle. The fact that there are women who are fully invested in keeping the status quo is one reason it’s so difficult to dismantle the patriarchy.
My mother is a standout example of this. Her mother was very pro-boys/men and anti-girls/women. Women were suppposed to stay home, have children, cook, clean, etc. Except her, of course, but that’s because she had to deal with a husband who could not pay the bills. Long story, but she saw nothing wrong with advocating that women be subservient to men and not being that way herself. And she passed on those harmful ideas to her eight children.
My mother had a very rocky relationship with her mother, probably because my mother was the most like her mother. She would be appalled to hear me say that, but it’s true. My mother may have spouted the same ideas as her mother (and, boy,did she), but she also lived a life very different than the onte she espoused.
Women were supposed to be mothers and wives first. They were supposed to only care about cooking, cleaning, and brithing them babies. She actually said that it didn’t matter if I wanted to have children or not because it was my duty as a woman. In other words, I did not matter as a person–only my abillity to procreate (and pander to my husband) mattered.
This is getting long so I’ll leave it here for now.
*By the way, I think I’m done with the site in part because of this issue. I may still read old posts, but I’m frustrated with the dragging of heels on ‘social justice’ issues. It’s not intentional and she’s far better than many on the issues. However, it’s not enough and I’ve reached the point where I’m very conscious of it. When I reach that point, then it’s time to move on. Also, the commentariat has either moved to the right, not moved ahead on certain issues, or has new reahders who are more conservative.