Naming All The Parts
by Kate Bornstein
Ore, Tracy E., ed. The Social Construction
of Difference and Inequalit: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality.
Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 178-190.
Bornstein, Kate. "Naming All the Parts."
From Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge,
1994, pp. 21-40.
For the first thirty-or-so years of my life, I didn't listen,
I didn't ask questions, I didn't talk, I didn't deal with gender-I avoided
the dilemma as best I could. I lived frantically on the edge of my white
male privilege, and it wasn't 'til I got into therapy around the issue
of my transsexualism that I began to take apart gender and really examine
it from several sides. As I looked at each facet of gender, I needed to
fix it with a definition, just long enough for me to realize that each
definition I came up with was entirely inadequate and needed to be abandoned
in search of deeper meaning.
Definitions have their uses in much the
same way that road signs make it easy to travel: they point out the directions.
But you don't get where you're going when you just stand underneath some
sign, waiting for it to tell you what to do.
I took the first steps of my journey by
trying to define the phenomenon I was daily becoming.
There's a real simple way to look at gender:
Once upon a time, someone drew a line in the sands of a culture and proclaimed
with great self-importance, "On this side, you are a man; on the
other side, you are a woman." It's time for the winds of change to
blow that line away. Simple.
Gender means class. By calling gender a
system of classification, we can dismantle the system and examine its
components. Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna in their landmark 1978 book,
Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, open the door to viewing
gender as a social construct. They pinpoint various phenomena of gender,
as follows:
GENDER ASSIGNMENT
Gender assignment happens when the culture says, "This
is what you are." In most cultures, we're assigned a gender at birth.
In our culture, once you've been assigned a gender, that's what you are;
and for the most part, it's doctors who dole out the gender assignments,
which shows you how emphatically gender has been medicalized. These doctors
look down at a newly-born infant and say "It has a penis, it's a
boy." Or they say, "It doesn't have a penis, it's a girl."
It has little or nothing to do with vaginas. It's all penises or no penises:
gender assignment is both phallocentric and genital. Other cultures are
not or have not been so rigid.
In the early nineteenth century, Kodiak
Islanders would occasionally assign a female gender to a child with a
penis: this resulted in a woman who would bring great good luck to her
husband, and a larger dowry to her parents. The European umbrella term
for this and any other type of Native American transgendered person is
berdache. Walter Williams in The Spirit and the Flesh chronicles
nearly as many types of berdache as there were nations.
Even as early as 1702, a French explorer who lived for
four years among the Illinois Indians noted that berdaches were known
"from their childhood, when they are seen frequently picking up
the spade, the spindle, the ax [women's tools], but making no use of
the bow and arrow as all the other small boys do." — Pierre
Liette, Memoir of Pierre Liette on the Illinois Country
When the gender of a child was in question in some Navajo
tribes, they reached a decision by putting a child inside a tipi with
loom and a bow and arrow, female and male implements respectively. They
set fire to the tipi, and whatever the child grabbed as he/she ran out
determined the child's gender. It was perfectly natural to these Navajo
that the child had some say in determining its own gender. Compare this
method with the following modern example:
[The Montana Educational Telecommunications Network, a
computer bulletin board] enabled students in tiny rural schools to communicate
with students around the world. Cynthia Denton, until last year a teacher
at the only public school in Hobson, Montana (population 200), describes
the benefit of such links. "When we got our first messages from
Japan, a wonderful little fifth-grade girl named Michelle was asked
if she was a boy or a girl. She was extraordinarily indignant at that,
and said, 'I'm Michelle I'm a girl of course.' Then I pointed out the
name of the person who had asked the question and said, 'Do you know
if this is a boy or a girl?' She said, 'No, how am I supposed to know
that?' I said, 'Oh, the rest of the world is supposed to know that Michelle
is a girl, but you have no social responsibility to know if this is
a boy or a girl?' She stopped and said, 'Oh.' And then she rephrased
her reply considerably." — Jacques Leslie, The Cursor Cowboy,
1993
Is the determination of one another's gender a "social
responsibility"?
Do we have the legal or moral right to decide and assign our own genders?
Or does that right belong to the state, the church, and the medical profession?
If gender is classification, can we afford to throw away the very basic
right to classify ourselves?
GENDER IDENTITY
Gender identity answers the question, "who am I?"
Am I a man or a woman or a what? It's a decision made by nearly every
individual, and it's subject to any influence: peer pressure, advertising,
drugs, cultural definitions of gender, whatever.
Gender identity is assumed by many to be
"natural"; that is someone can feel "like a man,"
or "like a woman." When I first started giving talks about gender,
this was the one question that would keep coming up: "Do you feel
like a woman now?" "Did you ever feel like a man?" "How
did you know what a woman would feel like?"
I've no idea what "a woman" feels
like. I never did feel like a girl or a woman; rather, it was my unshakable
conviction that I was not a boy or a man. It was the absence of a feeling,
rather than its presence, that convinced me to change my gender.
What does a man feel like?
What does a woman feel like?
Do you feel "like a man?"
Do you feel "like a woman?"
I'd really like to know that from people.
Gender identity answers another question: "to which
gender (class) do I want to belong?" Being and belonging are closely
related concepts when it comes to gender. I felt I was a woman (being),
and more importantly I felt I belonged with the other women (belonging).
In this culture, the only two sanctioned gender clubs are "men"
and "women." If you don't belong to one or the other, you're
told in no uncertain terms to sign up fast. ...
. . . I remember a dream I had when I was no more than seven
or eight years old—I might have been younger. In this dream, two
lines of battle were drawn up facing one another on a devastated plain:
I remember the earth was dry and cracked. An army of men on one side faced
an army of women on the other. The soldiers on both sides were exhausted.
They were all wearing skins—I remember smelling the untanned leather
in my dream. I was a young boy, on the side of the men, and I was being
tied down to a roughly-hewn cart. I wasn't struggling. When I was completely
secured the men attached a long rope to the cart, and tossed the other
end of the rope over to the women. The soldiers of the women's army slowly
pulled me across the empty ground between the two armies, as the sun began
to rise. I could see only the sun and the sky. When I'd been pulled over
to the side of the women, they untied me, turned their backs to the men,
and we all walked away. I looked back, and saw the men walking away from
us. We were all silent.
I wonder about reincarnation. I wonder how
a child could have had a dream like that in such detail. I told this dream
to the psychiatrist at the army induction center in Boston in 1969—they'd
asked if I'd ever had any strange dreams, so I told them this one. They
gave me a I-Y, deferred duty due to psychiatric instability.
GENDER ROLES
Gender roles are collections of factors which answer the
question, "How do I need to function so that society perceives me
as belonging or not belonging to a specific gender?" Some people
would include appearance, sexual orientation, and methods of communication
under the term, but I think it makes more sense to think in terms of things
like jobs, economic roles, chores, hobbies; in other words, positions
and actions specific to a given gender as defined by a culture. Gender
roles, when followed, send signals of membership in a given gender.
GENDER ATTRIBUTION
Then there's gender attribution, whereby we look at somebody
and say, "that's a man," or "that's a woman." And
this is important because the way we perceive another's gender affects
the way we relate to that person. Gender attribution is the sneaky one.
It's the one we do all the time without thinking about it; kinda like
driving a sixteen-wheeler down a crowded highway . . . without thinking
about it.
In this culture, gender attribution, like
gender assignment, is phallocentric. That is, one is male until perceived
otherwise. According to a study done by Kessler and McKenna, one can extrapolate
that it would take the presence of roughly four female cues to outweigh
the presence of one male cue: one is assumed male until proven otherwise.
That's one reason why many women today get "sirred" whereas
very few men get called "ma'am."
Gender attribution depends on cues given
by the attributee, and perceived by the attributer. The categories of
cues as I have looked at them apply to a man/woman bipolar gender system,
although they could be relevant to a more fluidly-gendered system. I found
these cues to be useful in training actors in cross-gender role-playing.
Physical cues include body, hair, clothes, voice,
skin, and movement.
I'm nearly six feet tall, and I'm large-boned. Like most
people born "male," my hands, feet, and forearms are proportionally
larger to my body as a whole than those of people born "female."
My hair pattern included coarse facial hair. My voice is naturally deep-I
sang bass in a high school choir and quartet. I've had to study ways
and means of either changing these physical cues, or drawing attention
away from them if I want to achieve a female attribution from people.
Susan Brownmiller's book, Femininity, is an excellent
analysis of the social impact of physical factors as gender cues.
Behavioral cues include manners, decorum, protocol,
and deportment. Like physical cues, behavioral cues change with time and
culture. Dear Abby and other advice columnists often freely dispense gender-specific
manners. Most of the behavioral cues I can think of boil down to how we
occupy space, both alone and with others.
Some points of manners are not taught in
books of etiquette. They are, instead, signals we learn from one another,
mostly signals acknowledging membership to an upper (male) or lower (female)
class. But to commit some of these manners in writing in terms of gender-specific
behavior would be an acknowledgment that gender exists as a class system.
Here's one: As part of learning to pass as a woman, I
was taught to avoid eye contact when walking down the street; that looking
someone in the eye was a male cue. Nowadays, sometimes I'll look away,
and sometimes I'll look someone in the eye—it's a behavior pattern
that's more fun to play with than to follow rigidly. A femme cue (not
"woman," but "femme") is to meet someone's eyes
(usually a butch), glance quickly away, then slowly look back into the
butch's eyes and hold that gaze: great hot fun, that one!
In many transsexual and transvestite meetings
I attended, when the subject of the discussion was "passing,"
a lot of emphasis was given to manners: who stands up to shake hands?
who exits an elevator first? who opens doors? who lights cigarettes?
These are all cues I had to learn in order to pass as a woman in this
culture. It wasn't 'til I began to read feminist literature that I began
to question these cues or to see them as oppressive.
Textual cues include histories, documents, names,
associates, relationships—true or false—which support a desired
gender attribution. Someone trying to be taken for male in this culture
might take the name Bernard, which would probably get a better male attribution
than the name Brenda.
Changing my name from Al to Kate was no big deal in Pennsylvania.
It was a simple matter of filing a form with the court and publishing
the name change in some unobtrusive "notices" column of a
court-approved newspaper. Bingo—done. The problems came with changing
all my documents. The driver's license was particularly interesting.
Prior to my full gender change. I'd been pulled over once already dressed
as a woman, yet holding my male driver's license—it wasn't something
I cared to repeat.
Any changes in licenses had to be done
in person at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I was working in corporate
America: Ford Aerospace. On my lunch break, I went down to the DMV and
waited in line with the other folks who had changes to make to their
licenses. The male officer at the desk was flirting with me, and I didn't
know what to do with that, so I kept looking away. When I finally got
to the desk, he asked "Well young lady, what can we do for you?"
"I've got to make a name change on my license," I mumbled.
"Just get married?" he asked jovially.
"Uh, no," I replied.
"Oh! Divorced!" he proclaimed with just a bit of hope in his
voice, "Let's see your license." I handed him my old driver's
license with my male name on it. He glanced down at the card, apparently
not registering what he saw. "You just go on over there, honey,
and take your test. We'll have you fixed up soon. Oh," he added
with a wink, "if you need anything special, you just come back
here and ask old Fred."
I left old Fred and joined the line for
my test. I handed the next officer both my license and my court order
authorizing my name change. This time, the officer didn't give my license
a cursory glance. He kept looking at me, then down at the paper, then
me, then the paper. His face grim, he pointed over to the direction
of the testing booths. On my way over to the booths, old Fred called
out, "Honey, they treating you all right?" Before I could
reply, the second officer snarled at old Fred to "get his butt
over" to look at all my paperwork.
I reached the testing booths and looked
back just in time to see a quite crestfallen old Fred looking at me,
then the paper, then me, then the paper.
Mythic cues include cultural and sub-cultural myths
which support membership in a given gender. This culture's myths include
archetypes like: weaker sex, dumb blonde, strong silent type, and better
half. Various waves of the women's movement have had to deal with a multitude
of myths of male superiority.
Power dynamics as cue include modes of communication,
communication techniques, and degrees of aggressiveness, assertiveness,
persistence, and ambition.
Sexual orientation as cue highlights, in the dominant
culture, the heterosexual imperative (or in the lesbian and gay culture,
the homosexual imperative). For this reason, many male heterosexual transvestites
who wish to pass as female will go out on a "date" with another
man (who is dressed as a man) the two seem to be a heterosexual couple.
In glancing at the "woman" of the two, an inner dialogue might
go, "It's wearing a dress, and it's hanging on the arm of a man,
so it must be a woman." For the same man to pass as a female in a
lesbian bar, he'd need to be with a woman, dressed as a woman, as a "date."
I remember one Fourth of July evening in Philadelphia,
about a year after my surgery. I was walking home arm in arm with Lisa,
my lover at the time, after the fireworks display. We were leaning in
to one another, walking like lovers walk. Coming towards us was a family
of five: mom, dad, and three teenage boys. "Look, it's a coupla
faggots," said one of the boys. "Nah, it's two girls,"
said another. "That's enough outa you," bellowed the father,
"one of 'em's got to be a man. This is America!"
So sex (the act) and gender (the classification) are different,
and depending on the qualifier one is using for gender differentiation,
they may or may not be dependent on one another. There are probably as
many types of gender (gender systems) as could be imagined. Gender by
clothing, gender by divine right, gender by lottery—these all make
as much sense as any other criteria, but in our Western civilization,
we bow down to the great god Science. No other type of gender holds as
much sway as:
Biological gender, which classifies a person through
any combination of body type, chromosomes, hormones, genitals, reproductive
organs, or some other corporal or chemical essence. Belief in biological
gender is in fact a belief in the supremacy of the body in the determination
of identity. It's biological gender that most folks refer to when they
say sex. By calling something "sex," we grant it seniority over
all the other types of gender by some right of biology.
So, there are all these types of gender which in and of
themselves are not gender, but criteria for systemic classification. And
there's sex, which somehow winds up on top of the heap. Add to this room
full of seeds the words male, female, masculine, feminine, man, woman,
boy, girl. These words are not descriptive of any sexual act, so all these
words fall under the category of gender and are highly subjective, depending
on which system of gender one is following.
But none of this explains why there is such
a widespread insistence upon the conflation of sex and gender. I think
a larger question is why Eurocentric culture needs to see so much in terms
of sex.
It's not like gender is the only thing we confuse with
sex. As a culture, we're encouraged to equate sex (the act) with money,
success, and security; and with the products we're told will help us
attain money, success and security. We live in a culture that succeeds
in selling products (the apex of accomplishment in capitalism) by aligning
those products with the attainment of one's sexual fantasies.
Switching my gender knocked me for a time
curiously out of the loop of ads designed for men or women, gays or
straights. I got to look at sex without the hype, and ads without the
allure. None of them, after all, spoke to me, although all of them beckoned.
KINDS OF SEX
It's important to keep gender and sex separated as, respectively,
system and function. Since function is easier to pin down than system,
sex is a simpler starting place than gender.
Sex does have a primary factor to it which
is germane to a discussion of gender: sexual orientation, which is what
people call it, if they believe you're born with it, or sexual preference,
which is what people call it if they believe you have more of a choice
and more of a say in the matter.
[W]e do not need a sophisticated methodology or technology to confirm
that the gender component of identity is the most important one articulated
during sex. Nearly everyone (except for bisexuals, perhaps) regards
it as the prime criterion for choosing a sex partner. —Murray S.
Davis, Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology, 1983
THE BASIC MIX-UP
A gay man who lived in Khartourn
Took a lesbian up to his room.
They argued all night
Over who had the right
To do what, and with what, to whom.
—Anonymous limerick
Here's the tangle that I found: sexual orientation/preference
is based in this culture solely on the gender of one's partner of choice.
Not only do we confuse the two words, we make them dependent on one another.
The only choices we're given to determine the focus of our sexual desire
are these:
Heterosexual model: in which a culturally-defined male
is in a relationship with a culturally-defined female.
Gay male model: two culturally-defined men involved with
each other.
Lesbian model: two culturally-defined women involved
with each other.
Bisexual model: culturally-defined men and women who
could be involved with either culturally-defined men or women.
Variants to these gender-based relationship dynamics would
include heterosexual female with gay male, gay male with lesbian woman,
lesbian woman with heterosexual woman, gay male with bisexual male, and
so forth. People involved in these variants know that each dynamic is
different from the other. A lesbian involved with another lesbian, for
example, is a very different relationship than that of a lesbian involved
with a bisexual woman, and that's distinct from being a lesbian woman
involved with a heterosexual woman. What these variants have in common
is that each of these combinations forms its own clearly-recognizable
dynamic, and none of these are acknowledged by the dominant cultural binary
of sexual orientation: heterosexuality/homosexuality.
Despite the non-recognition of these dynamics
by the broader culture, all these models depend on the gender of the partner.
This results in minimizing, if not completely dismissing, other dynamic
models of a relationship which could be more important than gender and
are often more telling about the real nature of someone's desire. There
are so many factors on which we could base sexual orientation. The point
is there's more to sex (the act) than gender (one classification of identity).
Try making a list of ways in which sexual
preference or orientation could be measured, and then add to that list
(or subtract from it) every day for a month, or a year (or for the rest
of your life). Could be fun!
SEX WITHOUT GENDER
There are plenty of instances in which sexual attraction
can have absolutely nothing to do with the gender of one's partner.
When Batman and Catwoman try to get it on sexually, it
only works when they are both in their caped crusader outfits. Naked
heterosexuality is a miserable failure between them. . . . When they
encounter each other in costume however something much sexier happens
and the only thing missing is a really good scene where we get to hear
the delicious sound of Catwoman's latex rubbing on Batman's black rubber/leather
skin. To me their flirtation in capes looked queer precisely because
it was not heterosexual, they were not man and woman, they were bat
and cat, or latex and rubber, or feminist and vigilante: gender became
irrelevant and sexuality was dependent on many other factors. . .
You could also read their sexual encounters
as the kind of sex play between gay men and lesbians that we are hearing
so much about recently: in other words, the sexual encounter is queer
because both partners are queer and the genders of the participants
are less relevant. Just because Batman is male and Catwoman is female
does not make their interactions heterosexual-think about it, there
is nothing straight about two people getting it on in rubber and latex
costumes, wearing eyemasks and carrying whips and other accoutrements.
—Judith Halberstam, "Queer Creatures," On Our Backs,
Nov/Dec, 1992
Sexual preference could be based on genital preference.
(This is not the same as saying preference for a specific gender, unless
you're basing your definition of gender on the presence or absence of
some combination of genitals.) Preference could also be based on the kind
of sex acts one prefers. But despite the many variations possible, sexual
orientation/preference remains culturally linked to our gender system
(and by extension to gender identity) through the fact that it's most
usually based on the gender of one's partner. This link probably accounts
for much of the tangle between sex and gender.
The confusion between sex and gender affects
more than individuals and relationships. The conflation of sex and gender
contributes to the linking together of the very different subcultures
of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, leather sexers, sex-workers, and the transgendered.
A common misconception is that male cross-dressers
are both gay and prostitutes, whereas the truth of the matter is that
most cross-dressers that I've met hold down more mainstream jobs, careers,
or professions, are married, and are practicing heterosexuals.
A dominant culture tends to combine its
subcultures into manageable units. As a result, those who practice non-traditional
sex are seen by members of the dominant culture (as well as by members
of sex and gender subcultures) as a whole with those who don non-traditional
gender roles and identities. Any work to deconstruct the gender system
needs to take into account the artificial amalgam of subcultures, which
might itself collapse if the confusion of terms holding it together were
to be settled.
In any case, if we buy into categories of
sexual orientation based solely on gender-heterosexual, homosexual, or
bisexual-we're cheating ourselves of a searching examination of our real
sexual preferences. In the same fashion, by subscribing to the categories
of gender based solely on the male/female binary, we cheat ourselves of
a searching examination of our real gender identity. And now we can park
sex off to the side for a while, and bring this essay back around to gender.
DESIRE
I was not an unattractive man. People's reactions to my
gender change often included the remonstrative, "But you're such
a good-looking guy!" Nowadays, as I navigate the waters between male
and female, there are still people attracted to me. At first, my reaction
was fear: "What kind of pervert," I thought, "would be
attracted to a freak like me?" As I got over that internalized phobia
of my transgender status, I began to get curious about the nature of desire,
sex, and identity. When, for example, I talk about the need to do away
with gender, I always get looks of horror from the audience: "What
about desire and attraction!" they want to know, "How can you
have desire with no gender?" They've got a good point: the concepts
of sex and gender seem to overlap around the phenomenon of desire. So
I began to explore my transgendered relationship to desire.
About five months into living full-time as a woman, I
woke up one morning and felt really good about the day. I got dressed
for work, and checking the mirror before I left, I liked what I saw-at
last! I opened the door to leave the building, only to find two workmen
standing on the porch, the hand of one poised to knock on the door.
This workman's face lit up when he saw me. "Well!" he said,
"Don't you look beautiful today." At that moment, I realized
I didn't know how to respond to that. I felt like a deer caught in the
headlights of an oncoming truck. I really wasn't prepared for people
to be attracted to me. To this day, I don't know how to respond to a
man who's attracted to me—I never learned the rituals.
To me, desire is a wish to experience someone or something
that I've never experienced, or that I'm not currently experiencing. Usually,
I need an identity appropriate (or appropriately inappropriate) to the
context in which I want to experience that person or thing. This context
could be anything: a romantic involvement, a tennis match, or a boat trip
up a canal. On a boat trip up the canal, I could appropriately be a passenger
or a crew member. In a tennis match, I could be a player, an audience
member, a concessionaire, a referee, a member of the grounds staff. In
the context of a romantic involvement, it gets less obvious about what
I need to be in order to have an appropriate identity, but I would need
to have some identity. Given that most romantic or sexual involvements
in this culture are defined by the genders of the partners, the most appropriate
identity to have in a romantic relationship would be a gender identity,
or something that passes for gender identity, like a gender role. A gender
role might be butch, femme, top, and bottom—these are all methods
of acting. So, even without a gender identity per se, some workable identity
can be called up and put into motion within a relationship, and when we
play with our identities, we play with desire. Some identities stimulate
desire, others diminish desire. To make ourselves attractive to someone,
we modify our identity, or at least the appearance of an identity—and
this includes gender identity.
I love the idea of being without an identity,
it gives me a lot of room to play around; but it makes me dizzy, having
nowhere to hang my hat. When I get too tired of not having an identity,
I take one on: it doesn't really matter what identity I take on, as long
as it's recognizable. I can be a writer, a lover, a confidante, a femme,
a top, or a woman. I retreat into definition as a way of demarcating my
space, a way of saying "Step back. I'm getting crowded here."
By saying "I am the (fill in the blank)," I also say, "You
are not, and so you are not in my space." Thus, I achieve privacy.
Gender identity is a form of self-definition: something into which we
can withdraw, from which we can glean a degree of privacy from time to
time, and with which we can, to a limited degree, manipulate desire.
Our culture is obsessed with desire: it
drives our economy. We come right out and say we're going to stimulate
desire for goods and services, and so we're bombarded daily with ads and
commercial announcements geared to make us desire things. No wonder the
emphasis on desire spills over into the rest of our lives. No wonder I
get panicked reactions from audiences when I suggest we eliminate gender
as a system; gender defines our desire, and we don't know what to do if
we don't have desire. Perhaps the more importance a culture places on
desire, the more conflated become the concepts of sex and gender.
As an exercise, can you recall the last
time you saw someone whose gender was ambiguous? Was this person attractive
to you? And if you knew they called themselves neither a man nor a woman,
what would it make you if you're attracted to that person? And if you
were to kiss? Make love? What would you be?
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