Clarifying my Thoughts after an Argument about Gender

Firstly, we must make explicit the distinction between sex and gender – sex exists, XX, XY (albeit with some grey areas – double Y, intersex babies, etc.). If you believe gender to simply mean the same as sex then the word ‘gender’ is redundant.
Gender is a cultural/sociological/psychological concept. Part of the concept of female gender, for example, will encompass biological femaleness. But it also encompasses a lot of other ideas that are culturally-specific, era-specific, geographically-specific, etc., and have no intrinsic link to sex at all. (Clearly the argument that women are predisposed to liking the colour pink, or shopping, or whatever, is not the kind of argument that will be graced with a response.) The problem comes when we try to marry these two concepts of sex and gender – we fail to make the distinction, and try to ascribe aspects of gender (something non-intrinsic, non-biological) to sex.

There are always plenty of people who are biologically one sex but fail to meet the criteria for our ideas of gender. We reserve words like ‘queer’ for them! Homophobia exists because people want to link sex and gender too closely – they are uncomfortable with, and have little tolerance for, those who would not inhabit the gender box society has prescribed for them. Humans have the tendency to want to ‘cement’ what are cultural and environmental norms by thinking about them as biological (there are various theories in psychology about this phenomenon). This then allows us to call those who would vary from those norms ‘unnatural’ (which is why I have such a problem with gender stereotypes and generalizations – it implies there is one natural and good way, and pathologizes those who would not adhere to it).

So we have men and we have women, biologically speaking. Some XXs and some XYs. What you’re trying to do is ascribe further characteristics to them based upon their genetic sex: i.e., ‘this is an XX and therefore we can further say a, b, and c about them, because that’s what we know about XXs’. But this is all statistics. What we are saying is ‘this is a way that a certain percentage of women tend to behave’, ‘this is something that a certain percentage of men are not good at’, etc.

Firstly, these statistical differences that we find in men’s and women’s abilities/traits/behaviours: how are we going to decide that they are intrinsic, when boys and girls are treated completely differently from birth? How are we going to separate what is biological from what is environmental? We never get the (in my opinion, utopian) situation where children are treated identically (or rather, treated all uniquely and as individuals, with absolutely no regard for gender or other such culture-laden and constrictive categories) so that we can construct such an experiment.

Secondly: If I take an arbitrary grouping – people with blonde hair vs. people who haven’t, people who had cornflakes for breakfast vs. those who didn’t – I bet I can also come up with a host of statistically significant factors. That doesn’t really mean that these two groups are ‘real’, that the members of each group actually have anything significant (in the non-statistical sense) in common with each other beyond that which initially categorized them. I remain unconvinced that we can really extrapolate beyond genetics to further characteristics.

But, thirdly, even if we can: say, we come up with a whole load of statistical stuff about people based on biological characteristics – race, gender, whatever. How do we use the information – and how useful is it? Shall we search more black guys than white when looking for a mugger because statistically it’s more likely to have been a black guy? Can you see no conflict with the interests of the individual in the use of such statistics (‘statistics’ here is interchangeable with ‘generalizations’)? (Again – my principle issue with the gender stereotyping – it inevitably works against the interests of the individual.) Are you going to tell me, for example, that the reason I am not good at manoeuvring my vehicle is because I’m a woman, based on statistics? In fact, you don’t know why I may not be good at this. It may be because I’m a woman, it may not be. On a case-by-case basis you don’t have any way of knowing how and whether gender is affecting somebody’s abilities, traits, and behaviours. On a case-by-case basis, the line of causation is not clear – speculating about causation on an individual level can only ever be conjecture, no matter what the status of the statistics. You have no way of knowing if you’re in error. In fact, what you do by referring to such statistics (even if they are accurate) is to reinforce gender roles that constrict the individual. (This urge to reinforce and streamline cultural divisions is, incidentally, exactly why we do this – not, as we convince ourselves, that we are factually correct when it comes to gender, as I go on to explain.)

And why? To reinforce and cement ideas which only need such reinforcement because they are vague, and certainly not self-evident, nor scientifically supported. Ironically it’s our sociobiological urge to create cohesive resilient group structures and identities that leads us to want to find the biological where it is not. To create a biological gender, ironically, has been to our evolutionary advantage and is, in itself, genuinely biological. We need to be aware that we all have a tendency towards making what is called in psychology the ‘fundamental attribution error’ – and we must remind ourselves of this when we feel the inclination to ascribe traits to intrinsic factors. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to ascribe characteristics to intrinsic factors mistakenly, or when we simply don’t have enough information to do so. For example: I see someone wearing a Xmas jumper – my conclusion is that he’s a geek. It may well be the case that it’s laundry day and he has nothing else to wear. In fact I simply don’t have enough information to draw conclusions, no genuine basis from which to extrapolate. Nevertheless, it is a human tendency to do so, and something which (most psychologists think) we do for evolutionary reasons (there are any number of evolutionary advantages to making a snap forced choice, even when there is not sufficient information). I would certainly argue that it comes into play in constantly streamlining and reinforcing gender division and stereotypes.

Now lets depart from these nature–nurture–type arguments, and introduce one based on philosophy, linguistics, and cultural theory.

The older I get, the more I’m seduced by structuralist and post-structuralist ideas about the extent to which we create our reality based on our cognitive schemas and vocabulary. Structuralism says that meanings of words are relational – no word can be defined in isolation of other similar words – it depends on the word’s status in a ‘paradigmatic chain’ (a set of words related in function or meaning). For example: ‘hovel, shed, hut, house, mansion, palace’. The meaning of one of these words would be altered if another was removed from the chain (didn’t exist). So: ‘hut’ and ‘shed’ are similar but subtley different – one implies something used primarily for shelter (for a security guard, say), the other primarily for storage (in a garden, for example). If either word didn’t exist, the meaning would have to be encompassed by the other word. Likewise we can define a mansion as being bigger and more grand than a house, but not as big and grand as a palace. Thus we define mansion in terms of how it relates to the words either side of it in the paradigmatic chain. This mutually defining aspect of words is even more apparent in paired opposites – no concept of ‘day’ without the paired concept of ‘night’, no concept of the feeling of ‘good’ without ‘bad’ to define against it. So, for example, the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ mainly have meaning in relation to each other – each designates the absence of the characteristics included in the other. ‘Male’ can be seen as meaning mainly ‘not female’ and vice versa. Saussure (Swiss linguist, and father of structuralism) said: “In a language there are only differences without fixed terms”.

He used a famous example of the 8.25 Geneva to Paris express train to explain this more fully. Is there anything material which gives the train its identity? Given that, each day it will have different engine, carriages, drivers, passengers, etc.? If it’s late, it won’t even leave at 8.25. It may not even be a train – we are all sadly familiar in this country with the replacement bus service! What gives it its identity is its position in a structure of differences: it comes between the 7.25 and the 9.25 – that is, its identity is purely relational.

So: language doesn’t just record or label our world – it constitutes it. Meanings are attributed by the human mind and constructed or expressed through language – it is not already contained in the thing itself. A famous example of this process would be the choice between paired alternatives like ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighter’. There is no neutral or objective way of designating such a person – merely a choice of two terms which ‘construct’ that person in certain ways.

(If we, however, have the courage of our convictions in such a philosophy, the consequences are a rather radical epistemology. We must enter a universe of extreme uncertainty, since we have no access to any fixed landmark which is beyond linguistic processing, no fixed standards by which to benchmark or measure anything.)

All this pertains to the discussion on gender simply in that, people who are dogmatic about gender differences are simply failing to realize how fluid and relative any category is.

So: can you see how the ‘men are men and women are women’ argument is mind-blowingly naïve, poorly thought out, and simply doesn’t engage with the issues, let alone challenge them?


28/05/06