Western culture preaches a binary sex/gender model with strict entailment between sex and gender: a person is male or female, therefore has a masculine or feminine gender, and grows up to be a man or woman. Anyone who does not conform to this model is labeled sick, deviant, inverted, intersexed, homosexual, transvestite or transsexual; expressions of failure to fit the binary model, expressed in terms of the model. Though taught as a universal truth, the model in fact fails to fit as much as 15% of the population, and is not universal across cultures in space or time.
People who do not fit the model have been killed, harassed into pretending to fit, put on display as freaks, or lately, 'fixed' so they do fit the model. Surgery on intersexed infants is a clear example, as is 'reparative therapy' for homosexuals and the entire paradigm of 'changing sex' applied to transsexuals by most gender clinics. Conformity to the model is the end; any means is justified.
The cultural response to transsexual people, beginning with the publicity given to Christine Jorgenson in 1952, is an attempt to preserve the model by 'changing the sex' of the trans person to validate their felt gender. Not everyone believes this is possible, but one hears only of the success or failure to change sex, not any hint that the model may be inadequate to describe the actual variation in human sex and gender. People who try to say that they are 'other' receive no coverage in the traditional press; such thoughts are not fit for family viewing, one must not question the model.
The political movement to assimilate 'straight acting' gay and lesbian people into the culture has the goal of changing the model as little as possible, of hiding the otherness of gay and lesbian people from public view, so the basic model can be preserved. "What they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms" must not matter, must not be known (any more than what so-called heterosexual people actually do is known) so the model is not challenged.
In a culture which teaches a binary sex/gender model from the moment of birth, to feel an incongruence between one's sex and one's gender is a serious problem, whether the incongruence is in sexual attraction or a broader identity which cannot be expressed without public notice and censure. Acceptance, comfort, safety and validation come from realigning oneself with the model. The pressure to not be different is enormous.
Although people defend such labels as gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual male crossdresser, transgender, transgenderist or transsexual as separate identities, these identities are usually an overlay on the traditional model, not an attempt to chart the region that does not conform to the model. Few people say, "Oh, I'm not a man or a woman, I'm _______" and fill in the blank with one of those labels, for to do so is to position oneself completely outside the culture.
Though behavior is the focus for people who seek to purify humanity in the name of the sex/gender model, the other side of the coin is the person whose body does not conform to the model. Most dramatically this is the intersexed infant who is surgically forced into conformity, but there are many people who are too tall, short, hairy, hairless, fat, skinny, over or under endowed, with inappropriately high or low voices, unfortunate features, or mismatched skills or interests who thereby fail to fit the model without having earned a damning label such as queer. Subsidiary labels such as tomboy and sissie exist, and cause much grief.
Looking at popular expressions of the sex/gender model (statues, paintings, centerfolds and magazine ads and covers) one must wonder whether there are any 'real people' who do conform to the model, a question strengthened by the billions of dollars spent on cosmetics, dieting, exercise plans, and body modification. No 'lifestyle' magazine today lacks ads for breast enhancement surgery, face lifts, liposuction, electrolysis, weight loss schemes, cosmetics, hair implants, and such, all aimed at 'normal' people who fail to conform to the youthful sex/gender model pushed by what is quickly becoming a world-wide consumer culture.
Feminism has challenged the assumption that anatomy determines behavior, but too often the challenge comes from within the given binary framework of the cultural model, as a statement that women are free to behave as men do, rather than that it's okay for people to invent themselves and to hell with prescriptive labels of any sort. The best of post-structuralist feminist analysis is beginning to get to the core of the problem, but still tends to see gender as a shallow upper layer constructed over a biologically determined foundation.
In the past decade or so popular concern has emerged that gender stereotyping of girls in school is a bad thing, leading to well-intentioned changes such as all-girl science classes and Take Our Daughter To Work Days which may in fact serve to strengthen the cultural gender model. A glimmer of hope is that there is now a backlash protesting that boys need some attention, too. Now if only people will add 2 + 2 and realize that the whole mess that is gender needs to be reconstructed, then we might get somewhere useful. (Perhaps the rash of school shootings will lead some people to question whether the folk wisdom that 'boys will be boys' should be rather that young males are taught to be boys, and something is dreadfully wrong with a culture that is producing boys who take weapons to school and try to kill their classmates.)
There is hope. I think we are in the early decades of sweeping change that will see the end of the long-standing binary model of sex and gender in what was the western world. As the Reformation could not have taken place without the printing press, the world wide web is a key factor in the many changes that are now taking place in our view of sex and gender. Defend this tool of free thought!
The fragmented identity politics of far too many narrowly focused organizations does not seem to be facilitating change, but I think the general confusion of so many voices does help raise awareness that there are diversity issues that are keeping people stirred up and unhappy. There's nothing like a public brawl to make people take notice of who is squaring off to fight and over what. Something good may yet come of it.
What could we be if we could invent ourselves? We aren't likely to know until we have the freedom to express our gender without punitive consequences. Not freedom to be something that's already defined by a label in some organization's acronym; freedom to be me, freedom to be you.
That's what I think, here in East Lansing in April, 2001.