Have you ever had a clear memory of a person or an event that was shattered when you ran across old photos or talked with someone else who was there? Have you made assumptions about someone you just met, a job just began, or a school in which you enrolled, and found them to be false? Our perceptions of the world are notoriously fickle and unreliable. We live inside our heads to an astonishing extent.
One thing that seems to exist mainly inside our heads is gender. Why do we divide people and so much of what they do along the rather arbitrary lines of male/female and masculine/feminine? And perhaps a more interesting question, why are we so stuck on finding dividing lines everywhere? Why do we try to look at things as if there are only two choices?
Not that there is no valid use for dividing lines. If I'm sorting strawberries, some go in the ripe pile and some in the unripe pile. All I can do with a strawberry is eat it now or not eat it now. But sensible folks realize that no two people will make this division in exactly the same way, and that's considered no big deal. Why is it a big deal when we divide people in different ways with gender and sexuality?
Most of the lines and edges we see, the boundaries, are in our brain, not 'out there.' We prefer to organize sensory data into binary categories, perhaps so we can make quick decisions. But as anyone who is familiar with magic tricks knows, our sensory assumptions are simplistic and naive.
We believe so strongly in dividing lines that much of the early work in machine vision focused on writing programs to find lines, edges, and patterns in data provided by video cameras. This turned out to be fiendishly difficult to do. The lines aren't really there; our brains use an enormous amount of dedicated hardware and firmware to impose lines and edges and either/or categories on a world that 'in reality' flows and melds and gradually changes.
What does this have to do with gender? I'm looking for a reason why gender is considered binary. Though there are aspects of reproductive biology that are inherently binary, there is little about gender, social role and sex for fun that follows per force from the scenario of sperm meets egg.
There are differences between people. But there is no solid dividing line, like those concrete barriers between freeway traffic lanes, to separate the genders. The line between masculine and feminine flows and melds and gradually changes with time. But we act as if we don't see that. Why?
Consider color. We talk as if light is made of red, green and blue colors that combine to produce the shades we see in a rainbow. But that's not so. It's our perception, the cones in our eyes, that makes red, green and blue important. White light is an even distribution of all wavelengths, spread out in a smooth continuum by the refraction and reflection in a drop of water. That we see a rainbow as bands of six or seven colors is because of what goes on inside our heads.
So it is with our other senses. Our musical rainbow is twelve notes in an octave with logarithmic loudness; we taste sweet, sour, bitter and salt; we feel hot, cold, smooth, rough and sharp. Much of this happens at such a low level in our brains that we can't find words to describe what we feel.
Having tried to explain to computer users why one cannot make a color print (subtractive CMYK, viewed by off-white reflected light) that looks 'just like what I see on my monitor screen' (additive RGB, emitted by excited phosphor dots), I know how hard it is for people to get outside their heads when thinking about perception.
What this all has to do with gender is that I believe our perception of gender is largely a result of how our brains function, not some fundamental absolute truth about the world 'out there.'
It may once have been important for us to see the world the way we do, so to quickly make decisions based on these binary perceptions. But the world we live in now is not the world in which we evolved. Our present task is to survive in a world shaped not by the slow mechanisms of biological change, but by the much faster mechanisms of intellectual change.
[Published in the spring 2000 "Gender" issue (it's a "gender issue," get it?) of Q-News at Michigan State University.]