I think about gender a lot. Almost constantly. It’s no wonder, considering my pre-transition experience. Much of what I’ve written on this blog describes that experience. If you haven’t read My Awakening yet, do so now. It provides a lot of context for what I’m going to write today. While you’re at it, read If You Want to Be…or Not to Be. It’s very pertinent.

All caught up? Let’s begin. Lately I’ve been defining myself as a genderfluid trans woman, but I’m not married to that definition(1). In fact, I’m trying to release myself from definitions in general. Descriptions are fine. But it’s all too easy to get caught up in the power of names. 

Consider these words:

• Queer
• Dyke
• Fag
• Pansy
• Fat
• Crippled
• Moron
• Retard
• Ni– No, I’m not going to type that one.

All of those words have the power of widespread connotation, specifically in North America. Their original definitions have faded into the background. Their negative use has given them the power to stir emotions and cause people to draw conclusions about a person who has been given one or more of those labels. People will often think negatively about themselves if a derogatory label is applied to them. 

Labels have power. Names have more power. That power isn’t always negative, even if it’s illusory. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology determined that naming an inanimate possession increases the owner’s valuation of the item(2). Have you ever named a car? If you had to sell it, or lost it through an accident, did you feel a personal loss? That’s just one example of the power in a name.

Once we’ve named something, that name can be difficult to shake. This applies not only to a discrete name for an individual item (or person), but to categories. People come in all shapes and sizes. Some people are taller than others. At what height would you consider someone to be tall? Or short? If you had to classify a hundred people into one of those two categories, what criteria would you use? Would you use yourself as average, or would you put yourself into one category or the other? If you categorize yourself as short, how does that make you feel?

A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology asked participants to compare pairs of line drawings of women of varying weight. When the drawings were divided into categories, the participants saw greater similarities between pairs within the same category and greater differences between pairs in different categories than they did before the drawings were categorized(3). Applying that to height, imagine that you have pictures of people who are 165 cm tall, 170 cm, 175 cm, and 180 cm. If you’re just shown the pictures (without knowing their exact height), you’d see the height differences between adjacent pairs as equal. But if the first two were labeled “short” and the last two were labeled “tall,” it’s likely that you would see the height difference between the two short people as less than the difference between the two in the middle because they’ve been separated into different categories. 

The other conclusion of that experiment was that, after the category labels were removed, the altered perception of the differences between the images was reduced, but did not disappear. Labels are persistent.

The act of categorization can result in perceived differences that may not exist at all. A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that participants with strong intrinsic motivation spent more time on activities labeled as “work” than people with a lower intrinsic motivation. No surprise there, but “The effect was eliminated or reversed if the activity had been labeled as a leisure pastime.”(4)

This may seem like a laundry list of research, but bear with me; I’m going somewhere. 

We’re not born with the tendency to categorize everything. One study found that preschool children were less likely to be affected by labels when discerning between pictures of identical and similar pictures(5). But this impartiality can be limited by parental biases. Another study found that mothers assigned male identities to non-gendered characters (such as animals) in children’s stories 95% of the time(6)…although this study is nearly forty years old; gender perception has changed a lot since 1987. (Trust me; I was there.)

Ah, gender perception. I keep running into that concept. It’s all-pervasive. Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls. One or the other, and never the twain shall meet. At least, that’s what global society seems to want us to think(7). Gender ideology, driven by a “biological-essentialist view of gender differences,” tells us that human beings come in two distinct types: male and female(7). Numerous studies have been conducted over the years, showing structural differences in male and female brains. And there’s no denying that males and females have immutable differences baked in from the moment of conception, right?

Except we don’t. The most comprehensive meta-study on “brain dimorphism” showed that there are basically no structural differences in human brains that are definitively male or female(8). There are size differences, but they’re proportional to body size, and there is considerable overlap. In fact, every difference that has been found in brain structure has either been found to have a lot of inter-sex overlap or has been small enough not to be statistically significant(8). 

Doc Impossible summarizes this very well in this article in her blog. The first part of the article is a detailed description of the hierarchy of scientific studies (with commentary on how the news cycle distorts science). The information on the lack of brain differences is farther down, under “Your brain isn’t different because you’re trans.”

Saguy et al goes on to show that most of the physical, emotional, and psychological traits that we think of as being definitively male or female are not; many physical traits–including hormones–have considerable overlap. Most of the psychological and behavioral traits are learned. 

So, if there’s so little difference, why is there such a damned huge gulf between men and women, and between the “normal” binary genders and those of us who refuse to stay on our side? Or take a side in the first place?

As Saguy et al explain, gender dimorphism–along with male dominance–is a self-perpetuating cycle. Bio-essentialism convinces people that gender is binary. Therefore they take on established gender roles. Therefore they spread the myth that gender is binary, which supports bio-essentialism.

Look out: There’s profanity ahead.

Fuck the binary!

As a character in the HBO series “Westworld” said, “This is the new world. And in the new world you can be whoever the fuck you want.”

I performed a binary gender role for most of my life. I felt trapped in that role. I couldn’t express myself the way I wanted to. I couldn’t feel the way I wanted to. Worst of all, if I chose the people who I really wanted to be friends with, they didn’t trust me, and my wife was afraid that I’d run away with them. 

Recalling my last post, if you want to be a girl, you can be a girl. If you want to be genderfluid, you can be genderfluid. If you want to be any gender, or no gender at all, just be the gender (or not) that feels right to you. You’re the only one who knows what’s right for you. If you identify strongly as a woman, but you enjoy typically masculine activities and want to be friends with men, don’t let anyone stop you. If you’re completely comfortable being a man, but you want to wear skirts and makeup, embrace your expression. 

I’m in the process of feeling gender labels reduce their hold on me. I use them to attempt to describe myself, but I don’t let them dictate who I am or what I have to do. I don’t even like the term “non-gender-conforming” anymore because it implies that certain behaviors are intrinsically masculine or feminine. 

I’m transfeminine; I’m medically transitioning in order to achieve the feminine attributes that feel right for me. I also describe myself as genderfluid because there are certain things about me that come up from time to time that aren’t as typically feminine. At heart, I guess I’m a gender anarchist. This is my new world. And in my world I’ll be whoever the fuck I want!

---

(1) After all, I’ll never be married to anything or anyone again!

(2) Stoner et al. The Name Game: How Naming Products Increases Psychological Ownership and Subsequent Consumer Evaluations. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322549946_The_Name_Game_How_Naming_Products_Increases_Psychological_Ownership_and_Subsequent_Consumer_Evaluations

(3) Foroni and Rothbart. Abandoning a label doesn’t make it disappear: The perseverance of labeling effects. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2013. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3478777

(4) Tang and Baumeister. Effects of Personal Values, Perceived Surveillance, and Task Labels on Task Preference: The Ideology of Turning Play Into Work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 1984. https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/34352424/JAP_1984_Tang_Baumeister_Intrinsic_Motivationapl-69-1-99-libre.pdf

(5) Noles and Gelman. Effects of categorical labels on similarity judgments: A critical analysis of similarity-based approaches. Developmental Psychology, 2012. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-25415-001

(6) DeLoache et al. The three bears are all boys: Mothers’ gender labeling of neutral picture book characters. Sex Roles, 1987. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00287623

(7) Saguy et al. The gender-binary cycle: the perpetual relations between a biological-essentialist view of gender, gender ideology, and gender-labelling and sorting. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2021. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2020.0141

(8) Eliot et al. Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2021. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804