The Illusion of Gender

Today's writing is 418 words.

Gender identity makes no sense. I can understand biological sex (which is what the term “gender” meant when I was a child) and I can understand gender roles (which are culturally constructed norms). What gender identities seem to do is to reinforce gender roles to the point of granting them some biological reality. What the gender identity movement seems to be saying is that if social expectations for a specific activity is granted to a different biological sex, one must really be that sex on some internal level. While they often claim to be running against social norms, the reality is that they are reinforcing these arbitrary associations, some even to the point where they modify their bodies in order to conform.

Oddly, this is precisely opposite of what we (meaning my social peers in the punk, goth, and death-rock scene) meant by such terms as gender-bending and gender-queer in the 1980s and early 1990s. Our goal, which seemed to be shared by many, was to destroy the concept of gender roles, or at least to break off the “gender” qualifier. If one felt a desire to perform a certain action, one should engage in it whether it was socially acceptable for one’s gender or not. When I dropped out of the scene in the mid-1990s, it seemed that we had been successful. Imagine my surprise when I returned to college in 2009 to find that the concept had been restored and mixed with biological determinism. Gender roles were now seen as some form of immutable intrinsic force.

This isn’t to say that all gender roles are completely arbitrary. Those things that deal with bearing or siring children are tied to biology and thus meaningful (though the behavior of a Mother or Father are culturally constructed expectations). The further one gets from biology, however, the more arbitrary the distinction becomes (e.g., the idea of men being doctors and women nurses). Gender identity seems to focus on these more nebulous roles. As an example, let’s say that society dictates that women are bad at math, but there is a girl who is good at math. In the 1980s, we would have advised her to tell them to “fuck off” and study math. Gender identity seems to advise them that they are “really” a male. They then come under pressure to “act like a man” in other areas. Rather than being a liberatory force, gender identity has instead become a restrictive force. The Bed of Procrustes seems to be eternal.