Why Do So Many Cling to the Gender Binary?
Part of knowing who we are is knowing who we aren’t
There are over 1.2 million adults in the US who consider themselves non-binary — a small but ever-growing rejection of the strictly defined gender boxes that are so much a part of American culture. “A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 1.6% of U.S. adults are transgender or nonbinary — that is, their gender differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.”
At the same time, the notion that men and women are fundamentally different is still a very strongly held cultural value. It’s something that I hear from more conservative-leaning men all the time, but I’ve also heard very liberal women express the same sentiment — that men and women are just vastly different by nature. It’s a way for us to understand who we are and how we fit into the culture, even if there are historical and current elements of that which are unsatisfactory.
Women and other historically marginalized groups may seek to differentiate themselves as a form of empowerment. One example is the book by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés entitled Women Who Run With Wolves.
Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate, and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.
You’ll get no argument from me that Yin (masculine) and Yang (feminine) energies are very different, but in reality, we are all a combination of both of those to varying degrees and Yin and Yang have little to do with actual gender. Nonetheless, genderized boxes are still upheld in the culture. Although women are now more often encouraged and allowed to express their decisive, analytical, and competitive sides (for the most part) men in our culture are still largely denied expression of their emotional, intuitive, and receptive sides.
For some time I’ve assumed that this was simply a function of patriarchy. Because it is a social system based on a dominance hierarchy where things that are feminine are coded as inferior, you demonstrate your masculinity (and therefore your superiority) by shunning the feminine — at least if you present as male. For example, sexual harassment tends to escalate in a group of men as each one vies for higher status in the hierarchy through the domination of the woman.
You may have noticed that conservative types are a lot more bothered by gay men and transgender women than they are lesbians and transmasculine people. This is because not traditionally masculine men flout the established rules of the hierarchy in a way that is more disruptive to the status quo. They are not just breaking down the boxes of Us and Them and in doing so muddying the waters of a culture built around a binary, but they are challenging the validity of the hierarchy itself.
I think, however, that there is also something else going on here, with this deep attachment to a belief in fundamental differences between men and women. Despite the fact that there is no actual reputable science to indicate that men's and women’s brains have different inherent capabilities or predilections — in part because we don’t yet know enough about the brain to demonstrate this — the search for proof of that is long-standing and continues. Why is that?
Besides the scientific evidence of it, it makes sense to me anecdotally that there are greater differences between individuals than there are between two binary genders. Now that at least some gender boxes are being loosened we see that women are quite capable of being physicists, astronauts, snipers, and business moguls, and some men are quite good as social workers, nurses, or kindergarten teachers. We know a lot about how despite this opening up, gender indoctrination is still strong and begins right at birth. And yet, some people keep clinging to the idea that men and women are almost two different species.
In the early 1900s, a man named Marcel Mauss wrote a series of essays about nationalism and civilization. What he discovered as he did so was the prevalence of schismogenesis — the way that people do things to intentionally demarcate their group from that of another.
Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Thai are people who use spoons, but not chopsticks, and so forth. It’s easy enough to see how this could be true of aesthetics — styles of art, music or table manners — but surprisingly, Mauss found, it extended even to technologies which held obvious adaptive or utilitarian benefits. He was intrigued, for example, by the fact that Athabascans in Alaska steadfastly refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats. Inuit, for their part, refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.
Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (p. 175). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
In other words, part of how we know who we are is by being very clear about who we are not and deliberately and intentionally signaling that by shunning certain characteristics of the other.
Inuit did not simply react with instinctual revulsion when they first encountered someone wearing snowshoes, and then refused to change their minds. They reflected on what adopting, or not adopting, snowshoes might say about the kind of people they considered themselves to be. In fact, Mauss concluded, it is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbours that people come to think of themselves as distinct groups.
Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (p. 175). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Pretty much all societies have some version of gender roles but in less hierarchical cultures, strict adherence to them may be largely optional. A core value of personal autonomy means that people mostly do what they want to as long as they are contributing to the welfare of the larger group. Of course, specific norms and mores vary by group, but we also see many indigenous cultures that consider there to be 3 or more genders.
As we get closer to recent history and we begin to have cultures where some people have more power in a dominance-based hierarchy — not only of gender but of class, wealth, and respect — it is then important to make it clear which one you are. For example, in ancient Roman culture, men who were the sexual “submitters” or the ones who were penetrated had a variety of pejorative names. By Roman standards, they behaved as women were supposed to, and therefore were not “real men.” These men could even lose legal standing.
The law bars men “who submitted his own body to womanly things” (i.e. have been the receptive partner during anal intercourse) from bringing cases to court on behalf of others. However, these men could still bring cases to court for themselves. This portion of the law exempts men who have been sexually assaulted in battle or by bandits. We are not sure how a magistrate or judge would determine if a man was a pathicus; it most likely would have been left up to accusations from others or a judgement of a man’s appearance and reputation.
So yes, this is patriarchy in action. Men have more power and status than women in a culture that is steeped in a zero-sum game. The Romans wanted to be clear that men differentiate themselves from women in part through their sexual conduct and the legacy of this way of thinking is still alive and well in American culture. Another modern example is school dress codes that often require boys to have short hair, whereas girls have great latitude over the length they wear, as long as it is neat. This is yet another way that boys are shown to be “not girls” — an important distinction in American culture if the language is any indication. “You throw like a girl.” “Don’t be such a pussy.”
Since things that are coded as male are seen as preferable in such a culture, most of the rules of differentiation are around boys demonstrating that they are not girls, rather than the other way around. A so-called Tomboy look, playing sports, and getting dirty get more of a pass for a girl than a boy wearing makeup or behaving in a way that is considered effeminate. One Catholic school’s guidelines specifically made clear that “gender-bending” was not allowed, but decreed that a girl who prefers jeans and t-shirts or playing kickball with the boys is fine while a boy who wears feminizing makeup or a dress to class is not.
Although women have more latitude in how they dress, they are still often penalized if they behave in ways that are considered too masculine. Female litigators have to walk a very fine line by appearing tough enough to be taken seriously but also soft enough to be considered feminine. Many women in traditionally male-dominated professions have to deal with the same kinds of pressures.
Assertive women are called bitches and ball-busters for the same behavior that gets men viewed as leaders, women are routinely told to “watch their tone” and are often encouraged to smile — something that signals being non-threatening and compliant. A lot of men view smiling as subservient and weak, and yet 98% of women report being told to smile at work at least once with 15% noting that it happens weekly.
The dominance hierarchy aspects of patriarchy are absolutely a part of this dynamic and they take place mostly in the collective consciousness of the culture, but given what I’ve learned about the prevalence of schismogenesis, I can’t help but wonder how much that plays a part as well. It is easier to know who we are when we contrast that with who we aren’t, particularly if we want to view ourselves as superior, particularly if there is a hierarchy.
Humans are social animals. We find comfort in belonging, but as we move into a time when more and more people reject gender as a binary I think it makes sense to foster the personal autonomy elements that so many of our ancestors embraced and allow people to be who they are — whatever that looks like for them. Gender (as distinct from biological sex) is, after all, a social construct — one that varies from culture to culture and from era to era.
More and more people want to choose for themselves who they are rather than try to fit themselves into boxes designed by others hundreds or even thousands of years ago. They want the opportunity to discover for themselves how they prefer to present themselves, and what they want to do, rather than forming their identity around a contrast of who they are not. It may be an ancient human impulse to do that but in a modern cosmopolitan world, it’s hardly necessary.
Individuation takes work, and in many cases, courage, but if the growing numbers are any indication, more and more people want that option. They are less interested in who they are in comparison to others in an artificial hierarchy and more interested in who they actually are inside. From my point of view, this can only be a good thing.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2022
