gender, continuums and the cultural conserve

[Regina Sewell]

Adam,

1. rs: What I have learned with working with transgendered people is how 
much of
gender is on one hand socially constructed and how on the  other hand, 
perhaps because of
this social construction, there is a  continuum to which people feel 
drawn to roles.
          ab: I'd like to hear about some of the more subtle gradients, 
because that might
bring up issues I hadn't considered before.
2. rs: "how do I deal with a world that is organized around binary 
gender/sex?"
           ab: again, intrigued... what are the issues?  I don't mean to 
suggest there
aren't any, but rather look forward to increasing my awareness of the 
kinds of problems
encountered.
3. rs where they are on the contiunuum   it's so much more 
complicated......  there's
so much more going on...   and there is more variation among men and 
among women than
between men and women....   so it's more helpful -- to me --  to view it 
on a continuum )
and help them decide how they want to live > and what they are willing 
to give up (men who
want to live as women must  give up a great deal of privilige and often 
times income,
women who even  take testosterone give up emotions and the sorts of 
tender connections
women have).
         ab: is that so? What are some of the other things going on? 
The more we can
identify specifics, the more we can know what to look for, the sharper 
becomes our skill
at diagnosis...

Hmmmm.   This is vague and mysterious.  Sorry about that.  Thanks for 
asking.  I remember listening to Noelle Howey talk about her memoir 
"Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods---My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine" 
on "Fresh Air" a few years back.  One of the phenomenon she described 
was that when her father first began transitioning, she became hyper 
feminine -- more girly than most biologically born girls.  And I 
remember sessions w/ a client who was struggling with where he/she fit. 
The dichotomous gender paradigm gave my client a model of femininity 
that my client found abhorent.  He/she was concerned that if (pronouns 
are so challenging here, please bear with me -- I'm trying to hold 
sacred my client's struggle and not sound trite - but at this point it 
was he/she) he/she didn't fit that image of femininity, then well... 
where did he/she fit.  We sat on the floor and talked about what 
constituted femininity.  Talked about living, breathing biological 
females he/she connected to and to what extent they met the "ideal type" 
and put it in the framework of roles as they related to masculine vs. 
feminine traits.  This is a social construction as we tend to define 
masculinity and feminity ultimately as "not the other."  But where along 
the continuum did he/she feel drawn.  We talked about skirts and dresses 
and Martha Stewart and the total impossibility of most models body 
types.  I have him/her a homework assignment to look at what seem to be 
biological women in public -- just out and about, at the grocery store, 
at the park, the neighbors, and note to what extent they "hit" or 
"missed" the "ideal type"  in terms of physical appearance and behavior. 
I did the same thing and was amazed at the extent to which women often 
looked masculine, minus the beard/5:00 shadow and vice versa. 
Instead, placed on a continuum, we see that there is more variation 
between men and between women than there is between men and women. 
Sure, men tend to be taller, as a whole, but my college roomate was 6 
foot 5 and I (at 5 foot 1 and 7/16ths) towered over one of the guys that 
lived in the dorm.   Sure, guys tend to be stronger -- but Bev Francis - 
a five foot five female body builder - was able to power lift 476 
pounds.  Few men can come close to lifting that much.

I just want to note that race has an impact on how we as society 
interpret gender.  We tend to think of women as passive -- but if we ask 
for descriptors of black women, the stereotype changes.  We appreciate 
men in buisness who are aggressive and decisive, who can easily take 
charge...   a strong man...   but if that "strong, decisive, take charge 
kind of guy is black...   he is threatening.

And what if we depart from diagnosing people and diagnose society, 
culture.  What if we accept that these differences are not signs of 
something that needs treating but as role roles that can be expanded and 
a cultural conserve that can be shifted and changed over time.  And 
please note that it has.  Early on, I believe it was Cotton Mather - the 
early Puritan preacher -- who deemed women unfit to be in charge of 
their children because of their moral defieciency.

And the separate spheres hypothesis that justified women's seclusion in 
the home because their delicate morals needed to be protected from the 
harsh, immoral outside world....  their roles as home maker to in part, 
rear children with the proper morals that men, without their feminine 
moral conterparts, lacked.

Cheers,
regina