After writing and posting my most recent piece “It’s a…Human!”, I realized I’ve just scratched the surface of this enormously important topic of sex and gender. The more I explore, the more I become aware of vast troves of writing, research, and opinions that are available to explore. And the more I learn, the more complex this area becomes. I am becoming aware that we have implicit cultural gender information deeply ingrained. Gender stereotypes are potent, omnipresent and operate invisibly. Are these things invisible because they are innate, biological, or are they invisible because that’s how humans transmit cultural information generation to generation? How do we make the invisible visible? What human potential might more visibility free up?
This is what I am exploring in my reading, thinking, and research. In this essay I’m going to first explore definitions of sex and gender, and then begin exploring gender stereotyping to share with you a bit of what I’ve learned so far.
In my last writing, I tried to use a simple definition of gender, only to discover I quickly (and unknowingly) deviated from that definition because language habits. I’m going to try to clarify a bit more.
When I was a child growing up the word “sex” meant were you a boy or girl, male or female. We “sexed” newborn animals, such as a litter of puppies or pet gerbils. Everyone had to know the sex of the newborn baby as though that was the most important thing one could know about another person. People didn’t talk openly about sex as an activity. That was called sexual intercourse, an awkward phrase, but since people didn’t discuss it much in public or in front of children, the words worked. In high school we were subjected to rudimentary sex ed classes where we learned about the horrors of sexually transmitted diseases, the bare minimum about sexual intercourse, and the tragedy of out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Then we were sent on our way with admonitions not to “do it" (whatever it was). As a farm girl, I what cows and dogs did, but wasn’t quite sure how that translated to people. Many of us were woefully uninformed.
Sex is and was the term used in law to indicate rights based on bodily biology and its implied social status. Thus the 19th amendment, which gave (white) women the right to vote states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation[1].” Similarly, laws such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prevented certain types of workplace discrimination based on sex[2].
Thus, sex was the word added to the constitution and placed in U.S. federal legislation. At the time these laws were written, lawmakers were likely thinking about male-female biologic sex, not about a spectrum of human sexual expression, but some laws have since been expanded offer some protections for sexual orientation and gender identity in recent years[3]. The amendments and laws in the 1960s were intended to (grudgingly) give women, particularly white women, some rights that men already had.
These legal changes came as the U.S. was emerging out of a culture where women were the weaker sex, the fairer sex, the purer sex in language and literature of the day (and people of color were considered less human). These conditions were considered god-determined, not-to-be-questioned characteristics that justified men having certain roles and powers and women having others, whether those roles suited the person or not. Humanity was spoken of as “man”. All (land-owning white English-) men were created equal.
Nonetheless, there had always been people who didn’t fit the expected sex roles and categories.Many have always known that there is more to being human that simple either/or descriptors, but society did its best to silence them along with non-white men and all women as much as possible in the public sphere. Women oversaw domestic things. Non-white men should know their place and do the unpleasant work with gratitude. LGBTQiA+ people should not exist.
The word sex was enough, then, until people started talking about sex, as in sexual activity, openly during the cultural revolution of the ‘60s, as civil rights, feminist, and gay rights activism brought what had been secret into more mainstream awareness. Shockingly sex (the activity) wasn’t just between married men and women of the same race! People of the same sex, people of different skin colors, people who weren’t married had sex and started talking about what had always been true but had been hidden. Some people even changed their sex! These previously prohibited topics showed up in television, movies, magazines as the sexual revolution and activism, incomplete though it was, changed how people saw themselves and one another…at least for some.
Enter the word ‘gender’. Before this time, gender was mostly used referring to grammatical gender in languages such Spanish, French, and German where some nouns are assigned gender which affects the spelling of the noun, adjectives, articles, and other parts of speech[4]. As the word sex started to mean having sex, and the movements of feminism, gay and trans rights started broadening the (American) cultural conversation, people starting the using the word ‘gender’ more often to talk about injustices and complexities.
Gender in this context was initially used to describe the behavioral, psychological, social, and cultural aspects or traits associated with male or female sex. However, in time, gender was also used to mean biologic sex…as in gender reveal parties to announce a baby’s sex before it’s born, or being asked to choose your gender (male, female, other) on forms.
Now we have the word gender to use to try to describe and discuss all this sticky, confusing and difficult stuff about where we fit in society, what we believe, who we love, and how we behave, what bodies we have, the injustices and inequalities inflicted...the struggles of being human in modern society. We have gender roles, gender stereotypes, gender identities, gender expression, gender-based injustices and violence. Our clothes, toys, hair, cars, tastes, mannerisms, decorations and adornments, jobs, roles, are all gendered either overtly or subtly. We are marketed to and recruited as consumers of goods based on gendered messaging.
We live in a highly gendered society. Take the example of these words - nurturing, aggressive, ambitious, tender, soft, angular, leader. Most of us quickly place these in male/female categories. I know I must consciously remind myself that words like ambitious, leader, strong, athletic can be feminine so that I can claim them as a female person. Otherwise my thinking automatically puts them into the category masculine. Even the word doctor (which I am by profession) takes effort. I must consciously think “the doctor, she” otherwise I automatically envision a man. Why is this so?
Many argue that our biology creates differences that parse by sex and thus, it’s just built into our brains. Get used to it, already, they say. Women and men just gravitate naturally to different things, right? Women are the biologic mothers, so it makes sense they’d be better caretakers, more intuitive, more empathetic than men, right? And because of the helplessness of small children, children must stay home and thus men need to go out and be strong and kill stuff to bring it home, right? Must be built into our programs and into our brains some insist[5] .
But what if that isn’t so? What if gonad (testes, ovaries), genital, and gene biology isn’t really all that simple and doesn’t extrapolate much to neurology? While the evidence for genital and gonadal gender is obvious, the evidence for neurologic gender seems flimsy when examined closely[6].
Cultural gender stereotyping, however, is potent and ubiquitous. We all know what these stereotypes are and how they speak to us. They are like the most basic substance of our conscious and unconscious culture, feeling as real as the grass and sky. Boys are like this; girls are like that. Yes, boys and girls can grow up to be anything they want, but still…boys are like this, and girls are like that. We are flooded incessantly with gender messages. Go into any store with toy isles and you’ll see the pink and violet from far away signaling the girls’ isle replete with dolls and fashion toys, with a smattering of pink girl-power messaging. Then go into the boys’ isles and you’ll see machines, guns, fighting games, big trucks…vroom! The building games – Legos, Lincoln logs, and the like - will be in the boys’ isle, perhaps with a token pink set in the girls’ isle. And how about the clothes? Those of you with children know it’s nearly impossible to find clothes that don’t have strongly gendered and color-coded messages (and advertisements). Boys wear video game characters and superheroes, while girls wear fairies and princesses. Why? Because they reinforce what our culture tells us. Girls are supposed to be soft, cute, pretty, maybe a bit magic, caretakers, but not too aggressive. Boys are supposed to be strong, big, active and be heroes and fighters. As you know, this is just the briefest description of the gender stereotypes that children and we are barraged with daily.
Here's my current rudimentary and simplistic understanding of what may be going on. Babies learn that gender messages are somehow all important based on what the world presents to them. They then build their world understanding based on gender information because it’s presented so powerfully and continuously. They absorb the information that matches themselves and their bodies and disassociate from that part of themselves that doesn’t match. As babies we are born into this vast pre-existing soup of information that tells us the history of our culture, as well as its current state and what’s expected of people like us. And that information is structured around and built upon gender information[7]. As babies, we also bring our innate selves; we respond to what we encounter. And so, our expression of gender develops out of our cultural soup and our native selves responding to what we find in our circumstances. Some of us fit better than others. Probably all of us are confused. I haven’t yet found a convincing reason we need to structure our culture this way anymore. It’s ripe for change except that it terrifies people. People want to believe the stereotypes exist because the are “hardwired”.
I suggest we be very careful in accepting or assuming that gender-ascribed human traits are mainly based in biology, particularly in our brains. Not that long ago, scientists believed non-white people were less intelligent and less capable that white people based on their innate biology, which has since been disproven. Might the same be true for gender? Probably.
We all have our stories within gender stereotyping. I was lucky in many ways. My parents thought I was a boy until I was born. They had a girl’s name ready just in case. That was before the days when baby clothes were commercials and before ultrasounds let parents know what sex their baby would have. So, Mom called me Junior until I was born, then she named me Cindy. My parents were ok with a girl and since I was a girl, Mom and Grandma made me all sorts of pretty, girl clothes. I didn’t like to play with dolls, but I liked stuffed animals. Soon I had three brothers and got lots of real baby experience so, really, who needed baby dolls? With brothers, I also had lots of opportunity to play with boy toys – trucks and cars, cowboy sets and GI Joe, building sets and lots of just junk to take apart and make into things - all while wearing Mom-made dresses.
I was good at reading and music at an early age (girl things), but I was also good at math and science (boy things). My dad pushed me to excel in what he called “the hard courses”, now call STEM (boy stuff). Dad saw no reason I should be excluded from boy-type work. If there was work to be done, I should be doing it. Mom believed in gender specific work, so she strictly excluded my brothers from “women’s work” because she didn’t want “effeminate” boys, however I was expected to do it and was also taught “women’s” skills like sewing, cooking, and knitting.
This is just a bit of my personal example, that although I was born a girl and felt like a girl, I had “masculine” exposure as a young child so I didn’t get the idea that things like being ambitious, or building things or being good at math or analysis were things I shouldn’t be good at because I was a girl. I would learn that in school. I rebelled against the idea of “women’s work” because people with power didn’t do women’s work I thought. But I did totally internalize the female body image stereotyping without any awareness until much later.
All of us have a story about our gender enculturation and how some of that fit and some didn’t. I would invite you to explore yours, because telling one’s story helps break its spell. I would argue that most of the traits we attribute to be gendered are in fact just human traits, shared by all of us. Each of us has our own milieu of human traits, to inform the potential of our unique human expression.
Part of our response to early gender stereotyping, is to repress or reject those parts of ourselves and our self-expression that did fit how we were “supposed” to be. I learned to dampen my intelligence and ambition because those weren’t “lady like”. I learned that wearing feminine clothing was disempowering in the professional world so dressed and adorned myself in very muted, boring ways to avoid attracting attention to myself. And I chronically dieted to keep myself small. I wasted a lot of energy on those concerns that could have gone to something more productive. How about you? What have you hidden away because of gendered expectations?
In our humanity, we are more alike that we are different regardless of our sex, our gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
So much human potential is waiting to be freed and empowered within each of us. Let’s not give up on equality for all just yet.
Further reading:
Fine, Cordelia PhD. Delusions of Gender. How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. 2010, WW Norton & Company, New York. Find it on Amazon here. Read an excellent summary here.
Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. “Gender Schema Theory and Its Implications for Child Development: Raising Gender-Aschematic Children in a Gender-Schematic Society.” Signs 8, no. 4 (1983): 598–616. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173685.
Footnotes:
[1] Read the 19th Amendment here. Find the entire text of the US constitution here or download a PDF version here.
[2] Find the Equal Pay Act of 1963 here. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 here. Some information on women’s rights in the Civil Rights Act is here and a New Yorker Article about the people behind getting “sex” added to the Civil Rights Act is here. Here is a list of other laws that address sex discrimination.
[3] Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was expanded to cover sexual harassment, and offer protections for pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Find more information about gender identity and sexual orientation protections here.
[4] As an example: in French, the noun for dog (chien) is masculine. The black dog is le chien noir. Cow is feminine so the black cow is la vache noire.
[5] I think we need to be very cautious when using terms about computers or machines to describe our neurology, biology, and characteristics. “Hardwired” suggests a light fixture or electric plug in or the electronics within an appliance...things that are minimally changeable. Every day we learn more about the changeable nature of our brains and our biology. Yes, using simplified metaphors like “wiring” and “programs” are useful to help with understand of things we don’t understand fully, but let’s not get fixed or “hardwired” where growth and new understanding is possible.
[6] See Fine, Cordelia PhD. Delusions of Gender. How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. 2010, WW Norton & Company, New York. Particularly chapters 14-16.
[7] I still haven’t come across a good theory or explanation for how human cultures came to structure culture on gender. We have other choices.
I am always overwhelmed by the extent the US and Canada promote gender-specific toys and clothing. it is–absurd.
Let me add some of my personal story. I was born a boy and grew to become a man. I am the proverbial straight white man but then, I am bad in sports, sucked in the army, played with Lego but never with machine guns, have no problems with pastels, cross my legs in a way that is considered "telling" in the US, and GI Joe never made it to Switzerland.
I was attracted to women but not very much. I have three children with the only woman I ever slept with, and we have been married for 37 years. I worked in computers and have become a coach and writer lately.
A nerdy, somewhat asexual man.
I did not care much about gender roles. When our kids were young, I went back to university and looked after the household, the kids, cooked, and cleaned, while my wife worked. Later, when I was unemployed for two years, I did that again. At other times, we had a rather "conventional" distribution of chores.
After I had prostate cancer and radiation, I had to go on testosterone deprivation therapy. And boy, did things change. Somebody once said that it was like taking off the bulletproof vest and losing the ever-present Russian bodyguard, and I agree.
Testosterone and estrogen are no dichotomy but a spectrum. They are hormones and neurotransmitters. They have a big effect on our behavior and identity. They are brain chemistry, and while not fixed wiring but fluid over time, they are biology.
Testosterone is mostly built in the testicles, and testicles are usually built when there is a Y chromosome. Testosterone influences libido, muscle building, the cardiovascular system, and–as I can attest to–moods, emotionality, and the preferred places for body fat.
Does all this justify gender roles? No. But it adds to the understanding of why gender roles emerged in the first place. As with everything, they are not mere power structures but more complex in their origin. And then, they got out of hand.
I agree with you: why gender roles in the first place? Let's grow out of them while accepting the complexity of the issue.
Thank you for these two pieces of writing.
Another coup in research and synthesis, Cynthia! This IS a very important investigation, because so much of our lives are directed through the lens of the simple gender stereotyping you speak about here.. Your examples from your own childhood clearly illustrated what you/we were/are up against in this regard. The Equal Rights amendment has still NOT passed, unbelievable as that seems. And I feel you are correct that until we can get clear about how much of this gender stereotyping is still unconsciously 'running the show" both personally and collectively, we will continue to allow all the inequities and distortion to just continue on as it has been in the past. Thankfully there is a full media blitz at this point in history (because of the transgender movement) that really demands for us to genuinely consider and become educated as to what our programming has been around this subject and hopefully to make new more empowered and fluid choices, and to choose to operate with less judgment about others choices in this regard. Thank you Cynthia for continuing to explore this difficult territory to assist us in bringing to consciousness, that which is calling to be shifted at this potent point of awakening and potential transformation personally and as a culture! Thank you! ariel spilsbury