Optical Allusionist

So, I know I've posted several long posts recently, but I am *horrible* at remembering things I need to post, so I'm going to post this, and then get off of here. Don't worry! I'll try to give you some space!

Anyway, this is a segment of chapter 1 of the book Becoming a Visible Man about the difference between gender and sex, and how we know what we are.

How Do You Know?

"You all know what sex you are, right?" That's how I like to start. To most students I look like a professor, a psychologist, or a businessman. I am short, athletically built, with a full, trimmed beard, a balding head, and a deep voice. I seek out the students' eyes, as many as will meet my gaze. They are a melange of ethnic backgrounds, ages, and life experiences, a generation or two different from the much more homogeneous group with whom I attended college in the late 1960s, and I think how much richer education can be today with so many diverse viewpoints close at hand. That is, provided we are not afraid to listen and give credence to different voices.

Most of the students look blankly at their papers or at the empty chalkboard behind me, but a few stare quizzically at me. Some look at me and look away. Are they afraid? am I fearful of their judgment, or of their misunderstanding? Can I get through their preconceptions, their resistance, and their various cultural positions that I have no time to explore? I am not their instructor; I'm merely a guest lecturer the instructor wants them to meet. I only have an hour or so with them, and-- like everything else-- mine is a topic that can be explored in so many ways. I can only skim the surface with hem. I can only hope to awaken them, to alert them to the possibilities.

"Come on," I encourage them. "You all know what sex you are, right?"

A few students nod in affirmation.

"So, how do you know? Without looking down... no cheating, now... How do you know what sex you are?"

Now some of them start to laugh. "Your mother tells you," someone suggests.

"And you believed her?" I ask, smiling. "Seriously, how do you know?"

"By your chromosomes?" someone asks.

"Okay, I don't mean to embarrass anyone, so don't volunteer information you are not comfortable sharing, but how many people in this room have had their chromosomes checked?" I inquire. In over ten years of lectures like this, speaking to several thousand people, I've encountered only three individuals who confessed to having had their chromosomes checked, all for development-related anomalies. This time not one hand is raised. "Right," I explain. "It's rare that any of us knows what our sex chromosomes actually are. Did you know that 1 in 20,000 men have to X-chromosomes, rather than one X- and one Y-chromosome? they don't find this out until their female partner can't get pregnant and doctors eliminate her infertility as the reason. Sure, there are plenty of reasons for a man to be sterile, but one possibility is that he has two X-chromosomes. One in 20,000 men is a 46-chromosome, XX male; ten percent of those have no Y-chromosome material. That's a pretty high number for something we are led to believe is impossible. That statistic is from Chapter 41 in the 13th edition of Smith's General Urology, a standard urology textbook And what does that tell us about the Y-chromosome? Not that you need a Y to be male, but that you need a Y to make viable sperm. Maybe! Because there are two species of small rodent-type mammals, called mole voles, in which there is no Y chromosome, yet they are still reproducing both males and females, still procreating just as other mammals [Graves, 2001]. So, if you can be a man with two X-chromosomes, and at least in 20,000 men is, what makes you a man?" Some students, particularly males, are scowling now, confused, possibly getting angry. "That's right: it's all more complicated than we've been led to believe."

"We can identify the sex chromosomes in a developing fetus, but geneticists will tell you we have no idea what genes are firing. We especially don't know what genes are firing during embryogenesis, when the embryo is formed. Our science so far understands certain clusters of gene firing, like those that control the development of limbs or cause the webbing between the fingers to go away, but we do not understand the sequence of gene firings necessary to create an unambiguous male or female result, regardless of what the sex chromosomes are. The fact is, both the XX and XY karyotypes have bi-potential; that is, either karyotype can produce a male or a female result depending on which genes fire. There are gene expressions in each pair that can go down what we might call a male pathway or a female pathway. Those gene expressions, which trigger myriad events in the future, and which combine with myriad other expression events to form combinations we cannot anticipate, are the root of what we don't yet understand about the generalizations we've labeled 'female' and male'.

"According to the Intersex Society of North America, 1 in 100 people have bodies have bodies that differ from standard male or female. That means that one out of one hundred bodies has some quality that doctors would specify as an abnormality of sexual differentiation. Roughly 1 in 1,000 births involves what's called 'ambiguous genitalia,' in which the doctor can't tell by looking whether the infant is a boy or a girl. One in 1,000 births! That's a pretty high number. and what do you suppose they do in such a situation? Until recently, the standard has been that the doctors will decide what sex to assign the child, based on what kind of genital reconstruction surgery would be easiest or most effective from the doctor's point of view. But now this policy is hotly debated. Do you think they get it right every time? Do you think just because your genitals are a certain shape that this tells you what sex you are?" Horrified looks cross some students' faces. "So how do you know what sex you are?"

"By how you feel?" someone usually suggests. It seems to be the only avenue I've left open to them.

"Certainly that's a big part of it. Most people have feelings that correspond to the type of body they have. We sometimes think of feelings as something having to do with feeling attracted to another person, but certainly we all have feelings about ourselves, too. We have feelings about how we look, and how our personalities and interests correspond with those of other people with whom we identify. Now, what we're talking about today is not sexual orientation. I'm not talking about to whom you are attracted or what kind of sexual role you like to play. I'm talking about your relationship to your own body.

"Most people do feel connected to the type of body they have; that is, generally, the female type or the male type. And people may be attracted to people who have opposite-type bodies, or people who have similar-type bodies, or maybe they're not attracted to body types at all, but to individual people regardless of their bodies, but when we start connecting only feelings about bodies to sexual response and bringing in very complicated social ideas about sexual behavior it's easy to become confused about which idea or feeling or belief leads to what other specific idea, feeling or behavior. So let's not complicate matters just yet with too much talk about sexual attraction and relationship entanglements, though we certainly need to acknowledge that these are important aspects of our social lives that are strongly influenced by our relationship to our own body. What I want to focus on right now is the relationship one has with one's own sense of self, in their body, and the individual's sense of how that body fits or relates in the world. It can help us to understand this if we talk not just about sex, but about gender, too. Sex and gender are not the same things. Who can tell me the difference between sex and gender?"

The students are all watching me closely now, and several volunteer guesses; sometimes someone comes very close to the response I'm seeking. Still, it's likely that I'll need to explain: "Sex is a system of classification that divides body types based on presumed reproductive capacity as determined typically by visual examination of the external genitalia. There's a second meaning of the word 'sex,' which is that sex is also an activity we can engage in, and that activity has complex social meanings itself. We sometimes use the word 'love' as a euphemism for the second meaning of the word sex-- having sex and making love. That second meaning leads us right back into sexual orientation, so for now we're going to discuss sex as just that system of classification of body types.

"The language we use to discuss sex as biology is derived from the study of plants. Our science about human sexuality is still very young. Plant biology? People have been studying plants for thousands of years, and we think we have them down pretty well. But we don't understand much about human sexuality. We've only been studying it seriously for a little over a century. It's not as simple as Xs and Ys or in-ies and out-ies. Science cannot tell us exactly what events must occur in the development of a human embryo that will give a completely male or female result. Remember, we don't know, in full scientific detail, what constitutes human maleness or femaleness. We're not plants that can be classified by the color of our petals or the shape of our leaves. We're much more complex than the color of our skin and hair or the shape of our genitals. We have social characteristics, too, like gender and sexual orientation, and maybe more characteristics that we don't yet know about. If we look closely enough at people we can see that none of these things-- sex, gender, or sexual orientation-- is the same, or are they necessarily casual factors in relationship to each other, though they are certainly intertwined. But for now, to recap, sex is a system of classification of bodies that we call 'male' and female.'

"So, what's gender? Gender is another system of classification that describes characteristics and behaviors that we ascribe to bodies, and we call those characteristics and behaviors 'masculine' or 'feminine'. For example, we perceive a high-pitched voice as feminine and a low-pitched voice as masculine; or we think of fine-motor skills-- the ability to do small dexterous work with the fingers-- as feminine, and brute strength as masculine. And, as individuals, we can both express and perceive these qualities, these characteristics and behaviors, so it's an interactive system, this thing called gender. You may see a very beautiful woman, with long hair and a gorgeous body, and think of her as very feminine, but when all of a sudden she lifts up a park bench and says 'not another step closer, or I'll shove this down your throat' in a deep, menacing growl, you may realize there's more to her than meets the eye. So, if you had that experience, what would you think?

"She's really a man," someone will suggest. After all, they may know I'm there to discuss transsexualism. They want me to get to the juicy part. But I haven't finished laying the foundation yet.

"What makes you think that?"

"Women don't do those things."

"Well, yes, generally, most women can't lift park benches, and most women don't have really low voices. But that doesn't mean this particular woman is not a woman. It could simply mean she's a woman who has a low voice and great strength. I notice you said, 'She's really a man.' I think it is interesting to consider why it's so tempting to conclude there is a deception going on. What makes us so confident that we know what's real? I see this as a cognitive process: we make assumptions based on what we observe, and when we find our observations were incorrect according to some arbitrary system of categorization, instead of recalibrating our categories we react with shock, horror, shame, anger, embarrassment, whatever, toward that person or object about which we were incorrect. It can't be our fault if we were wrong in our categorization; it had to be that we were either deceived, or we wouldn't have been wrong at all. I think it's fascinating that we perceive it this way, instead of saying to ourselves, 'Wow, she's strong, and beautiful, and what a sexy voice, and I guess I'd better back off because it seems she means business!"

"So we make assumptions about what is real or possible based on the gendered characteristics and behaviors that we learn in our culture. Another interesting thing about these gendered qualities is that the category they're assigned to can change between cultures, or change within a culture over time. What were decidedly masculine once, like the occupations of secretary, telephone operator, bank clerk, and tailor, went through a feminine phase and are now more gender-neutral. Another example of this kind of shift occurred in the 1960s and 1970s when some American men began to wear their hair long (again, after a few generations where short hair was the fashion), and people thought a man with long hair was trying to be a woman, or at least was expressing himself as a feminine man, whereas no men can have long or short hair and it's far less likely to be interpreted as a gender statement.

"Changing hairstyles often challenge gender norms. More than a few long-haired men in the 1960s were beaten up because they challenged gender norms. We experienced a culturally similar, though not as physically painful, shift when women began to wear jeans everywhere, not just in the barn. And a man with fine-motor dexterity will be praised for it if he applies his abilities to tying fishing flies, or building model railroads or ships in bottles, or playing a musical instrument, but he'll be ridiculed if he likes to crochet doilies. We tend to prefer our male-bodied people to have masculine gender characteristics, and when they don't, particularly if the dichotomy is highly visible, it can make some people uncomfortable, even angry, when they feel they don't know how to classify the person they are observing, or when the other person's gender qualities threaten the observer's sense of confidence in her or his own gender. I find this level of response to gender variance fascinating. How is it that someone else's gender can throw a person's sense of confidence or solidarity out of balance? What cognitive mechanism is at work here, and what purpose does it serve? We learn as young children that behaving according to our assigned gender role means doing expected things based upon conformance to the sex we appear to be. If our sex and gender correspond, that's not too difficult for most of us, and we assume everyone feels about themselves the same way we do, and experiences similar difficulty or ease in adjusting behavior and appearance to conform to the gender norms of our culture. And if we travel to a new cultural environment, we quickly learn any new gender norms because we want people to perceive us as 'who we are.' If those new gender norms went against our ability to internalize or express them, we would experience tremendous discomfort.

"Like sex, gender is also more than one thing. It's more than the external presentation of gendered qualities. It's also one's deeply felt sense of self. That's what we call gender identity. Gender could be what we call male and female from a social standpoint, without regard to the need for reproduction, and it could be that there are more than two genders. Similarly, intersexed people potentially demonstrate that there are more than two discrete sexes, even though we tend to classify everything in these dichotomies of female and male, feminine and masculine.

"Perhaps this computer analogy will be helpful: think of sex as the hardware; gender as the software. In between there is an operating system that allows the software and hardware to give meaningful instructions to each other so they work together to accomplish tasks. It's easy to see how that works if a person's sex and gender are aligned, but what happens if your body doesn't match your sense of self? Think about that for a moment. Imagine you are exactly who you know yourself to be, you feel great about yourself, you have plans for your future, but when you look down your body is the opposite sex from who you know yourself to be. You know you're a woman, but you have to dress like a man, you have to behave like a man, because you have a male body. And you guys who know you're guys, you have all the feelings you know so well, but imagine your body is female. What's more valid: your feelings and your certain knowledge of yourself, or your body, the thing that other people see which signals to them what they can expect from you? Imagine what it would feel like to live with that discrepancy. That's something that many transgendered people feel, what they have to deal with every day.

"For transgendered and transsexual people, their sense of self doesn't line up with their body in various ways, or they may be perceived as belonging to one sex or gender when they actually belong to the other, or they don't feel they belong at all. But people seem to be more closely connected to their gender than to their sex. That's hard to grasp if your sex and gender are aligned, but not so difficult if you are one of the millions of people who are to some extent in-between. All the evidence of that physical body doesn't mean much when a person has a gender identity that doesn't match that body. Gender identity-- the sense of self-- is stronger than the body, and will find a way to manifest itself.

"To return to the computer analogy, one of the things we really don't know about in people is the interface between the software and the hardware. Take that male person with masculine characteristics: he may actually feel feminine, no matter what he looks or acts like. Or you might see a male person with feminine characteristics and assume that he is gay, but he may very well be straight or bisexual. And he might think of himself as masculine, no matter what you might conclude from observing him. Or he could think of himself as androgynous, and still have a prideful sense of himself as male and as a man. You simply can't tell by looking at someone what his or her sexual orientation is, or what the person's gender identity is. You may see aspects of the person's gender, just as you may see aspects of the person's sex, as in secondary sex characteristics, but those may or may not be the aspects with which the person identifies or experiences affinity, and those may not be the aspects that define that individual as to their gender or their sex by any particular standard. For example, we think of thick body hair as a masculine trait because it is more common for males, but many women have significantly visible hair on their arms or faces. Hair on her arms won't make a woman feel she's a man, nor does it necessarily detract from her femininity. If a woman wears jeans it doesn't mean she has a masculine gender identity. And if a woman is attractive and seems feminine to you, sir, it doesn't mean she is attracted to men, or even that she think of herself as a woman.

"This is very complicated human behavior. We can reduce it to this: if you're a girl, and you want to wear lipstick because you like the way it makes you look and feel about yourself, and you're not allowed to wear lipstick, you may be able to divert your desire to wear lipstick, but that desire to express that gender-related characteristic will surface somehow, whether by finding times and places where you can wear lipstick with impunity or by finding some other way to express the same motivation. If you're a girl in a male body, those feelings don't change just because you're in a male body. It's your gender identity that's in the driver's seat.

"If you think it's difficult for you to understand, think of how it feels to be someone like that. While it is true that such feelings may indicate a delusional or dissociative disorder, we tend to think everyone like that is crazy somehow, that the feeling that your body doesn't match your sense of self is always some kind of delusional state. Or we tend to blame the person whose gender characteristics don't match their physical sex as if it is that person's fault for making us feel confused. Wrong. It's our fault for not being secure and sensitive enough to allow that person a vehicle for honest self-expression. I challenge you to consider why it would ever be necessary, except to survive under coercion, to conform to someone else's notion of maleness or femaleness, either biologically or socially.

"I'd like you to think about both sex and gender difference as variations, not as deceit or defects, but as natural diversity that occurs with surprising frequency in human beings. We are not cookie-cutter men who all have penises that look exactly alike, who all feel the same way about ourselves or about women, and we are not all cookie-cutter women who like exactly the same clothes or want to wear the same hairstyle, and none of us focus on our gender or sex all the time... there are other things to think about in life. Yet if we don't find a point of comfort or balance between our gender identity and our social interactions, no matter who we are, we won't be able to find peace in any aspect of our lives."

Then I tell them: "I learned about this because I was born with a female body." If they weren't paying full attention before, they are now.

Students seem to like the shock factor. Sometimes the instructor will tell the class in advance that they will have a transsexual speaker at their next session, and students are disappointed when they see me because they think the transsexual couldn't come after all. They think they know what transsexual people look like, and I don't fit the picture. But rather than confronting them with the nutshell version of my life story, I like to provide a frame of reference, some context for relating to experience that differs from the presupposed, to encourage people to think in new ways about something most of us take for granted, but that some of us struggle with our entire lives.