Whenever I get a chance on a form or questionnaire, I select “other” for gender. If it’s not a required field, I skip it altogether. It’s not because I am “gender fluid” or “questioning,” it’s just that I’ve come to believe it’s nobody’s business.
Gender was originally a linguistic term referring to the sex assignment of words (in English, just a few pronouns and a few gendered word pairs such as actor/actress and waiter/waitress). This linguistic tradition strikes many people today as anachronistic and even oppressive. In the U.S., we are fighting over who gets to decide what pronouns we use. In other languages, like French and German, the conflict is much more serious, as many more words are gendered. A quick Google search will bring up similar raging controversies around the world. We’re lucky to be speaking English!
Recently (some say the 1970s), we started using gender to apply also to the sex assignment of human actions and personality traits. We started referring to behaviors and traits as “gendered” to the extent that we saw them associated differentially with males and females. Moving beyond mere description, we started talking about “gender roles” in a normative sense, as the way our culture expected, and even required, biologically male and female persons to behave. Used in this way, any particular person could be located between the male and female poles along numerous dimensions of personal traits and behaviors. A person could be more-or-less gendered, more-or-less typically male or female, on a multitude of behavioral characteristics.
To me, gender identity makes most sense when defined as one’s particular location within this multidimensional cloud of gendered characteristics. It makes no sense to argue about “how many gender identities” there are, since the possible options for one’s unique location within this cloud are infinite. No multi-letter abbreviation is ever going to be inclusive of everyone’s individual gender identity.
It might be argued that people tend to clump at one end of the gendered scale on a lot of dimensions, and that these clumps of people are different enough to deserve academic study. It may even be that there are a few identifiable clusters of people out there in multi-dimensional gendered space that can be usefully grouped and studied, the way political scientists group people according to political attitudes and preferences (“the four political tribes,” etc). In that academic sense, it might be reasonable for someone to develop a finite set of gender identity classifications.
I think it is probably true that most people clump at one end of the gender scale, and so don’t really have an issue identifying themselves as predominately male or female according to gendered characteristics. However, that doesn’t mean we should start redefining all our sex classification words as gender words. For one thing, a lot more people inhabit a gray area between those two gender poles than inhabit a gray area between the poles of male and female sex.
As for pronouns and gendered noun pairs, I am all for getting rid of the male/female forced binary and creating a neutral option (such as German has). I’m also happy to let people choose their own pronouns, which strikes me as similar to the Ms./Mrs. issue from the ’60s. That was controversial and strange once, but now no one ever thinks about it. Won’t it be nice when the pronoun controversy is similarly in the rear view mirror? When everyone is just an actor or a waiter (or a server)?
So what does all this word play imply for the real world of our laws and regulatory practices? In general, I think we would be better off sticking with sex categorization where there are real reasons for doing so (sports? medicine? college roommate assignment? maybe bathrooms?) and not muddy the waters by trying to redefine these as gender classifications.
In other situations where sex classification is not crucial (dress codes? adoption policies?), we should just not do it — i.e., have no sex-based rules. I don’t think our current sex discrimination laws should be redefined to apply to gender expression discrimination, but I do think we should create ways to explicitly protect people against gender expression discrimination by incorporating new, carefully crafted, language into our anti-discrimination laws and regulations.
And how about forms and applications that ask me for my sex? That’s less confusing, but I still think, in most contexts, it’s nobody’s business either.
Henry Hardy lives in Greenfield.