Is Gender constructed and merely conventional?

A modest proposal

Yes it is. With a view to some spicy responses, with flourish and confidence, here is set out a position that is thoroughly non-gendered, thoroughly non-dimorphic, and dispenses even with a continuum of female-to-male. Do you note the determined clarity, and absence of historical or sociological reference? Never mind, what does that matter? At least, why should it be relevant to an analytical and legalistic philosopher, pronouncing for all peoples at all times and places? I’m teasing and being flippant. Many sentences feel as if I’m floundering to put down the true meanings. But is that an indulgent confession? Who cares? What writer, hack or talented, thinks otherwise? Could other than a fool suppose than in her own estimation, or that of pitifully few readers, s/he should shimmer with supurbia? Be like Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius, on a promonade in down-town Alexandria?

In summary, we would not be the first to transcend the concepts of feminine and masculine, absorbing the meanings into a set of richer and more accurate variables, where the apparent usefulness of “feminine” and “masculine” simply evaporates.

A short walk through the Hindu consciousness

Some art-history won’t harm. I claim, as a truth of the human heart, that a sensuous capacity to love a person - to loose sight of gender-identity, gender-role or physiological sex type - animates us all. It is a proposition well understood by subtle artists of Hindu iconography. I take you to a favourite illustration, a symbolic and expressive masterpiece – Shiva depicted as Lord of the Dance. The bronze figure is from Tamil Nadu, in the Chola period, circa 1100AD.

Shiva’s foot tramples upon the dwarf of ignorance. S/he is wild, intoxicated and divine. In her hair are the crescent moon, the hypnotic datura flower and a personification of the goddess Ganga. S/he wears earings that signify her feminine and masculine unity. Two hands signal “have no fear”. Another hand plays the drum of continuous creation.

In a fourth hand burns a paradoxical flame of “creation-by-destruction”, which enlightens by tearing down false opposites, chief of which is the illusory contrast between feminine and masculine. This latter point is made plain in the curator’s note on the exhibit in the India Galleries at the British Museum, though not in the online commentary. But, I am showing-off.

I say this sensuous capacity is true of us all. We can use our understanding to see our lovers and ourselves as neither feminine nor masculine. We can gesture to each other that we have no reason to fear another’s love, if that fear is based only on perception of sex or gender type differences. No such types exist. Such love, with its mix of friendship, romance, desire and erotic engagement, might well approximate to divine intoxication. Consciously to live with this sensuous capacity, however, is sometimes to be bound upon a wheel of fire. That is a quote from Lear in the midst of madness, but I realise now that Shiva also dances in her fiery circle.

Metaphysical and factual claims of religions are nonsense or false, yet I could be beguiled for a long time by the imagery of a religion that has at its centre the divine reunionification of the feminine and masculine. Whose chief object of worship, no less, is that synthesis. It is as if one were handed a refreshing antidote to all those hyper-patriarchal, blood-thirsty,  jealous, anti-feminine, butchering warlords. The projections of tyranny, dressed up as gods, too many of them from iron-age mind-sets and harsh deserts beyond the eastern Mediterranean shores. Monotheism has a horrid, masculine monomania for murder.

Contemplating the Chola bronzes  evokes the sensation of liberation I have when someone says, “let me kiss you”. One is, perhaps, leaning over the kitchen worktop. Time halts. In so many nibbles, and teeth-hitting, and slipping her tongue past mine, and my lips at a hungry angle to his, we are lost in each other. Then s/he says, “I have something else for you”, and with a laugh s/he hands me a bottle of ice cold water from the fridge. His hands are wet – from the condensation on the bottle, of course. First s/he drinks.  “Now it is your turn”. Love makes one thirsty.

Consider next what is at heart of every Shiva temple in India. Whatever is meant by divinity, this is its most powerful and important image – the reunification of the feminine and masculine, in an abstract or an-iconic representation.

A smooth cylinder rises out of the vulva-shaped yoni, the latter being a symbol of feminine creativity, generosity and confidence. It is the quintessence of lovely communion and power. The cylinder is usually described as a further abstract symbol of strength, the linga, a masculine form of Shiva. But to my mind, the more correct interpretation is that it crystallises the strength and resolution of that very female potency. The synthesis is not that of true opposites, but of concepts wrongly perceived as in opposition. It may be said that the abstraction of the imagery is a key to rightly comprehending the synthesis, when a few distracting trappings are put aside.

When ones perception is broadened, we can see these are facets of an integrated, sensuous, eroticised, generous existence. The imagery of light and perception often has strong transcendental connotations. Perhaps for modern metropolitans, such understanding comes through idle hours prowling the Museum Galleries. In a Hindu temple, devotees have the advantage of an opportunity to ponder matters whilst bathing the statue in milk, yoghurt and honey, and adorning it with flowers. Hands-on learning, so to speak, and only a few degrees away from that most instructive forum for study – being undressed and in each others arms.

Notice how a snake coils around the yoni and linga as a protective guardian.  I chuckle to myself how snakes get a better press in Hindu imagery than in the Christian mythology.

Empiricists can have faith in the transcendental – provisionally

As far as this thoroughly modern materialist is concerned, all that can be meant by the transcendental is the belief, provisionally held, in the possibility of faltering but continuous correction of our theories regarding objective truth. This process, the empiricist provisionally believes, has no finish. There is no ultimate knowledge of things in themselves, no static heaven of perfect perception.

 ”For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13, verses 12-13)

When we are face to face as ordinary lovers, les amoureux humains, our hopes and generosity towards each other attain the highest splendour in the warmth and faltering gasps and moisture of our love. The highest possible, that is for mere fallible mortals. Then do we see each other as we truly are, reflected in the eyes and feelings of each other, not in distorting mirrors.

My hands stop shaking, and my lover has wiped the drops of perspiration from her/his face. S/he brushes my dampened hair from my eyes, and asks: “Are you back with me, Andrea?” Then, as I write this, I think of the compassion and tenderness within a remark by A.J. Yaeger, Sir Edward Elgar’s publisher. Towards the end of the 3^rd movement Lento of Symphony No 1, there are some passages of exquisite and delicate scoring, ending in a benedictory melody (7:42-8:44), marked molto espressivo e sostenuto, scored for strings, harp, clarinet and trombones. Hearing this theme and instrumentation, thought Jaeger, ”we are brought near heaven.”

Which bits of identity are conventional?

Back in the humdrum land of day-to-day, all the following, I say, are merely conventional:

-            gender identity

-            gender role

-           sexual orientation or erotic preference (“hey, what does that mean, we’re all pansexual and polyamourous, at heart”)

-            affectional orientation (a useful though academic concept, to articulate cases where erotic engagement is not quite the same as friendship, or romance, or the heart-stopping drama of high-flown love)

-            biological classification schemes using trad female/male primary and secondary sexual characteristics (which traditionally tend to forget intersex phenotypes and the many natal chromosomal types other than XX or XY)

Conventional in the sense that they assume a female to male dimension, though that dimension might be a continuum with multiple points between the end values. Conventional, constructed and …. misconceived.

Firstly, by way of background, here are two excellent wiki pages on modern attitudes to biological sex-determination, which show that at the level of phenotype and chromosomes, a simple binary female/male divide is now regarded as false.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersexuality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_determination_and_differentiation_(human)

The special place of trans

I maintain that even the concept of trans assumes (whilst simultaneously wittily flouting) the convention. I take a standard, perhaps over-conformist, meaning for trans:

-            transgendered, for those of us who one way or another smear the boundaries of a binary gender identity or gender role

-            transsexual, for those of us who one way or another smear the boundaries of a binary physiological sex-type.

When I say smeared, I have in mind a Russia-marbled cover on a book binding, with rivulets of colour running in many delicious, surprising and disperate directions.

Trans assumes the convention as, one might say, a backdrop and arrangement of lighting, even with its highly developed sense of consonance and dissonance between layers of personality and behaviour and biology, and its super-ironic treatment of identity in ones own eyes and the eyes of others. I hastily add that a cautious person infers nothing about someone’s affectional or erotic preferences from where someone stands on a trans continuum. That, I add modestly, is a teeny weenie bit of simplification. For more info, see wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender#Transsexual

Constructed and conventional

Of course, it would help to qualify a little more the concepts of “constructed” and “conventional”. Do we mean contingently false; or contingently true; or false but a convincing illusion? Do we mean that it is necessarily false in fact, but apparently necessarily true? Do we mean that it necessarily has the truth-value it does, but that truth-value is not determined? There are other permutations. Do we wish, instead, to highlight the controlling factors?

I opt for the claim that, as conventionally understood, binary female/male masculine/feminine schemes at all levels are:

(i)            factually false (even at the supposedly foundational level of biology),

(ii)            superfluous, in that we can fully describe the richness of human biological, social and psychological life without them,

(iii)            mischievous, since you can be sure someone is going to latch upon them to propound some nasty scheme of purportedly neutral distinctions, which elide into unjustified discrimination, with the outcome of revolting injustice.

Women at prayers during menstruation? Ungodly! The testimony of women? Only half the value of men! You non-heterosexuals, you natal-intersex, you trans, you gender-rebels? You devils are consigned to the flames!

Time to contact the Board of Education

Even if the grand claim that “it’s all constructed” is false (I think it’s true), we might still ask if it is (i) “ethically better” OR (ii) “psychologically more balanced” if, as a rule, young people are socialised in a fully non-gendered fashion? By that I mean non-dimorphic. I mean not even using a spectrum running from F-to-M. There would be no F or M points of reference. Even the delicious physiology of reproduction would become no more demarcatory than red hair/brown/black hair. Or no hair. Or dyed hair, or highlighted hair, or strightened hair. Or curled hair, whether natural or by curlers. You get the point. The English curriculum would feature Shakespeare with new illustrations.

I assert “Yes “, it would be more ethical and psychologically balanced. I assert it with a cry of “Nonsex toilets, now!” I propose that we may always decode the meanings behind the categories (be they dimorphic or gendered continuums), and work with those underlying non-gendered dimensions. Into the bargain we would dissolve many of the apparent tensions of the sort “do you mean feminine or do you mean masculine, you can’t mean both?”

Put with rhetorical flair, talk of “female and male” or “feminine and masculine”, and attempts to fix or synthesise points in between, would gently fade from the human taxonomy, much as describing someone as acting, or being or thinking like a lower-class person or an upper-class person is now thoroughly antique. So much so that it evokes puzzlement and a hurried search for manuals on 19thCentury etiquette (I say, fingers crossed). Likewise the redundancy of those Marxist simplicities of capitalist and bourgeoisie. What once seemed to have the most concrete reality has now dissolved into air. Of course, you may well still want to talk of the underlying realities of political power, or military power, or wealth, or levels of education, or management of industry and capital, or effective access to medical care, or life expectancies, or control of information, or opportunities to increase these goods for yourself or your children. These are the truths behind class categories. Likewise, volumes of psychology are still true of humans after the withering away of gender. Nor do I suppose a non-gendered society would be a second Eden, shorn of tensions or unhappiness. There are no utopias, with or without class descriptions, and no non-gendered ones either. I sadly suspect that in the androgyne universe, the problems of friendship and love and the erotic and parenthood, unburdened by one distracting dimension, are unlikely to be solved any time soon. The long and winding road that leads to friends and lovers isn’t going to disappear. Many times we will remain alone and many times still cry. And many times, your lovers will never know how many times you have tried.

When one walks away, half numbed, half despairing, unable to think clearly enough to even care about ones appearance, there will still be the steps of St Martins to sit upon. 

Some modern taxonomies of sex, gender, affection and the erotic

Put more soberly, if one took a contemporary taxonomy of sex, gender and the erotic (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_taxonomy ) one could drop the dimorphic elements, and indeed the use of any gendered multi-valent dimensions, and not falsify the underlying facts.

Take the well-regarded eight-layer model on Sexual and Affectional Orientation, drawn-up by the pin-up poster-hero of bisexual studies, by Doc Fritz Klein http://www.bisexual.org/kleingrid.html . We can retain the layers and the seven-point scale used in each layer. As conceived by Klein, that scale is an F-to-M seven-valued dimension. It always struck me as somewhat suspect to assume that the meaning of female or male was constant either across the layers in the model, or between people taking the test. I used to console myself by thinking that everyone doing the test would do a decode for what F or M meant in the context of each layer, and simply use that decode to answer the questions. Then I thought, why didn’t the researchers give a key to the meaning of the F-to-M dimension to ensure each subject was at least attempting to measure the same preference. By which time I thought, just give me the metrics up front, and skip the female/male camouflage. 

Nonetheless, if the categories are constructed and non-necessary, that still leaves the research work of explaining why they are as they are, and how (if) they can be dispelled in everyday life, as opposed to an androgyne “anti-gendered” utopia. Plenty of years of sociology and anthropology there, with fat grants.

Being realistic, some contingent patterns and habits can’t currently be modified.

Do you regard false-consciousness as the negation of free-will?

On a side note, one might be motivated to dismantle the F-to-M continuum, because of worries about femininity or masculinity being a particular constraint on free-will. One might say that if one does not consciously operate with the dimension, then one is less likely to act with a sense of internal compulsion. Dropping the F-to-M continuum may be said to be a form of psychoanalysis. Whatever the truth of that suggestion, we may assume initially that the research work is independent of the over-arching question of free-will in ones thoughts and feelings and actions. However, there might be critics who would describe the feminine and masculine dichotomy or the F-to-M continuum as a form of “oppression”, by which is meant some “grand” external system injecting thoughts or feelings or mental representations into consciousness. For such a critic, free-will might be considered an inherent illusion, and the injected mental representations merely supporting evidence for the falsehood of that illusion. Perhaps such critics are straw-women. But real or put-up, I would not except such an antihuman dismissal of free-will or individual agency. That is because, on this over-arching question of free-will, I’m a classical compatabilist. With a witty intent, you are specifically invited to read the following analysis of free-will, so that you can be caused by reading it to drop from your beliefs any mistaken and anti-human dismissal of free-will. I employ the language of invitation, because that usually causes people to act with an accompanying desire to do that action. Unless, of course, they have it brought to their attention that the language of invitation is a device to get them to do what they would not otherwise wish to do. There are some people who are determined not to be tricked into accepting a common-sense concept of free-will. Such people tend to be victims of the god-delusion, whether called Yahweh or “historical necessity”.

Free-will (properly defined, of course, ho ho) is not a matter of “an uncaused mental cause” of your other thoughts & feelings & actions. BTW, I’m not happy with this tri-partite classification. An inspired life blends the three together.

The free-will problem consists of three supposedly inconsistent propositions:

(a)       all events have prior causes and are rule governed (ie there are no uncaused initial events in any chain of causation). A presumption of scientific explanation

(b)       therefore, the mental and physical events that feature in an account of “my doing x” have prior causes

(c)        but, free will depends on (at least some of) my mental events that feature in an account of “my doing x” not being caused by prior events

But, the inconsistency disappears on a proper understanding of freewill. The classic compatibilist position is that free will and causation are consistent, because “free action” means something like (eg):

(d)       my arm moved, AND

(e)       I intended my arm to move, AND

(f)         I wanted my arm to move, AND

(g)       it is not true that I simultaneously wanted my arm not to move, AND

(h)       I decided to move my arm, AND

(i)         I was not subject to external duress (no gun to the forehead, no knife at the back. Or, to quote Lord Hailsham, I was not subject to that “species of necessity actuated by threats”)

A few moments thought will show that account (d) to (i) is quite compatible with universal causation.  In essence, the fact that a causal chain runs through our will, does not falsify free-will. Indeed, the fact that our will is within the casual chain is required, and in many cases is sufficient, on the compatibilist account, to make us responsible moral agents. In essence, if one could turn-off consciousness, and control hand movement directly by external computer controlled electrical impulse and feedback, then one would not be responsible for the hand movements, unless in some strong sense one had setup the external computer control.

In particular, this bravura compatibilist solution is not automatically defaulted by situations where ”I had no reasonable alternative”, because one can freely do what one has no alternative to doing, provided one is doing what one wishes to do, and it is not true that one does not want to do that same thing – conditions (f) and (g). In short, cases of no reasonable alternative as preserved as free-will if there is no conflict of desires.

The interesting case is when (i) fails, and you are subject to external duress. A good working definiton of external duress, is a choice game, created by another person, where all the choices are to your disadvantage, and the person creating the game has an interest in all the choices, though at least one is more beneficial for her. What is wrong with the gun to the head, is that you can either hand over the money, or be shot and hand over the money (with your dying breath). It is assumed you are not responsible for being in the power of the gunwoman.

For an hilarious examination of what happens if you are not clear about where you stand on free-will, when there are multiple logically possible options, all with significant disadvantages, and the game situation is not constructed by you, watch “Free-will, god-style, part 2″. The video is at the deserved expense of the Christian mythology, which seeks to dress-up “multiple choice under duress”, in a game constructed by a god, as if it were the optimal choice game which an omnipotent, benevolent and omniscient diety would design. It patently is not.

In a nutshell, the problem is not wanting another person to believe you are freely acting, if:

- there are multiple logical alternatives

- the person has setup the circumstances so that all choices are to your disadvantage (ie, pay taxes, or dont pay taxes but go to jail and you are still liable for the taxes)

- they want you to carry out the least disadvantageous choice for you, which also benefits them

On the compatabilist model, it is true that you could wish to pay the taxes. But the model also permits the intuitively correct objection, that you don’t want it to become true that you wish to pay the taxes, if either the predominant cause of  or the only reason for having such a wish is the threatened disadvantage. You simply do not want to be caused to have the desire, whereas the tax collector wishes you to have the desire, and wishes to instill the desire by threats.  The analysis of conflicting wishes, and an introduction of a 2nd level desire not to have a particular 1st level desire, remains compatible with universal causation.

Good philosophy pages on free-will:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#3.1

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/%7Euctytho/DetFreeDeadTheories.html

http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/PGreenspan/Res/gen2.html

http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/freewill.htm

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2002/entries/freewill/

Gender theories are inherently interpersonal

Back to not using gendered categories. Particularly tricky are “interpersonal self-referential bits” if they use gender (binary or higher). Eg, “I hold this gendered opinion about myself primarily because I believe you hold this expectation about me”. We’re social creatures. These beliefs/thoughts/feelings are the bread-n-butter of life. It is difficult to make “mass substitutions” for such thoughts, esp. in a society founded on liberty. Are we proposing to issue travel orders to non-gendered re-education camps?

 

x andrea the androgyne

 

PS, andrea is no relativist or subjectivist. The constructions exist, in the public world and in our objective mental realms. They are waiting to be rebuilt, recrafted into something more human and more feminine.