They do so in a fashion so strongly coded female in the other portions of USA society that I’m used to that I was really startled when I first ran into it.
I suspect there are a lot of other examples. My experience is limited.
Why?
My experience is limited in this area also. But I wouldn’t, in any other area, translate “this does not apply” to mean “all of this applies but this case is exactly in the middle”; and, while there do seem to be some people saying they’re somewhere in the middle, there also seem to be people saying “this does not apply.”
So help me out. Can you describe a person whose behaviors can’t described as “mostly masculine”, “mostly feminine”, “masculine and feminine”, or "moderately masculine with feminine features or “moderately feminine with masculine features”?
Because I can’t. Nor can I imagine a third gender that totally defies a “masculine-feminine” categorization. I suppose I can imagine a very small minority of people who would be unclassifiable because all their behaviors are so unusual that they can’t be described pegged in a conventional gender box. I’m thinking of a person who is moderately dyspraxic and aphasic such that their gait and speech patterns cannot be assessed on the masculine-feminine scale. But I don’t think these people would necessarily self-identify as third-gender.
I actually don’t see why a third gender is even relevant to the question of whether masculine or feminine inclinations can be predicted through biological indicia. The Monstro Masculine-Feminine Scale[sup]TM[/sup] would not be a measure of one’s self-identified gender. It would only predict their gender presentation–how other people perceive them in terms of masculinity or feminininty. If a third gendered individual were to be scored as 9 on the scale (with 10 being the upper end of masculinity) by a panel of highly qualified gender experts, I don’t think this result would somehow question the existence or utility of a third gender self-identity. But it would say something about how others perceive this specific individual in a gender-sense, in a particular place and time. IMHO, the significance a person wants to give this is totally up to them. Like, I’m 33% European according to DNA tests, but that doesn’t stop me from identifying as a black person. My DNA has nothing to do with my self-identity.
Now, I do understand that what constitutes “masculine” or “feminine” can vary from time to time and place to place. So I’m not arguing that such a rubric would be free from cultural baggage. For it to be meaningful, it would have to be calibrated to a specific time and place. But that would make it no different than any other psychometric scale.
The concept that we would continue the process of boxing people up as masculine and feminine and continuing to bolster partially constructed things as “aggression is masculine” and “walking softly is feminine”, “women smile more”, “men have short hair” and, “you’re a 60/40 split of masculine/feminine based on…”…honestly, I’m just getting angry? I have to deal with this stupid shit day in and day out, and you want to expand it as a worthwhile thing in science? Bolster it with some sort of scientific credibility when half of it is made up bullshit? I’m tired of being picked apart societally but then we’d also have science measuring me according to bogus societal expectations? Fuck this noise. I’d yeet myself off the planet. I’m suddenly feeling more agender than I have ever been in my god damn life at the prospect of more bullshit boxes to get shoved into. And you know what the current “scientific tests” say about me now? I’m 50% masculine and 50% nothing. I guess it might make someone feel better to be described in these terms but it sure sounds offensive to have someone else call me that.
There’s a whole lot of behavior that I don’t think of, and I think most people don’t think of, as specifically masculine or feminine at all. ‘This person walks to work.’ ‘This person prefers to eat out.’ ‘This person proselytizes for their religion, or their diet’. ‘This person likes to play scrabble.’ I could go on.
There’s also behavior that I’m aware the majority and/or advertising culture codes as masculine or feminine, but I’m also aware of other cultures that code the same things differently, or in my personal experience I’ve known so many exceptions that I don’t even perceive it that way. I don’t code that specific style of giggling as female any longer; I’ve seen too many men do it. I don’t code either fussy or sloppy housekeeping as either, I’ve seen a lot of both in both men and women. I don’t code farming as either masculine or feminine for all sorts of reasons – European culture codes it male, but I’m well aware I’m on originally Haudenosaunee ground (Canandaigua Treaty) and that culture codes it female; organic farmers IME mostly don’t code it either way; and even in traditional European-descent USA farming families everybody’s really doing the farming, stepping in for each other as needed even if certain jobs are more commonly done by one gender or another.
And maybe at the center of the point, for me – I’m strongly cis female. And all my life, I’ve done at least some things that are currently defined as non-gender-conforming. I never felt masculine doing them; I felt, and feel, that if I’m doing these things, then they’re also feminine things. Because here am I, a woman, doing them.
When I give my presentations, one of the analogies I use is sweet and salty.
Unlike bright and dark, they don’t exist as a linear continuum. Something can be neither (think black coffee. or lemons). Or it can be both (saltwater taffy). Two items of roughly identical sweetness can vary dramatically in their saltiness. There are many tastes that are distinct in and of themselves, tastes that aren’t sweet, aren’t salty, and aren’t made up of a combination of the two.
And yet none of those true statements makes the categories “sweet” and “salty” useless or misleading or wrong. They do discredit any notion that sweet is the “opposite” of salty.
I think this is why most discussions about gender identity are hard for me to relate to, because it seems like they are premised on the idea that “women do this” and “men do that”. Not just for most things, but for things that apply to the deepest most important aspects of one’s self. That is not how I relate to my own gender identity.
I see myself as a woman and I don’t subscribe to rigid beliefs about gender, and because of that, I tend to perceive all my actions as being consistent with my gender identity. In other words, I don’t feel like a non-woman just because shoe shopping doesn’t make me excited. I identify as a woman who hates shoe shopping.
For other people, it seems to work the other way. They recognize that they don’t behave, think, or feel in a way that aligns with a certain gender, and thus, their gender identity reflects this. At least that’s the impression I’m getting from many genderqueer people.
Where this causes me to scratch my head is when they I’m trying to reconcile my view towards gender (“I’m a woman, therefore what I’m doing is feminine”) with this other view. I can’t really disagree with how someone see themselves or the rationale, if any, for the specific identity that they have. It is what it is. But it seems to me that an agender (or 3rd gender) identity actually affirms the binary gender categorization that sorts people in masculine and feminine boxes.
I agree with this.
A similar thing would be spiciness.
A spicy food can be described that way for multiple reasons. It burns the tongue (chili pepper). It stings the nose (horseradish). Or it’s strongly flavored (curry powder). Just saying something is “very spicy” isn’t precise enough for another person to know how to prepare themselves. But as long as there’s a rubric that food tasters can be taught that allows them to form a consensus on what constitutes “very spicy” versus “spicy” within a given category of foods, then “very spicy” can be a useful descriptor. It can tell someone who is presented with a menu item that is common in cuisine they’re familiar with what exactly they are in store for once they start eating.
I see gender in a similar way. If you tell me a rando human drawn from all of humanity that has ever been existed is “very masculine”, I don’t know what to expect. But if I know you’re talking about a white American born in 1948, I’ll have a pretty good picture of what “very masculine” means.
I would argue that most behaviors aren’t gendered at all.
But the expert panel of highly trained and well-respected gender scientists wouldn’t be classifying all behaviors. Perhaps their task would be to study a video recording of an individual in a controlled setting and only rate those behaviors that have a high probability of being inflected by a person’s gender programming. So how they fill a glass of water wouldn’t be scored, but how they walk over to the water fountain would be. Whether they look up at the flickering fluorescent lamp wouldn’t be scored. But the nature of their body language while that flicking lamp is being repaired by a technician might be.
So let’s say there are 20 behaviors that the expert panel has determined a priori (from other tests) to be highly influenced by gender (self-identified or otherwise). A test subject may exhibit thousands of responses over the examination period, but only those that fall into the 20 bins will get scored.
Like I said, I’m open to the idea that there could be a test subject who can’t be classified because their behavior is very unusual (like instead of frowning up at the flickering light, they do a handstand and quack like a duck). But would that be a sign of an agender or third gendered individual? I don’t think so, because I would expect a lot of people exhibiting such unusual behavior to still self-identify as a gender and still perceive themselves as being some shade of masculine or feminine. Maybe for such individuals, those 20 behaviors simply aren’t good enough predictors.
I don’t think it would be a shock to find that most people with a masculine self-identity will be perceived as such by objective examiners, at least to SOME degree. Because I would expect something that exists as a social construct–which I’ve been told that is all gender is by the gender experts in this thread–would work like this.
And then I thought, I have this sense of being female, that’s so strong that even if I’m in greasy men’s clothes underneath the tractor changing the oil in a society that says the clothes, the grease, the wrench, and the fact that the very idea of getting a pedicure makes me cringe are all non-female, my reaction is to hell with that, this is a female thing to do because I’m female and I’m doing it.
And maybe somebody else has an equally strong sense of being female, that’s so strong that even if they’re inherent in a body with penis and testicles but no breast development or vagina their reaction is to hell with it, this is a female way to live because I’m female and I’m living it –
[ETA: it occurs to me that that doesn’t directly address the third gender or agender issue; but I’ll add that maybe some people have an equally strong sense of not being female and not being male.]
All of that reads to me like saying, if the expert panel is bound and determined to fit people into 2 bins or into 20, then they’ll jam everybody into those bins whether they fit or not.
If there are thousands of behaviors that are sideways from the two-dimensional line that’s being used, and 20 that fit along it, taking the 20 and saying that they can be used to put the entire person somewhere along that line seems to me to leave most of the person out.
I don’t think my sense of being female is strong, that’s the thing. I highly suspect that my gender is what it is because I don’t have a compelling reason it shouldn’t be what it is. All of my life, I’ve been socialized as a girl/woman, just as I’ve been socialized to respond to my name when it’s called.
I honestly can relate better when people speak of gender identity in terms of “its just what I feel like”. Because that’s how I relate to my own, on an operational level. I feel like a woman therefore I am. Or to put it another way, I don’t feel like anything else except a woman, because I have not been given a compelling reason to do so.
I get lost when gender identity is intellectualized and presented as a reaction to conventional notions of masculinity and femininity.
I don’t think that’s a fair surmise of my hypothetical test, but obviously YMMV.
There are thousands of traits* that can be used to peg someone racially. But Americans only rely on a handful of traits. Hair texture, skin color, eye shape. And other cues also help. Speech patterns, style of clothing and accessories, and surname origins. I guess we could throw nailbed shape and eyebrow thickness into this rubric, but I’m unaware of any people on Earth who use nailbed shape and eyebrow thickness to distinguish “us” from “them”. But hair texture, skin color, and eye shape are what most of us Americans have programmed to see through a racial lens. So I would expect those variables to be useful for predicting someone’s apparent race, using American rules.
If I were to describe my skin tone (let’s say with a Munsell color chart) and hair texture with a hair typing system and let you listen to a sample of my voice and you were to assess me as “African American” based on these indicia, would that mean that the rubric you used to make that determination somehow excludes all the parts of me that might point to another racial label? I don’t think so since the indicia you used are almost certainly the ones that you (and everyone else) have been programmed to evaluate when it comes to pegging someone racially. If you were to discover that I identify as “aracial” after surmising I’m African American, does that mean your rubric is completely meaningless? Or would it just mean that racial self-identification is a different thing than how someone is perceived racially?
It sounds like you’re saying is that it is impossible to come up with a classification scheme for gender that produces highly accurate results (meaning, a test that predicts whether an individual will be perceived as masculine/feminine on average by the average person in a given setting and time). If we’re going to go with that surmise, OK I guess. But then let’s do away with the notion that gender is a social construct. Because it seems to me we can’t speak of something being a “social construct” without also acknowledging that there’s a coherent and measurable set of social norms and rules that define this thing. And in the US at least, I don’t believe we construct gender outside of the masculine and feminine spectrum.
I’m waiting for someone (not necessarily you, but you are welcome to) to describe an alternative system to the masculine-feminine framework. Because I’m still not getting how we can describe a particular gender without falling back on these terms, and it’s not for lack of trying.
*I don’t know if you’re a scientist, but I feel the need to say that scientists don’t choose potential metrics all willy-nilly. They use statistical methods to determine which variables to use and which to ignore. So I would hope that the highly trained and well-respected gender scientists would follow the best practices of model building and not exclude variables based on subjective reasoning.
I actually covered most of this in my first post in this thread:
I’d especially like the emphasize the second paragraph – a ton of trans women resonate with butch, tomboy or otherwise traditionally “masc” presentation styles, some resonate with a mix, and some resonate with “high femme” or whatever. Just like cis women. Hell, my butch lesbian trans woman friend actually ended up unintentionally influencing her friend, a budding trans man, to detransition, and is now supporting her through it, because said woman found she related to her own gender and womanhood more like my trans woman friend does than she did to being a man per se. (Though reportedly she has talked about deciding to stick with non-binary instead of picking man/woman).
Still, this isn’t entirely complete. I’d like to focus on:
I mean, it is partially a philosophical stance, that gender is only fluid and individually meaningful. Yes, yes, you can define a bunch of behaviors as stereotypically masc or femme and tally them up and determine “mascness”, the “futch scale” (that is the continuum between “high femme” and “stone butch”) is a common millenial/zoomer lesbian joke about this, see this picture rating the “futchness” (that is, femmeness/mascness) of various weapons.
I would point out that, even in a society where this applies (and this is partially a response to monstro too), it is at best contextual. You may have different degrees of mascness/femmeness in your behaviors depending on who you’re with, your mood, who you are etc. But beyond that, the concept of being agender is rejecting the scale not in the sense of “I’m going to deliberately do things like acting weird or dressing in certain ways to fuck with the scale” – that is a set of philosophies more broadly called “genderfuck”, which is related but distinct – but rather the rejection of it being a scale that’s externally applied to you and used to box them. It’s very similar to the notion that was typically written about in second wave feminism called “radical degendering”.
I’m not going to pretend like there’s not some tension here. There absolutely exists some unspoken tension between the more classical notion of “I’m just as womanly if I like trucks” and “I’m masc because I have masc behaviors and tastes, like liking trucks.” It’s not something that is 100% philosophically resolveable, which is partially where the shift to identity comes from. Gender simply has different individual meanings to people, some people identify with being a woman, whether that’s just because they’ve always accepted it or feel like they “are”/“should be” one. Some do because they feel “femme” and feel that their “femmeness” is what makes them female. Some people don’t identify because they feel the societal label doesn’t fit them. Not everybody has the same internal, consistently defined reasons for their held gender. That’s fine. It’s why this article I keep posting calls queerness “contextual, fluid, and autonomous”. It reflects peoples shifting understandings about society, gender, and self over their lives.
Do you agree with all these stances? I don’t, necessarily. I personally don’t think just being “femme” makes you “a woman” because, well, look at all the femme people who don’t identify that way (femme men in dresses, nonbinary femme-presenting people, etc), but ultimately it’s their identity, their life, and their own autonomy and self-perception at work, not mine. They understand their life and how their view of gender applies to them. And hey, some day I may agree with them. Or some day they may act the same way but have a different philosophical viewpoint and change their identity but not how they act. Maybe the label just stops “feeling” right absent a philosophical shift and they change identities.
Queer gender largely isn’t about descriptors in the sense of taxonomizing information, as that article I keep posting states, taxonomizing is inherently hostile to and at odds with queer identity. It’s about self-identity and empowerment. There is a certain degree of agreement on the definitions just because people like to bond over labels and use those labels to seek others who are like-minded to do said bonding with, but the primary person you’re communicating with with queer identity labels (even including broader terms than gendered ones) is yourself and your self perception, not society at large.
Now I want to be clear, none of what I just said is agreed upon by queer people… because there is no wide agreement, that’s my personal analysis spending maybe 85% of time talking with queer people, but is also inherently limited to the space of queer people I inhabit and move in. Someone else in a different subcommunity may have a different take, or someone in the same community may see it differently (but most of the people I’ve run things like this past largely agree with me). And that’s fine.
Sorry if that’s too meandering and confusing, but it’s a large sociological-philosophical phenomenon with no clear answers. PhD theses are made on this stuff. Also I’m tired and it’s a bit taxing to read a bunch of this stuff about agender people, well meaning and knowledge seeking as it is.
Finally
I mean, ultimately it comes down to this. Comparison time: I like music theory, and you can rationalize a ton of weird non-standard constructions with increasingly esoteric theory. But as someone I follow who was explaining one of his own weird tricks that way said “… also it sounded good in the moment. Most of this is post-hoc, but it ended up being a neat illustration of the theory. People rarely think about this level of theory while actually writing.”
I’m agender because I feel agender because I am agender because I feel agender. Not just a decision on a whim. A strong, fiercely held personal sense of being that can feel very disconcerting when you don’t listen to what that feeling is telling you. Same for 95%+ of people who identify as trans/an atypical gender identity (and some who don’t as well, honestly). A lot of us philosophize gender for myriad reasons: people expect an explanation because it’s a deviation from the norm, we need to medically or politically justify ourselves to an uncaring bureaucratic institution or bigots or “concerned” family members, it’s a big part of our lives going against the grain so we want to explain it to ourselves, people keep throwing gender philosophy in our face so we end up well versed in it whether we want to or not, we and our queer friends get to chatting about our lives and go off on gender tangents (I can’t overstate how common this one is lol) we just like to philosophize and it’s fun to think about, and many other reasons. However, at the end of the day the vast majority of this is “I feel this way, due to some mix of our own closely held feelings and being influenced by hearing how others relate to their own gender, and now I’m trying to figure out why.”
Also this. Tbh I’m about at “yeet myself off the planet” just from talking about this in the abstract lol. I may wait a while before coming back to this thread, it’s starting to take its toll (but also who knows, I have no self restraint on this topic). Admittedly I’m not helping myself by writing chapters in a novel each time I post.
