I want to describe three conflicting viewpoints. Just to lay them all three out there on the table and stuff.
• Viewpoint A —Gender identities exist; and some legitimate ones have been discovered and acknowledged over time. This AHunter3 thinks he has a candidate for yet another one to be recognized and considered legitimate. Some of us aren’t so onboard with that; we think the one he’s describing is not so much of a legitimate gender identity. At best it’s a variation on some existing gender identity. He should use the existing legitimate gender identity that comes closest and modify it with an adjective or two, instead of trying to get us to regard his newfangled homemade gender identity as real.
• Viewpoint B — Gender identities only exist in the social imagination. Everyone who claims to have one is just reflecting the forces of socialization, the expectations and media representations etc ad nauseum that make people think of themselves in these limited ways. To some extent we’re all pressured into buying in to some of that, but when you get right down to it, gender is just stereotyped nonsense, at least if we’re confining ourselves to things like personality and behavioral differences and all that other “soft” identity stuff. Some of us think AHunter3 is one of those “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” people who, instead of being sufficiently astute to reject gender definitions altogether, is pining for the feminine side as a reaction to his not liking the masculine side. Others, more charitably, think AHunter3 is using this “gender invert” thing as a way of sidestepping the masculine gender imperatives, or trying to, although we aren’t necessarily buying into it as an actual identity the way he describes it.
• Viewpoint C — “Gender identity” is a notion that makes enough sense to enough people that it is useful in communication, because most (if not all) people are familiar with how other people have used “gender identity” as a concept, so when AHunter3 describes his situation in terms of being another gender identity, we know in general the kind of thing he’s talking about, even if we’re not clear on the specifics of how the one he’s describing is different from the ones we’ve heard others using. We recognize the utilitarian usefulness of him describing what he’s trying to describe in terms we’re familiar with, although some of us don’t think he has chosen the best possible terms. Some of us think he could say what he is trying to say using other selected concepts and notions that are in general circulation and make more sense to more people. l
I think there is at least a good kernel of useful insight and truth in all three viewpoints. I myself am probably least in alignment with the first (Viewpoint A), although I think there’s a social-context-specific sense (rather than an absolute and inevitable sense) in which a finite number of gender identities “exist”. I don’t think genders exist the way people with Rhesus-factor negative blood versus Rhesus-factor positive blood exist, as concrete things that people either have or have not yet discovered at any given point in history, and where at any given time society correctly knows or else has an incorrect understanding of it. I think instead that gender is like archetypes: socially shared notions, images, collectively accumulated identities that work in our heads at the level of myth and legend, inspiring us or sometimes warding us off.
I tend to consider the Viewpoint B people to be like the folks who say “well, myths and legends are, by definition, stuff that isn’t true. So this stuff isn’t true, it isn’t real”. Neither is the Marlboro man in his cowboy hat, but our culture is permeated with the sense of a certain kind of character, and when someone sort of channels that myth they are speaking a kind of language to us, and we understand it. We go to movies or read books and we don’t have to “believe the American cowboy was real as conventionally depicted” in order to say “Hey, Jeff Bridges really did the western hero in the modern automative era to perfection” or something of that ilk.
My own viewpoint, in case it’s not blindingly obvious, is closest to Viewpoint C. I don’t think there are social truths with exactly denotatively perfect English-language terms that mean those exact things. Instead, I think the process of communicating social truths is an art, not a science. It is not possible to put most things in completely accurate words — in order for that to work, the audience would have to have an identical lexicon so that the meaning that ends up bouncing around inside their heads is the exact meaning that the speaker intended, and that it would work that way for any English-speaking audience because that’s what those words mean. Well, it ain’t like that, folks. Instead, one chooses terms and juxtaposes them with other terms and mixes in some other descriptive stuff and paints a verbal picture on the canvas in hopes that a goodly chunk of the audience picks up on the notions and myths and shared iconography and all that shit and gets what the speaker or author meant. And where they don’t? You try to have dialog. You sometimes take a run at expressing the same thoughts in different words in hopes of attaining that “aha” moment with the people who didn’t go “aha” on the first go-around.
Now, people can understand you, all the way down to the proverbial gut level, and still not agree with the associations you’re trying to conjure. Just like I can come back from Hell or High Water and say negative things about the kind of person that Jeff Bridges portrayed and reject the hero-trappings. But the biggest hurdle is usually just to communicate.
With social realities, it’s usually more about the connotations than the denotations. In the 1850s in America, abolitionists didn’t have to explain to folks that people from Africa had been enslaved. People knew that. Abolitionists had to connect that fact with shared notions of equality and fairness, with the country’s stated promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happeness, with the ideals of the enlightenment and its notions of what it means to be a person, in such a way that the folks listening go “Oh! Aha! Hey, this is morally wrong”.
I’ve used other terms, other ways of trying to dish out the central points I’m trying to make to people, at earlier points in my life. (I’ve been at this since roughly January of 1980). The terms I’ve chosen, both earlier and now, were picked by me because of the connections I wanted folks to make in their heads when considering this stuff. If that sounds cynical and manipulative, I can only tell you that I’m not cynical (although I’m every bit as manipulative as any artist and many a politician). I observe you (collectively, the people who constitute my society) to currently be thinking in a certain way about gay, lesbian, and transgender people. I very non-cynically have always seen myself as being in an analogous situation, but much of the useful language didn’t exist, or at least not in a widely shared fashion, such that it was easy to use that as a starting point. (Not that I didnt’ try that some, in 1980 and 1981, but I drifted towards trying to express it in terms of feminist theory and the feminist attack on the unfairness of one set of standards for men and another for women, and get to my point from that starting point instead, for a decade or so afterwards). I choose to use LGBTQ terms and, specifically, the existing & ongoing talk about gender identity because it is a good comparison: I want to be thought of in the same general way that many of you think of transgender, gay, bisexual, lesbian, etc people. I don’t mean me, personally, but my category. To add a new category and have you all think of the new category along the same lines. And my desire for that outcome is, of course, embedded in my choice of the language that I use. Yes, I want something from you! I’m trying to shape your perception and your emotional reaction and attitude to a category of people I’m describing!
I am trying to be honest and put all of my cards on the table.
Feminist Carol Hanisch wrote “The Personal is Political”. Indeed it is. This is social politics. And it’s way personal. I’m not immune to getting defensive and stuff but I don’t think I’m too bad about it, actually.