With the latest installment of "Culture Wars: Restroom Mania", I've been thinking a lot about gender lately. I am interested in and a bit apprehensive about the societal and cultural impact of loosening the hitherto tight coupling between gender and the phenotypic expression of sex.
How much of our success in achieving a measure of civilization, for example, can be attributed to our traditionally strong commitment to a strictly binary interpretation of gender that is largely determined by the visible sex organs?
Today, when a baby is born, practically the first thing we do is to observe what is present between the child's legs. This mere observation sets in motion an immense and immensely complicated train of events and expectations that will affect the child profoundly in pretty much every aspect of life. I'm explicitly avoiding value judgements about this train of events and how it pertains to an individual.
Rather, what I am trying to come to grips with is the question of how (and whether) our culture can survive the switch to a much more fluid conception of gender (and sexuality). Gender is deeply woven into our legal, economic and social frameworks and is absolutely foundational to much of the culture we transmit from generation to generation. What does it mean to unwind these institutions to such an extent? What are the unintended consequences? Will we impose an unbearable cost on the many to confer a degree of freedom desired by a few? I don't know. And granted that there is much to cavil about in our Western world, there is no gainsaying that it has conferred many significant material benefits on humankind and we should be extremely circumspect about how we alter its foundation stones.
I am not referring to the shallow, silly traditions that make boys things blue and girl things pink. Nor am I alluding to the conception of gender roles as embodied in 1950s pop culture.
Rather I am concerned about our ability to cohere as a society when there is an infinite number of gender and sexuality buckets and one can move freely between them. It's all well and good that some few individuals' needs are better accommodated, but what are the effects on the second and third generations? How does this tendency affect the all-important activity of replenishing the race and raising children to be decent people? Is it fair and healthy to all children to bid them decide their own gender and pronoun?
Respecting the primary acquisition of language, there is a critical period during which a child must be exposed to language or else he or she will never be able to attain linguistic competency. To fail to endow a child with language during this timeframe is impose a life sentence of profound dysfunction on that individual.
Now the $64,000 question: is there a critical period for the acquisition of gender? By relegating to children the responsibility of deciding their own gender, are we doing them a terrible disservice? More to the point, are we deferring that decision in such a way as to miss a critical developmental window and thus similarly condemning the child to a lifetime of profound dysfunction?
We do not know the answer to any of these questions. And much rides on our getting it right. The effects of imposing gender fluidity on language are profound, awkward and messy. I expect it will be the same on our other cultural and social institutions. We should be very, very careful and proceed with glacial slowness in this area.
With all that said, I think the notion of privilege can be very helpful in this space. By pointing out to people that they're merely fortunate that their gender matches their sex and not "correct", we solve two problems. First it makes it a lot easier for people's reaction to non-traditional gender assignment to be compassionate rather than judgmental. And second, it provides for people with gender dysphoria to be just different instead of broken. That makes a big difference for those who don't draw a winning ticket in the demographic lottery.
Posted with Blogsy
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