Gender: inchoate thought

[redbird]

Most of my thoughts on gender these days are tentative and inchoate, for which I am grateful to the Tiptree Motherboard and my fellow jurors for offering me a consciousness-raising project (not labeled as such).

There's a "my gender presentation is" meme going around, with a couple of hundred options. Some of those strike me as fitting better into boxes labeled as "sexual orientation" or "political position." Some I could check, but my thought was "my gender presentation is irrelevant in any context where you have to ask." This connects to rysmiel's deliberate obfuscation of zir gender online "because it matters that it should not matter." (If you can't tell whether you're attracted to me without knowing the answer to that question, fine—I can't tell whether I'm attracted to you until we've spent time together, even if you tell me your gender and provide photos and audiotapes.)

I think my gender presentation is "passing." Not passing as a woman, or a man: passing as someone who understands gender. That most people would take one look at me and say "female" (and the ones who automatically come up with the other answer and call me "sir" apologize when they hear my voice or see my chest) is only tangent to the relevant arc [1]. It's like the forms in Northern Ireland that would ask, not about actual religion/ethnicity [2] but whether the person would "be perceived as" Catholic or Protestant. When Rysmiel and papersky told me about those, I said I would need a "don't know" box, and they both confidently told me that, in that context, I would be perceived as Protestant. "Woman" doesn't feel actively wrong the way "Protestant" does, because to the extent that I do have an understanding of what that means, there's significant overlap. A woman is a person who [cares that she] is assigned certain pronouns, who has certain phenotypic characteristics, who has no Y chromosome (and usually two X chromosomes), who is expected to play certain roles (which vary with time, location, and subculture), and probably several other things.

I'm not so much trying to pass, as only resisting the parts of the mold that don't fit. I like long hair and dangly earrings, I don't much care for skirts, I won't wear high-heeled shoes. Where I object to the roles, it's usually on feminist grounds--not "I don't fit in that box, I fit in the other one" but "Dividing people into two boxes for this purpose is stupid and oppressive."

[1] I almost wrote "tangent to the relevant point" and then realized that the geometrically meaningful image was probably better than the metaphoric use of "point."

[2] The two concepts being more entwined there than in some other places; in New York "ethnically Catholic" seems weird, but "ethnically Jewish" does not.

Comments

[kiya]

I keep saying that my gender is 50% male and 86.6% female, and I always appreciate it when someone gets that. (Which is probably a sign that I'm an example of the alt.poly-posited "geek" gender.)

A friend of mine told me I was butch at one point, which cracks me up, since I wear long skirts a fair amount.

Gender is a state of mind?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Gender is a state of minds?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I know some people who are ethnically Catholic. They have no belief in God, the Virgin Mother, etc., but many Catholic folkways and belief patterns firmly affect how they approach the world, more so than the traditional ethnic categories they could claim instead. (Also, some of these people are "Catholic atheists": the god they don't believe in is an extremely specific Catholic God.)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

me me me me me.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I call that mindset "There is no God and Mary is is mother".

I also know people with the mindset "There is no God and Mohammed is his prophet".

It's hard to put them under the same label as atheists!

[redbird]

Also "there is no God, and he has forbidden us to eat pork and shellfish."

I agree that it feels rather different from atheists, which I think of as "there are no gods, let's get on with life." Agnosticism, in this approach, is "I see no evidence for any gods."

[deor.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't that be culturally Catholic, rather than ethnically?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[I should have something to say about this, but I am several days sleep-depped.]

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

As a Jew who grew up in NY, I feel qualified to comment on that last.

Most people in the US, when they think of Jewish culture/ cooking/ language/ etc., think of Ashkenazic Jews: German/Russian/Central European Jewry Yiddish-speakers, like my ancestors (Germany, Russia, Hungary, Czech-land). Ashkenazim are as much an ethnic group as many others, such as "Chinese", including all the subdivisions and oppositions within what outsiders see as a homogeneous bunch (Cantonese and Mandarin are separate languages, as much so as French and Italian). That totally leaves out Sephardic (Mediterranean Europe) and Oriental (Yemen, Iran, and points East) Jews, not to mention other communities like the Bnei Yisrael ("Falashas") from Ethiopia, but that's what "ethnically Jewish" probably means to most people, at least most non-Jews.

But everybody in New York "knows" that
- the Italians are Catholic
- the Irish are Catholic (except for the Irish Protestants, as dunkelpig just pointed out over my shoulder)
- Hispanics are Catholic
- Italians and Irish and Hispanics are all different ethnic groups
- therefore, "ethnically Catholic" is meaningless

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think we probably have some largish areas of overlap in our attitudes toward our own gender.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

"Ethnically Catholic and Protestant" makes perfect sense to me (I grew up in the West of Scotland, the second most sectarian place in Britain after Northern Ireland - we have Orange Walks and everything).

I'm second-generation nonreligious, but if I have to classify myself under that heading I know that I count as Protestant - even if I didn't know what that meant when the kids at school asked me and didn't know the difference between Celtic (Catholic Glasgow football team) and Rangers (Protestant Glasgow football team) when I was wee. And even though my father is a nonreligious Ashkenazi Jew.

It's complicated in GLasgow (and, I expect, NI) because state schools are either Catholic or non-denominational. So basically you're Catholic if you went to a Catholic school (recognisable by being named after a saint - historically, employers would ask potential employees which school they went to in order to find out whether they were catholic or protestant, which would then affect whether they were hired) and Protestant if you went to a nondenominational, nonreligious school - which of course included all nonchristians too.

On gender, I would say stuff but I'm going to be late for work!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

My gender presentation is: "This also is a valid way of being a real woman".

I absolutely refuse the claiming of the female by the "femme" and being stuffed into the category of "neuter" or "other". I think it helps reinforce stereotypes of what is a "real woman" or a "real man" if people who don't fit the stereotype insist on other definitions rather than broadening the possibilities of what's real.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

As an aside, I want to note that the meme-form allows both multiple options for the "My gender is.." bit, and some of the descriptors fit better with other options. (I chose "I am.."; another was "My sexual-orientation is..."; there were 6 or 8 all told when I last looked.) Also, there's a box for custom terms, down at the bottom, and custom terms, once entered, appear to become options in the future -- the one I enterede as custom was in the list when I looked later, and I'd seen other terms appear, as well. I think it's a really well designed meme, if one wishes to publicize onee's self-identification -- or lack thereof!