Gender

I spent years on the periphery of queer spaces. While the concept of “gender” was king, there were also no secret of the underlying fact that lots of people didn’t really get it. “What even is a gender?” nonbinary folks would joke.

A few months before I came in contact with the radical feminists or gender critical internet, I heard gender defined from a sociology perspective for the first time, rather than a queer theory perspective. Suddenly it all snapped into focus and made sense.

Gender is the social trappings of sex. It is the social role, rather than biology.

So… yes, gender roles and sex stereotypes. But not just the things that we usually think of as stereotypes, such as clothing or hobbies. Also things like gendered names and pronouns, which are not usually considered stereotypes.

There are genders other than men and women; some societies have included other roles. The hijra of India are a gender. The muxe of Oaxaca are a gender. In 50s lesbian bar culture, butch and femme were genders.

The big thing that queer theory tries to erase about “cultural genders” or “third genders” is this: they’re all sex-specific. If there is any cultural gender which is not, I have yet to hear about it. Asking a society to be unaware of or indifferent to people’s sex is unrealistic and impractical. No society would naturally create a system like that, because sex actually does matter. People are very good at recognizing the sex of others, and without modern drugs, surgeries, and selfie filters, conceding one’s sex was rarely even on the table.

In addition to being sex-specific, a major difference between these cultural genders (which arose in society naturally) and modern queer theory genders (which requires lobby groups to beat people over the head with it) is that the former all have social roles that go with them. They have a distinct way of dressing, customs, and relationship patterns. Hijra dress in womenswear, and have sex with men. Butches dress in menswear and have sex with femmes. This is in stark contrast to the “anything goes” concept of nonbinary that’s popular in the queer conglomerate.

Gender is societally constructed, so for a gender to exist, society must construct it. Stargender is not a real gender because society has not made it so. Which sex are they? Who do they partner with? How do they dress? What is their relationship to the rest of society?

It has been posited that worldwide, the societies that create third genders are usually very patriarchal ones with strict gender roles. These third genders exist as a sort of release valve, so that the existence of gender non-conforming people does not challenge or disrupt their strict gender roles for men and women. More egalitarian societies usually don’t have third genders. I myself an not a sociologist; I don’t have a broad knowledge of third genders across the world and the societies that create them, so I am not qualified to indorse this claim myself. But I do think it’s something worth mentioning.

It’s also worth considering that while every society is going to have some role for males and some role for females, they’re not consistent cross-culturally. The social trappings of womanhood are different for a Zulu woman than a Chinese woman, just as manhood was different in the 1700s than it is now. “Man” and “woman” look very different depending on the time and place.

(As far as I understand it, this is basically the same difference that is going on between butches and studs. They’re both lesbians who take on many of the social trappings of men. They’re both masculine, but “masculinity” is not monolith across cultures. Studs are Black and Latina, and their version of masculinity is more like that of Black and Latino men, and has an urban, hip-hop slant.)

The key thing that makes a gender a gender is that it’s sex-based. This is what distinguishes genders from styles, subcultures, and aesthetics. Goth is also a fairly well-defined, recognizable social role, but it’s not a gender because it’s not sex-specific. Likewise, I would sooner call nonbinary a subculture than a gender — although it’s a pretty amorphous subculture at that.

A gender without a sex is just an aesthetic. On tumblr, you’ll see queer kids making jokes like, “Ah, yes, the two genders: knight and pirate.” They’re seeped in gender theory, so they’re kidding as they say it. But I do think it’s interesting that they seem to be edging up on that knowledge, even though they don’t consciously realize it yet.