Translator: Ellen Maloney Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good morning, WCCW!
My talk this morning is about gender boxes
and I'm wondering, how many of you weren't sure
which gender box to put me in when I first walked out on stage?
No surprise, because I've never really fit into either gender box.
Literally since the day I was born.
I was supposed to be a boy,
and when the doctors said it's girl, my mother freaked out.
She got hysterical, she refused to hold me,
and this went on for so many hours
that the doctor finally came back into the room and said,
"Mrs. Carroll, my wife can't have children.
If you really don't want that baby girl, we'd love to adopt her."
Well, if this had been 1954 in China,
I might have have ended up on the steps of an orphanage
because I was a girl.
If my mother had gotten pregnant with me any time in the last 20 years
and found out at ten weeks that I was a female fetus,
I could be one of the 40 million female fetuses that have been aborted
in the last 20 years
because they weren't wanted because they were girls.
So this was supposed to be a funny story that my parents told, every year,
on my birthday, when I was growing up.
I used to get so angry.
I would say, "I wish you had let that doctor adopt me.
I would have been an only child, and I would have had everything I wanted."
But I didn't want the things I would get as an only child.
I wanted to be wanted.
That's what made me angry.
Luckily for me, my parents already had two daughters, so they let me be a tomboy.
Because I didn't fit into the male box.
As I looked around me, on the military bases where I was growing up,
what I saw as the expectations of males were that they were warriors.
They were strong, they were logical. They weren't emotional, except for angry.
They were very active, they were brave, they were leaders,
they would challenge their kids, challenge other people.
And they were worthy. Men's work was paid for.
But looking around at the women?
The women were weaker, they were very emotional,
they cried all the time because that's all they were allowed to do was to cry.
Women were powerless. They were passive. They were afraid. They were followers.
Yeah, they were nurturing, but they were worth less.
They were worth less than the men. Their work wasn't paid for at all.
Which box would you want to be in?
The male box sounded a lot better to me.
And my temperament was more like my dad's, my personality was more like dad.
I was the tomboy and the great thing was, I got to do everything the boys did.
I got to run around, scuff my knees.
Dad said I was at the top of a 30-foot tree when I was 7 years old,
and he was, "A little worried!"
I got to have my own Roy Rogers cowboy guns, the cap guns,
you know the metal ones that had the fake bone handles?
And army soldiers.
So when I was little, it was cool.
I was a tomboy which is sort of like an honorary second-class boy.
But at least I got to do everything boys do, right?
The only accommodation I had to make to being female
was that I had to wear dresses to school and to church.
Even when it was freezing cold, and your knees would be freezing,
we had to wear dresses.
This of course is the 50s and 60s, right?
You don't have to do that anymore.
But then I reached adolescence, and things changed.
We moved to a new town where I didn't have a bunch of friends in the neighbourhood
that I could run around and play with.
My body started changing.
And I was told that I'm not allowed to be a tomboy anymore.
To make matters worse, I discovered I was having crushes on other girls
It's bad enough to not quite fit into the 'little girl' box.
But in 1968, in a small town in Ohio,
I'd never heard the words, 'gay' or 'lesbian' or 'homosexual'.
All I knew was that there was something wrong with me.
And I couldn't talk to anybody about it.
So I did what 20-40% of GLBT youth do, I attempted suicide.
I ate a bottle of aspirin, I didn't know that much about how to attempt suicide.
Made my stomach really sick for a few days
and after that bout of adolescent melodrama,
I decided, "OK, I just have to figure this out".
So I started reading.
Everything I could get my hands on about sex, and gender, and sexuality.
That helped, I could just go into my head with it.
One of the most important books I read was Margaret Mead's,
"Sex and Temperament: In Three Primitive Societies".
In the 1930s, Margaret Mead, a famous anthropologist,
was studying primitive tribes in the area of the world we know as New Guinea
because they had not yet been impacted by Western civilisation.
She felt like she could learn how they really were.
She found tribes that did not fit our gender expectations.
The Arapech tribe, both men and women, were nurturing, cooperative,
loved taking care of their children, were not highly sexed, were not violent.
The Mundomar tribe, both men and women were violent.
Aggressively sexual.
They were not nurturing of their children at all.
If their kids wanted to hold on when they were on their backs,
they had to hold onto their hair.
Finally, the Tchambuli tribe, where the women were the managers,
who were more distant.
And the men were emotionally dependant on the women.
They were the ones who were more nurturing and they were even the gossipers.
What Margaret Mead came to was the idea that sex is about biology.
Temperament, or masculine and feminine, is actually about what society does.
It's cultural.
That really helped me to be able to say,
"OK, I can be a girl, biologically, and still be masculine in my temperament."
As I continued reading more about biology,
I discovered actually there's more than just male and female.
One out of every 15,000 babies born is inter-sexed.
Which means the baby comes out, and the doctor says, "Aah, yeah."
They don't know what it is!
Until they run more tests and actually even the 'more tests'
just tell them which box can they try to force this baby to fit into.
Inter-sex children can have anywhere between six and ten surgeries
throughout their childhood and adolescence.
They have the shame of being different, of being so different,
they have to have the secrecy
of not telling anybody where they were during all of these surgeries.
They most often lose sexual functioning and sexual feeling,
and are not very happy about it once they reach adulthood.
But not only are there
those three discreet portions of biological sex,
actually, what we find is that even biological sex is on a continuum.
That if we look at male characteristics and female characteristics,
there are very few characteristics
that each gender and inter-sex people don't have some of.
If you look at this graph up here,
the purple in the middle includes males, females, and inter-sexed.
The blue side is just males, the pink side is just females,
I am not quite sure where inter-sexed people would fit,
it depends on what the issue was.
What that tells us is even our biology is not just either/or.
The second aspect I was looking at
since it was differentiated for me by Margaret Mead was gender.
Socially-constructed gender.
Not only do we have masculine and feminine,
but over the last 20 or 30 years,
we have been talked about a term called "androgenous".
People that are both masculine and feminine have some of both qualities,
or seem kind of 'gender neutral', tend to fall in that category.
What psychologists are telling us
is that androgenous people are actually psychologically healthier
because they get to express
both their feminine sides and their masculine sides.
The third set of gender boxes that I thought it was important to look at
were the boxes of sexuality.
When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s,
the only kind of sexuality I'd ever heard about was heterosexual. Right?
Everybody was heterosexual back then.
Supposedly.
But then, after Stonewall, in the 70s and 80s,
we started hearing a lot about homosexuality and gay rights.
This became common knowledge.
In the last 20 or 30 years, more and more people are saying,
"Oh, but I can be bisexual",, "I can be homosexual and heterosexual,"
"I can be attracted to both."
Actually, Alfred Kinsey started studying sexuality in 1948
and through the 50s interviewed thousands and thousands of men,
and found out that sexual behaviour too is on a continuum.
Most human beings are not totally heterosexual or totally homosexual.
But most humans have had the experience of having
some attraction or some involvement
with the same and the opposite sex throughout their life.
And it changes through people's life.
This was all very useful for me,
and I decided to put it together into a model
that would help everybody understand this complicated subject of gender.
Plus I like models. One of my exes was a model.
(Laughter)
That was supposed to be funny.
The X axis is biology. Male to female.
The Y axis is cultural gender.
The Z axis is is sexuality.
Multiply 3 x 3 x 3.
You get 27 possibilities for human gender expression.
Not two.
Not male, and female, and queer.
Not male, and female, and transgendered.
27 different possibilities for human gender expression.
What does this all mean, and why should it be important to you?
Aside from the fact that when we put people in little boxes,
they have to cut off parts of themselves
- for some people they cut off physical parts of themselves,
or emotional parts of themselves, or mental parts of themselves,
or spiritual parts of themselves -
aside from that, I believe that humanity is on the verge of evolution
from an adolescent, self-centered focus
on independance and autonomy
to a more mature stance where we recognise
that we are interconnected with each other, with all of life.
Where we are more interested in connection than being separate.
I believe that lots of us have already started recognising
that we don't need to judge differences as 'less than' or 'greater than'
because we see the beauty and the creativity in all of diversity.
I think some of us have started to recognize and transcend polarities
of either/or and move toward both/and.
No longer thinking in terms of 'black' and 'white',
but in terms of shades of grey.
I believe that when we can take the masculine tendency,
the masculine overdone strengths of focus on task and competition,
and combine them with the feminine overdone strengths
of accommodation to others and focus on cooperation, and focus on relationship,
that then we can learn how to collaborate,
find win-win solutions to the problems that beset our world.
Thank you.
(Applause)