The first thing you need to know about gender is that it’s not the same as sex. If you
wanna go into that distinction Marinashutup has a great video on it, but
the tl:dr – sex comes from biology, though that does not mean that it's a binary
or clearly understood, and gender is… more. Gender is a state of being, a mode of life.
And what exactly that ‘more’ is we shall investigate.
One of the most famous theories of gender and where it comes from is Judith Butler’s
“gender performativism.” You may have heard of it, it's the idea that gender is
something we perform, it is “the stylised repetition of acts through time.”
Now some people have taken gender performativism to mean that you can perform whatever gender
you like, and that ultimately your gender is a means of self-expression, but interestingly that's not actually what Butler meant
by it. It’s not a performance in the way that an actor chooses to perform a role, and reads from a script and dresses themselves up; it’s performance
like "performativism", which is a technical term. Let me explain:
Some ways of speaking are performative – they don’t just communicate something, they also
constitute an act. Like for instance, if you say “guilty” during your trial, you're not just
communicating that you did it, you're also actually instigating a legal process and a whole bunch of other stuff happens as a
result of you doing that. Or for instance saying “I do” at your
wedding, or an umpire saying “That’s out!” in tennis. Yes the speaker
is communicating but they're also performing an action. Butler thinks that one of the things performative
speech can do is constitute an identity. The repeated, stylised actions that make up your gender
aren't an expression of some hidden self – they are the self. She says, “Gender
performativity is not a matter of choosing which gender one will be today. Performativity
is a matter of reiterating or repeating the norms through which one is constituted.”
Another very important thing that Butler emphasises is that your gender identity is not constructed
by you. The repeated stylised actions that make up your gender are taught to you and enforced. When a baby is
born, she says, a performance of "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!" and
the baby can be expected to perform very differently depending on what that assigned identity is.
In her famous book of feminist existentialism "Le Deuxième Sexe," Simone de Beauvoir emphasises
at great length that those who are gendered male are often expected to maintain very different
identities from those gendered female. Just to be clear, Butler is not denying that
sexual differences exist. What she’s interested in is how some physical differences between people come to acquire such
significance, and other physical differences like hair colour or eye colour don’t
so much. But hang on a minute! (I hear some of you
saying.) "Are you telling me that all
those people on tumblr who say that their gender identity is some thing I've never even freaking heard of - are you
telling me they're actually correct?!"
Well... yeah. Kindof. Your gender identity is not an expression of anything in yourself, according to Butler;
it is your self, so there's not really any grounds for saying that somebody's doing
their gender wrong. In fact, as new social systems are created online it's
perhaps not surprising that we see some gender identities emerging that under different systems
would be interpreted differently, or actively side-lined. In actually a point in Butler’s favour
that as new social systems emerge we see new gender performances emerging with it.
There are two big theories about what gender is and where it comes from. Gender essentialism says that whatever
it is to be a gender is ultimately best explained by biology –
sex chromosomes usually. Social constructivism on the other hand says, surprise surprise, that your gender
is socially constructed. If you're very clever you might have noticed a parallel to the similar debate about what race
is, which we’ve talked about on this channel before. Butler’s performativism plays very much to the social
constructivist angle because she thinks that gender identities and all of the expectations and rules that come with them are grounded in social norms.
Julia Serano says that gender performativism is in danger of being a little bit patronising.
It's in danger of overlooking the fact that for a great many people their gender expression is what feels right for them. It is, in a way, an expression of something inside them.
Serano thinks that both essentialism and social constructivism are incomplete. She thinks that people acting against
what essentialism says their gender should be based on their sex chromosomes occurs far more
frequently than the essentialist can account for. The essentialist would say that people with
exceptional gender expressions come down to genetic anomalies – but as a geneticist Serano thinks
they occur far too frequently in the population for that to be true. But at the same time, she says, people with exceptional gender expressions
often display them from an early
age, supposedly before any kind of social conditioning could have set
in. So maybe the social constructivist is missing something as well?
The missing ingredient, she thinks, is what she calls “subconscious sex,” which is how your brain expects your
body to be. She thinks trans people can be acutely aware that their subconscious sex
does not match their physical body, and therefore the identity that they were assigned on the basis
of that body. Whereas cis people have a subconscious sex that does match their physical body, and therefore they don’t experience
that very painful “gender dissonance.”
Whilst she does think that subconscious sex is a matter of how your brain is wired, she doesn’t want to go full gender essentialist on it,
because she does think that social conditioning can play a huge role in how you interpret your subconscious sex.
What she’s really trying to explain is what she’s found as a trans woman, which is that certain kinds of gender expression just
feel right, and that feeling right she says is a function both of your subconscious sex and the social construction of gendered identities.
So as an alternative she puts forward the “Intrinsic Inclination” model. According to this theory,
you are intrinsically inclined to some of the kinds of behaviours that make up your
gender. If take gender, which is a spectrum, and graph it
against physical sex, which is also a spectrum, we get two overlapping bell curves – just like
if we graph height against physical sex. And just like with height, there are certain correlations that we can observe.
People with penises tend to be taller, and tend to have certain kinds of gender inclinations. But just like with
any set of overlapping bell curves there are outlying cases. The difference between this and the
gender essentialist model is that whereas the essentialist would say that the outlying cases are down to "genetic errors" or "anomalies,"
the intrinsic inclination theorist can say that they're just examples of perfectly normal
variation within the human species.
Serano thinks the chief advantage of this model is that it explains both why there are typical cases
- most people are in the middle of the bell curves and most people are therefore cis - but
also why there are some rarer but still perfectly normal cases.
I think Serano's theory is compatible with Butler’s gender performativism. The subconscious sex needn’t
be a complete self that exists prior to being assigned a gendered identity. It could just be,
as she says, natural variation in the kind of gendered selves that feel right.
What all this gets at is that, perhaps worryingly, your identity as a gendered being may not be up to you.
Serano thinks that your brain can, and definately should be allowed to, play a role in shaping your gender, but she, Butler, and de Beauvoir
all emphasise that gender is as much Object as it is Subject. An Object that is shaped and acted
on by other people, as well as you.
What do you think? What is gender? Is performativism is on the money? What's your
experience as a performer and be-er of your gender. Leave me a comment telling me what you think, and for more philosophical videos from me, don't forget to subscribe.
This episode, as well as the two that I did on Kant, was filmed in YouTube Space London as part of YouTube's NextUp Creator Camp,
so I wanna say a massive thank you to all the staff who've helped me move these huge lights and cameras and microphones from studio to studio
on this, which has been a very long day of filming.
I've been filming for about eight hours now, so I'm gonna go to bed, but
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