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Sex and Gender, Man and Woman, Male and female

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ONLY NICE THINGS

18:07 / 26.11.02

What's the purpose of identifying these genders?

Well, drag, obviously.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

08:16 / 27.11.02

I agree, I probably should have used 'sexes' rather than 'genders' in my first post.

The biological way of identifying sex is through the type of sex organs - there are only two types, those that produce female gametes (the ovaries) or male gametes (the testes). The attached mechanism for distributing these gametes would have little relevance in biological calssification terms. There are people who have neither type of sex-organs, either through birth or surgery. Are they sexless?

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:36 / 27.11.02

And, if somebody has testes but happens to "look like a woman", or has ovaries and happens to "look like a man", at whatever level of detail we wish to specify, or indeed has either and looks like neither, what are we to do?

00:17 / 17.12.02

Laurence, if your position is that "intellectuals" should stick to the definitions understood, assumed and accepted by the "masses", wouldn't that make virtually all of the physical sciences moot? I mean, you're not going to get very far in thermodynamics if the definition of heat isn't allowed to be more sophisticated than "makes you want to cool down". If that isn't your position, could you specify exactly which disciplines are obliged to subject their work to the discipline of what-most-people-think, and if possible, provide a means of specifying what-most-people-think other than what-Laurence-says-they-do.

Do you really think gender studies (etc.) has taken up arbitrarily specious and confusing positions about gender and sex just cause, and not because this is in some way(s) helpful to the theoretical and political projects various people want to work on?

I am very tempted to try and summarise Judith Butler's critique of the distinction between sex and gender here, but I'm ungodly bus-lagged and it's going to have to wait until I can put a coherent sentence together. That should probably have applied to the whole post, but oh well.

06:41 / 17.12.02

So RuPaul gets a "she" when "she looks like a woman" but a "he" when out of character. I dispute that pronouns are popularly offered according to the "ideas, processes and peformances" you mentioned earlier for this very reason.

My turn to pick nits. These two statements appear to contradict each other very directly.

RuPaul is either a "he" or a "she" depending on being in or out of character. This is quite clearly a performance which evokes a particular pronoun; what are you disputing?

Gender, gender roles, gender performances, societal expectations - all are concepts currently "under construction" and going through a lot of exploration and change. The difficulties highlighted in this thread are ample demonstration of the inadequacies of the language and conceptual framework as they stand...

As a career biologist and gender-fucker/fuckee, I'm content to use "sex" to refer to either intimate acts between consenting adults or a system of classification dependent on chromosomal makeup and/or the presence/absence of Barr Bodies. And I'm working on restricting my use of the word to adhere to those two categories.

I wish I could remember who declared that, "Gender is a sex toy." Gender is performative - there are days when I am seen as performing as a male by my dress and behavior, how I walk and take up space, and, most importantly, how that performance is interpreted by the people around me. (I can be seen as being male, female, dyke, or straight girl all at the same time, depending on who's watching me, how I conform to their idea of what constitutes gender.)

It's a major mistake to look at gender and gender roles as being solid categories. Gender is fluid, gender roles are fluid; and as gender roles relax by being stretched by girls with mustaches and boys in skirts, I think we may start seeing what portion of gendered identity is not defined by society.

06:59 / 17.12.02

Gah. Pardon my appearing to conflate gender and partner preference... that was not intended at all. I got way beyond discussing gender in talking about how what message gets communicated is dependent on the recipient of the message. Let's just leave it at "I tend to present an ambiguous identity and people tend to interpret me differently depending on their conceptual frameworks."

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:11 / 17.12.02

Hmmm. But how do we differentiate "being seen as performing as a male human being", "being seen as a male human being" and "being mistaken for a male human being". If I understand Lawrence correctly, he might suggest that you are either being treated as if male, or being mistaken for a male, and otherwise you're just being seen as a woman in a suit, and as soon as the suit comes off these all collapse back into "being a woman"; it's either on this thread or the one linked to in the opening thread, but he uses the example of the third-gendered Native American who, when going skinny-dipping, is "revealed as a man", and we're back to the difference between being male, being a man, acting like a man, acting as if male, looking male, looking like a man, and so on....

The other question is, of course, to what extent, how and how successfully gender can be altered/redefined by performance, which is where the Judy Butler thing becomes terribly useful...

15:30 / 17.12.02

Ahh. Care to guess why the language is evolving?

I'm fond of genderfuck - there are days when I (intentionally) perform as male. And it works in different ways, depending on the eye of the beholder. Little old American men call me sir in dim restaurants (and are horribly embarrassed to find out I have a girl's voice), little old Russian women in grocery stores react to me as male even after I speak, friends who are fond of butches ooh and ahh and are coquette to my gallant, I get the occasional nonverbal damn freak reaction on the street....

Performance is dependent on audience. We are in the process of giving the audience, Joe America, new ways of viewing a performance in separating biological sex from apparent physical gender from perceived/performed gender. As the concepts stretch, language and its usage will stretch as well. (Consider how the concept of death has changed in medical, legal, and common usage since 1950.)

I had a series of thoughts last night about gender signifiers being dependent on cultural context that might have answered Laurence to some degree, but I don't think I can recreate them this morning. But, if you look at that Native American in the context of that culture I don't think there's any problem. Three Feathers has an identity as a third gender that is so well accepted in that culture that if genitalia are glimpsed in public, they're (probably) politely ignored as being irrelevant to the public person. The concept and language are embedded in that culture, and Three Feather's gender only becomes problematic when Laurence isolates the individual and tries to apply the limited and inappropriate binary labels of our culture.

As far as what happens when I take off my suit, it's simple - I stop performing as male. I stop performing genderfuck and go back to being a mostly female person in an unabashedly female body. I have MTF friends who pass in hot tubs, and MTF friends who don't go tubbing because they can't continue the (personally necessary) performance of female in a mixed group of folks who may not be willing to accept the discontinuity between performance and body.

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