The Purgatory of Thoughts

I don’t know what to think of the “new breed” of Nerd Girls (these are two different links, by the way), almost supernatural girls that are geeky and smart and socially adept and hot! What’s not to like, right?

Hmm, well, it depends.  Certainly, we don’t want to foster the false dichotomy that women can either be smart or beautiful, but not both.  But this “trend” (or perhaps the media coverage of it) makes me uncomfortable because I am afraid that it reinforces a somewhat different, and not as empowering, message instead: that women have to be smart and attractive (whereas men can be both but do not have to be).  Or even worse, the same old message in disguise: as a female, you can’t just be smart, you also have to be beautiful to be valued (except now we’ll accept your intelligence as well, maybe.)  The beauty almost becomes a compensation for being intelligent/nerdy.  “It’s ok that they’re nerdy; they’re still hot (aka conventionally feminine)!”

Furthermore, I am rather wary whenever pop culture claims to promote female empowerment, especially when it comes to sexuality.  I say this because I feel like one of the feminist movement’s greatest accomplishments, sexual liberation for women, has been turned into another tool of oppression for the patriarchy, to the point where people will often mistakenly blame feminism for our current “slut” culture.  The healthy premise that women should be free to express their sexuality has been corrupted into the notion that women have to appear sexualized, not for themselves or by their standards, but for society and for (real or imaginary) men.  That is not sexual liberation, but the same old women’s sexuality being controlled by society and men, just in modern guise.  I cannot be confident that this “new nerd girls” trend isn’t along the same vein.

At the same time, I don’t want to say that a girl cannot be nerdy and hot, or if a nerdy girl appears conventionally hot, she is “selling out” in some sort of way.  I just don’t want to pull out the pom-pom’s just yet and automatically declare this an empowering trend (if it indeed is one) as the media and pop-culture might have us believe.  The issue just isn’t that simple.

Ok, my blog isn’t meant to be about gender identity, but it’s an issue that I’m very interested in (and it often strikes a nerve with me), so I’m writing on it again. Plus, this article I came across today reminded me of this recent incident:

(Setting: the security check-through at Bradley Airport)

TSA man: laptops in a separate bin.
Woman in front me: I don’t have a laptop.
TSA man: (referring to me) no, but this guy does…
Me: this guy? Well, maybe he’s using it in the nongendered sense…*pulls laptop out of bag*
TSA man: …look, he’s pulling it out right now.
Me: he?

Now, I didn’t exactly look ultra feminine that day. I had on a rather androgynous outfit: black v-neck t-shirt, blue-gray zip-up hoodie, and khaki pants, though they were all from the women’s section of mainstream stores like the Gap. I also have short hair, and I’ve kind of stopped wearing make-up on a regular basis awhile ago (and I certainly wasn’t wearing any on that day after not enough sleep and frantic packing). But, despite all this, I didn’t think I looked so masculine as to be confused for the wrong gender. At the same time, what did it matter? It made me uneasy, but I wasn’t sure if it should have.

Indeed, the fact that it bothered me probably bothered me more than the actual incident itself. So our culture is very gendered. So what? I already knew that. But why do I care? Why did some part of me feel like I must have done something wrong for that man to confuse my gender? (Hell, I probably did something right!) If he had confused my ethnicity or something, I would have just chalked it up to his ignorance and moved on rather then thinking that the incident reflected anything about myself. I mean, I know the standard response: it’s a result of all my societal conditioning and what not, but as someone who tries to be an ardent feminist, it bothers me that I still react this way sometimes.

This also reminds me of a conversation I overheard on campus some weeks ago. This girl is reading the section of Gender Trouble which features overheard sexist comments on campus. In particular, she is reading the selection which (I don’t have a copy of GT with me right now, so this will be paraphrased) a guy comments on how some girl “looks like a man.” The girl reading the magazine comments to her guy friend that she feels bad, to which the friend responds, “Why?”

“Well, because I feel like we say stuff like this, and we shouldn’t,” the girl replies.
The guy shrugs, “I don’t think you should feel bad.”
“Why not? It’s not good.”
“I don’t like it when people purposely do things that they know other people think is weird and then they complain about it when other people think it’s weird.”

Except that I wasn’t trying to “be weird” (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I was just trying to be comfortable for moving out of my room and for sitting on an airplane (one of my least favorite activities) for four hours. And what’s to say that other women who are tagged as looking too masculine aren’t doing the same?

The TSA man’s assumption bothered me in two ways: first, it implied that dressing comfortably and perhaps a bit drably is only something males do; in order to look like an authentic woman, you must look like you put much effort into your outfit. Why is comfort and practicality a male domain? Don’t women have the right to dress that way as well? It also bothered me because my own reaction to it shows that the pressure to conform to gender roles still has enormous influence, both socially and personally.

As for the ignorant Amherst College student up there, well, that’s a whole ‘nother set of annoyances. For a group of supposedly bright critical thinkers, we sure have some rather conventional and conformists individuals. Shouldn’t the goal of Amherst students be to push and challenge the norms, rather than enforcing them?

Anyway, this rant is over.

Recently I’ve ran into many discussions about gender identity, the most recent being this NPR article (which will form the basis of my post, so you should go read it first). Interestingly, in all of these discussions, the claim has come up that those who support transgender people (and especially transsexual people) are basically holding an essentialist position on gender. In other words, that they believe gender and gendered behavior is something one is born with.

For example, this NPR article features two boys, Bradley and Jonah, who want to be girls. Bradley’s therapist, Dr. Ken Zucker, tells his parents that Bradley needs to learn masculine behavior or else he will be socially rejected by people of both genders as he enters adolescence. So his parents take away his toys (which were all girl toys) and try to make him play with boy toys, wear boy clothes, etc. On the other hand, Jonah’s therapist, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, tells Jonah’s parents to just let him be who he is. So Jonah’s parents changes his name to Jona, starts calling him “her,” and let Jona become a full-fledged girl. Even Jona’s teachers and classmates at school regard her as a girl.

Ehrensaft compares Zucker’s therapy as akin to those back in the 70’s and 80’s that tried to “correct” homosexuality, which the American Psychiatric Association now considers unethical. To Ehrensaft, gender identity is analogous to sexual orientation, and it is just as unethical to “correct” one as it is the other. Zucker counters that people like Ehrensaft are making a mistake. Sexual orientation is something that one is born with, while gender is socially learned, not something that one is born with. According to Zucker, letting children like Bradley and Jonah become girls is akin to letting a black child who comes in wanting to be white become white. In that case, the therapist should strive for the child to accept his own racial identity; therefore in gender identity cases, the therapist should also strive for the child to accept his own gender.

Now, I find Zucker’s view interesting because it is true that transgender/transsexual people and their allies believe that gender is innate in some sense, for the main reason someone would want to switch genders is because he or she believes that his or her biological sex does not match up with his or her gender. Often, the feeling is described as one of being “a woman trapped in a man’s body” or vice versa. However, on the other hand, the same people who staunchly support transgender identity are also usually the same people who most strongly believe that gender is a social construct that is too often believed to be innate and “biological” by conventional society whereas in reality gender identity can be much more fluid than people assume. So either Zucker (and those who share similar views as his) are correct, and people like Ehrensaft are making a mistake as well as being hypocrites, or else people like Zucker are making some sort of fundamental flaw in their argument. I believe it’s the latter, so that’s what I’ll be arguing here.

To start with, Zucker’s analogy with racial identity is seriously flawed, because the way he is treating children like Bradley is not like how he would treat hypothetical black kid who wants to be white at all. Like gender, race also has certain behaviors attached to it, but usually intelligent and educated people realize that those attachments are a matter of culture and society. Now, hypothetical black kid probably wants to be white because he does not care for stereotypically “black” interests (i.e. basketball and rap music) but is instead interested in stereotypically “white” activities (i.e. soccer and piano). He thinks to have these interests he needs to be white. How would most therapists work with this kid so that he accepts his own racial identity? The therapist would probably try to convince the kid that he can be black and still pursue the activities that he enjoys, that being black is not necessarily tied up with superficial interests. The therapist might also tell his parents to find him other peers, perhaps preferably of the same race, who share the same interests that he does so that he has a group of people around whom he feels accepted. What the therapist would definitely not do is tell his parents to deprive him of his interests and make him take on stereotypically black interests, wear stereotypical black clothing styles, so that he will be accepted by his peers. I am pretty sure that most people, including Zucker himself, would consider this hypothetical therapist to be not just unethical, but also pretty racist. Yet, how is Zucker’s treatment of Bradley that much different from this hypothetical screwed-up therapy? He tells Bradley’s parents to deprive Bradley of all the things he likes and to mold him into a stereotypical boy instead, wearing blue, playing with trucks, etc. But because gender identity is so much more essentialized in our society than racial identity, Zucker’s treatment is not only accepted among the psychiatric community, it is the conventional treatment for non-gender-conforming children. (In fact, I read elsewhere that he has recently been put in charge by the APA of the definition of “transgender” in the next edition of the DSM.)

Gender is essentialized in two ways in our society. First, a group of behaviors and desires are grouped together and labeled “feminine” and “masculine,” and then even more importantly (and problematic) is that “feminine” is attached to the female sex, so that anyone of that biological sex is expected to display that set of dispositions and behaviors, and “masculine” is attached to the male sex in the same way. That is, being female or male means fundamentally having certain personality traits and dispositions, and having those traits automatically means that it should be expressed in this way. I really don’t think that Ehrensaft and people like her believe that about gender. This view seems much more like what Zucker and his supporters believe.

Though I cannot speak for her, I think what Ehrensaft and others like her believe is not that people are naturally born wanting to play with Barbie dolls and wear dresses, but that they are born with dominantly feminine dispositions (being nurturing or something like that), and in our culture that disposition is expressed by playing with Barbie dolls, a behavior only accepted for female children. Therefore, unfortunately, if children like Bradley and Jonah want their interests and behavior to be accepted, they have to change their gender, but this is a reflection of how gender is still essentialized in our society. Think about it. We don’t call Bradley and Jonah “boys who like to play with dolls and wear dresses instead of playing with blocks and wear shorts,” we call them “boys who act like girls” in a way that we would not call hypothetical black kid “black kid who acts like a white kid.” (Ok, I am well aware that many people in actual life do say things like that, but I don’t think anyone in the professional psychiatric/psychological community would think saying something like that is acceptable.)

How behaviors are gendered in the first place is that they are considered acceptable only of females or males, not both. Otherwise they have another label besides “feminine” or “masculine.” Playing sports and drawing are in some ways learned behaviors as well (lets ignore for a moment that those also have gender connotations), but recognizing that some children have a preference or natural disposition for one over the other does not contradict that fact. I’m not sure why playing with dolls or wearing dresses is not considered the same. In fact, if we think about it, in the past people would have had to change their genders in order to do certain things that are acceptable of both genders now, such as studying science or even just going to higher education, and those like Bradley and Jonah are just more modern day examples. The way many modern boys and girls behave would have been considered pathological, so that children whose behavior is now considered normal would probably be labeled as having “gender identity disorder.” We recognize for the past that what needed to be corrected wasn’t the deviant individuals but rather society, so why can’t we recognize the same with children like Bradley and Jonah.

Which makes me wonder that as (if) gender roles become less rigid, whether we would have less transgender people as well? The word would eventually cease to have any meaning if gender becomes unattached from biological sex. In any case, those like Zucker are only contributing more to the essentializing of gender, rather than treating it like a social construct, like he claims.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. I want to hear your thoughts on this.

Well, now that finals are over and I have abundant free time (an unfamiliar feeling), I have no excuses not to blog anymore. This blog will mostly serve as a testing place for my thoughts, those thoughts that are not quite solidified enough to be opinion but a bit more serious than mere musing. Somewhere between personal wanderings and social/philosophical commentary. That’s what I usually aim for my blogs, with varying degrees of success.

I am a bit nervous about this actually. I’ve never had a blog so accessible to the public. However, hopefully that will motivate me to write quality entries and not let this blog degenerate into a litany of complaints and/or dry listings of every mundane event that occur in my day, as it has with too many of my blogs in the past.

I can’t, at this exact moment, write an entry, though the first one is soon forthcoming. Instead, for the moment I will finally stop being the loser on the laptop and join my friends in making crepes and crooning Ingrid Michaelson.

~J