gender construction

Good Questions From Bond Help Assess Your Gender Identity

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2010-01-12 00:31

Bond of Dear Diaspora, who wrestles productively with questions of gender, has some gender-clarifying questions of her own.

The following questions are intended to help one’s own thinking only — there are no right answers, nor right interpretations of answers. Some of them are questions posed to me by others, some are questions I stumbled across in one or many places, and some are questions I’ve asked myself. I apologize for not being able to cite them all properly — credit is given where possible, but I’ve consumed a huge volume of information on this topic and I can’t trace it all back now.

I’m aware that the way I’m using phrases like “born as” is somewhat problematic. Keep in mind these are questions, not answers, and that responses like “I have no idea” and “neither” are very much allowed.

Bond asked these questions here.

I’ve pulled the answers out of the block quote so I could answer as best I could. I’m assuming they all wish-related questions relate to gender and not general-purpose. So I won’t say “I wish I could fly” in response to “if a genie came to me…” Answering the questions leave me feeling I’m a strongly cis-gendered, sexually male, impatient-with-gender-impositions man. Which might not be a surprise to you, and which surprised me mostly by how strongly born-cis-male (if not born gendered male) I turn out to be.

#1 If a genie came to you and offered you one wish, to change your body in any way you like, what would your wish be? (Thanks to Rebecca for asking me this one some months ago.)

For me it would be mostly about hair, maybe. I had a friend who by about age 15 could grow a full beard and mustache in just a few weeks. With the result that he could fiddle his appearance endlessly — a pencil-thin mustache one week, and nearly a full cossack in a month. I have more of a classic Scottish/Southerner beard that takes forever to grow and leaves bare patches on my cheeks. And unlike the rest of my hair it’s nearly red! On the other hand he now might wish he had my head hair. I also wish I had either less body hair or else softer and less prickly.

Stepping only slightly further away from gender I’d love it if I’d been less ferociously asthmatic as a kid — skinny boys with sunken chests who can neither run nor roughhouse are tailor made for bullying and gendered taunts. But then I might not be as impatient with that as I’ve turned out to be.

#2 If you could either a) be born in the body of the other sex, with your same gender identity, or b) be born in this body, but be someone who never had gender dysphoria, which would you choose? Why?

It’s sort of cheating since I don’t have gender dysphoria, but B. I suspect if I was born in the body of the other sex, with the same gender identity I have now, I’d spend as much time grappling with these issues as Bond does.

#3 If you could either a) change yourself to have the body of the other sex or b) change the world so you’d be accepted unconditionally as your gender without changing your body, which would you choose? Why?

I think this is a $64,000 question. Also a possibly real-world relevant one. I’ve heard from several sources, each with differing degrees of sympathy for trans issues, that cultural climate seems to have a very strong influence on people’s sense of identity and dysphoria, one that ties in quite a lot with corresponding levels of tolerance vs transphobia and homophobia. And so before I’d ask individuals to undergo the (at present) considerable hassle of surgical and medicinal transition I’d want to do what I could to make present society (including the affected individuals themselves) more comfortable with the ambiguity that seems to be part of ordinary human nature. So my strong preference would be B. (Not that my preference counts for a whole lot — I’m not conflicted about my identity. But then for

#4 If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

In the dimension of male gender stereotype I wish my vocal range could be a little deeper. In the dimension of female gender stereotype I wish I was more physically flexible and that I had a better sense of smell. I also dearly wish I could (still) hear higher frequencies — traditionally high-register hearing loss is a masculine trait but in my case I think it has a lot more to do with rock and roll in my youth.

#5 What would your gender identity be if you’d been born as the other sex? How masculine or feminine would you be? (This comes from an old one for when one is questioning her sexual orientation: What would your sexual orientation be if you were the other sex?)

I gotta say if I had been born as the other sex my brain says I’d probably identify as female, assuming I was as cis-bodied then as I am now. My hindbrain says I’d identify as I am now. Which happens to be male. As for how feminine or masculine, I imagine if I was born female I’d still be pretty dour about gender constructions and work towards the middle. As for orientation since I’m straight now I assume I’d be straight then as well. Which is intellectually easy to imagine but conceptually difficult.

#6 When given the opportunity to construct a persona, such as online, in writing, or in video games, what gender do you make yourself, and why?

When I’ve constructed online personalities I’ve always constructed male ones. I think maybe because of my introverted, couldabeen Aspergers-y personality most of my constructed personalities (including attempts at dialogue in ordinary fiction) come out sounding exactly like me.

#7 Jewish tradition teaches that each person has three names: the name she is given at birth, the name she is called, and her real name. What is your real name?

Interesting question. In a lot of ways my real name could almost be figleaf! I spend an awful lot of time in my head and I write best when I’m pouring my thoughts out with as little editing as possible. I vastly prefer to be called David in person, however. :-)

#8 What gender were you in your past life?

What sex is easy: Intuition (the only possible way to answer something like this) says I’ve always been male. What gender? That would depend on the culture and language I was born into.

#9 What questions have helped you understand your gender issues? What questions would you ask someone struggling with hers? Feel free to share answers [with Bond], too.

Repost or Like this

Intersection at the Track: Caster Semenya

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2009-09-10 19:17

Paleoanthropologist and geneticist John Hawks says of the determination that runner Caster Semenya has internal testes…

None of the reports I’ve found say anything about karyotype. The spokesman’s comments raise the question of culpability versus performance advantage. Semenya’s testosterone-fueled development is arguably a competitive advantage over other women. But she’s done nothing wrong; she did not seek out this advantage. Yet girls in many countries diagnosed with internal testes would usually have them surgically removed — would their parents refuse the surgery if it neutralized a possible sports career? What triggers eligibility, anyway?

He said it here.

Notes: Karyotype is the term for chromosomal complement. In other words they’re not saying whether she has XX or XY chromosomes.

There’s not a whole lot of new information about other people with internal testes but I did find a very positive post by Mary Hanan of ABC News about another woman who, like Semenya, learned she had internal testes instead of ovaries as a result of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. (The upshot? Whatever her chromosomal sex she’s not a “man.”)

True Diagnosis

[Musician Eden] Atwood is not a freak — nor is she half-man, half-woman. But her DNA says she’s a man. That’s because she has male chromosomes, an X and a Y, instead of two Xs, like most females. It’s a disorder of sexual development in the womb called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS. It can be passed down through the mother or occur as a spontaneous mutation.

“There are probably about seven-and-a-half thousand people, women, in the U.S. with the condition,” said Dr. Charmian Quigley, a pediatric endocrinologist.

Despite the male chromosomes, Quigley said, women with AIS are just that — women.

“They have a vagina, like anybody else’s,” she said, “but it’s basically just a pouch, it’s not connected to a uterus. There is no uterus. But what they have internally is testes that you would typically find in a male.”

It turns out the doctors had lied to Atwood about having twisted ovaries. She really had internal testicles.

Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

All of us, men and women, have a mix of male and female hormones running through our systems. And as you might expect, the testes of women with AIS produce huge amounts of the typically male hormone testosterone. But here’s the hitch: their bodies can’t process any of it. And amazingly, they turn it into the typically female hormone estrogen, giving them much more estrogen than the average woman.

These women don’t get acne, and have no body odor and minimal sweating. In essence, they are the furthest thing from a male that there could be.

So, why keep it a secret from them? Quigley explained that there was a concept that “if you told them that they had a Y chromosome, or a testicle inside them, but they were externally female, they would completely meltdown.”

She even showed ABC News a 1970s medical textbook that says, “It is of no benefit to disclose that the gonads were testes instead of ovaries.”

It’s a lie doctors have been telling since about 1953, when the syndrome was formally identified. For Atwood, it was the discovery of that lie that shattered her self-image and drove her to sleep with many men in an effort to prove her femininity.

And as for the act of sex, it’s pretty much the same. Women with AIS can have orgasms just like the rest of us. But they say the lies about their conditions can interfere with intimacy and become far more toxic than the actual diagnosis.
Read the quote in context here.

Please note, though, that at least so far no one’s saying what sex chromosomes Symenya has. Nor have they said she has AIS. (If she does have it then it wouldn’t matter how much testosterone her gonads were producing.) Nor are the only possible sex-chromosome combinations XX or XY. And even if she does there can be other factors present.

The Intersex Society of North America has a great FAQ on the many possible combinations, some of which may, or may not apply to Semenya.

One thing the ISNA, and Mary Hanan’s ABC News article, does talk about? The fact that a lot of parents and their doctors know their children’s intersexed status very early on… and the devastating effect of lying to or otherwise keeping your children in the dark can have on them when, as looks like the case with Semenya, the news gets dumped on you in adulthood.

Just sayin’

Repost or Like this

Small Gendered Hearing Differences Shouldn't Require Different Teaching Strategies

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-09-05 13:55

Apropos yesterday’s post on deep vs. shallow behavioral studies Mark Liberman of Language Log takes to task yet another study “proving” gender differences.

According to Abigail Norfleet James, Teaching the Male Brain: How Boys Think, Feel, and Learn in School (2007), p 37:

The shape of the inner ear is not the same for boys and girls. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the female cochlea responds more quickly to sound than does the male cochlea (Don et al., 1993) That means that boys are likely to respond to aural information of questions just a bit slower than girls will. Because boys don’t hear soft or high sounds very well and because they don’t respond to sounds as rapidly as do girls, boys may have trouble with auditory sources of information.

The reference is to M. Don et al., “Gender differences in cochlear response time: An explanation for gender amplitude differences in the unmasked auditory brain-stem response“, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94(4): 2135-2148, 1993. And yes, there really are sex differences in cochlear response time — but the distributions for males and females overlap, as usual, and the average sex differences are less than a thousandth of a second.

He said it here.

It may or may not be the case that boys think, feel, and learn differently from girls in school. If you read his post, though, Liberman questions how a study demonstrating an infinitesimal difference in a single component of hearing and processing language could possibly support the burden placed on it.

Compare how we would interpret a similar study of thousandths-of-a-second differences men’s vs. women’s reaction times as “proof” that men are better drivers than women (or vice versa.) If that were the only factor, biological, social, or psychological between men and women we could all go home. But actually before you left you’d probably want to ask whether the difference was large enough to account for many actual accidents, whether there might be other factors affecting men’s or women’s behavior (likelihood of drinking and driving, likelihood of rubbernecking or attention to the road, socialization to be cautious or aggressive, etc., or for that matter other minute, biological, even gendered-biological cognitive or metabolic factors that might account for the differences — average blood-sugar levels at peak drive times, for instance.) And the reason you’d look for those factors, by the way, is to see whether they make more or or less of a difference than the reaction-times under discussion. And, finally, you might even want to know because, seriously, we’re not going to be influencing reaction-processing neuron speed any time soon but we probably could influence alcohol or blood-sugar levels or rubbernecking/cell-phone use. Which would probably make everyone safer drivers because...? Because as usual there’s liable to be a great deal of overlap, which means that while men on average and women on average might have different reaction times it’s far less likely that differences between any two randomly-chosen individuals can be attributed to their gender.

Same with learning differences in school. Having shepherded two children to the verge of puberty I’m aware there really are differences between boys and girls. I’m also (as Liberman mentions in his post) aware that there’s massive overlap. In other words while the two individuals most likely to face discipline for being inattentive or disruptive over the last six years in either of my children’s classes are definitely boys the five next-most-likely children to be inattentive are a mix of girls and boys.

Same with the topic Liberman discusses, learning difficulty. Two of the seven least attentive children in one of my children’s classes, both boys, are also near the top of their classes academically speaking. They learn fine, they’re just bumptious. (Their hearing, incidentally, is also perfectly fine, as I’ve determined by whispering “ice cream” across the room.) A number of of the kids who get pulled out for special coaching, on the other hand, are perfectly attentive.

The point being that while there are surely differences in the children’s inner ears, and the differences may even be gender-identifiable, I’m… pretty sure that

  • That minute hearing differences are not the biggest factor in children’s thinking, feeling, or learning in class.
  • That even if it were there’s enough overlap between boys and girls to make assertions about “how boys learn” or “how girls learn” useful only in the aggregate, and therefore
  • You probably wouldn’t want to use hearing differences as your justification for dividing classes into boys and girls, or, if you did
  • It would make even more sense to divide classes into one for “faster” hearing boys and girls and another for “slower” ones… or
  • Heck, once freed of gender binaries you might be able to divide the class into even smaller categories of inner-ear shape or auditory-processing speeds.

In other words in a technical sense it might be interesting that on average boys and girls hear very slightly differently, but in a practical sense of determining education policy, even determining gendered policy, it’s irrelevant.

—-

One other point about this? Let’s say boys really are handicapped hearingwise compared to girls. And not fractionally but markedly — enough so that, upon learning it teachers radically altered the way they taught. (Yes, this requires forgetting that teachers are bright, motivated, trained, and experienced professionals who wouldn’t have noticed and adapted to differences years or decades ago but let’s say that too.) Would that be enough to warrant separate-but-equal instruction for boys and girls? Or would it be enough to, oh, say, recommend that teachers speak louder and more clearly? And/or, possibly, more directly and to the point using simpler or shorter sentences? Call me a wild-eyed gender-equalitarian here but wouldn’t girls also benefit. (Hint: as an adult educator familiar with instructional design and information delivery I know it facilitates information adoption in both female and male adults.)

If you look at the history of modern-day conveniences, from TV remote controls to self-opening doors to telescopes and microscopes (which derive from eyeglass technology), to comfortable handles on kitchen utensils you see all kinds of technology originally developed for the physically or biologically disadvantaged that’s been readily, even enthusiastically, adopted by the general public because it benefits everyone and not just the bedbound (tv remotes), people with crutches or wheelchairs (door openers), bad eyesight (glasses), arthritis (Good Grips knives and peelers), or developmental disabilities (Montessori education.)

Point being that it’s very unlikely that educational technology that might benefit boys would only benefit boys. Certainly not so much that boys should be segregated from girls. (Remembering that gender segregation leads to… other social problems.)

Repost or Like this

Overcoming the Shock of Normal Libido In the Face of Gender Expectations Helps Overcome Those Expectations

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-02-02 14:23

Dr. Kate of Gynotalk has a cool post from a woman she refers to as “Sexless in Seattle”

I am in a very happy monogamous relationship and I love my boyfriend very much. When we first got together, the sex was fantastic. We had it all the time and it was good. But since we moved in together, the sex life has slowed down. Here’s the problem: my boyfriend really isn’t interested in sex. We do still have sex, but not as often as I would like. When we do, it is fantastic, but it is rare when he comes. He does come both during intercourse and oral sex, but not always, and when he masturbates, he does come. Clearly my sex drive is higher, I’m 24 and he is only 23. Last night he said to me sometimes he worries why his sex drive is lower. He swears it isn’t me and this has always been the way with girls and he doesn’t like that I can’t just pounce on and get him turned on. Therefore we always have to go on his schedule because when he is horny, he is ready to go. Am I being totally oblivious and not realizing he has ED? I asked him if he thinks too much about it and if that’s the problem, and he thinks maybe that’s it, but he isn’t sure. He hates that he can’t keep up with my needs and I haven’t been complaining about it, but sometimes a girl just wants to get laid. I love him and am willing to work through it, but I just don’t know what to think. I don’t want to worry and I don’t want him to worry either, but is it normal for a young guy’s sex drive to be so low?

Read the rest of quote and Dr. Kate’s reply in context here.

Kate’s reply is pretty wonderful and gently iconoclastic. After listing the common reasons for loss of libido she says, basically, that he’s probably perfectly normal (but lower than her higher-than-his but also probably perfectly normal one.)

But the more likely answer is simply a lower libido. Decreased sex drive, while it’s usually thought of as a woman’s problem, affects up to one in four men. In the end, you and your boyfriend may have sex drives that don’t match…requiring a little creativity to figure out what will keep you both happy.

Yup. While we’re used to hearing about men, especially younger men, always in hot pursuit of their tired or “low libido” women partners, the reality is that for both men and women normal libido is still distributed on a bell-shaped curve. That means that even if on average (younger) men’s preferred frequency for sex was higher than their partner’s were on average… and even if men’s ease of orgasm was higher on average than women’s… then assuming plain old statistical distribution there’s going to be a healthy percentage of women and men who’s libidos balance contrary to social expectations.**

One quick nudge for Sexless in Seattle that harks to something we’re more used to hearing men say: there’s a huge difference between “less frequent sex in Seattle than I’d prefer” and “sexless in Seattle.”

As SiS said her partner comes from intercourse and oral sex, which implies that he is available for sex sometimes. And therefore she’s having a least some sex. Which, while perhaps frustrating for her is still pretty different from no sex.

Very cool of her to write in with her issue, though, and cool of Dr. Kate to give her a wider audience. Society is so pitched towards men chasing and women retreating that it takes a little courage to come forward when the shoe’s on the other foot.

The consequences of not discussing such “reversals” from constructed gender expectations only contribute to waaaay too many gender stereotyping Mars/Venus books but also leaves a lot of people, like SiS and her partner, convinced they’re the only one.

And just for the record they’re obviously not the only ones. The wonderful Shay of The S Spot (who uses teaser-only newsfeeds, a-hem) gives equally level-headed advice to a breathless reader with even stronger conventional expectations.

hi shay, Do all men have high libido’s and what is a normal level for a man?
I’m asking because my husband doesn’t seem to want to have sex as much as me and when i ask him if he wants to have sex he almost always says no which is a shocker to me cuz i thought all guys said YES to sex no matter when or were lol and i guess I’m just use to all the guys who want sex 24-7 i mean most guys i know or have dated want sex like 4to 5 times a day or more if they can get it lol. but he only wants sex like maybe 1or 2 times a week and i would like to have sex like once day that would be great! is there something wrong with him i mean he’s only 22 and I’m 21 and we’ve only been married for 2 1/2 years.

Read the rest of the quote, and Shay’s excellent answer, here.

Once again it’s really nice to see these issues get aired out.

[** The contrary-to-perception imbalance grows as couples get older, with heterosexual men on average slowing down sooner than on average their partners. —fl]

Repost or Like this

Gender and Textual Analysis

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2008-11-26 08:47

According to “Genderanalyzer


Man or woman – who is writing that blog?

We guess http://www.realadultsex.com is written by a man (59%), however it’s quite gender neutral.

You can rate your own website here.

My take? What. Ever. I mean, what does it even mean to be “59% man?” Or “41% woman?” I mean, genetically I’m 98% plus chimpanzee! Or (if I remember correctly) 43% ear of corn, just like everyone else! Chemically I’m 85% (or is it 95%?) water. Chromosomally I’m 50% X chromosomes… nah, not even that since with very, very few exceptions only one out of 23 chromosome pairs are gendered at all.

What they mean, I guess, is that my writing is 59% typical of constructed masculinity and/or 41% typical of constructed femininity.

(Via Blue Gal.)

Repost or Like this

Revisiting the Blowjob Wars To Deconstruct Masculinity

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2008-03-07 10:43

In a completely different context a commenter said “I think there is a bit of a double-bind in the fact that masculinity is WHOLLY performative, at least among heterosexuals…”

It’s certainly true that when it comes to sex the gender construct of “masculinity” is, indeed, wholly performative. Which, I think, is why blowjobs are such a hot button for some people. To receive a blowjob is almost wholly passive. People who philosophically oppose blowjobs therefore are upholding the conventional construction of masculine gender.

This in turn is problematic because, often, those for whom blowjobs are a huge issue are often those for whom the gender construction of masculinity is an issue as well. See the startling-to-millions-of-gay-men-let-alone-women contention that fellatio can be safely performed only under hypnosis. Yes, for a lot of people experience says that’s pretty silly, but then chances are that those who’ve experienced either giving or receiving fellatio are less offended by breaches of masculinity’s wholly performative mandate.

(And not to go too far afield here but I wonder if the problem isn’t a held-over conviction from the 1970s that masculinity must be performative because then the right quantity of pressure, shame, “sex strike,” or perhaps with just the right insight, wholly performative men can simply decide to stop performing gender oppression. And that, in turn, would be convenient because one could then luxuriate in the stereotypical gender passivity of disappointment and “blaming.” But I digress…)

The trick, of course, is to alter the narrative so that fellatio is seen for what it normally is: performative acts conducted on passive, non-performative men, people who often as not who performative as well as social, tactile, and erotic enjoyment from it when they do. And it is a bit of a trick, part of which involves little things helping the recipient get that “if I try to comfort myself or try to regain control by grabbing her head or thrusting she’s going to decide to do something else. That isn’t fellatio.”

—-

Just for the record, while I’ve always enjoyed cunnilingus, and even fantasized about it before I really understood exactly how PIV intercourse worked, I found I enjoy performing it on a whole new level once I learned to feel comfortable letting someone perform fellatio on me. Recognizing that others enjoy doing to me what I enjoy doing to them… recognizing that “wholly performative” or “wholly receptive” cuts us off from half the world of experience… opened my eyes in a way I think others might enjoy opening theirs.

[Caveat: The accompanying below-the-fold photo is topic-appropriate but entirely not work safe. —fl]

Repost or Like this

User login