I used to say I was a man who identified with women. Now I say I am a mirl, a male girl. Both versions are true.
I have been struggling since early childhood, in an ineffectual way, to find peace with my identity. Identity is a many-splendored thing, and each piece must be right. I was at peace with my ethnicity, religion, class, education level, intellectual bent, love of physical work, analytic mind, etc. Gender has been the sticking point.
Gender ideology is so pervasive that I have doubted my own experience for 60+ years!
Gender is not a stable trait. Not for me, or for the macho male who feels the constant need to reinforce his success gender by asserting dominance. Not for the mother who teaches her daughter how to sit, or for the daughter learning to respond to various provocations, usually from men steeped in their own misunderstanding of relationship.
Gender is a position we take in society for the purpose of relationship. It is, as Judith Butler insists, a social performance- to be learned, refined, internalized, defended, and insisted upon for others. The current binary model for gender is defended as either a anatomical birthright or just necessary for community orderliness. It is a constant nuisance- with — tell me again- what are the benefits?
More precisely, it is a terrible and damaging mythology.
Gender prescriptions create constant tension both within and between people. Every male or female, [and it is doubly complicated for our sibling intersex people], is constantly struggling to figure out how to ‘be’ an acceptable version of the gender they are told they must adhere to. If they succeed in conforming, and find some social rewards, they minimize, to the point of forgetting, the wide swaths of personhood they have abandoned.
It is as if we are all sworn to a suicide pact that lasts a lifetime. We agree to become ‘real men’ or ‘desirable women’ — to sacrifice roughly half of natural human personality traits, and to fight with and curtail our native instincts to recover them.
We embellish the gender stereotypes with exaggerated idealizations that are clearly damaging- and swear that we enjoy it! Men who inhabit the extremes of masculine gender, and who scrupulously wipe away any trace of tender emotions that are surfacing, have raised their barrenness and, yes, suffering, to a stoic virtue. Many men have learned that the acceptable resolution for the pain and psychic emptiness is to relieve tension and frustration in violence and other forms of exploitation of the power they have received in return. Others seek relief in the chaos of drinking and rowdy challenges to all who might cluck at their lack of restraint. Restraint is their life- restraint of their natural human desire for expression of their dreams, worries, fears, vulnerability. And it is all to avoid the shameful rejection and abuse of men who fail to adopt the standards.
Women who inhabit the extremes of Madonna/whore suffer the mirror images of all this. Every spot in between- of good girl to invisible maid, is fraught with abuse and limitation. All try to make it better by claiming sufficient value in their Pyrrhic victories.
David Bowie and other androgynous figures are celebrated widely, but kept on the shelf as ‘not-to-be-fully-admitted’ examples of the real nature of people. However, the simple fact of wide acceptance is the tip of the invisible iceberg of willingness to drop the prison walls.
Can we please stop now?
We can move forward if we stop countering our internal impulses to behave normally-that is- according to who we really are.
The Representation Project is working to mainstream a better version of man and woman hood. Transgender understanding is slowly growing, and people of all ages are realizing that perhaps their individual desires to be more whole do have a future after all.
The #MeToo rejection of sexual abuse and harassment is a good beginning, and many realize that toxic masculinity is a problem now. Rapid progress is being made in integrating women into new occupations, but this won’t succeed until we abandon the basic ideology that manifests as all these social ills.
Rather than just adjusting the border of acceptable gender privileges, let’s make real progress by abandoning gender privilege altogether. True freedom means being full human beings, adjusting our relationship style as we see fit in agreement with those we are in relationship with.
Yes- we are free to choose a different social paradigm. Currently, our assumptions based on gender create a social order which severely limits options for everyone, to the detriment of our collective progress.
Yes, those who have social power from their gender will resist, but I’ll wager that for the majority of us, the power gained is not worth the personal cost.
As a very practical step forward- will you just do one small thing each day that transcends your current gender role? And if you have children around, make just one simple and truthful statement about gender within range of their hearing. You’ll find that the children are eager, and the public resistance is weak. You can take it slowly. Let your experiences ripen. Before you know it, the hold the gender rulebook has on you and your kids will be significantly weaker, and each of you will discover feelings of a deeper well-being that you formerly could barely imagine.
Let me know in your comments how it goes!
