From the Archives: What the Entire Left Gets Wrong About Gender

I tried to get this published in 2020.

I was searching through my archives—that is, disorganized, unpublished work—for something I’d written ages ago about the history of the word gender. It was one of the earliest pieces I tried to get published that would interrupt the dominant gender paradigm. When I found it earlier in the week, I realized that many of these ideas still haven’t been explored by those talking and teaching about gender. Of course, I wouldn’t write a lot of this today, having learned so much more since then. But it’s interesting that even this was unacceptable.

So here ya’ go—Gender: the Cliff Notes. The subtitle was: “The real truth about the word ‘gender’ is that there are multiple truths.”

A movie theater playing a movie called "Gender Bender"

Last month, after J.K. Rowling’s blasphemous tirade, or her reasoned raising of ideas—depending on whose interpretation you embrace—a flurry of articles ensued, explaining that she didn’t understand the words sex and gender.

One writer referred to gender as “the social and political roles and possibilities we take on as women, as men, as something else or none of the above.” That op-ed noted the harm done to trans people when we mistakenly “assign gender purely by sex.” Another defined gender as “the way that you experience your own sense of gender identity.” It noted that “gender is a social construct and a social identity.”

Those articles, and many like them, conflate two different and sometimes competing meanings of the word gender, calling it both a sense of self, and a culturally-created and assigned social role. “People don’t notice how at odds the meanings are,” said linguist Deborah Cameron, who has written about these definitions.

It is that battle—not between definitions of gender and sex but between definitions of gender itself—that pits some feminists and trans people against one another, and which contributes to culture wars and cancellation. Those competing definitions are the source of tension, bitterness, and misunderstanding, even among people unaware of the division.

If we want to find peace and consensus on the left when it comes to gender, we must understand those definitions and what they mean to the people who claim them — and not assume that one is more valid than another.

The word gender stems from the French genre, meaning kind, or species, and appeared around the year 1300. Sex appears in English a century later, referring to biological type, but, once sex had erotic connotations, gender more regularly replaced it. That happened often, including famously in the 1970s when Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s secretary suggested she use the word “gender” instead of “sex” when arguing about sex discrimination in front of the Supreme Court; “sex” might distract the nine men sitting on the bench. Those words were used as synonyms.

In the twentieth century, gender was separated from sex, splitting off into two divergent meanings, one in a medical or psychological setting, the other in social science. “The two meanings that we’re talking about have both existed for the same amount of time,” said Cameron.

Psychiatrist Robert Stoller, who worked with and studied people known then as “transsexuals” and today known as “transgender,” is believed to have coined the term “gender identity,” in the middle of the last century. He meant people’s innate sense of who they feel themselves to be, regardless of body parts, chemistry or chromosomes.

Meanwhile, psychologist John Money is thought to have coined the term “gender role” in the 1950s when working with intersex people, then known as hermaphrodites. He and his colleagues defined the term as “general mannerisms, deportment and demeanor; play preferences and recreational interests; spontaneous topics of talk in unprompted conversation and casual comment; content of dreams, daydreams and fantasies; replies to oblique inquiries and projective tests; evidence of erotic practices, and, finally, the person’s own replies to direct inquiry.”

All this research begot a deeper understanding that one could be male, female or intersex and still take on the mannerisms, interests, and fantasies associated with another sex — though much of these researchers’ ideas about what was associated with each sex was rooted in stereotypes. Or they could take on the identity associated with another sex. The bottom line: Gender and sex weren’t always tied neatly together.

That’s the same conclusion drawn by those who subscribe to the competing definition of gender, which developed along a similar timeline. As one paper on the history of the conflation of sex and gender in law put it, “…sex is to gender as male and female are to masculine and feminine. Sex is biological, gender social; sex is a noun, gender an adjective.”

In this lexicon, sex refers to bodies and gender refers to the meaning we make of those bodies: masculine and feminine as the cultural associations, stereotypes and expectations we affix to them. This is where “gender is a construct” comes from, something we know from work like anthropologist Margaret Mead’s: Different cultures have different roles and expectations, and ideas of normalcy, for men and women. “Those norms differ throughout history and across cultures,” Cameron notes.

Gender includes ideas that women have a natural lack of aptitude for science, or are physically and intellectually inferior to men. Gender roles in this vision aren’t biologically determined, but imposed onto people—mostly women—to prevent them from having power, though male gender roles aren’t particularly freeing either, as the national conversation around toxic masculinity has revealed.

In 1975, cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin defined gender as ‘the socially-imposed division of the sexes,” and discussed the sex-gender system as one “built on the biological foundation of human sexual dimorphism, which allocated different roles, rights and responsibilities to male and female humans.”

That same decade, David Bowie gained popularity as a “gender-bender.” It didn’t have to do with identity, but rather upending gender roles, defying stereotypes, and not being limited by cultural definitions of masculine and feminine.

Gender and sex in this definition aren’t tied neatly together in this definition, either. Thus, “The people who are fighting would seem to be on the same side,” Cameron said. Yet they are not. “The two meanings really are not politically possible to reconcile.”

For those who believe that gender means gender identity, the idea that “gender is a construct” and socially created is deeply threatening. They may feel that their gender identity is innate, biologically rooted, and immutable; their sense of who they are is not a choice, or a social imposition, not based on stereotypes, but biology — how masculine or feminine we are is not culturally created.

As I interviewed non-binary and trans people for a book on tomboys, many explained their origin story as dressing or acting “like a boy,” without interrogating what “like a boy” meant or came from; their sense of self was so strong, the adherence to a stereotype didn’t matter. Accepting this version of gender can lead to more room and protections for trans people, who have had to fight for their very existence on the planet.

Cisgender women have had to fight, too, because of the other definition of gender: for the right to vote; to have control over their bodies (this fight obviously is not done); to have credit cards in their own names; to not be raped by their husbands; to pursue advanced education; to have jobs in the medical fields or fight in wars. These were all things they were told they were ill-suited for, or lawfully unable to do, because of both their sex (their biological category) and their gender (the expectations associated with that category).

This battle often plays out in the field brain sex-difference research. There are plenty of studies showing some correlation between gender identity and the brain, that trans women have similar brains to cisgender women: gender as biological, gender as a way to prove and justify trans women’s rights and existence.

And there is a mountain of research claiming that there are few inherent differences between male and female brains, that they are not sexually dimorphic, but change over time in response to experience: gender as constructed, gender as a way to prove that women should have equal rights as men.

The more we research, the more we see that both of these versions hold water. Gender is both biological and constructed. We used to see sex as permanent and gender as the thing that was mutable. Now many see gender — masculinity and femininity — as what’s fixed, and sex as the thing that’s mutable, through hormones or surgery.

Some gendered behaviors have biological roots, especially reproductive behaviors. Some are the result of socialization. Some are the result of the interplay between biology and culture, genes and the environment. If we aren’t raising boys and girls as equal, assuming and fostering equality between men and women, we can’t know how they’d be without the imprint of socialization.

And while many believe that our culture is gender equitable, I have found the opposite, especially when it comes to children. More of childhood has become hyper-gendered than ever before. Ideas like pink is for girls and blue is for boys, that girls are naturally kind or that boys don’t cry, have come to be seen as biological and not cultural. Every aspect of childhood — clothes, toys, personality traits, colors, foods, toothbrushes, bikes — is divided by gender, telling kids who and how they are supposed to be. We may have a multitude of gender identities, more support and options than ever before, but the social imposition of gender is pressing as hard as it ever was.

If we are going to move beyond cancel culture, then we can’t argue about who’s right. To be a liberal is to embrace a wide body of ideas, a big tent, which means standing, sheltered, together with people who see the world a bit differently than we do. People have opposing definitions of very common gender words—from trans to man and woman. Language is constantly in evolution. “The meanings of all important political words are always under contestation,” Cameron said. When we pronounce that people are wrong, that they don’t understand the meanings of these words and therefore deserve to be silenced or canceled, we miss a chance at a broader understanding, a chance at allyship.

We should to try to understand the murk and complexity of biology and culture, and the way gender boxes us all in, tells us who we’re supposed to be because of the bodies we’re born in. Trans people, especially trans people of color, are disproportionately vulnerable to violence. One study found that 12 % of trans youth had been sexually assaulted at school, and 22 % of homeless trans youth had been sexually assaulted in shelters.

Meanwhile, a third of cisgender women have experienced physical violence at the hand of a partner; a tenth of them have been raped. Anyone born in a woman’s body, or who transitions to one, or who identifies as a woman regardless of body: we’re all more vulnerable than our male counterparts.

We are all saying the same thing: we don’t want our bodies to limit us, to determine where we’re allowed to go or what we’re allowed to wear or who we love. But it’s an extremely messy alliance, because we all still want to determine the boundaries of our categories. We want to feel safe and to belong. We want the right to self-determine and to determine who is like our self.

Most of us can agree that biology is not destiny, even if we can’t agree on what’s biological. We believe different things about words. We believe different things about nature and nurture. But we believe in the right for each other to exist, to have protections, and to flourish.