8,000,000,000 Genders; Or, Why “Gender” Should Be Abandoned
And Why All Social Constructions Should Never Be Taken Too Seriously
By Christopher Bernard
A Personal Note
One day, coming into my bedroom with an unusually serious expression on her elegantly beautiful face, my mother sat me down and gave me a brief talk that turned out to be one of the most influential in my life. I was nine years old.
What she said, in her characteristically direct, even blunt way, was that I was a boy because I had a penis and testicles; my sister, on the other hand, was a girl because she had a vagina. (We were easygoing about nudity in our household, without making a fetish of it, so I knew precisely what she meant; I was only puzzled why she was making a point about something she knew I was fully aware of.)
At this point you might think, and dismiss, my mother as a biological determinist. But not so fast, because then she came to her main point. Men and women were not (according to her definitions) absolute categories; they were not walled off from each other in impenetrable silos: all men had some so-called feminine traits, and all women had some so-called masculine traits. This was essential, she said, to their “emotional balance” and psychological wellbeing.
She went on: Some men were excessively “masculine” (I was reminded of the Charles Atlas ads I had seen in comic books; the posturing muscleman had always struck me as ludicrous) and some women were excessively “feminine” (and I thought of Marilyn Monroe, who struck me, then and now, as almost a caricature of femaleness; both Atlas and Monroe were performing, theatrical, false; healthy men and women did not let themselves to be bound and throttled by appearances). In both cases, this was unhealthy for both males and females, to say nothing of their relationships. Gender excesses (she said) had a number of bad effects: they created a wall between the sexes, and locked both women and men away from parts of their own psyches, creating sometimes irresolvable emotional conflicts within them.
As she said this, I was thinking of both her and my father. My father, from a family that came to America from England in the early seventeenth century, with old Norman blood and later native American heritage (according to family legend), was a television director and producer and involved in the arts and literature (he was a gifted draftsman, musician, and writer; his own father had had literary ambitions in his youth, and his mother was a gifted poet). Dad was also the main, and an adventurous, cook at home and the main wit at our family dinners, often reducing the rest of us to tears of laughter. He had no interest in sports, automobile mechanics, or the sorts of things my friends’ fathers cared about, aside from shooting pheasant in the farm country where we lived during the hunting season each fall.
My mother had traits some might call masculine: the elder daughter of a Czechoslovakian father and a Welsh mother, she had a blusteriness and directness, and an impatience with insinuation and communicative hints, to say nothing of an irascible fearlessness that had no time for squeamishness and timidity (such as my own), that I didn’t see in my friends’ mothers or other females. She swore like a sailor and made no pretense of extreme sensitiveness, though she was a talented photographer and sculptor and had a gift for pithy phrases that was legendary in the family. I have often said that Polly had more testosterone than most of the men I knew.
So I felt I had examples right before my eyes of what my mother was saying. And since I loved and trusted both of my parents implicitly, and was convinced I had by far the best family that walked upon the green earth, her lesson met no resistance from me.
My mother gave me a serious look and asked if I understood. I nodded, though I was still puzzled why she had told me this at that particular moment. Then I recalled I was being referred to more and more as “a sensitive boy” and already showing signs of artistic interests and a complete indifference to sports and other traditionally boyish pursuits, so I guessed there might be some connection; my mother was doing this to reassure me, and I felt a warmth of deep gratitude such as I have rarely felt. It is only in the last few years I have come to realize what a profoundly wise and kind thing she had done for me. She died too long ago for me to have had the chance to thank her, and I can only wish I had had this realization sooner.
Her talk had the great benefit of allowing me never to doubt my “masculinity”; whatever I did or whoever I was, I was “male” by definition. I would have other problems to deal with – how, for example, to be a decent human being in an often indifferent and brutal world and what it meant to be a successful grownup – or merely how to talk to “girls” without offending them (a talent I have never quite mastered). But “gender issues” had no meaning for me. Who was a “real man”? I was. Next question.
Social Illusions and a Modest Proposal
What a difference a handful of decades can make.
What is “gender”? What used to be a convenient two genders has, in recent decades, morphed, according to some, into as many as 78 – a meaningless number. And the dazzling invention of pronouns confuses the matter further. In my more puckish moments, I claim that my own pronouns are “I/me/mine.” Or if I want to be really annoying: “we/us/ours,” though whether I am being royal or merely editorial depends on whose skin I am trying to get under.
I have come to suspect that “gender” may have no useful meaning at all.
The social construction “gender” has come to represent, for some, what no social construction, by definition, can be: an essence, an ultimate reality about a person, an “identity” (that other dubious and fashionable idea), when it is, at best, a rough intellectual model that, like any model, only approximates what it represents, and therefore must not be taken with complete seriousness and never, under any circumstances, literally.
One of the many pitfalls of the human condition is a perennial temptation to take our intellectual inventions and “social constructions” as well as the surrounding web of insights and projections, guesses and delusions that make up human culture, as ultimate realities; even among secularists, as somehow sacred. And any deviation in the real world from those imagined realities may find itself attacked as “false,” “inappropriate,” or “politically incorrect.” I recall the futile controversies during Obama’s first presidential campaign over whether he was “black” enough; one of the more ludicrous moments of that time. But it takes only a glance at recent history to see how such illusions, and the futile attempt to impose them on real human beings, can lead to psychological, social, and political pathologies of the most horrendous kind; to personal despair and mass violence.
Any concept, any idea we have about the world, is, of course, a more or less crude, more or less effective, tool for living in it. A useful concept grows and changes over time, adapting to circumstances and molding with the times; a useless concept is one that has frozen at a given moment and is now used as a weapon with which to hammer people who refuse to be paralyzed by fear of change. By the same token, every worthwhile concept is living, never to be completed because never a perfectly accurate picture of reality.
My favorite example is “house”: certainly we mean something very different when we say “house” from what was meant during Shakespeare’s time – our “house” is likely to contain dozens of devices and items of “infrastructure” that Shakespeare could only have dreamed about in his most exalted inspirations, and yet it retains the same function in the “real world”: a structure to keep out the wind and the rain; a shelter, a place to make a home.
But imagine if we had saddled the concept “house” with details irrelevant to its function: if we had said a “house” must be half-timber, or built of bricks, or have at least one chimney and hearth, or not be higher than twenty feet – and if we had taken these details with complete seriousness so that not only was any building that deviated from these “norms” not a “house,” but was some sort of threat to the community, to social order, even to human life – and one can imagine the (to speak charitably) violent lunacy into which we would have descended.
When taken literally, “gender” is a form of just such misapplied Platonism: it presents the idea as more real (a “real man,” an “ideal woman”) than the scrubby, scruffy reality of actual boys and girls, of men and women trying to live in the world. As soon as one says this, it is obviously true. But when it comes to gender, we seem to immediately forget it and become hypnotized by phantoms.
“Gender” is especially, even tragically, problematic because of the explosive emotions regarding sexuality and physical desire (different from gender though easily confused with it). This is true above all during adolescence, when young people have yet to learn that the “concepts” and “norms” of their society have no objective reality outside practical necessity and the dictates of power, and therefore they try, hopelessly, to conform to them, often down to the most exacting, and delusive, details. Indeed, their peers are often the worst offenders, as they seek to impose these illusions not only on themselves but also, through peer pressure, on their fellows. The violent dance of delusions and paranoia that makes up so much of human life often takes its first cruel steps in the corridors of high school.
The mistake we have made is splitting off the concept of gender from the biological reality of sex. This mistake has had disastrous consequences.
If we believe that “maleness” (to choose a glaring example) is reflected in a particular concept of “gender,” and then try to impose that concept, we are certain that, at some point, we will get wrong what actual boys and men do and what they really are. No concept of “maleness” can cover all the details of how actual men and boys behave and exist in the world; and many of those details are often conflicting and ambiguous and change over time. Many details regarding “gender” are illusory, though an illusion shared by powerful and influential figures, from parents to teachers, from peers to priests to presidents. The particulars of males will fall outside any concept of maleness and confuse people who cling to the concept no matter how much reality contradicts it. Most importantly, they will confuse the boy or man himself over who and what he “is.”
Whenever we take a concept as more true than the physical reality the concept represents, we become at best wrong-headed and at worst actively evil – both delusional and cruel, even murderous. The history of the past century provides more examples than many may be willing to fully absorb: the lessons, that is, of human delusions followed to the point of murder and mass murder.
All social constructions are illusions, socially shared will-o’-wisps, socially agreed plausible absurdities that are useful but have no ultimate reality; that have only the most tangential relationship to the reality we must deal with if we hope to live for moment to moment in the world. To take them seriously is to court madness and death, for an individual or a society. They should be handled, like any belief, lightly and ironically, and willingly discarded as soon as they cease to serve their purpose, which is to help us survive – no, thrive and know happiness in this world. As soon as they prevent that, they have become our enemy and must be mastered and conquered.
Speaking for myself (and I present this only as a catalyst for further discussion), I would define “masculine” as whatever physical human beings born with penises and testicles and the hormonal system that goes with them be and do.
And I would define the “feminine” analogously; that is according to sex, not gender.
In other words, I would abandon “gender” as a normative or even a useful term. It has done more damage than almost any other word or idea in the language in recent history. It is time to add it to such anachronisms as “phlogiston,” “phrenology,” and “bloodletting” – the obsolete social constructions with absurd or horrendous consequences in the real world that we abandoned long ago.
When asked my “gender,” I reply (puckishly!): myself.
Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet and critic as well as essayist. His books include the novels A Spy in the Ruins, Voyage to a Phantom City, and Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, and the poetry collections Chien Lunatique, The Rose Shipwreck, and the award-winning The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, as well as collections of short fiction In the American Night and Dangerous Stories for Boys. His new poetry collection, The Beauty of Matter, will be published in 2023.