Identity and Gender
I thought those last two posts on identity would be enough to make me feel like I’ve developed a solid understanding of what’s going on, but I still feel the identity puzzle is far from solved, and more important to solve than ever. With each post I manage to drag a couple more thoughts from my unconscious mind kicking and screaming into my conscious mind, where the requirement for entry is to be expressible in words. I’m getting better at the process but by sharing that process with others in the form of blog posts, There’s always going to be some roughness around the edges. A wise professor once said ‘we have to speak to know what we think’ and these semi-stream-of-consciousness posts are my attempts of living by that idea.
Really slight digression: There has to be some parallel between observing quantum particles and articulating unconscious thoughts. In both situations, you’ve got this thing that’s floating around and you can infer certain qualities about it, but it’s not until you go and observe it consciously that it actually takes a form you can work with. I wonder if, just like how the position of an observed quantum particle is ‘random’, a political position can also be random when you investigate an unconscious feeling you have about some topic. Maybe if I consciously thought about gender identity on a Monday, I would have had come away with a different conscious opinion than I did from writing this blog post today on a Tuesday. Okay end of digression.
A recurring theme I’m finding in the stuff that I keep thinking about is how people do weird things not because they themselves are necessarily weird, but because they’re operating in a world made weird by the collective limitations of other people. People will work really hard distinguishing themselves from somebody who they could be mistaken for if that person has undesirable traits. For example, many people who espouse some right wing beliefs will eagerly denounce Trump and bible-thumping christians, because they know that your average joe doesn’t have enough time to learn about the internal complexities of the right wing, and if they hear that somebody is anti-abortion, they will likely characterise that person as a bible-thumping Trump supporter. The fact we even categorise the political landscape in terms of left and right wing is a testament to our capacity for generalisations that are simultaneously very useful and very wrong. Useful, because if you’re on ‘the left’ and identify with somebody else on ‘the left’ you can jump into a conversation without worrying whether your joke deriding christians will fall flat, or wasting time establishing what your values are when you both already get the gist.
But categorisations are also always wrong, on some level. You can always turn up the resolution until it’s clear that the boundaries you’ve drawn in your internal map don’t quite fit the landscape.
Person on the left A: ‘Hang on, you’re apparently on the left but you have an issue with Caitlyn Jenner getting woman of the year? Who are you to decide what gender a person chooses to identify with?’
Person on the left B: ‘Could there be anything more patriarchal than a man getting woman of the year? I suppose you also had no issue when Tony Abbot was the self-appointed minister for women?’
The reason why trans people have been at the centre of so much media controversy (and will continue to be by virtue of this blog post) is that they are the clearest example of how a society responds when ancient categorisations start to break down.
Categorisations are limited in their accuracy, but it’s not like we threw out Newton’s physics after they were superseded by Einstein’s equations. Why would I use Einsteins equations, whose utility only kicks in around the speed of light, when measuring the speed of a skateboard on the ground? Newton’s physics still have their place, but the difference between newton’s physics and categorisations is that when a physicist uses newton’s physics, they know they’re sacrificing some part of the whole story for the sake of efficiency. On the other hand, humans have no idea when, through categorisation, they sacrifice accuracy for usefulness. We have no idea that categorisation is just a tool, whose output enables us to navigate life without having to contend with the universe’s infinite complexity in every passing moment.
Once a categorisation has been made, like defining female-ness as having female genitalia, and vice versa with male-ness, people can go about their day enjoying the fruits of that categorisation. Identities form which distill the average traits of a gender into some coherent whole, i.e. feminine or masculine, and an individual can explore the corners of their chosen identity through an interplay with other people who in turn reciprocate and update their internal conceptualisation of it. To be able to lean on a socially agreed-upon set of behaviours to guide your interactions with other people liberates you from your own under-nurtured and mutually contradicting traits. Some people like to fine-tune their characters’ appearance, skillset, and background when starting a new game of an RPG, and some people like myself just want to roll a barbarian, get a face tattoo, and start killing people. Last time I tried fine-tuning my own character, I was stupid enough to spec into strength with a stormcaller class, when all the magical items in the game had a low strength requirement, and the high damage that strength affords in close-range combat is useless to a class specialising in ranged spells. If I can’t get my RPG character right in the tightly-programmed confines of an RPG, how the hell am I supposed to get my self’s character right in the complexity of the real world? Stereotypical identities constitute the scaffolding that countless people use to build their character over time. The hope is that when they’ve built enough, they can throw the scaffolding away.
Every individual has some set of unique leanings to their personality, all floating around in the maelstrom of our unconscious minds. It might not be until you first beat somebody in a game of checkers before you recognise that you have a yearning for competition. It might not be until you first try your hand in song writing that you recognise you want to create something. And even once you do recognise those things, how do you rank them? How do you reconcile them? Does it make sense to write a song in a competitive mindset, fantasising about when your music gets compared to well known bands? To what extent do you reveal any of these things in conversations with other people, given they are likely to have wisdom to contribute, or may actually want to cooperate with you on some of your endeavours.
Beyond enabling self-realisation, identities can enable highly efficient cooperation. If I signal that I love playing video games (just by talking about them), and somebody catches that signal and invites me to a lan session of counterstrike, that’s a massive win-win situation. In playing a videogame with somebody, you both unconsciously cooperate to validate a fun pasttime of escapism. The human biological hardware that enables efficient identification of aligned individuals for the purposes of cooperation is extraordinarily powerful.
But with great power comes great responsibility. Somebody comes along signalling that they like playing videogames, then you invite them to a counterstrike lan session, and it turns out they’re actually not that competitive and laugh when they get killed or accidentally shoot a teammate. That’s definitely not a win-win situation. The group has taken a risk in opening their doors to an outsider, whose every expression betrays the values of competitive fun that the group is founded upon. When people head home, there is a slight feeling in the air that the night was spoiled by the outsider.
Unconsciously, the person who invited the outsider does a recap on what went wrong. He received the signal of ‘gamer’ and identified with the outsider, failing to realise that at a higher level of resolution, a better name for the desirable identity would be ‘competitive gamer’. From now on, before inviting anybody to these coveted lan sessions, the signal of ‘competitive gamer’ will be the key that unlocks the door. Our lan session enthusiast might even start to find himself trash-talking casual games like farmville as he unconsciously signals distinction from the ‘casual gamer’ group, to bar them from infiltrating his group again and ruining another night.
The pruning that we apply to identities and groups is what keeps us feeling grounded in environments where our values are aligned with those around us, enabling us to seek the things we want without needing to worry about wider social repercussions.
Tying this back into gender, it seems to me that a lot of the debate over transgendered people is really about trying to preserve group distinctions that people find valuable to them. Somebody might view Caitlyn Jenner’s self-identification as a female as a blatant false signal.
A lot of the anti-Caitlyn sentiment went something like this: ‘When I think of the word ‘woman’, I think of a person who has to bear the burden of compassion for the weak, weariness of the future, and strength to operate in a world dominated by men. How does Caitlyn Jenner embody any of those things? What experiences does Caitlyn Jenner share with us about the unique challenges of being a woman? None.’ The inside view is that Caitlyn critics see her as a wolf in sheep’s clothing trying to reap all the benefits of socially-ordained ‘womanhood’ without going through any of the actual rituals (e.g. childbirth). The outside view is these critics are actually signalling their own place in a group by distinguishing themselves from an outsider. I guess both views have some truth.
I wonder if a male-to-female transgendered person walking into a public female restroom is a more intense version of the lan session with the casual gamer. Women walk in there having a certain level of expectation that their values are aligned with those around them i.e. that nobody has the desire (let alone ability) to violate the personal space of anybody else in that restroom. Is it likely that a trans person would disrupt that? No, but if a clearly trans person walks into a bathroom, the spike from 0% to 2% perceived chance of a person getting harassed is enough to deeply disturb the psychological landscape of that restroom. It’s not like having a casual gamer in a counter strike session is a deal breaker, but all it takes to disturb the social dynamic is for them to not only fail at planting the bomb but also laugh at the fact they had no clue how to plant it in the first place, costing the match for the rest of the team (that example does beg the question of how this so-called casual gamer managed to be the last person alive to plant the bomb: perhaps some hidden talent yet to be explored). I wonder if the source of the debate is around entropy rather than well-understood possible outcomes.
It’s interesting that so many people said something like ‘would you want a man in a public restroom with your daughter?’ without really explaining what specifically would be bad about that. Maybe the full extent is left unspoken because nobody wants to say ‘I think trans people have a high chance of actually sexually assaulting other women in public restrooms’. But I think that most of the outrage was just at the fact that human beings who happened to have superior upper body strength to the average woman would now be free to share the sacred space of ‘true’ women, increasing the entropy of the landscape in some way.
Here the categorisation of ‘woman’ is really a proxy for the lack of ability or will to harm other women, and to be reciprocal to the sensitivities of other women. Given that most male-to-female trans people I’ve come across have usually been quite timid (understandable given the political climate) and usually are attracted to masculine traits, that would suggest the category of ‘woman’ would appropriately apply to them. But just like how the term ‘gamer’ more or less maps on to ‘competitive gamer’, I can understand why there would be people saying ‘no, you need to be a woman all the way down’. At the end of the day I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman of any kind so my ability to weigh up the arguments is limited.
But what the hell do we do about the fact we can’t navigate towards a clear understanding of reality without reliance on blunt, imprecise categorisations of identities? What do we do about the fact that our brains simply are not powerful enough to perceive reality without recourse to generalisations that may not adequately explain the particular? What do we do about the fact that not only are we categorising every second of every day, but that we don’t even realise ourselves doing it, even when we’re going to war over it? What do we do about the fact that it’s USEFUL, SOMETIMES. Can we even hold all of these things in working memory in a public dialogue about this?
On the topic of gender stereotypes, what’s the most amiable way for me to say something like ‘not every male is well suited to a masculine identity compared to a feminine identity, but most males are and therefore you shouldn’t run experiments on them by giving them dolls instead of trucks to play with as a kid, even though as they get older they will likely carve out their own identity from a variety of sources, hopefully maturing into a unique and self-actualised adult.’
There are so many holes to be poked in that statement. What’s so bad about giving a boy dolls to play with if he wants to play with trucks? ‘Harmful gender stereotypes are so prolific that a person is effectively exposed to them from birth, so to think that a boy’s desire to play with a truck is a true reflection of their wants is spurious at best and harmful at worst.’
Yes, gender stereotypes exist. Sometimes, peoples’ lives are made worse because the glove of their sex’s typical gender identity doesn’t quite fit. But even child male apes have been found to show a preference for thing-like toys over ape-like toys and I can’t think of many people who would argue that’s because of traditional gender stereotypes within the ape community. Experiments done on children to establish the learnedness of gender identity in humans have also failed catastrophically.
I have this feeling that because in the public sphere your group allegiance is so important, speaking up about an opinion that walks the line between the two extremes is the worst thing you could possibly do, because if your belief has 50% overlap with somebody else’s belief, they’re going to be more likely to try and publicly distinguish themselves from you so as to not be erroneously boxed into the same category as them. Categories. Everywhere.
I’m probably (hopefully) not going to be a father anytime soon. But I think the right way to go about raising a kid in terms of gender identity is to give them the tools to explore their sex’s typical gender identity (sex being male/female, gender being masculine/feminine) and if you see a clear divergence from that, then nurture whatever identity it is they begin to grow into. I don’t think there are many people making that case in the public sphere right now. I’m only hearing people say that all gender stereotypes are bad for both females and males, or people on the other side saying that it is the natural procession of a boy to grow into a man, and for a girl to grow into a woman. Why is it so hard to consider that maybe both of those perspectives, if realised on a societal level, will have winners and losers, and that the best loser-minimisation strategy is going to require a more complex engagement with reality?
What am I getting at? Categorisation is powerful, but we mistake the map for the landscape and when the landscape proves our map to be incorrect, an entire nation gets divided on what the map should be. Group signalling is useful in identifying people with similar values to cooperate with, but the fallibility of ‘the masses’ in accurately cartographing the boundaries of groups makes people work very hard to signal where those boundaries are, often at the cost of individuals who find themselves on the border. Sex-stereotyped gender identities are the most matured forms of identity scaffolding available to children and though one size does not fit all, it certainly does fit many, and I believe refining the gender identities to better align with our society’s values is a nobler pursuit than trying to culturally dissolve the relationship between sex and gender.
Categories. Useful, but wrong, but useful, but wrong,…
