The Model of Acquired Gender
In Whipping Girl, Julia Serano proposes a model of gender that revolves around the idea of “subconscious sex”.
the phrase “gender identity” is problematic because it seems to describe two potentially different things: the gender we consciously choose to identify as, and the gender we subconsciously feel ourselves to be. To make things clearer, I will refer to the latter as subconscious sex.
— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl (2005)
Serano goes on to describe “subconscious sex” through her own experiences as a trans woman:
Perhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female.
While I disagree with the notion of a hardwired biological gender, and by extension the framing of this internal, semi-conscious gender inclination as “sex”, I do think that it is important to differentiate between this so-called “subconscious sex” and our consciously chosen “gender identity”. I would first like to refine and redefine the “subconscious sex” concept, and then I will discuss why I believe it is philosophically important and (more importantly) interesting to separate these two concepts.
Refining the idea of subconscious sex
I reject Serano’s preferred theory of biologically hardwired gender, and instead prefer Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s theory of gender as an unconscious elaboration of one’s Self, through lived experience and the transferral and translation of signs and symbols from one’s cultural surroundings (building on the concept of Jean Laplanche’s “mythosymbolic” realm).
…we also find problematic those clinical approaches that treat non-normative gender or sexualities as fixed or as a reflection of some internal “truth,” because such approaches misunderstand that all gender/sexuality is an unfolding and dynamic psychic process, not a static or a predetermined one.
— Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity (2024)
In their book Gender Without Identity, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini put forward a theory of gender formation which rejects “born-this-way” theorisations. Instead, they propose that all genders and sexualities, including normative ones, “arise out of complex psychic processes that are by no means reducible to biology alone”. In other words, based on our experiences in early childhood (as well as throughout the rest of our lives), all humans (through no conscious process of our own) elaborate an internal, subconscious gender, which may or may not be consciously realised.
I want to call this concept acquired gender to reflect the way linguists speak of acquiring a language. Linguists such as Stephen Krashen differentiate between “language learning”, a conscious process of study, and “language acquisition”, an unconscious process which occurs through exposure to “input” — speech and writing in the target language. Language acquisition is the process which enables us to speak and hear a language fluently, on a subconscious level, while language learning is merely a process that allows us to understand a language’s structures academically and theoretically. Language acquisition is said to begin from infancy, before a child even has the ability to form conscious thought, which demonstrates the complexity of pattern recognition and processing that the subconscious mind is capable of, even in infants.
If we are to subscribe to Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s theory of gender formation being an “unfolding and dynamic process” that occurs subconsciously as a result of societal input, we can see parallels between this “acquisition” of gender (all genders, including normative genders) and the acquisition of a language.
What this highly mobile process also means is that that we do not (and cannot) control our own or another’s gender-becoming. If gender is a translation, as this volume presumes, then it is neither a volitional outcome nor a process that can be steered by an other.
— Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity (2024)
For example, the inability to consciously change or resist one’s acquired gender is similar to the fact that one is unable to make oneself less fluent in a language by consciously thinking in another language. And much like the automaticity of word-reading in an acquired language (as the Stroop effect demonstrates), there is an automaticity to recognising oneself as a particular gender. A conscious attempt at heeding a warning “Do not read the below word” cannot override the automatic processing that occurs with text in an acquired language, similar to the fact that many anti-transition warnings or discouragements cannot override the automatic identification with one’s acquired gender in a trans person.(1)
So, I am substituting acquired gender in place of subconscious sex, but I am maintaining Serano’s divide between this concept (a deeply felt but partially or fully subconscious gender) and the concept of gender identity (how one consciously identifies).
The separation of acquired gender and gender identity
These two concepts are often homogenised by popular gender discourse under the generic term “gender”. The term “gender” by itself is often used to describe either concept interchangeably, and many people who use the term will not have given thought into a difference between the two concepts.
However, it seems many trans people do, on some level, acknowledge that there is a difference. This can be seen in the many memes about and popular use of the term “egg”, meaning a trans person who has not yet realised that they are trans. People talking about eggs will often use the pronouns of the gender that the egg would hypothetically transition to, as in, “She hasn’t figured it out yet” in reference to someone who currently identifies as a cis man. Here the difference can be clearly seen: the egg’s acquired gender is (supposedly) that of a woman, but their gender identity is (currently) that of a man.(2)
At the beginning of Whipping Girl, Serano discusses the diversity of identities among the queer community, and notes:
And while many trans people identify as genderqueer because it helps them make sense of their own experiences of living in a world where their understanding of themselves differs so greatly from the way they are perceived by society, other people identify as genderqueer because, on a purely intellectual level, they question the validity of the binary gender system.
In Serano’s example, we can see that among these trans people, the former have both a genderqueer acquired gender and genderqueer gender identity, while the latter only have a genderqueer gender identity — suggesting that these people have an acquired gender that differs from this. What do we make of people whose gender identity is nonbinary, yet have an acquired gender that is not nonbinary?
At stake is not essence … but how the subject is self-theorized at any one particular moment.
— Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity (2024)
What we should not do is dismiss these people’s gender identity as invalid. It is important to respect and affirm everyone’s gender identity regardless of a supposed difference in their internal acquired gender. Acquired gender is difficult for a individual to discern in themself, let alone discernable by an other; we should not presuppose that we know someone’s acquired gender better than they know it themself. However, while both are valid ways of being nonbinary, I do find it philosophically and sociologically interesting to differentiate between “acquired” nonbinaryness and “intellectually identified” nonbinaryness. For example, it may help explain discrepancies between numbers of AFAB nonbinary and AMAB nonbinary people.
In the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 20% of nonbinary participants were AMAB, while 80% were AFAB, and in the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey Early Insights Report, approximately 21% of nonbinary participants were AMAB, while 79% were AFAB. These discrepancies are traditionally explained by the fact that male femininity is more socially maligned than female masculinity, with people suggesting that AMAB nonbinary people are more strongly incentivised to stay closeted or repressed (and thus not participate in the survey), but an additional and complimentary explanation could be that AFAB people are more aware of the ways in which the gender binary is used as a tool of oppression, and thus consciously choose to identify themselves as separate from it.
But does it even make sense to say someone’s acquired gender is “nonbinary” or not?
When you say you identify as a certain gender, you are saying “I fit best under this particular umbrella of many similar identities”. Every man is a man in a slightly different way, every nonbinary person is nonbinary in a slightly different way. By choosing a label, you describe your identity in a useful way, but always to varying degrees of inaccuracy or ambiguity.
I believe that the internal and subconscious “acquired gender” is not really “gender” as we understand it as a social construct. From infancy, we subconsciously relate our selves to other people in the world, understanding and creating a selfhood (a whole selfhood, not just a gender) through these relations. Through a web of relations — “I am like him in X way”, “I am not like her in X way” — we understand our position in (our model of) the world, and this position includes components that are gendered (by ourselves and others). While gender identities are discrete categories, the gender-y parts of your abstract and internal selfhood are multitudinous and complexly interrelated.
To put it another way: no one’s acquired gender is simply “woman” in the same way there is no such thing as an animal that is simply a “bird” and nothing else. “Bird” is a category we created to conveniently group real organisms, not a description of a single flesh-and-blood animal. Each organism that we consider a “bird” is individually unique. Even in a given species (which is also a category of convenience), there is unique genetic variation, physical differences, and mutation. Similarly, “woman” is a category we created to conveniently group real humans, and as a category, it does not describe an exact way of being; it groups many disparate ways of being together under an umbrella. There are many women; there is no one “woman”. So to say that your gender identity is “woman” is a convenient simplification, while under the hood, your acquired gender, the gendered aspect of your abstract selfhood, is something much more complex and individual.
A map-territory relationship seems appropriate to describe these two concepts. One’s individual experience of acquired gender is the territory, and in interrogating our cis- or transness, we seek a gender identity, a map, that will describe the territory with at least reasonable accuracy.
Thus, the question of “am I really a woman?” could be asking two different things, depending on the asker. The first: “is my internal ‘acquired gender’ woman?” is not coherent, as established above. The second, on the other hand: “does it make sense to identify as a woman, given the acquired gender that I have?” is a coherent and important question for each person to ask themselves. It is also a difficult question, because it is difficult to consciously identify one’s subconsciously felt “acquired gender”.
Queer discourse has been held back by mistaking the map for the territory. We fixate on whether we or others are “really” a certain gender, despite gender labels being to our acquired gender as a menu is to a meal. Asking if someone is “really” nonbinary (for example) is as silly as asking if a hotdog is a sandwich. To quote Gender Without Identity again, “At stake is not essence … but how the subject is self-theorized at any one particular moment.” I hope that understanding this can help others in their own self-understanding and self-theorisation.
(1) I will concede that the similarities between language acquisition and gender acquisition do have a limit. One particularly relevant dissimilarity is that an acquired language can be lost if an environment of continuous input is not maintained, while acquired gender cannot be “snuffed out” by denial and repression.
(2) Gender identity, then, is obviously subject to changes throughout one’s life. It is interesting (though quite irrelevant to this particular discussion) that Pellegrini’s and Saketopoulou’s theory of gender allows for the possibility that acquired gender is also subject to changes throughout one’s life (just as one’s acquired languages are!)
