#3 mistakes

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Beauty: Tips, Makeup Trends, and More |mybeautygrace.com

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On Sept 11, 2016, The Verge’s Casey Newton reported on “Our favorite discoveries from the internet's best festival.”

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Back on Nov 8, 2011, The Awl posted “A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage” by Willy Staley.

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On August 26, 2016, Variety published “Ryan Lochte, Nate Parker and When Apology Tours Come Up Short” by Maureen Ryan.

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August 29, 2016 “Summer Box-Office Wrap...” by Pamela McClintock.

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the “3 mistakes” model of gender

When you start picking at it, gender really is one of the weirdest and most confusing things in the world. There’s not just one mistake you can identify and fix; the whole thing is built out of a whole bunch of mistakes, all interlocking with each other and compounding into this gigantic messy tangle. The mistakes are all harmful on their own, but combined, they make a mistake so world-structuringly huge that it’s honestly hard to really get your head around.

You can cut the cake in a lot of different ways, but I think it’s useful to see the traditional way of thinking about gender as having three basic parts:

“If you’re born with a penis, you’ll grow up to be a man, and men are like this.”

“If you’re born with a vagina, you’ll grow up to be a woman, and women are like that.”

Three parts, three mistakes. The three linkages mostly come packaged together as part of a unified cultural idea of gender, but I think it’s useful to break it down. Each mistake is tied to different areas of gender oppression, and the main place where gender theory sometimes goes awry (I think) is when it critiques one mistake while endorsing one or more of the others. 

#1: the biological mistake

“If you’re born with a penis …” / “If you’re born with a vagina …”

There is a massive diversity human bodies, but the idea of those differences being naturally divided into two mutually-exclusive categories is genuinely nonsense. We all start out in the womb with the same genital structure, which then develops in a spectrum of different ways. If we try really hard, we can cram all of those (hormonal / gonadal / morphological / chromosomal) sex variances into just two categories, but that involves totally erasing the existence of intersex people, which has fucking ghastly consequences. Intersex people are part of the same physiological spectrum as non-intersex people are (and hell, the differences between people within our conventional categories can sometimes be larger than the differences that are supposed to divide those categories). There’s literally nothing wrong with intersex people, and it’s only our misguided belief in a biological male/female binary – a fiction we believe in no small part because 19th-century doctors were obsessed with preserving gender roles – that makes us think that there is.

That’s the first mistake. It’s taking the whole range of human bodies, and boiling them down into two polarised and mutually-exclusive categories called “male” and “female”. Basically, it’s looking at this but registering only this. Call this the biological mistake.

#2: the ‘becoming’ mistake

“… you’ll grow up to be a man …” / “… you’ll grow up to be a woman …”

We don’t just say that kids born with penises are male; we say they’re boys. The same goes for kids born with vaginas (better known as girls). ‘Boy’ means something different from “kid with a penis”, just like ‘girl’ means something different from “kid with a vagina”. Building off the error-riddled biology of the first mistake, the second mistake doubles down on dichotomy, saying “Not only are you either biologically male or female, but that means that you’re either part of this boy group or part of this girl group.” From there, boys become men, and girls become women. 

You can think of this as the “becoming” mistake. The body of a person doesn’t get to just ‘be their body’; it becomes their membership card to a club they didn’t choose to join. If you ever try to say “Hey, I think maybe I want out of this club,” society points at your body and says, “Um, what? Your membership card says you’re here for life.” Taking that dodgy notion of binary, static sex and chaining it to an equally dodgy notion of binary, static gender-categories (boy and girl, man and woman, all there was and all you ever shall be) – that’s the second mistake.

#3: the cultural mistake

“… and men are like this …” / “… and women are like that …”

As categories, “man” and “woman” are packed with information. While knowing that someone is in the category of “has a penis” only tells us about one minor element of their physiology, the category of “man” is treated as conveying a lot more than that. When someone is in the category of “man”, we think we know what they like, how they experience sexual desire, how they approach relationships, what they’re good at, what their brain is like, what they like in bed … it goes on and on. (Note: all those links are hot garbage.) “Man” and “woman” are cultural and social categories, but they’re steeped in the biological mistake. Those categories take the genitals you have to be one of the most crucial pieces of information about you, draw inferences from it to virtually every area of life, and demand that this information be made clear to everyone, at all times. If you’re speaking to an accountant about your taxes, and that accountant can’t tell at a glance what genitals you have, they’re likely to be extremely uncomfortable. 

It really can’t be overstated how weird this is. As the feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye wrote all the way back in 1983:

“We announce [our sex] in a thousand ways. We deck ourselves from head to toe with garments and decorations which serve like badges and buttons to announce our sexes. For every type of occasion there are distinct clothes, gear and accessories, hairdos, cosmetics and scents, labeled as “ladies’” or “men’s” and labeling us as females or males, and most of the time most of us choose, use, wear or bear the paraphernalia associated with our sex. It goes below the skin as well. There are different styles of gait, gesture, posture, speech, humour, taste and even of perception, interest and attention that we learn as we grow up to be women or to be men and that label and announce us as women or as men. It begins early in life: even infants in arms are color coded. […]

The enormous frequency with which information about people’s sexes is conveyed conveys implicitly the message that this topic is enormously important. I suspect that this is the single topic on which we most frequently receive information from others throughout our entire lives. If I am right, it would go part way to explaining why we end up with an almost irresistible impression, unarticulated, that the matter of people’s sexes is the most important and fundamental topic in the world.” (Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality, p.23-4, 27)

Call this the cultural mistake. As they’re traditionally constructed, “man” and “woman” are like cultural hyperextensions of the biological mistake, saying that not only are ‘male’ and ‘female’ people sharply separated physically, they’re also sharply separated in just about every other way possible. Their essence is different. So we have all of these totally human traits, like being emotional and rational and nurturing and assertive, et al, but instead of recognising them as human traits that are available to everyone, we divvy them up into ‘masculine’ traits and ‘feminine’ traits. We punish girls when they act too masculine, and boys when they act too feminine. In this way, we forcibly sculpt kids into the shape we’re convinced they already are.

This third mistake is a goddamn sprawling mess. It’s every single chain of signification that says “if you are [a particular gender], that means you have to [do this particular thing], [wear these particular clothes], [have these particular interests], [adopt this particular role], [be this particular way]…” It’s also the corollary: every chain of signification that says that if you do those things, then that means you are the gender that’s associated with them. “You can’t be an [x] if you [y]. Who ever heard of an [x] that [y]s? If you [y], you’re [the gender associated with y].”

A lot of tumblr discourse about gender is devoted to hacking away at the cultural mistake, chain by chain. Every post that’s like “trans women can still like traditionally masculine things!” is hacking away at the chain of signification tying ‘liking traditionally masculine things’ to ‘being a man’. Every post that’s like “you can be nonbinary and femme” is hacking away at the chains of signification between conventionally feminine presentation and feminine gender identity. Every post asserting that “clothes have no gender” is hacking away at the chain of signification between particular clothes and particular genders, and urging people to just wear what makes them happy. 

Hack, hack, hacking away.

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Each of these three mistakes is implicated in particular aspects of gender oppression, and they all interlock and support each other. But when people want to critique one of the mistakes, there’s often a strong temptation to do so by endorsing – and so gaining a perceived legitimacy from – one or more of the others. There are some trans folk who want people to be free to transition from man to woman and vice versa, but who are reactionary enough to think that getting genital surgery (and/or behaving in stereotypically gendered ways) is necessary for trans gender identities to be legitimate. In other words, they want to undo the ‘becoming’ mistake, but they’re totally fine with the biological mistake and the cultural mistake.

Radfems, on the other hand, hate the cultural mistake with a passion. That’s their whole thing: they argue that women have been forcibly made into what they are by material and psychological oppression, and they want a world in which being a woman no longer entails that. But in arguing that women’s oppression is rooted in their biology, most of the radfem writings I’ve read attack the cultural mistake, but uncritically endorse the biological mistake and the ‘becoming’ mistake (”If you’re born with a penis, you’ll grow up to be a man” / “If you’re born with a vagina, you’ll grow up to be a woman”). This leads them to treat trans critiques of those two mistakes not as what they are – that is, critiques of other components of gender oppression – but as part of gender oppression itself. 

(It doesn’t help that radfems only ever seem to pay attention to the most reactionary kind of trans person. Germaine Greer seriously still seems to think that the entire trans thing is predicated on the belief that surgery makes trans women into women. I feel like Greer probably spoke to one trans woman in 1978 who believed that, and she simply hasn’t looked into it any further since. That is such a minority opinion among trans people, especially younger ones. Greer could realise that pretty easily if she just spent, like, half an hour reading some blogs by trans people.)

So radfems are generally only interested in undoing the cultural mistake, and transmedicalists are generally only interested in undoing the ‘becoming’ mistake. Sometimes there are hardcore gender abolitionists who go further than either, arguing that the whole idea of gender needs to be abolished. For gender abolitionists, nobody should be a man, nobody should be a woman, nobody should be nonbinary – there simply shouldn’t be those kinds of classifications. Everyone is an individual, with their own body and their own traits, and a world without gender would treat everyone as such. 

I think this is close to right. This kind of gender abolitionism wants to undo the biological mistake, which is great, and the ‘becoming’ mistake, which is also great. But by acting as though ‘man’ and ‘woman’ could never mean anything better and less oppressive than they currently do, it subtly endorses the cultural mistake. It’s a way of tacitly agreeing that, so long as people are “men”, they will be like this, and as long as people are “women”, they will be like that, and so if we want that to change, we need to get rid of those categories. It precludes the possibility of gender categories coming to mean something else entirely (not to mention colonially ignoring where they already do), and precludes the possibility of different understandings remaking the practice of gender-categorisation so completely that everything oppressive about it is left behind. 

If someone wants to abolish gender, I assume that their ultimate goal is abolishing what is oppressive about gender. While a total catalogue of ‘what is oppressive about gender’ would run way too long for this already-overstuffed blog post to contain, I think that they all loosely orbit those three mistakes. Contrary to the hardest-core gender abolitionists, I don’t think that the best way to get rid of the oppressiveness of gender is to get rid of gender categories themselves. I think the best way to get rid of the oppressiveness of gender is to change what gender means. That involves redefining gender as something negotiated from inside (rather than imposed from the outside), removing the chains of signification that hurt people, and reimagining gender as something kinder, freer, and more consensual. It involves undoing all three mistakes. 

*

It’s not for me alone to say what that a model of gender that undoes all three mistakes might look like, but the more I read contemporary gender bloggers, the more I feel like we’re witnessing a vision of it coming together. It’s a model where everyone has a distinct body, those bodies aren’t gendered, and all bodies are valid. (And not weird membership cards to any club.) It’s a model where gender identification is an optional way for people to express themselves, and there’s no expectation that such identification will be static. It’s a model where the chains of signification have been severed: you wear what you want to wear, you are who you want to be, and what your gender means gets to be up to you. 

Less a model than a utopian dream, maybe, but imagining these things is the first step to making them real. 

To people used to the false solidity of oppressive mistakes, self-determination can seem intolerably intangible. “Okay, but if being a woman isn’t determined by biology, and it isn’t determined by cultural ideas about what a woman is, then what can being a woman actually mean?” The only good way to answer that question, I think, is “whatever the woman in question wants it to mean.” The same for ‘men’, and for 'nonbinary’, and for 'genderqueer’, and for whatever other words someone wants to use to help express their self-understanding. It would be a much less oppressive world if that could be the answer to the question. There’s a lot of practical structural oppression standing between us and that place, but it’s probably also worth asking: can we handle a world in which the answer is so variable? Can we cede the power of gendering others against their will, in all of the millions of ways that we do? Can we unravel all the mistakes of gender, patiently and tenderly, and uncover underneath them other human beings, in all their differences and all their sameness, and find this new way to respect them?

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3 Mistakes to Avoid when Beginning a Wellness Journey

3 Mistakes to Avoid when Beginning a Wellness Journey

We all want to become healthier. The wellness industry is one of the biggest money making industries around. Unfortunately, many of us fall off the wagon before we have completed our second month of our journey. To keep you on your journey, here are 3 mistakes to avoid when beginning your wellness journey.

3 Mistakes to Avoid when Beginning a Wellness Journey: Making your Wellness Journey all…

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