Who says I like right angles?

[tim]

I've been reading Carolyn Heilbrun's _Reinventing Womanhood_. I have the seeds of a post or an essay germinating in my head about geek-as-third-gender[*], genderqueerness (especially in female-assigned people), and how that does or doesn't relate to the idea of successful women aspiring to be "honorary men" as Heilbrun argues against, and to feminism and/or the rejection thereof. It still all comes down to the need to make gender both matter and not matter at the same time. To the apparent contradiction between saying, "fuck it, your labels don't apply to me, and I refuse to attach any of them to myself" and the idea of accepting the label of "woman" and living your life as an example of what being a woman can mean. To do either of those seems to be giving more credence to the concepts of "man" and "woman" than they deserve -- but that's what it means to live in a man's world. So, sometime, I will write something better-thought-out on this point.

[*] is worth noting because it's an essay that I and many other people in my circle have enjoyed, yet it seems somehow quite revealing that it's titled "The Anti-Girl Manifesto" -- why is it so frequent that when somebody writes something rejecting gender, it's always the trappings of the female gender that get attacked far more harshly? The author writes, "I'm not a woman, I'm a geek;" yet why does it seem so natural for a woman to write that when it would seem almost unnecessary for a man to declare, "I'm not a man, I'm a geek"? It's not that no one would ever say such a thing, but there doesn't seem to be anything contradictory in our discourse about being a man and a geek. I mean, duh. So when you say, "I'm not a woman, I'm a geek," is this a daring statement of individuality, or does it just reveal you've bought into the same poisonous stereotypes we all have, that you've bought the idea that you can't be a woman and a geek? When I say that I don't identify as a woman or a man because I don't feel like either one, am I just buying into the idea that man is default and woman is special-case? If I were exactly the same as I am now, with the same mind except with convex instead of concave bits (ignoring that I'd have lived a different life if I'd been born with them), would I feel the same need to repudiate my assigned gender? Or would I just take it as a given that I was a person first and a man later, because all men grow up with the privilege of being able to take it for granted that they are a person first, whereas a woman has to spend her life proving it?

To put it another way, there's something really quite broken about the fact that if you call a man a "lady", you're cruising for a bruising (unless he's gay or has an unusually good sense of humor), but if you call a woman a "gentleman", she's supposed to take it as a compliment.

Comments

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

suggesting that there are actually two types of women (in contrast to one type of men).

I don't see where this point is mentioned in your post or in the Amazon page you linked to about the book (although admittedly, I had to stop reading that Amazon page pretty quickly, as it made my eyes bleed.) Care to elaborate?

[dan4th.livejournal.com]

It's actually more elaborated in the National Review article (http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/sexdifferences/reviews7.html):

"The culture wars," Rhoads notes with some justice, "are really about the role of women." He shows that while men are all about the same when it comes to the masculine traits of competitiveness, aggression, and dominance (even "computer nerds" enjoy the frenzied clashes of "BattleBots"), women are divided into two camps: a majority who are traditionally feminine with a yearning for nest-building and children; and a minority, exposed to higher levels of testosterone, who show more male attributes. The tension between these two kinds of women becomes a recurring theme in the book.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

I find that rather pat. I know plenty of unaggressive men, for one, and for another, if there are these two types of women (and I don't think it breaks down into two types; liking computers doesn't mean you don't want to spawn offspring), I don't attribute it to biology (because I don't see a preponderance of evidence for doing so), but rather to social messages that women are the special case and so if you're a woman who likes computers and competition and so on, that that's something strange and worth remarking on.

If it looks like there isn't more than one type of men, it's because we don't divide up men into categories according to how much of a man they really are, because more or less anything is compatible with being a man (if man is the default and woman is a special case), whereas when we see an autonomous woman somehow that makes her less womanly in our minds (regardless of her own gender identity). So if there are these two categories, they exist in our minds and in our discourse; I'm pretty skeptical of any claims unbacked by proof that they result from biology, given how eager most people are to accept biological explanations when they don't have the training to evaluate them as being good or bad science.

[dan4th.livejournal.com]

Okay. I think we're getting sidetracked by the awfulness of his argument, because what I was really interested in was in your focus on female-bodied-genderqueers as "third gender" -- is it just that you have little experience with male-bodied-genderqueers, or do you see a difference between male and female bodied GQs?

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

I should define what I mean by "genderqueer" here, which I'm using to refer to people who haven't done anything to change the physical characteristics of their sex, don't intend to, and identify as some gender identity that's neither female or male. If I think about the set of such people I've run into, more of them are people who were female-assigned at birth than male-assigned. So I do think of "genderqueer", in the sense I'm using it, as being more of a female thing than a male thing. Certainly the person whose experience I'm most familiar with is my own, and I'm a female-bodied genderqueer. And because of that, I wonder whether the specific need to identify as neither male or female is a response to the idea of woman-as-special-case. But I don't know whether I'm right in assuming that most genderqueers are female-assigned, and it would be hard to figure out if that's really true, since genderqueers don't really exist as a mainstream category yet.

[dan4th.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I don't think I know any male-assigned genderqueers either. I'm just assuming that they're out there, but more connected to some other community that I'm not part of. FBGQs tend to be loosely affiliated with FTMs, but I think that MBGQs might not be affiliated with MTFs, because in my (very limited) experience, there is even worse "identity police" in MTF cuilture than in FTM...

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Yes, and the struggle for trans acceptance, I think, provides another angle on the "making gender matter and not matter at the same time" problem. You have the "gender is fluid" camp, and the "I have the right to be accepted as my inborn biological gender" camp, and the two make an uneasy alliance, if they make one at all. Califia's _Sex Changes_ covers that pretty well, though, IMO.

[dan4th.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me of a poll I wanted to do
thanks!

[dan4th.livejournal.com]

I've put up the poll (http://dan4th.livejournal.com/738283.html?#cutid1) and I'd appreciate you promoting it to your list, if you don't mind.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

One step ahead of you!

[dan4th.livejournal.com]

awesomeness!

[goddess32585.livejournal.com]

i feel like i've seen a fair number of male-bodied gq folk at genderqueer, and a good rl friend of mine is. if you want hand-wavy numbers, you could probably ask there.

fwiw, i think you're right about the motivations for some females to id as 'something else', though probably not for all, or even most; i'm not uncomfortable in my female body, but being expected to act like a woman, whatever that means, is just ridiculous. besides, apparently real women have curves.

[dan4th.livejournal.com]

oh, I should probably warn: Reading that review may cause a fog of rage to descend upon you. It's having an interesting effect on my morning.