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Gender assignment considered harmful
Apr. 1st, 2011 12:47 amThis is not an April Fool's joke, it's just a question that's been on my mind a lot lately.
Why do we assign genders to infants at birth? The historical reasons are obvious: until recently, in the culture that I live in, there was a belief that externally visible genitalia determine the gender role that an infant will eventually feel most comfortable in. There was also a belief that sex is binary and all humans have a consistent set of sexed biological attributes---chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, and internal neurological maps of the body, to name a few---such that, for each person, all of those attributes correspond to the same sex category. We now know that those beliefs are false, but the practice of assigning genders to newborns based on what's no more than a guess---albeit a guess that's likely to be right---persists.
I really like the vocabulary of "assigned male/female at birth" and "coercively assigned male/female at birth" because it emphasizes the subjectivity of sex assignment. The existence of an individual body is real and objective, to be sure, but the placement of that individual into a category created by humans as a model for understanding the world is subjective and requires an observer to be meaningful. In contrast, saying "born male"/"born female" reifies subjective judgments of maleness or femaleness in a way that serves to reinforce coercion. It's a sly use of language to surreptitiously remove the observer (the one who decides, about this person who hasn't had a chance to assert their own identity yet, whether the person is male or female) from the picture. The "born male"/"born female" usage implicitly blesses the observer's subjectivity as "real" and "objective", and marks the observed's subjectivity as "subjective" and "imaginary". But the belief that everyone has a real, objective biological sex that is just waiting to be observed and that may conflict with their internal, subjectively experienced sex is predicated on confusion between the map and the territory. So adding the word "coercively" helps us remember that rarely if ever do the parents of a newborn get to opt out of sex assignment---most of the time, they don't even know it's possible to opt out. And the child themself certainly does not have the option of protesting the gender arbitrarily assigned to them.
So, why assign gender? Other than historical reasons and the fact that most cis people would likely see it as awkward or socially disruptive to have a child about whom they would choose not to answer the question "Is it a boy or a girl?", I'm not sure. Neither history nor the comfort zones of adults are particularly relevant to the welfare of a particular child.
I think about what I would have preferred to have done for me when I was born. What if, instead of saying "it's a girl," no one had labeled me as a boy or a girl, instead waiting until I was old enough to speak for myself and proclaim that I felt more of an affinity with the girls over there, or the boys over there, or maybe neither? I think it would probably have been easier for me to say that I was a boy if I'd grown up in a milieu where I hadn't been getting told that I was something I was not---a girl---for as long as I could remember. I spent at least seven years of my life, from age 11 to 18, both severely depressed as a result of having the wrong hormone balance in my body, and unable to describe what might be wrong because I wasn't familiar with the concept of being a boy who everyone else thought was a girl. It's easier to assert yourself and speak for what you need when you haven't spent a great deal of your life being told something you are not.
I can't really blame my mother for thinking I was a girl because I happened to be born with external genitals that looked like female external genitals, because in 1980 not a lot of people knew that not all babies born with vulvas were girls and not all babies born with penises were boys. But now, in 2011, a lot of people do know that, at least within the circle of people I know. And yet even people with a good understanding of all the ways in which humans are not sexually dimorphic, and who find themselves parents of an infant, assume that their particular infant's gender follows from the infant's genitals, even though they know that in general this is not true. They say that their child is probably cissexual and so they will treat them as such until they have evidence otherwise.
There are, of course, a number of problems with this approach. First, the way that statistics work is that any particular individual, like your baby, is either 100% likely to be transsexual, or 0% likely. If you pick a random individual from the population, you have a 9 in 10 chance of picking a cissexual person. But if you fix one specific individual, any particular statement about them is true or false. In the case of a child who's too young to communicate about who they are, you just don't have any way of knowing which it is. But the point "they're probably cissexual" is moot.
More importantly, to me, I don't think any kid should have to go through what I went through, so if you say that every child should be treated as if they are cissexual until proven otherwise, you're saying that you approve of some kids having to make a choice between contradicting what every authority in their life tells them is true, or being non-functional for many years. You're saying that the minority (trans kids) should have to pay the cost of making life convenient and comfortable and non-socially-awkward for the majority (cis kids). I think of Ursula Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" here. Should even one person be condemned to suffer if that suffering directly results in happiness for every single other human being? I don't believe so, because I believe that every individual has worth that can't be destroyed just to accrue benefit to somebody else, and that doesn't change even if it's a lot of somebody else's.
Moreover, if you assign gender coercively, you're saying, if you're a parent, that you don't want what's best for your kid. You want what's best for an idealized version of your kid who's perfectly conformant to any social norms you happen to value. You only want what's best for your kid to the extent that they happen to conform to that ideal.
Even if you don't agree with me, I hope you can excuse me for not advocating a position predicated on me being less than a person. If I am a person whose self-determination is just as important as anyone else's, then the same is true of other people like me, and so a systematic course of behavior that makes it much more difficult for such people to achieve self-determination---for no particularly good reason---cannot be justified. For me to approve of coercive gender assignment would be for me to say that I believe that if I got another chance to be born, I should once again have to spend the majority of my adolescence and young adulthood fighting to show that I am not who I'd been told I was, taking up much energy that my peers got to use on more externally rewarding pursuits. For me to approve of coercive gender assignment would be for me to deny my worth as a person.
I do not feel comfortable co-signing an ideology that threw me under the bus and would do so again unrepentantly if it could.
Finally, if the idea of waiting until a child can speak for themself before assigning gender -- just in the same way that you wouldn't decide, the instant a child was born, that they were a Democrat, were extroverted, were left-handed, or were Buddhist -- seems weird, I would ask what you think is harmful about it. I've already argued that assigning gender coercively is harmful to a minority of children. Is failure to coercively assign gender harmful? I don't think it is. Any discomfort involved is endured by adults, who can well afford to endure it, not by very young children, who generally don't think much of propriety. The instant a child expresses a preference as to whether he would like to be addressed with "he" and "him" or she would like to be addressed with "she" and "her", you can start doing that. And if they never express a preference, there's no harm in that either.
To be clear, I'm not advocating treating one's kid a certain way to advance a political agenda or to better the lot of anyone other than your kid. I'm advocating treating your kid in a way that's neutral about 9 times out of 10, and that spares them from psychic and/or literal death 1 time out of 10. "What if by addressing my child as 'he', I was actually gradually eroding their sense of self?" is probably not a question that many parents lie awake worrying about at night, but it's relevant to a hell of a lot more lives than "What if my kid got into some stranger's car to help look for their lost puppy?" So, considering that a lot of parents expend quite a bit of effort into preventing some much, much less likely occurrences (like their child being kidnapped by strangers), I can't see why a parent wouldn't want to decline to assign.
(As with many questions, Questioning Transphobia covered this one before me and better than me, with "Raising (Potentially) Trans Children".)
Why do we assign genders to infants at birth? The historical reasons are obvious: until recently, in the culture that I live in, there was a belief that externally visible genitalia determine the gender role that an infant will eventually feel most comfortable in. There was also a belief that sex is binary and all humans have a consistent set of sexed biological attributes---chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, and internal neurological maps of the body, to name a few---such that, for each person, all of those attributes correspond to the same sex category. We now know that those beliefs are false, but the practice of assigning genders to newborns based on what's no more than a guess---albeit a guess that's likely to be right---persists.
I really like the vocabulary of "assigned male/female at birth" and "coercively assigned male/female at birth" because it emphasizes the subjectivity of sex assignment. The existence of an individual body is real and objective, to be sure, but the placement of that individual into a category created by humans as a model for understanding the world is subjective and requires an observer to be meaningful. In contrast, saying "born male"/"born female" reifies subjective judgments of maleness or femaleness in a way that serves to reinforce coercion. It's a sly use of language to surreptitiously remove the observer (the one who decides, about this person who hasn't had a chance to assert their own identity yet, whether the person is male or female) from the picture. The "born male"/"born female" usage implicitly blesses the observer's subjectivity as "real" and "objective", and marks the observed's subjectivity as "subjective" and "imaginary". But the belief that everyone has a real, objective biological sex that is just waiting to be observed and that may conflict with their internal, subjectively experienced sex is predicated on confusion between the map and the territory. So adding the word "coercively" helps us remember that rarely if ever do the parents of a newborn get to opt out of sex assignment---most of the time, they don't even know it's possible to opt out. And the child themself certainly does not have the option of protesting the gender arbitrarily assigned to them.
So, why assign gender? Other than historical reasons and the fact that most cis people would likely see it as awkward or socially disruptive to have a child about whom they would choose not to answer the question "Is it a boy or a girl?", I'm not sure. Neither history nor the comfort zones of adults are particularly relevant to the welfare of a particular child.
I think about what I would have preferred to have done for me when I was born. What if, instead of saying "it's a girl," no one had labeled me as a boy or a girl, instead waiting until I was old enough to speak for myself and proclaim that I felt more of an affinity with the girls over there, or the boys over there, or maybe neither? I think it would probably have been easier for me to say that I was a boy if I'd grown up in a milieu where I hadn't been getting told that I was something I was not---a girl---for as long as I could remember. I spent at least seven years of my life, from age 11 to 18, both severely depressed as a result of having the wrong hormone balance in my body, and unable to describe what might be wrong because I wasn't familiar with the concept of being a boy who everyone else thought was a girl. It's easier to assert yourself and speak for what you need when you haven't spent a great deal of your life being told something you are not.
I can't really blame my mother for thinking I was a girl because I happened to be born with external genitals that looked like female external genitals, because in 1980 not a lot of people knew that not all babies born with vulvas were girls and not all babies born with penises were boys. But now, in 2011, a lot of people do know that, at least within the circle of people I know. And yet even people with a good understanding of all the ways in which humans are not sexually dimorphic, and who find themselves parents of an infant, assume that their particular infant's gender follows from the infant's genitals, even though they know that in general this is not true. They say that their child is probably cissexual and so they will treat them as such until they have evidence otherwise.
There are, of course, a number of problems with this approach. First, the way that statistics work is that any particular individual, like your baby, is either 100% likely to be transsexual, or 0% likely. If you pick a random individual from the population, you have a 9 in 10 chance of picking a cissexual person. But if you fix one specific individual, any particular statement about them is true or false. In the case of a child who's too young to communicate about who they are, you just don't have any way of knowing which it is. But the point "they're probably cissexual" is moot.
More importantly, to me, I don't think any kid should have to go through what I went through, so if you say that every child should be treated as if they are cissexual until proven otherwise, you're saying that you approve of some kids having to make a choice between contradicting what every authority in their life tells them is true, or being non-functional for many years. You're saying that the minority (trans kids) should have to pay the cost of making life convenient and comfortable and non-socially-awkward for the majority (cis kids). I think of Ursula Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" here. Should even one person be condemned to suffer if that suffering directly results in happiness for every single other human being? I don't believe so, because I believe that every individual has worth that can't be destroyed just to accrue benefit to somebody else, and that doesn't change even if it's a lot of somebody else's.
Moreover, if you assign gender coercively, you're saying, if you're a parent, that you don't want what's best for your kid. You want what's best for an idealized version of your kid who's perfectly conformant to any social norms you happen to value. You only want what's best for your kid to the extent that they happen to conform to that ideal.
Even if you don't agree with me, I hope you can excuse me for not advocating a position predicated on me being less than a person. If I am a person whose self-determination is just as important as anyone else's, then the same is true of other people like me, and so a systematic course of behavior that makes it much more difficult for such people to achieve self-determination---for no particularly good reason---cannot be justified. For me to approve of coercive gender assignment would be for me to say that I believe that if I got another chance to be born, I should once again have to spend the majority of my adolescence and young adulthood fighting to show that I am not who I'd been told I was, taking up much energy that my peers got to use on more externally rewarding pursuits. For me to approve of coercive gender assignment would be for me to deny my worth as a person.
I do not feel comfortable co-signing an ideology that threw me under the bus and would do so again unrepentantly if it could.
Finally, if the idea of waiting until a child can speak for themself before assigning gender -- just in the same way that you wouldn't decide, the instant a child was born, that they were a Democrat, were extroverted, were left-handed, or were Buddhist -- seems weird, I would ask what you think is harmful about it. I've already argued that assigning gender coercively is harmful to a minority of children. Is failure to coercively assign gender harmful? I don't think it is. Any discomfort involved is endured by adults, who can well afford to endure it, not by very young children, who generally don't think much of propriety. The instant a child expresses a preference as to whether he would like to be addressed with "he" and "him" or she would like to be addressed with "she" and "her", you can start doing that. And if they never express a preference, there's no harm in that either.
To be clear, I'm not advocating treating one's kid a certain way to advance a political agenda or to better the lot of anyone other than your kid. I'm advocating treating your kid in a way that's neutral about 9 times out of 10, and that spares them from psychic and/or literal death 1 time out of 10. "What if by addressing my child as 'he', I was actually gradually eroding their sense of self?" is probably not a question that many parents lie awake worrying about at night, but it's relevant to a hell of a lot more lives than "What if my kid got into some stranger's car to help look for their lost puppy?" So, considering that a lot of parents expend quite a bit of effort into preventing some much, much less likely occurrences (like their child being kidnapped by strangers), I can't see why a parent wouldn't want to decline to assign.
(As with many questions, Questioning Transphobia covered this one before me and better than me, with "Raising (Potentially) Trans Children".)