The first question to address, when considering gender dysphoria, is also the easiest. Is this even a thing in the first place? Does gender dysphoria really exist?
The answer is obviously Yes. Dysphoria means pain or misery or unhappiness. If at least one person on Earth is unhappy about the gender he* was assigned at birth, gender dysphoria exists. That was easy.
But if someone suffers from gender dysphoria, what next? When people feel deeply alienated from the genders they** were assigned at birth, what advice should they be given about how to live their lives and present themselves to the world?
The answer to this second question is a little more involved, and relies on two premises.
The first premise is the modern (non-linguistic) distinction between gender and sex. This evening, Wikipedia defines gender as:
either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.
In other words, if sex is taken to denote a biological structure — a structure involving genital organs shaped like this and hormonal chemicals balanced like that — then gender (by contrast) involves someone's social and cultural identity: how he acts, and how he is received and treated by others. This distinction will become important in a minute.
The second premise is a general confession of human ignorance. There is a lot that we don't know. And it behooves us to tread cautiously in areas we don't understand. Since we sometimes learn that we were confused even about topics we thought we understood,*** it behooves us to tread cautiously in most areas.
But let's slow down. We know that the vast majority of humans belong to one of two biological sexes. (A few people are intersex or fail to fit the standard male-or-female categorization in some other way at a biological level.) But gender has to do with cultural and social systems and categories. And we all know that cultural and social systems are far more creative, and show far more diversity, than biological systems. So how can we be sure that there are only two genders? How can we be sure that there aren't three, ... or four, ... or six, ... or twelve, ... or twenty-seven?
We can't.
And therefore there are no reasonable grounds on which to constrain the ways that people choose to present themselves. For all that we know, there are more genders than we are aware of: so perhaps this person belongs to one of those unknown genders, and perhaps members of that (unknown) gender normally dress like this and act like that. Maybe it is normal for people in the gender to which this person actually belongs to present themselves in this way, or in this complex of ways. We just don't know, because we just can't know how many genders there really are. And therefore we have no grounds for telling this person, You're doing it wrong.
Therefore the advice to those who feel alienated from the gender to which they were assigned at birth has to be, Act, dress, and present yourself in whatever way seems right to you in your own eyes. We have no grounds to say anything else.
__________
* Yes, I still use he as the unmarked (generic) third-person singular personal pronoun. I recognize that some readers will find this usage problematic, but I have not yet seen an alternative which is both euphonious and standardized. Often I will reword the sentence so that I can use they with a plural verb, but sometimes I find I have painted myself into a corner. In the cases when I use he, as I once advised in another context, I am emphatically not trying to make a political point.
** Ha! That time I got to use they! See? I do try. 😀
*** There were a lot of people who were certain they understood astronomy because they had studied Ptolemy, and who were certain they understood medicine because they had studied Galen. They were wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment