Gender as a Verb: Identifying and Assigning
The transgender community has given us AMAB and AFAB - "assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth", respectively. There are things I like a lot about that formulation. It makes a radical departure from the notion that such characteristics are just right there, inherent in the person and self-explanatory, and instead draws our attention to the categorizer, a person who makes the classification.
That's an important shift of focus. Without it, a hostile skeptic may say, for example, that John is male but "thinks he is" or "dresses up as" or "wants to be thought of as" female, as if John's perceptions are in error and the reality is that John is male. But with that important shift in focus, we are drawn to the fact that some human being categorized John as male - an act that involves perceptions just as much as John's own, a human social act that is not immune to errors or differences of opinion. "Is male" gets suspended, replaced with "is regarded as male by _____".
There are a few things about the AMAB / AFAM formulation that I'm a bit less fond of, on the other hand. The "at birth" part of the phrases creates the implicit sense that the folks who assign such classifications to people do so just once, when the individual is born, and then they close up shop. That's not at all how things work, and we need a term and a concept to refer to the way that people go around doing this to us all the time, every day and in every situation. People categorize us and treat us accordingly, and we cope with that (some of us with more friction and dismay than others) because it is a real part of our social reality, being categorized and regarded in this fashion.
Another thing I'm not so comfortable with regarding AMAB / AFAB is that it makes no distinction between sex (by which I mean physical morphology, the contours of the body) and gender. I think that among transgender activists there may have been the perception that using AMAB and AFAB made as much distinction between sex and gender as they needed to make: Jane, who was given the name John by her parents, was AMAB - assigned male at birth - but is a woman, female; Jane is therefore transgender and it's no one's freaking bloody business what Jane's physical morphology is or what surgeries or hormones she takes, because the authenticity of Jane's identity as a woman shouldn't be subjected to a litmus test. That, I think, is more or less the lines along which the transgender activists were thinking when they reached their consensus around the use of the AMAB / AFAB nomenclature.
The problem with that is that transgender people are not the only gender-variant or gender-atypical people who have these concerns. Let me introduce you to Miguel, Sophia, and me, Allan.
Miguel was designated "female" by the hospital doctors (AFAB, you could say), but not without some discussion and some interesting notes in the medical charts. The doctors observed a vaginal opening and a urethra that did not pass down the barrel of the penis, and there did not appear to be testicles, but penis there did indeed appear to be. Surgery on Miguel was contemplated, and the simplest, in the opinion of the doctors, was to truncate that penile appendage and classify Miguel as female. Today, Miguel identifies as a man, and uses male pronouns and presents as a man and prefers to be classified by other people as a man and treated accordingly, at least in a world where the only other everyday-accessible option is to be classifed and treated as a woman. Miguel, however, does not identify as male. Or as female. Miguel identifies as intersex. And if it's "no one's freaking bloody business what Miguel's physiological morphology is" (or was), Miguel gets silenced and erased, unable to speak about his identity and situation.
It would be more useful for Miguel to be able to use separate terms for the categorization by other people of his physical body as "female" and for the categorization of his gender as "girl" (then) and "man" (now) - sex and gender as two different things, both of them being characteristics that other people go around classifying people, assigning people to categorically, and treating them accordingly. And having both of those terms and concepts in front of us makes it easier to point out the obvious: that perceiving and categorizing a person as female (sex) nearly always leads to folks also perceiving and categorizing them as girl or woman (gender).
Sophia's tale is different. She was born with fairly typical female morphology, assigned female, and based on that treated as a girl growing up. She has never, as far as she can recollect, ever thought she was male, or thought she should have been male. The "girl" thing, on the other hand, was always complicated and problematic for her. Because she was perceived as female, she was categorized as a girl and treated accordingly, but she experienced this as people treating her as someone she was not, as someone with vastly different characteristics than the ones she actually had. When she was encountering people for the first time, such as the first day of classes in a new school, people expected her to think and behave more or less in the generic way they expected all girls to think and behave. After they had more experience interacting with her, people's behavior towards her changed: they regarded her as "doing it all wrong", holding her in contempt or disapproving of her for not meeting their expectations. And her own reaction was to feel anger and frustration when regarded and treated as a (typical) girl and rebellious pride when regarded and treated as a (misbehaving, atypical) not-very-girlish girl instead.
Sophia identifies as a butch. She does not regard herself as transgender. She expects "she / her" pronouns and does not present visually to the world in such a way as to prompt the average person to categorize her within their heads as a man. Her physical morphology is classified, both by her and by anyone familiar with it, as female. The lesbian community understands butch as an identity, recognizes her presentation of herself as butch, and treats her accordingly, and the qualities and characteristics that are assigned to her along with that identity are a pretty decent fit, one that does not cause her friction and dismay the way being perceived and treated as a girl did while she was growing up.
Sophia's identity, as perceived by others, could therefore be expressed as "female" (sex) and "butch" (gender).
Outside of the lesbian community Sophia has less assurance of being perceived and treated accurately. The larger culture doesn't have the same awareness of "butch" as a gender identity. Sophia herself says she is unable to make any distinction between homophobia towards her as a lesbian, misogyny towards her as a woman stepping out of the confinement of sexist expectations, or ignorance of the possibility of a female person having butch as their gender identity. From her vantage point it's the same ball of wax however you cast it.
Then there's me, Allan. My story is a lot like Sophia's, except with some factors inverted. I was born with reasonably typical male physiology, assigned male on that basis, and raised and treated as a boy growing up. Like Sophia, I didn't like the effects of that treatment and experienced it as people treating me like someone I was definitely not. And, again like Sophia, people would start off expecting me to think and behave like a generically typical boy and then, given sufficient familiarity with me and my ways, treated me instead like someone to be contemptuous of and hostile towards for not matching those expectations. And I, too, felt irritation and resentment when treated like one of the boys and was proud of my difference when it was brought to my attention.
Unlike Sophia, I don't have a ready-made community in which I can identify as and be quickly and easily perceived as a femme. I don't have that kind of social home where I get to experience that. I never have. There is a sort of femme identity in the gay male community (although it seems to be less established as a subtype of gay male than butch is for lesbians and instead is perceived more like a negative and unfortunate stereotype about all gay males). But insofar as my sexual attraction is towards people with a female morphological architecture, and the gay male community is defined around sexual attraction towards male folks, that's not of any use to me.
Which may well be a problem for butch women who are not lesbians, as well. We have more cultural awareness that not all lesbians are butch or all gay guys femme than used to be the case, but there's less cognitive appreciation for someone being a heterosexual butch female person or a heterosexual femme male person.
Do you like complicated truths and complex explanations? Is it complicated enough for you yet?
All of this so far has focused on the act of assigning sex and gender (and sexual orientation, too) identities. I've talked about those assignments either "fitting" or "not fitting", as if each person had an internal identity code that was just there inside them. That one's own identity is "just there", that it "just is".
But gender identification of one's self is also a verb. (So, for that matter, is sex identification). I think it is possible but not compellingly likely that our brains are hardwired to make us think of ourselves as male or female, girl or boy, butch or femme, or any of those other identity factors. What I am very confident of is that we recognize the patterns in the social world around us, and then we mentally place ourselves where we think we fit, and that is the act and the art of identifying. We may, in fact, "try on" various available identity-formulations, seeking that fit, until something clicks and we embrace it as a good one. Usually, that will also involve wanting to be perceived (and hence assigned) that same identity, or a reasonably close approximation of it, by the other people we come in contact with us.
There is a tendency within the larger LGBTQIA+ community to embrace the notion that our differences are built in, biological. Maybe they are - for instance, there may have been something inherently in me that shaped my tendency to resent being treated as a boy and to take rebellious pride in being seen as akin to one of the girls instead. The fact that I'm describing "identification" as an active verb, a verb that involves "choosing", doesn't mean the choices made can't be motivated by built-in differences. But I think a lot of the fondness for the "biologically built in" explanation is motivated by the questionable notion that "if we are this way by nature, we can't be blamed for it as if it is a 'behavior' we have chosen, and they'll have to accept us". People really shouldn't endorse a theory just because they like one of the conclusions it would let them draw if it were true. Firstly because it's intellectually dishonest, in the same sense that the Republican Party in the United States Congress were being intellectually dishonest if the real reason they said "the President shouldn't be allowed to pick a Supreme Court justice in his final year in office" was that the President, at that specific time, happened to be a Democrat. Secondly, because if the theory is ultimately dependent on discernable scientific fact (in this case, the existence of actual biological differences in the brain), research may prove it to be wrong and then you've spent years explaining that the reason it is OK to be gay or transgender or whatever is that it isn't a choice, it's built in, so that can backfire. Finally, the conclusion may not inevitably follow from the theory being true anyhow. Did you know that the mental health professions claim that the various mental illnesses are biologically built in? Did you know that genocidal racists have quite often believed that the people they were killing were biologically different and hence inferior? It is entirely possible for our culture to accept that people with LGBTQIA+ identities are fundamentally born that way and still to want our rights stripped from us and for our identities to be fundamentally illegal and for us as individuals to be subjected to extreme violence for being who we are.
Anyway, so now we have two forms of identity: the kind that is attributed to people by others, the identity that folks assign to you; and the kind that you carry around inside your head, the category that you recognize yourself as belonging to. And for each form, there is both a sex and a gender variable to think about.
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I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
That's an important shift of focus. Without it, a hostile skeptic may say, for example, that John is male but "thinks he is" or "dresses up as" or "wants to be thought of as" female, as if John's perceptions are in error and the reality is that John is male. But with that important shift in focus, we are drawn to the fact that some human being categorized John as male - an act that involves perceptions just as much as John's own, a human social act that is not immune to errors or differences of opinion. "Is male" gets suspended, replaced with "is regarded as male by _____".
There are a few things about the AMAB / AFAM formulation that I'm a bit less fond of, on the other hand. The "at birth" part of the phrases creates the implicit sense that the folks who assign such classifications to people do so just once, when the individual is born, and then they close up shop. That's not at all how things work, and we need a term and a concept to refer to the way that people go around doing this to us all the time, every day and in every situation. People categorize us and treat us accordingly, and we cope with that (some of us with more friction and dismay than others) because it is a real part of our social reality, being categorized and regarded in this fashion.
Another thing I'm not so comfortable with regarding AMAB / AFAB is that it makes no distinction between sex (by which I mean physical morphology, the contours of the body) and gender. I think that among transgender activists there may have been the perception that using AMAB and AFAB made as much distinction between sex and gender as they needed to make: Jane, who was given the name John by her parents, was AMAB - assigned male at birth - but is a woman, female; Jane is therefore transgender and it's no one's freaking bloody business what Jane's physical morphology is or what surgeries or hormones she takes, because the authenticity of Jane's identity as a woman shouldn't be subjected to a litmus test. That, I think, is more or less the lines along which the transgender activists were thinking when they reached their consensus around the use of the AMAB / AFAB nomenclature.
The problem with that is that transgender people are not the only gender-variant or gender-atypical people who have these concerns. Let me introduce you to Miguel, Sophia, and me, Allan.
Miguel was designated "female" by the hospital doctors (AFAB, you could say), but not without some discussion and some interesting notes in the medical charts. The doctors observed a vaginal opening and a urethra that did not pass down the barrel of the penis, and there did not appear to be testicles, but penis there did indeed appear to be. Surgery on Miguel was contemplated, and the simplest, in the opinion of the doctors, was to truncate that penile appendage and classify Miguel as female. Today, Miguel identifies as a man, and uses male pronouns and presents as a man and prefers to be classified by other people as a man and treated accordingly, at least in a world where the only other everyday-accessible option is to be classifed and treated as a woman. Miguel, however, does not identify as male. Or as female. Miguel identifies as intersex. And if it's "no one's freaking bloody business what Miguel's physiological morphology is" (or was), Miguel gets silenced and erased, unable to speak about his identity and situation.
It would be more useful for Miguel to be able to use separate terms for the categorization by other people of his physical body as "female" and for the categorization of his gender as "girl" (then) and "man" (now) - sex and gender as two different things, both of them being characteristics that other people go around classifying people, assigning people to categorically, and treating them accordingly. And having both of those terms and concepts in front of us makes it easier to point out the obvious: that perceiving and categorizing a person as female (sex) nearly always leads to folks also perceiving and categorizing them as girl or woman (gender).
Sophia's tale is different. She was born with fairly typical female morphology, assigned female, and based on that treated as a girl growing up. She has never, as far as she can recollect, ever thought she was male, or thought she should have been male. The "girl" thing, on the other hand, was always complicated and problematic for her. Because she was perceived as female, she was categorized as a girl and treated accordingly, but she experienced this as people treating her as someone she was not, as someone with vastly different characteristics than the ones she actually had. When she was encountering people for the first time, such as the first day of classes in a new school, people expected her to think and behave more or less in the generic way they expected all girls to think and behave. After they had more experience interacting with her, people's behavior towards her changed: they regarded her as "doing it all wrong", holding her in contempt or disapproving of her for not meeting their expectations. And her own reaction was to feel anger and frustration when regarded and treated as a (typical) girl and rebellious pride when regarded and treated as a (misbehaving, atypical) not-very-girlish girl instead.
Sophia identifies as a butch. She does not regard herself as transgender. She expects "she / her" pronouns and does not present visually to the world in such a way as to prompt the average person to categorize her within their heads as a man. Her physical morphology is classified, both by her and by anyone familiar with it, as female. The lesbian community understands butch as an identity, recognizes her presentation of herself as butch, and treats her accordingly, and the qualities and characteristics that are assigned to her along with that identity are a pretty decent fit, one that does not cause her friction and dismay the way being perceived and treated as a girl did while she was growing up.
Sophia's identity, as perceived by others, could therefore be expressed as "female" (sex) and "butch" (gender).
Outside of the lesbian community Sophia has less assurance of being perceived and treated accurately. The larger culture doesn't have the same awareness of "butch" as a gender identity. Sophia herself says she is unable to make any distinction between homophobia towards her as a lesbian, misogyny towards her as a woman stepping out of the confinement of sexist expectations, or ignorance of the possibility of a female person having butch as their gender identity. From her vantage point it's the same ball of wax however you cast it.
Then there's me, Allan. My story is a lot like Sophia's, except with some factors inverted. I was born with reasonably typical male physiology, assigned male on that basis, and raised and treated as a boy growing up. Like Sophia, I didn't like the effects of that treatment and experienced it as people treating me like someone I was definitely not. And, again like Sophia, people would start off expecting me to think and behave like a generically typical boy and then, given sufficient familiarity with me and my ways, treated me instead like someone to be contemptuous of and hostile towards for not matching those expectations. And I, too, felt irritation and resentment when treated like one of the boys and was proud of my difference when it was brought to my attention.
Unlike Sophia, I don't have a ready-made community in which I can identify as and be quickly and easily perceived as a femme. I don't have that kind of social home where I get to experience that. I never have. There is a sort of femme identity in the gay male community (although it seems to be less established as a subtype of gay male than butch is for lesbians and instead is perceived more like a negative and unfortunate stereotype about all gay males). But insofar as my sexual attraction is towards people with a female morphological architecture, and the gay male community is defined around sexual attraction towards male folks, that's not of any use to me.
Which may well be a problem for butch women who are not lesbians, as well. We have more cultural awareness that not all lesbians are butch or all gay guys femme than used to be the case, but there's less cognitive appreciation for someone being a heterosexual butch female person or a heterosexual femme male person.
Do you like complicated truths and complex explanations? Is it complicated enough for you yet?
All of this so far has focused on the act of assigning sex and gender (and sexual orientation, too) identities. I've talked about those assignments either "fitting" or "not fitting", as if each person had an internal identity code that was just there inside them. That one's own identity is "just there", that it "just is".
But gender identification of one's self is also a verb. (So, for that matter, is sex identification). I think it is possible but not compellingly likely that our brains are hardwired to make us think of ourselves as male or female, girl or boy, butch or femme, or any of those other identity factors. What I am very confident of is that we recognize the patterns in the social world around us, and then we mentally place ourselves where we think we fit, and that is the act and the art of identifying. We may, in fact, "try on" various available identity-formulations, seeking that fit, until something clicks and we embrace it as a good one. Usually, that will also involve wanting to be perceived (and hence assigned) that same identity, or a reasonably close approximation of it, by the other people we come in contact with us.
There is a tendency within the larger LGBTQIA+ community to embrace the notion that our differences are built in, biological. Maybe they are - for instance, there may have been something inherently in me that shaped my tendency to resent being treated as a boy and to take rebellious pride in being seen as akin to one of the girls instead. The fact that I'm describing "identification" as an active verb, a verb that involves "choosing", doesn't mean the choices made can't be motivated by built-in differences. But I think a lot of the fondness for the "biologically built in" explanation is motivated by the questionable notion that "if we are this way by nature, we can't be blamed for it as if it is a 'behavior' we have chosen, and they'll have to accept us". People really shouldn't endorse a theory just because they like one of the conclusions it would let them draw if it were true. Firstly because it's intellectually dishonest, in the same sense that the Republican Party in the United States Congress were being intellectually dishonest if the real reason they said "the President shouldn't be allowed to pick a Supreme Court justice in his final year in office" was that the President, at that specific time, happened to be a Democrat. Secondly, because if the theory is ultimately dependent on discernable scientific fact (in this case, the existence of actual biological differences in the brain), research may prove it to be wrong and then you've spent years explaining that the reason it is OK to be gay or transgender or whatever is that it isn't a choice, it's built in, so that can backfire. Finally, the conclusion may not inevitably follow from the theory being true anyhow. Did you know that the mental health professions claim that the various mental illnesses are biologically built in? Did you know that genocidal racists have quite often believed that the people they were killing were biologically different and hence inferior? It is entirely possible for our culture to accept that people with LGBTQIA+ identities are fundamentally born that way and still to want our rights stripped from us and for our identities to be fundamentally illegal and for us as individuals to be subjected to extreme violence for being who we are.
Anyway, so now we have two forms of identity: the kind that is attributed to people by others, the identity that folks assign to you; and the kind that you carry around inside your head, the category that you recognize yourself as belonging to. And for each form, there is both a sex and a gender variable to think about.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts