77. TIME TO EVOLVE ON GENDER - Why We Can't Ethically Support An Exclusionary Binary

A few weeks ago I put out a tweet asking readers if there were any issues they wanted me to cover here on Philosophy Unleashed (and if you have any and didn’t see the tweet - get in touch!). One response suggested I write about gender abolition, pointing out “the merging of gender roles over recent years begs the question of whether the traditional gender binary is really necessary at all“ and I must say the suggestion definitely scratched at an itch that I’ve been feeling for quite a while now. After all, I work in an all-boys school, something I have been finding increasingly anachronistic year by year, especially as more and more of our students begin to identify themselves as female by the end of their time with us. When I bring up with our Academy Trust the idea that our single-sex schools are problematic I am usually given the argument that because we have both all-boys and all-girls schools, ultimately we are still offering equal education to all. Furthermore, as all the girls at our boys schools and boys at our girls schools who transition, or want to transition, from the gender they were assigned at birth and find themselves now in the “wrong” school for their gender have so far wanted to stay at the school where they have made their friends and know the teachers, and this has been allowed, theoretically (although they will often be misgendered as part of a collective group, may feel uncomfortable with the uniform, etc.) the single-sex school system doesn’t technically have to be a barrier to trans students. But what about those students whose gender fits neither side of this male/female binary? When we acknowledge the existence of non-binary individuals suddenly the awkward fudge of “separate but equal” falls radically apart as there is no “Theys’ School” within the binary system.

This blindspot to non-binary people is not exclusive to education. Recently singer/songwriter Sam Smith was excluded from the BRIT Awards categories of Best Male and Best Female Solo Artist because they are neither. There is no BRIT Award to acknowledge Best Non-Binary Solo Artist. Now, putting aside - as with the single-sex school system - the entire other issue of whether there even should be gendered separation in these areas at all (Best Solo Artist would cover all - though likely be biased against more marginalised sectors of society) it seems clear that if you are separating the genders for such categories then to not include all genders is to knowingly either exclude artists who don’t fit the binary or force them into being misgendered for their work to be acknowledged. Similarly, the 2021 UK Census has caused some controversy in the non-binary and transgender communities because its attempt to adapt to new understandings of gender have fallen short. A mandatory question asks “what is your sex” and only gives the option male or female while guiding respondents to record the gender recorded on their birth certificate (which will not always correspond to the sex/gender the respondent actually identifies as). Meanwhile there is a question about gender, which includes the option to specify and clarify, but that question is optional. While many have seen this as excellent progress to give the option to state gender in this way, some trans and non-binary people see within the framing of these questions a sense of the government taking the biological sex recorded on a birth certificate (where only male or female is allowed) as somehow more “official” than the merely optional idea of what the respondent actually identifies as - a way of degrading trans or non-binary identities as “choices” or “opinions” rather than reality.

As a cis-gendered (someone who identifies with the gender that corresponds with their birth-sex) man, I am as guilty as anyone of thinking such retrograde things in the past. In fact, I believed I was simply “doing philosophy” when I would question the validity of gender identifies. After all, I reasoned, drawing on my A-level sociology background, gender has always been a mere social construct so how can anyone “be” specifically any gender? Aren’t we all just biologically male or female based on sex organs and then personality-wise can be whoever we want to be because identifying certain behaviours/instincts/personality traits as distinctly “male” or “female” is a fiction anyway? What does it mean to “feel feminine” as a biological man or “feel masculine” as a biological woman? Is such an idea even coherent? Easy for me to say, having never felt a clash between my sex and my gender, but even when I learnt about gender dysphoria there was my A-level psychology to draw on and so I questioned why this was a negative bodily perception we took seriously when other examples of people feeling alienated from their body were seen as something to be challenged? My sister, for example, had suffered a severe eating disorder. When she saw her body in a mirror she did not see a true reflection of herself and believed all kinds of negative things about her body which she wanted changed at drastic cost. Why when we feel alienated from our body and it manifests as an eating disorder do we treat the alienation as something which needs to be overcome but when it manifests as wanting to identify as a different gender do we encourage it? To put forward such ideas felt philosophical at the time because with them I was questioning norms and received wisdoms and analysing concepts for coherency. Yet there was a lot missing from the analysis, which ultimately caused me to change my mind, and I must have known the analysis was flawed even as I thought it, because I only ever said such things out loud around other cis-gendered people who already thought the same thing as I did. We knew that stating such a controversial view to a transgender or non-binary person would be hurtful, and the fact that it would be hurtful made me consider there may be more to it than I was capable of grasping having never experience gender dysphoria myself. So I spent some time re-assessing and looking at where I might be wrong in my dismissal of people’s very real feelings.

Firstly, the sort of body dysmorphia which manifests as an eating disorder can kill you. The solution - starvation/binging/purging - only ends one way unless treated and that way is suffering and death. The consequences of indulging in that particular self-perception is self-harming. They do not feel good about what they are doing or feeling. In contrast, the more I actually took the time to listen to the stories of people who had experienced gender dysphoria, the more I realised this wasn’t about having a negative desire to change a part of their body they weren’t happy with - this was a genuine sense of distress that the physical characteristics they presented to the world didn’t match with the inner identity of who they actually were. And the solutions - surgeries or hormones to physically transition, or non-medical changes to feel more comfortable - did not harm the person, they liberated them. They made them feel like the person they always were. Not self-harm, but self-care. As a punk this need to express who you really are - even if it breaks stereotypes and typical norms - was something I accepted routinely of my spiked haired and ripped clothes wearing cis-gendered friends. Why could I not grasp it when it came to an expression of gender identity instead? Exploring my prejudice I think it was because it seemed to me like giving in to the social construct of gender and giving a manufactured fiction about who we are supposed to be a power it didn’t deserve. If you wanted to behave and dress a certain way why couldn’t you do it just because of the particular reproductive organs you were born with? But again - that was easy to say when I myself could move effortlessly in a world built on those socially constructed fictions. I never had to justify my very existence. I never had to deal with the millions of everyday prejudices that told me I wasn’t who I knew I was. I never had to look in the mirror and see something looking at back at me other than myself.

Better educated by listening to the actual lived experiences of trans and non-binary people instead of reasoning in the abstract through the blinkers of my own gender privileges, I realised, gender may be a social construct, but we are forced to live in the society that constructed it. If gender is the game we are forced to play then let people feel comfortable and identify as the correct gender that they feel they are. And if the constructed binary of male and female turns out to be too limiting and not fit for the purpose of fully describing how they feel, let them add to the construct and break the binary. None of the above. A mixture of both. Everything in between. A further corollary of gender being a social construct is the recognition that biological sex is no determination of anything beyond the obvious and superficial bodily differences. Basing identity on a construct like gender makes sense because identity itself is equally constructed, and a synthesis of all kinds of other contingencies and constructs. Basing identity on your biological sex is like forcing yourself to identify as a certain kind of person simply because of the colour of your hair.

It seems obvious to the bulk of society these days that dated views on the biological determinism of sex should be rejected. If you suggested that women should be barred from having the same rights as men because of their reproductive organs you would be laughed at or face a lawsuit for discrimination. We have overcome these old ways of thinking with technological, intellectual and emotional advances which have rendered the old narratives obsolete. Yet for some reason the myth of gender norms seems harder for people to shake despite the obvious failings of the binary male/female model. If the failings aren’t obvious to you then consider how diverse the men and women you know in your life are. And if there are some elements you can identify which are universal only to all who identify as men, and others universal only to those who identify as women, can you honestly say that these traits are innate features rather than learned behaviours from a socialisation which actively encourages them? For me, I cannot think of an inherent feature of the masculine or the feminine which is not constructed, subject to change, or widely existent in members of both male and female genders, making the idea that gender is “either/or” self-evidently untrue. From that the idea that gender is, in fact, a spectrum makes far more sense. And if gender is a spectrum and not a binary then limiting discussions of gender to the male/female binary is undeniably exclusionary of any who don’t strongly identify with the male or female ends of the spectrum.

What it really comes down to is a moral question more than a biological one: do you want to live in a world where people to feel comfortable in their own skin and accepted for who they are, or a world where many people are made to feel like their existence doesn’t count and their lived experience can be ignored? To me it seems clear that the former is the sort of world we should be aiming for and the latter is no world to aspire to. By ignoring non-binary identities, by misgendering transgender people or writing off how they feel, we are making a world which is hostile and unwelcoming to many simply for being who they are. And like all evolutions in ethical thinking and revolutions in how we construct the world we live in, opening our eyes to something new like this may make us see that there was a lot about the way we used to do things which need changing. See, for example, how we are still struggling to make a society which is less racist, less sexist than it has been despite the great efforts and progress of the last hundred years. This is actually a cause for celebration rather than despair because it shows us that with each step forward we become emboldened to notice how the racist and sexist attitudes we have already defeated had tentacles which spread far further than we may have first realised. They are cancers which metastasise and infiltrate all aspects of our lives, and tackling the different racisms and sexisms in different venues requires different treatments, but once we know how to detect the infection we get better at detecting its mutations. The same will be true about gender. We are already making progress on some fronts, recognising that gender should not be a barrier for boys who want to do “girl” things and girls who want to do “boy” things. But the arguments which begin like that have further entailments, and now we need to start thinking about them too. If gender isn’t as we have previously conceptualised it to be - what else follows?

I am not sure if the reader who asked me to think about this is right to advocate complete gender abolition because people seem to feel strongly about the gender(s) they identify with all across the spectrum, but certainly a gender evolution is needed for the true fluidity of existing gender identities to be accounted for and included wherever gender is being discussed in the modern context. Having a Best Female Solo Artist and comparable all-girls school alongside a Best Male Solo Artist and successful all-boys school was indeed progress when women were being excluded and treated unequally from men in the fields of education and pop music acclaim, but that existing progress now has to progress further still, and acknowledge those we continue to exclude. The great strides forward we have already made are not nothing, but they remain, sadly, not enough.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers.