Being honest with the gendered self
Gender is a slippery thing, especially when you are not entirely sure where your own internal gender compass points. Much conversation around trans identities revolves around what age you first express gender divergence, whether transness is innate or develops, and whether you can truly know if you are the gender, you eventually align yourself with. The truth is that there are no definitive correct answers to these questions, as essentially, they are all relative to your own personal experience. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that part of the modern societal problems with gender identity is that we are desperate to wrap these questions up in easy answers.
The fact is that no-one can provide a fixed reference point for a specific gender without it becoming hideously outmoded pretty much as soon as it is put forth. What is male, what is female, what is non-binary are all utterly subjective terms that are as wrapped up in societal context as they are in biological determinism. One of the key goals of feminism has always been to tease apart this notion that one’s biological assignment at birth should not determine your fate in the world. Yet, when it comes to those who explore the gender hinterlands, we as society readily reinforce those existing gender constructs with prejudice.
Is it ever truly possibly to completely know your internal gender? I would argue this depends on which intrinsic or extrinsic mode of thinking you choose to take. If gender is the performative biological extrinsic interaction with the world, then your internal understand is as much a reflection of the society and culture you grow up in. If it is an intrinsic thought process, subjective only to yourself through reflection and innate understanding, then the physical shell and external trimmings are a by product to that. Societies and cultures have produced the binary model of gender because it perceives gender as this extrinsic manifestation of millennia of cultural evolution, and to bring in the intrinsic intangible mind space makes all of that messy through dint of shattering easy answers.
Which then leads to the question of honesty in gendered self-perception. Is it ever right to say to a person they are not gender X simply because you perceive then externally as a different gender? The honest answer is no, yet societally we readily jump to preconceptions when we meet people for the first time. Male/Female. Easy. But the honest truth is that easy does not intersect well with the personal. Does it really matter is being gender variant or wanting to explore the gender hinterland are innate biological processes or places we come to through our own life experiences? If we are graced the time and space to fully live our lives then the answer should again be no. Yet, culturally we are quick to demand a gender purity test, that if somehow we were not assigned a gender at birth then how could we possibly understand or exist in that gendered space?
Gender, as an English language construct, asks us to perceive of an essence of language that begins to entangle you the further you explore the roots and sub-roots. What do we mean by woman? Could the very definition of womanhood be the same from one generation to the next? Chattel, property, waiting to be married, spinster, mother, maiden, crone. Woman alone feeds into many roots and branches, some obvious, others hidden in the depths of our culture. To simplify woman down to an idealised form is to discard 3000 years of cultural evolution. Yet, this is what we do when we demand non-cis women align to a idealised understanding of womanhood, be it inclusive or radically exclusionary.
And this is just English. Every language and culture have the same roots and branches that twist and turn language into more than mere words. For all we desire simplicity and straight forward concepts, every language freight meaning and context with words, hence the need for dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Being honest culturally means framing your own understanding of gender within the societal context you find yourself in. We are not raised in a vacuum; we are all exposed to ideas and processes far beyond our own control. If we are taught concepts in our schooling and media then it is hard to break through those, and thus when we come to analyse our internal gender compass, we can only frame our thoughts based on those same experiences.
This means that the slipperiness of gender is less to do with our own inabilities to articulate meaning, but rather down to the ever evolving nature of how we societally construct be the language of gender and the context within with it sits. This is as much as cis thing as it is non-cis, and is a key reason why it is essential that we break down this linguistic barrier between the two. Feminist critiques of socially constructed gender benefit all folk, not just those in the gender hinterland, and by having honest and free-wheeling conversations about gender we can enhance our collective gender experiences.
