Whose gender is it anyway?
When we discuss the concept of gender who do we place our faith in, our trust in, to give us a complete concept of what gender actually means? Is the construction of gender a sociological one, with a binary construct developed to explain biology? Or, is it a personal wellspring of understanding that each of us innately knows? Or, is it an amalgam of these and something more? When we talk of gender as a semantic term we draw on all three questions, relying on others to help us answer them, and who we trust becomes essential in our understanding of gender.
Which ever culture you are brought up in has its own conceptions of gender, its own way of answering the question of what exactly is gender. In English linguistically we mean two ideas: 1) the internal notion of self, the inner innate understanding of the gendered self, and 2) the expression we externalise, the clothes we wear, the adornments we put on, and the other manifestations of how we wish to express our inner identity. Other languages have different constructions of gender, some using different words to split apart the internal and external. It is the language we are born into and exposed to that helps define, in part, the societal truths of gender.
This then leads to the philosophical understanding of gender, the notions of binary male/female and the more expansive spectrum with each of those semantic concepts at either end. Indeed, if you perceive gender as a vast hinterland of internal self-understanding, the theoretically gendered identity is as unique as each individual, with the semantic of a given language the only conceptual boundaries placed on it. If you are never asked to question your gendered self, or if your gendered self is not something you actively internally enquire about, then your mode of understand will likely fall back on the societal ideas. However, if you begin to dig into what makes you a gendered being, then you have to rely on the philosophical conversation within your society. Gender becomes a matter of time and place, with your understanding of gender reliant on those concepts prevalent in the moment you begin to interrogate it.
Take this a step further and ask why you are presented with these concepts of gender, and why you should engage with any of the ideas presented to you. In a binary, or gender spectrum, version of gendered identity your linguistic comprehension is reliant on working through those societal ideas. If you find within one of those binary, or non-binary, categories then it your own understanding of self that guide you there. However, it is the world’s, and your society’s, reflection of that back onto you that both affirms that gendered self and provides the bounding within which you exist. If your gendered self is normative, fits within the expectations of society, then your ability to engage and thrive is all the easier. Your gender goes from the self-understood to becoming an artefact for societal dissection and engagement. Conversely, if your self-understanding is deemed deviant and disordered by society, then it is society that is inherently the problem, not your understanding of your gender.
This tension between the inner self and the external acceptance of your gendered expression is key to understanding why many of the trans and feminist arguments end up so heated and contested. By setting aside matters of biology and focusing on the dual nature of English’s semantic term gender, it is possible to address the psychological nature of the gendered self and then the external construction of gender expression without being biologically essentialist. Every single person has a gendered self and a gender expression, this is not a cis or trans dichotomy. Just because you do not interrogate your gender identity or gender expression does not mean that you do not have either. It just means that you are congruent within and without yourself. Yet, society has much to say about your gendered self.
Society, in particular the media and corporations, sell a particular idea of what gendered expression should be. A girl should play with dolls and be demure, a boy guns and be rough. Even amongst binary trans folk this narrative holds sway, for if a boy is soft and feminine, plays with dolls and likes pink then surely they must identify as a girl, and thus are gendered as such. Yet, this is a logical fallacy, because it is only the internal understanding of your gendered self that can truly make that leap. The external trappings of gender, masculine, feminine, or neutral, do not make you internally anything except what you understand your self to be. Just because pink is associated with girls does not make it inherently feminine thing, it is just that as a society we choose to encode it as such.
It is this encoding of meaning that trips up what gender is and becomes, that we insist within society to ascribe notions of the external to notions of the internal gendered self. Just because something is ascribed to one gender or the other does not inherently make the person who enjoys it or appreciates it that gender. Gender expression does not equal gender identity, and those who attempt to police a rigid enforcement of expression should match identity fail to grasp this.
In answer to the three questions posed, the answer to whose gender is it would appear to be manifestly the individuals in reflection of the time/place/society they find themselves in. We can no more escape our moment in time than we can the bodies we inhabit, and because we are inherently a communal species we are also reflections of the people around us. On the deep internal level we have to respond to our own inquiries and understand our internal gendered self, while our external gender expression is based on our own buy-in, or rejection of, the societally constructed norms of the gender we understand ourselves to be.
