Gender Trouble

Situating gender as domestication is a way to understand gender violence outside of an essentialist and white framework. Without this understanding, all theories which attribute some natural dimension to sex/gender (from eco-feminist to Marxist feminist) are structurally unable to account for the violence, capture, and exclusion experienced by anyone who deviates from the gender binary or the heterosexual matrix. These ideologies will expand to pay lip-service to queer and transpeople, but they never alter the structure of their theory. This amounts to little more than the liberal politics of inclusion. If, however, we understand gender as something which captures us, rather than something natural to us (or extracted from our biological existence), we can begin to analyze all the methods of domination experienced by queer or transgender people. Brutality and exclusion come to be recognized as the policing methods by which individuals remain captured; assimilation and exploitation represent a more sophisticated capture. From here I can see the line which binds together the boys who called me faggot as a teenager and the gay men who would pay me for sex a few years later. Everything about the refusal of gender follows from this. The criticism of identity, assimilation, medicalization or any technique of the self becomes meaningful once it is placed in this continuum.

– Baedan – “Against The Gendered Nightmare”

On March 23, 2016, North Carolina approved a law which ignores the gender identities of transgender individuals by forcing them to use bathrooms based on their biological sex. Such a bold and disgusting act of discrimination and bigotry has provoked widespread outrage from LGBT individuals and transgender activists across the country. It continues to demonstrate how deeply ingrained essentialist, naturalized perceptions of gender are in the public mind and how far we have to go to liberate ourselves from these oppressive categorizations.

The bill was signed into law in reaction to an ordinance proposed by the city of Charlotte, NC which would have added gender and sexual orientation as protected classes under existing anti-discrimination laws. The proposed ordinance included provisions granting transgender individuals the right to use public restrooms in accordance with their gender identity as well as protection for LGBT individuals from discrimination by businesses and public institutions.

The potential for this kind of egalitarian arrangement led to the fast-tracking of House Bill 2, known as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act. The bill requires individuals to use public restrooms based on the gender specified on their birth certificate. The proposal reinforces transphobic stereotypes which portray transgender individuals as predatory as well as preconceptions of gender as a natural, biologically determined category which is forced upon one at birth.

That’s disgusting enough. But in all the controversy about which bathroom people are forced to use, a provision striking down existing nondiscrimination statutes across the state has gone widely ignored, effectively enshrining discrimination in state law. The sweeping implication of this is the disassembly of civil rights for huge sections of the population, leaving individuals facing discrimination based on race, gender, religion, or any other category without legal remedy in state courts. The politicization of gender identity and sexuality have in this case been used as a Trojan Horse in order to implement a dismantling of basic protections under law.

The overwrought obsession with what sex organs people have and how it conforms to their gender identity represents what Michel Foucault discusses in his History of Sexuality Vol. 1 under the name ‘the repressive hypothesis’. Rather than exclusively repressing sexuality in the population, assemblages of power compel individuals to continually talk about it. The 18th century saw the emergence of a discursive explosion around sexuality, with authority figures using the ‘incitement to discourse’ to categorize and control populations. As time went on, this discourse shifted from discussion of the married couple as a site of social reproduction to a preoccupation with the ‘world of perversion’; criminal sexuality, child sexuality, homosexuality, and other forms deemed unacceptable by authorities. This discussion and analysis of sexual forms deemed ‘perverse’ serves to power a disciplinary apparatus which categorizes and manipulates the bodies and subjectivities of individuals.

In a modern context, this ‘incitement to discourse’ disproportionately affects LGBT individuals. Especially as regards transgender individuals, there is a tremendous preoccupation with whether sex is naturally determined or not and what organs a person does or does not have, leading to debates over gender reassignment surgery, access to hormones, and other topics relative to gender fluidity. In order to ensure these options are only available to ‘the right people’, individuals are compelled to speak in detail about their sexuality and gender identity to doctors, psychologists, and other figures of authority. It also manifests in increased distrust and monitoring, leading to stereotypes of transgender individuals as predatory and stoking fears that lead to proposals such as North Carolina’s discriminatory law. This obsession forces transgender individuals to have to explain and justify their gender identity under the observation of a heteronormative gaze which presumes sex and gender as natural, biologically-determined categories, along with the attendant behavioral standards which accompany them.

Of course, as Judith Butler demonstrated conclusively in her book Gender Trouble, gender is anything but natural. In her book, Butler challenges the conventional understanding of sex as biologically determined and gender as culturally determined by demonstrating both to be socially constructed categories. Against this normative understanding, she argues that gender is always performative; that is, that there is no essential identity underlying the expression of one’s gender identity. By showing how gender is constructed through acts of performance, she opens the door to performative acts that subversively undermine gender norms and demonstrate how gender identity is purely interpretive, with no underlying essence.

Gender is a tool of authority, an apparatus which intercepts, shapes, and categorizes individual bodies. It is necessarily hierarchical, creating a historical division of labor between men and women, with feminine labor valued less than masculine labor. Women are forced into relationships of economic dependency on men, leading to coercive institutions like the family, wherein women are tasked with the crucial, but unpaid, tasks of reproductive labor. There is also a class element to this division of labor, with different expectations for both men and women of different economic backgrounds.

But gender’s influence is felt far beyond the economic sphere. Gender carries with it a host of normative presumptions which shape our bodies and subjectivities; defining behaviors, clothing, interests, etc. which correspond to standards of masculine and feminine. Singular individuals are categorized based on their presumed gender identity, and there are penalties for those who transgress outside the norms prescribed to their sex, primarily stigmatization and ostracization. This leads to a desire by most to conform to their assigned gender identity, embodying stereotyped ideals of what it means to be a man or a woman and causing a great deal of anxiety for those who do not neatly fit into these predefined expectations.

Oppressive measures like those recently enacted in North Carolina demonstrate the need for the category of gender to be revealed for what it is: a contingent, socially-constructed apparatus which is used as a tool to govern and discipline bodies. While efforts to strip individuals who do not neatly conform to gender expectations of their legal rights is indeed a reprehensible practice, our response cannot be primarily based on a call for more rights and greater recognition by systems of authority. This would only serve to recuperate resistance into the recognized channels of government, while affirming and maintaining the structural categories which allow these expectations to exist in the first place.

The power of gender as a tool of authority lies in our accepting the presumptions which underlie it and choosing to abide by them. By recognizing gender (and all identities) as socially constituted and manufactured, with no essential or foundational grounding, we undermine the hold it has over our lives and open up a multitude of opportunities to subvert and resist the normative definitions and behaviors it prescribes. We are not first and foremost ‘women’ nor ‘men’, nor any other categorical description, but unique individuals defined by our singularity and difference. It is on this basis that we can conceive of forms of resistance which subvert the repressive limits of gender and coincide with our projects for self-determination.