Gender is a culturally negotiated process.
A child is born sexed (or more rarely, intersexed), but only acculturation can ascribe gender. The child learns to behave in the manner associated with his/her biological sex, either masculine or feminine, in accordance with sociocultural praxis. Gender, like biological sex, has also historically been constructed by Western culture as a hard dichotomy, an either/or between masculine and feminine, and these genders were not given equal value. Traits perceived as ‘masculine’, such as activity, strength, and rationality, have been traditionally considered better than ‘feminine’ traits, like passivity, emotionalism, and compassion (Fausto-Sterling, 1992). The belief that there are inherent gender characteristics determined by biology was thus been used to assign ‘natural’ social roles, such as public labor and political authority for men, and domestic functions, including childcare, for women.
At the dawn of feminism, one of the first shots fired in the battle for equality was to challenge the idea that gender (and therefore gender roles and gender norms) was hardwired into biological sex. Women, feminists argued, were not slaves to their biological sex. A uterus did not define what a human being was capable of.
This was a hard message to get across, and is still resisted by many people even today.
Why?
In part, it is because the belief that women were inextricably linked to their bodies in a way men were not has its roots in the very heart of Western philosophical heritage (Schiebringer, 2000a; Butler, 1993; Wilshire, 1989). Philosophers, including Plato, Descartes, and Augustine, considered the body a ‘prison’ that ‘caged’ and limited the rational soul, creating a mythic split between mind/soul and body that became commonly known as Cartesian dualism. For millennia (and until relatively recently), philosophers argued that men were more aligned with the spiritual/mental aspects of this duality, while women were more associated with the body. Based on this ‘truism’, women were considered inherently inferior because of their close association with the emotional, animalistic body (Bordo, 1993; Shildrick and Price,1999; Spelman, 1999; Grosz, 1994). Worse, women were not only allegorized as the Body, but their reproductive organs were believed to control them (Thompson, 1999). It was considered a fact that while men made choices by using their mind/soul, women did only what their uteruses made them do.
For centuries, Western medicine was based in the humoral system, which believed the human body contained four fluid humors: cold/wet, cold/dry, hot/wet, and hot/dry. Under this system, it was decided that women were simply deformed men who had been too ‘cold’ to expel the penis and scrotum, creating an ‘inside-out’ model of the female reproductive organs (Schiebringer, 2000b). As a result, women were “mutilated males” and “monsters”, inasmuch as women were the end result of a normal process that had gone ‘wrong’ and failed to produce a male (Wilshire, 1989). This image of women as deformed men correlates Women as ‘monster’ (Wilshire,1989; Braidotti, 1997; Shildrick and Price, 1999; Schiebinger, 2000). This humoral-based understanding of the uterus and of women as ‘men gone wrong’ was adopted by European physicians and would hold sway until the 18th century (Thompson, 1999).
This monster/woman image had the deeper implication in that women, simply by being not-men, were anomalies which needed t be feared and restrained. The body of a woman “shares with the monster the privilege of bringing out a unique blend of fascination and horror” (Braidotti, 1997). This simultaneous attraction and repulsion felt toward the female body has been postulated to be the key to misogynists’ secret dread and fear of women (English, 2000; Braidotti, 1997). Even when the belief in humoral medicine and the ‘inside-out’ understanding of women’s bodies was eclipsed by the growing information on the physiological processes and anatomy of the human body, women were still portrayed as ‘monsters’, abnormal beings that deviated from the normal — as did any body that was not a White, heterosexual, male body (Thompson, 1999; Braidotti, 1997; Fausto-Sterling, 1995; Schiebinger, 2000a; Schiebinger, 2000b; Urla and Terry, 1995). During this century, or the Enlightenment period, the uterus was thought to be naturally toxic, and a women’s ‘spoiled seed’ left inside the uterus was believed to cause putrefaction (Thompson, 1999). During this era of burgeoning scientific discoveries, Western physicians and anatomists began ‘discovering’ sex differences in every “bone, muscle, nerve, and vein of the human body”, rendering the Woman’s body more authoritatively different (Schiebinger, 2000b).
This trend of ‘proving’ the fundamental physiological difference of Woman as a method of demonstrating her essential weaknesses would continue into the Victorian era of the 1800’s. Nineteenth century criminologist Cesare Lombroso found that women were as a “man arrested in his intellectual and physical development” and found that the physical characteristics of women’s skulls indicated that they were more like criminals, prostitutes, and children than they were like men (Horn, 1995). The woman’s body continued to be portrayed as congenitally inferior and subnormal when compared to the male body, just as it had been thousands of years before. Not only were women equated to the body rather than the soul/mind, the female body was biologically flawed from birth because it was not male.
The lesbian body, in particular, was seen as abnormal. In the 19th and 20th centuries ‘science’ tried repeatedly to ‘prove’ that lesbian bodies were an even more monsterous version of the already flawed female form. Homosexuals were theorized to be an “intermediate” biological sex, the result of an unknown birth defect or throwback to a “more primitive stage of eveloutinary development than normal (heterozexual) people” (Terry, 1995). Other scientists theorized that homosexuality was a ‘disease’ caused by a bodily malformation. It was argued that doctors could ‘identify’ a lesbian by deformed, larger genitals and the “hypertrophy” of the clitoris (Terry, 1995). According to the ‘science’ of the 20th century, you could spot lesbians by looking for the women who had had:
“a common deficiency of fat in the shoulders and abdomen, dense skulls, firm muscles, excess hair on the face, chest, back, and lower extremities, a tendency toward “masculine” distribution of pubic hair, a low pitched voice, and either excessively developed or underdeveloped breasts … muscles [that were] small but firm, but angular, with “masculine contours” (Terry, 1995)
Leaving aside for the moment the mindboggling mystery of what constitutes a ‘masculine’ distribution of pubic hair, it is obvious that these ‘signs’ of ‘sexual inversion’ of women were completely arbitrary. Who decides if breasts are too big or too small to be heterosexual? What is ‘excess’ hair on the face, and does it still apply to post-menopausal women? How much fat does a woman need to have in her shoulders and abdomen before she magically transforms into a herterozexual?
However illogical the stance appears to any rational human being, this sort of ‘biological realism’ was what women and homosexuals were up against when they began to demand their civil rights and socio-cultural equality. The patriarchy insisted that it had scientific ‘proof’ that women couldn’t vote, because having a uterus meant that they couldn’t think rationally. Biology ‘proved’ that homosexuals were a disease to be cured or eradicated, not a spectrum of human sexuality to be recognized.
That’s why the insistence by TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) that a “woman” must only be defined in terms of biological sex is so bat crap crazy. The very foundation of feminism is about removing the perceived biological limits on women. For centuries it was a biological ‘fact’ that women couldn’t understand math, or study science, or participate in sports, or be financially independent. Moreover, because sex and gender were considered identical, the very concept of womanhood was biologically determined, and thus ‘femine’ gender roles were thought to be innate and unchangeable. Fighting wasn’t ‘feminine’, QED women could not join the military. Science wasn’t ‘feminie’, QED women couldn’t go to medical school. THAT is the end result of biology = gender. THAT is what TERFs are unthinkingly supporting when they argue a woman is wholly defined by her reproductive organs.
TERFs also insist that to accept trans women as women harms cis women and lesbians because it “erases” biological sex and disenfranchises lesbians. This is untrue. No one in the trans community is trying to claim cis women are not women. They simply argue, rightly, that gender is not the same thing as biology. No one is ‘born’ a biological woman. People are born biologically male, female, or intersexed and then learn their gender roles via culture. The trans community argues that gender may be ascribed at birth based on what your genitals look like, but no one has the right to decide how ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ you become. The transgender ideology that genitals do not define a person’s abilities or interests is the bedrock of feminism. Furthermore, no one in the trans community is claiming cis lesbians aren’t women, or don’t face oppression in patriarchal systems. It is the trans community that defends the clear distinction between ‘butch’ cis lesbians and trans men. The trans community, unlike TERFs, do not consider genitalia to be the same thing as gender identity or sexual orientation.
The cold, hard truth of it is that it is the TERF community who is trying to oppress and elide trans identities, not the trans community trying to erase either straight cis women or lesbian cis women.
Currently, TERFs are attacking Margaret E. Atwood on Twitter, one of the leading feminist writers in 20th century literature, because she dared to suggest (correctly) that biological sex and gender are both seperate and fluid. The TERFs are calling Atwood a “handmaid” and “anti-feminist”. They are attacking a cis woman for her views … while at the same time proclaiming that anyone who disputes transphobia is a ‘misogynist’. Yes. They are insisting that their attacks on women who disagree with transphobia are de facto NOT misogynistic, but attacks on transphobic women can ONLY be misogynistic.
Why? For the same reason ultra-concervative evangelicals scream “Christian persecution!” whenever they are prevented from passing laws discriminating against the LGBTQ community, or when they are called homophobic for their anti-gay ideologies. ‘Punching down’ on the oppressed is the act of a bully, which is bad, so they must reframe themselves sympathetically as the real victims of oppression. The same goes for TERFs. If they claim TERF is a slur and that those who fight their transphobia are misogynists trying to ‘erase biological sex’, then they become the underdogs fighting ‘back’ against oppression rather than the ones enforcing socio-cultural oppression. The thing is, transphobia is oppression, no matter how much TERFs howl that disagreeing with transphobia is oppressive.
Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight. London/Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press
Braidotti, Rosi. 1997. “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines”; In Writing on the Body. Kate Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. New York/London: Routledge
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1992. Myths of Gender. New York: Basic Books
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
Horn, David G. 1995. “This Norm Which Is Not One”; In Deviant Bodies. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
Schiebinger, Londa. 2000a. “Introduction”; In Feminism and the Body. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press
Schiebinger, Londa. 2000b. “Skeletons in the Closet”; In Feminism and the Body. Londa Schiebinger. Oxford/New york: Oxford University Press
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Wilshire, Donna. 1989. “The Uses of Myth, Image, and the Female Body in Re-Visioning Knowledge”; In Gender/Body/Knowledge. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick/London: Rutgers University Press