The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [1]
Walking home from a neighborhood bar, Tacy Ranta was shot by a gang of adolescents and young adults who had been on a crime spree, carjacking and mugging twelve people in the neighborhood over a five-hour period. Although the miscreants robbed everyone, the only person they shot was Ranta. The newspaper reports on the murder focused on Ranta’s transsexuality and used the male pronouns of her birth sex when referring to her, even though she had been living as a woman for years and, in the month preceding her murder, had had the sex on her driver’s license altered from M to F.
The murder of Tacy Ranta mere blocks from my home, coming on the heels of my friend’s announcement, caused me to confront my basic lack of knowledge and understanding of a group of people who I barely knew existed. I wanted to know more about gender variance, and though this desire was born partly of a desire to understand and support my friend, it was also linked to my own lifelong questioning of gender roles.
I was born in 1958 and grew up in the seventies, when large numbers of women began to challenge the institutions and assumptions that had created their social subordination. I lived through the second wave of feminism and I know that my life has been profoundly affected by the vastly increased opportunities for women and the breakdown of gender stereotypes that were its fruits.
Yet I, like many women, have also felt ambivalent about some of the results of that revolution. I remember very well the patronizing attitudes I encountered from other women when I chose to remain at home with my preschool children during the eighties. The unspoken assumption seemed to be that only a chump would sacrifice her career advancement to take care of babies. Virtues traditionally gendered female (modesty, gentleness, and emotional generosity) were scorned by those who viewed them as a pathetic accommodation to the patriarchal status quo. The qualities our culture respects and rewards are the traditionally masculine traits of independence, assertiveness, and enlightened self-interest, and feminism has done nothing to change that. We wanted the best of both worlds; instead it seems sometimes that we have the worst of each. Women have been liberated to become rakes and workaholics, and men have won the freedom to drift aimlessly in a kind of perpetual adolescence. This may be a kind of progress, but it is not the equality between the sexes once envisioned by feminists.
And despite our well-intentioned efforts to melt gender stereotypes with the blowtorch of change, differences remain. As a parent, I have certainly observed what seem to be gender-mediated differences between my daughters and my son throughout their childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. As toddlers, they played equally happily with the Little Tikes play kitchen, a car, and various other gender-neutral toys that I as a feminist parent provided. But at a certain point, my son and his best friend began to develop an interest in dinosaurs and Godzilla, to manufacture guns and swords out of tree branches, and to engage in the kind of semi-serious wrestling and roughhousing that often produced minor injuries. Yet my son’s two trips to the emergency room in early childhood were the result of “accidental” injuries inflicted by his older sister. Clearly, she hadn’t heard the news that