The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [163]
Scientific responses to the riddle of gender have been used to police gendered behavior, but have also at times been helpful in liberating us from limiting beliefs about the nature of the differences we observe between males and females. It’s surely no accident that the birth of endocrinology coincided with the first wave of feminism, nor that the social construction hypothesis was generated by, and helped fuel, the second wave. It cannot be mere coincidence that gender-variant people became highly visible during those periods of “sexual anarchy,” when the scientific and social markers of gender suddenly became less fixed and less immutable. Gender, as distinct from sex, was defined during an era when many people hoped that biology was not destiny, an era in which women acquired reproductive freedom and were liberated from menarche-to-menopause childbearing. The biological basis of gender is being reasserted during an era of resurgent social conservatism, when many people are feeling disenchanted with the excesses of feminist rhetoric, and seeking a way to be both pro-woman and pro-family.
The belief that gender is a social construct enables us to diminish the limitations assigned to the female sex in most cultures, but it also penalizes women in subtle ways. Like it or not, women remain the bearers of children and their primary caretakers. Any theory of gender that ignores this elementary fact, and the economic and social impact of childbearing and child rearing on women, is bound to fail because it ignores not only social reality but biological reality. Yet not all women choose to bear children these days, and even many who do, do not not wish to be perceived primarily as mothers. In this realm, as in so many others, a middle-ground perspective that acknowledges women’s unique biological responsibilities and yet does not seek to define women solely in terms of biology seems most appealing.
And who can speak more authoritatively of what it is like to inhabit the middle ground between biology and culture than gender-variant people? An individual who has inhabited the social roles of both man and woman, with all the cultural baggage that accrues to both states— or to neither—acquires a kind of gender gnosis: a secret knowledge denied the rest of us who live in our assigned boxes, M or F, without really probing the boundaries. Yet rather than letting these individuals be themselves, or even soliciting their insights, society in general continues to try to force gender-variant people (whether transgendered, transsexual, or intersexual) into one of the two socially acceptable boxes. This seems not only cruel but also foolish. In certain cultures, transgendered or “two spirit” people were considered wise counselors, shamans in fact. There are traces of this belief in our cultural tradition. Tiresias, the ancient Greek sage—who transformed into a woman after seeing two snakes mating, and then back into a man many years later—was wise because of, not in spite of, his metamorphoses. The religions of the world are replete with androgynous deities, or deities able to transgender themselves at will. Even Christianity and Judaism, together with Islam, the most androcentric of religions, retain traces of an ambigendered deity. Shekinah is the feminine face of God in Judaism, just as Wisdom in Christianity is gendered female. Neither Shekinah nor Wisdom is a separate being; both are a part of God, who is perhaps just as omnigendered as the embryo, and as potent with possibility.
These philosophical and theological musings are, of