The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [37]
That’s not to say that there aren’t real physical differences between bodies, but we have this cultural belief about the relationship between someone’s sense of self and how they interact with other human subjects, and how that relates to their physical embodiment, and we materialize gender through the body in accordance with certain cultural assumptions. That’s part of the radicalness about transgender politics in the later part of the twentieth century—that it just flies in the face of that construction. Part of why we (as transpeople) are so marginalized is that we offer this very radical critique of a very pervasive set of assumptions about gender.
Q: But isn’t that critique somewhat paradoxical in that transsexuals do essentially gender by saying that I need a certain kind of body in order to fully express my gender?
Admittedly my position is a minority position, but I see that whole “transsexuals are essentializing gender because they are so concerned with the body” as an artifact of Cartesian dualism, the mind/body split. You don’t ever not have a body; your body is that through which you interact with other people. There is a language of the body. There is an appearance of the body. We’re never disembodied people. My own sense of what I did is that I had this sense of self, whatever story you want tell about how that came about. There was that sense for me that it was more appropriate for me to answer to the pronoun “she” than “he”—it goes way back—and there was a perception growing up that “I’m in a situation that I can’t control, and that I can’t get out of,” and there was affect around that. I was really sad about it. I would try to put it aside and go about my business in life, but it proved to be really intractable and unshakable, and when at some point I figured, “Oh, I can do these things,” it was like a paradigm shift in my own head.
It’s not that these procedures make me a different person. It’s more like “if you cut on the dotted line, and I sign this piece of paper, I can legally be a different person. I can pay you these monies, and you’ll stick a little electrified needle in my face, and I won’t have hair there anymore. I’ll take this pill and it will make my breasts grow.” It’s that recognition that the body is malleable, and that it is how we present to people. There’s something very fundamental about being two bodies in communication with each other. Just the thought that I could use my body to communicate my sense of self to other people the way that everybody else does, instead of having to verbalize it or feel invisible. The idea that I could go to a beach, like I did yesterday, and lie around in the sun and drink beer and watch my kids play, and people would say “she” … Cool.
Q: What is gender? It seems clear that it is somehow neurobiological in origin.
I think our language is not really sufficient for talking about it. The words are too blunt. Gender means “kind” or “genre,” it means “what kind of person are you?” But you can’t divorce the question of gender from the larger question of how the human organism needs to live in culture. Humans are social animals. You can’t take a baby human and throw it out in the wild and expect it to learn how to forage. We have to be in society. Unlike a kitten, human babies don’t lick the gunk off and stand up on all twos and run about. They are born very young in a developmental sense. As soon as the lungs can work, the baby comes out. So the evolutionary pressure is for situations that provide care of the newborn. That, I really