The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [4]
Yet we continue to wonder how much of gender performance is cultural and how much is biological. That’s the heart of the riddle, the part that really baffles us. And it’s that part of the riddle that gender-variant people may ultimately help resolve. My conversations with transgendered, transsexual, and intersexual people over the past few years have helped me understand a number of facts that I had not recognized previously. First, despite the social changes initiated by the second wave of feminism, we as a society still maintain some fairly inflexible strategies for policing the boundaries between the sexes. Each time you relieve yourself in a public place, for example, you implicitly accept the idea that Door Number 1 (women) and Door Number 2 (men) are the only options, and that each person will know precisely to which category he or she belongs, and use the “appropriate” toilet. To most of us, the choice may not seem quite as oppressive as that between the “White” and “Colored” bathrooms that were contested by the civil rights movement, but the significance is the same. A ritual boundary is being enforced, as the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment recognized when they claimed that the ERA would result in a promiscuous mingling of the sexes in bathrooms.
Similarly, many people pay lip service to the idea that males and females have both a “feminine” and a “masculine” side, and as I finish the final draft of this book, a great deal of attention is being devoted to the rise of the “metrosexual,” an urban feminized man. Yet a male-bodied person who expresses his femininity by wearing dresses quickly discovers the limits of social tolerance. Women have more freedom to dress as they please, as I discovered on a rainy night in Washington, D.C., when I attended a support group meeting for cross-dressers. As I sat in the meeting in my sweatshirt and jeans—the only female-bodied person in the room and the only person wearing pants—I realized that little more than a century ago, I would have been just as freakishly attired as the male-bodied people around me in their dresses, high heels, and makeup. According to the social standards of 1902, I, too, was “cross-dressed.” Even in 1932 my garb would have been considered suspicious. But because our culture now permits women to wear clothing once thought of as “masculine,” my outfit was unremarkable. Not so for the outfits on the people around me. They are defined (and define themselves) as “transgendered” partially because they yearn to express aspects of femininity denied to male-bodied persons by cultural norms. While most male-bodied persons don’t seem to feel a desire to wear dresses and use cosmetics, the ones who do so encounter extraordinary social ostracism and violence. The great majority of transgendered people who are the victims of hate crimes are male-bodied persons dressing and living as females.
That doesn’t mean that women are free of gender-based limitations and bias. Western women may wear pants, and some may have claimed the right to work, play, and have sex like men, but as any woman of a certain age will be happy to tell you, female cultural power is