Under the Spell of Gender

getting into a muddle with freedom, sex & identity

Genderfree Space 1

photo credits – background: Johannes Plenio / restroom sign: No Revisions, both on Unsplash

»Speaking as a scientist, the human brain is genderless.«

〰 Tomas Kirchhausen 〰

Genderfreedom

I clearly remember hearing the word genderfree for the first time. It was on a trip to Japan in April 2000 during the cherry blossom season. We’d been invited by my friend Hiroko (not her real name) to run a workshop at a Buddhist temple in the countryside of the Okayama prefecture. The temple was a family business ~ which is normal in Japan ~ with an attached room and fireplace for small social gatherings.

After the workshop, our hosts had organised a delicious Korean BBQ for us and all workshop participants. By the time we were leaving, the sun had set; distant animal voices the soundscape in the serene surroundings.

Hiroko went to pick up Suki, her young daughter. The six-year-old had fallen asleep during the meal, and we were getting ready to make our way in the dark, back to the car. Josh offered to carry the child.

'Genderfree!’ Hiroko declared with a wry smile.

She put on a brave face and declined, despite struggling with Suki’s weight. As soon as we were out of the door she gratefully accepted Josh’s offer.

I understood instantly what she meant ~ of course. Genderfree means that women don’t need a man’s help. Genderfreedom is about women and men being independent individuals. It’s about liberation from the old program of whatever we’ve been taught to expect from fellow humans of the opposite sex.

Genderfreedom ~ or gender neutrality in the current official English gender-language ~ has turned out to be far bigger and more complex than I suspected 23 and a half years ago. But let’s start with the root-word itself.

Gender is a verbiont with a dazzling, multifaceted identity. It is a master at multitasking. It can slip into many roles, depending on context, background, and perception of its human symbiophant.

Gender is a shapeshifter. A metamorph. A living creature who can appear in various guises and put humans under its spell.

Gender is free of gender. Neither ‘his’ nor ‘hers’. Not ‘he’ or ‘she’. Not even ‘androgynous’, or ‘hermaphrodite’, or ‘binary’ because such labels would imply gendering gender with both genders, if you see what I mean.

Being truly free from gender means not ‘having’ any gender at all, not being boxed in by gender, not identifying with any particular gender ~ or several of them. It’s about engendering oneself anew in every moment.

Here is why and how:::

Gender [from Latin generare via French genrer, gendrer] starts as a verb (as all verbionts do), carrying the meaning engender, beget, give birth to, bring forth.

Gendering generates, creates, procreates, propagates, produces, breeds, seeds, and multiplies. Inevitably, this fertile word-creature, spawns a prolific offspring. And like all living creatures, it can only reproduce its own kind.

Becoming a noun, gender [from Latin genus via French genre] identifies with kind, sort, class, race, stock, family, rank, order, species. This means, gender cannot be biased towards either this ~ or that.

Gender doesn’t side with one polarity or the other because both poles belong together ~ two sides of the same oneness, each carrying the seed of the other within ~ yin and yang.

Gender is always true to itself ~ kind, loyal to its own progeny and primogeniture.

Genderfree Space 2

photo credits – background: Pascal M / restroom sign: No Revisions, both on Unsplash

Gender & Sex

Inspired by Aristotle's Greek grammatical term genos, gender also serves to identify words as masculine, feminine, and neutral. This doesn’t mean it splits into two, three, or many. Feminine, neutral, and masculine are simply different aspects of gender’s creative expression.

Incidentally, the Latin word grammar originally also referred to ‘magic incantation, bewitching spells’. Philologists have done a good job hiding that facet, and now we believe that grammar is exclusively about ‘the art of letters’ and ‘science of written language’.

Perhaps it happened under the spell of the use of gender in the grammatical context, that the word became associated with the biological sex of male and female.

In scientific jargon the term genus (= kind or class of organisms) is a taxonomic category, used in the biological classification below ‘family’ and above ‘species’.

In German, the definition of the term genus extends to linguistics and philology. In other words, the grammatical 'gender' in English translates into 'Genus' in German.

The entanglement of the word gender with sexual, social, psychological and political connotations took place in the English lingosphere almost unnoticed. It has generated a plethora of new gender-words:::

transgender, cisgender, gender-activism, gender affirming surgery, genderator, gender-blind, gender-debate, gender dictionary, gender distress, genderdiversity, gender dysphoria, genderfluid, gender-friendly, gendergap, gender-identity, gender-inclusive, genderism, gender-mania, genderneutral, gender pronouns, gender-responsive, gender role, gender-sensitive, gender studies, genderwar, postgenderism, etc.

German has no word for ‘gender’ in the current sense of the word. Native speakers of the Germanic countries have swiftly adopted the English term. For this reason, the definition of gender in German can help us understand what the word currently means without all the entanglement, fusion, and obfuscation with interpretations and associations from past eras.

Here is a translation of a sample definition taken from a German website which explains the new word to children.

“The word gender (spoken: dschänder) comes from English and means ‘Geschlecht’ (= biological sex). This meaning includes everything that is considered ’typical for women’ or ’typical for men’. For example, what professions are more typical for men, and which ones are more commonly taken up by women…”

What the authors are referring to is not the ‘biological gender’ but the social gender roles assigned to female and male humans, which happen to be linked to the sexual identification at birth.

In contrast to German, and many other languages, English is largely genderneutral by nature ~ in the grammatical sense. While German has three definite articles ~ der (masculine), die (feminine), das (neutral) ~ English manages to cover the same ground with greater simplicity ~ the.

der Vater = the father

die Mutter = the mother

das Haus = the house

Genderneutrality in the social sense is anything but simple. Many facets of the current complexity can be blamed on the confusion between biological sex, social conditioning and cultural norms, which now leads to the incorrect German explanation of gender = biological sex quoted above.

When the noun gender first entered the English language around 1300, it was a neutral word ~ meaning kind, sort, class etc. The only indication of a sexual connection might have been found in the verb to gender ~ and only if you really want to make that link ~ via the definition: to give birth.

So what happened there? How and when did gender and sex become an item?

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the fusion of gender with sex in English back to 1963. That's when the word gender was introduced as “a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.”

This ‘sexual’ association with gender ~ meant as a distinction, rather than a confusion, was later popularised through feminist discourse.

Genderfree Space 3

photo credits – background: Vince GX / restroom sign: No Revisions, both on Unsplash

Gender & Identity

In contemporary English, gender doesn’t refer to biological sex but to social gender. Through growing awareness and visibility of transgender humans ~ and especially the transgender rights movement ~ the word gender has developed a closer attachment to identity.

We were brought up to believe that in terms of biological sex there are only two types of humans:: male and female. Unbeknown to most of us, people with other biological constellations ~ fellow humans who are neither exclusively male, nor purely female ~ have been condemned to life in the shadows of society, until recently.

This doesn't mean that they can be lumped together into a so-called 'third gender' ~ or that 'other genders' are an entirely new phenomenon ~ or an invention of 21st century LBGTQ academics.

Intersexual (= fellow humans born with biological signs of both sexes) and transgender (= fellow humans who are assigned one biological sex at birth and develop a strong identification with the other sex during childhood) have always been around, as we can learn from ancient mythologies.

Hermaphroditos, the androgynous child of Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love, beauty, sex and procreation) and her lover Hermes (the divine trickster and messenger of the gods) is portrayed as a feminine beauty with male genitals.

Agdistis is an andrognynous offspring of Zeus and Gaia, a superhuman with a ‘wild and uncontrollable nature’.

Androgynous [from Greek andros = man + gune = woman] is a term used in reference to ‘the third sex’ which appears in mythologies of many cultures.

Ardhanarishvara in Hindu mythology is known as the “Lord Who Is Half Woman.” Such historic sources are quoted as evidence for a ‘third gender’, expressing a confusion between sex and gender.

The ‘helpfulprofessor’ suggests that there are over 80 types of genders.

An organisation called ‘Sexual Diversity’ currently lists 107 ‘gender identities’ on their website.*

Many of the different ’gender types’ on these lists seem to overlap. ~ Names from different parts of the world represent the same or very similar configurations of physical, psychological, social and spiritual features assigned to male and female biological sex and social gender roles.

This relatively recent explosion in the categorisation of genders is an attempt to practice ‘inclusivity’ and ‘equality’ of ‘all genders’.

While the discourse certainly raises awareness about issues related to intersexual and transgender fellow humans, and their struggles in a society that has ignored, denied, or persecuted them far too long, turning the gender assignment into a political agenda can also lead to alienation.

The term cisgender was invented in the 1990s in psychological jargon as the polar opposite of transgender.

The term nonbinary has been adopted by the LGBTQ movement to represent anyone who doesn’t feel included in current (or past) norms. The academic foundation Point ~ supporting gender diversity in students and scholars ~ defines nonbinary as follows:

“Nonbinary is a gender identity and experience that embraces a full spectrum of expressions and ways of being that resonate for an individual.”

A full spectrum of expressions and ways of being that resonate for an individual must include all individuals. 

What if some of us don’t want to have gender labels assigned to us.

What if the term ‘cis-gender’ doesn’t resonate with us?

In a world populated by humans who claim the right to choose their own gender, a binary system of cisgender vs transgender makes no sense any more.

Gender is no longer about sex or social roles or stereotypes, or even belonging to a certain group of people. Gender has become synonymous with the search for personal identity, for self-acceptance, for claiming one’s rightful place in the world.

The English word identity [from Latin identitas = sameness] was adopted around 1600. In its original definition it referred to oneness, the state of being the same, the quality of being identical.

By the time the term identity card was introduced three centuries later, the word referred to an individual. Identity had become inherently personal.

ID cards have been invented to distinguish one person from another, and to register the national identity of individuals as ‘belonging to specific countries’.

Identity crisis was first recorded in 1954. Identity politics have been discussed predominantly in ‘LBGTQ communities’ and other ‘minority groups’ since 1987. Identity theft has been a problem since at least 1995.

Through the link between gender and identity, the definition of the latter seems to have returned to its original meaning of ‘sameness’. Gender identity is about the sense of belonging, the experience of being able to identify with a particular gender.

That identity has a strong association with gender and sexuality in the context of the transgender movement is understandable. Excluding fellow humans who are born with characteristics outside the assumed binary categories of male//female is a grave violation of the fundamental human right to equality, and a severely traumatising experience for the affected individuals.

Nevertheless, identity does not relate exclusively to gender. Identity and gender are not identical. Identity is as fluid as gender ~ the search for identity as old as mankind and as complex as gender. But identity has its own story which deserves to be explored in a wordcast of its own.

Genderfree Space 4

photo credits – background: Dana Katharina / restroom sign: No Revisions, both on Unsplash

P.S. 〰 *According to sexualdiversity.org “The term gender identity was coined by psychiatry professor Robert J. Stoller in 1964 and popularized by psychologist John Money.”

What the site doesn’t mention is that the same John Money had earlier pioneered the concept of a distinction between biological sex and gender identity in 1955. According to his Wikipedia page, he coined the terms gender role and sexual orientation.

John Money, also a specialist in sexology, was the ‘expert on sexual identity’ overseeing a tragic case of sex reassignment in the 1960s.

The Canadian David Reimer was raised as a girl following medical advice and sex-change surgery after his penis was severely injured by a failed circumcision when he was only seven months old. J. Money oversaw the case, reported the gender reassignment as successful, and used the story ~ anonymously referred to as the ‘John/Joan’ case ~ as evidence for his theories that gender identity is primarily learned.

Reimer later detransitioned to live as a man and ended his own life at the age of 39 due to severe depression.