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The Gender Non-Conformity Cop-Out
I’ve been thinking about this post for a few days, but what prompted me to write it now, rather than this coming weekend, is a delightfully wrong-headed piece by our very own and much-loved Fred Cole. So, while this isn’t a rebuttal to Fred’s piece, I’ll nonetheless dedicate it to him.
To Fred
There. On with the show.
My argument is that transgender individuals are, by and large, being lazy and rude, and we do them a disservice if we don’t correct that behavior. Let me explain.
There are only a relative handful of people who are actually sexually ambiguous. A tiny fraction of them are biologically ambiguous, true hermaphrodites having both male and female genitalia. The rest are outliers on the natural scale of masculine and feminine morphology: men with fine bones, delicate features, high voices; women with heavier bones, more rugged features, deeper voices. For the most part, people who are outliers can still present themselves as their correct sex; a relative few may prefer to either remain ambiguous or simply present themselves as the opposite sex.
This isn’t new. There have always been effeminate men and masculine women. They haven’t always been treated well, and I think that’s something which really does call for compassion and courtesy.
That doesn’t explain Caitlyn Jenner*, nor the young lady who works at my local hardware store sporting a button which reads “My pronouns are: he/him/his.” Nor does it explain most of the newly sexually ambiguous, all the men and women, boys and girls, who are perfectly obviously identifiable by their true sex, but who would rather be identified as something else.
What does explain these people? Various things, I’m sure: some undoubtedly enjoy the attention, others get a thrill out of the cross-dressing and role playing, still others are dissatisfied and hope a dramatic change will improve their lives.
But I think most of the “gender non-conforming” are simply being lazy.
Non-conformity has always been a cover for laziness: nonconformity means that the normal rules don’t apply to you, and you don’t have to live up to other people’s expectations or standards. It means exempting yourself from judgment, not playing the same game as everyone else, not being measured by their yardsticks and possibly found wanting.
Tune in, turn out, drop out. Because if you aren’t in the rat race, you don’t have to run — and you can’t lose.
Live Up to Your Sex
Men and women really are different, both in terms of their physical capacities and their emotional natures. Men and women want different things; they are biologically primed to value different things. They have different strengths and vulnerabilities. Why? Because gestation. Because a man can have a thousand children and never think twice, but a woman can’t have a single one without devoting a substantial fraction of her life to it.
I hope this isn’t news, that evolution has produced two very different creatures in men and women, and that five years of Gender Studies at UC Berkeley, no matter how confusing, can’t unmake what adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine have quietly conspired to create.
The phrase “be a man” means something. It means do the hard thing without complaining. Don’t leave it to someone weaker and more vulnerable to do what a lifetime of testosterone has prepared you to do. Step up, man up, do it, and move on.
We don’t really have a similar phrase for women: it isn’t a matter of honor for a woman to “be a woman,” not in the same sense. Women are weaker, and aren’t expected to be heroic, to come through in a clinch, as men are. Less feminine woman have rarely been the target of (unkind, I admit) mirth in the same way that effeminate men have been. But we still have expectations of women: that they’ll be more sensitive and nurturing than men, that they’ll possess an aesthetic sense lacking in the coarser half of the species, that they’ll be more civilized and refined, less vulgar and, in general, less physical.
The point is that there are standards for being a man or a woman. There are expectations, and people are to varying degrees judged by how well they meet those standards. It isn’t particularly fair, but there it is: if you’re a man, you’re expected to behave like a man and we’ll tend to think less of you if you don’t; if you’re a woman, we’d like you to act like one. You’re one or the other and, while we know you didn’t get to pick which, you’re stuck with it: play the hand you’re dealt and try to do it well.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. But that takes effort, and effort is… hard. If you offer people an alternative to effort, they’ll be tempted to take it, even if it leads to a mediocre and sub-par life. (That’s part of evolution too, unfortunately.) So if you tell young people that they can be “gender nonconforming,” and that that’s natural and no big deal and perfectly okay — cool even — then some are going to see that as a nice way of avoiding the burden of rising to sexual expectations, of being manly if they’re male, or appropriately feminine if they’re female. Nonconformity means not having to try, and never falling short.
It isn’t brave, it isn’t wise, and it isn’t a path to a good, full life. But, increasingly, it’s safe and easy.
Let’s encourage our young men to be men and our young women to be women, and not indulge the temptation to seek an easy end-run around traditional and sensible standards of masculine and feminine behavior. Let’s stop pretending that gender is other than sex, and that it’s a choice — or that non-conformity is, usually, other than lazy self-indulgence.
* Caitlyn Jenner is his legal name, and I’m happy to call him that. It’s a silly name for a man, but then he’s a silly man.
Published in Culture
I’ve got a gal there.
I think you are as out to lunch as Fred is and that attitudes like yours are what has driven transgender activists to go over the top. You’ve essentially written them out of the human race when, by all informed accounts, transgenderism is a real, if fairly rare phenomenon.
As a gay person I can tell you that being told “you’re faking it” and “be who I’d be comfortable with, not who you are” gets my hackles up. It is this kind of dismissiveness of minorities and their legitimate feelings and interests that makes them (us) so willing to discount yours.
In the gay marriage fight we fought about marriage and bakers. I sympathize with both – gay couples who want to marry and bakers who don’t want to be involved. But when the baker says “I not only don’t want to be involved, but I want the law to ban you from doing it” my instinctive reaction is “screw you buddy, I not only want to do it but I want the law to force you to participate.”
At the end of the day, we either learn to respect each other’s differences and live and let live, or we fight and grasp to co-opt the power of the state to force others to live by our lights and do our bidding. But it’s one or the other – across the board. If you think I’m going to live and let live with you while you’re co-opting the power of the state to keep me down, you’ve got another guess coming.
Third. Oh how restrictive and passe….
Well, you can add 71 genders to the list of stupid things Facebook has done in the past year. Apparently, the only two existing gender, male and female, weren’t progressive enough and neither were the previous 50 genders Facebook had initially added. We now have 21 new genders to bring Facebook’s gender count to a total of 71.
The new genders being added to the list are:
Asexual
Female to male trans man
Female to male transgender man
Female to male transsexual man
F2M
Gender neutral
Hermaphrodite
Intersex man
Intersex person
Intersex woman
Male to female trans woman
Male to female transgender woman
Male to female transsexual woman
Man
M2F
Polygender
T* man
T* woman
Two* person
Two-spirit person
Woman
The list of the 50 previous gender options:
Agender
Androgyne
Androgynes
Androgynous
Bigender
Cis
Cis Female
Cis Male
Cis Man
Cis Woman
Cisgender
Cisgender Female
Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man
Cisgender Woman
Female to Male
FTM
Gender Fluid
Gender Nonconforming
Gender Questioning
Gender Variant
Genderqueer
Intersex
Male to Female
MTF
Neither
Neutrois
Non-binary
Other
Pangender
Trans
Trans Female
Trans Male
Trans Man
Trans Person
Trans*Female
Trans*Male
Trans*Man
Trans*Person
Trans*Woman
Transexual
Transexual Female
Transexual Male
Transexual Man
Transexual Person
Transexual Woman
Transgender Female
Transgender Person
Transmasculine
Two-spirit
You should check out out Gender definition glossary for the definitions of these new genders.
Genital mutilation is what actually occurs.
Mostly agree, especially when it’s personally directed, although I do find Rush’s general statement illuminating. Especially when one compares “before” and “after” photos of celebrity ladies at various wokeful stages in their journey to enlightenment.
Someone on Ricochet wrote a post about this several months ago (it’s still early morning here on the East Coast, and bleary-eyed me is not going to wrestle with the elephantine and idiosyncratic memory of the Ricochet search engine trying to find it, but I think the Kathy Griffin “severed head” controversy may have been its inspiration. Certainly, whatever happens at the nexus of looks and political and career opportunism has not worked in that particular lady’s favor as a Google “images” search will quickly attest).
My life is full of women who’ll never win a “beauty” contest, or who might superficially look like candidates for fun-making or derision, but who, because I know them, I count among some of the loveliest women of my acquaintance. “Beauty,” as one of my literary heroines is alleged to have said, “is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.” Where there’s ugly, no amount of palliative surgery and makeup on the surface will restore the balance; eventually, the “ugly” will out. And when there’s true beauty, even if it’s all on the inside, sooner or later, it will, too.
I keep thinking back to the phase my son went through at around the age of 5 when he would raid his sister’s dress-up clothes and run around in a frilly pink or greet tutu. He thought it was funny. We knew that to either encourage or chastise him would be equally damaging. We let him be, and he got bored with it.
Once again, Chesterton’s Fence is a great instructive. I would take it one step further, however. The character who argued that the fence should not be removed until they learned why it was there was just as ignorant – he didn’t know why it was there either.
Pushing back against tradition is a natural instinct of the young. It is natural to ask “Why do we do this?” Western Civilization only took off because people realized that “Because it is tradition” is not a sufficient answer. It behooves believers in tradition to have the knowledge of how traditions developed and why.
One should always question tradition. Questioning is a form of respect – it shows that you are interested and want to learn. Some traditions solved problems we would otherwise still have, and are therefore still useful. Some solved problems we no longer have, or now have a better solution for. Others fall somewhere in the middle.
Being smitten with someone you don’t know is not love. Still being smitten with someone with whose foibles you are intimately familiar is love. To blindly accept or categorically reject tradition are both forms of laziness. To properly follow or reject tradition requires knowledge and learning. This takes work. Our true enemy is laziness.
Yeah. Both the OP and the transgender movement concede that manhood and womanhood are defined — in part, at least — by behavior, interests, and self-presentation.
It might make me unpopular around here, but I’d rather the definition be a humble biological one: men are human beings with X and Y chromosomes; women are human beings with two X chromosomes. Done. It’s as simple as that.
Now, in nine cases out of ten, men might be more physical than women. They might be more assertive, more aggressive, and more likely to tussle in the dirt. But that doesn’t mean that less-physically-inclined men are “defective” or “inferior” to their athletic counterparts, nor does it mean that feisty, opinionated women are “defective” or “inferior” to their demure counterparts. (Frankly, there’s nothing attractive about a pushover, male or female.)
All human beings have responsibilities. These responsibilities may or may not align with traditional male–female roles. If they do, so be it. If they don’t, that’s fine, too. We ought to accept our responsibilities with grace and dignity, however our chromosomes happen to be aligned.
Eh, it’s happened sure but I wouldn’t say it’s anything like the rule. In fact, I’d say that the attractive yet venomous still get the lion’s share of attention. Biology can be that way sometimes.
It’s not the fall that kills you but the sudden stop.
Henry, your essay speaks about expectations. While I agree that these expectations aren’t exactly arbitrary since they derive from biological realities, I think it’s also true that these expectations and the biological realities underlying them are not and should not be as deterministic at this granular of a level. There’s more than one way to be a man, and trying to fit everyone into one mold leads to dissatusfactio
You say men are x, but a not unreasonable response is “says who?” or “that’s arbitrary, it could just as easily mean y if it has to mean anything at all”.
Does that mean the trans movement is justified? I don’t think so. I think it means we need to be compassionate and tolerant of outward appearance; we don’t need to discard or revise biology or science, we don’t need a new legal regime, and there’s really no reason to study the matter for years in college and emerge with a degree in “it takes all kinds”.
The trans movement, on the other hand, should realize that biology is real and does determine some things, and that just because you want to doesn’t mean you should. As free as you are to disregard society’s standards and expectation, that society is also free to disregard you as a serious or dependable person. Those standards too aren’t completely arbitrary as they have some basis in biology and some basis in what will get us to the good lifenough to what best contributes to a good society.
You might rather, but what are the odds of it ever happening?
One of humans’ responsibilities is conforming to social roles and expectations. Suppose two siblings are brilliant engineers, one a boy and one a girl. The girl is, in fact, a marginally more brilliant engineer than her brother. Then a family crisis happens and one of them needs to put their career on hold. Which one will it be?
The sister being more talented than her brother is not enough reason to pick the brother, unless it’s already set in stone that the sister never plans to get pregnant and raise kids. Because odds are good, someday she will, and that will interrupt her career to the point where a small amount of extra talent can’t make up for it. No, the only reason, all else but a talent-difference equal, to pick the brother over the sister is if the sister is astronomically more talented than the brother. Granted, there are other ways for not all else to be equal — perhaps the brother lives much closer to the family crisis and so on.
The fact that most people have a slight tendency to conform to gender roles is enough to keep them going. Really, for those who are scared gender roles might go the way of the dodo, this is good news.
Maybe we should get rid of male, female, trans, etc, and just go with “innie” and “outie”.
I don’t disagree with any of this.
The divisions of labor individuals devise within their households (and among their families) often conform to gender roles, and that’s not objectionable. What would be objectionable, I think, is if the hypothetical sister were told, “You should quit your job, because being an engineer isn’t ladylike,” or if that sister’s father said, “I’d rather you not study engineering in college. It’d be a waste of your time. You’ll just quit and become a mother, anyway.”
Now, I don’t think such conversations are particularly common — perhaps because people, as you say, have a slight tendency to conform whether or not society polices their behavior. But, in the sort of world the OP desires, society’s policing would be more noticeable.
Dismissing males who lack a natural inclination to enjoy carpentry, sports, and tinkering with automobiles — chiding them as “unmanly” wimps deserving of society’s scorn — is precisely the sort of thing that drives a few insecure men into the arms of transgenderism.
I question the entire premise that non-conformity is “laziness.” It may appear that way to conformists, but I could just as easily call them unthinking followers, which is a kind of laziness.
Just because society has a certain set of expectations, doesn’t mean all those things are good and should be followed. Some of the best accomplishments are seen through by non-conformists. It’s arguable that anyone who starts a business is non-conformist.
I myself am non-conformist. I hold extreamly unpopular views. I went to school until I was 32. I’ve never held down a “real” job. In a lot of ways I am “lazy,” in that I won’t do things unless I feel there’s enough in it for me. But I managed to land myself an amazing wife, a really nice house, two great kids with another on the way. Things are looking pretty good for this lazy non-conformist.
What of the father knows his daughter well enough that he really does think “she’ll just quit and become a mother anyway”. Isn’t it his responsibility to let her know it’s not a good idea to spend all that tuition on something she’s not going to get a good return on before she quits?
As a woman with a connective-tissue problem that has made womanhood uncomfortable from puberty on, yes, this kind of dismissiveness is alienating. And, if I had been born later, maybe this alienation would have prompted me to wonder harder if God “really meant for me” to be a woman. As it was, though, my cynical appreciation of the fact that most people will probably think you’re faking it and expect you to be who they’d be comfortable with, rather than who or whatever you are, won out. Femininity is an act for me, an artifice put on in large part to soothe others from the awkwardness of having to be around my awkward body.
Knowing how much of an act femininity is in some ways makes me more sympathetic, not less, to those with a strong drive to perform a gender not matching their genitalia. On the other hand, if the drive can be resisted, I think it should be, since life is never going to be easy for those who don’t conform. Making peace with others’ expectations, even their petty or spiteful expectations, is part of life.
Well, if she’s that clear about her interest in motherhood, then perhaps.
In general, I’m not a fan of the argument that women ought to skip college because their potential child-rearing might make the decision less remunerative. Forgoing college closes a lot of doors (and robs women of opportunities to meet men, and vice versa). And, of course, hypothetical children are just that — hypothetical. They don’t exist until they exist.
(Then again, I’m hopelessly biased about the question of college’s value. I’m an academic at heart, and I graduated from Hillsdale — so I shudder to imagine how dreary my life would’ve been had I followed, say, Mike Rowe’s advice.)
Given that quitting isn’t forever, and that many women do eventually re-enter the workplace after time off for kids, albeit much lower on the food chain than men of the same age, perhaps what the father ought to emphasize is that she get a good deal on her tuition and finish her degree quickly if she chooses to go to college, taking advantage of scholarships and such, rather than going into debt. If the girl’s father is concerned for the success of his grandchildren, or even just his male grandchildren, there’s much to be said for letting his daughter get that engineering degree if she can do it at a bargain: many people meet their spouses in college.
Many wives end up doing secretarial work for their husbands anyhow. A secretary familiar with your field is a useful thing, and an asset as a wife.
You may be selling yourself short. I followed Mike’s advice for about 25 years, and enjoyed it for the most part.
Oh, trust me. In my case, the Mike Rowe way led in only one direction — deeper into the dank pit of retail work.
I don’t think the trans-gender impulse is one of laziness or rudeness.
Other than those with medical issues, I believe the impulse to be transgender is one of escapism, as in trying to escape from the reality of one’s life. There are many, many people who have come from troubled backgrounds and live troubled lives and the list of those people is unfortunately growing. Often these people seek an escape, commonly to drugs or other addictions, but being a transgender appears to be another form of escape gaining popularity.
That said I don’t feel that the gay impulse is necessarily related to the transgender impulse. Yes, both involve non-conformance to understood gender roles, but the transgender thing requires one to try to actually make oneself at least look like someone of the other sex, including often as Kozak says the severe step of genital mutilation . To me, that severe transgender makeover is a severe step in trying to jump to another reality and to leave one’s present reality behind forever. I have never understood that to be motivation to be gay.
It’s a free country. I accept one’s right to be transgender. However, I don’t accept and am frankly disgusted by the current push to force everyone to condone, enable or approve the transgender fashion. I am even more appalled at the push by our Progressive Betters to hold out being a transgender as a solution to one’s troubles and perhaps a solution to one’s temporary gender confusion of youth.
Are you suggesting I should have married a woman, bought a house in the suburbs, had a couple of kids and (god forbid) maybe even stuck with practicing law?? I don’t think so. Some of us just don’t fit certain molds and freedom means the freedom to carve out our own mold to live in. It has been a genuine struggle. There was a time when the fear of how I would survive if I couldn’t (and I mean “couldn’t” not “wouldn’t”) conform was a crushing weight. But life is a struggle in one way or another for most of us.
And for me the struggle has been worth it. I would have been destroyed by trying to force my square peg into the round hole of the social expectations I was confronted with. Either drank myself to death or wound up stepping out and leaving (like so many gay men a generation before me did) my middle aged angry wife behind when I finally couldn’t take living the lie anymore. For some people, who simply don’t fit the social expectations, trying to force it does more damage, both to the person and those around them, than just accepting that they are different.
I know this is a trans conversation, not a gay conversation. But the fact that trans people face issues like these in very much the same way that gay people once did, and to a lesser extent sometimes still do, is why LGB and T, are often put together.
Ms. Rattlesnake, I’m still amazed about how much Ricochet members trust other members. Ricochet is, for the most part, supportive and understanding.
In this spirit, I would like to know what you mean by, “Femininity is an act for me. . . .“. And later, “Knowing how much of an act femininity is. . . .
Do you mean you don’t like to wear skirts and act girlish? I can understand that. I don’t care much for girly girly girls myself. But what does your “inability” to act in feminine ways have to do with your connective tissue issues?
I think I’ve missed something here.
Nope. What I mean is, whether or not I like to wear skirts and act girlish, doing so draws attention away from other things about me and my body which might make others uncomfortable. Therefore, if my interest is in putting others at their ease, I have an even greater incentive to play up the girly angle in choice of dress and makeup and so forth in order to “pass” as a “normal woman”. Whether I inherently like acting girly ends up having little to do with it. It’s an act I (reluctantly, at first) learned to put on in order to be more socially agreeable.
There’s a difficult issue here. I think that it is important for people to conform to social norms. I think that you probably agree.
You think that it is important for people who don’t want to conform to social norms to have the freedom to do so. I agree, within reason, and I think homosexuality is one of the areas in which this request is within reason. However, those who do not conform to social norms should also expect to pay some price for this, such as decreased acceptance. That’s essentially the definition of a social norm.
There is space for a discussion of the degree of social sanction associated with deviation from a social norm. I think that criminalization of homosexuality, for example, was too severe a sanction.
However, I think that what has been going on regarding homosexuality, and now regarding transsexualism, is something different. It is a redefinition of the social norm. This is necessarily going to be much more contentious. It is potentially much more dangerous to society, in the long term.
We don’t know the long-term effect of this latest change in sexual norms. The last major change — the heterosexual revolution of the 1960s — has been catastrophic, so I think that there was reason to move cautiously. Not that this mattered to Justice Kennedy, who turned out to be the only person whose opinion was relevant.
I don’t think anyone has properly recognized the humor in this statement.
If I understand the terminology explained in Fred’s post correctly, you managed to misgender Jenner in the same sentence in which you agreed not to deadname him.
If I said that you misgendered Bruce in the same sentence in which you agreed not to deadname him, then I would have both misgendered and deadnamed him. Or her.
Joe Rogan has a comedy sketch about Jenner here. (Warning – not for kids.)
In some regards, I have no problems with this.
However, how do you signal what you are to a potential mate? And when I say “mate”, I am not talking about the sterile couplings made because of some unconventional love. I’m talking about actual, biological, offspring producing mate.
In nature, males and females signal to each other what they are for reproductive purposes. Going around asking what your chromosomes are and if your intact because I’d really like to have kids seems like a really weird way to approach dating life. And in a world where men and women have no external signals as to what their role in reproductive life is, doesn’t that lead to confusion, too?
Now, I’m betting the more “enlightened” among us will berate me for my backwards thinking that doesn’t consider the possibilities of advanced technology on reproduction. The development of artificial wombs, artificial insemination, test-tube babies will make it all moot.
I’m sorry, but I really am not interested in living in Aldous Huxley’s imagined world. And that’s where this leads. Neither male nor female because we have no way of distinguishing between one or the other in any real way and technology takes care of reproduction purposes?
I don’t think it will ever get that far, because I think this creates sufficient amounts of instability we would collapse under it before it got that far, but assuming we maintained stability, deviancy spreads. And this is deviant.
We do have a similar phrase for women. “Be a lady.” It implies feminine virtue, which essentially consists of sexual fidelity to the male hero, motherhood, and the nurturing of children, especially small children. There is courage involved, but it is the courage to endure hardship and encourage the male hero when he is losing, not the courage to fight the dragon herself. There is also a leap of faith involved, as she has to trust the man, who may fail or betray her.
This view is even less politically correct than the OP.
Time once again for the single greatest Onion article ever:
https://www.theonion.com/gay-pride-parade-sets-mainstream-acceptance-of-gays-bac-1819566014
Money quotes:
<snip>
Well, I agree it is going to be contentious. And I support your “within reason” caveat. As I just said on a thread on Facebook, when I tell you I’m romantically attracted to men, I’m not sure why you should disbelieve me. When I tell you I’m a poodle, I think your skepticism might be justified. Each different change to the social norms needs to be considered on its own merits, not as some slipperly slope down the arc of history toward progressive nirvana. But that doesn’t mean none of the changes to social norms are salutary.