The Binary: Is it a Necessity or a Redundant Relic?
I took a deep dive to understand where our gender binary came from.
Lately, my mind has been on gender. Not really in terms of myself, but how our society defines it and informs us on how to define and express ourselves within these paradigms. Our society runs on a dichotomy of gender, which encompasses a range of things that all relate back to manhood and womanhood. I think a lot about our collective perspective on it and whether it’s beneficial to put effort into preserving it, changing it or seeking something entirely new. Our current binary is strict and absolute. It lacks the variation to allow any space for individuals who don’t fully identify with these concepts. But with the increasing visibility of transgender people’s realities, there is a challenge to the society’s dominant views on gender. These views have been around for so long that as people, we’ve fully internalized them into our own self-concepts. As a result, growing LGBTQ+ visibility has sparked reactionary anger and discomfort from some who view it as a threat to their own identity.
As a disclaimer I must say that my critique of what we define as the traditional gender/sex binary, as well as our conceptions around manhood and womanhood, is not an attack on the concept or an invalidation of those who fit into these ideals. I’m examining these societal structures, and simply posing a question of whether it’s truly beneficial to everyone or a specific group. And also asking whether we as a society should keep these structures or replace them with a more accurate and functional model. I am not advocating that there is any one correct way of being a man or a woman, only that there is a diverse array of human experiences that all deserve equal validation.
I’ve never shied away from questioning our societal paradigms. As a black woman, it’s in my best interest to question, examine and judge the perspectives our society indoctrinates us with because I know the damage that can occur when we accept the ideas and perspectives of the past without questioning it’s morals and ethics or giving a hefty examination of the motives behind the creation of these perspectives. If we are to care of our society and direct it into a positive future, we need to be sure that what we’re bringing with us is in everyone’s best interest and reflects reality appropriately.
And with that, I’m thinking about womanhood, manhood and where these paradigms came from, who’s benefiting from them, who’s harmed by them and if it’s worth keeping intact.
Context Is Always Important
When looking at the origins of our paradigms around gender, one will always end up landing in Europe, and we cannot have a productive conversation about gender without also discussing the European perspective on gender and sex. The dominant understanding of gender and sex was that the two were linked and existed within a strict binary that was natural and unchanging. This was a primary piece in upholding a patriarchal societal system.
At the time maleness and masculinity was defined as a person born with male genitalia, who expressed masculine features and behaviors, such as heterosexual attraction to women. This was what, and how, a man was considered to be. Being a man provided a privileged position of power in society. The idea that masculinity or maleness was purely exclusive to a single demographic, who were also self-ordained as the most fit for positions of leadership solely based on them being men, secured their status and ensured that women would not have access to maleness/masculinity, and by extension, the privileges enjoyed by men at the time. This line of thinking persisted for many years, contrary to the fact that human behavior was refuting it. Queer, intersex and trans people have always existed. Their very existence was, and still is, seen as a challenge to the binary. And if it’s a challenge to the gender/sex binary, it’s perceived as a threat to male privilege.
Erasure
For centuries, the existence of queer people has been defined through a religious lens. Christianity was used as a tool to condemn anyone who didn’t fit into what was considered “normal” in white European societies at the time. So, what we have is a rigid binary that was conceived and propagated by men in order to protect their position in society, while also being tied to Christianity to legitimize and enforce these views. Our current paradigms surrounding manhood and womanhood are rooted in those white European ideals.
Throughout colonization, countless cultures and peoples around the world were weighed up against white European ideals and every single time Europeans came to the same conclusion which was of their own superiority and others’ inferiority. And so, colonizers decided to forcibly overhaul hundreds of different cultures, religions and perspectives, and replace them with white European religion and values, which positioned whiteness as an ideal to aspire to in way of life, appearance and belief.
Through colonization, the European perspective of how gender is defined was exported across the globe and forcibly positioned as the only authority on the matter. The motive was to subjugate the indigenous peoples of whatever lands they sought to conquer. Many diverse cultures across the world were stripped of their own paradigms, and told that their own beliefs were wrong. These ideologies, given to people of color by colonizers, were not given to enlighten, but rather to indoctrinate the population into a colonized mindset and distance them from their cultures, traditions, beliefs, and their roots.
With the power to determine the narrative, colonizers portrayed colonization as advanced European countries, ordained by a Christian God, civilizing new lands filled with ignorant savages who couldn’t possibly provide any meaningful contributions to any aspect of life. To the contrary, many cultures around the world did develop their own complex understanding of life, including gender and sex, and many did not subscribe to any kind of binary.
Within Hinduism there are many examples of gender-fluidity, which illustrates that Indians had an understanding that gender and sex were mutable and not fixed. Hindu god Shikhandi was depicted as a warrior who was born female, then changed gender later in life. Vishnu/Mohini is also clearly depicted as genderfluid.
Hijras is a term used in India since antiquity referring to people who were of “third gender” or people who were intersex or transgender. The presence and recognition of gender and sex variations within Indian religion and language highlights India’s attitude toward queerness pre-colonization. Queerness was integrated into their culture and society, not marginalized.
Colonizers in South America observed and wrote about the indigenous people’s way of life, and often observed behaviors that did not fit the European perspective on gender and sex. In 1551, Father Pero Correia, a Jesuit priest, wrote: “among the Indian women some who do not only took up weapons but also performed other functions addressed to men. They were even married to other woman.” Although Indigenous roles were generally organized by male and female functions, these functions were not strictly tied to one’s biological sex. In 1795, Jose Manual do Rosario, a colonist wrote: “Among the Guaycurus there are men who affect all the ways of women; they dress like them, they are busy spinning, weaving, making pans and so on.” The Indigenous peoples were not restricted by a binary, and, by first hand accounts, seemed to regard gender and sexual fluidity as a norm; allowing people to express their natural tendencies toward masculinity or femininity, as well as, same-sex attraction.
The Igbo and Yoruba people (present day Nigeria) of West Africa, did not have a binary of genders, and did not assign genders to babies at birth but instead waited until later in life. Their language was also gender neutral, which means it has no gendered pronouns. It also didn’t have any gender specific terms like, brother, sister, son, daughter. The most prominent organizing category for people within this language is age. However, the effects of colonization has made the use of Western pronouns more widespread.
In the West African Yoruba religion, the Orisha Obatala is sometimes depicted as a man in all white feminine garments, demonstrating the flexibility in gender expression within the culture pre colonialism.
The Dagaaba people (present day Ghana) also did not assign anatomy based gender at birth. They instead determined gender based on one’s energy. African paradigms around gender and sex were more fluid, and didn’t link biological sex to gender identity. In fact, prior to colonization Africa had no indicated history of prejudice against queer individuals. Homophobic attitudes and the discriminatory laws that followed were only observed after colonization.
The understanding of gender and sex as fluid was also reflected in women’s mobility within society. In many parts of pre-colonized Africa, women had access to many of the social and cultural positions men had. In some cases, the introduction of European paradigms around gender and sex resulted in the upending of the social standing women held in their communities.
Many non European cultures developed and integrated the occurrence of gender and sex variations into their understanding of life differently than white Europeans. They positioned queerness as a natural occurrence in life, whereas Europeans positioned it as unnatural and deviant. The successful integration of queerness into pre-colonial society’s framework of human experience and expression serves as a positive reminder that we are capable of forming a more accepting society.
What We’ve Been Left With Today
The current gender and sex binary that we widely employ across the globe was created to consolidate and sustain power for cisgender men, particularly those of European descent. It’s a categorical system for gender that also functions as a vital pillar in the social hierarchies of our societies. However, such systems are inherently biased by intentionally excluding individuals who do not fit into a narrow definition of gender and sex.
As time passed and society developed, so did science. Because of modern advancements in technology, scientists are able to study human gender, sex and sexuality more in depth than ever before, and the findings do not support the strict binary spread by Europe during colonization, but instead seems to validate many of the sentiments from other pre-colonial cultures. The sentiment being that gender and sexuality are fluid and unrelated to one’s biological sex.
It’s common knowledge that biologically, male and female brains have structural and functional differences. Using various brain imaging technologies, scientists have been able to observe the brains of transgender individuals and compare them to cisgender male and female groups. What they found was that the brain of the transgender person resembled the gender that they identified as. Some research has also observed the brains of transgender people to be somewhere in between, resembling both male and female brains. This supports the growing understanding of gender as a spectrum rather than a binary, and gives validation to gender identities such as: genderqueer, genderfluid and non-binary. We’ve only scratched the surface of studying structural and functional similarities of transgender brains, but there is a clear trend emerging from the findings. It reinforces what many cultures understood about gender and sex, which was that one’s gender is not linear. The brain and the body can go in different directions, and are not unitary.
Studies like these are vital moving forward in our discussions around gender and sex, because lack of understanding in these matters is widespread and has caused severe, mental, emotional and physical damage to queer and trans individuals. When we don’t examine our paradigms and blindly accept what has been passed down, we’ll end up approaching nuanced issues without the proper range to understand and help someone effectively. Misconstruing the experiences people who do not fit into the gender/sex binary does happen and always results in someone getting hurt. Trans individuals are still denied rights, conversion therapy is still legal in many parts of the country, and intersex people (individuals born with any of several variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones or genitals that do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies) are still fighting for visibility, autonomy over their genitalia and accountability from the health professionals who interfered in their gender and sex identity.
In The Five Sexes Revisited, author Anne Fausto-Sterling discussed John Money. Money was a psychologist who actually did not fully subscribe to a strict gender binary and acknowledged society’s incessant and overbearing emphasis on gender, but still mistakenly attempted to remedy these issues by recommending conformity to the societal binary. Money’s work was often used as guidelines for handling intersex cases in the 1950s. In one case in particular, David Reimer, a Canadian man born biologically male suffered a botched circumcision as an infant which left him without a penis. Money believed that gender was malleable in the first 18 months after birth, and recommended to the parents that the baby be raised as a girl. This didn’t have the desired effect they were hoping for as the child grew up not identifying with their new assigned gender. The child ended up suffering severe psychological damage later in life as a result, and ultimately committed suicide.
Although in this case the child was not born with ambiguous genitalia, this story rhymes with the experiences of many intersex individuals. The mishandling of intersex infants often has disastorous effects overtime. The decision to have surgery on their genitalia, ideally should be left up to them at a later time when they are of the appropriate age to consent. It is unfit to perform this kind of surgery on an infant, especially when you consider the fact that having ambiguous genitalia does not put the infant’s life in danger, making the surgery an unnecessary risk.
Because these health professionals ascribed to a paradigm that says sex and gender are a strict binary, they perceived intersex babies as in need of “correction”, and that changing the genitalia was an adequate way to change the gender of an infant. It didn’t occur to them that there was nothing abnormal about having ambiguous genitalia because the narrow societal beliefs they operated within did not allow for a broader understanding of human biological expression.
With All That Being Said…
It’s through the telling of history that we lay the backdrop for our present, and how we handle our present will shape our future. The paradigms that we employ everyday coat the atmosphere of our society and reveal who’s valued and who isn’t. It discerns who is allowed access to mobility of one’s individuality, and who is restricted in their expression. No human can be free within a system of gender and sex that isn’t based upon, the human experience, as it naturally exists, as it’s core concept. As humans, our minds and bodies won’t evolve toward any man made ideal we’ve inherited through generations. Our ideals are what need to evolve.
SOME REFERENCES:
Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000) “The Five Sexes, Revisited” The Sciences (July/August) pp. 18–23.
FERNANDES, Estevão Rafael. Decolonizing sexualities: colonial frameworks and indigenous homosexuality in Brazil and the United States. 2015. 383 f., Il. Thesis (Doctorate in Social Sciences) — Universidade de Brasília, Brasília, 2015.
European Society of Endocrinology. “Transgender brains are more like their desired gender from an early age.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 24 May 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180524112351.htm>.
