Ask the Transperson

[DanaC]

The gender is purely 100% conditioning argument just doesn't hold up at all. The idea that how we express, understand and respond to gender may be very much learned and conditioned is more compelling to me.

I do not believe that girls are biologically driven to like pink dresses and wear high heeled shoes. But I do think little girls are biologically driven to want to know how to be a girl and if the answer they see around them is that girls like pink dresses and high heeled shoes then they are very likely to start wanting those things. Similarly the drive to attract a mate requires knowing what the other person might find attractive - and if everything tells you that what makes a woman attractive is that she be this or that, then that becomes the thing we aim for.

The same is true I think of many of the features of femininity and masculinity that we culturally deem natural and unassailable.

In other words, what it is to be a woman, think like a woman and express a female gender is heavily shaped by the cultural context. The same cultural context surrounds people who have a conflict between the gender they feel they are and the gender they are told they are. They were seeking out the same answers to the question of what is male and what is female - just with a less conventional focus. You can't look for messages about one gender and not see messages about the other, they are defined in opposition to each other.


I don't think gender defines, at a biological level, whether we will want to play nurse or fix a computer. Nor do I think it defines whether we are home bodies or adventurers, able to be funny, or capable of mathematical genius. But the biological drive to be our gender may be important in defining those things, along the lines of the lessons we learn about femaleness and maleness. It also, in many ways, defines who we are in relation to others and ourselves - and that is profoundly important. And, however culturally conditioned our understanding of what it means, fundamentally.. to be male or female, that context isn't easily dismissed. Aspects of it may even be desirable - socially useful.