EXPANDING GENDER OPTIONS AND SELF IDENTIFYING ON FACEBOOK
Asked and answered by Michel Foucault in his introduction to Herculine Barbin:
“Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative. They have obstinately brought into play this question of a “true sex” in an order of things where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures.”
As Foucault points out, it has been the rising power of medical science and law in the defining and gendering of human bodies. Gender has been socially constructed by the powerful discourse of law and medicine. Yet, this does not lead to the conclusion that we cannot change the norms for identifying a persons gender; the criteria for identifying gender is not in the hands of a faceless society over which we have no control. Today, narratives of gender that challenge past definitions are emerging. These competing narratives have recently been allowed to be explicitly articulated and expressed on Facebook. The lives we live online are able to live out with the powerful forces of law and medicine, diminishing the power they have over us and increasing the power we have over ourselves.
Gender exists today very strongly, persuasively and destructively. This is evident in the gender violence and discrimination that happens toward both women and to gender nonconforming people. You can see this anytime a man gets called a “sissie” for being too emotional, when a woman gets called a “slut” when she sleeps around. People are abused in these ways because they are not adhering to society’s expectations about what it means to be a man or a woman.
If gender is something that is causing so many problems, surely we must somehow ditch it. The difficulty is how.
How can we abolish gender? I do not think we can live in a world in which we are suddenly without gender. A full nullification of gender, given where we are historically, does not seem possible. For one thing, a lot of people really like their genders, and they are not ready to give them up. Being a man, and being woman continues to mean a hell of a lot to people. Moreover, gender does matter in positive ways too. For example, gender presentation plays a crucial role in whom you attract and who you are attracted to. And so, the gender categories of man and the woman are likely to exist for some time.
So it seems we cannot abolish man and woman but we can ameliorate the perceived differences between them. We can create and acknowledge permissible gender identities in addition to man and woman. If gender becomes 1 of 70 things – it will cease to mean as much. Or, begin to mean something different.
Transcending the Gender Binary
“There is perhaps nothing so firmly entrench in way that our society thinks about the world than that there are two and only two genders, and that those genders never change.”
Barbara Findlay, Q.C.
Current law in Scotland follows this binary understanding of sexed/gendered bodies, which offers only two possible classifications: men and women.
In 2004 the Gender Recognition Act was introduced in Scotland. The Act allows trans persons to change their gender. Unfortunately, it is essentially a conservative act which attempts to deny the threat transsexualism poses to the dualistic system of gender. Persons may only cross the gender binary; that is, move from one gender to another. Transcendence of the gender binary; that is, moving beyond the categories of man and woman, remains a legal impossibility. As part of their Equality Campaign, The Scottish Transgender Alliance seek to introduce a non-binary legal gender category. Until such times, any gender identity between, above, below, and beyond, the binary is both unrecognisable and unthinkable in the eyes of the law.
Facebook however, in 2014 introduced more than 70 new gender options to the UK. The new gender options include androgynous, trans person, trans woman, trans man, transsexual, pangender, bi -gender, agender, polygender, and cisgender . You can see what these terms mean here.
Gender non-conforming people describe a range of identities and experiences, including but not limited to the ones listed by Facebook. Gender non-conforming identities highlight the allegorical qualities of ‘female’ and ‘male’ gender identity, the extent to which gender is always already a performance, and the potential flexibility of those terms.
Even in the face of the existence of those who do not neatly fit on one side of the binary, law is refusing to change this categorical model of fixed dualistic genders. Law continues to postulate its “truth” of sex; that there are only two categories; man and woman.
Facebook on the other hand seems to have recognised that the rigid binary easily falters in the face of complex lived realities. Indeed, when asked why it changed its gender policy Facebook’s policy director in the UK, Simon Milner replied that the purpose was “to reflect society.”
If one is of the view that the point of law is to give recognition to the reality that individuals actually inhabit, then it is time for the law to change.
Self-Identification
And it is not enough that we recognise am individual’s gender identity, we must do so in a morally acceptable way. In absence of any “truth” of sex/gender, (we still do not know exactly what it is), we must accept individual’s own description of their identity.
Facebook does this. Facebook has not only challenged the notion that there can only be two genders, but it has also introduced the idea of self-identification as definitive of gender identity. Users can simply select a gender option from a drop down menu with no requirements or conditions that must be satisfied before you are allowed to do this.
But to legally change your gender, law requires a number of things. Two of the most problematic being that firstly, the applicant must have had, or has, gender dysphoria and secondly that the applicant has lived in the acquired gender for a period of two years and intends to continue to live in the acquired gender until death. A gender dysphoria requirement constructs transsexualism as a mental illness, pathologizing trans people. Given that ‘‘disorder’’ implies some level of personal are distress, it has been suggested that a well-adjusted trans person is out with the scope of the act. In addition to this, trans individuals who are defined as gender dysphoric, but do not intend to cross and live in an acquired gender for life will not be recognised. The law is ignoring a substantial amount of trans lives and rendering them invisible.
In the world of Facebook, people are now able to define categories and terms of gender themselves, instead of having it imposed on them. You can change your gender on Facebook with no proof needed, nor an avowal that you will remain that gender for life. It is recognising and respecting an individual’s subjectivity. It is not enough that we recognise a persons gender identity, we must do so in a more morally acceptable way than the Gender Recognition Act currently does. In absence of any “truth” of sex/gender, (we still do not know what it is), we must accept individual’s own description of their identity.
Why it’s so important
“Fucksake, what next?”
Many act confused or hostile when they see so many “weird words” emerging that they don’t understand. And it is also common to see comments making fun of the queer dictionary by creating arbitrary and ridiculous identities in order to mock gender-nonconforming identities.
There are a diverse number of terms and definitions for various gender situations because people experience gender in various and diverse ways. The people who mock underestimate the joy of having words exist that resonate with and describe your lived gendered experience, where no words existed before. They are ignorant to the fact that trans people have had to develop a complex understanding of a complex idea for self-preservation. Many people have not needed to explore this because they have always lived a life that has been recognised and intelligible in society. The ability to articulate and express who you are on Facebook, when a substantial amount of our lives are now lived online, is a significant step in social recognition of a growing trans community. People should not have to make themselves more palatable for others. They should not be forced into the categories of man and woman when those categories do not describe their lived experience. They should be allowed to have a label for themselves and be able to express and communicate that label to the world.
Of course, the cynic in me is suspicious that this is a truly altruistic act by Facebook, (it is after all, a large corporation that makes it money through targeted ads) — “Facebook cares more about targeting ads than affirming your gender identity”. And I am also well aware that expressing one’s gender on Facebook has no legal force. But at the very least Facebook is moving the conversation along.
This is also a good move for women. A strict gender binary has the effect of ensuring the continued marginalisation of women. A social system that has a strict binary of man and woman allows men to exploit the social hierarchy that exists between them to dominate and control women. If we come to recognise gender as highly variable and partly under control of the individual, it ceases to be a reliable basis of domination, since its variability too easily allows for passage from the group of the marginalised to the group of the oppressors. The more gender options we recognise, the more the borders between the dominant and the marginalised are blurred.
We need to get to a place where gender is either meaningless in social or psychological terms, or is figured as choice not prison, as self-expression not prescription. Facebook is allowing bodies and personalities to become less constrained and circumscribed by gendered traits and instead, enriched by their use in the palette of diverse self-expression.
People are eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender. And crucially, the power of recognition is reliant less on traditional institutions such as the law and medicine and more on an individual’s identification. In a way then, power is being appropriated from the law to the people.
[Amy Rodgers]