Gender-concepts like ‘male’ and ‘female’ allow us to make helpful assumptions about what’s going on around us and how we ought to respond.

When we’re really young, we learn that there are rules & expectations that apply only to some people, and we learn which ones apply to whom (including ourselves).

We’re taught these — and most of the teaching is non-verbal. We learn ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ like ‘square’ and ‘circle’: most of what we learn about them, we learn by observation and experience.

But the rules for gender-concepts apply both to objects in the world (animate and inanimate, including our bodies) — objects we can sense— and to our inner selves, including how we ought to choose to behave, how we ought to feel and think. They also apply to others’ inner selves: how we imagine what others think and feel.

Gender-rules apply to both outward objects and to inner experience.

The rules we learn about how we are gendered (which groups we’re a part of, which expectations others have of us, what we ought expect of others) are somehow supposed to apply to selves, souls, inner sense.

Gender-rules have features of outward rules and rules of the heart.

Some rules are analogous to a certain kind of state law: it doesn’t matter to the state if you think of yourself as a murderer or a reckless driver. It matters if you murder people or drive recklessly.

On the one hand, gender rules are a little bit like these state laws: what matters for getting on in the world is that you & others (more or less) follow them.

On the other hand, the rules we learn about how we’re gendered are supposed to (or assumed to) also work like the rules in some strands of Judaism and (esp. Protestant) Christianity, wherein inner, heart-felt convictions are as important as —if not more important than— following the letter of the law.

This insight (attributed to figures like Paul, Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant, and others) underlies many contemporary appeals to conscience. When we say, “I will or won’t do x because otherwise I’d be a hypocrite, pretending to believe something I don’t,” or when we say, “I have a conviction that y is the right (or wrong) thing to do,” we nod to it.

Not thinking like, not thinking of oneself as, not being a reckless driver is, for many, perhaps more important than not driving recklessly.

To be sure, it’s easier to follow rules when you follow from the heart, when what’s imposed from without and what’s imposed from within match up.

But (and this was a great insight of Thomas Hobbes) external rules can’t be imposed on hearts. The state can ask you to go to church, but it won’t be a stable state if it asks you to believe in church teachings.

Outward laws can help regulate social relations, but they can’t change inner convictions.

When states punish people for their beliefs, things get really dicey, in part, Hobbes said, because we don’t have much control over what we genuinely believe. When you punish people for not believing something they can’t, they’ll feel threatened. They’ll pick fights and riot.

But, Hobbes said, the state can ask people to behave in certain ways and not behave in others. It can ask me to go to church and say a creed, but I don’t have to believe it.

My friends, family, nearby strangers, etc., can ask me to behave according to certain gender rules. They can punish me when I don’t. And I can even internalize those rules: I can reward myself when I follow them, and punish myself when I don’t. But there’s little they (or I) can do about my inner convictions.

Gender-identity (our own, and our beliefs about others’) helps us break gender-rules without thinking of ourselves and others as rule-breakers.

We’re much better at thinking well of ourselves (e.g., I’m not a reckless driver) than we are at not driving recklessly. Most of us occasionally put our desire to be somewhere else above others’ safety; we drive too fast, we try to sneak through orange lights from time to time. But we don’t think of ourselves as reckless drivers.

I suspect most all of us do something similar with ‘gender identity’ (the gender-concepts and gender-rules someone believes to apply to themselves and their behavior): we think of ourselves as having a core identity. The core identity helps us feel good about who we are and how we relate to other people. It helps us feel like we’re doing and expecting the right things.

But it also helps us cover over the things we do, feel, say, and think that break the rules. It’s perfectly common to hear someone say, “I’m a man who likes pink orchids,” or “I’m a woman with a man’s sex drive.”

A gender identity helps us to not-see the staggering number of gender-rules we break as a challenge to the systems of gender-rules that govern our relationships with others.

Trans & Gender Identity

Perhaps trans* folks don’t have a problem with gender identity (perhaps we want to not-see the staggering number of gender-rules we break as a challenge to the systems of gender-rules that govern our relationships with others), but rather with a single part of a rule about gender-rules: that they should be followed out of a conviction of the heart.

Perhaps our ‘problem’ isn’t rejecting the religious notion that heart-felt rule-following is more important than outward rule-following, but that we have a deep conviction about its importance.

Beyond Oppression and Liberation

Given these hypotheses, we might imagine a way to understand the contribution of LGBT people to the greater good. And we might better understand the cost of those contributions.

If gender-rules structure our relationships with others, we all have reason and incentive to preserve and replicate them: if they’re disrupted, so are our relationships, so is our sense of order.

Suppose our relational structures have a narcissistic character, which may be healthy or unhealthy, but which offer special protection to the condition of the possibility of civilized relating, and of love.

Suppose that ‘out’ LGBT people symbolically represent the possibility of the disruption of our orders of relating. But the possibility of disruption is for narcissistic structures the possibility of flexibility, growth, love. If a possibility of disruption appears at all, it is something of a miracle.

The possibility of disruption ‘out’ LGBT people represent might be taken as a challenge. It would be a challenge for those who trust that other parts of the social ordering are firmly grounded enough that the possibility of disruption to the gender parts don’t represent a great threat. More simply: if one takes the relational order to be basically solid —able to change, grow, lose, and grieve— disruption needn’t be a great threat. This is a healthier sort of narcissistic structure.

But we can’t quickly pass over the less healthy, for the one is never far from the other. Here the possibility of disruption is taken to be a totalizing threat: the whole structure might collapse were any part altered. ‘Out’ LGBT people, from this point of view, might symbolize the destruction of the structures of social relating.

Taking on the habit of a challenge or a threat, of becoming a miracle (an interruption to a regulated sphere) is no easy task. For many, it requires building a narcissistic protective shell (often in the form of an oppressor/oppressed narrative), which can withstand the narcissistic doubt, grief, and rage ‘coming out’ may occasion.