What Does it Mean if the Gender Binary Is .0016% Years Old?
Sociological meanderings towards collective well-being.
I was reading a book the other day and the author was talking about something she calls “speck syndrome,” which is basically how an individual human makes sense of their relationship to historical time. I also recently read Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Burkeman reminds us that we are always making decisions around time. For example, we could wait for the “right” circumstances to do the thing or we could just go ahead and do the thing now, especially if it’s important to us.
I brought this up in class the other day.
We were talking about the historical transformation of the human experience from that of hunting and gathering to subsistence agriculture to the Industrial Revolution to now, to whatever way we want to describe capitalism in 2023 (late-modern, post-industrial, consumerist, etc…). In this process we explored how food systems impact how humans organize themselves. One such example is how the food system/economy shapes what we have come to understand as “gender roles.”
In truth, the gender binary is just a tiny blip in the expanse of human history.
And yet we experience it as a totality, an inevitability, a massively oppressive and often violent system.
Because right now it is those things.
Patriarchy wasn’t the norm, en masse, on this continent until after colonization. We didn’t utilize a strict — breadwinner/homemaker — gendered division of labor until after the Industrial Revolution of the 1700–1800s. Scientists didn’t discover what we now call “sex hormones” until the early twentieth Century. We didn’t start using the word “heterosexual” as part of our regular vernacular until the mid-twentieth century.
To those of us living today, the start of colonization feels like a long time ago: 500 years! We can barely make sense of the 80 or so years that we hope for ourselves. But put those 500 years in the context of 300,000 years and you paint a different picture. That’s .0016%, if you’re curious.
In my read, C. Wright Mills wrote The Sociological Imagination so as to illuminate what the discipline of sociology could teach us about social change.
What is possible? Well, history teaches us: everything.
Everything is possible. So much has happened, and so much has changed. And we aren’t, in fact, stuck with everything, or with anything.
We live in a present day culture, however, that is profoundly shaped by gender fatalism. How many times have you heard someone say something like this:
“Patriarchy has been around forever. There’s nothing we can do about it.” Shake head, shrug shoulders, go back to Instagram.
This fatalism holds us back; it is a lie. We can write a new story. Most of us already are, even if we don’t know it. Others of us put our lives on the line every day because without a new story we will die.
In November of 2020 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. My surgical oncologist informed me that a mastectomy was the only option given the amount of tissue that would have to be removed for clean margins. This took one decision off the table — mastectomy or lumpectomy + radiation — and put a new one on the table: do I do breast reconstruction or do I go flat?
One of the ways that the gender binary functions is by creating arbitrary measures of authenticity, thus shaping our daily choices and actions. How do we know when we are man enough? Or gay enough? Or trans enough?
Would I be woman enough if I carried around a body without breasts?
My whole life I have wondered, “what do I have to do to be a ‘woman’”? I’ve wondered this in large part because I have never felt woman enough. Case in point: in a public washroom while other humans are putting on make up and checking their outfits and their waistlines and talking to the others who are doing the same, I would always feel present, but on the outside. Often, they were tall, heightened by their heels, and this would add to my feeling small, invisible. Sure, I was in the same washroom as all these other humans, but sans make up, friends, and mirror checking. My jeans, t-shirt and Doc Martins required no such inspection. I felt not quite.
And yet, I didn’t change. I kept on doing my thing, pondering my authenticity, being my own version of myself, never fully certain where I landed on that whole “woman” thing, though always finding my identity within the category of “female.” I’ve done this in a myriad of ways, most recently in rejecting breast reconstruction. Along with millions of others, I have carried my human body into the world as a direct challenge to the gender binary.
To me, in the infinitely small number of years that I have been alive when compared to the expanse of human existence, the gender binary feels intractable. But these little actions of mine, of yours, of the millions of feminist and queer activists fighting their daily fight, they build up and build new.
Something else is possible. And we will write that future. The time is now.
