What is gender?
A miserable little pile of secrets.
Okay, but really, what is gender, anyway? Not, “What is a Man,” or “What is a Woman,” or “What is an Agender Person,” or any other specific, single gender identity, but when you strip away the skirts and pockets and undercuts and suspenders and speaking patterns and mannerisms and gender roles and everything else—what is gender in and of itself?
That’s actually a much bigger and weirder question than you probably think.
In a broad sense, feminism as a discipline was first founded to pursue that question, though what they thought they were doing—and what they tried to do for many decades—was try to understand what it meant to be a woman, relative to what it meant to be a man. Those efforts were ultimately in vain because one cannot understand womanhood, manhood, or any other gendered way of being without seeking out the foundations of what gender is, independent of any particular variety of it—it’s like trying to understand the properties of light as a whole while only using the parts of the visible spectrum available to the human eye. Heck, if you try to understand gender only using men and women as a starting point, it’s like trying to extrapolate all features of light from just red and blue light. You’re ignoring the vast majority of the data and context. Of course you can’t make any progress!
That said, there’s some history we've got to talk about first, or the complicated stuff won’t make any sense, since it came about in response to a whole mountain of research. It’d be like trying to learn about gravity by jumping straight to Hawkins and skipping Newton and everything in between them.
Surfing the waves of feminism
Generally speaking, feminist theory is spoken of in 'waves,’ or major philosophical shifts. You’ve probably heard the term before, but all it means is ‘grouped philosophical focus.’
The first wave of feminism was the fight for equal rights, and you’ve probably heard about a lot of that already in school—the Seneca Falls Convention, Virginia Woolfe, and all the rest. First wave feminism was very practical: it wanted the vote, the ability to live alone and own your own property—that sort of stuff. It was interested in gender, yes, but mostly in questions of access to public life. They wanted true equality, but fought for the fundamentals. The stuff they worked for isn’t exactly controversial, so it gets taught very commonly in high school and college history classes these days, so I’m not going to spend much time on it.
Second wave feminism was born in 1949 by Simone de Beauvior’s germinal book, The Second Sex. It was the first really serious detailed and focused dive into what it meant to be a woman, relative to what it meant to be a man, how those differences subjugated women, and it absolutely lit feminism as a discipline on fire. This focus would remain the central idea in feminist theory through the 1980s and the last of it dribbled into the very early 1990’s. The Second Sex argued that man is the default sex (Note: sex and gender didn’t get disambiguated until the 1990’s), that woman is defined as everything a man is not, and so inherently all of the undesirable features of human existence are passed from man to woman. It argued that “reproductive slavery,” or the fact that sex left women pregnant and, later, responsible for children while men were free to do as they pleased, was the major axis upon which men were able to dominate women.
Many theorists took up de Beauvior’s work, and so the defining work of the second wave of feminism was to secure reproductive autonomy for women—the right to an abortion and birth control. In the 1980s, with these aims largely secured (for the time being), things began to churn. Black feminists like bell hooks very rightly criticized mainline white feminist theorists for being almost exclusively concerned with the lives of upper-middle-class white women, who often subjugated minoritized women as housekeepers and nannies so that they could live more autonomous lives. Sex-positive feminists criticized the rejection of the erotic and the sensual that second wave feminism revolved around, and On Our Backs, a celebration of women’s bodies and erotic experiences, was born. Radical lesbian feminism began to decay from an aggressive, bar-none (and originally trans-inclusive) philosophical fistfight for egalitarianism to a separatist, and ultimately exclusionary, movement. And, as the genocidal neglect of the AIDS crisis began, queer feminists independent of radfems began to publicly explore the essence of queerness as more and more people began to come out.
These forces—Black feminism, queer feminism, and sex-positive feminism, came together in an incandescent explosion that washed through feminist circles, championing sex positivity, queerness, intersectionality, and giving birth to the modern gay and trans rights movements, theoretical perspectives like critical race theory, and the defense and eventual celebration of sex work.
Most feminists agree that that fire was lit by Judith Butler’s first book, Gender Trouble, which finally squared up to the question we’re all here for: what the actual electric fuck is gender, anyway?
So, what does Judith Butler say gender is?
It doesn’t exist.
No, really.
Butler spends the first 44 pages of Gender Trouble absolutely eviscerating the work of every single major feminist theorist (and, for good measure, Derrida) who came before them (Butler is nonbinary, and came out in 2020, a fact many people seem to have missed). They tear absolutely everything down, right down to the idea of binary gender—unsurprising, given their own gender. In short, they argue that gender does not exist as an identifiable, concrete, ordinal thing:
Once we dispense with “man” and “woman” as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as a substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility (Butler, 32).
Yeah, Butler is known for their intensely dense theoretical language. Sorry about that. Let’s break it down a bit.
They’re basically saying here that the data we have about gender shows that there’s a huge amount of stuff that “man” and “woman,” as concepts, cannot contain. If they can’t contain all that stuff, gender can’t be binary, and moreover, no gender can be a specific thing. Rather, binary, or even mostly-binary, gender is a convenient fiction that lets us get on with our days efficiently, as long as we don’t look at it too closely—which is exactly what Butler is doing.
Okay, so that’s what it isn’t. But what is gender, then? Well:
The presumption here is that the “being” of a gender is an effect… To claim that gender is constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or artificiality… If there is something right in de Beauvior’s claim that one is not born, but becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to begin or end. Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the “congealing” itself is an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social means (Butler, 43).
Gender, in short, is a thing we create, we manufacture, and which becomes meaningful inside a structured system. It is something we use to communicate with and to others, to signify who and what we are to each other without the equivalent of a massive Powerpoint presentation every time we meet a new person. It is performative. Oh, I bet you’ve heard that word before. And you know what? Butler is 100%, absolutely correct in arguing that gender is performative.
I can hear the torches being lit and the pitchforks sharpened now. Hang in there with me, though—this word has specific scholarly meaning, and it’s not what you think it is.
(Mis)understanding performativity
When trans people hear the word “performative",” we often get really defensive, because it sounds and feels like an attack on our very existence. We say, “I am my gender! I’m not a stage performer, playing out some melodrama! I am real!”
And you’re right.
Confused yet? Okay. Let’s fix that.
Something which is performative in scholar-speak—not just gender, but anything which is performative—is technical jargon, meaning “an action charged with symbolic meaning.” This is a whole zone of scholarly investigation, and a huge number of scholars have built their entire careers investigating one type or another of performative action. This scholarly zone, however, ultimately traces back to a rhetorician named Kenneth Burke, who I absolutely refuse to quote here because he’s about ten times as dense and complicated as Butler. In a nutshell, though, he laid out a foundational theory of communication as drama (in the sense of a stage play), using it as an extended metaphor to describe what he meant—that all types of communication are ephemeral things that we do, and that there’s no such thing as communication that is. However, because ‘drama’ really does have its own meaning, and two Big Ideas using a single term caused a hell of a lot of unnecessary confusion, another rhetorician, Walter Beale, recast it as performativity in 1978.
The last bit we need from this aside came four years later, from another Really Smart Dude named Walter Ong. His masterpiece Orality and Literacy (which is the only scholarly text in this whole talk that’s written in a way that a reasonable human being can actually understand, and is fascinating, so go read it if you’re interested in language development) explores how language—which is always performative, remember—is created, produced, and performed in a strict regulatory framework where the urge to create language is a natural evolutionary part of being human, but where any given individual language, and especially written language, are all ultimately artificial and arbitrary. That regulation gives language meaning which can be understood by other human beings, and as such is actually a really good thing.
It gets cooler.
Ong argues that languages, and especially written languages, are a technology which is so potent, powerful, and central to human existence that it bends human evolution itself to better take advantage of it by fundamentally restructuring consciousness and even the physical shape of the human body and brain:
To say writing is artificial is not to condemn but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller , interior human potentials. Technologies are not mere external aids but also interior transformations of consciousness… The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life (Ong, 81-2).
Hey, wait a minute. Wasn’t Butler talking about the artificiality of gender a bit ago?
Performativity and Performance
So, when Butler is talking about performativity and artificiality, they’re drawing on this huge scholarly history that’s talking about how meaning is created when people talk to each other. Let’s stick with that, then—Butler is equating gender to language. Well, if Butler’s doing that, it means that some stuff about language applies to gender too, since they never say it doesn’t:
Performativity is about using action to convey symbolic meaning to other people.
Conveying that meaning relies on a shared, arbitrary, artificial structure.
Since the structure is arbitrary, none of the individual bits and pieces in it are particularly important, and can be changed when moving from one context to another. It’s the whole that matters.
Gender is a social technology.
Social technologies restructure consciousness itself.
Wild stuff, huh? So, let’s pull things together a bit here.
Gender, Butler argues, is “a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to begin or end, (43)” which is a long-winded way of saying it’s a verb, not a noun. Like language, it’s ephemeral, something we create to be understood, but whose existence predates us to such a degree that it creates us as discrete human beings, different from one another. Its artificiality is a boon, because as technology, we can develop and change it to suit our existence, to “enlarge our spirits, and intensify our interior lives.” We’re not just stuck with it in its current state if it doesn’t suit us in the way we’re just stuck with whatever eyes we’re born with, whether they allow us to see clearly or not.
I mean, except for glasses. And contacts. And laser eye surgery.
Technology’s neat, huh?
Performing gender
So, how do we perform gender? Well, let’s use an analogy, like Burke liked to. He’s dense, but I like him.
Gender is a thing we do, right? That means it’s a verb. Really, it can be any verb, and that verb can change if you need it to, or from place to place, like if a transfeminine person needs to boymode for whatever reason. Thing is, a verb is really vague and unhelpful, so I’m going to arbitrarily pick a verb that fits the whole ‘performing’ thing, just so we can get a better idea of how it all works: dancing.
I want you to imagine there’s a big dance. Huge, really, with a dance floor stretching to the horizon in every direction. It’s filled with people who are dancing when you arrive at the dance, and as you look at them, you see that most people are dancing in one of two specific styles in a very standardized, regular step. A few other people are in there, but on their own. They’re freestyling, moving however the music strikes them, and mostly getting some baffled looks from people in the two major styles. Thing is, from time to time, someone in one of those two styles gets inspired and peels off, joining the freestylers, or even moving to the other style. People in the two main styles sometimes throw these folks dirty looks, but everyone’s dancing.
Well, except for a handful of people hanging out by the punch bowl and smoking a joint, a little baffled at the whole affair.
You step onto the dance floor and begin to dance, moving in whatever way best suits the feelings that the music inspires within you. Maybe it’s one of the two standard styles. Maybe you’re freestyling. Maybe you’re very similar to one, enough so that most people would never know you’re not quite identical, but unique all the same. In that moment, no matter what kind of dance you dance, you contribute to the creation of this infinite dance, performing and producing it alongside all of these other people.
But in that moment you also become a dancer—your very existence and identity is created by by the dance, which existed before you did and will continue to exist long after you’re gone. Language works the exact same way. You speak, creating language, and in doing so are created by your language, which has existed since long before you were born.
You are an ouroboros, creating the thing that is also creating you.
Verbs in infinite variation
And that’s what gender is, in the end: an indeterminate verb that can mean anything and everything, all at once. But the thing is… we’re trans. The dancers who are unbound to any single dance style, who consciously define the place on the dance floor that best fits our deepest selves.
We’re the ones who choose our verbs to best fit ourselves.
I said a while ago that “transition, for me, has been joy in its purest form,” and I mean it. Being trans is wonderful beyond description as far as I’m concerned.
So, if I get to choose my verb, the word that describes and defines what my gender performs, the thing that the deepest heart of my soul creates and sends out into the world?
Well, then, my gender is a celebration. A jubilee. The party to end all parties.
What’s yours?
Ooh, mixing some linguistics theory into our gender studies! Nice!
I gotta ask something because I'm really confused now. If gender is a verb how is it that so many of us want a different body? Body isn't a verb. I feel like a crucial bit of information hasn't clicked for me yet.