Dialogues Issues - Sex and Gender 

When I first took my partner down to meet my parents, we were returning from a weekend getaway in Monterey. We went out to a nice dinner and then headed to their house to relax & socialize for a bit before continuing our journey back home to San Francisco. The conversation (inevitably) turned toward my childhood & whatever embarrassing pictures could be displayed or stories related.We ended up focusing on my early childhood years...

I was lucky to go to an awesome preschool. I don't have many concrete memories of it (I'm more of an emotional memory kind of kid--I remember how things *feel* rather than how they actually *were*), but I remember it being one of the happiest times of my life. Getting messy, learning new information about the world, hanging out with all my besties, climbing anything in front of me, having camp-outs, playing with animals, roughhousing...you get the idea.

One of the things the preschool did was have parents create scrapbooks for their kids--one of the coolest things ever, in my humble opinion. I mean, not only capturing pictures of me at that age, but my artwork & words put down verbatim--oh the things I said! And man, that tendency to tell stories? Definitely inborn. Also inborn? We chuckled at the part that described my personality: 'Shy, strong-willed, aggressive' (yep, all three simultaneously--and still true today!), 'Does not take defeat well.'

We kept flipping through the pages. Picture after picture of me; shaving with my dad (one of my *favorite* things to do), straddling my trike with hips cocked & a tough look on my face (premonition of me on my motorcycle so many years in the future?), and most importantly (and frequently) me playing dress-up. When we reach the picture of me wearing an adult-sized petticoat up around my chest with a baby tucked under one arm steering a shopping cart with the under all topped off by a football helmet, my partner turned to me and said: 'Even when you were a kid, your gender was THIS BIG.'

All I could do was shrug & nod with a sheepish grin. Yeah--that and I wanted it all, even back then.

I used to joke that I was a fag trapped in a dyke's body. Back when I had time to perform, my bio started: 'The bastard love child of an opera singer and a madman, Charlie was taken in by drag queens and schooled in proper faggish fashion, diction, etiquette, and grandiose metaphor.' I still tell people that 'My mother was an opera singer, so I was raised by queens.' The point of the story is, I was not only raised with gay men as role models, but I identified with so many of the specific emotive and playful aspects they embraced from the culture of theater/music within which they made their lives. So what the hell does that make me?

Part of the problem is that I can't decide. I can't commit to being one or the other. I took a boy's name so I could feel comfortable wearing dresses; I have more ties and more dicks than most of my 'butch' partners--and get more use out of them too; last year I lopped most of my chest off, but then kept growing my hair out to ridiculously feminine proportions. I struggled for a long time trying to figure out if I was trans before realizing I was just genderqueer. A queer genderqueer, to be ever so elusively precise. Because that's the thing--it's not that I wanted to be a boy or a girl. I just wanted to be a kid playing dress-up, and let my whims and whimsy take hold every day. Let the imaginative power and magic shape my interactions with the world through choosing the presentation that shapes my role in it. I wanted to be able to (re)invent myself everyday.

A big part of the problem is that I rarely like baggy clothes, and when I do bust out that wardrobe I merely resonate dyke--more sexual identity than gender identity. In addition, my 'boy' is usually either a queeny preener or a dapper prancer.  Give me a tight, trashy shirt & slutty pants (see: Queer as Folk, Emmett) or something beautifully tailored & labeled (see: Glee, Kurt). Those + female secondary sex characteristics (does not equal) dancing queen--at least not in the way I want it to.

So I read as 'girl' most of the time. And because I have the experience, I can play that role well--often so well that individuals don't see the subtler shades of gender that ripple across my skin when I turn my face to the world. They don't see that this 'femme' thing is just a front, that I make my way with a coy but deliberate tribute to all things camp, that there is a subtle subterfuge to each wardrobe decision. They see a fragment, a slice, a sliver of the spectrum. Thankfully, though, I know those who know & love me see the small but fiercely beating heart of agirlboy wonder making its way in the world, one teetering-heeled step at a time.

Yesterday I sent out an appeal on behalf of the National Sexuality Resource Center, asking our community to call in to reject Orrin Hatch's sneaky attempts to add $250 million for abstinence-only education into the health reform package. Thanks to all of you who made calls.

Today, I came in to work to find this email in my in box:

"Hi - I just had to comment about your cheesecake photo that went out with a letter urging people to reject abstinence-only sex education.  While I agree with the philosophy and am familiar with the research documenting the failure of that type of sex education, the style of photo you chose to include with the email was overtly sexual and undermined your message. I agree that 'sex sells' but this seems, to me, to set the wrong tone for an important issue.  A more business-like image would have convinced me, but I don't feel comfortable forwarding the letter to other friends to request their support."

I was dumbfounded. And saddened. And disappointed, that a woman anthropology professor--one who probably considers herself progressive on gender and sexuality issues (she is on our mailing list, after all)--would not take me seriously because of the way I looked. And even worse, that she would try to shame me because she perceived my appearance as being sexual. I say perceived, because I have examined and re-examined my pic--no lowcut blouse, no suggestive look, but I do have a fondness for red lipstick.

In my life, I have had blue hair, unshaved legs and pits, four or five facial piercings at a time, worn flannel shirts (they were a mistake) and tiaras, and gone to formal events wearing fake teeth. I took my bottle of tooth black on the plane to my grandmother's funeral because it made me feel safe. I have gone out in full masculine drag, including moustache, plus lipstick. I have performed as a female-born female impersonator. I got a flattop on a military base in the middle of Texas.

When my son, who is four, wanted to wear a dress to preschool, I was scared that someone would try and shame him for busting their very binary concepts of gender. Then I went out, got him a dress with big buttons that he could undo himself, practiced funny retorts with him, and sent him off to school with a shirt and jeans as backup. I am a dyke, a mom, a sexuality activist, and many, many other things--none of which require wearing lipstick, but none that preclude it, either.  Do I have to prove that I am committed to smashing the way we think about gender and sexuality? Evidently, even after twenty years of activism, my lipstick says I do.

I have been able to enjoy gender and femininity as performance--and I also understand that there are many people who don't get to 'enjoy' how their gender is expressed or perceived; that for many people the way they look is not just play, but something that poses a danger to them daily as they move through the world. That kind of courage is something that I haven't lived, but have felt viscerally as I held my butch girlfriend's hand in a public bathroom in Texas. I get that my choice to look more conventionally feminine is a choice that I am able to make, and that privileges accompany it--as does the privilege I get from being white and educated.

This woman--who claims she believes in our work-- was offered the opportunity to make a call to end abstinence-only education, a failed strategy that reinforces heteronormative behavior, waiting until 'marriage' for sex, and traditional gender roles for both men and women. Instead, she used her time and energy to write me a personal email to put me down for the way I looked, and to attempt to embarass me because she thought I was sexy. (To which I say: not embarassed, and thanks.)

When I read about the girl who was gangraped by more than twenty boys in Richmond this week, and heard girls from her school say that she 'asked for it' because she had gone off with the boys in the first place, I cried, because I thought we had gotten past the point where we tell women that because of the way they look, or the choices they make, they somehow deserve to be thought of as less human than someone else. And when the Matthew Shepard Act passed this week, I thought about my son and his dress and his barbie backpack, and all of my hot gender outlaw friends, and knew that someone is recognizing--and protecting--the courage they have to be just who they are, damned if you like it or not.

A boss once commented that he knew what Freud would say about my wearing lipstick [Freud said it was a secret desire to castrate men]. I smiled, and put on another bright red coat. If you want to find my lipstick a threat or a distraction, so be it. But you just might miss me changing the world--and you'll be missing your opportunity to do the same.

In our graduate seminars, we talk a lot about race and color, including how whiteness is cherished and celebrated in and outside the United States.

These class discussions and other conversations with my fellow students and friends made me think about the various fairness products that are marketed and sold back home. (In no way am I trying to be the voice of my nation. These are just MY views on such 'beauty' products.)

Here's a fine example of what I'm talking about:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI5WCNR81YM&feature=related]

So clearly, once you're beautiful (i.e. fair, white) you can achieve anything! Name, fame, money and power! You can realize your inner dreams and talents 'cos opportunities are endless!

So what happens if you're not fair? Well, basically then you're nobody! You're boring, unwanted and invisible. Your life sucks! (and not in a pleasurable way!)

Not only that, if cannot get married because of your dark complexion, all you need to do is use a cream! Look at this for instance:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lN26TMwm6s&feature=related]

Use it for a couple of days and see the results! You'll impress your guy and his mother in no time! How gendered and how setreotypical is that!

Ummm, but wait, isn't skin color largely genetic? So the fairness creams/soaps/sprays just suck out all the melanin? That doesn't sound right! It probably just washes away dead skin cells, leaving it smoother and cleaner with a momentary glow. It cannot possibly change one’s life! Common!

It often worries me how whiteness and fairness has become a virtue among some social groups:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-9tcXpW1DE&feature=related]

The message in the above video is clear - 'not so far people' are looked down upon by 'fairer' folks. The only way to shut them up is by 'becoming' like them, and if possible, a shade lighter! Intra-race racism? (I'm sure there's a better academic term for this.)

Corporates spend a lot of time and energy researching their target consumers. Of course there the question of what came first? The chicken or the egg? Was there always a need for creating fairness? Did the marketers study people's aspiration or did they create this market through such campaigns by feeding consumer's minds with bogus claims?

It amuses me that most brands selling such fairness products are not domestic. Nivea, Garnier, J&J and many others have spent millions of $$ conducting R&D on Eastern markets to come up with skin whitening merchandise.

Oh, and if you thought their target audience is just women, you're wrong! Men too have been using fairness products. As the following clips suggests, men can finally 'come out' as they now have their own personal line of fairness products. Of course, men's fairness creams are packaged in blue, grey and black as opposed to pink in case of women :)

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgBevCTBTJw&feature=related]

It's completely macho to make yourself go a few shades lighter 'cos now, women will run after you!

[Editor's note: this blog was originally a comment on the XX-Why? IAAF out of Caster Semenya's Pants petition.]

Controversy and a lot of prurient interest exploded into the news this week when South African Caster Semenya outran her competition in the 800m world championships by a more than two second lead, only to be accused of cheating by being intersex. As an intersex person following this story, I've felt . . . well, largely appalled by what spews from the mouths of competitors, sport officials, news commentators, bloggers, and eyebrow waggling, head-shaking people on the street. It's hard not to feel depressed encountering innumerable snarky statements such as this one: "South African runner Caster Semenya (hehehe...she has semen in her name...hehehe) won the gold in the women's 800-meter at the World Championships in Berlin last night, but officials may snatch (peen, I mean, pun intended) away her victory if it turns out she's really a dude." (That one can be found here, if you're really inclined to read it.) So I wanted to share my perspective on this story. I do apologize to Caster for joining the pile of people giving her no privacy, but as the media are overflowing with details of her life already, I at least wanted to step in to defend her.

The basic outline of Caster's situation, as best as I can understand it through news reporting which is mediocre at its best, is that she was born intersex, assigned female sans surgery based on her predominant genital appearance, and raised as a girl. However, like lots of us whose genitals are visibly intermediate, she grew up knowing she was not a typical female, which liberated her from gender conventions. She was a classic tomboy, refusing to wear dresses and competing with boys in sports. From what I can gather from the news, Caster did not, however, question her female sex assignment, only gender role limitations. An excellent athlete, chances are that she was defined by her physical abilities, as are many tomboy athlete girls with typical female anatomy. When she began to compete in major sporting events, her status as a woman was questioned, and Athletics South Africa "cleared her," declaring her female. Now that she has proven her remarkable running ability on an international stage, her international competitors want her disqualified for "cheating" by not "really" being a woman. The International Association of Athletics Federations has stepped in and is investigating her status, in what most news sources are oddly calling "gender testing." Generally, the news media assume that they will be able to issue a definitive answer on what her "true" (dyadic) sex is.

The main thing that saddens me about this story is the emotional tone of the commentaries. Other athletes, people on the street, and low media blogs are full of sneers and winks and nosewrinkled disgust. The major media bring in scientists and voice patronizing sympathy for how humiliating this must be for Caster, meanwhile capitalizing on the prurient interest in the story to gather viewer attention. Underneath it all is a widespread impulse to yank down Caster's pants and let everyone have a good look. It's a freakshow, with an intersex person the object of millions of prying eyes.

Some basic themes that will be familiar to anyone intersex arise over and over in the news coverage. There's ignorance of the very existence of intersex people, evinced in frequent speculation by laypeople that Caster must have had a sex change or engaged in doping. There's confusion of physical sex with gender identity, with detractors, including some of Caster's competitors, referring to her with male pronouns and speaking disparagingly of her butch appearance. There's racist scientific hubris, with Western sports scientists asserting that they can determine Caster's "true" dyadic sex after doing an exhaustive investigation of her chromosomes, hormone levels, anatomy, gonadal tissue, and psychology, while speaking derisively of the ASA's investigation as being unsophisticated. And most of all, there's the overwhelming belief in the myth of dyadic sex. Caster must be female or male; intersex cannot exist as a sex category.

One depressing sideline of this insistence that Caster must have a definitive dyadic sex is the regularity with which the term "pseudohermaphrodite" is raised by detractors. I've posted on how this term emerged in Western medical science to try to define away the existence of intersexuality ( see here.) Basically, in trying to erase the challenge intersex people place to the medical ideology of sex dyadism, doctors in the 20th century decided to call all intersex individuals who did not have ovotestes as their gonads "pseudohermaphrodites," no matter what their anatomy or experience. Somebody can be raised female, with average-looking genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts, living a typical valorized heterosexual life, femme as can be (housewife, reader of romance novels, cookie-baker), yet all unaware, have internal testes and androgen insensitivity syndrome. If she goes to a doctor for treatment of infertility, suddenly she'll find herself labeled a "male pseudohermaphrodite." The medical term defines her as "really a man," not even intersex, let alone a woman. Anyone with testes is "really a man" according to this scheme of classification--which reveals the sex politics and semantics in supposedly "objective" science.

Those same politics emerge from the mouths of Caster's detractors. She is a "pseudohermaphrodite," they claim--not a woman, not even intersex, but a man trying to cheat honest female competitors.

Here's an irony for you. According to Western medical practice, the majority of infants discovered to be intersex are assigned female. This is done for surgical convenience (it being considered easier to remove an "inappropriate" penis than create an "appropriate" one), and due to a covert assumption about gender psychology, that women can deal better with gender ambiguity than can men. So we're assigned female, told we are "really women," subjected to mutilating infant surgery, expected to identify as female, not intersex, told to keep our medical history, if we know it, a secret, and sent out to live dyadic female lives. Many of us carefully live by the rules. But it turns out that if we do as we are told, we are still subject to being outed, discredited, mocked, and returned unceremoniously to the status of intersex oddity, as Caster's life illustrates--accused of breaking the rules.

What Caster's situation illustrates, from an intersex perspective, is that we exist. Dyadic sex is a myth--sex is a spectrum. Hormones, chromosomes, genitals, gonads--they are all arranged in many complex ways, and imposing a binary onto them is arbitrary. It's as arbitrary as saying all fruit is either sweet or sour. Sure, ripe cherries are sweet and ripe limes are sour, but most fruit gets its savor from both tastes, and some fruits balance at the tangy sweet-and-sour midpoint. You can measure all the fructose and ascorbic acid you want, scientifically. You can create a rule that divides all fruit into sweet and sour categories using precise measurements of sugars and acids. But that will not eliminate the fact that the experience of tasting fruit is complex, and that this complexity is what makes eating fruit delicious.

Given that sex is a spectrum, and that some of us live near its center, being obviously intersex, society needs to deal with us in better ways than by denying our existence, hiding us medically, and then reasserting our existence to disqualify us from participating in sports. And let us acknowledge that this disqualification is based on the insulting assumption that "real women" are categorically inferior to "real men."

Really, what Caster's case makes us consider is the strange fact that athletics are divided along dyadic sex lines. Sensibly, if one is looking at any particular sport, advantages exist according to physical distinctions--tall, long-legged people do better as hurdlers, for example. But millions of female-assigned people are taller and have longer legs than a typical male-assigned person, so why is gender and not leg-length used to create categories of competitors? There are significant differences in average height by race/ethnicity--would you therefore suggest that we divide people by race for sports competition? That would be no less arbitrary than dividing competitors by gender, though today it would be much more controversial. A much more sensible approach would be to create competitor classes by relevant physical category--as weightlifters are divided into weight classes. Then the question of "true" dyadic sex would be as irrelevant as the question of "true race" for athletic competitors.

My heart goes out to Caster Semenya, an intersex sibling caught in an impossible position--required to live in a dyadic gender, and then accused of wrongdoing because the assignment suits poorly.

Dr. Cary Costello is a tenured sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin in the USA. She has extensive teaching, research and publication experience in areas including culture, identity, embodiment, and virtual environments.