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Reading Notes: Gatens, "A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction"
I've often opened up trans 101 kinda talks with making the sex/gender distinction in a cursory way in order to ground the conversation; the instructor I'm working as a grader/assistant for also did this in her Sex, Gender and Pop Culture class. It's become a very common thing to bounce around not only academic circles but "lay genderheads" or something --- and from reading Meyerowitz (which I didn't take notes on, sorry) I can see that it's a relatively recent construction in some senses, maybe 1950s?, that was put in place in part to support various social constructionist theories that were coming to the forefront at the time. I've heard a couple of people express discomfort with it but haven't previously seen a good explanation for why; perhaps this paper will be that explanation! It's from 1983 and comes with a warning of such, so it may lack some context I have.
Gatens claims (correctly, I think) that drawing a line between sex and gender comes out of, or at least is used most often by, groups with leftist political goals --- "Marxists, homosexual groups and feminists of equality." I mean, go team I guess, but it's an interesting point.
"What I wish to take to task in these uses of gender theory is the unreasoned, unargued assumption that both the body and the psyche are postnatally passive tabulae rasae." Oh, this argument. Yeah, most people I know are so over this one. It's very easy to see where the trans identity disrupts existing feminisms here:
Aaaaanyway. Gatens finds the "solution" of "reprogramming" to remove patriarchal brainwashing to be ineffective and kinda creepy and I, with reservations, agree. I guess maybe in 1983 people weren't yet doing a good job of saying "there are social factors and there are biological factors and we're created in part by the intersections between them?" (Even one of the readings for the Pop Culture class was trying to claim that David Reimer would have been perfectly happy growing up as a woman in the 1990s when there was less sexism, which WHAT THE FUCK NO.)
"the biologically normal but psychologically disturbed individual (for example, the transsexual)" ... *sigh* Stoller claimed that it was all social factors that made people into transsexuals, specifically failure to separate from the mother. Then a bunch of feminists went and cited his work as proof that there was no intrinsic gender identity. The assumptions made in order to leap to these conslutions are implicitly "rationalist" and "ahistorical" according to our author. And there's also this whole assumed mind/body divide which we already know to be problematic (and "a problematic" to boot).
"Concerning the neutrality of the body, let me be explicit, there is no neutral body, there are at least two kinds of bodies, the male body and the female body." As a random aside while I'm letting the itch in my teeth subside, I've been reading, for another class, Making Sex, which shows that historically, from the Greeks until the 1600s at least, the common conception of the human body was a one sex model, with women just being imperfect forms of men whose bodies were structured slightly differently because they lacked heat or vital energy or something. Obviously this perspective didn't bring about women's equality but it did cause difference to be viewed differently.
"The fact that menstruation occurs only in (normal) female bodies is of considerable import for this essay. Given that in this society there is a network of relations obtaining between femininity and femaleness, that is, between the female body and femininity, then there must be a qualitative difference between the kind of femininity 'lived' by women and that 'lived' by men." ... "The 'feminine male' may have experiences that are socially coded as 'feminine' but these experiences must be qualitatively different from female experience of the feminine. His experiences are parasitically dependent on the female body, more particularly on the maternal body, by a process of identification." Offensive as this reads (and... is, as far as I can tell), I think she has an important point. I don't think it's (somewhere between "almost ever" and "ever") OK for women's events to exclude trans women, say, but I think that has more to do with treatment of marginalized groups than with the lack of Any Difference Whatsoever. After all, if I had a trans women only meetup for whatever reason --- I dunno, a support group or something --- I wouldn't be cool with cis women showing up. Obviously something about the experiences is different, no? In a broad-scale categorical sense? That there exist cis women who never menstruate, can't give birth, and so on doesn't mean that there exist trans women who can, and with those aspects of the "female" body being coded so importantly by society, well, grargh, I feel dirty even making this argument. I'm gonna move on. But I think there's something there.
Here's something I'd seen before but want to mark out in my head as interesting especially if I decide to rock furry stuff in my paper: "Schilder maintains that both 'phantom limb' and hysteria can be understood only if we take into account the fact that all healthy people are, or have, in addition to a material body, a body-phantom or an imaginary body... The imaginary body is developed, learnt, connected to the body image of others, and is not static." This brings me back to Jay Prosser's Second Skins which I don't have time to reread right now but is an amazing book.
The section called "transsexualism reconsidered" doesn't reconsider transsexualism at all. It's barely a page long. Lame sauce.
I should look into Firestone's "cybernetic communism" mentioned in this essay. It sounds like it's problematic in terms of taking the male as the base role and encouraging everyone into it but it could be an interesting read.
WHAT. Gatens just called "class" and "power" "hobby-horses" that get in the way of looking at real feminism. Madam, I think we are done here.
Gatens claims (correctly, I think) that drawing a line between sex and gender comes out of, or at least is used most often by, groups with leftist political goals --- "Marxists, homosexual groups and feminists of equality." I mean, go team I guess, but it's an interesting point.
"What I wish to take to task in these uses of gender theory is the unreasoned, unargued assumption that both the body and the psyche are postnatally passive tabulae rasae." Oh, this argument. Yeah, most people I know are so over this one. It's very easy to see where the trans identity disrupts existing feminisms here:
Aaaaanyway. Gatens finds the "solution" of "reprogramming" to remove patriarchal brainwashing to be ineffective and kinda creepy and I, with reservations, agree. I guess maybe in 1983 people weren't yet doing a good job of saying "there are social factors and there are biological factors and we're created in part by the intersections between them?" (Even one of the readings for the Pop Culture class was trying to claim that David Reimer would have been perfectly happy growing up as a woman in the 1990s when there was less sexism, which WHAT THE FUCK NO.)
"the biologically normal but psychologically disturbed individual (for example, the transsexual)" ... *sigh* Stoller claimed that it was all social factors that made people into transsexuals, specifically failure to separate from the mother. Then a bunch of feminists went and cited his work as proof that there was no intrinsic gender identity. The assumptions made in order to leap to these conslutions are implicitly "rationalist" and "ahistorical" according to our author. And there's also this whole assumed mind/body divide which we already know to be problematic (and "a problematic" to boot).
"Concerning the neutrality of the body, let me be explicit, there is no neutral body, there are at least two kinds of bodies, the male body and the female body." As a random aside while I'm letting the itch in my teeth subside, I've been reading, for another class, Making Sex, which shows that historically, from the Greeks until the 1600s at least, the common conception of the human body was a one sex model, with women just being imperfect forms of men whose bodies were structured slightly differently because they lacked heat or vital energy or something. Obviously this perspective didn't bring about women's equality but it did cause difference to be viewed differently.
"The fact that menstruation occurs only in (normal) female bodies is of considerable import for this essay. Given that in this society there is a network of relations obtaining between femininity and femaleness, that is, between the female body and femininity, then there must be a qualitative difference between the kind of femininity 'lived' by women and that 'lived' by men." ... "The 'feminine male' may have experiences that are socially coded as 'feminine' but these experiences must be qualitatively different from female experience of the feminine. His experiences are parasitically dependent on the female body, more particularly on the maternal body, by a process of identification." Offensive as this reads (and... is, as far as I can tell), I think she has an important point. I don't think it's (somewhere between "almost ever" and "ever") OK for women's events to exclude trans women, say, but I think that has more to do with treatment of marginalized groups than with the lack of Any Difference Whatsoever. After all, if I had a trans women only meetup for whatever reason --- I dunno, a support group or something --- I wouldn't be cool with cis women showing up. Obviously something about the experiences is different, no? In a broad-scale categorical sense? That there exist cis women who never menstruate, can't give birth, and so on doesn't mean that there exist trans women who can, and with those aspects of the "female" body being coded so importantly by society, well, grargh, I feel dirty even making this argument. I'm gonna move on. But I think there's something there.
Here's something I'd seen before but want to mark out in my head as interesting especially if I decide to rock furry stuff in my paper: "Schilder maintains that both 'phantom limb' and hysteria can be understood only if we take into account the fact that all healthy people are, or have, in addition to a material body, a body-phantom or an imaginary body... The imaginary body is developed, learnt, connected to the body image of others, and is not static." This brings me back to Jay Prosser's Second Skins which I don't have time to reread right now but is an amazing book.
The section called "transsexualism reconsidered" doesn't reconsider transsexualism at all. It's barely a page long. Lame sauce.
I should look into Firestone's "cybernetic communism" mentioned in this essay. It sounds like it's problematic in terms of taking the male as the base role and encouraging everyone into it but it could be an interesting read.
WHAT. Gatens just called "class" and "power" "hobby-horses" that get in the way of looking at real feminism. Madam, I think we are done here.