There has been a lot of discussion in this forum lately about gender and identity. A lot of people seem to think that gender is a one-dimensional spectrum (100% woman to 100% man). Others think that gender is just a meaningless social construct, or that gender "identity" doesn't really exist at all. A select few have offered strongly worded opinions that we are whatever sex and gender we were born too, and implied that any of us that think otherwise are guilty of faulty mental processes (i.e. delusional).
Rather than continue to debate these various concepts in threads started for other purposes, I thought it would be better to start a new thread for the purpose of continuing this discussion.
My personal experience is that a one-dimensional model for all aspects of gender does not map very well to reality. Also, some of these concepts have been studied, and some of the opinions offered here are somewhat in conflict with research results. Anyway, I think that "gender" is a composite of a whole bunch of independent qualities, many of which are individually a spectrum. This is how I would currently break down gender into its component parts:
Gender Expression
This is arguably the simplest of the component parts of gender: How do you wish do express your gender externally?
This is also what this section of these forums is really all about. The people that post here, for the most part, want to express themselves in an extremely feminine fashion.
Gender expression can run from extremely feminine ("high femme", in lesbian terms) to extremely masculine. Some people want to engage in gender performance where they vary their outward expression at times over a wide range - for instance, while some people here would like to be ultra femmy all the time (if they could be), others want to vary from over-the-top feminine to extremely masculine. Personally, my expression is sort of that of a soft, low-maintenance femme most of the time, but I like to occasionally put on a pretty dress and look more feminine - maybe even wear makeup. I also fully intend to do the drag king thing someday, just for kicks.
This mostly seems like a one-dimensional spectrum, but the middle is kind of muddled. Most of the time, when someone says they are presenting "androgynously", they mean that their outward presentation is low on obvious gender cues - they are dressing in relatively gender neutral clothing. However, some people like presenting in a genderqueer fashion that is actually high in overt gender cues - for instance, having a beard and some visible tatoos that are very macho, while also wearing a dress and makeup. So it is arguably more completely modeled as a two-dimensional spectrum, with how masculine you wish to present AND how feminine you wish to present as separate variables - but those two variables are inversely linked for most people, so you can think of it as one-dimensional and be right most of the time.
One important thing to remember is that this component is more fluid than most other aspects of gender.
Gender Traits
By gender traits, I mean those traits that are often stereotyped as being associated with gender. Researchers have grouped the "masculine" task-oriented talents into a group of traits they call instrumental traits (assertiveness, self-reliance, ambition, leadership, decisiveness). The "feminine" social and emotional skills are called expressive traits (warmth, tenderness, compassion, kindness, sensitivity to others). Research has indicated that 25-35% of such skills are inherited, but the rest are socially acquired. Like all aspects of gender, most people follow the stereotypical pattern (women are higher in "feminine" traits", for instance). But there are many exceptions.
Our society strongly encourages men to be good at instrumental traits and poor at expressive ones, and women to be the reverse. But it often doesn't work out that way. Only 50% of men are "traditional" men (high in instrumental traits, low in expressive traits). 35% of men are androgynous (high in instrumental and expressive traits). The other 15% of men are split between being cross-typed (low in instrumental traits, high in expressive traits) and being undifferentiated (low in instrumental and expressive traits). Women follow the same pattern, only in reverse (so 50% of women are high in expressive traits and low in instrumental traits).
Incidentally, research has shown that traditional couples (where the man is high in instrumental traits and low in expressive traits, and the woman is the reverse) are less happy than couples where one or both members are androgynous. In particular, it is not very satisfying to live with someone that is bad at expressive traits (but people that are poor at instrumental traits are less capanble of self-independence and more inclined towards poor self-esteem, so that causes problems too). In an ideal world, everyone would be androgynous when it comes to gender traits.
Gender traits are clearly best expressed as at least a two-dimensional spectrum, treating "feminine" and "masculine" traits independently. For some purposes, it would be probably more accurate to treat the individual traits (like self-reliance and ambition) as independent variables, creating a multi-dimensional matrix.
Gender Roles
This relates somewhat to gender traits, but is slightly different. Gender roles, as I have chosen to define it, is a description for those gender-linked roles that a person chooses to fill. These can be quite general ("nurturer", "provider", "protector"), or quite specific (such as "home-maker" or "soldier").
Unlike some other aspects of gender, gender roles really are almost entirely culturally constructed. I'm not saying that evolutionary psychology doesn't present some strong arguments for why women and men are more inclined towards certain roles (it does). But still, we are no longer living in prehistoric times, and psychological traits that were adaptive to primitive man are often no longer socially adaptive. There may well be some biological reasons why women and men possess certain tendencies and traits in greater abundance than others, but the fact is that women can make excellent soldiers or protectors, and some men are perfectly capable of being excellent home-makers or nurturers.
The false reliance on the concept of "gender roles" for stereotyping people, and (worse yet) channeling people into certain professions, is one of the aspects of society that feminism has been trying hard to eliminate - but we still have a long way to go.
Gender Identity
The basic concept of identity is that a person's identity is her mental model of herself. It determines her awareness of self. It dictates how an individual views herself as a person. It relates to her individuation, her self-esteem, and her capacity for self-reflection.
Gender identity, in essence, is specifically how a person views their personal gender. Those of us that have gender dysphoria suffer from being uncomfortable with one's assigned gender.
Gender identity is NOT the same as gender expression - there are many examples of butch women and feminine men.
Gender identity is NOT the same as gender traits - 50% of all people are cross-typed, androgynous, or undifferetiated in gender traits relative to their gender. I know plenty of assertive women and sensitive men.
Gender identity is NOT the same as gender roles - I know women who are engineers and men who are home-makers.
I've oft seen the argument that gender identity is socially constructed. This concept is appealing - certainly, gender roles are socially constructed, and gender performance is strongly socially influenced. However, there is reason to believe that there is still a core sense of self that reflects a gender self-awareness independent of social factors.
There have been biological studies that have shown that rats can be induced to exhibit cross-gendered behavior (by manipulating prenatal and perinatal hormones). There have been numerous studies on intersexed individuals that have shown that merely assigning a convenient gender at birth (based on what the genitals can most easily be altered to resemble) is not effective. The "tabula rasa" ("blank slate") psychological theory of gender was very popular a few decades ago, but it is now widely viewed as discredited by more recent research. So with all due respect to those that insist that gender identity is just a social construct with no real meaning, I'm afraid that your theories, while they sound very nice, do not actually reflect reality very well.
In any case, it doesn't really matter to what degree gender identity arises from biological causes, and to what degree it can be attributed to early socialization. What matters is that for many of us it is real and unmutable.
Gender Differences
This is not another aspect of gender, but I wanted to note that while gender differences *do* exist, and there are many statistically significant differences between men and women, *most* of those differences are quite small (with a great deal of overlap between men and women). There are only a few characteristics where the difference is somewhat large. Incidentally, it should come as no great surpise to most of you to learn that sex drive and frequency of masturbation are two of the largest differences.
Sexuality
Sexuality is not really an aspect of gender, but our gender does influence how we express our sexuality (and our sexuality does often influence our gender presentation).
Sexuality is often a component of identity. Many heterosexual women identify as just that - straight women. That identification is often very important to their core being, which is part of why so many straight women have a difficult time coming to terms with a feminine (or even female) partner. It challenges who they are to their very core, in some of the same ways that being forced to live as a "man" challenges a transgendered woman. Some women discover that their sexuality is more flexible than they had previously believed and they are able to redefine their identity to a broader self-model that allows for being happy with a feminine or female partner. However, many cannot do this.
Being lesbian is definitely more than just a description of sexuality. In fact, I know women who are married to other women who do not consider themselves lesbians (although they do consider themselves dykes and queer women). The point is that, for many women, being lesbian is more than just a description of their sex life. Also, within the queer women community, sexuality is explicitly incorporated into identity in other very specific ways (I'll discuss this in more detail in the next section).
I would like to point out to all of the people that keep posting things like "they like men when they are enfemme because their feminine persona exhibits female sexuality" that they are making a heteronormative value judgement by equating "female sexuality" with "likes men". More simply put, every time someone posts that, they are implicitly insulting lesbians everywhere by implying that our sexuality is not that of a female. Grrr.
Similarly, I don't know of any lesbian women that like it when someone male-identified co-opts their identitity by claiming to be a male lesbian. As a feminist and a lesbian woman, I've got to say that this bothers me to a certain extent every time I see it.
Identity
Identity is more than just gender identity. It's more than just gender and sexuality rolled into one. But these aspects are very important to a person's identity.
Queer women have embraced this by developing a plethora of very detailed identities. For instance, I identify as a femme (used as a noun, not an adjective). Femmes are queer women that prefer to express their gender in a feminine fashion with a queer twist, and that tend to be high in expressive traits. There are many other categories ("transsensual femme", "stone butch", etc.). Many of these are *very* detailed, and incorporate gender traits and sexuality - not just gender identity and/or gender expression. This may seem like pointless labeling, but it makes some people happy to be able to encapsulate and describe their identity in this fashion. In some cases, I think it gives people that are gender-variant and/or sexuality-variant a sense of belonging to a group of like individuals.
When I describe myself, I usually use the word "woman", but I also often (or instead) use the words "femme" and/or "lesbian" (or "queer"). So I have been known to describe myself as a "femme lesbian woman" or a "queer woman".
How does all this relate to this forum? Well, a lot of people here have some strange concepts about some of these aspects of gender and identity. If you meet enough people (particularly queer people), you will find these components combined in pretty much every permutation imaginable. The mere fact that someone is high in "feminine" expressive traits does not mean they are a woman. The detail that someone is a woman does not mean that they ought to like men. Someone feeling happy dressing in a cross-gendered fashion does not necessarily imply anything about their gender identity or their sexuality.
Originally Posted by Kehleyr
me.
If you really don't think that some of the people in this forum like to push the boundaries well beyond dressing up in a little black dress for a semi-formal occasion, I think we are reading a different forum.
