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Worldcon panel: The future of gender
May. 2nd, 2010 10:04 amScience fiction and fantasy fans spend a lot of time discussing issues related to sex and gender, in part because the fan community is remarkably open to such notions and more willing than most to embrace diversity. Naturally enough, we end up with several panels per convention to discuss these issues.
When I was first studying biology (i.e., in high school), there were no openly gay kids in my school, and not much in the way of diversity in general; I lived in a remarkably whitebread area, to the point that I was the ethnic guy. (No, really.) I learned human biology as if it were a simple binary fact: males have the XY chromosome pairs, females have the XX chromosome pair, and that's about it. Most people don't learn much more about the issue because most don't take any more biology once they leave high school.
Subsequently, as I began exploring the depths of biology at university, it became clear how simplistic and misleading my original understanding was. There are a great many intermediate situations, such as males with XXY chromosome triplets, who suffer from Klinefelter's syndrome, which causes infertility and possibly other symptoms, and males with androgen insensitivity syndrome, who sometimes appear even to a casual medical examination to be ordinary women—often extremely attractive women. That's just scratching the surface, as it doesn't even consider the psychological aspects of sex and gender. We also need to distinguish between sex, which is a primarily biological concept, and gender, which is primarily psychological and social. Needless to say, and therefore doubly worth saying, the biological and psychological are inextricably entangled.
It's also important to recognize the wide variation that exists within a sex, from the "hypermale" American football linebacker physiology to skeletally thin and undermuscled men or even overtly feminine men, who are often described pejoratively as effeminate or even more aggressively as "gay", irrespective of their sexual preferences. For women, things become even more complicated, since there are multiple competing images of femininity. The extremes range from the "hyperfemale" shape of centerfold models to the "masculine" athletic women with tons of muscles*, and from obese to anorexically thin women in both categories. (All adjectives chosen deliberately here to make several points, including the fact that although men are less stigmatized, we're not free of objectification either.)
* For the record, Florence Griffith-Joyner was a major hottie, despite having more muscle than I can ever dream of having.
All of this means that any kind of nuanced consideration of gender would describe humans in terms of their biological (chromosomal) sex, their sexual orientation, the social and cultural roles they adopt or have thrust upon them, and their gender identity (how they see themselves). Of these two points, sexual orientation and gender identity deserve more space than I can give them here (particularly since I'm not an expert in the subject), but here's something to get you thinking about the possible complexities: if you'll accept for the moment another artificial duality, people can be either cis-gendered, in which case they feel comfortable that their self-image matches their body, or trans-gendered, in which their self-image doesn't match their body identity. Both groups of people may be either heterosexual or homosexual, but transgendered people often seek gender-reassignment surgery to bring their body into conformity with how they see themselves.
Yes, I deliberately excluded bisexual from that categorization, because I wanted to see if you were paying attention. *evil grin* Because homosexuality has become so politicized, in part as a survival mechanism, bisexuals sometimes get treated as the odd cousins nobody wants to mention because they don't fit into comfortable binary categories. They also get subjected to odious stereotypes that suggest them as being somehow hypersexual or "sexually promiscuous" because the conventional perspective simply can't understand the notion of being sexually attracted to someone without acting on it. When I must explain bisexuality to someone more naïve in such matters, I've often resorted to the phrase "X is/was bisexual" to clarify that they still are ("is") bisexual in their identity, but are not ("was") bisexual in their practice because they're currently in a monogamous relationship.
Those who are most strongly in denial like to make claims that homosexuality is "unnatural", which is usually evidence that they dropped out of science class before high school or at least developed a highly refined ability to ignore the evidence. In fact, homexuality, while not the "norm" in nature, is so ubiquitous you have to work mighty hard to ignore this. I won't waste any space trying to refute the ridiculous argument that humans should know better.
Science tends to be remarkably binary in its thought patterns, at least in part because it's much easier to pigeonhole things into distinct categories than it is to grapple with the complexities. In fact, I sometimes think scientists are people who are even less secure than the rest of us, and adopt their profession in a desperate attempt to reduce the uncertainties in their lives. But it's also true that non-scientists want to divide things into neat categories because this is part of human nature and tied in with how strongly we want to understand our relationships with our fellows. Because of the dominance of the heterosexual paradigm in modern Western culture, this is so ubiquitous it's even acquired its own name: heteronormativity. You can't get too deep into the evolutionary psychology of this topic before you start encountering lunatics, but the phenomenon is nonetheless real.
Be that as it may, one of the things science fiction often does very well is to explore these complexities. Ursula Leguin is probably the best known living writer who deals with these issues, and does so brilliantly, but there are others. (Feel free to share your favorites.) In many ways, gender is equivalent to race in how it's treated in fiction, probably because both differences from the prevailing norm in race and gender are both perceived as somehow threatening to many people who cling desperately to the statistical average and call that the norm. In that perceived threat lies conflict, and in that conflict lies potentially interesting fiction.
When I was first studying biology (i.e., in high school), there were no openly gay kids in my school, and not much in the way of diversity in general; I lived in a remarkably whitebread area, to the point that I was the ethnic guy. (No, really.) I learned human biology as if it were a simple binary fact: males have the XY chromosome pairs, females have the XX chromosome pair, and that's about it. Most people don't learn much more about the issue because most don't take any more biology once they leave high school.
Subsequently, as I began exploring the depths of biology at university, it became clear how simplistic and misleading my original understanding was. There are a great many intermediate situations, such as males with XXY chromosome triplets, who suffer from Klinefelter's syndrome, which causes infertility and possibly other symptoms, and males with androgen insensitivity syndrome, who sometimes appear even to a casual medical examination to be ordinary women—often extremely attractive women. That's just scratching the surface, as it doesn't even consider the psychological aspects of sex and gender. We also need to distinguish between sex, which is a primarily biological concept, and gender, which is primarily psychological and social. Needless to say, and therefore doubly worth saying, the biological and psychological are inextricably entangled.
It's also important to recognize the wide variation that exists within a sex, from the "hypermale" American football linebacker physiology to skeletally thin and undermuscled men or even overtly feminine men, who are often described pejoratively as effeminate or even more aggressively as "gay", irrespective of their sexual preferences. For women, things become even more complicated, since there are multiple competing images of femininity. The extremes range from the "hyperfemale" shape of centerfold models to the "masculine" athletic women with tons of muscles*, and from obese to anorexically thin women in both categories. (All adjectives chosen deliberately here to make several points, including the fact that although men are less stigmatized, we're not free of objectification either.)
* For the record, Florence Griffith-Joyner was a major hottie, despite having more muscle than I can ever dream of having.
All of this means that any kind of nuanced consideration of gender would describe humans in terms of their biological (chromosomal) sex, their sexual orientation, the social and cultural roles they adopt or have thrust upon them, and their gender identity (how they see themselves). Of these two points, sexual orientation and gender identity deserve more space than I can give them here (particularly since I'm not an expert in the subject), but here's something to get you thinking about the possible complexities: if you'll accept for the moment another artificial duality, people can be either cis-gendered, in which case they feel comfortable that their self-image matches their body, or trans-gendered, in which their self-image doesn't match their body identity. Both groups of people may be either heterosexual or homosexual, but transgendered people often seek gender-reassignment surgery to bring their body into conformity with how they see themselves.
Yes, I deliberately excluded bisexual from that categorization, because I wanted to see if you were paying attention. *evil grin* Because homosexuality has become so politicized, in part as a survival mechanism, bisexuals sometimes get treated as the odd cousins nobody wants to mention because they don't fit into comfortable binary categories. They also get subjected to odious stereotypes that suggest them as being somehow hypersexual or "sexually promiscuous" because the conventional perspective simply can't understand the notion of being sexually attracted to someone without acting on it. When I must explain bisexuality to someone more naïve in such matters, I've often resorted to the phrase "X is/was bisexual" to clarify that they still are ("is") bisexual in their identity, but are not ("was") bisexual in their practice because they're currently in a monogamous relationship.
Those who are most strongly in denial like to make claims that homosexuality is "unnatural", which is usually evidence that they dropped out of science class before high school or at least developed a highly refined ability to ignore the evidence. In fact, homexuality, while not the "norm" in nature, is so ubiquitous you have to work mighty hard to ignore this. I won't waste any space trying to refute the ridiculous argument that humans should know better.
Science tends to be remarkably binary in its thought patterns, at least in part because it's much easier to pigeonhole things into distinct categories than it is to grapple with the complexities. In fact, I sometimes think scientists are people who are even less secure than the rest of us, and adopt their profession in a desperate attempt to reduce the uncertainties in their lives. But it's also true that non-scientists want to divide things into neat categories because this is part of human nature and tied in with how strongly we want to understand our relationships with our fellows. Because of the dominance of the heterosexual paradigm in modern Western culture, this is so ubiquitous it's even acquired its own name: heteronormativity. You can't get too deep into the evolutionary psychology of this topic before you start encountering lunatics, but the phenomenon is nonetheless real.
Be that as it may, one of the things science fiction often does very well is to explore these complexities. Ursula Leguin is probably the best known living writer who deals with these issues, and does so brilliantly, but there are others. (Feel free to share your favorites.) In many ways, gender is equivalent to race in how it's treated in fiction, probably because both differences from the prevailing norm in race and gender are both perceived as somehow threatening to many people who cling desperately to the statistical average and call that the norm. In that perceived threat lies conflict, and in that conflict lies potentially interesting fiction.