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The New Gender Paradox: Fragmentation and Persistence of the Binary
Judith Lorber
Contents
1. Introduction
2. How gendered people, organizations, and societies are constructed
Ethnomethodological insights into gender construction
Doing gender
Gender as performativity
Constructing gendered structures
Gender regimes
Gender as a social institution
Conclusion
3. Fragmentation of the gender binary
Multiple genders
Gender-neutral bathrooms
Intersex identifiers
Intersex athletes
Menstruating and birthing men
Battle of the pronouns
Doing research without the gender binary
Pros and cons of fragmenting the gender binary
Conclusion
4. Persistence of the gender binary
2
The myth of female and male brains
Gendered research
Standpoint theory
Hegemonic masculinity and the ‘new’ masculinities
The #MeToo movement
Sexuality and the binary
Pros and cons of binary persistence
Conclusion
5. Why haven’t we had a gender revolution?
The politics of identity
Borderlands
The politics of empowerment
The gender frame
Minimizing genders and gender inequality
How to minimize gendering
Conclusion
6. A world without gender
Envisioning a world without gender
A degendered institution
Degendered individuals
Conclusion
References
Index
3
Acknowledgements
About the author
Acknowledgements
Some material is adapted from Lorber, J. (2000) ‘Using gender to undo gender: A feminist
degendering movement.’ Feminist Theory 1:101-118; Lorber, J. (2005) Breaking the Bowls:
Degendering and Feminist Change. New York: W.W. Norton; Lorber, J. (2008) ‘Constructing
gender: The dancer and the dance.’ In Holstein, J.A. & Gubrium, J.F. (eds.) Handbook of
Constructionist Research. New York: Guilford Publications; and Lorber, J. (2018) ‘Paradoxes of
gender redux: Multiple genders and the persistence of the binary.’ In Messerschmidt, J.W., et al.
(eds.) Gender Reckonings: New Social Theory and Research. New York: New York University
Press.
3 reviews – brain, bathrooms, intersex
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1. Introduction
Recently, I received an email urging everyone to use gender-neutral pronouns – they,
their, them. A long-time proponent of doing away with gender, I nonetheless found myself
resisting the erasure of my identity as a woman, even at the cost of maintaining the gender binary
that I believed was the source of women’s oppression. So I refused. I want to be identified as a
woman — she, hers, her. I want women to be visible. Others responded similarly, especially
women of color, noting the need for visibility and recognition of accomplishments as well as
identifying continued areas of discrimination (Hanna et al. 2019, Saguy & Williams 2019). At
that point I realized that one of the reasons for the persistence of the gender binary is the
necessity of the continued valorization of women, especially those of denigrated groups.
Today, in Western countries, we are seeing both the fragmentation of the gender binary
(the division of the social world into two and only two genders) and its persistence. Multiple
genders, gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms, X designations on official documents and
other manifestations of degendering are prevalent, and yet the two-gender structure of most
social worlds persists.
The main gender paradox I explored over twenty-five years ago in Paradoxes of Gender
(Lorber 1994) focused on the rhetoric of gender equality made meaningless by a total system that
rendered women unequal and exploited. Today’s new gender paradox is a rhetoric of gender
multiplicity undermined by a continuing bigendered social structure that supports continued
gender inequality. Underneath the seeming erasure of a rigid gender binary and its
discriminatory norms and expectations lurks the persistence of men’s power and patriarchal
privilege.
2
When the concept of gender emerged in the early 1970’s, it presented a contrast with the
prevailing belief in the biological underpinnings of the behavior of women and men. The concept
of gender in this book rests on social construction – the contention that gender differences are
made through socialization of children and maintained through surveillance of adults (West &
Zimmerman 1987). The norms and expectations of a society coalesce into a gender regime
supported by familiar interaction and legal strictures.
People construct gender for themselves and those they interact with by doing or
performing gender. These processes institutionalize as gender structures (Martin 2004). Gender
as process and structure are both complementary and in conflict. They are complementary in that
process creates and maintains structures. They are in conflict because structuration delimits
process. With the simultaneous fragmentation and persistence of the gender binary, process is
not changing structure.
Politically, gender fragmented long before the current popularity of multiple genders.
Under liberal feminism in the 1970s, the pressure was to treat women and men alike. In order to
do so, women were allowed and encouraged to enter men’s professions, such as law and
medicine, and to run for political office. Today, in the United States, the ceilings still being
broken by women include space travel, combat, and running for president. Other countries have
elected successful women heads of state.
The problem with this route to gender equality was that women were emulating men but
men were not emulating women. The unspoken implication of gender neutrality was that women
deserved the rights and privileges men had as long as they acted like men (Mackinnon 1987;
Saguy, Williams, & Rees 2020). On the other hand, many of the most successful legal cases in
3
the United States gave men rights, such as child custody, that only women had without their
having to demonstrate women’s capabilities.
The counter argument to women’s perfect equality with men was to focus on women’s
special qualities, particularly nurturance and emotional empathy. Women’s bodies and
sexualities, which had been downplayed by liberal feminism, came to the fore. Radical feminism
valorized women’s behavior and experiences, and in women’s studies, explored women’s history
and sources of oppression in different gender regimes. Politically, the focus was on women
rather than gender per se.
It soon became clear that women were not a global category of people. Intersectionality
broke them up by racial and ethnic identity, social class, occupation, sexuality, relationship
status, place of residence, age, bodily integrity, and so on. Each of these groups had its own
political battles to fight, some of which involved allying with the men of their group rather than
always envisaging them as the enemy. (See Lorber 2012 for a review of feminist theory and
politics).
The fragmentation of gender has evolved today into multiple genders. These can be
bigender, agender, gender fluid, variant, questioning, queer, transman, transwoman, intersex,
neutrois, two-spirit and variations of each. Some countries have designated an X or third gender
as a legal status. Australia’s High Court has allowed someone to register their gender officially
as “nonspecific” (Baird 2014). India’s Supreme Court recognized transgender as a third gender
(Varma and Najar 2014). Germany now allows parents of intersexed babies to register them as
“indeterminate” (Nandi 2013). ‘Queer,’ once a radical identity, is being used more and more
frequently (Wortham 2016). Multiple genders may seem revolutionary, but they are not changing
the binary structure of most gender regimes. They are personal identities, not legal or
4
bureaucratic statuses. Politically, their individualistic rebelliousness does not encourage a
gender-resistant movement (Lorber 2018).
After a review of the premises of the social construction of gender, this book will explore
both sides of the current paradox of gender – processes in the fragmentation of gender that are
undermining the binary and processes in the performance of gender that reinforce the binary’s
persistence. After that, I’ll explore why we aren’t having a gender revolution. The conclusion of
the book will be speculation about where we might end up.
My focus and sources are mostly Western societies with relatively egalitarian and
individualistic gender regimes. Looking at similar issues in societies with different gender
regimes would of necessity find different imbalances between fragmentation and persistence of
binary genders.
TERMS
While there are many variations in nomenclature, the terms I will be using are:
SEX – referring to internal and external anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, and variations of
each. Terms are male, female, intersex.
SEXUALITY – referring to physical attraction and acts, emotional involvement, relationships.
Terms are heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, genderqueer sexual, asexual.
GENDER – referring to identity, self-presentation, performance, legal status. Terms are man,
woman, cis-gender (gender identity assigned at birth), transgender man (woman to man),
transgender woman (man to woman), non-binary, genderqueer.
1067 words (4 pgs.)

1
2. How gendered people, organizations, and societies are constructed
We live in a world that is divided by gender in every way. Gender is a constant part of
who and what we are, how others treat us, and our general standing in society. Our bodies,
personalities, and ways of thinking, acting, and feeling are gendered. Because we are gendered
from birth by naming, clothing, and interaction with family, teachers, and peers, our identity as a
boy or girl, and then as a man or woman, is felt as, and usually explained as, a natural outcome
of the appearance of our genitalia, the signs of our biological sex. The assumption is that it is
biology that produces two social categories of different people, ‘females’ and ‘males,’ and that it
is inevitable that societies will be divided along the lines of these two categories and that the
people in those categories will be different.
It’s a twentieth-century doxa – that which “goes without saying because it comes without
saying” (Bourdieu 1977, 167, emphasis in original). Despite its taken-for-grantedness, the search
for the biological sources of gender differences fuels the glut of scientific studies on genetic,
hormonal, or other physiological origins for all sorts of gendered behavior (Van Den Wijngaard
1997; Jordan-Young 2010). Actually, there are very few gender differences, as meta-analyses of
compilations of those studies has shown. One research team (Zell, Krizan & Teeter 2015) had
106 meta-analyses, incorporating data from 12 million people. Most of the gender differences
they found were small, with few that were medium (11.9%), large (1.8%), or very large in size
(0.8%).
Yet we live in societies structured by gender differences, so, since they are not natural,
they need to be constructed. Gender divides people into contrasting social categories, ‘girls’ and
‘boys’ and ‘women’ and ‘men.’ In this structural conceptualization, gendering is the process and
the gendered social order the product of social construction. Through interaction with caretakers,
2
socialization in childhood, peer pressure in adolescence, and gendered work and family roles,
people are divided into two groups and made to be different in behavior, attitudes, and emotions.
The content of the differences depends on the society’s current culture, values, economic and
family structure, and past history. The resultant gendered social order is based on and maintains
these differences. Thus, there is a continuous loop-back effect between gendered social
institutions and the social construction of gender by individuals (West & Zimmerman 1987). In
societies with other major social divisions, such as race, ethnicity, religion, and social class,
gender is intricately intertwined with these other statuses (West & Fenstermaker 1995). Despite
these cross-cutting statuses, the contemporary Western world is a very bi-gendered world,
consisting of only two legal categories – ‘female’ and ‘male.’
For individuals, gender is a major social status that is cross-cut by other major social
statuses (racial ethnic group, social class, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) and so gender is
actually not a binary status, even though it is treated as such legally, socially, and in most social
science research. On an individual basis, gender fragments; from a societal perspective, gender
overrides these multiplicities and simply divides people into two categories.
The binary divisions of gender are deeply rooted in every aspect of social life and social
organization in most societies. Although the binary principle of gender remains the same, its
content changes as other major aspects of the social order change. The gendered division of work
has shifted with changing means of producing food and other goods, which in turn modifies
patterns of child care and family structures. Gendered power imbalances, which are usually
based on the ability to amass and distribute material resources, change with rules about property
ownership and inheritance. Men’s domination of women has not been the same throughout time
and place, but varies with political, economic, and family structures. In the sense of an
3
underlying principle of how people are categorized and valued, gender is differently constructed
throughout the world and throughout history. The prevailing tenet is that men dominate women,
although the extent of domination fluctuates.
As pervasive as gender is, because it is constructed and maintained through daily
interaction, it can be resisted and reshaped by gender trouble-makers (Butler 1990). The social
construction perspective argues that people create their social realities and identities, including
their gender, through their interactions with others — their families, friends, colleagues. Gender is
a constant performance, but its enactment is hemmed in by the general rules of social life,
cultural expectations, workplace norms, and laws. These social restraints are also amenable to
change, but not easily, because the social order is structured for stability (Giddens 1984). Many
aspects of gender have been changed through individual agency, group pressure, and social
movements. But the underlying binary structure has not.
Gender is built into the Western world’s overall social system, interpenetrating the
organization of the production of goods and services, kinship and family, sexuality, emotional
relationships, and the minutiae of daily life. Gendered practices have been questioned, but the
overall legitimacy of the gendered social order is deeply ingrained and currently bolstered by
scientific studies on supposed inborn differences between females and males. The ultimate
touchstone is pregnancy and childbirth. Yet procreative and other biological differences are part
of the gendered social order, which is so pervasive that the behavior and attitudes it produces are
perceived as natural, including women’s greater predisposition to nurturance and bonding. This
belief in natural – and thus, necessary – differences legitimates many gender inequalities and
exploitations of women.
4
As the concept of gender has developed in the social sciences, it has moved from an
attribute of individuals that produces effects in the phenomenon under study (e.g., men’s and
women’s crime rates, voting patterns, labor force participation) to a major building block in the
social order and an integral element in every aspect of social life (e.g., how crime is
conceptualized and categorized is gendered, political power is gendered, the economy and the
labor force are gender-segregated and gender-stratified). Feminist social scientists have mapped
out the effects of gendering on daily lives and on social institutions and have produced reams of
data on how these processes maintain inequality between women and men.
Feminist theories have linked gendered social structures with gendered personalities and
consciousness. Nancy Chodorow (1978) links the division of parenting in the heterogendered
Western nuclear family to the objectification and emotional repression in men’s psyches and the
emotional openness and nurturance of women’s psyches. Both emerge from the primacy of
women in parenting. Boys’ separation from their mothers and identification with their fathers
leads to their entrance into the dominant world but also necessitates continuous repression of
their emotional longings for their mothers and fear of castration. Girls’ continued identification
with their mothers makes them available for intimacy; their heterosexual coupling with
emotionally dissatisfying men produces their desires to become mothers and reproduces the
gendered family structure from which gendered psyches emerge.
As for the sources of women’s oppression, multicultural and postcolonial feminists claim
that there are complex systems of dominance and subordination, in which some men are
subordinate to other men, and to some women as well (Trinh 1989; Collins 2000). All men may
have a ‘patriarchal dividend’ of privilege and entitlement to women’s labor, sexuality, and
emotions, but some men additionally have the privileges of whiteness, education, prosperity, and
5
prestige (Connell 1995). A gender analysis sees gender hierarchies as inextricable from other
hierarchies, but conversely argues that hierarchies of class, race, and achievement must be seen
as substantively gendered (Acker 1999; Glenn 1999). In this sense, difference is expanded from
men vs. women to the multiplicities of sameness and difference among women and among men
and within individuals as well, these differences arising from similar and different social
locations (Braidotti 1994; Frye 1996; Felski 1997).
Despite these multiplicities, the Western social world is divided into only two genders,
and the members of each of these categories are made similar enough to be easily identifiable
and different enough from the members of the other category to be allocated separate work and
family responsibilities, and to be economically rewarded and culturally valued in significantly
non-equivalent ways.
Social constructionist structural feminist theory argues that the gendered social order is
constantly restabilized even when disrupted by individual and collective action, while
postmodern feminism has shown how individuals can consciously and purposefully create
disorder and categorical instability, opening the way to change (Flax 1987). The social order is
an intersectional structure, with socially constructed individuals and groups ranged in a
pyramidal hierarchy of power and powerlessness, privilege and disadvantage, normality and
otherness. Because these social statuses and the rationales that legitimate their inequality are
constructed in the interaction of everyday life and in cultural representations and solidified in
institutional practices and laws, they can all be subverted by resistance, rebellion, and concerted
political action.
But most people do gender all the time, usually without thinking. Whether they are
privileged or oppressed, people do gender because not to do so is to be shamed as unmanly or
6
unwomanly. In this dual sense of doing and done to lies the power of gender as a socially
constructed system of inequality. This power is enormously strengthened by the invisibility of
gender processes, the lack of reflection in doing gender, and the belief that the gender order is
based on natural and immutable sex differences.
This bi-gendered social structure is what is currently being fragmented in multiple ways –
by choosers of non-binary identities and those who queer or question its foundations and by
transgenders who straddle identities as women and men, by intersex activists and athletes, and by
those erasing gendered language use. At the same time, bi-gendering is being upheld by beliefs
in the biological source of gendered brains and behavior, research based on only two gender
categories, standpoint stances that valorize women, hegemonic masculinity, the #MeToo
movement, and sexuality dependent on gendered partners.
Ethnomethodological insights into gender construction
Gender as a construct first appeared in Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology
(1967) in the story of Agnes. She was a 19-year-old with fully developed breasts, penis, and
testicles who came to a U.C.L.A. center for the study of people with ‘severe anatomical
irregularities.’ She presented as intersexual but in actuality was a normal boy who had been
taking female hormone pills she stole from her mother since the age of 12. What was important
to Garfinkel was the way that Agnes achieved the gender display of a ‘natural, normal female’
through voice pitch, gestures, dress, and other mannerisms that today we would call ‘emphasized
femininity.’ The construction of gender identity by transgenders has subsequently been described
in many accounts and is now a staple of the constructionist literature (Bolin 1988; Devor 1997;
Ekins 1997).
7
Buried in Garfinkel but subsequently spotlighted by gender studies analysts is the idea
that it is not only transgenders who create a gender identity; everyone produces a version of
masculinity or femininity socially and culturally acceptable enough to meet the expectations of
normality in the eyes of others in their social groups. Building on Garfinkel, Suzanne Kessler
and Wendy McKenna, in Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (1978), showed that
gender is produced as a social fact by presenting a self that is acceptable to others. Gender
attribution reproduces the gender binary by ignoring anomalies and assuming anatomical
congruence with outer appearance. Genitalia may be the signs used in the initial assignment of an
infant to a sex category, but in gender attribution, the genitalia under clothing are assumed;
Kessler and McKenna call them ‘cultural.’ In their ethnomethodological account of gender
construction, Kessler and McKenna focus on the role of the ‘other’ in the validation of gender,
but they end their book by coming back to the doer: ‘All persons create both the reality of their
specific gender and a sense of its history, thus at the same time creating the reality of two, and
only two, natural genders’ (139).
Garfinkel did not address the question of the extent of consciousness and complicity in
the construction of gender because he did not know until years after that Agnes had been lying
about the source of her bodily anomalies (breasts and a penis). In a feminist reanalysis of the
story of Agnes, Mary Rogers (1992) argued that Garfinkel was an unwitting ‘gender
collaborator’ who displayed the masculinity Agnes needed as a contrast. Although most cisnormals present themselves as women or men without the deliberate impression management of
transgenders, there were times when Garfinkel was well aware that he played up to Agnes’
emphasized femininity by a complementarily emphasized masculinity — holding doors open,
seating her in a car, and so on. What was below the surface of his awareness, according to
8
Rogers, were the power differentials in his relationship with Agnes. He was older, a professional,
in control of the interview sessions, and with the other men in the research/clinic situation, the
ultimate decider of whether Agnes would get the sex-change surgery she desired. And so, like
other Western women in the 1950s, Agnes had to be manipulative and secretive to get what she
wanted from men who had power over her.
Constructionist feminist theory and research subsequently focused on how girls and
women consciously learn heterosexual gender displays and subservient behavior as strategies to
attract a husband, but seemed to assume that boys and men absorbed the attitudes of patriarchal
privilege much less consciously. Since consciousness-raising was at one time a radical feminist
political strategy, it would seem that without the ‘click’ of self-awareness, women are no more
conscious of the gender construction of their lives than men are.
The use of Agnes in the feminist literature as a model of the production of femininity by
‘normal, natural females’ greatly expanded the concept of gender construction. A huge body of
empirical research shows how girls and women in Western societies are made docile,
submissive, emotional, and nurturant through socialization by parents, teachers, peers, and
imitation of constantly presented media depictions of heterosexual attractiveness. Later work on
masculinity shows that the same process takes place in the making of assertive, emotionally
repressed, sexually aggressive boys and men, with the addition of sports as an arena for reward
and emulation of violent behavior (Messner 2002).
Doing gender
The signature term in constructionist gender studies is ‘doing gender’ (West &
Zimmerman 1987). West and Zimmerman argued that
9
gender is not a set of traits, not a variable, nor a role, but the product of social doings of
some sort. … Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and
women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. Once the
differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the ‘essentialness’ of
gender. (129, 137)
Given membership in a sex category, doing gender is inevitable and unavoidable in a gendered
society. One’s gender performance is evaluated by others and one is accountable for its
appropriateness. The end result is not only personal and interpersonal gendering, but gendered
workplaces, politics, medical and legal systems, religions, and cultural productions: ‘Doing
gender furnishes the interactional scaffolding of social structure, along with built-in mechanisms
of social control’ (147).
To the extent that women conform to norms of femininity, they are complicit in their own
oppression, just as men who benefit from the privileges of masculinity are complicit in
reproducing that oppression (Martin 2001, 2003). The pressures of accountability for doing
gender properly create family-work conflicts among successful women (Hochschild 1997; BlairLoy 2003). These pressures constrain their career and family choices in ways that are often not
of their own choosing. The discourse shaping the norms of work and family reflects invidious
gendered assumptions and values. Julia Nentwich (2004), a Swiss psychologist, suggests
alternative language to construct different realities. Within a work organization, she says, women
can be different – exotic, not the norm, a problem to integrate. Or they can be similar, so that
treating them differently is discrimination. In the family, the language of the traditional division
of labor puts children and job in conflict, makes a paid job a privilege for mothers and spending
time with the family a privilege for fathers. In contrast, the language of equal partnership
10
assumes that her paid work is important to the woman, that fathers take care of their children,
and that both participate in work and family. On full-time vs. part-time work, the dominant
language framework is that full-time has to be the norm because the demands of the job come
first, performance is measured by time spent at the job, and work and private life are two
separate spheres. In an alternative language framework, performance is measured by fulfilling
objectives, jobs can be partitioned, and work, family, and other life concerns are overlapping
spheres (Epstein, et al. 1999).
Gender as performativity
If ‘doing gender’ has been the touchstone of gender construction in the social sciences,
Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, from Gender Trouble (1990), has been the prevailing
concept in the humanities. Conceptually based in philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Butler’s
concept of performativity encompasses the unconscious process of making gendered selves that
reiterate social norms of femininity and masculinity and inscribe femaleness and maleness on the
body and heterosexuality on the psyche. Performance and identity are one and the same; one
does not precede or exist without the other. And there lies the possibility for ‘gender trouble.’
Gendering has to be done over and over, almost ritualistically, to reproduce the social norms. But
different ways of gendering produce differently gendered people. So, with conscious
deliberation, one might create oneself differently gendered, and indeed, transgenders do just that.
By 1993, Butler was rethinking aspects of gender performativity. In Bodies that Matter (1993),
she took up the materiality or bodiedness of gender performativity and analyzed the ways that it
encompassed sex and sexuality as well.
11
Butler ended Gender Trouble by arguing for the subversive political possibilities inherent
in gender performativity. She said,
The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations,
destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory
heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ (1990, 146)
Constructing gendered structures
Structuration is the congealing of the situationally based rules of interactive processes
and practices and their enforced application across time and space (Giddens 1984). Concepts of
gendered organizations, gender regimes, and gender as an institution convey stability and
solidity, in contrast to the fluidity and mutability of doing gender and gender performativity.
Gendered structures are not just the accumulation of gender processes; they constitute and
organize a major part of the social order. With structuring, gendered practices (process) are
imposed by institutionalized patterns of social interaction embedded in legal and bureaucratic
rules and regulations. Most significantly, these institutionalized patterns are imbued with
domination and power.
A prime arena for research on gender structuration is the organization of workplaces
(Ferguson 1984; Acker 1990; Britton 2000). A workplace is more or less structurally gendered
on several levels. One is the extent of the division into women’s and men’s jobs; another is the
steepness or flatness of the hierarchy of authority and prestige and the gender clustering at each
level; still another is the range of wage and benefits scales and where women and men workers
fall on it. The extent of gendering depends on the decisions, policies, and history of the particular
12
workplace, which reflect and reproduce its structure through the interactions of workers as
colleagues, bosses, and subordinates.
When workers are recruited to a heavily gendered workplace, a belief in the importance
of gendered characteristics influences the search for candidates who are ‘masculine’ or
‘feminine.’ In Westernized cultures, ‘masculine’ traits would be physical strength, rationality,
objectivity, aggressiveness; ‘feminine’ traits would be dexterity, emotional sensitivity,
psychological perceptivity, ability to mediate and compromise. In a non-gendered workplace, the
search would be for workers who exhibited ‘neutral’ characteristics, such as intelligence,
honesty, experience, and mental agility. The gender designations of attributes as masculine,
feminine, or neutral are culturally contingent, and the skills needed for a job are frequently regendered as the gender composition of the workforce changes (Jacobs 1989; Reskin & Roos
1990). The same jobs can be stereotyped as masculine ‘dangerous work’ in one country and
feminine work needing ‘nimble fingers’ in another (Poster 2001).
The end result of the attribution of desired characteristics is the valuation of men workers
over women workers, men’s jobs over women’s jobs, and ‘masculine’ over ‘feminine’ work
capabilities. However the workplace is gendered, the economic outcome seems to be stubbornly
uniform in advantaging men. Salaries are highest in jobs where men are the predominant
workers, whether the worker is a woman or a man, and lowest in jobs where women are the
predominant workers, again whether the worker is a man or a woman. Looked at from the
perspective of the worker, men have the advantage no matter what the gender composition of the
job or workplace, since they earn more than women in jobs where men are the majority, in jobs
where women are the majority, and in gender-balanced jobs.
13
The pervasive cultural beliefs about women and men workers that perpetuate gender
inequality support the devaluation of women’s competence by men. Women themselves help to
sustain the devaluation because they frequently compare themselves with other women, not men,
at the same level. The unequal salary scales and opportunities for career advancement thus seem
fair because there are no challenges to the beliefs that sustain them. In sum, the process
producing gender inequality in the workplace is both interactive and structural. As Cecilia
Ridgeway (1997) says,
The result is a system of interdependent effects that are everywhere and nowhere because
they develop through multiple workplace interactions, often in taken-for-granted ways.
Their aggregate result is structural: the preservation of wage inequality and the sex
segregation of jobs. (230)
Gender regimes
Gender structures nation-states into gender regimes. Just as organizations are not
aggregates of gendered practices but have a logic of their own, gender regimes are not
aggregations of gendered organizations. Gender regimes stratify women and men across
organizations, so that they are valued more or less over a matrix of statuses that determine their
access to power, prestige, and economic resources (Yuval-Davis 1997; Collins 2000).
Commonly, gender intertwines with racial, ethnic and class stratification, so that gender is only
one aspect of a complex of inequality (McCall 2001; Acker 2006; Collins 2019).
Many gender regimes privilege one group of men. In Masculinities, Connell (1995)
contrasted hegemonic men and subordinated men. Hegemonic men have economic and
educational advantages and institutionalized patriarchal privileges, and their characteristics are
14
the most valued attributes of masculinity. Subordinated men are not necessarily devalued, but
they have fewer opportunities for advancement and little of the power, prestige, and wealth of
hegemonic men. Connell describes how Western hegemonic masculinity is produced through
college education, where young men are trained to be rational and technically expert, and
reproduced in professional and managerial careers in hierarchically organized workplaces, where
hegemonic men expect eventually to have positions of authority over other men. Hegemonic and
subordinated groups of men shift with changing historical conditions, but according to Connell,
the hegemony of White European men over the past 500 years has spread globally through
colonization, economic control, and state violence (1993, 1998, 2005).
The gender regimes of Middle Eastern Islamic theocracies that were established after
successful religious revolutions have not privileged college-educated men. In Iran after the
overthrow of the shah, as Shahin Gerami (2003) notes, new masculine prototypes were in favor –
-mullahs as the leaders of revolution; martyrs as its soul; and working-class men as its
beneficiaries. With a high birth rate and low levels of economic development, college-educated
men find that urban jobs are hard to come by or pay too little to sustain a middle-class life style.
An alternative route to hegemonic masculine status has been to become heroic soldiers and
martyrs, protectors of women and their country’s honor (Kimmel 2003). When martyrs die
heroically, their families reap the economic and prestige benefits of their new hegemonic status.
Islamic women live in the same gender regimes as Islamic men, but the economic,
educational, and status opportunities for women are different than those of men in the same
societies. The political shifts that reversed men’s gender hierarchies, bringing hegemonic status
to formerly subordinated men, made college-educated and professional women, who were
dominant over some men, subordinate to all men. Formerly subordinated, poor religious women
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could attain positions of dominance over other women as enforcers of purity codes of dress and
behavior (Gerami & Lehnerer 2001). The nationalistic and revolutionary movements in Muslim
countries have produced pendulum swings of Westernized, secular regimes and the counterestablishment of tradition-based theocracies. Women have had a more equal status with men
under secular regimes and have lost many rights with theocratic revolutions, but there is
considerable cross-national variation (Moghadam 1999).
Gender as a social institution
According to Giddens, society-wide structural principles that extend over time and space
can be considered institutions (1984). In Paradoxes of Gender (1994), I claimed that gender was
a social institution based on three structural principles: the division of people into two social
groups, ‘men’ and ‘women,’ the social construction of perceptible differences between them, and
their differential treatment legitimated by the socially produced differences. In complex
societies, the binary division by gender overrides individual differences and intertwines with
other major social statuses – racial categorization, ethnic grouping, economic class, age, religion,
and sexual orientation – to create a hierarchical system of dominance and subordination,
oppression, and exploitation. The members of the dominant gender status, usually hegemonic
men, legitimate and rationalize the gender order through politics, the media, the education
system, religion, and the production of knowledge and culture. Gendered kinship statuses reflect
and reinforce the prestige and power differences of the different genders and institutionalize
heterosexuality as an intrinsic part of gender (Butler 2002; Ingraham 2006).
The concept of gender as a social institution makes change seem impossible, but
institutions do evolve or are drastically altered through political movements. Through feminist
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political activism and other political and social forces, the institution of gender has certainly
evolved in Western societies: Women and men now have formal equality in all the major social
spheres (Jackson 1998). No laws prevent women from achieving what they can, and many laws
help them do it by preventing discrimination and sexual harassment. More and more countries
are ratifying laws to protect women’s procreative and sexual rights, and to designate rape,
battering, and genital mutilation as human rights crimes. However, despite formal and legal
equality, discriminatory treatment of women still regularly occurs in the economy and in politics.
Gender equality has not significantly penetrated the family division of labor, and conflicts over
who takes care of the children spill over and are exacerbated by gender inequities in the paid job
market. Women have not gained the power or economic resources in most Western societies to
ensure the structural bases of gender equality, and so their successes are constantly being
undermined by the vicissitudes of the economy, a war, or the resurgence of religious
fundamentalism.
Conclusion
The processes of doing gender and gender performance construct individual identity.
Gendered individuals in interaction with others equally gendered construct gendered
organizations. These are cemented by gendered political structures, cultural productions,
religions, and educational systems into gendered regimes within which individual constructions
of gender play out. It is this edifice of gender that is fragmenting in many ways and being
sustained in other ways. The next two chapters will describe these two warring trends.
4580 words (18 pgs)
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3. Fragmentation of the Gender Binary
Within the space of two weeks in 2014, the New York Times published several pieces on
multiple genders. One was on the 50-some choices of gender identity for Facebook users (Ball
2014; Herbenick & Baldwin 2014). In addition to multiple gendering, there are other current
manifestations of the fragmentation of the gender binary. Other ways the gender binary is being
broken up that I will discuss in this chapter are: multi-gender bathrooms, intersex identities and
intersex athletes, transgender men (female-to-male) who continue to menstruate and who become
pregnant and give birth, non-gendered pronouns and language, and doing research without the
binary. I will end with pros and cons of fragmenting the binary.
Multiple genders
Some of the variant gender identities are bigender, agender, gender fluid, variant,
questioning, queer, transman, transwoman, intersex, neutrois, two-spirit and variations of each.
Australia’s High Court has allowed someone to register their gender officially as ‘nonspecific’
(Baird 2014). India’s Supreme Court recognized transgender as a third gender (Varma & Najar
2014). Germany allows parents of intersexed babies to register them as ‘indeterminate’ (Nandi
2013). ‘Queer,’ once a radical identity, has almost become the new normal (Wortham 2016).
These are 21st century iterations of going beyond the binary, the strict division of people into
two and only two sexes or genders.
The most radical among the gender variations is non-binary, trying to live entirely outside
of the gender structure. A survey of 27,715 transgender people in the U.S. reported that nonbinary people may account for 25-35 percent of the transgender population, residing
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predominantly in metropolitan areas (James et al. 2016). Estimates for the general population in
the U.S. and U.K. fluctuate with self-definition as non-binary (Richards et al. 2017).
A recent study of 17 non-binary interviewees found that all reported emotional
exhaustion in the battle for acceptance as non-gendered (Barbee & Schrock 2019). Most
interviewees were between 18 and 23 years old, three were 29–35 and one was 63. Eleven were
white, three identified as Latinx, two as South Asian, and one as ‘mixed.’ The interviewers were
themselves non-binary. Presenting as non-gendered involved clothing, hair (facial and head),
voice pitch and manner of talking, pronoun usage, name change, and choice of romantic partner.
Appearance then becomes activism. When challenged or misgendered, non-binaries have to
explain that genders are constructed and there are more than two, thus constantly educating those
they are interacting with. More onerous is the need for vigilance in the face of hostility and
potential violence from strangers, since gender-mixed appearances often incur open antagonism.
As one non-binary said:
People don’t know what to make of me when they see me, because they feel my features
contradict one another. They see no room for the curve of my hips to coexist with my
facial hair; they desperately want me to be someone they can easily categorise. My
existence causes people to question everything they have been taught about gender,
which in turn inspires them to question what they know about themselves, and that scares
them. Strangers are often desperate to figure out what genitalia I have… . (Ford 2015)
The emotional benefits were feelings of ‘authenticity and confidence, pride in problematizing the
binary, and liberation from the strictures of binarily gendered clothing and behavioral
expectations’ (Barbee & Schrock 2019, 589).
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The description of the struggles of those who don’t want to be identified as a man or a
woman suggest that it takes all their psychic strength to live in an often hostile binary world
(Bergner 2019). It would be hard to negotiate the psychological and interpersonal obstacles and
mount a battle with gendered laws and policies at the same time. As a result, non-binaries’
potential structural challenge to the binary system disappears.
A non-binary Wiki was created in 2017 with 410 content pages and 1,224 registered
users. It has a blog for an annual survey of ‘humans worldwide whose genders or lack thereof are
not fully described by the gender binary.’ The 2019 gender census had 11,242 responses (Lodge
2019). The most popular answers to the question ‘Which of the following best describe(s) in
English how you think of yourself?’ broke down to: non-binary – 66.6%, queer – 43.0%, trans –
36.6%, enby – 31.7%, transgender – 30.4%. (Choices were multiple.) The choices of titles were:
no title at all – 33.0%, Mx – 31.3%, Mr – 8.7%, non-gendered prof/acad. – 5.5%, Ms – 4.7%. The
choices of pronouns were: singular they/them/their/theirs/themself – 79.5%, he/him/his/himself –
30.8%, she/her/hers/herself – 29.0%, none/avoid pronouns – 10.3%, xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself –
7.2%. It’s clear from this survey that there isn’t a consensus among those who identify as nonbinary for designation, titles or pronouns, with the puzzling choices of gendered titles and
pronouns.
Helena Darwin (2017) found that on the Reddit genderqueer subgroup there were those
who identified as ‘agender, aliagender, androgynous, bigender, demigirl/demiguy, genderfluid,
genderflux, genderfuck, gender variant, intergender, neutrois, poly-gender, and pangender’
(315). Other variations are in the presentation of self – ‘doing non-binary.’ In an interview study
of 47 non-binary people, Darwin (2020) found much blurring between non-binary and
transgender. Darwin concludes that ‘the non-binary identity category functions as an umbrella for
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a host of gender identities’ (2017, 331). Ironically, if non-binary is thought of as another
category of gender, it remains in the gender regime (Barbee & Schrock 2019, 576).
Another variation are people who are asexual and also agendered. The two are not
automatically linked; asexuality is described as non-chosen, agender as a deliberately adopted
identity (Cuthbert 2019). The rationale, according to the 12 out of 21 interviewees in this study,
is that sexuality needs opposite genders, and since they were asexual, it made sense to them to be
agender. It was also a way to stop being identified as a sexual target. The overlap between
asexuality and agender is a minority position. In the 2016 Asexual Community Census, 26
percent of asexual respondents (2,420 out of 9,294) identified as non-binary, agender,
genderqueer or similar options (Bauer et al. 2018).
In many ways the existence of non-binary and queer identities is in itself revolutionary
(Nicholas & Clark 2020). However, the individuality of the adoption of an alternate gender
forecloses the possibility of a non-binary movement. Gender goes back to being a personal
identity, even though many of the battles have to be fought with bureaucracies and legal policies.
Gender-neutral bathrooms
The ‘bathroom wars’ are a clear case of how multiple gendering clashes with state
policies of gender. The demand for gender-neutral bathrooms used to come from feminist
women tired of waiting in long lines while men’s rooms were empty. It was an integral part of
the fight for gender equality (Molotch 1988). The current demand for gender-neutral bathrooms
is coming from people who are gender-variant (Brown 2005; Weiner 2015). In the United States,
the demands for gender-neutral bathrooms are still seen as so radical as to continue to warrant
legal battles (Liptak 2016; Suk Gersen 2016). In the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, nearly 60
5
percent of respondents reported being too afraid to use public restrooms out of fear of a
confrontation and 12 percent reported being verbally harassed while accessing a bathroom in the
past year (National Center for Transgender Equality 2015).
Gender-variant users of multiple-use bathrooms visibly confront the binary gender social
order. They violate what is to many people the psychological and biological immutability of their
own sex and gender identity. In Queering Bathrooms, Sheila L. Cavanagh (2010) explored the
shocked responses to the use of conventional bathrooms by people whose gender appearance is
ambiguous. She suggests that being in a bathroom with someone of a seemingly different gender
disrupts the psyche’s carefully developed gender identity, achieved in great part through toilet
training. The confrontation challenges the expectation that everyone is the same gender since
they were born and have bodies congruent with gender appearance. Cavanagh interviewed 100
mostly white, able-bodied, middle-to-upper-class graduate students and others aged 18-59 who
identified as transsexual or transgender, as gender queer, and as gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Three
self-identified as intersex. Their experiences were with gender-identified Western bathrooms.
Many were activists, so they were able to analyze the reaction to their bathroom use. They
reported double takes, verbal challenges, calling security guards, and even arrests.
Conventional users of gendered bathrooms uphold the binary and the clear segregation of
women and men in certain public spaces. Safety is invoked, although women would be safer in
bathrooms where there are several of each gender. The comfort of being with ‘one’s own’ in a
private space is also an issue. There is no official mandate for non-gendered bathrooms, the way
legal racial desegregation and laws governing access for the disabled altered bathroom use. In
‘On Not Making History,’ Harvey Molotch (2010) described a multi-gendered bathroom that
never got built at New York University’s new facilities for a Department of Social and Cultural
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Analysis. He says, ‘It was a lost opportunity to inscribe social change into architectural form and
to use form to facilitate intellectual growth’ (264). But it didn’t have enough supporters who
were willing to fight for it.
Intersex identifiers
One group that has become active are open intersex identifiers. In Contesting Intersex,
Georgiann Davis (2015) describes how intersex is currently experienced, defined, and fought
over. She is an insider to these debates, as she has an intersex trait (complete androgen
insensitivity syndrome) and in 2013 was elected president of the Androgen Insensitivity
Syndrome-DSD Support Group. Like many other intersex people, Davis was not told the truth
when she was diagnosed at the age of 13 and had irreversible surgery (removal of undescended
testes) at 17. She found out about her intersex status at 19, when she saw her medical records –
and was so upset, she threw them away. Ten years later, she was able to explore her diagnosis
and treatment through the lens of feminist gender and sexuality scholarship.
One of the areas of activism that Davis explored is the shift in nomenclature from
intersex as a gender identity to a specifically medically oriented diagnosis, ‘disorder of sex
development’ (DSD). In this sense, intersex goes from a chosen to an ascribed identity.
Davis’s interviews with 36 people who have intersex traits revealed two major and
oppositional patterns: Those who favored the use of intersex as an identity tended to accept the
idea of the social construction of gender and sex and their fluidity and to identify as nonheterosexual (also see Preves 2003). The consequence was confrontations with parents and
medical experts over their treatment. Two-thirds of the intersex people Davis interviewed were
in this group. The other third accepted the use of DSD even with its emphasis on disorder and the
7
consequent stigma of abnormality. They adhered to an essentialist view of sexuality and gender
as binary and hard-wired, and they collaborated with parents’ and experts’ recommendations of
surgical alterations for the bodily manifestations of their intersex trait. With the surgery, they
identified as a woman or man.
These patterns at the individual level of gender were paralleled at the interactional level
with parents (17 interviews) and medical experts (10 interviews). Medical experts impose a
gender on intersex infants that is based on the appearance of genitalia (Kessler 1990). They then
recommend immediate surgical treatment to correct what is now diagnosed as a disorder within a
rigid gender binary. With the body ‘corrected,’ the child can be raised in a clearly designated
gender. Most parents believed that sex and gender were fetally established and immutable, and
they accepted the DSD nomenclature. The underlying stigma of abnormality and fear of
homosexuality, however, led most parents to hide the diagnosis and lie about the need for
treatment – to prevent cancer is the usual rationale.
In her discussion of advocacy organizations, Davis focuses on the shift from ‘collective
confrontation’ to ‘contested collaboration,’ with acceptance of DSD as the diagnosis. Those
organizations which resist the term ‘disorders’ have used ‘differences of sex development’ while
other organizations insist that intersex is the proper term. However, the question of intersex as an
identity has itself created contention, with some intersex advocates rejecting its legal adoption as
a ‘third sex’ as stigmatizing.
As an activist, Davis lays out seven ‘actions for liberation’: stop medically unnecessary
surgeries, collaborate with medical experts, expand and diversify peer support, empower through
education about gender and sex variability, use feminist scholarship on gender construction,
understand the institutional construction of diagnoses and other stigmatizing labels, and
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incorporate children’s voices into medical decisions. Intersex liberation could become a direct
confrontation with the gender binary if the variations of sex development became variations in
gender identity or a legal third gender. But the more common treatment is to ‘normalize’
genitalia and grow up in an ‘appropriate’ gender.
Intersex athletes
In their struggle to maintain clear gender boundaries, sports organizations have targeted
hormones and chromosomes, but these don’t clearly distinguish female from male. The current
focus is on testosterone and its higher than normal levels in intersex women athletes, particularly
competitive runners.
Major sports organizations set up binary gender borders but come up against multiple
variations when they try to use physical anatomy – visible genitalia, internal procreative organs,
chromosomes, hormonal output – as markers of gender boundaries. The International Olympic
Committee dropped gender verification tests for women in 2000 but then had to confront
transgender and intersex athletes. In 2004, it ruled that male-to-female and female-to-male
transgenders could compete in their new gender, provided they had had ‘appropriate surgery,’
had completed hormone treatment two years before, and were legally recognized as members of
their new gender.
The contested issue then shifted to possible intersex effects, namely, elevated testosterone
levels in intersex runners. In 2009, when Caster Semenya, an 18-year-old South African woman,
won the 800-meter race at the World Championships in Athletics in Berlin, her womanhood was
challenged by one of her competitors, and a gender verification test was called for (Clarey and
Kolata 2009). Semenya won the race with a time of 1 minute 55.45 seconds, the best in the world
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in 2009, beating the defending champion by 2.45 seconds. Her time was not the all-time fastest,
yet none of the other champions had to prove they were women. Semenya was described in one
news report as having ‘an unusually developed muscular frame and a deep voice’ (Kessel 2009),
hardly accurate criteria for gender verification. But trying to develop ‘simple rules for complex
gender realities’ presents a major challenge to gender segregation, wrote Alice Dreger, professor
of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University (2009). Measuring
testosterone levels might give an indication of muscle mass, but testosterone levels aren’t a
criterion for gender division. Men with low testosterone levels don’t compete with women with
similar levels; rather, the men are allowed to boost their levels.
Most women have natural testosterone levels of 0.12 to 1.79 nanomoles per liter. The
typical male range after puberty is 7.7 to 29.4 nanomoles per liter. The current ruling is that
intersex women athletes who want to participate in middle-distance women’s track events must
take hormone-suppressing drugs to reduce testosterone levels below five nanomoles per liter for
six months before competing, then maintain those lowered levels. After several lawsuits, in 2019
the international Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld this regulation. Caster Semenya
brought her case against the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), arguing
that IAAF’s rule is unscientific, unethical and discriminatory. She lost (Longman 2020).
The CAS panel agreed that the rule is discriminatory, but justified it based on the IAAF’s
arguments about sex differences and testosterone. Men are, on average across athletics events, 9–
12 percent better than women. The IAAF claims that testosterone is main cause of this
difference. Therefore, women with high testosterone level have an unfair advantage. These
claims about testosterone have been challenged on the grounds that the relationship between
testosterone and athletic performance is not clear-cut (Jordan-Young & Karkazis 2019).
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Training, body size, and menstrual cycles are among the myriad other factors that influence
athletic performance.
Even more controversial is the question of whether transgender women, who were once
men, should compete in women’s sports (Brassil & Longman 2020). Regulations vary and often
conflict. There is little data on elite transgender women athletes to determine whether they have
physiological advantages. Note that as with intersex athletes, it is women’s sports that is
invariably the source of conflict, since transgender men, who were once women, are not thought
to be a threat to men’s sports.
Acceptance of people with variations of sex characteristics and development without
trying to physically normalize them would go a long way to fragment the gender binary. It would
undermine the belief that the behavior of women and men is produced by biology and therefore
immutable (Lorber 1993).
Menstruating and birthing men
In 1978 Gloria Steinem asked, ‘What would happen…if suddenly, magically, men could
menstruate and women could not? … The answer is clear — menstruation would become an
enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event’ (Steinem 1978, 110). Some transgender men do
menstruate, but it is not an affirming experience for them. The problem harks back to the lack of
gender-neutral bathrooms. Men’s bathrooms do not have supplies of tampons and sanitary
napkins the way many women’s bathrooms do, nor do they have places to dispose of used
‘feminine hygiene’ items.
Menstruation in women is often stigmatizing, rendering them polluting in many cultures.
For transgender men who still menstruate, it’s doubly stigmatizing, adding psychological
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disorientation to physical discomfort (Frank 2020). Menstruation challenges transmen’s
masculinity, so most hide their periods. It was newsworthy when a bearded transgender man
posed with women activists, fashion designers and writers in T-shirts with period-positive
slogans in an ‘I’m On’ campaign (Hosie 2018). That was binary-breaking, for sure, but in general,
transgender men who menstruate are a hidden phenomenon, and so they may queer menstruation
(Frank 2020) but they don’t affect the gender binary.
More binary-breaking are transgender men who become pregnant and give birth. They
are frequently reported as ‘the first’ but they are not so uncommon. Australian Medicare, one of
the few sources of data on transgender men who get pregnant, reports 55 men gave birth in 2014-
15, 44 in 2015-16, 37 in 2016-17, and 22 in 2018-19 (Hook 2019). Yet pregnant men are also not
so visible. They report passing as fat men even at full term, attributing this phenomenon to their
beards, markers of maleness (Dozier 2005, 305; Hattenstone 2019).
A man giving birth is always newsworthy and usually described erroneously as ‘the first’
(Beatie 2008). This description seems to be a way this potentially binary-breaking phenomenon
is fitted into the gender binary as an anomaly. Otherwise, they are normalized. A review of 27
news reports on transgender men giving birth from 14 U.S. news media outlets published
between 2013 and 2017 found a consistent pattern of normalization (Lampe et al. 2019). The
transmen’s pregnancy and birth are described as the same as cis-gendered biological processes
and their parenting as no different from cis-gendered fathers. The remarkable phenomenon of a
body going from female to male but keeping female reproductive capability is not noted.
A meta-synthesis of 14 articles dated from 2012 to 2019 on transgender men’s
experiences with pregnancy and childbirth showed that they encountered obstacles and hostility
from the medical system (Besse, Lampe & Mann 2020). In trying to conceive, they were faced
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with the incompatibility of the hormones they used to transition from female to male and those
needed for conception. They encountered lack of access to costly assisted reproductive
technology as well as difficulty in paying for it. Once pregnant, they had to decide how to juggle
a male identity with a growing abdomen. Some passed as overweight men and others went back
to a temporary female identity. Those who maintained presentation as a man in name, pronouns
and clothing and didn’t hide their pregnancy were truly gender-resistant. Because of their
discomfort with the medical system, many chose nurse midwives for the birth and some opted
for home births.
Some transgender men want to flaunt their births. To counteract his invisibility as a
pregnant man, a 32-year-old British transgender man, Freddy McConnell, made a movie called
‘Seahorse’ (male seahorses carry the unborn eggs). It documented the reversal of his transition of
ten years, getting pregnant with a sperm donor, his pregnancy, and the birth of his son
(Hattenstone 2019). McConnell had taken testosterone and had mastectomies when he was 25,
but he didn’t have a hysterectomy. In the movie, he describes how his body felt when he stopped
taking testosterone:
He started having periods again (‘I don’t like the idea that I’ve got tampons in my bag,’ he
winces); his facial hair gets wispier, his hips broaden, his tummy softens and he starts to
speak less from his chest and more from his throat.
Yet he never altered his chosen identity as a man. However, he was denied being listed as ‘father’
rather than ‘mother’ on the child’s birth certificate. The judge defined ‘mother’ as a physical and
biological status — the person who is pregnant and gives birth — while Connell defined ‘father’ in
its gendered social status (Magra 2020). In both ways — his own gender identity as a man and the
legal enforcement of his status as ‘mother’ — the gender binary was upheld.
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Battle of the pronouns
The one phenomenon that does seem to be fragmenting the binary is the movement to
erase gender distinctions from language usage by calling individuals ‘they, them, theirs,’ and
identifying ethnicity with gender-neutral tags such as Latinx instead of Latino or Latina. Also,
Mx. is replacing Ms. and Mr. for some English speakers (Tobia 2015). These gender-neutral
designations, originally designed for non-binary, transgender and other gender non-conformists,
are being adopted by cis-gendered people and used in major newspapers and magazines in the
U.S. (Saguy and Williams 2019b). For linguists, ‘they’ was the word of the year and of the
decade in 2020, according to the American Dialect Society (Blaylock 2020). There is an
International Pronouns Day on the third Wednesday in October, which began in 2018. It gets
endorsements by diverse organizations who promise to create grassroots activities around nongendered pronouns (pronounsday.org).
The use of ‘they’ as a third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun is not new in
English literature or informal conversation (‘what’s their name?’), in use since the Middle
Ages (Baron 2020). That may be why there’s so little resistance to it although it does make
you stop and think.
The use of gender-neutral pronouns has the same effect as other unexpected language
use, such as ‘she’ for president in the U.S. It produces comprehension disruption or a ‘surprise.’
A British study of pronoun use during the 2016 U.S. and 2017 U.K. elections, both of which
had a woman candidate (Hillary Clinton and Teresa May, respectively), found that the use of
‘she’ pronouns produced ‘massive comprehension disruption’ in U.S. readers but none in U.K.
readers (von der Malsburg et al. 2020). Britain, of course, had already had a woman prime
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minister, Margaret Thatcher. In the U.S. even when the woman was expected to win, ‘she’
pronouns were rarely used; ‘they’ was used instead.
In 2012, Sweden had school children using the pronoun ‘hen’ and calling each other
‘friends’ (Tagiabue 2012). More revolutionary is the adoption of non-gendered usage for
languages that are deeply gendered, such as Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Hebrew. In
Argentina in 2019, teenagers began replacing the masculine ‘o’ and feminine ‘a’ endings with
the non-gendered ‘e’ (Schmidt 2019). In 2020, the president, Alberto Fernández, publicly
joined them, referring to ‘Argentines’ (Politi 2020). The shift in language coincided with the rise
of a feminist movement in Argentina centered around a campaign against femicide, the killing of
girls and women because of their gender. That campaign, called ‘Ni Una Menos,’ (‘Not One
Less’), bolstered political support for legalizing abortion, a legislative priority for President
Fernández. Non-gendering the name of the country was thus transformed into an aspect of
women’s rights.
There have been attempts to create non-binary Hebrew to use in place of the standard
male and female grammatical categories (Kushner 2019). French and German have been much
more resistant to erasing gender distinctions in language use. The French Academy, the guardian
of French language, is vehemently against it, only allowing the feminization of professional titles
(Nossiter 2019). German has long used feminine versions of titles and job descriptions. The
proposal to substitute an asterisk for all endings was deemed ridiculous by the Association for
German Language (Johnson 2019). A petition signed by 100 writers, satirists and scholars and
titled ‘stop this gender nonsense’ called on trade unions, regional authorities, and journalists to
keep German gendered.
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European languages that are non-gendered, such as Estonian and Finnish, do make life
easier for those who are non-binary. However, as one Estonian speaker points out, there are ways
to indicate gender so ‘… genderless languages are not the utopia one may imagine. Assumptions
about the binary nature of gender and the status of masculinity seem to survive intact, even under
genderless language conditions’ (Crouch 2018).
The widespread use of he/she and Ms. in English went a long way to erase the longtime designation of he/him/his as referring to women as well as men. That is, any group with
one or more men in it was referred to as male, the dominant gender. Insisting on ‘he or she’
and ‘women and men’ was a hard-won feminist fight for women’s visibility that unfortunately
is now being erased by gender-neutral language. However, erasing gender distinctions in
language is a stepping stone to gender equality (Liu et al. 2018). If you can’t separate people
into distinct categories, you can’t treat them differently. But gender blurring needs to go much
further than gender-neutral pronouns. Every aspect of presentation of self needs to be nonbinary.
Doing research without the gender binary
Feminist researchers start with the assumption that the content and dividing lines for
genders, sexes, and sexualities are fluid, intertwined, and crosscut by other major social
statuses; thus, there are no ‘opposites.’ Even if we use the categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’
we need to recognize people’s different racial and ethnic identities, social classes, religions,
nationalities, residencies, and occupations. In some research, we need to compare the women
and men within these groups. In other research, we need to compare women and men across
groups.
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The question becomes, who is being compared to whom? Why? What do we want to
find out? Even without challenge to the binary, deconstructing gender reveals many possible
categories embedded in social experiences and social practices, as does the deconstruction of
sexuality, race, ethnicity, and social class. The resultant multiple categories disturb the neat
polarity of familiar opposites that assume one dominant and one subordinate group, one
normal and one deviant identity, one hegemonic status and one ‘other.’
Multiplying research categories uses several strategies. One strategy is to recognize
that gender statuses combined with other major statuses produce many identities in one
individual. Another is to acknowledge that individuals belong to many groups. Therefore, it is
extremely important to figure out what you want to know before choosing the subjects and
variables for comparison. Samples have to be heterogenous enough to allow for multiple
subject categories. The common practice of comparing women and men frequently produces
data that is so mixed that it takes another level of analysis to sort out meaningful subject
categories. It would be better to start with patterns of behavior derived from data analysis of
all subjects and then see the extent to which they attach to the conventional categories.
However, in order to do this second level of analysis, the sample groups have to be
heterogenous in the first place. So you are back to the question, ‘What do you want to know?’
Pros and cons of fragmenting the gender binary
In evaluating the fragmenting of the binary, we need to look at the effects on
individuals, interaction, and legal and bureaucratic structures of each of the ways that the
binary is being broken up – multiple genders, gender-neutral bathrooms, intersex
17
identification, intersex athletes, menstruating and birthing men, gender-neutral language, and
mixed-gender research.
The existence of multiple genders allows for a variety of gender non-conforming
identities. Otherwise, it’s either accepting a gender designation or declaring oneself agender.
To live without gender in a gendered world is almost impossible, since everything in one’s
presentation of self – clothing, head and facial hair, weight and muscular distribution, name,
pronouns – proclaim gender. Mixing genders within a self-presentation is gender nonconforming in that attributes won’t add up to a consistent gender. In face-to-face interaction,
one can have friends and sexual partners who are declared women, men, non-binary,
transgender, and other self-designated identities. Formal documents are offering a non-gender
choice but legal designations are still likely to be bi-gendered.
The downside of multiple gendering is that it either precludes concerted political
action or one ends up in a third gender category. Gendered others are not likely to be
accepting of someone whose gender is a puzzle, and many mixed-gender identifiers have
reported encountering hostility and even violence. As long as one’s official documents
proclaim a gender, it is impossible to be ‘other.’
As a woman who has ‘liberated’ many men’s rooms, gender-neutral bathrooms are all
to the good. Not only non-binaries need them, every cis-gendered person who has stood on a
long bathroom line appreciates being able to use whatever bathroom is free. Gender-neutral
bathrooms also benefit fathers with infants who need diapering since changing tables are not
likely to be found in men’s bathrooms. Multi-gender bathrooms are also appreciated by
parents of small opposite-gendered children, and transgendered men who menstruate. The
hostility and legal restrictions faced by gender non-conformists who seem to be using the
18
‘wrong’ bathroom would be minimized if all bathrooms were non-gendered. What would be
missed is the chance to have single-gendered space to commune with like-gendered friends.
Intersex people who have fought for open and legal identification as intersex
appreciate their acceptance. Intersex activism has also helped in the fight against surgical
‘normalization’ procedures. For parents who want to bring up a child with a clear
conventional gender and for older children and adults who don’t want to be singled out as
different, this movement is seen as hurtful. As for intersex athletes who must battle rigidly
gendered sports organizations, they are ending up undergoing surgery or hormone treatment to
bring their bodies into line with whatever rules and regulations are set as indicating normality.
Menstruating and birthing men are exemplars of breaking the binary. They have split
physiological sex characteristics from gender identity in startling ways. But men who have
given birth as men have not been able to get legal recognition of their status as fathers. In
medical facilities, their pregnancies and births lead to treatment as female. Menstruating men
need to carry their own supplies and hide their disposal if they are using men’s bathrooms.
During pregnancy their appearance may let them pass as fat men, but in the act of
menstruating or giving birth, their sex supersedes their chosen gender. In short, these men are
legally and physically identified by their bodies as female. They are not able to actually
fragment the binary.
The use of non-gendered pronouns seems to be growing in popularity and in media
usage. Many organizations have sessions teaching the proper way to address those who use
‘they, their, theirs’ as chosen pronouns, and in many circles and families, it is considered
polite and loving to learn non-gendered ways of speaking. Non-gendered pronouns do not
depend on ratification by non-gendered legal identification, so they can be adopted by people
19
who maintain a gender presentation otherwise. The downside is loss of gender visibility and
recognition when the goal is to praise cross-gender behavior, such as women scientists who
receive Nobel prizes or walk in space, and primary-parent fathers. The parallel movement,
non-gendering languages, is more sporadic in acceptance. It also takes more effort and group
action to develop non-gendered language forms in deeply gendered languages, such as
German, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew. Once they are developed, it takes more group action to
get them used routinely.
Feminist social science has long gone beyond binary gender categories in research,
recognizing the ways that other statuses, such as race, ethnicity, social class, and age intersect
gender. Intersectionality prescribes breaking up gender categories by these other relevant
statuses. The resultant data on gender inequality will also be intersected by other statuses, so
that you will be comparing Black, Hispanic, and Caucasian women and men on wages in an
economic sector or educational attainment. Such findings are more accurate than simple
comparisons of women and men. Mixed-gender or non-binary categories are rarely part of
research unless the topic is specifically multiple genders. Comparisons of the before-and-after
economic status of transgender men and women provide data that confirms the effects of
gender. When women become men, they gain in the workplace. Transgender men are often
praised as so much better than the woman who worked there before. Transgender women
often lose out economically and are very vulnerable to violence.
Conclusion
What fragments the binary are X designations on official documents like birth
certificates, non-binary and intersex identities, multi-gender self-presentations, gender-neutral
20
bathrooms, gender-neutral pronoun use, and intersectional research. What seem to but don’t
fragment the binary are intersex athletes and menstruating and birthing men. There are many
ways that the gender binary is being upheld, which I will discuss in the next chapter.
5580 words, 22 pgs
1
The gender binary would persist if it wasn’t resisted or rebelled against, since it is built
into the structure of most societies and major institutions — economy, family, religion, and so on.
Feats of women that seem to challenge the binary — space walks, grueling U.S. Marine Corps
training, scientific discoveries — paradoxically uphold it. Without the binary and its
discriminatory assumptions of women’s physical and mental inferiority, these accomplishments
would be commonplace. Instead, they are lauded as historical milestones (Davenport & Beachum
2019).
There are, however, specific supports that are rarely questioned. The most common is
physical; females and males have different chromosomes, hormones, procreative systems and
body structure. Major differences in behavior and social interaction must necessarily ensue. All
the comparative sex and gender research assumes the differences are binary, not divided by other
characteristics or spectrums in themselves.
Feminist focus on women’s standpoints and the value of women’s history and visibility
that created women’s studies supports the binary. “New” masculinities have not undercut
masculine hegemony. In the #Me Too movement women rebelled against the normality of their
sexual exploitation by hegemonic men, and toppled many, but it didn’t affect the binary.
The open acceptance of homosexuality is intertwined with continuance of the binary,
since both heterosexuality and homosexuality are interlocked with the two genders. As modes of
attraction, they rely on distinct opposites. But in lifestyle, rather than undercutting
heteronormativity, ‘homonormativity’ began to resemblance it with same-gender couples
marrying and having children. The underlying gender structure is maintained.

4. Persistence of the Gender Binary

2
The transgender resurgence, which seems to blur the binary, needs it. Without statuses
and identities that are seen as opposite, transition from one to the other would be meaningless.
Transitioning means constructing a masculine or feminine persona, and for most transgender
women and men, successfully passing from the old to the new gender.
In this chapter, I will explore each of these ways that the gender binary is strengthened.
The myth of female and male brains
There is an on-going debate over the distinctness of female and male brains and the effect
of brain structure and function on the binary behavior of women and men (Del Guidice et al.
2019; Fine, Joel & Rippon 2019). A persistent claim of biological ‘hard-wiring’ is the theory of
brain organization. It was based on the administration of testosterone prenatally to a female
guinea pig with resultant male mating behavior (Phoenix et al. 1959). The theory was applied to
humans in 1967 and soon became textbook knowledge.
Brain organization theory claims that the path to female and male behavior starts with
XX and XY chromosomes, which produce estrogen and testosterone respectively, which
construct not only the clitoris and vagina, testes and scrotum, but also organize the brain’s neural
substrates into female and male potential for feminine and masculine characteristics and
behavior. This potential is intensified at puberty by the production of additional estrogen and
testosterone.
Critiques of this theory note that just as the social environment affects bodies (exercise
affects bone mass and menstruation; smoking affects lungs), the human brain itself shows
changes from repeated actions of specialized knowledge, experiences and training, such as in
jugglers, ballet dancers, judo players and London taxi drivers (Rippon 2019). Cabdrivers’
3
knowledge of the map of London gets literally imprinted on their brains. The changes fade when
they retire.
Another argument against the neat binary of brain organization theory is that androgens
and estrogens are both masculinizing and feminizing and affect both women and men (JordanYoung 2010). In addition, the lines between feminine and masculine behavior are blurry and
malleable so that there aren’t clearly gender-distinguishable characteristics to link back to female
and male brains. Social psychological studies show how easily gendered self-perceptions,
attitudes and behavior thought to be inborn can be reinforced, erased, or reversed by subliminal
cues, contexts and other manipulations (Fine 2010). There aren’t average female or male brains
to compare and contrast. Brains are rather physical mosaics of individual characteristics (Joel &
Vikhanski 2019).
In a test of brain patterning in a contested area of gendered ability, researchers mapped
neural processes of mathematics in 3-to-10-year-old children (Kersey et al. 2019). They
measured the brain patterns for mathematics of 55 girls and 49 boys with functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) during viewings of mathematics education videos. They found that
boys and girls showed equivalent mathematics-related neural responses. That shouldn’t have
been surprising, since another test of early mathematics ability in 50 girls and 47 boys 3-to-9-
years-old by the same researchers did not show gender differences in mean ability or variance.
The researchers conclude that their results are consistent with the ‘Gender Similarities
Hypothesis,’ which argues that boys and girls function similarly in most areas of cognition and
that ‘gender differences in STEM fields in adults are not derived from intrinsic differences in
children’s brains but likely from a complex environmental origin.’
4
So not only is it difficult to distinguish male from female brains or to confirm the linkage
between gendered brains and gendered behavior, but there are very few differences between the
behaviors of women and men. One set of researchers (Zell, Krizan & Teeter 2015) did 106
different meta-analyses, incorporating data from 12 million people. The results showed once
again that the majority of gender effects were either very small (39.4%) or small (46.1%);
relatively few effects were medium (11.9%), large (1.8%), or very large in size (0.8%).
The linkage of brain organization to feminine and masculine behavior is less a
demonstrable cause and effect than an attempt to uphold a binary gender structure by arguing for
its biological origin. The contention that nature precedes nurture should crumble as women do
more and more actions that were considered naturally masculine, such as military combat, space
walks and running governments as premiers and presidents. But the belief in male and female
brains persists.
Gendered research
Almost immediately on the outbreak of COVID-19 and the world-wide spread of the
coronavirus that causes it, gendered research began. It appeared that men had a higher death rate
from COVID-19 than women and were more likely to develop a severe illness (Xiyi 2020).
Possible behavioral causes were men’s higher rate of smoking and lesser attention to washing
hands. Refusal to wear masks was attributed to machismo attitudes (Victor 2020). Other salient
factors are pre-existing conditions and gender-segregated occupational exposures (ShattuckHeidorn et al. 2020). One biological theory focused on chromosomes and hormones (Moalem
2020). Women have two X chromosomes which carry 2,000 genes that interact with women’s
cells. Cells can use genes on one X chromosome to destroy invading viruses, and genes on the
5
other X chromosome to kill infected cells. Also, XX chromosomes produce estrogens, which
stimulate immunological responses, while testosterone seems to suppress them. The protective
effect of estrogens led to trials of administering them to men and post-menopausal women with
COVID-19 (Rabin 2020).
Another branch of research was on the gender effects of the lockdown that kept workers
home and school closings that kept children at home. Employers had to adopt flexible work
schedules and telecommuting for men and women employees, for which many women have been
fighting for years. Another result of the lockdown was the availability of fathers for child care
and home schooling. Where mothers worked outside the home, as medical providers or grocery
and pharmacy employees, fathers had to became the main child carers.
Reports on sharing housework and child care by heterosexual co-habiting partners
working from home were mixed. In one study men partners claimed to be doing half the homeschooling; their women co-habiters claimed that they were doing 80 percent (Miller 2020).
Another study of 1,060 U.S. heterosexual couples on their early COVID-19 experiences found an
increase in sharing housework from 26 percent to 41 percent; similar results were reported for
shared care of children (Carlson et al. 2020). A report on 4,915 opposite-gender U.K. parents
with children on domestic work, child care and work experiences during April 29 to May 15,
2020, found many inequities (Packham 2020). Mothers were doing more housework and
childcare and less paid work. More women than men had lost their jobs, thrusting them into
standard domestic gendered roles. A U.S. study of telecommuting heterosexual couples with
children found that by April 2020 mothers with children aged 1-12 had cut back their work time
by 4.6 hours per week, while fathers had not cut back at all (Collins et al. 2020). A study
comparing work at home before and during the pandemic found that fathers benefited more
6
because they saw more of their children, but mothers were more depressed because they still had
the burden of housework (Lyttelton, Zang & Musick 2020). So where there was some evidence
of greater gender equality, there were predictions of a positive outcome of the pandemic (Wiest
2020). But other reports of women losing jobs or dropping out of the work force because of
home demands pessimistically predicted long-term disastrous consequences for women’s work
participation (Alon et al. 2020a, b; Cohen 2020).
A serendipitous gender effect was the leadership of countries that most successfully
combated the coronavirus. Eight countries with the best outcomes of controlling cases and deaths
all had women leaders whose actions were early and decisive. The countries were Bangladesh,
Bolivia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hong Kong, Namibia, Nepal and Singapore. Also touted for their
control of the spread of the virus were Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, and
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany. At the beginning of June 2020, New Zealand was
declared virus-free (Cave 2020). However, other countries that hadn’t controlled the coronavirus
so well were also governed by women, so what was different about those women leaders? A
comparison of the two groups of women leaders to see how they each managed the COVID-19
epidemic would indicate what leadership skills were most efficacious in the crisis. Some reports
did focus on styles of leadership, rather than on the gender of the leader and noted that the
women’s and men’s styles are gendered culturally (Lewis 2020; Somvichian-Clausen 2020;
Taub 2020; Wade & Bridges 2020). Men leaders were prone to using war metaphors with the
coronavirus as the enemy to be attacked aggressively and vanquished. More successful women
leaders focused on communal efforts and careful planning that demanded shared long-term
sacrifice, a leadership style considered ‘feminine.’ Clearly, comparisons need to be made within
7
genders as well as between them. Women leaders are not all alike, nor are men leaders. Leaders
of either gender can adopt ‘feminine’ leadership styles.
A better research design than starting with two unaggregated groups of women and men
and seeing how they produce a variable is to start with the variable and then see who are the
producers of the differences in the variable (Lorber 1996). In the COVID-19 pandemic, we could
take an outcome, say, reduction in death rates within the first two months, and see which leaders
and which directives produced this outcome. We could then see what was crucial about the
leadership correlated with the differences in outcome. The characteristic might not be gender.
Standpoint theory
Thirty years ago the contention in medical and pharmaceutical research was that much of
it left out women. The model body was male; women’s bodies, with menstruation, menopause,
pregnancy and childbirth, were seen as ‘deviants.’ In 1990, the Society for the Advancement of
Women’s Health Research was founded and has flourished with a journal (Journal of Women’s
Health) and ongoing research projects (Society for Women’s Health Research 2020).
In the social sciences, a critique of gendered research is that it is not enough to just add
more women to research teams or even to have them head a team (‘add women and stir’); these
women have to have a critical woman’s viewpoint. Although men could certainly do research on
and about women, and women on men, standpoint theory argues that women would be better
able to design and conduct research from their own point of view (Harding 1991). But to make a
difference they have to be critical of mainstream concepts that justify established lines of power,
and they should recognize that ‘facts’ often reflect stereotypical values and beliefs about women
and men (Harding 1986).
8
Standpoint theory argues that as physical and social producers of children out of bodies,
emotions, thought and physical labor, women are grounded in material reality in ways that men
usually are not. Women are responsible for most of the everyday work of living, even if they are
highly educated, while highly educated men concentrate on the abstract and the intellectual.
Because they are closely connected to their bodies and emotions, women’s unconscious as well
as conscious view of the world is unitary and concrete. If women produced knowledge, it would
be much more in touch with the everyday material world and with the connectedness among
people, because that is what women experience.
Dorothy Smith, a feminist sociologist who has helped develop the ideas of standpoint
theory, says that knowledge has to be sought in ‘everyday/everynight’ local practices of
individuals combined with institutional ethnography — mapping the practices of organizations
and their members, which constrain individual actions by the relations of ruling. For example,
research on marketing should go from the woman shopper to the organization of the store, the
supply chain, means of production, and the global economy, recognizing that each level has
hierarchal relations of ruling that impact on the people involved and that this impact is likely to
be gendered (Smith 1987, 1990a,b, 2005).
While standpoint theory originally focused on the differences between women and men,
it soon recognized that the gender categories were fragmented by other major statuses, especially
racial and ethnic identity and social class (Collins 2000; McCall 2001). Their standpoints had to
be made visible as well. Others argued for bringing ‘southern’ theory into Western thought. For
Raewyn Connell (2007) the social experience and ideas that have emerged from Indigenous
peoples and inhabitants of Australia, Latin America, India, Africa and other post-colonial
9
societies, are sources of significant contributions to social science. Sandra Harding (1998)
similarly argues for the importance of multi-cultural perspectives in science.
Standpoint theory was originally a bolster of the gender binary, arguing for major
differences in outlook and behavior of women and men based on their different social locations
in the gendered social structure. The later expansions of intersectionality and transnationalism
also argue for the value of perspectives of people from different social locations, not only gender
(Mohanty 2003; Collins 2019). Ultimately, therefore, the gender binary is actually fragmented as
intersectionality superseded standpoint theory.
Hegemonic masculinity and the ‘new’ masculinities
Parallel to feminist studies of women was the field of feminist studies of men. Most
germane to explaining the persistence of the binary is the concept of hegemonic masculinity –
elite men’s pervasive dominance in values, knowledge, culture and politics. Hegemony embodies
the consent and compliance of subordinate men and women to the gender hierarchy; in other
words, women’s continued acceptance of the gender inequality of the binary and non-elite men
allying with dominant men.
First proposed in Connell’s Gender and Power (1987, 183-188), the concept was refined
by Connell and Messerschmitdt (2005) and later by Messerschmidt (2018) and Messerschmidt
and Messner (2018). The 2005 critique reiterated the notion of multiple masculinities
(hegemonic and subordinate) but instead of compliance with gender inequality, pointed to
antagonisms and resistances of subordinate men, especially over the issue of homosexuality.
Homosexual men, formerly considered subordinate, began to filter the ranks of the elite and to
10
gain the acceptance of hegemonic men. Homophobia may have dropped out as part of
heterosexual hegemonic masculinities but gender inequality has not, nor has racism.
While Western hegemonic masculinity tends to be global (Connell 2005), there are
regional and local variations. As social constructions, the variations allow for the possibility of
change in what masculinities remain hegemonic and their downfall. Messerschmidt (2018)
describes counterhegemonic practices that do not support gender inequality. In his research on
adolescent boys, he encountered a group who were friends with girls, were non-hierarchical, and
who walked away from bullies. They didn’t reject masculinity but redefined it positively. ‘The
boys aimed to be seen as boys as well as egalitarian in their gender relations, thus disrupting
gender difference by redefining what it means to be a boy through the orchestration of positive
masculinities’ (144). They rejected hegemonic masculinity but continued to act within the
binary.
These ‘hybrid masculinities’ do not undermine hegemonic masculinity (Bridges &
Pascoe 2018). White, middle- and upper-class, straight men strategically borrow elements of gay,
Black and working-class masculine styles and practices, but maintain their separate circles and
hegemonic status. They sustain their power and privileges; their relationship to women is more
protective than egalitarian. In some cases, men acknowledge the characteristics of hegemonic
masculinity while deviating from them. A study of 24 men at an elite university found that while
all agreed that for hegemonic men, academic achievement was downgraded in favor of athletics
and social life, ‘nerds’ who embraced concentrating on schoolwork nevertheless felt they were
masculine as well (Gruys & Munsch 2020).
The #MeToo movement
11
The one recent major change in hegemonic masculinity is the #MeToo movement.
Started by Tarana Burke in 2006 (Garcia 2017), women began to publically reveal the extent to
which they were sexually exploited and even raped by men with power over them for years in
every field. The movement exploded in 2017 with Harvey Weinstein, movie mogul who had
been paying off survivors of his sexual violence for years (Kantor & Twohey 2017). Ultimately,
he landed in jail. Other accused men, instead of being protected by their male bosses, were fired
and lost their reputations (Farrow 2019). A review in 2018 of changes in laws, policies and
practices said, ‘Perhaps more than any new policy or law, the past year has been defined by a
parade of once-powerful men resigning or being fired for sexual misconduct. In some cases,
women are taking their place’ (Greenberg 2018).
Not only the culture but the structure of workplaces has been changed to outlaw sexual
harassment and exploitation (Greenberg 2018). Some of the changes at the U.S. state level are
banning nondisclosure or other confidentiality agreements as a condition of employment,
expanding sexual harassment protections to independent contractors, volunteers and interns, and
mandating sexual harassment training and education. Companies are forced to disclose their
history of sexual harassment suits and to attest to the fact that no managers, directors, or
executives have been accused of sexual harassment. Men have stopped meeting women one-toone behind closed doors and going on trips with just one woman for their own self-protection.
On U.S. college campuses, women students have long complained that their reports of
sexual assaults and rape were ignored. In 2011, then-President Obama’s Department of
Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to 4,600 colleges and universities expanding
Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding.
Sex discrimination earlier was expanded to include sexual harassment and assault. The directive
12
shifted all belief to the accuser. The accused couldn’t confront the accuser or belie the evidence
against them. Also, sexual harassment was defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual
nature.’ While applauded for supporting traumatized women who claimed assault, the directive
was criticized for denying the accused of due process, even by feminists (Gernter 2015). In 2020,
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos issued rules that gave more protections to the accused, who
faced discipline or expulsion due to allegations of sexual misconduct. The new directive was
denounced by unions, the National Organization for Women and Democratic senators as turning
the clock back, but it was supported by some feminist legal scholars for restoring due process
(Powell 2020). In comments on the DeVos decrees, Jeannie Suk Gerson (2020), a Harvard law
professor, favored the option of informal resolution, such as mediation. Another good change
was forbidding having one person act as investigator and judge, interviewing witnesses,
examining evidence and adjudicating the outcome. Suk Gerson notes that the definition of sexual
harassment and the required response by school administrations was still fuzzy.
The Obama regulations resulted in law suits and the DeVos rules are expected to, also.
Successful #MeToo accusations have generated reprisal lawsuits. Sexual harassment and
#MeToo accusations of sexual assault are rooted in the antagonism and power differences of the
gender binary. Women standing up to men’s sexual predations reinforces gender borders.
Nonetheless, casual and violent sexual exploitation of subordinate women is no longer an
assumed masculine privilege. While maintaining the gender binary, they have dropped out of the
repertoire of hegemonic masculinity.
Sexuality and the binary
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Sexuality and gender are both socially constructed and flexible over lifetimes (Gagnon &
Simon 2005). They both encompass more than emotions and relationships – sexualities structure
families and social lives. We have thought of sexuality as a binary like gender with only two
categories, heterosexuality/homosexuality, but the realities of sexual variations have been
recognized far longer throughout the world than current multiple genders. Heterosexuality,
homosexuality and bisexuality have distinctive structures, interactions, legalities and cultural
values (Greenberg 1988; Rodriguez Rust 2000; Jackson & Scott 2010). Yet they are embedded
in the gender binary, which is much more limited in its variation. Homosexual men proclaim
their masculinity with beards and burly bodies (Dozier 2005; Hennen 2005). Lesbians are first
and foremost women in a continuum of emotional bonding (Rich 1980).
Sheila Jeffreys (1996) dissected heterosexual sex and its ‘desire for gender.’ She argues
that what is being eroticized in heterosexuality is the man’s power and the woman’s submission.
Lesbians can enact dominance-submission sexuality, but homosexual desire, both lesbian and
gay, she contends are based on mutuality and egality.
Statistics on homosexuality are notoriously slippery. Data questions may be based on
sexual identity, behavior (number and frequency of same-sex partners), or attraction, which vary
separately. A U.S study (Mishel 2019) based on interviews with 30,861 women and 24,357 men
aged 15-45 found 4.9 percent of the women identified as bisexual and 1.5 percent as lesbian.
Among the men, 1.9 percent identified as gay and 1.7 percent as bisexual. Combining identity
with same-sex behavior and attraction, 20 percent of 6,277 women could be classified as lesbian
or bisexual, and 10 percent of 2,470 men as gay or bisexual.
Lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations not only fluctuate separately over time but also by
gender, social class, and racial and ethnic identity. A study using U.S. General Social Survey
14
data from 1988 to 2018 found steep increases over time in same-sex behavior by women and not
as steep increases among men (Mishel et al. 2020). The women’s rates especially rose with the
sexual revolution loosening norms. Among the men, the increase was greater for Black and
working-class men. The authors speculate that gender norms regarding same-sex behavior are
looser for women than white men, who have to uphold their superior status. Lower-status men
have had increasing rates of incarceration and opportunities for same-sex sexual behavior,
accounting for their increase in same-sex activity.
Bisexuality, which is usually combined with lesbian and gay sexuality, had a flurry of
visibility and politics in the 1990s (Rust 1995; Tucker 1995). The politics was with lesbians, who
can be seen as betrayers if they sleep with a man. There is an ongoing academic quarterly,
Journal of Bisexuality, which began in 2000 as an official journal of the American Institute of
Bisexuality, which was established in 1998.
After a hiatus, bisexuality is now increasing in popularity. The U.S. General Social
Survey reported in 2018 that 3.3 percent of their responders identified as bisexual, compared to
1.7 percent who identified as lesbian or gay. When sexual identity was first included in GSS
questions in 2008, only 1.1 percent identified as bisexual and 1.6 percent as lesbian or gay.
Young Black women contributed the most to the increase in bisexual identification, with rates of
6-8 percent (Bridges & Moore 2018; Compton & Bridges 2019). Numbers of GSS responders
fluctuate and can be small.
Does bisexuality support the gender binary? Yes, if the attraction to and sex with is to
both cis-gender women and men. But if there are multiple genders, then there can be people who
are attracted to queers and non-binaries and any other gender. Since bisexuality as an identifying
term assumes sex relations and attraction to two (‘bi’) genders, some in the community have
15
adopted the term ‘pansexual’ to indicate sex partners and attraction to all sorts of genders (Zane
2018). Pansexuality would be to binary sexuality what multiple genders are to the gender binary
– part of the process of fragmentation.
Transgender and the binary
Exchanging the gender identity ascribed at birth (cis-gender) for the opposite gender
(transgender) seems like it should undermine the binary by challenging its stability. But in
actuality, it very much upholds it. The whole binary structure is what underpins transgendering –
changing bodies and faces, sexual relationships, clothing, hair, manner of speaking and walking
– to conform to one’s chosen identity. The social construction of gender identity is the same
whether the gender is cis or trans (Garfinkel 1967). In-depth interviews with transgender men
(female-to-male) and transgender women (male-to-female) found that body transformation was
interwoven with social presentation and sense of self as newly gendered. Transgender women
described ‘retraining, redecorating, and remaking the body’ in myriad small ways – walking and
talking, dressing and using make-up, removing and restyling hair (Schrock et al. 2005).
Transgender men described growing facial hair and removing breasts as most important to
establishing their new identity (Dozier 2005). But even large breasts can be masculinized as a
glandular imperfection (Abelson 2019).
White transgender men, especially those who transitioned in secret, were very aware of
their gain in status, noting that they received greater respect, authority and attributions of
competence (Schilt 2010). Often, they were compared as so much better than the ‘previous
woman who had their job,’ who was of course, them. Black transgender men, however, lost
status, reporting that they were harassed as gay or feared as threatening (Dozier 2005).
16
Catherine Connell (2010), in her in-depth interviews of 19 transgender men and women
and genderqueers, found that those who were ‘stealth’ (hiding their transgender status) were
most conforming to gender norms. Those who were open in their transgender status and
genderqueers tried to redo gender by mixing male and female self-presentations, but found that
they ‘often felt they were gender disciplined and/or reinterpreted according to conventional
gender norms’ (39). However, some transgender men did deliberately incorporate aspects of their
former femininity, such as empathy, to counteract masculine privilege. The activist transgender
people were more apt to challenge conventionally doing gender, but the resistance of others
made redoing gender difficult. Connell says they are ‘doing transgender’ since they were very
aware of gender inequality, having undergone reduced status for transgender women and
enhanced status for transgender men. They were then able to counter misogynistic behavior or
talk from co-workers.
The reinforcement of gender inequality in transgendering is also evident in couples where
cis-gendered women are living with transgender men. One study of 61 mostly white couples
found that they tended to divide housework in conventionally gendered ways, with the woman
doing most of it (Pfeffer 2017).
These couples, which were often previously lesbian relationships, also illustrate the
gendered quality of sexuality. In some instances, the transitioning creates a heterosexual couple
from one that was lesbian or gay, and in others, the transitioning transforms a heterosexual
couple into a same-gender relationship. The same partners may be involved but the gender of the
sexuality has changed. The quality of same-gender and different-gender sexuality differs. Cisgender heterosexuals take that for granted but it is salient to couples involving a transgender
person.
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The pressure to maintain heteronormativity in the face of transgendering leads cis-gender
men to readily masculinize transgender men, but cis-gender women to reject them as potential
sexual partners (Schilt & Westbrook 2009). In the women’s eyes, such a relationship would be
homosexual. For cis-men, feeling they were tricked into homosexuality by a transgender woman
who has male genitals can lead to violence, even murder, actions that restore the masculinity of
the gender ‘normals.’
In many ways, then, transgendering is made to fit into the binary to maintain
heteronormativity (Westbrook & Schilt 2014). The gendering of transgender people is
conventionalized, even to the point of reinforcing gender inequality and masculine privilege. The
transgender people who resist and rebel against the binary need to find new ways of interacting.
A study of controversies among transgender activists in Finland up to 1999 found resistance to
medical categorization and treatment and rebellion against the binary (Wickman 2001). Seeing
gender identity on a continuum ending with non-binary was one proposed solution to where
transgender fits into the social order without reifying the binary. But for the most part,
transgender people are today granted their preferred gender identity, with and without surgery
and taking hormones, as long as they fit acceptable norms for gendered behavior and
presentation of self.
Pros and cons of binary persistence
The areas of support for the gender binary are the myth of female and male brains, gendered
research, standpoint theory, hegemonic masculinity and the ‘new’ masculinities, the #MeToo
movement, gendered sexuality, and transgendering. Not all have positive aspects.
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I can’t think of anything positive to say about the belief that brains can be codified as
male and female and from infancy on produce subsequent gendered behavior. Copious research
indicates that human brains are not gendered. Further, brain structure and organization do not
alone produce behavior, nor do genes or chromosomes or hormones. Human behavior is a
composite of physical, environmental and social influences. Also, gender differences at any age
are minimal, so the effects that female and male brains are supposed to produce are
inconsequential. Yet this series of beliefs – that brains are binary and produce binary behavior
that creates and maintains the binary structure of our social world – is the foundation of Western
biological ideology. When the gender binary is seen as natural, it is also seen as immutable.
When it is seen as socially constructed, it is seen as changeable.
Research that compares women and men is useful as an initial step in exploring a new
area, as was shown with early data on COVID-19. It was found unexpectedly that men were
more likely to get sick, to be sicker, and to die at higher rates than women. More expectedly,
women were more likely to lose their jobs and when they did work at home, to bear more of the
burden of juggling child care and home schooling. An unexpected finding was that countries
where the pandemic was successfully controlled were likely to have women leaders.
This early data had to be disaggregated further. Race and ethnic group, as well as economic
inequity and crowded living conditions were also shown to affect rates of coronavirus illness and
death. The long-term effects of women’s career erosion and imbalanced division of domestic
labor were predicted to be dire. But there were data that indicated more involvement of
heterosexual fathers in child care when both partners worked from home. The data on women’s
leadership, when looked at further, showed that it wasn’t gender but style of leadership that
affected pandemic outcome. Not all women leaders were particularly effective.
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About thirty years ago, adding women to medical research was a positive step. In the
social sciences and humanities, focusing on women’s point of view, women’s history, and
women’s cultural productions rectified the dominance of men’s ‘gaze.’ Women’s studies grew
out of this turnaround, producing a proliferation of science, sociology, and history using
women’s standpoint. Past women’s art, music, poetry, fiction, and plays were brought to the fore,
as was contemporary culture by women. Just as comparative gender research needs to be
unpacked, research and culture that focused on women’s point of view had to be intersected by
other major factors – in particular, race and ethnicity. A whole genre of Black, Latina, and Asian
women’s studies has flourished.
The parallel area was the development of men’s studies. It was diverse from the
beginning, so we have data on men of all classes in many types of communities and in many
countries. These studies were linked by the theory of hegemonic masculinity (and emphasized or
complicit femininity), the analysis of the social hierarchy of dominant men and women who
were subordinate to the men of their class, race, ethnicity, religion and place of residence. Except
for actions to control physical, psychological and sexual violence and its connection to sports,
men’s studies did not challenge the premises of the gender binary. In fact, it has examined the
ways patriarchy is rooted in the ideology of two differentiated genders, one dominant and the
other subordinate, without calling for dismantling the binary.
The gender-resistant #MeToo movement came out of feminism and wasn’t incorporated
into men’s studies. It has been positive in encouraging women in many countries to accuse men
they worked with of abuse ranging from commonplace sexual harassment to actual rape. The
public outcry against accused men has resulted in many firings and reversals of iconic
reputations. The negative side are counter-suits and million-dollar buy outs. Another subtle
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negative side has been the realization among women that the men who have been revered as
famous culture creators of the past were often guilty of sexual abuse. If they were to be
ostracized, there would be no Western culture left. Sexual abuse has been an intrinsic part of the
hegemonic masculinity explored in men’s studies. Both are rooted in the gender binary and its
structure of dominance and subordination. It is clearly the downside of the persistence of the
binary.
The linkage of binary gender and patterns of sexuality has provided rich data in what has
become an offshoot of gender studies – sexuality studies. Lesbians and gay men are not seen as
separate from being a woman or a man. Much of the sexuality literature explores their gendered
communities. Same-gendered marriages and families often emulate heterosexual patterns and so
fit into the gender binary.
Transgendering is a proliferating and increasingly accepted phenomenon. By adopting
conventionally gendered bodies, sexuality, interactions and selves, transgender people fit into the
binary. The downside is that they perpetuate gender inequality by accepting the diminishment or
enhancement of status entailed by their transition from man to woman or woman to man.
Conclusion
The gender binary in Western countries continues to be supported legally, interactionally
and structurally. Its major form of persistence is that it is the taken-for-granted default position.
From birth, people are identified as male or female, dressed and brought up accordingly, interact
with each other as members of their assigned gender, and are workers, family members and often
religious participants as women and men. In higher education, the military, space, and some
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religions, gender is officially deliberately ignored, although it informally emerges in
discrimination, hidden biases and harassment of women.
Areas where the gender binary is still strong are gendered research, where gender is a
standing variable, although now often fragmented intersectionally by social class, racial and
ethnic identity, age, physical ability and other major statuses. Feminists are ambivalent about the
need to still stress women’s accomplishments and standpoints to counter the assumptions of
hegemonic masculinity about men’s superiority. Patriarchal privilege – men’s advantages in
politics, the economy, and culture – is based on the gender binary. The continued social
construction of gender differences is the scaffolding for inequalities between women and men.
Beliefs that gender differences are natural, not constructed, legitimate discrimination,
exploitation and oppression of women as an inevitable outcome of the gender binary.
Sexuality seems to be one area where there is some blurring of the binary. However,
despite the normalization of open gay and lesbian identities, heterosexuality and heteronormative
lifestyle are intertwined with the gender binary, which they reinforce. Transgender is built on the
gender binary, with exchange of one gender identity for the other. The transgender non-binaries
who change bodies but don’t adopt new social identities certainly challenge the binary, but the
transgender women and men who embrace their new gender identities strongly endorse it.
In the next chapter, I will explore why we don’t have a gender revolution and the
usefulness of degendering as an interim strategy that encourages continued fragmentation of the
binary.
6023 words 24 pgs

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5. Why Haven’t We Had A Gender Revolution?
Given all the people who fragment the gender binary in developed Western societies,
why haven’t we had a revolution that tried to overturn the bigendered social structure? Why
hasn’t there been a concerted reaction against the structure of the binary gender regime and its
legal and bureaucratic underpinnings? Why don’t the gender nonconformists, non-binaries,
intersex identifiers, and the menstruating and birthing men get together and revolt against the
legal strictures of the binary? It may be that the very variety of gender challengers works against
unitary political action and goals. For one thing, some gender rebels want more than two genders
while others want to eradicate gender categories entirely. As a result, the fight has stayed at the
individual level.
The politics of identity
The politics of identity demand that you know who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them.’ As William
Connelly says in Identity/Difference, ‘Identity requires difference in order to be, and it conveys
difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty” (1991, 94). Gender multipliers
and deniers have to forge a visible identity to engage in political action. They also will run
counter to feminists who feel the world isn’t ready to drop the battle for women’s visibility.
Joan Wallach Scott calls it an inevitable feminist paradox that to fight to erase the effects
of gender differences, you have to invoke them:
To the extent that it acted for ‘women,’ feminism produced the ‘sexual difference’
it sought to eliminate. This paradox – the need both to accept and to refuse
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‘sexual difference’ – was the constitutive condition of feminism as a political
movement throughout its history. (Scott 1994, 3-4)
Radical feminists in particular valorized women’s ways – caring and emotionality – as
equal to if not superior to men’s focus on rationality and objectivity. Maya Maor (2015)
found an example of such a practice in martial arts, where women teachers create their
own more relational, emotional and less brutal style of karate and tae kwon do to
distinguish themselves from more prevalent men teachers.
Particularly relevant to why the challengers of hegemonic gender identity don’t
achieve structural change is that acceptance and integration often produce what Urvashi
Vaid (1995) calls virtual equality, the erasure of differences without changes in the social
structure that make it possible to live differently. For the group, the marks of
differentness may help their members identify one another as sources of help. As
Suzanna Danuta Walters says of the gay and lesbian community in the United States,
‘One of the positive “fallouts” of discrimination is the forging of community and the
development of a concern for others, activism, a culture of responsibility. The response to
AIDS is only one example’ (2001, 19). However, Jane Ward’s research (2004) on an
AIDS service organization found that Latina lesbian women felt their health-care needs
were neglected because most of the money went to gay Latino men. Obviously,
differences must be bracketed off for some political action and invoked when it is
politically necessary to counter invisibility.
What do gender multipliers and deniers want? Just the right to call themselves a
non-binary name? To act it out? To legalize it? The first is a matter of personal identity;
the second would challenge conventional face-to-face interaction; the third would disrupt
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the structure of the gender binary. The first and second goals don’t need political
unification; the third does.
Alternatively, queer theory has argued that change will come when there are so many
sexualities and genders that one cannot be played against the other as normal and deviant, valued
and stigmatized. Those who queer the gender and sexuality binaries rebel against the strictures of
two and only two oppositional and fixed categories (Beemyn & Eliason 1996; Elliot 2010;
Castro et al. 2011). They construct ambiguities and blur borders, but they haven’t undermined
the structural or interactional foundations of gender as a binary institution. To make structural
change, people with various non-binary gender identifications would have to perform their
genders of choice openly, confront conventional others in interaction, coalesce into a unified
force, bring new knowledge to bear on gender issues, and insist on bureaucratic and legal
recognition.
One problem is that those who eschew identity as a woman or a man live in a borderland
between men and women (Callis 2014). Another is that they consciously need to pursue the
politics of power (Collins 2000, 275-290). Finally, they have to confront the pervasive
interactive gender frame (Ridgeway 2011, 190-200). Let’s look at each of the issues in turn.
Borderlands
As long as the gender binary persists, those who are not conventionally gendered live in a
borderland. Drawing on the borderlands theory of Gloria Anzuldu’a (1987) and the work of
Pablo Vila (2000), April Scarlette Callis (2014) argues that people identifying as bisexual,
pansexual, queer and other sexual non-binaries inhabit the borderland between heterosexuality
and homosexuality. Callis notes that theoretically, ‘borderlands simultaneously develop their
4
own cultures while challenging hegemonic ideology’ (2014, 68). By this analogy, those who
inhabit sexual borderlands should be creating new forms of being sexual and eventually open a
space for an institutionalized ‘third sexuality.’ What she found was the other way around: the
sexual borderland was created by the structures of heterosexuality and homosexuality. The 37
people with non-binary sexualities that she interviewed ‘used 21 different terms or phrases in
multiple combinations to label their sexual identities. Despite the wide array of labels used, all of
these identities were formed as a reaction to the binary of heterosexual/homosexual, and each
moved within and beyond this binary’ (2014, 78).
Those denying and fragmenting gender identities similarly exist in a borderland
constrained by a powerful binary frame. Like those with non-binary sexualities, those who
invoke non-standard gender identities have not developed a shared identity or a culture. They
include transgender people who alter their bodies in order to transition and live as women, men
or non-binaries, those with intersexed bodies who want a third gender or X identity, and those
with the bodies they were born with who have adopted alternative gender identities. They are too
heterogenous to challenge the binary hegemony. Some transgender people support the gender
binary by wanting to pass as the gender they have transitioned into. Their goal may be the right
to change their gender on their birth certificate. Intersexual people have generated substantial
activism for the right to be accurately identified. Unlike non-binaries, they don’t want to do away
with gender.
If people who were queering gender in one way or another did want to make a political
difference, how would they get empowered?
5
The politics of empowerment
In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins says that to develop a politics of
empowerment, you need to understand how power is organized and operates (2000). According
to Hill Collins,
Whether viewed through the lens of a single system of power or through that of
intersecting oppressions, any particular matrix of domination is organized via four
interrelated domains of power, namely, the structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and
interpersonal domains. … The structural domain organizes oppression, whereas the
disciplinary domain manages it. The hegemonic domain justifies oppression, and the
interpersonal domain influences everyday lived experience and the individual
consciousness that ensues. (276)
How could those challenging the gender binary be empowered to change it on each of the four
dimensions – structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and interpersonal?
Multiple gendering could affect the structure of the gender binary if there were a
concerted effort to either abolish bureaucratic gender identities or to legally recognize the range
of sexed bodies. Despite the biological challenges of intersexed anatomies and anomalous
hormonal and chromosomal development, each body is forced into a procrustean legal gender
identity. Ambiguous infantile genitalia are surgically altered to look ‘normal’ soon after birth
(Dreger 1998; Kessler 1998). Anomalies continuously plague gender categorization in sports,
with forced body changes rather than challenges to the intensely gendered structure of this
powerful and pervasive institution (Dreger 2009; Karkazis & Jordan-Young 2014).
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Hill Collins (2000) notes the conflicts of ‘outsiders within,’ those who have been able to
move into positions of power in dominant institutions, but who are in danger of cooptation to
maintain their positions and who therefore do not use their different perspectives to alter policies
and practices. Transgendered people and homosexuals have made their identities visible and
have promulgated non-discriminatory laws, legal identity change and marriage equality, but just
adopting a variant gender identity does not seem consequential or revolutionary. It seems to be a
matter of individual consciousness — the end point of a process of change, not the beginning.
After consciousness of the strictures of the two-gender social structure and the adoption of a
gender-variant personal identity, there does not seem to be a path of rebellion. The two areas that
should get shaken up by the open invocation and adoption of non-binary gender identities are
interpersonal interaction and hegemonic thinking about gender. Are they?
The gender frame
Cecilia Ridgeway argues that to make gender less powerful as a frame for most
interaction, people would have to stop automatically categorizing everyone they interact with as
a man or a woman (2011, 190-192). She feels this is highly unlikely since it creates too much
social confusion and even anxiety in others because it ‘challenges the stability and validity of
their own identity as a man or woman’ (191). Of course, if others’ gender identity was irrelevant
to the interaction, then no one’s gender would be of consequence. For that to happen, gender
status beliefs and relevance would have to alter substantially (193).
If men did more of women’s work and women more of men’s work both in the work
force and at home, Ridgeway argues, conventional gender beliefs would be challenged and
gradually made less relevant. In actuality, what has happened is that when men do what has been
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conventionally seen as ‘women’s work,’ such as nursing or child care, it is reframed in gendered
ways: men in nursing do more physical work or get rapidly promoted to administrative positions,
and they do child care in masculine ways – roughhousing, sports, physical play. Women doing
men’s work, such as military combat, going into space, and ruling countries are seen as
remarkable innovators, far from the norm. Women now dominate in previously masculine
professions, such Western medicine, and have changed medical school curricula and ways of
practice, turning it into women’s work, but men still predominate in the more lucrative
specialties — surgery, neurology, and sports medicine. Thus, gendered cultural overlays persist,
even as practices have shifted.
Minimizing gender and maximizing equality
If we argue that gender as an institution is built on the construction of a gender binary
and justifying differences between the genders that allows for the subsequent hegemony of men
and exploitation of women in low-paid work and unpaid domestic labor, then the minimization
of gender should lead to greater equality. If we can’t tell or don’t constantly remark on gender in
face-to-face interaction, women and men should be social equals. I have argued that with that
goal in mind, everyone should practice degendering – consciously act and talk and behave as if
everyone had no gender (Lorber 2000, 2005). It should be everyone’s revolution, not just those
who deliberately queer gender. But it needs legal and bureaucratic degendering as well, as in the
more gender-equal countries, where men and women are comparably educated, work in
comparable occupations and professions for equal pay, have comparable political power, and
share responsibility for the care of children. In short, if gender is irrelevant, then gender equality
should follow.
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This argument is testable. The hypothesis is that the greater the gender neutrality in
norms, the greater the gender equality in practice and policy. The World Economic Forum
Global Gender Gap Index (2020) measures gender equality in the relative gaps between women
and men in health, education, economy and politics. According to the 2020 Global Gender Gap
report, educational attainment and health and survival are close to parity – women and men share
equally in whatever educational and health resources are available in a country. The political
empowerment gap is the greatest at only 24.7 percent parity. The second-largest gap is in
economic participation and opportunity; 57.8 percent of this gap has been closed. Comparing
countries, Iceland was once again the most gender-equal country in the world for the 11th time in
a row. It has closed almost 88 percent of its overall gender gap. Iceland is followed by Norway at
84.2, Finland at 83.2 and Sweden at 82.0. The U.K. ranks 21st at 76.7. The U.S. ranks 26th at
75.6.
Attitudes about gender norms can serve as a measure of gender neutrality. A recent
global survey asked women and men in 24 countries to answer 10 questions about gender norms
and expectations for men and women; the countries were ranked on the level of progressive
gender attitudes. Matching the index of gender equality, the Nordic countries had the highest
level of gender-neutral attitudes (YouGov 2015). In Sweden, there was very little difference
between women’s and men’s attitudes. Thus, the level of gender neutrality in attitudes matches
the level of gender equality in the economy and politics (Jackson & Jackson 2020).
How to minimize gendering
How can we then minimize the extent to which we do gender? We could demand genderneutral bathrooms and language use. We could stop doing gender-reveal celebrations that feature
9
the sex of a growing fetus and proclaiming it with pink or blue balloons, cakes and fireworks.
We could have a rainbow-colored gender-neutral celebration of the pregnancy instead. We could
consciously seek out non-gendered clothing for small children and give them non-gendered toys
and games. Since it’s hard to find non-gendered toys, we could make sure children had some of
each considered appropriate and not appropriate for their gender. We could insist that teachers
throughout school grades do not separate and compare and contrast girls and boys but group
them by other characteristics. Before puberty, girls and boys can do athletics together, and for
older children there could probably be more gender-integrated teams or more concentration on
gender-neutral sports.
For heterosexual couples, Ellen Lamont (2020) challenges them to date as equals if they
intend to have an egalitarian marriage. She interviewed 105 college-educated young adults in the
San Francisco Bay Area about their dating lives and romantic relationships and found that
heterosexual women and men expressed a desire for permanent egalitarian relationships, where
both partners have a career and share the labor at home. But they were still dating the oldfashioned gendered way — the man asks for, plans, and pays for the date. When it comes time for
a permanent commitment, the man is expected to be the one to propose marriage and present the
woman with a ring. Lamont says, ‘Although these rituals are viewed as romantic, chivalrous, and
fun – and of little long-term consequence – they actually lay the foundation for relationship
inequality. The result is: Gender inequality gets disguised as romance.’ Although her
interviewees said they wanted shared marital practices, they were not likely to carry them out,
since they believed that men and women are innately different, with different interests, skills and
emotional availability. In contrast, the LGBQ respondents had egalitarian and flexible
relationship practices from the beginning. One person wasn’t responsible for asking for or paying
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for dates. They focused on communication, negotiation, flexibility and building balanced
relationships that took into consideration each person’s needs.
Parenting in particular needs a non-gendered approach. Describing revolutionary
parenting, bell hooks (1984) said:
Structured in the definitions and the very usage of the terms father and mother is the
sense that these two words refer to two distinctly different experiences. Women and men
must define the work of fathering and mothering in the same way if males and females
are to accept equal responsibility in parenting. (137)
Pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding are often invoked as insurmountable barriers to
men’s parenting, seeming to give women bonding advantages that deepen their psychological
leanings toward intensive mothering. Yet many men accompany the mother of their child to
obstetric checkups, listen to the baby’s heartbeat and look at the sonograms with the mother, take
prenatal classes, coach the mother through the birth, hold the baby immediately after, and even
without paid parental leave, take time off from work after the birth. Many reports of shared
parenting describe fathers waking up with the mother during night feedings and diapering and
burping the baby, thus sharing the breast-feeding work and the bonding. Scott Coltrane (1996)
was surprised by how many of the 20 co-parenting fathers he interviewed said it was
a rare opportunity to develop the sensitive, vulnerable, and caring parts of themselves.
Many talked about discovering a new form of love and experiencing the world in
different ways since they became fathers. Some also talked about how being a parent was
helping them to work through unresolved emotional issues with their own fathers. (116-
117).
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Men routinely sharing parenting would break the psychological cycle of gendering sons who
grow up emotionally stilted.
Diane Ehrensaft (1987) claimed that the middle-class urban and academic heterosexual
couples whom she studied shared parenting chores fairly equitably, but the mothers tended to
take on more of the psychological and emotional management – to worry more. They felt they
were on call for their children all the time while the fathers could let them cry. The mothers felt
they had to struggle for separation, the fathers for closeness. Women, she said, are mothers; men
do fathering. Yet in the course of fathering, the men had fallen in love with their children and
wanted to be with them because they were so fascinating and lovable. The intensity of the men’s
feelings for their children reversed the conventional parental triangle; instead of the fathers being
jealous of the time the mothers spent with the children, mothers felt left out of the father-child
‘couple.’
For women and men, the skills of parenting are learned, usually ‘on the job.’ Expertise is
the result, not the cause, of gendered parenting. If women are better than men at parenting, it’s
because they do it more. Men who are single fathers or who do a significant amount of child care
become good at it, too. Barbara Risman (1987) interviewed men who became single parents out
of necessity because their wives had died or left them with the children. These single fathers did
not have previous beliefs about their capacity for intimate parenting, but they developed fully
nurturing relationships with their children.
The right of men to parent had to be upheld legally in the US. In 1975, in her pursuit of
equal treatment under the law for women and men, Ruth Bader Ginsburg successfully defended a
man whose wife died in childbirth and who wanted to be a full-time father to his newborn son
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(Weinberger v. Weisenfeld). He had to go to court to be able to receive the Social Security
benefits as a widower that a widow would be entitled to.
Sweden and Norway encourage men to share parenting with a ‘daddy month,’ paid
parental leave that paralleled what mothers were getting. The days for fathers eventually were
extended to months and years. But unlike mothers, fathers tended to break up their leave time
into the equivalent of long weekends or extended vacations rather than spending intensive time
after the birth of their child. These practices were condoned by peers and colleagues.
Degendering parenting entails downplaying conventional gender expectations. Fathers
need to devote extensive physical and mental energy to their children while also earning a living,
and mothers need to contribute substantial economic support to the family while also caring for
and giving emotional attention to the children. Same-gender parents presumably don’t have to go
against the grain to the same extent, since they have already challenged the gendered family
structure, but gender norms about manhood and womanhood emerge even in same-gender
households and have to be consciously counteracted (Malone & Cleary 2002).
Barbara Risman’s study (1998) of shared parenting focused on deliberately ‘gender-fair’
heterosexual families. An extensive search process turned up only 15 families that met the
equality criteria: a 40/60 or better split on sharing household labor, equal responsibility for
breadwinning and childrearing, and a self-assessment that their relationship was fair. Their
gender-fairness was reflected in the surnames they used. They tended to divide housework by
preference and competence without much discussion or argument (and with supplemental paid
cleaning help). The majority of the couples had dual careers; both were career-oriented, and both
felt that each other’s career was equally important as their own. Two of the couples were what
Risman called ‘dual nurturers,’ less career-oriented than focused on home and family. Another
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family, with older children, was deliberately structured for sharing domestic tasks equally among
all five members of the household.
Risman found that adults’ relationships are often strengthened by their shared
involvement with their children. They spend a lot of time talking about raising the children,
comparing and improving each other’s skills. Neither partner gets to have a conventional ‘male
career,’ because neither has a ‘wife’ to do the work at home. Both are workers in both spheres;
both get the rewards of their work and of hands-on parenting. They also both get the fatigue, the
boredom of performing household chores, the time crunch, the guilt that they are spending either
too much or too little time with their children or on their work.
Conclusion
The last two chapters indicate that the gender binary is both fragmented and persists.
Except for intersectional research, the fragmentation is pretty much on the surface, with some
non-binary self-presentations and pronoun usage and scattered legal recognition of X
designations. The binary not only persists without acknowledgement of its ubiquity, but is
supported by routinely gendered research, continued belief in biological origins of gender
differences, a focus on women’s distinctiveness, and hegemonic masculinity. The gender binary
is still built into most people’s personal identity and self-presentation, organizes interactions, and
structures the major components of the social order. The gender binary underlies Western
civilizations’ value systems. Hegemonic masculinity, patriarchal privilege, and the gender binary
are all part of each other. The dominance of the values and the culture of hegemonic masculinity
asserting the superiority of men over women, and the legal structures and organizational policies
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that shore up the superior resources and power of men depend on the gender binary. They could
not exist without the constructed elaboration of gender differences.
We are at a crossroads of fragmentation and persistence of the gender binary. If we
continue with fragmentation, eventually doing away with gendered legal categories, identities,
presentations of self and social practices as ‘women’ and ‘men’ we will have the basis for
equality – at least by gender category. Degendering would take us well along the road to doing
away with gender. But at the present time, we still have institutional and interactional practices
of gender inequality that have to be made visible and fought. And in order to fight gender
inequality, we need to distinguish women from men as legal and social categories. We need to be
able to compare them to make gender inequality visible.
That is the source of the new gender paradox. We need to persist with the gender binary,
which is producing gender inequality, in order to fight it, and at the same time, fragment it more
and more so it eventually disappears. A gender revolution is unlikely since the multiplicity of
identities of the challengers of the binary and the variety of their goals makes united political
action unfeasible. The various bi-gender challengers haven’t recognized each other as allies, and
the politics of identity needs a separation between us and them. They live on the borderland
between the binary genders. If they did unite, it could create a third gender, yet many want to
eschew gender identities entirely.
It may be that a gender revolution is not necessary to create gender equality. Just the
minimization of gender identities has the potential of undermining the differential treatment of
women and men. If we can’t tell or don’t constantly remark on gender in face-to-face interaction,
women and men become social equals. The more organizational policies, especially salaries and
promotions, are equal for women and men, the less they have to be compared. With that goal in
15
mind, everyone should practice degendering – consciously act and talk and behave as if everyone
had no gender. It should be everyone’s revolution, not just those who deliberately queer gender.
But it needs legal and bureaucratic degendering as well as equitable organizational policies.
It would be revolutionary if birth certificates and ID cards and drivers’ licenses did not
indicate gender. The changes necessitated on marriage licenses by same-gender marriages are
cases in point for how legal policies need to follow changed practices. Husbands and wives have
become spouses. Equal sharers of child care similarly should be parents, not mother and father.
In many ways, degendering practices are revolutionary. Parents downplaying the gender of their
children and men routinely parenting are revolutionary. So is gender-neutral treatment of
children through the years of school. So is egalitarian dating. In many small ways, the gender
binary can be chipped away by all of us.
What would be lost is the valorization of women and their history and accomplishments
and the rich and varied women’s cultures that feminists have worked so hard to produce,
maintain and make visible in the last 50 years. It would erase the ‘womanist’ focus on the
distinctive qualities of women — their relationship to their bodies and sexuality, their emotional
and nurturing capabilities, and their special viewpoint in male-dominated societies and cultures.
In entering men’s domains, women have had to emulate men. In parenting, men in turn are
emulating women. To the extent that women’s and men’s leadership styles are different and
women seem to have produced better outcomes in crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, men
might emulate women in leadership, too.
A major social problem that degendering does not solve is violence against women –
domestic battering and femicide – as well as sexual harassment, sexual attacks and rape. The
current ostracism of men who have routinely exploited and violated women and removing them
16
from their positions of power has gone a long way to increasing women’s ability to fight against
their sexual vulnerability. But battling violence against women needs women to support other
women. When they have downplayed their mutual gender, it’s been a disaster. Women have
assisted men in their sexual victimization of other women. More horrible, women family
members in ‘honor’ societies have killed daughters who they believe have destroyed family
honor by sexual misdeeds or even by being raped.
In societies where women are more equal to men and where men’s power and privileges
have been diminished it may be that women maintaining their identity and visibility may not be
so necessary. Gradual degendering might eventually replace taken-for-granted gendered
practices with degendered practices in bureaucracies and work organizations and in informal
interaction in everyday life. But a period of self-conscious attention to gendering has to come
first. You have to be aware of gendering to degender.
Our goal at present can’t be a world without gender. Yet it needs to be a world without
gender inequality. And that takes both fragmentation and persistence of the binary. Breaking
down the binary is needed in law, bureaucracies, politics, the economy, the culture and other
formal organizations to undermine discriminatory practices. But we need the binary to identify
where formal gender inequality exists and to make hidden discriminatory practices visible.
Perhaps the best epitaph for us is what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her 1996 majority
Supreme Court opinion that Virginia Military Institute should admit women. With the current
understanding that most gender differences are socially constructed and not inborn, her statement
in defense of eliminating gender discrimination but sustaining admirable gender differences
holds for today:
17
Inherent differences between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause
for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial
constraints on an individual’s opportunity.
Perhaps that is the best we can do in continuing to live with the gender binary and at the same
time diminishing its invidious impact.
(4708 words, 19 pgs)
1
6. A world without gender
In Paradoxes of Gender, I proposed two thought experiments that render gender
irrelevant (Lorber 1994, 294-302). In the first, a society divided into two genders treats them
strictly equally, with half of all jobs held by men and half by women, family work done half by
women and half by men, men and women serving alternately as head of governments, equal
numbers of women and men in the officer corps and ranks of armed forces, on sports teams, in
cultural productions, and so on throughout this imaginary society. In the second imaginary
society, all work is equally valued and recompensed, regardless of who does it, and families and
work groups are structured for equality of control of resources and decisions. In both societies,
gender is actually irrelevant. Strict parity would make it pointless to construct and maintain
gender differences since women and men are interchangeable. Strict equality would contradict
the purpose of gender divisions and undercut the subordination of women by men.
Let’s take these thought experiments further and imagine a world without gender.
It would be a society where people come in all colors, shapes, and sizes but where body
characteristics are not markers for status identification or for predetermined allocation to any
kind of activity. Here is my vision of such a world, described ten years after Paradoxes in
Breaking the Bowls (Lorber 2005, 166-169).
Envisioning a world without gender
Love and sexuality, friendships and intimacies revolve around people with a mutual
attraction to each other’s bodies, intellects, interests, and personalities. Males inseminate willing
females through copulation or provide sperm for insemination. Females who want to, give birth
2
to infants. These infants become part of families of different kinds of kinship groups and
households composed of a variety of responsible adults. They are breast-fed by lactating females
and cared for by competent child minders. They receive love and affection from the older
children and adults in their circles of relationships. Their favorites and role models vary over
time, but there is at least one legally responsible adult for every child.
Children are not sexed at birth – their genitalia are irrelevant in the choice of names,
blankets, and clothing. ‘A child is born to …,’ the announcements read. In play groups and
schools, children are organized by age, size, talents, skills, reading ability, math competence,
whatever the needs of the children in the group. Children’s talents, skills, and interests shape
their choices of further education and job training.
If we can assume non-assortment by other invidious categories, such as racial or ethnic
group, people are hired on the basis of their credentials, experience, interviewing skills, and
connections. The salary scales and prestige value of occupations and professions depend on
various kinds of social assessments, just as they do now, but the positions that pay best and are
valued most are not monopolized by any one type of person. Science is done by scientists,
teaching by teachers, cultural productions by writers, artists, musicians, dancers, singers, actors,
and media producers. The beliefs and values and technologies of the time and place govern the
content. In a gender-less world, cultural productions are gender-free.
Positions of public authority in corporations, bureaucracies, and governments are attained
by competition, sponsorship and patronage, networking, and other familiar forms of mobility.
Charity, honesty, and competence are as evident as corruption, double dealing, and shoddy work
– people are people.
3
So there are still murders, wars, and other forms of violence, although perhaps through an
ethical evolution, societies might develop in which people are taught how to handle anger and
conflict in positive ways. But rules are made to be broken, so there is still a need for police and
soldiers, judges and prison guards. All are non-gendered.
Games and sports are played for fitness and fun. New games have been devised that put
less emphasis on body shapes and more on skill. In competitions, people of different levels of
body functioning and abilities compete against one another in a variety of ‘Olympics.’
In the major and minor religions, new liturgies and rituals are in use, but old ones are
turned to for their historical cultural value, as are the old novels, plays, songs, and operas. Those
who have the calling and the talent lead congregations and prayer services and speak for the
god(s).
New gender-free language forms do not categorize the speaker or the spoken about. The
old forms of language and literature are studied for their archaic beauty and what they tell us
about the way people used to live and behave and think.
People group and identify themselves on the basis of all sorts of similarities and disdain
others on the basis of all sorts of differences. Sometimes those who identify with each other wear
similar clothing or hair styles or jewelry or cosmetics. Sometimes these displays become
fashions for all who consider themselves chic. Group and individual ways of speaking, dressing,
and behaving serve as cues for interaction and distancing.
There are no women or men, boys or girls – just parents and children, siblings and
cousins, and other newly named kin, and partners and lovers, friends and enemies, managers and
workers, rulers and ruled, conformers and rebels. People form social groups and have statuses
and positions and rights and responsibilities – and no gender. The world goes on quite familiarly
4
but is radically changed — gender no longer determines an infant’s upbringing, a child’s
education, an adult’s occupation, a parent’s care, an economy’s distribution of wealth, a
country’s politicians, the world’s power brokers.
To take this thought experiment further, let’s look at how degendering would affect the
components of individuals and institutions. The components of gender as a social institution and
as individual identity were first described in Paradoxes (Lorber 1994, 30-31).
A degendered institution
As a social institution, gender is composed of legal statuses, a division of labor, kinship
structures, sexual scripts, cultural productions, norms for interaction, social control, and overall
ideology. Degendering those components would result in a less gendered and more equal social
order.
Gender statuses — Degendering legal and bureaucratic statuses involves not identifying a
gender category on birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, and other legal sources of identification.
Degendering would downplay or eliminate the unequal effects of gender statuses and the norms
built into them. The important outcome is to eliminate gender inequality by enforcing equal
treatment for everyone under the law and thus equalizing access to sources of prestige, power,
and economic wealth. The ideal social regime would also eliminate sources of inequality
stemming from other statuses, such as race, ethnicity, place of birth, and so on.
The gendered division of labor — Degendering eliminates allocation of jobs, occupations
and professions by gender. Barring the intervention of other statuses, allocation of jobs, tasks,
and occupations and professions would be on the basis of credentials, experience and abilities.
5
Rewards – economic and prestigious – would accrue to the type of work, as they do today, but
the distribution of people to work of different sorts would vary by capabilities, not by gender.
Degendered superiors and subordinates in workplaces would relate to each other as people of the
same gender do today. The hierarchy embedded in the organization and evaluation of work
would still exist, as would the prestige and economic worth of the worker, but gender would be
left out of the status reckoning.
Gendered kinship structures — Degendering kinship would structure heterosexual
marriages like same-gender and egalitarian families – allocation of breadwinning, caretaking and
domestic responsibilities would be shared in ways chosen by the people involved, who may be
more than two. In that way, each partner would have access to similar economic resources and
invest equally in the emotional development of children. Non-gendered parent-child
relationships would be diverse and interchangeable. Children would be raised according to their
individual characteristics and not by gendered expectations.
Gendered sexual scripts — With degendering, sexual scripts can be fluid and open.
Dominance and exploitation will not be eliminated if social class, racial, ethnic or other stratified
statuses permeate the structure of a relationship. Degendered family contracts or legal
partnerships could help protect the rights of the weaker partner in long-term relationships.
Heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual connotations would be gone from relationships; they
would all be pansexual.
Gendered norms for interaction — Degendering means that expectations and assessment
of others in interaction would be made on the basis of the situation and participants and not
shaped by gendered norms. Other statuses may shape how people identify and interact, but
gendered patterns of deference and domination would be gone.
6
Gendered culture — Women’s cultural productions would have to be valorized and made
much more visible before significant degendering can take place. Not exactly degendering, but
playing with gender by cross-casting is a long-time practice. Women characters are more
predominant in movies and plays than they were in the past. More along the lines of degendering
per se are non-gender-specific awards so that Best Actor can be a woman or a man. But for
thoroughly degendered stories, with characters that don’t have a gender, and societies that are not
divided in two, we have to turn to science fiction.
Gendered social control — Degendering is not likely to affect criminal justice activities.
Changes in gender stereotyping would affect custody judgements with perhaps men being held to
higher standards of parenting. Violence against transgender people might diminish. Violence
against cis-women might be punished more consistently. But gender divisions and statuses are
part of the social control apparatus of the state; the whole gender binary would need to collapse
to materially modify social control.
Gender ideology — An ideology of degendering assumes that sex is biological,
physiological, and procreative, not a basis for social categorization; that sexual desire is fluid,
not bound by gendered opposites; and that gender is not a valid basis for organizing societies. To
the extent that gender itself is an institution, degendering breaks it down into its component parts
and strips many of them of their binary structure. Gender is then no longer an institution.
Degendered individuals
For an individual, gender is composed of the sex category assigned at birth, sense of self
and personality as a gender, presentation of self as a gender, gendered sexual proclivities,
gendered kinship and parental status, gender beliefs.
7
Sex category — With degendering, genitalia, internal organs and chromosomes would
indicate potential for body shape and procreation but they wouldn’t be grounds for gender
categorization. They may be altered surgically and/or hormonally for physiological reasons, but
not to conform as markers of a gender category. The sex/gender categorization of a child would
not be revealed prenatally as the main identification of the future individual and their prospects
as an adult.
Gender identity — Degendering eliminates only one form of appropriate behavior, but one
that permeates all interaction today. With degendering, socialization of children would be
markedly changed, as would norms for formal and informal adult interaction. Individuals would
learn how to be a person free of the strictures of a particular gender. A degendered identity may
be based on many characteristics and commitments, group memberships, and senses of self.
Gendered marital and procreative status –In a degendered society, partner, parent, child,
sibling, and other kin relationships would be transformed by new family structures. Biological
procreation may be more commonly separated from parenting so that family roles would be more
diverse.
Gendered sexual orientation — Degendering would mean that sexual desire, relationships
and social scripts for intimacy would be far more fluid and flexible. Relationships would be
formed on the basis of personality, interests and other individual characteristics, as well as
genital preferences. Sexual choices would not be the basis for social identities.
Gender display — Degendering would encourage varieties of self-display: multiple
presentations for different occasions, communities, identities. Rebels might resuscitate extreme
gender displays, somewhat like drag. Gender traditionalists would need to choose ways of
displaying their beliefs to one another and to the degendered. There might be conflicts and
8
crossovers and multiple levels of gendering and degendering within a society. Without the
legality of gender statuses, presentations of self would depend on membership in a variety of
groups. These may be loose or restrictive but would not be divided by the gender binary.
Gender beliefs — There may be individual resistance to degendering in the form of
exaggerated masculinity or femininity by traditionalists. Members of religious or other groups
may choose to continue gendering. A degendered society should not be rigid or punitive about
continued gendering but would encourage people to be non-binary.
Conclusion
In this book, I described ways that the gender binary is consciously being fragmented but
not done away with completely. Fragmentation occurs with multiple genders and non-binary
identities, more prevalent gender-neutral bathrooms, open intersex identification, men who
menstruate and give birth, the beginnings of gender-neutral language, and doing research with
multiple categories. Counteracting these processes are powerful elements of maintaining the
binary, some subconscious and others conscious. These are the persistent belief in female and
male brains, research based on only two gender categories, the need for valorizing women and
keeping them visible, the continuance of hegemonic masculinity despite ongoing outing of
sexual predators, the attractiveness of gendered sexuality, and trangender conformation to
convemtional genders.
We are at a crossroads between these two trends. At present, the gender binary seems to
be going strong, propelled by the inequality it produces. Research comparing women and men is
needed to prove the extent of gender inequality in the economy, politics, and family work.
Gendered language makes misogyny evident. The #MeToo movement, which pits women
9
against men who sexually exploit and violently abuse women, is still needed, since these
practices are still happening with depressing frequency. We need to show that women can be
national leaders, financiers, astronauts, scientists. We can stop singling out women’s
accomplishments when they are commonplace, and that will take degendering practices and
policies. Similarly, men must parent routinely both to take on half the labor of bringing up
children and also to break the cycle of emotionally repressed fathers and sons. Men sharing
parenting is a prime aspect of the degendering processes that can undermine the binary.
The description of what an imaginary world without gender would be like reveals how
much would have to be dismantled to live gender-free. Breaking down the changes needed for all
the institutional and individual components of gender makes it even more evident that doing
away with gender entirely is unlikely and possible unfeasible. Gradual degendering might
eventually dismantle the gender binary, replacing taken-for-granted gendered practices with
degendered practices in bureaucracies and work organizations and in informal interaction in
everyday life. The challenge is to cis-genders – to enhance gender equality, we need to diminish
gendering and replace it with degendering. At the same time, we need to keep women and
women’s accomplishments visible and valorized. That’s the new gender paradox we are living
with.
2483 words (10 pages)
1
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