Are you a man or a woman?

Someone says to a transgender person "but you were born a man!" and my head wants to explode. No one is born a man or a woman, but instead male or female with the added non-negligible array of intersex conditions and ambiguous genitalia which leaves us unable to instantly pick a binary designation at birth. All this because nature abhors uniformity. 

Guest post by Joanna Santos

It turns out the perfect binary never truly existed but the idea was created and maintained to suppress any natural human gradations found everywhere else in biological processes. 

If we base ourselves exclusively on science this perfect binary isn't real. It was a cultural artifact where religious leaders and the ruling class could have the predictability they needed, and for most people it worked if imperfectly. 

Tolerance or intolerance?

Many native cultures have tolerated and even embraced those who exhibited gender variance. Others, more steeped in orthodoxy, fought it vigorously as it contradicted dogma that couldn't contain flexibility. 

People in those latter cultures with the most need to transition, were obliged as much as possible into stealth. Even variations of expression were discouraged to the point of physical arrest and incarceration well into the 20th century. 

Today the natural human spectrum is more visible than ever which is why the forces wanting to put things back into the genie bottle are so up in arms. The political weight of gender is coming down like an anvil over the heads of people who just want to be left alone. It doesn't matter how small their number because their very existence make traditionalist fear the risk that their natures will spread like a virus. 

Societal obligation

The terms man and woman have always contained a healthy dose of societal obligation adhered to them. How to dress, gesture, speak and move were monitored to the point of holding many people paranoid that their proclivities towards variations would be punished. Despite gender norms shifting depending on the era, you were simply expected to mold yourself accordingly and follow the rules. 

The late 20th century division of sex and gender into separate components has been strongly condemned by those who want to enforce the binary. Moral panics around women's spaces have been created to scaremonger and paint transgender people as predators. 

But if sex is about gameets, chromosomes and other genetic markers, gender is about behaviour and feeling which the aforementioned do not govern. Yes there is brain chemistry involved. Most experts in the field argue that gender incongruence most likely has a biological, inborn, component. 

However we haven't yet found that definitive smoking gun which many advocates want found as proof that transgender people are telling the truth. There are so many variables involved towards the creation of an individual that we may never have one and does it even matter? 

When Matt Walsh asks "what is woman?" he is being disingenuous with the cultural framing of binary as his baseline. He doesn't want to decouple sex from gender and assumes they are one and the same. Biology determines the behaviour and identification and any anomalies are chalked up to mental illness. Many in the public agree without going further than their own bias and lived experience as proof. 

After all, we live in an era where expertise need not apply. 

Hierarchy and policing

Decades ago the drama surrounding gender variance and transitions eventually created its own internal policing and a hierarchy was formed. Those who transitioned medically early in life were considered more authentic than anyone else. 

As the reins on expression and identity were loosened it became even easier to attack those who were more easily singled out as frauds for not meeting a standard. For decades, some people fitting the primary, classical or binary transsexual category (take your pick) saw fit to contest the authenticity of others. 

Today walking around any large city will result in seeing many people who stray by degrees from what used to be an unyielding and rigid standard. Iterations of androgyny are ignored by a public now accustomed to witnessing it daily. Youth liberally mix elements of masculine and feminine to suit their originality as sharp contrast to what the 1950's once prescribed. 

The era of stigma and secrecy should be over. 

Nonbinary

If you ask some people whether they feel like a man or a woman they might tell you they don't know what that means. They feel like neither and they embrace an identity somewhere within some malleable middle ground of masculine and feminine terrain. They check off a box on a medical form because they must choose one; a reality only recently being revised as a category of "other". 

Some gleefully toy with gender for their own motivations while for others it becomes a sacrosanct and integral part of their identity. Further proof that human beings are messy and unpredictable creatures. 

Very much as nature intended.

Photo: Getty