Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Gender is not always absolute
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Betsy Biesenbach
Biesenbach lives in Roanoke and is a freelance writer and title examiner.
A few months ago, AOL ran a story from TheLocal.se, an English-language site for Swedish news, about a young couple who was determined not to reveal the gender of their firstborn. According to the article, the only people who know the child's sex are the ones who change his/her diapers.
The child wears the clothes and hairstyles of both genders and plays with all kinds of toys. For good or for ill, the parents do not plan ever to tell anyone the sex of their child. They are leaving that up to him/her for whenever he/she is ready. My guess is that will be the first time he/she is faced with going into a public restroom on his/her own.
The story reminded me of a guest speaker we once had at our church. Let me explain first that this is a Unitarian Universalist Church, and when we say we welcome everyone, we aren't kidding. The speaker came dressed in a man's suit and dress shoes and sported a scraggly red beard. The speaker's hair was cut short in front, but fell well past the shoulders in the back. Our guest used a female name, but told us he/she refused to use a gender-specific pronoun, and announced that he/she did not consider him/herself as belonging to either sex.
Sure that it couldn't really be true, I was determined to figure out whether this person was a male or a female, and listened carefully while he/she read a story to the children. But there were no clues in his/her voice or body language.
As the service went on, I found myself becoming irritated. After all, if there is nothing else we humans know about each other, we know who is male and who is female, regardless of dress or behavior or sexual orientation. In fact, the first thing anyone asks when a baby is born is "Is it a girl or a boy?" This is basic information about how we order our world, and I was surprised at how much it bothered me not to be able to pigeonhole this one individual.
I found myself wanting to stand up and say: "Hey, there are only two choices here! Pick one! How hard can it be?"
As it turns out, it's harder than I thought. I learned later that there are people who are born intersexed, meaning that physically and genetically, they have both male and female traits and no one, not their doctors or their coaches or their diaper changers, can figure out which team they're playing for. Some, such as South African runner Caster Semenya, seem to occupy some vague middle ground. She has three times the level of testosterone than an average woman has. But while she can run significantly faster than most females, she cannot compete with males.
To top it off, parents who make the wrong choice for a child like this can cause a lifetime of heartache. Just explaining such a thing to other people must not only be difficult because it's so unusual, it also involves publicly discussing the most intimate aspects of the child's life with strangers. Maybe this is what the Swedish child's parents are trying to avoid. Maybe they're beating the rest of the world to the punch, as in: "Don't put labels on my kid now; don't put labels on my kid later."
Before he/she dismissed the children, our speaker asked if they thought he/she was male or female. The children all thought he/she was a man, taking their cues, as children will, from the clothes and the beard. I privately agreed, until a friend of mind said later:
"Didn't you notice her breasts?" Well, actually, no, there was a good deal of tummy there, too, and it all kind of blended in.
What I did notice was his/her bravery. In his/her talk, he/she admitted that he/she was probably at an enormous disadvantage when it came to looking for employment, as he/she was at the time. But rather than shaving the beard and putting on a skirt or taking hormones to look more masculine, he/she was presenting him/herself to the world just as he/she was, with no deception and no apologies.
I realized that the point our guest had made was that although he/she didn't feel the need to choose a gender, we were free to interpret his/her appearance in any way we wanted. In the end, instead of being offensive or frustrating, it was actually exciting to think of something I thought was set in stone in a whole new way. His/her message was simply: "It's OK just to be."
And it is.
