Attempting to Define Gender, a Case Study

What is the definition of "woman"?  When I first saw the essay "Are Lesbians Women?" by Jacob Hale [trans man], it piqued my interest, partly because one of the first objections to my gender when I came out as genderqueer was that if I cannot adequately define "woman", I cannot adequately define myself to be outside of "woman".  (One wonders why it would not suggest that, given the allegedly questionable validity of womanhood itself, I could be more easily "allowed" to define myself outside of it, but I digress.)

Pop culturally, trans women are not "real women", but a quick google reveals that cis women can have their "real woman" card revoked as well (though albeit on a somewhat different "no true scotsman" level).  "Are Lesbians Women?" attempts to break down the fundamentals of womanhood into a list of what society has generally agreed are the criteria.  Jacob Hale is quick to point out that no one single item on the list is "necessary or sufficient", meaning you can generally leave one off and still be included within the category of "woman" by society, but if you can only count one in your favor you are not included.  For example: while "identifies as a woman" should be necessary and sufficient for womanhood, society rejects that criterion as such.

1. Absence of a penis
2. Presence of breasts
3. Presence of reproductive organs which allow for pregnancy to occur
4. Presence of estrogen and progesterone in balance with androgens within "normal" range
5. Presence of XX, or perhaps absence of Y, chromosomes
6. Having a gender identity as a woman
7. Having an occupation considered to be acceptable for a woman
8. Engaging in leisure pursuits considered to be acceptable for a woman
9. Engaging in some sort of sexual/affectional relationship with a man who is commonly recognized as heterosexual
10. Achieving and maintaining a physical gender self-presentation the elements of which work together to produce the gender assignment "woman"
11. Behaving in ways to produce the gender assignment "woman"
12. Giving textual [documentation] cues that work together to produce the gender assignment "woman"
13. Having an unbroken history consistent with the gender assignment "woman"

Notice that, thanks to the work of feminists, some of these categories have been so expanded as to include most people of any gender, particularly #s 7 and 8, and 10 and 11 to a lesser extent.  Perhaps that's what my well-meaning friends are saying when they insist that I do not fall outside of sufficient criteria, because to a certain extent I cannot fall outside a criteria which encompasses nearly everything.  However, as it stands, I only fully satisfy some of these requirements at this point (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12),  others are satisfied/unsatisfied in different ways at different stages of my life (7, 8, 9, 10, 11), and I definitely do not satisfy a few obvious ones (6, 13).  It becomes even more complex when one realizes that #s 1-5 cannot be verified as fact by others without an intimate understanding of my medical history.

What about "lesbian" - can that be a gender identity in its own right independent of woman?  (Yes, anything can be a gender identity. And no, claiming your gender identity is "squirrel" doesn't make you cute, it makes you a jerk.)  How many criteria of "woman" can one violate and still be "lesbian"?  For example, a genderqueer friend satisfies #s 7, 8, 11; partially satisfies 10; and does not satisfy 1-5 or 9.  They also answer #6 as "identifies as lesbian" (among other gender labels).

There are many questions yet unanswered:  How "woman" is "woman enough"?  How many criteria must one meet before one is "real"; how many criteria must one violate before one is "fake"?  How do we take into account the different ways different people rank the importance of different criteria?  How do we allow for the ways that race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality, regional location, etc influence the threshold of each criterion?  To whom do we defer authority to answer these and further questions on authentic womanhood, and how do we process dissent?  Certainly Jacob Hale was in no position to answer all of these, and certainly I am neither, but that's the way I rather prefer it to be.

Bling vs Specs

This is something I wrote for class because I'm too school for cool.

Bling (aka Large Ornate Gold Necklaces/Jewelry)
We've all seen it: the ostentatious medallion hanging around the neck of a wealthy performance artist.

       

The name was popularized by a 1999 song with the title Bling-Bling.  The term "bling" refers to the bling-bling of light reflecting off the facets of the jewelry.  This is key - it must be ornate, gaudy, a blatant display of the economic power of the wearer.  Traditionally, blacks are seen as poor and lacking in social status, so the in-your-face consumerism of bling can be seen as an empowering reaction against such negative stereotypes.  This is known as conspicuous consumption. So why consume conspicuously?  Well, let's use bling as an example.  When we think of a middle-class white adolescent wearing bling, the reaction is probably something similar to this:

I noticed that you're gangster... I'm pretty gangster myself.

  

We mock people like that, because we see them as trying to pretend to be what they're not, aka a poser.  We wouldn't do that if stuff is just stuff, clothes are just clothes, and each individual has a unique style.  Conspicuous consumption isn't just about wealth and self-expression, it's about identifying with a particular social caste or sub-culture.  As social creatures, we not only have an individual identity, we have a group identity.  We subconsciously label ourselves, even those of us who reject labels, by how we dress.  The bling-laden white boy in the West County suburbs isn't showing pride in his identity, he's engaging in an insensitive type of conspicuous consumption known as cultural appropriation.

Specs (aka Hipster Glasses)
Hipsters are a group of people who typically don't identify themselves as being a collective group of people for the simple reason that they share a common distaste for personal labels.  They're the natural result of our cultural cult of individuality taken to the extreme.  As such, they reject conspicuous consumption because that could potentially cause them to be mistaken for a member of a particular social caste (a practice which often causes them to be so rejecting of any culture close to themselves that the only option they have left is severe and shameless cultural appropriation).  And for a while, they were successful at being beautiful and unique snowflakes.

But a funny thing happens when enough people reject the concept of social castes - they become a social caste of people who share that common rejection.  This is where hipster irony is born.

 

Specs like these are nothing new, not at all.  Horn-rimmed glasses actually got their kick start in 1917 by actor Harry Lloyd.  They became rather popular in the 50s as well.  Some people never stopped wearing them.  So why do hipsters love them so?  Simple: they're ugly.  I mean, seriously.  They're so ugly, in the military they're known as BCGs - birth control glasses.  (They're the only style allowed at basic training [update: the military's policy has been changed since this paper was written].)

 

(Tasty.)  Hipsters caught on to the extreme unpopularity of these glasses and began wearing them ironically, as a rejection of conspicuous consumption.  Only, it caught on and became popular among the totally-not-at-all-affiliated-with-each-other hipsters themselves, and became a "hipster thing", to the point where it's now it's own meme.  That's right, you can take any image, add glasses, and it's instantly hipster.

I'm the biggest thing ever - I'm only being a hipster ironically.

"A hipster can be so emphatically, conspicuously hipster that he becomes a predictable caricature or stereotype so that he becomes, unwittingly, anti-hipster."  Ironic, isn't it?