I’ve been thinking about writing this post for several weeks. The original reason for it was a random encounter at the grocery store. It made me reflect on my experiences as a young parent when I realized that preschoolers appear to have a gender of their own in that they do not yet have the secondary sexual characteristics that will emerge with puberty. So, they appear gender neutral except for features that society imposes on their appearance – attire, hair style, mannerisms, and the like. These are all external rather than intrinsic to the child.
The Japanese have an aesthetic that they call genderless; it’s a subculture. It uses cosmetics and attire to create the appearance of masculine females and feminine males. It is a cultural self-expression of androgyny. There is an androgynous aesthetic in Korea as well. There is also a whole gender metamorphosis or transfiguration, if you prefer, that is revealed in Thailand’s ladyboys.
My encounter at the grocery store was quite prosaic. I was leaving the store and observed an elderly man having a pleasant conversation with a store employee. When I looked again, I realized that it was an elderly woman rather than a man. I smiled at the idea that the older we get, the more like preschoolers we are in that our secondary sexual characteristics become less pronounced. It is no surprise that folks observe that life-long partners begin to look like one another after a while.
This evening, I read a Medscape article that commented on The Multiple Meanings of Sex. The author was exploring the issues of biological sex and gender identity. Biological sex isn’t just about one’s external genitalia (phenotypic sex) but must also consider genetic sex (the X and Y chromosomes), and gonadal sex (whether one has ovaries or testes).
Of course, if you happen to be genetically XX, have ovaries, and your external genitals are female, then we say you are Female. If you happen to be genetically XY, have testes and a penis, we say that you are Male. But what if you are XO (Turner’s Syndrome)? Are you male or female? And if you are XY but your body is insensitive to testosterone (one of several forms of congenital insensitivity to androgens) and you have a phenotypical female body (no facial hair, female muscle and fat distribution, and a micro-penis) – should your parents raise you as a boy or as a girl?
The whole notion of assigning one’s sex at birth really doesn’t do justice to the complexity of human biology or gender identity. Just because we get gender assignment at birth right most of the time doesn’t mean that the children that we fail to assign correctly are somehow broken. It really means that we are being rigid and unimaginative about both sex and gender.
The reality is that we are all androgynous whether we are overwhelmingly one sex or the other, or somewhere in between.