Gender and The Master's Tools

When it comes to gender, I start with the assumption that people's behavior, tastes, interests, and, overall, their personality, have no necessary relationship to which sex organs they possess. Whether there is a de facto correlation between type of sexual organs and personality/behavior in society at large is irrelevant; whatever statistical central tendency may exist in a population between sex organs and any trait or behavior is belied by tremendous variation. Any personality trait or behavior you can come up with that supposedly "belongs" to males or females, I can very easily find members of the opposite sex who display it.

Starting with these assumptions leads me to the conclusion that there are no essential male or female traits. If there are no essential female or male traits, then the words "masculine" and "feminine" have essentially no meaning. Gender isn't a thing. There is only behavior and personality, and everybody is unique. I think this approach, for the most part, works pretty well.

One way to deconstruct this masculinity/feminity bullshit dichotomy is to construct a 3 x 3 typology of behavior/personality characteristics.



I have tried in earnest to fill out this table in the past; I failed. Try it! I think you'll find that traits quickly become impossible to categorize. It's a good exercise in seeing through the bullshittiness of the masculine/feminine dichotomy.

If you subscribe to my point of view that gender is essentially meaningless, it's easy to criticize social conservatives' "traditional family values" approach to gender roles. It's easy to identify why they are wrong, and politically, other gender critics in the culture tend to be on board with the criticism.

What's harder from this "gender is meaningless" perspective is to call out people who try to use essentialist language to advocate sex equality. For instance, an argument I see used frequently is that women are better suited for leadership in the modern economy because they have better social instincts (or some such nonesense). Or that women need special treatment from Paid Family Leave law because they are more suited for nurturing babies (putting aside the breast feeding issue). While I certainly agree with the goals of empowering women in the workplace, these arguments are still based on an underlying masculine/feminine essentialist dichotomy that ultimately reinforces the underlying ideological problem.

To quote Audre Lorde, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Gender isn't a thing; if your argument assumes that it is, then winning the argument is a pyrrhic victory at best, no matter the end result.