Why Gender Won’t Go Away
I am in Chicago at the moment attending the Central Division meeting of the AMerican Philosophical Association and that’s about as exciting as it sounds. But some parts are more fun than others. Tonight I attended a great panel on intersex–organized by the Society for Analytical Feminism. The high point was talking to Alice Dreger. Who is Alice Dreger? She describes herself as a medical humanist, writer, speaker, patient adovcate, and a member of the
faculty in the Medical
Humanites and Bioethics Program at the Feinberg School of
Medicine of Northwestern
University in Chicago. She writes: "Most of my professional energies have gone to
improving the medical and social treatment of people born with
socially-challenging bodies, including people with intersex, conjoinment,
dwarfism, and cleft lip. I work with affected adults, parents, and clinicians to
make things better in the social and medical worlds. The question that motivates
me is this: Why not change minds instead of bodies?"
Dreger has published books on intersex but also more recently on conjoined twins. My interest is in children’s rights and sexuality and I did ask a couple of questions about that. More interesting were Dreger’s comments about gender, sex, and fun on the issue of why we make so much of gender. She urged us to think about the pleasurable aspects of gender, gender as connected to play. While that’s certainly true there is only so much room to play in the traditional sandbox. What’s galling about gender is when others think it matters and relate to me as a gendered person when I am in a context where I think my gender is irrelevant. Teaching is a good example. (An aside: favourite bad comment on teaching evaluations: "Prof Sam cares more about her children than she does about us." Of course I do you morons. There are 200 of you. I see you for 2 hours a week. It’s a 13 week course.) Or when I am forced to declare a sex when it really seems irrelevant. Does it matter that I am a woman driver? Why do we include that on drivers’ licenses at all? Gender would be fun if it were more fluid, if there were more categories, if it were optional and context dependent. So it’s not quite that I want to make less of gender. Rather I’d like to make more of it, more degrees, more categories, more room to play. We need a bigger sandbox. Oh, and Dreger sometimes pinch hits for Dan Savage, the sex advice columnist.
