How to Construct Gender
Non-Fiction by Karen Bell
In my thirties, I’ve reached the Allison Bechdel stage of queer hair and fashion, shaggy pixie+old-man oxfords. I’m one of two non-traditional students in an environmental ethics class. We’ve been grappling with ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s discussion of how dualism fractures interconnected relationships and creates superior and inferior categories. How can we rectify the split? How do we act with care so that the oppressed do not become the oppressors? This class asks the hard questions about power, the impacts our binaries have on the environment, and how we construct, or refuse to construct, gender. I’m learning from the professor about how to let students, including myself, sit with difficulty. As eager as I am to blame white men for everything, the professor won’t let us.
Culture / Nature
Public / Private
Reason / Emotion
Universality / Particular
Dominance / Reciprocity
Male / Female
Cisgender / Transgender
Heteronormative / Deviant
Subject / Other
Human / Nonhuman
Mind / Body
“The ‘men’ in this column is a placeholder.” She points to the pairs in Plumwood’s essay on dualism and the five characteristics of colonialism: backgrounding, radical exclusion, incorporation, instrumentalism, and homogenization. “If there were no men, the position of power would be filled by some other group.”
Cisgender, economically privileged white women, for example.
The theories we’ve looked at so far haven’t offered solid solutions to reconnecting relationships and reimagining power dynamics with ourselves and nature. One student asks if we need to blow up the entire system. How do we reset when our culture is based on colonialism and patriarchy?
I. Backgrounding (denial): patriarchy places women, minorities, and the environment in the background of a “phallocratic reality.”
In my mid-twenties, I was a noodle-limbed waif wearing suspenders and a London Fog coat, pockets filled with cheap cigarillos, the requisite hipster Moleskine notebook, and free dental-dams from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. I was at a graduate student mixer in a crowded pub, holding a warming glass of amber-oak whisky, while a classmate named Liam talked about himself. We connected over dystopic books, but I was getting the feeling he was a douche canoe.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-four.”
“That’s too young for me. I was going to invite you home to make the two-backed beast.”
I squinted my eyes and imagined this. “Gross, would that have involved touching you? Because I’m not into that.”
Liam, the gym bro with all the charisma of a Harlequin romance cover, was shocked.
“What, you’re gay or something?”
“Dude.” I gestured to my clothes. “I’m sapio-sexual queer, actually.”
“What the hell does that mean?” He leaned in, intimate, resting his elbows on the sticky bar. “You have a girlfriend? Who’s the guy in the relationship?”
“There’s no guy. You’re missing the core concept.”
“But there’s someone with a strap, right? Because otherwise it’s not real sex.”
I downed my glass. “Okay, bye. See you in class, unfortunately.”
“Don’t get offended. Have you ever been with a man?”
“Gods, don’t say it —”
“Because I could change your mind.”
Cis women, lesbian or not, take the foreground in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s horror novel Manhunt. In this dystopic future, a gendered virus, “t. rex” knocks cis men off the power hierarchy. The plague turns all cis men into apex predators with serious eczema. They become screaming werewolves that eat prey in chunks, wield barbed penises, and have an incurable taste for cannibalistic necrophilia. TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) assume the dominant role in patriarchy; they exchange trolling trans people on the internet for a more active hatred involving undercuts, fatigues, and cross-bows. A white woman known as Teach, with an xx tattoo above the bridge of her nose (“Pussy certified all-natural by the Daughters of the Witches You Couldn’t Burn”), leads these “chromosome crusaders.” This death squad fears that transwomen, “estrogen thieves,” might turn at any moment and become what they’ve always predicted.
II. Radical exclusion (hyperseparation): characterized by an exaggeration of difference. By claiming different natures, the dominating group denies any similarities or connections with the dominated. (Republican lawmakers have been working hard on this one, with an explosion of anti-trans legislation with 497 bills introduced across the us in 2023).
As a queer woman, I’ve experienced animosity from church groups, I’ve been evicted, been the non-consenting recipient of a deliverance ceremony, and have been denied some job opportunities. However, my experiences don’t compare to targets of TERF policies. According to TERFs, men can’t be born with a female brain because gender is a reductive, social construct, which should be dismantled; therefore, the only path to womanhood is biology. The exclusion of transwomen from cis spaces has been based on harmful stereotypes and a lack of shared biological experiences.
Even though forty-seven per cent of transwomen are rape survivors (National Resource Center on Domestic Violence), TERF narratives focus on the assumption of sexual violence from transwomen in women’s spaces. Academics such as Holly Lawford-Smith, argue for womyn born only spaces. She explains how these spaces were often created by women to combat the ways women are globally victimized by sex-specific forms of violence, discrimination, and dehumanization. She implies that transwomen are still men, and therefore likely to assault women in women-only-spaces such as prisons, bathrooms, fitting rooms. She goes on to summarize how historically men have decided what it means to be a woman, and “men” are now invading those spaces under the appropriated identity of womanhood.
TERFs also assert that even if a man transitions and willingly gives up his position of privilege, having been born into that privilege means that he’ll never fully understand what it means to be a woman. TERFs feel that the demand of transwomen to be recognized as women is an extension of male privilege, or, as Lierre Kieth, founder of the militant ecofeminist group Deep Green Resistance, argues: “It’s aggrieved entitlement.” While it is true that transwomen cannot fully know what it is to be biologically born female, they don’t fully know what it is to have access to heterosexual cis privilege either because they are outside of the binary. Kieth might concede that an exception to this entitlement results from “mistaken identity” when some men see transwomen as women, until suddenly they don’t. A cis heterosexual man’s surprise regarding a victim’s sexual orientation and or gender identity can result in violence, which is legally supported in thirty-five states (2022, Isimemen Etute acquitted of beating a man to death; 2018, James Miller received a light sentence for stabbing his neighbour to death).
In Manhunt, Felker-Martin describes the horrific risks of passing and not passing. In one scene, a militant TERF, Viv, unknowingly makes out with one of our heroines, Fran. Elton John plays in the background as the two women kiss, and Viv tries to escalate their encounter. Fran says no several times. When Viv realizes Fran is trans, she jumps back and shouts, “That’s rape. Fucking tranny. Fucking monster. Undisclosed fucking genital rape.” In response, Fran begs, “Please, I’ll leave. . . .I’m sorry.” Viv’s hand reaches for her pistol.
I sit in a café with my younger cousin, Matt, discussing gender experiences. As a transmasculine non-binary, Matt’s in a unique position to talk about assumed privilege. We’re in a booth, my back to the wall, sitting crisscross while we eat chocolate muffins and slurp coffee. Nearby patrons give us the quick “hm” glance. Visually, Matt, with their buzz cut, multiple piercings, and androgyny, would make any white nationalist clutch pearls.
“Are any of our cousins straight?” Matt asks me, blowing over their coffee mug.
“My brother David. He’s a blue-eyed, military-faded Casanova, apparently.” I think for a minute. “And your uncle Peter, but we won’t use him as a representative of heterosexuality.” “I’m not out to him. Can you imagine his response to my pronouns? People get nervous around me because they don’t know how to identify me. I don’t have enough of the normal markers.”
“Are strangers upset because they don’t know if they should be sexist towards you or not? ‘I don’t know what genitals you have; therefore, I don’t know how much respect to pay you according to our gender hierarchy.’”
“Pretty much.” Matt laughs and tells me how Uncle Peter’s son, John, had asked our grandma for a cross necklace for his birthday. “And poor Grandma knows that Peter would have a fit if John wore something too flashy as a necklace.”
“Think of the children!” I cry. “Johnny can wear a personal talisman of an agonizing death, but only if it’s made from masculine materials, like wood or metal?”
Matt shrugs. “Uncle Peter’s probably freaking out about drag shows, too. Why are people upset about them now? Is it because they’re less derogatory towards women than they used to be?”
“There’s a disconnect there about the difference between people who perform drag and people who are transgender.”
“It’s like that freak out at my high school over being able to use bathrooms that make you comfortable. Suddenly those spaces aren’t safe if ‘men’ can go in.”
“Why worry about hypothetical men pretending to be women to rape women when there’s no accountability for raping women now?”
“What do you think about born womyn only spaces? I would completely understand after what you’ve been through if you weren’t comfortable. Would you feel safer?”
“I feel safest surrounded by the queer community. Of all the times I was catcalled, groped at a bar, or attacked, it was never by a transwoman. Not to pull my trauma card, but if I, as someone who was brutally assaulted, don’t give a fuck about who wants to be a woman, what’s their excuse? It’s not taking anything away from me.” I stab my muffin with my fork and take a bite. “So no, I don’t think we should be excluding anyone. I mean, unless they’re an asshole.”
“Words of wisdom from my elder queer.”
“Shush and eat your muffin, baby gay.”
III. Incorporation (relational definition): While each of the pairs listed earlier are interwoven and dependent on each other, in patriarchy the “inferior” entity is defined as a lack. “Unassimilated otherness”, deviancy, is intolerable.
Another white academic, Sheila Jeffreys, has written extensively on the dehumanization of women through rape culture, pornography, sex work, and the politics of the transgender movement. In her latest book she explains that women transition to men “in order to raise their status in a sexist system.” But why would a man, particularly a white man, feel compelled to give up his privilege for being the target of a hate crime? Jeffreys pulls from the theories of Professor Ray Blanchard and Professor Michael Bailey that “the majority of trans women in the West start off not as effeminate gay men but as straight or bisexual men, and they are initially motivated by erotic compulsions rather than by any conceived female identity.” TERF, OBE, and former academic, Kathleen Stock describes transwomen as afflicted with auto-gynephilia. To support her claim, she includes the usual stereotypes, generalizations, and slippery slope arguments.
As a lesbian herself, Stock knows what it means to have her identity and orientation linked with a fetish. Freud had his theories of lesbian penis envy. Reading backwards takes us to Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds’ 1897 Sexual Inversion, which takes us back to Kaan’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1844). This last text, written in Latin, lists aberrations of masturbation, violation of cadavers, sex with animals, the satisfaction of lust with statues, and lesbian love.
When I was living in Scotland, I would go dancing a few nights a week with my girlfriend, Silvia. I couldn’t dance the salsa in heels, so I wore a wrinkled suit from Oxfam. Silvia always played the lady’s part in a little black dress because she had the balance for it.
On our way out of what sounded like an underground punk bar mitzvah, Silvia’s heel, caught between cobblestones, snapped.
Momentarily hobbled, she wrapped her arm around my shoulder.
We were making our way up the slope of Cowgate to the elevated street of South Bridge when a few young lads, shirtless and drunk clocked us. The blokes gave us the once over and frowned.
They walked past us, a breath away from possible assault.
“Going to peg her later?”
“What are you pretending to be then?”
“Dykes. Sit on my face.”
The threat couched as an invitation took my brain a moment to process. Silvia unwrapped her arm from my shoulder and walked up the road in her stocking feet. When the lads were out of earshot, I tried to joke. “I’ve never gotten so much attention from guys.”
We resurfaced onto the main street before I noticed Silvia shaking. She walked quickly and stayed under the streetlights.
After a few blocks, in the quiet residential streets, she turned and asked me, “Don’t you ever wonder if this is a maladaptation to our environment?”
Only a few weeks ago, we had celebrated Pride. The speaker on the Mercat Cross platform reminded the crowd how far we had come. Standing in the flamboyant lovefest, the celebration of sexuality, freedom of identity and expression, we were momentarily buoyant, euphoric, empowered.
“We don’t need wedding rings or heterosexual genitalia to make love legitimate,” I said. “I think it might be a genetic mutation,” replied Dora. “If I could choose, I wouldn’t be gay.”
At 4 a.m., the sun was coming up. I took her hand, and we walked back to her flat in silence.
IV. Instrumentalism (objectification): lacking intrinsic value and easier to dehumanize.
Felker-Martin didn’t fabricate dialogue or exaggerate the ways transwomen and allies are dehumanized. The leader of the TERFs, Teach, sends soldiers to find communities harboring transwomen. In an early scene, one of the TERF recruits, Karin, struggles to execute a line of prisoners. She’s told to just breathe through it. “It’s not your sister. . . It’s just a man in disguise. We let it go, sooner or later it’s going to come out of its skin.” Later, when Teach discovers that Karin is a spy, a “tranny lover,” Teach tortures her to death. Teach’s language of TERF militantism is straight out of a gender critical essay. She says, “This traitor sold out her sisters for a degenerate subspecies of autogynephiles... Men who take pleasure in stealing our bodies. In wearing our skin.”
TW: The following is a list of transgender people who have been murdered just in January 2023 based on reports from Remembering Our Dead.
On January 2nd, a Georgian national, Liza Kistauri, aged 26, was murdered in her home in Antwerp, Belgian.
January 3rd, the police in Bundibugyo, Uganda beat an unknown transwoman to death.
January 4th, a transwoman and her boyfriend murdered an unknown transwoman in Ubá, Brazil.
January 4th, Gwen Gatewood, aged 22, died by suicide in Michigan.
January 4th, a man in Rio de Janeiro killed 31-year-old Tailla Ariany Santos and dismembered her body.
January 4th, a man in Izmir, Turkey stabbed 22-year-old Ece Erdo an/Ecem Seçkin.
January 7th, Jasmine “Star” Mack, aged 36, was stabbed in Washington, D.C.
January 10th, Minal, aged 22, was stabbed in New Delhi, India.
January 13th, KC Johnson, aged 27, was murdered in Wilmington, North Carolina.
January 18th, Manuel Teran “Tortugita”, aged 26, was shot in Atlanta, Georgia.
January 18th, La Gata, aged 68, stabbed in Medellin, Columbia.
January 21st, Maria Jose Rivera Rivera, shot in Houston, Texas.
January 21st, Praneetha, aged 29, died by suicide in Rajahmundry, India.
January 23rd, Unique Banks, aged 20 was shot in Chicago, Illinois.
V. Homogenization or stereotyping: creates a binary of male and female “natures.” This is achieved by exaggerating the patterns of difference between the two groups—whether in a colonizer/colonized relationship, cis/ trans, male female, human/nature.
Identifying herself as the original TERF, academic Janice Raymond writes in her 1979 work The Transsexual Empire, “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.” She takes up this refrain again in 2021, making sweeping generalizations of the trans community by claiming that all “self-declared women” are obsessed with “superficial preoccupation with women’s body parts and with women’s bodily functions — not a respect for women’s selves.” She also claims that all transwomen demand a change in the language we use to discuss birth and motherhood, reduce cis women to disconnected parts, and that trying to conform to societal expectations of women’s physical appearances affirms instead of challenges the gender dualism resulting from toxic patriarchy. Despite Raymond’s claims, according to the National Center survey, most trans women have taken female hormones, but only about a quarter of them have had genital surgery.
It’s not clear if Professor Raymond has spoken with a trans person who doesn’t align with her narrative, so I go in search of counter anecdotal evidence.
“Sibling!” I shout out my car window to Bri as I pull into the brewery parking lot. A few months ago, he admitted via text that while he knew I supported him growing up to be a confident gay lumbersexual, he was starting to think he might be trans. I admitted to him that I did feel a lot of anxiety when he first came out because I have experienced trauma in this body, and I know that he might be a target for a different kind of trauma. But that doesn’t mean his experience will be like mine. I hop out and dash towards his lanky figure. We crash into each other, and I wrap my arms around him, one end of a measuring tape in my hand. I bring the other end across his chest.
He flinches, ticklish. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing, nothing at all,” I say, rolling up the tape and tucking it back into my pocket.
“Did you just measure me for a bra?” I shrug.
“My chest is humongous. Big ol’ ribcage.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your ribcage,” I say, as we walk towards the brewery.
“Your timing,” he says, “is funny and flattering. I’m staggered that you’re like ‘hell yeah, let’s get trans.’ Didn’t know the extent that my sis was supporting me. And I’m not used to being taken seriously about anything identity-wise.”
“Well, get used to it,” I say, as we seat ourselves in the back of an industrial building with steampunk décor, exposed brick, and Edison lightbulbs.
Bri, who cuts his own hair into jagged points with scissors to avoid being touched by a barber, grew a beard out of neglect, and wears flowing, flower-print shirts from the women’s section of Goodwill, orders for us and tries to explain brew chemistry to me. He sits across from me gesturing at our two value-gradient flights of beer with his long, Rachmaninov-playing fingers.
“Random question,” he says. “Do you think our parents can handle having a trans child? I’m sorry if I’m making this conversation too real. I am super curious about your thoughts, with the disclaimer that in no way do I expect you to be my therapist for this process, particularly if it’s difficult for you.”
“I appreciate that, but what did I say about apologizing?” I ask. I take a sip of golden piss and quote Parks and Rec. “I’m getting notes of dried robin’s blood, old dirty cashews, and just a hint of a robot’s bath water.”
Bri gargles a stout and finishes Aubrey Plaza’s line, “This comes from your mother’s butt.” He hands me the glass. “Seriously though, try this. I think you’ll like it.”
I sip cool foam and chocolate-coffee creaminess. “Why don’t I grimace when I drink this?” “IPAs have a shit ton of hops that give them that bitter taste, but stouts are more malt based.” He pauses then asks, “What if I just go home with boobs sometime?” He puts his hand out. “Not that being a woman is about having composite parts.”
“As our family is deeply repressed, it’s unlikely anyone will mention it. It won’t occur to anyone that you’re growing them on purpose.”
“I feel like you’ve been giving our parents exposure therapy with all the rainbows.”
“I did get a lez pass from grandma because she found out I had been attacked.”
Bri makes a noise in the back of his throat. “That’s not being much of an ally if you think people are gay because they were traumatized. That our identities result from violence.”
“I know, but I’m desperate for validation.” I try a mango pale ale. “Fruity. How do you see yourself?”
“As an asexual tomboy.”
“Okay so here’s my other question after falling down this pit of transgenderism vs. radical feminism: if we make up gender, why change yourself physically to fit into that binary?”
He sighs. “So I don’t get murdered for going into the women’s bathroom. It shouldn’t be anyone’s business what I am, but my presence can trigger fear or anger.”
“A survival tactic.”
“Exactly. Passing can equate safety, and it also sometimes helps with gender dysphoria. But there’s a growing movement in the community that we shouldn’t have to pass or change because that pressure can be super toxic.” He runs his hand through his hair. “But the community in general feels safer occupying those fluid in-between spaces. I think a lot of this generation is less about ‘please respect this weird thing I’m over-valuing about myself’ and more about ‘why are we following these rules? We can make new ones.”
I nod. “And you’re not in this alone. LGBTQ+ activists have been working on these issues for decades. They are not surprised by alt-right hijinks. If you need some trans joy and encouragement, I’ll send you some TikTok creators to follow.”
“You can spend your entire life feeling like these issues are unique to you.” He heaves a sigh. “And then it’s just mind-blowing to hear that it’s just another niche thing to have in common, which means it’s a type of thing humans experience, and worth celebrating. It’s nice to look at an aesthetic just to see that it exists, y’know? Seeing someone else embrace a thing helps you realize that you’re allowed to, that it can be done.”
We look around at the other brewery patrons and staff: a few mid-western students at the bar wearing flannel and boots, our flamboyant waiter’s contouring and glitter eyeshadow so flawless any beauty influencer jealous, a young couple sitting outside on the patio. On my right I catch sight of an older gentleman casting a glance at Bri. The older man has a fluff of white hair, pale blue eyes, bifocals on a beaded chain around his neck, delicate gold thread earrings, and blush nail polish. If he’s anything like me, he’s been listening to our conversation. He stands, leaving a few bills under his plate.
On his way past our table, he points towards my corporate Pride Converses and says, “Love the chucks.”
“Thank you!” I say. “Not as classy as a green carnation, but you can never have too many rainbows.”
My shy sibling nods and risks eye contact with the stranger as we take a moment to see each other and connect in the lazy afternoon. »