Many Americans today have accepted what seemed inconceivable
just a generation ago: that gender is artificial, is socially
constructed, and can be chosen freely by all individuals. This
notion—that biological sex can be willfully separated from
gender—originated in the arguments of influential radical feminists
writing from the 1950s through the 1970s. The premises of their
theories, in turn, have ushered in the new world of transgenderism.
Yesterday’s shocking theory has become today’s accepted norm, with more
changes to come. Yet whether this new world will prove to be fit for
human flourishing remains to be seen.
Key Takeaways
There exists no better way of
extending the sexual revolution that second-wave feminists imagined
than by shaking confidence in the very idea of man and woman.
Many facets of family life
have been roiled by the feminist effort to separate sex from gender and
subsequent efforts to create a world without preconceived roles.
Transgender theories are
part of the feminist goal of a sexual revolution that eliminates the
proprietary family and celebrates non-monogamous sexual experiences.
Many intractable controversies in today’s culture
wars relate to issues of sex and gender. Americans disagree, for
instance, about whether marriage is limited to a man and a woman, who
can use which bathrooms, and whether we should hope that mothers should
take care of children—at least in their formative years. These
controversies are emblematic of the inability to say what a man is, what
a woman is, or even whether stable sexual identities are linked to our
bodies.
This confusion has origins in the revolution that the French feminist
Simone de Beauvoir initiated after the Second World War. Before the
publication of Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex in 1949, science and
philosophy assumed that society’s prevailing opinions about men and
women were grounded in sex so that gender corresponded to sex. Beauvoir
demurred. She drew a distinction between gender (society’s prevailing
opinions about what man and woman should be) and sex or biology (the
seemingly immutable characteristics of the body and closely linked
psychological traits). There is no reason, feminists from Beauvoir
onward would argue, for sex to be destiny: A woman’s biology had seemed
to direct her toward family life and make her dependent on a husband.
Such feminists promised to bring forth a new, independent woman who
would overcome her gender. This new woman would no longer take her
bearings from what her body or society suggested about her destiny. In
this mode of thinking, gender is merely an idea constructed to keep
women in a subordinate position. This critique claimed to show how
biological realities and social mores contributing to womanly identity
were neither necessary nor healthy, and it posited a future where women
would be free to define their identities without any reference to their
bodies. A world of complete freedom would be a world “beyond gender”—a
world in which no members of society would make assumptions about an
individual based on biology.
The feminist aspiration to create a world without gender, first
articulated by Beauvoir in the 1940s and later by American disciples
such as Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and others in the 1960s, prepared
the ground for a more radical vision in the 1990s by scholars like
Judith Butler, who extended the idea to include advocacy for transgender
rights.
The idea of a supposedly socially constructed gender foisted on all
individuals is bound to cause intense debate and hence ever more radical
calls to “deconstruct” gender in the name of greater autonomy and
creativity in human identity. The new liberating philosophy would
deconstruct or expose norms as arbitrary obstacles to healthy human
identity. Taking things a step further, “queer theory,” derived from the
post-structural thought of Michel Foucault, questioned the naturalness
and necessity of everyday practices of self-control of sexual passions,
the prominence of heterosexual norms, and the binary conception of
gender.
The result has been a spiraling revolution in which what had seemed
natural and possibly also crucial to human identity is alleged to be
extraneous, accidental, and repressive. From this revolution proceeds
another level of confusion about extending marriage to same-sex couples,
gendered pronouns, transgender issues about the use of public restrooms
and locker rooms, the importance of fidelity to marriage, and any
number of additional permutations of such issues.
This revolution has required ongoing readjustment on the part of
government, as well as in public mores and even in the conception of
language. It gives rise to new opinions and sentiments, suggests new
concepts, and modifies every aspect of life within the sphere of
personal relations. Many facets of family life have been roiled by the
feminist effort to separate sex from gender and subsequent efforts to
create a world beyond gender and without preconceived roles.
In addition, the supposedly objective application of liberationist
science identifies even more socially constructed distinctions. Since
society manufactures gender difference, the theory goes, gender can be
unmade and remade by properly reconstructing society. This is the
foundation of a world built on the liberation of the individual and the
freedom to create an identity without social or biological constraints.
Feminism Before the Separation of Sex from Gender
Feminist thinkers of all stripes today define themselves against
biological essentialism and its concomitant political and cultural
patriarchy. Biological essentialism alleges that the differing
characters and roles of men and women have a permanent basis in sexual
biology and innate psychological proclivities originating in sex. Thus,
according to this theory, biological sex goes a long way in determining
how societies conceive of gender, with perceptions of women as more
passive and caring and less aggressive and violent than men,
1
more sexually modest or less promiscuous than men,
2
less physically powerful than men,
3
and more interested in and affectionate with children than more daring, rough-and-tumble men,
4
among a myriad of other differences.
The most influential defender of patriarchy on such grounds during
the 19th century was Charles Darwin, who defended the sexual basis for
gender on apparently authoritative, scientific grounds.
5
Especially in
The Descent of Man, published in 1871,
6
Darwin argues that males and females have different characters because
they have different genetic makeups derived from the successful
procreative and survival strategies of genetic forbears.
7
- Strong men capable of surviving gained sexual access to women
capable of attracting men and nurturing children—according to Darwin,
the natural basis for the idea that men are aggressive and women
passive;
- Men had to be sure of their progeny in order to provide protection,
so women at least affected to be more modest and passive sexually—the
natural basis for the sexual double standard; and
- Men provided for the family, while women specialized in caring for
the children—the natural basis for the division of labor between the
sexes.
Similar ideas are also found in the thinking of Sigmund Freud,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, August Comte, and others. Each thought
that women are less inclined to run for political office, put career
before family, pursue wealth aggressively, or be sexually promiscuous.
8
Otto Weininger even argues that the emancipation of women is a
contradiction in terms, and many feminists influenced by Beauvoir cite
his
Sex and Character as representative of this patriarchal scientific tradition.
9
The First Wave of Feminist Reformers
While these biological essentialists were writing, the first wave of
feminist reformers (1850–1920) arose to critique the subordinate
condition of women. These thinkers, finding their source in the thought
of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), operated within a classically
liberal intellectual framework and hoped, as the title of
Wollstonecraft’s 1792 book suggests, for the “vindication of the rights
of women.” In America, such a vindication was conceived as extending
rights to women within America’s traditional dedication to individual
rights and limited government.
10
The crowning achievements for first-wave feminists lay in
establishing a legal right for women to own property, legal acceptance
for divorce, and ultimately the right to vote. If women had not
previously appeared interested in exercising such rights, argued
first-wave feminists, this apolitical appearance was traceable to
society’s failure to protect such rights. They were concerned that, as
John Stuart Mill argues in
The Subjection of Women (1869), no
society could yet know what woman actually is because “the whole force
of education…enslaves [women’s] minds” to motherly and wifely
sacrificial duties.
11
The old system of coverture in which women lost their legal identity
within marriage had underestimated the capacity of women for
citizenship. Women and men could choose differently from one another
under this regime of greater freedom and independence.
12
The legal framework for which first-wave feminists fervently wished
was established, more or less throughout the Western world, during the
first third of the 20th century.
The Second Wave: Simone de Beauvoir and the Distinction Between Sex and Gender
Beginning with Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of second-wave
feminism, feminists expressed disappointment in the actual choices women
made with the rights and protections that first-wave feminists had won.
Many women still prioritized motherhood over a career and valued loving
relationships within marriage more than market relations outside the
home and sexual liberation. When they chose a career, they tended to
enter the caring professions instead of aspiring to be chief executive
officers, bohemian poets, or academics. Generally, despite a century of
struggle, women lived more passively and dependently than second-wave
feminists thought healthy or appropriate.
Simone de Beauvoir and her American
disciples recommended freeing women from accumulated patriarchal culture
and spent a great deal of intellectual energy finding ways to identify
the assumptions that enslaved women to their old character.
Second-wave feminists argued that this perceived lack of progress was
traceable to the entrenched cultural patriarchy, because of which men
and women continued to indulge beliefs consistent with biological
essentialism. Legal freedom was not enough to provide substantive
equality for women. Getting women to choose differently would require a
more fundamental cultural reformation centered on encouraging women to
shed their maternal, wifely personalities and become independent.
Beauvoir and her American disciples recommended freeing women from
accumulated patriarchal culture and spent a great deal of intellectual
energy finding ways to identify the assumptions that enslaved women to
their old character.
13
Beauvoir’s thought is the first to provide intellectual justification
for divorcing sex from gender and for holding that culture alone has
determined the meaning of sex and the body. Her opus,
The Second Sex
(1949 French; 1953 English translation), frames the argument for
contemporary feminism and for all subsequent thinkers who criticize and
deconstruct seemingly natural human distinctions.
14
This deconstruction is evident in the most famous expression of Beauvoir’s thought, the question that begins
The Second Sex: “what is a woman?” She answers:
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological,
psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human
female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces
this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described
as feminine.15
Women, the argument runs, were passively defined by their biological,
cultural, and civilizational situation. They grew into the artificial
roles of dependent wife and sacrificing mother according to the cultural
influence of gender roles, and these gender roles had been built on a
seemingly obvious interpretation of the female body. Individuals who
allowed themselves to be thus defined, perhaps falsely thinking that
culture is a reflection of nature, manifest what Beauvoir called an
almost subhuman “immanence.”
For Beauvoir, the common traits of “immanent” women result from
pervasive social indoctrination or socialization. Beauvoir identifies
how immanence is taught and reinforced in a thousand different ways.
Society, for instance, prepares women to be passive and tender and men
to take the initiative in sexual relations. Male initiative in sex is
“an essential element” in patriarchy’s “general frame.”
Everything helps to confirm this hierarchy in the eyes of the little
girl. The historical and literary culture to which she belongs, the
songs and legends with which she is lulled to sleep, are one long
exaltation of man…. Children’s books, mythology, stories, tales, all
reflect the myths born of the pride and the desires of men; thus it is
that through the eyes of men the little girl discovers the world and
reads therein her destiny.16
And Beauvoir means
everything. Indoctrination starts early.
Men, for instance, are made to be faster, stronger, more competitive,
and more aggressive than girls in sports through our belief that sports
are “good for boys,” and girls are encouraged to be meek, timid,
feminine, and maternal instead of risking injury.
17
Society creates and baptizes male promiscuity and sexual desire, while
women are seen as objects of sexual desire. Men are to take women; women
are taught to dream of being taken. Girls are taught sexual shame and
modesty, while boys are taught confidence and eroticism.
18
Thus, according to Beauvoir, there is the universal acceptance of the
sexual double standard whereby men are given a pass for promiscuity and
adultery while women are punished.
19
Trained to be passive, women, for Beauvoir, accept their seemingly
subordinate roles as mothers and housewives. Against such education
toward immanence, Beauvoir encourages what she calls “transcendence,”
the idea that human beings must struggle to free themselves from the
social or natural influence in a “continual reaching out toward other
liberties” and in an effort “to engage in freely chosen projects.”
20
Human beings will either be made passively by their situation
(immanence) or define and make themselves (transcendence). “Man is
defined as a being who is not fixed, who makes himself what he is,”
Beauvoir writes. “Man is not a natural species: he is a historical
idea.”
21
As historical beings without fixed boundaries, women are not bound to
be governed by any of the customs, assigned psychological traits,
economic considerations, moral virtues, respective bodies, cultural
attributes, or other limits that have long made them the “second sex.”
Men have been transcendent; women have been relegated to a world of
immanence. If women would transcend their current fate as the second
sex, they would enjoy an “indefinitely open future” as they strive for
more freedom and independence.
22
As Beauvoir sees it, sexual passivity and the nexus of motherhood and
marriage have combined to trap women in immanence and stagnation. Those
traps can be sprung with sexual revolution and independent careers in a
genuinely liberated workplace, which are steps on the road toward
reaching other liberties. Sexual revolutionaries must shun sexual
modesty and domesticity, adopt independent careers, and develop the
qualities of character needed to pursue them.
Contraception and abortion also play an important part in Beauvoir’s
project for reform. Birth control helps women to be more sexually
adventurous and promiscuous and less dependent on one man for sex.
Untroubled about the consequences of sex, women might take the
initiative in sexual matters, perhaps even becoming the controlling
partner and escaping the aforementioned posture of defeat.
23
To help this along, Beauvoir follows Freud, arguing that passive women
are sexually “frigid,” repressed, narcissistic, and nervous.
24
By limiting women to performing Sisyphean,
'tiresome, empty, monotonous' household tasks, marriage 'mutilates' and
'annihilates' the wife. In marriage, 'her life is virtually finished
forever.'
In Beauvoir’s view, to be a “passive” woman is to be an uninteresting
lover, relying ineffectually on looks and makeup to keep the interest
of a man. However, the availability of birth control and abortion is
“only a point of departure for the liberation of women,”
25
because women must also believe that using birth control methods is
honorable, necessary, a key contribution to the good life, and perhaps
even an exercise in social responsibility. Their sex lives must express
their independence; they must never be dependent on any particular
person for satisfaction.
Beauvoir goes beyond appeals that we make contraception and abortion
legal and provide public provision for both. Since unprotected sex could
lead to motherhood, the best way to encourage the use of birth control
is through a forceful critique of motherhood and family life that calls
into question not only their naturalness, but also their nobility and
our need for them. As she says in reflecting on
The Second Sex
(and with the assistance of Shulamith Firestone’s powerful elaboration
of her thought), “I think that the family must be abolished.”
26
For Beauvoir, the false elevation of motherhood captures the gendered
sexual division of labor of the past, with men pursuing interesting
careers while women mind the home. By limiting women to performing
Sisyphean, “tiresome, empty, monotonous” household tasks, marriage
“mutilates” and “annihilates” the wife. In marriage, “her life is
virtually finished forever.”
27
Moreover, according to Beauvoir, no man doing creative work outside the
home could respect a woman who is just a housewife. Marriage therefore
provides scant protection and satisfaction for women. No wonder it marks
a boring, “slow assassination” of life for both husbands and wives.
28
As a practical matter, Beauvoir imagines a future in which women use
contraception to avoid this slow death in life as mothers and wives. The
combination of readily available contraception and the fundamental
critique of motherhood opens the door, for Beauvoir’s feminist
followers, to new practices such as state-funded day care and new
technologies such as cloning that may very well continue the process of
gender deconstruction and liberation.
In leveling this critique, Beauvoir suggests that all or most aspects
of what had been regarded as rooted in sex (e.g., motherhood) are
really socially constructed and hence changeable.
29
For those who would argue that the differences between the bodies of
men and women place limits on how much social experimentation can be
undertaken, Beauvoir answers emphatically: “The situation does not
depend on the body; the reverse is true.”
30
It is how we conceive of the body that matters, not the body itself.
If biological essentialists collapsed gender into sex, Beauvoir does
the opposite: There is no sex, no natural woman or man, no stable
meaningful biology underlying an “[a]bsolute” man or woman; women and
men are social construction or “gender” all the way down. Sex, too is
only “gender” if human beings would but interpret it creatively. Human
ingenuity, responding creatively to changes in our situation and
manipulating the situation itself with technology (e.g., contraception
and later genetic engineering), can manufacture a new woman and a new
man. Transcendent individuals create themselves, freed from society’s
gender roles, nature, and sex.
Beauvoir does not detail what awaits human beings once legal changes,
new stories, myths and clichés, and advances in technology come about.
Women will be “autonomous individuals,” she writes. Each woman will
finally be “a full human being” able to “live in and for herself.”
31
Subsequent thinkers follow where Beauvoir points and provide a more
vivid picture of what a world of transcendent human beings would look
like.
Beauvoir Comes to America: Betty Friedan and the Construction of a Healthy Human Identity
Moving beyond traditional ideas of man or woman raises the question of what now constitutes human identity. Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
(1963) accepts Beauvoir’s intellectual framework and conclusions
regarding the psychology of human identity. Friedan, however,
rearticulates these in a manner more congenial to American politics and
modern life—that is, in terms of the emerging science of human
liberation characteristic of American Progressivism.
Friedan claims to have been just a simple suburban girl when she ran across Beauvoir’s thought:
It was The Second Sex that introduced me to an
existentialist approach to reality and political responsibility—that in
effect freed me from the rubrics of authoritative ideology and led me to
whatever original analysis of women’s existence that I have been able
to contribute to the Women’s Movement and its unique politics…. When I
first read The Second Sex in the early Fifties, I was writing “housewife” on the census blanks, still in the unanalyzed embrace of the feminine mystique.32
Friedan uses the term “feminine mystique” to describe the complex of
laws, opinions, and pressures that turn women into the sexually passive
housewives that Beauvoir called the “second sex.” Friedan brought
Beauvoir’s abstract endorsement of “transcendence,” suggestive of making
human beings into gods, down from the heavens and packaged it in terms
more consistent with America’s dedication to individual rights. The
prevailing Progressive ideology, captured in America’s universities, put
the new science in the service of cultural reconstruction to support
healthy, chosen human identities.
For Friedan, the old patriarchal science had long reinforced the
“feminine mystique,” counseling women to find fulfillment in their
distinctive wifely and motherly tasks. According to that science, women
of Friedan’s day should have been satisfied, fulfilling their destinies
as wives and mothers during the baby boom.
Friedan, however, diagnosed a discontentment traceable to a
disjunction between society’s expectations and women’s real dreams. In
her estimation, women of the 1950s and early 1960s yearned to escape
their immanent fates and suffered from boredom, feeling trapped and
sensing that they had nothing important to do. They suffered from the
“problem that has no name.”
33
This problem, she says, is a problem that no one—not scientists,
doctors, counselors, psychiatrists, or the popular press—has yet
identified.
A woman who allows society to define her
life for her has what Betty Friedan calls a 'forfeited self' with 'no
goal, no purpose, no ambition…making her stretch and grow beyond the
small score of years in which her body can fill its biological
function.' Such a woman commits 'a kind of suicide.'
A woman who allows society to define her life for her has what
Friedan calls a “forfeited self” with “no goal, no purpose, no ambition
patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond
the small score of years in which her body can fill its biological
function.” Such a woman commits “a kind of suicide.”
34
Stirring next to the old patriarchal science was a new liberating
science that would show how old ideas actually disabled women. It would
establish the importance of human liberation to a healthy identity. “The
core of the problem for women today,” Friedan contends, “is a problem
of identity—a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the
feminine mystique.”
35
Friedan writes:
I think the experts in a great many fields have been holding pieces
of that truth under their microscopes for a long time without realizing
it. I found pieces of it in certain new research and theoretical
developments in psychology, social and biological science whose
implications for women seem never to have been examined. I became aware
of a growing body of evidence, much of which has not been reported
publicly because it does not fit the current modes of thought about
women—evidence which throws into question the standards of feminine
normality, feminine adjustment, feminine fulfillment, and feminine
maturity.36
Instead of living according to the feminine mystique, each woman must
solve her own “identity crisis” by finding “the work, or the cause, or
the purpose that evokes…creativity.”
37
Creative work fosters genuine struggle, and such struggle fosters
personal growth. Through such creativity, women can become their true
selves and achieve “self-actualization,” a phrase Friedan borrows from
mid-century psychologist Abraham Maslow.
Maslow, a leading light of the new liberating science, argues that
achieving the highest levels of happiness requires “giving up a simpler
and easier and less effortful life” as a mother and wife “in exchange
for a more demanding, more difficult life” pursuing a larger mission
“concerned with the good of mankind.”
38
Self-actualized people possess “the full use and exploitation of
talents, capacities, potentialities. Such people seem to be fulfilling
themselves and to be doing the best that they are capable of doing” and
to be conscious of it.
39
They have “good self-confidence, self-assurance, high evaluation of the
self, feelings of general capability or superiority, and lack of
shyness, timidity, self-consciousness or embarrassment.”
40
A fully developed woman will strive “beyond femaleness to the full humanness she shares with males,” Maslow writes.
41
At the pinnacle of human motivation is the desire for
self-actualization, which Maslow defines as “growth…the striving toward
health, the quest for identity and autonomy, the yearning for
excellence.”
42
Following Maslow, Friedan sees such people moving “beyond privatism”
toward “some mission in life…outside themselves,” enjoying sexual
pleasures more than others because they have a stronger sense of their
own individuality, and loving out of gifted love and “spontaneous
admiration” instead of a needy love informed by personal dependence.
43
Friedan applies Maslow’s theory and concludes that old gender roles
immiserate women and that self-actualized women would be happy.
44
A self-actualized person is “psychologically free—more autonomous.”
45
Friedan marks a second wave of progressive political thought in which
New Deal Progressivism’s focus on reconstructing the economy changed to
the 1960s sexual revolution’s focus on
reconstructing major cultural
institutions and bringing forth a new kind of self-actualized human
being/woman. She frames issues of healthy identity clinically, in terms
of promoting psychological health, and links the realization of
liberation or autonomy to what promotes mental health, personal
fulfillment, and self-actualization, all framed in a largely
value-neutral way: It is possible to be fulfilled so long as one
constructs his or her own destiny, regardless of the destiny chosen.
This contains an implicit critique of women living traditional roles
unless they can independently and self-consciously understand and
embrace all that such roles entail. The task for psychiatrists, parents,
government generally, and educators is to ensure that no individual is
forced to conform to society’s preconceived notions of proper living and
that all individuals are free to choose their own identities. It is a
task involving continual diagnosis and an ongoing search for a remedy.
After the publication of
The Feminine Mystique, exposing the
influence of patriarchy and realizing the promise of a new future for
individual growth became linchpins for the scientific enterprise.
Science had uncovered the hidden power of gender and hence could point
to the gap between what women have been and what women on a path to
self-actualization could become. In this stream of thought, healthy
human identity for women lay beyond society’s prevailing notions of
gender.
Kate Millett and the Fully Realized Sexual Revolution
Kate Millett, whose
Sexual Politics (1970) is the first major feminist book to embrace the distinction between the words
sex and
gender,
marks perhaps the culmination of feminist thinking. Millett points to
the need to reconstruct academic disciplines, especially the social
sciences and humanities, with a new focus on structures of gender
oppression that have subjugated women. Universities become doubly
central to social transformation, on Millett’s view: They identify the
sources of social indoctrination and oppression from which women and
others must be liberated, and they recommend methods for constructing a
world without gender.
Millett’s theory of sexual politics includes a research agenda for
the new science of liberation in which biology, sociology, economics,
anthropology, psychology, history, and other disciplines should be
directed toward demonstrating how gender has been socially constructed
in the past. The clear implication is that such constructions can be
dismantled and a new society constructed with the assistance of these
and other disciplines.
46
Kate Millett’s theory of sexual politics
includes a research agenda for the new science of liberation in which
biology, economics, psychology, and other disciplines should be directed
toward demonstrating how gender has been socially constructed in the
past.
This liberating science can identify and condemn the sources of
oppression, but by itself, it can only give a glimpse of what a future
world without gender would be like. Producing a revolution of ideas
regarding sex and gender would require a work of imagination promoted
through all public institutions: Universities (especially the new
humanities) and popular culture would all play a part in undertaking
such an exercise of imagination to produce this revolution. Millett
imagines that “a fully realized sexual revolution” would have three main
facets.
First, a sexual revolution would abolish “the ideology of
male supremacy and the traditional socialization by which it is upheld
in matters of status, role, and temperament,” leading to the
“integration of the separate sexual subcultures, an assimilation of both
sides of previously segregated human experience.”
47
Roles in child-rearing, for instance, would likely fade and eventually
disappear as parental roles became less gender-defined and more
androgynous.
Another alleged element of male ideology is the tradition of romantic
love as central to relations between men and women. Love, “perhaps even
more than childbearing, is the pivot of women’s oppression,” Shulamith
Firestone writes.
48
Women, for Firestone, seem dreamy about love, emotions, and
relationships. This preoccupation detains them while men pursue creative
work on their own. Women thus seem “more monogamous, better at loving,
possessive, ‘clinging,’ more interested in (highly involved)
relationships than in sex per se.”
Because men and women are not equally vulnerable in love (men can get
out of a love relationship with fewer economic or emotional
consequences), love is not possible without a complete social revolution
in which men and women can be equally vulnerable (or equally
invulnerable) and mutually supportive of (or equally indifferent to) one
another. “It is not the process of love itself that is at fault, but
its
political, i.e., unequal
power context: the who, why, when, and where of it is what makes it now such a holocaust.”
49
Second, a drastic change in the “patriarchal proprietary
family” is necessary for women to secure “complete economic
independence.” Women must obviously secure fulfilling employment outside
of the home. An “important corollary” to this goal, writes Millet, is
“the end of the present chattel status and denial of right to minors.”
50
The dependence of children is an invention of patriarchy, in this
view, designed to make women feel as if they are needed to raise them. A
charter of rights for minors would foster their independence from the
family, freeing mothers from it as well. With fewer marital duties,
women would be freer to pursue economic independence outside marriage.
According to this theory, childhood appears to be a gender too—a phase
of life invented by society that creates expectations for how needy
“children” should act. Thus, the abolition of gender requires movement
toward the abolition of childhood.
The dependence of children is an invention
of patriarchy, in this view, designed to make women feel as if they are
needed to raise them. A charter of rights for minors would foster their
independence from the family, freeing mothers from it as well.
Beauvoir nodded in this direction after learning from Firestone’s
The Dialectic of Sex
that, in Beauvoir’s words, “women will not be liberated until they have
been liberated from their children and by the same token, until
children have also been liberated from their parents.”
51
Such liberation may also require artificial reproduction (i.e.,
cloning) and the professionalization of child care or a willingness to
leave children free to develop on their own as in the case of “ghetto”
children, as Firestone notes.
52
In fact, both Beauvoir and Firestone envision children freely experimenting sexually,
53
becoming economically viable and major contributors to a future society
on par with adults. Because of this, curtailing parental rights falls
under the rubric of securing independence for women.
Third, sexual revolution also requires “an end to
traditional sexual inhibitions and taboos, particularly those that most
threaten patriarchal monogamous marriage: homosexuality, ‘illegitimacy,’
adolescent, and pre- and extra-marital sexuality.” Restrictions on
sexual activity reinforce ideas of monogamous romantic love, parental
responsibility, economic dependence, and other cultural attributes that
define traditional family life. Emancipating sexuality from such
restrictions would help to divorce marriage from sexuality and allow
individuals to express primal human drives without inhibition. Sex has
supposedly been repressed and channeled toward responsible reproduction,
but under conditions of sexual freedom, all sexual outlets would
receive equal public approval.
54
In Millett’s view, cultivating an individual identity instead of
dully accepting the identity proposed by society fosters a healthier,
happier individual. The mismatch between society’s artificial demands
and the requirements of individual fulfillment, identified by Friedan as
“the problem that has no name,” is central to the scientific project.
The way to a world of fulfillment and liberation passes through a
three-pronged sexual revolution: It requires the destruction of
patriarchal sources of socialization, the cultivation of an ethic of
individuality, and the removal of sexual inhibitions.
In Millett’s view, the way to a world of
fulfillment and liberation passes through a three-pronged sexual
revolution: It requires the destruction of patriarchal sources of
socialization, the cultivation of an ethic of individuality, and the
removal of sexual inhibitions.
Millett’s sexual revolution, while it represents the fully built-out
feminist project, also has profound implications for the acceptance of
homosexuality, transgenderism, and other issues of gender identity.
Realization of feminist ambitions demands transcending women’s issues
narrowly defined. It implicates changing our ideas about children, love,
manhood, and even the existence of these categories as such. The
theoretical mission initiated in Beauvoir’s thought has many direct
applications for political practice and daily life as it deconstructs
what people take for granted as a matter of course.
The Third Wave: The Rolling Revolution and Transgenderism
Friedan’s emphasis on identity led reformers to apply the
identity-crisis concept beyond women, first to homosexuality, then to
natural sexual aberrations, and most recently to transgender
individuals. This initiated a third wave of feminism that seeks to move
beyond the binary character of Beauvoir’s feminism toward her hopes for
an “indefinitely open future” of sexual identities.
55
Transsexual Ambiguities. Advances beyond second-wave
feminism include the changing evaluation of transsexuals (people who
undergo sex-change operations) and those born with sexual aberrations
such as hermaphrodites. Second-wave feminists recognized the importance
to their theories of those who are born with anatomical aberrations.
Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, and Millett allude to sexual aberrations to
show that the concept of nature with which sex is associated is “not
always unambiguous.”
56
Nature, they note, does not reliably produce human beings who are identifiably male or female.
Second-wave feminists embraced Robert Stoller’s scientific work on
the grip that gender apparently has on human identity. Stoller
established the Gender Identity Center at the University of
California–Los Angeles in 1965 and wrote
Sex and Gender (1968), a very influential book.
For Stoller, sex has “connotations of anatomy and physiology,” while
gender relates to the “tremendous areas of behavior, feelings, thoughts,
and fantasies that…do not have primarily biological connotations.”
While “sex and gender seem to common sense inextricably bound
together…[the] two realms…are not inevitably bound in anything like a
one-to-one relationship” and “may go in quite independent ways.”
57
Gender may in fact exist contrary to anatomy and physiology, as in the
case of those who are born with anatomical features of both men and
women:
Although the external genitalia (penis, testes, scrotum) contribute
to the sense of maleness, no one of them is essential for it, not even
all of them together. In the absence of complete evidence, I agree with
Money and the Hampsons who show in their large series of intersexed
[those with features of both sexes] patients that gender role is
determined by postnatal forces, regardless of the anatomy and physiology
of the external genitalia.58
Stoller views gender identity as shaped by important social and
sexual experiences in the first 18 months of life. So stubborn is gender
identity that it would be easier, he argues, to surgically change the
sex of an adolescent male assigned as a female at birth and raised as a
girl than it would be to change his gendered sense of self.
Therewith, Stoller points to the trailblazer in transsexual activism,
John Money, cofounder of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in
1965. Money was involved in winning approval for sexual reassignment
surgery in 1966 and in creating the transsexual category for those with
mixed sexual identities.
Money won fame for the case of David Reimer, catalogued by Money and coauthor Patricia Tucker in
Sexual Signatures
(1976). A botched circumcision at eight months left the boy without a
penis. Johns Hopkins staff convinced David’s parents to castrate the boy
and raise him as a girl renamed Brenda according to conventional
standards. No vagina was added to make Brenda a girl physically. Annual
follow-up visits “proved how well all [parties] succeeded in adjusting
to that decision.”
59
Money thought this case proved that “the gender identity gate is open
at birth for a normal child no less than for one born with unfinished
sex organs…and that it stays open at least for something over a year
after birth.”
60
Both David and his brother Brian would die before reaching 40, each by his own hand after a history of mental illness.
61
After relating David Reimer’s story, Money relates several others
about well-adjusted patients who physically transitioned from one sex to
the other at the ages of 11 and 12, suggesting that the “gender
identity gate” may remain open much longer than 18 months.
62
The door to ever-later sex reassignment surgery seems open. More
important from the perspective of second-wave feminism, the door is open
to a greater role for human choice concerning the creation of identity
or self-conception and to the idea of gender fluidity independent of the
body.
63
Some second-wave feminists endorsed Money’s approach because its
ideas about femininity and masculinity seemed malleable and because it
suggested that the body does not imply a fixed destiny. This
philosophical alliance between feminists and Money and his scientific
acolytes had a political hue as well: Few things erode “the ideology of
male supremacy and the traditional socialization” as much as
problematizing the biological basis of identity.
64
Judith Butler: Queer Theory, Homosexual Advocacy, and Transgender Rights
In this rolling revolution, the supposed insights of one generation
can become an obstacle in the next. Chief among the third-wave critics
of such second-wave alliances is Judith Butler.
Those who were performing the gender reassignment surgeries thought
of themselves as breaking new ground, but to Butler, they were merely
reinforcing society’s tendency to view people as either women or men.
Butler thinks that these surgeries call for “a serious and increasingly
popular critique of idealized gender dimorphism within the transsexual
movement itself”—one that will lead to a world in which “mixed genital
attributes might be accepted and loved without having to transform them
into a more socially coherent or normative notion of gender.”
65
Butler links third-wave feminism to developments in queer theory, homosexual advocacy, and transgender rights.
66
Queer theory holds that all expressions of gender and sexuality are
socially constructed and hence changeable, with the hope that
celebrating the supposedly queer lifestyles will undermine or
“problematize” fixed notions of personal identity and rigid
distinctions.
67
Society’s way of pigeonholing individuals into binary male and female
categories is especially prominent. Queer theory finds liberation beyond
the binary and beyond the normal. Among those liberated through a wide
acceptance of queer theory would be transgendered people, whose
self-conception transcends supposedly normal conceptions of gender but
who do not necessarily reconfigure their bodies to accommodate this
self-conception.
Feminists may once have opposed the inclusion of homosexual
(“queer”), drag (men dressed as women), butch (masculine lesbians),
femme (feminine lesbians), and transgender persons in their movement
because such individuals undermined the idea of sisterhood that bound
the movement together.
68
Early homosexual activists similarly seemed to accept the idea of
homosexual or heterosexual orientation as embedded in a person’s genetic
makeup or as somehow natural.
According to third-wave theorists, their
feminist predecessors were insufficiently radical because they did not
reject the binary character of gender and instead just encouraged
supposedly 'immanent' women to perform more like 'transcendent' men.
Butler and others among this third wave accept the feminist divorce
of sex from gender and its aspiration to move “beyond gender” or to
“undo” gender. According to third-wave theorists, their feminist
predecessors were insufficiently radical because they did not reject the
binary character of gender and instead just encouraged supposedly
“immanent” women to perform more like “transcendent” men.
For Butler, gender itself is an imposition, an act of pseudoviolence
integrated into our language and expectations. There is no real, natural
gender for Butler, nor is there a natural or proper expression of
sexuality. Gender and sexuality are “performances” arising from and
constituting common life. For her understanding of social norms, Butler
relies especially on French post-structuralist philosopher Michel
Foucault, who seeks to expose political power as it manifests itself in
our ideas of truth, reality, and language, all of which reinforce the
dominant group’s vision of political power and make its way of life
implicitly normal. Society exerts this power subtly by constructing
“truth” and “reality” and thereby constructs a theory of which
categories count as human. Many subtle things in society, for instance,
from religious teaching to popular culture, encourage people to expect
love relations between men and women. These expectations must be exposed
as artificial so that a more open and “queer” future can arise.
Foucault’s
History of Sexuality, to use Butler’s more technical
language, exposes the “mechanism of coercion” behind the modern
preference for heterosexual sex in the hope of liberating a more
polymorphous expression of sexual desire and, ultimately, new
engenderings.
69
Leslie Feinberg, whose pamphlet “Transgender Liberation: A Movement
Whose Time Has Come” (1992) likely offers the first full treatment of
the transgender phenomenon, echoes Friedan’s account of the
discrimination suffered by the transgendered as “an oppression without a
name” because it is so engrained in culture as to appear natural.
70
Engendering has been an unseen “violence” that in Butler’s words
“emerges from a profound desire to keep the order of binary gender to
appear natural or necessary, to make of it a structure, either natural
or cultural or both, which no human being can oppose, and still remain
human.”
71
Undoing gender requires empowerment of those who fantasize about and
also perform different gender spectacles, revealing fluid and
transgressive possibilities of new realities. Butler’s
Gender Trouble72
emphasizes the transgressive nature of drag and cross-dressing, while her
Undoing Gender adds
transgender as the latest new gender performance. “When something
[seemingly] unreal,” Butler writes, “lays claim to reality…something
other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and does take
place. The norms themselves become rattled, display their instability,
and become open to resignification.”
73
Accordingly, a more developed feminism would integrate queer theory
because “queers” “struggle to rework the norms” and posit “a different
future for the norm itself.” They “make us not only question what is
real and what ‘must’ be, but they also show us how the norms that govern
contemporary notions of reality can be questioned and how new modes of
reality can become instituted,” just as feminists hope.
74
With new transgressive possibilities, “a new legitimating lexicon
for…gender complexity” can develop within “law, psychiatry, social and
literary theory.
75
Freedom from society’s impositions or
constructions is not enough. In a future of transgender liberation, say
third-wave theorists, a thousand genders will bloom because the public
will recognize the legitimacy, even the beauty, of all gender
performances.
Thus, a recognition of transgenderism is consistent with the
philosophical premises of second-wave feminism (i.e., divorcing one’s
body from one’s identity) and also furthers the three political goals of
sexual revolution that Millett articulates. It moves beyond second-wave
feminists because the ground won by those activists has been won, and
new fields of conquest appear open.
Freedom from society’s impositions or constructions is not enough,
however. In a future of transgender liberation, say third-wave
theorists, a thousand genders will bloom because the public will
recognize the legitimacy, even the beauty, of all gender performances.
“We are not carving out a place for autonomy,” Butler writes, “if by
autonomy we mean a state of individuation, taken as self-persisting
prior to and apart from any relations of dependency on the world of
others.” Persons “cannot persist without norms of recognition” that
support their persistence and build their mental health. One’s identity
is never fully real or fully one’s own until it is endorsed in and
through the public authorities and recognized as such by one’s fellow
citizens. The “very sense of personhood is linked to the desire for
recognition, and that desire places us outside ourselves, in a realm of
social norms that we do not fully choose.”
76
It is difficult to imagine how the work of undoing gender could be
completed: It seems to demand continual social transformation not only
in the name of liberation from past impositions, but also as a way to
secure recognition for tomorrow’s desires. Butler doubts whether we need
norms to live, but all individuals need public recognition and
affirmation for their identity to continue.
Butler’s argument leads to a transgressive defense of same-sex
marriage. Far from welcoming “virtually normal” couples into a
traditional marriage culture, Butler embraces same-sex marriage because
it creates gender trouble for marriage. It combats essentialism and
upsets expected gender norms about heterosexuality within marriage. It
introduces new realities such as open marriage, thereby creating new
performances that perhaps may point toward dethroning marriage as an
important public value and ending the legal recognition of marriage. In
the long term, same-sex marriage may affirm transgressive performances
by disrupting the old norm. Shaking the public recognition of marriage
in this way is a step toward creating a more open future.
77
Butler expects that witnessing transgender incidents would produce a
disruptive effect much like that produced by observing two men or two
women in wedlock. Following this logic, public restrooms and showering
facilities are based on a binary conception of gender, serving as
instruments of oppression for those who do not conform to society’s
norms. Support for women’s sports also seems to be based on such
essentialism, so finding a place for transgender athletes likewise
becomes a moral imperative. After all, women’s sports are based on the
seemingly benighted assumption that there are women. Transgendered
persons create “gender trouble” for contemporary notions of reality and
call for affirmation and recognition so that those who formerly were
considered “unreal” can be welcomed into the human race.
According to Butler, the body is neither a given nor a limit: The
limit in our identity is our ability to entertain “fantasy,” which is
“an internal film that we project inside the interior theater of the
mind.”
78
A new politics must “create a world in which those who understand their
gender and their desire to be nonnormative can live and thrive not only
without the threat of violence from the outside but without the
pervasive sense of their own unreality, which can lead to suicide or a
suicidal life.”
79
Few transgendered activists are self-consciously post-structuralist
queer theorists, just as few feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were
Beauvoir-inspired existentialists. Their activism, however, bends in the
direction of these theories.
Transgender activism begins with the help of
a science that deconstructs, claims that individuals’ health is
compromised by society’s repressions, and names a psychological syndrome
from which such individuals suffer: 'gender dysphoria.'
Transgender activism begins with the help of a science that
deconstructs, claims that individuals’ health is compromised by
society’s repressions, and names a psychological syndrome from which
such individuals suffer. The scientific keystone to this new
establishment is the disorder known as “gender dysphoria,”
80
which seems to cause a persistent and consistent unease about one’s
gender identity or an incongruity between one’s biological sex and
internal sense of life as either a man or a woman. In this case, a
scientific name is assigned to an issue that on other occasions had gone
unnamed.
From the perspective of queer theory, these reactions are almost
charming in their adherence to the traditional relation between sex and
gender.
81
For queer theorists, those who are experiencing gender confusion should
not be cured; rather, their identities should be affirmed and
celebrated. When a child suffering from “gender dysphoria” arrives at
school, it is not simply a question of demanding transitioning measures
and hormone treatments. For queer theorists, such a child arrives with a
demand that the school and its community recognize and affirm the
child’s questionable gender status as a permanent fact.
The 2015 experience of Minnesota’s Nova Classical Academy illustrates
this point. A parent enrolled his five-year-old in the charter school.
The child, according to the parent, thought of himself as a boy who
likes “girl things.” The parent demanded that the school support the
non-gender-conforming student with changes in curriculum and policies
(among other things), and the school complied under legal and public
pressure.
82
There are multiple stories of how professionals in some states are
prevented from treating “gender dysphoria” as a pathological syndrome
requiring counseling and preventive parenting. The ultimate goal is
public recognition of queer theory’s view of the human landscape.
Conclusion
The queer theory that leads to demands that the transgendered be
publicly recognized shares much with Beauvoir’s initial insight about
women being made, not born. Transgender theorists, in Butler’s words,
“are carrying on the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir: if one is not born a
woman, but rather becomes one, then becoming is the vehicle for gender
itself.”
83
Beauvoir and her successors drained all significance from the term
sex and said that it could be filled through human construction with a new idea of woman.
Queer theorists agreed and went further, filling gender more freely
based on individual imagination and choice instead of artificial
dichotomies and other remnants of tradition. Becoming human would now
have to proceed from individual imagination, unaffected by socially
imposed ideas of gender. Queer theorists pushed against a door that
second-wave feminists had already opened. With queer theory, human
beings come closer to being, as Beauvoir contended, historical beings
instead of fixed species.
The importance of identity formation, begun in Friedan’s reiteration
of Beauvoir’s thought, also fosters the importance of transgender
rights. Human identity is not determined by one’s biology, genes, or
upbringing; it is a product of how people conceive of themselves. Human
beings are, on this view, unsexed persons caught in a body of one sex or
another without any need to follow previous gender scripts. “No more
vivid example exists,” writes the philosopher Roger Scruton, “of the
human determination to triumph over biological destiny, in the interests
of a moral idea.”
84
Elevating the morality of human imagination and escaping the iron grip
of gender construction—in effect, two sides of the same coin—transgender
activists make common cause with feminists in the defense of autonomy,
freedom from biological necessity, and human liberation.
There exists no better way of extending the sexual revolution that
second-wave feminists imagined than by shaking confidence in the very
idea of man and woman. Transgender theories are thus a late iteration of
the feminist goal of a sexual revolution that includes abolition of
male supremacy and traditional socialization toward gender scripts,
cultivation of androgyny, elimination of the proprietary family and the
dependence of women and children on that family, and celebration of
non-monogamous, non-marital sexual experiences. Being one gender or
another is a matter of human imagination, and new types of genders can
be imagined: These experiences are in keeping with the rolling sexual
revolution.
Transgender rights therefore extend the philosophical premises of
second-wave feminism and foster its political project while pointing to a
world that is not exactly what those feminists thought was needed in
their time. Whether this new world will prove to be fit for human
flourishing remains to be seen.
—
Scott Yenor is a Professor of
Political Science at Boise State University and was the 2015–2016
Visiting Fellow in American Political Thought in the B. Kenneth Simon
Center for Principles and Politics, of the Institute for Constitutional
Government, at The Heritage Foundation.
