Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil, and tonight? I have a weird question for trans people.
Hold on, don’t freak out… This is not me going mask off or being creepy, I promise. Also, if you’re NOT trans, I think you should contemplate this question about yourself too. You’ll see what I mean in a sec.
I’m certain I’m not the first person to have this question or think through this scenario but, on principle, I haven’t actually researched anything as I write this sentence. As well as this next one. I will do so as soon as I pop this question and then maybe all of us can take 5, do a quick google search, and come back with our thoughts.
Ya ready? okay, here goes:
If you are a trans person and you have transitioned in any way (socially, medically, or maybe just internally for now), if you are in any particular way living as your authentic gender, what would that look like for you if you were transported to an uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean? Forget worrying about food and shelter, assume all your physical needs are comfortably met, my question is, what does gender actually mean if you are completely outside of a society, outside of a community, just totally alone?
I was thinking about this topic because despite my best efforts, I am still occasionally exposed to the gormless ravings of TERFs and right-wing chuds (ah but I repeat myself). And I feel like the anti-trans movement has a very muddled, very unsophisticated view of gender, full of superstitions and half-remembered myths from childhood. I mean these are the people who think anyone in the world cares about what some archeaologist in the future might think about our bones. Get real.
But, their goofy thoughts on gender, for me anyway, still invite a kind of introspection. Not because they have anything of value to say, but rather, if I think they have wrong thoughts about gender, then what are the right ones?
And of course, we’ve probably all heard “Gender is a social construct” before, that’s a fairly standard (though possibly dated) rebuttal to anti-trans material. At time of recording, I remain a Butler Bro, so I’m also a big fan of their theory that “Gender is a performance” an “active style of living [your] body in the world”.
But as I was thinking about that the other day, this weird idea started percolating in my mind… if gender is a social construct, then what happens if there is no society around to construct it? If gender is a performance, does that necessarily require an audience? How would a trans femme or trans masc person live out their femme-ness or masc-ness in total isolation and totally outside of the systems and structures that exist all around us, such as on a deserted island, out in space, something like that…
In fact, my weirdest version of this thought experiment is about the Singularity, the hypothetical future event when all human consciousness will allegedly be uploaded to a cloud-based paradise. If you were a subjective entity with no body in an empty server, what would gender look like for you?
And just to be clear, this isn’t something that I think is a “gotcha” against trans people or the concept of transness. I believe that trans people ARE the gender they say they are, full stop. That’s why I found this thought experiment interesting.
But anyway, gimme 2 seconds to google this and see what I see. Hopefully I’m not doing Baby’s First Trans Discourse (but if I am, this video will probably not be made, so if you’re hearing this, I must’ve found something interesting!). ¡Uno memento!
…
Okay, so! As expected, I am not the first person to think about Trans Island. Apparently the Desert Island is the site of LOTS of trans discussion. What stood out to me from a cursory initial foray, though, was that the desert island was being used slightly differently than how I’m using it. In various reddit threads, it instead functioned as a thought experiment like, “If you were on a desert island with no social pressures or threats, would you still transition?”, meaning, does your desire to transition feel like it comes from something deep inside you versus as a response to how other people see and treat you out in the world.
Some people used this as a thought experiment to find some validation in their transition, feeling reassured that their transness was “real” because they would still transition even if no one was else around to perceive them. Unfortunately others seemed to use this in a gate-keepy way, implying that if you wouldn’t transition on a desert island, you weren’t “really trans”.
Interestingly, in one blog post I read (and do not take my citation as endorsement of this person please), the author expressed frustration with the desire to even try to talk about transness divorced from social pressures and expectations. They write:
“It is a fact of our human condition that we cannot escape our embeddedness in the social world…
There is nothing untouched in us by other persons. Nothing we have did not originate, somewhere, in another human life or lives.
The idea, then, that upon arriving at Desert Island, we drop everything we have ever known about human life, is ludicrous. When we look at our body– here or there– we look at our body with eyes shaped by years and years of having to look at our body in a social world, under social circumstances. Our eyes and our visual apparatus are not just for seeing bare physical reality; they [are] for telling us what is useful and what is important…
When we go to Desert Island, we know what a hammer is and what it is for. And unfortunately, we still know what breasts are and what they are for. There are no carpenters on Desert Island, and no men, but what does that change? The hammer still holds the possibility of driving a nail. The breast still holds the possibility of damning us to inhumanity so long as it is attached to the body.” (https://destroyyourbinder.tumblr.com/post/148527019380/the-desert-island)
While still not coming from the exact same angle I am, that post does conjure up two important points: 1) don’t waste too much time obsessing over an impossible hypothetical (which, fair enough…) and 2) whatever gender is (performed, constructed or otherwise), it’s still firmly related to one’s intimate, individual relationship to their own body at the end of the day.
Now, cis people who stuck around, first of all, hey, thanks! Second of all, I’m not sure where you’re personally at with gender, either your own or others. So very very quickly, let’s talk about social construction and gender performance.
In the 1987 paper Doing Gender, Candace West and Don Zimmerman write the following:
“We argue that gender is not a set of traits, nor a variable, nor a role, but the product of social doings of some sort. What then is the social doing of gender? It is more than the continuous creation of the meaning of gender through human actions. We claim that gender itself is constituted through interaction…
..Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. Once the differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the ‘essentialness’ of gender…
If we do gender appropriately, we simultaneously sustain, reproduce, and render legitimate the institutional arrangements that are based on sex category. If we fail to do gender appropriately, we as individuals-not the institutional arrangements-may be called to account (for our character, motives, and predispositions).”
(Candace West; Don H. Zimmerman Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 125-151.)
This is one take on the social construction model of gender, the idea that gender is a set of norms and expectations within a culture or a society that justify some existing social order based on, in this case, primary sex characteristics such as genitals, the ability to impregnate, or the ability to get pregnant, and so on.
Judith Butler put their own spin on that in Gender Trouble, where they write:
“Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being… (pg.43)
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self…(pg. 179)”
(Gender Trouble, 2002 edition)
This would be what we mean by a Performance theory of gender, as in, gender isn’t something you are innately, it’s something you do, something you mimic, something you maybe even parody.
And of course, just in case it needs to be said, whatever your opinion about these models are, don’t forget that just because something is a social construct or a performance doesn’t mean it isn’t real or doesn’t have consequences for your life. Money is a social construct, a work week is a social construct, a government is a social construct, and all of those are very real, sometimes in painful ways.
Likewise, a performance in this sense does not imply lying or inauthenticity. Instead, I think it’s more like the idea of how, say, being a “good friend” is a performance. You can’t just say you’re someone’s good friend, you have to live that out over repeated interactions and situations through acts of loyalty and kindness and generosity. I think a lot of religious people would similarly say something like being a devout Jew or devout Muslim isn’t something you are, it’s something you live out in large ways and small. It’s a performance, but it’s not insincere or dishonest.
The classic example in linguistics would be a sentence like “I bet you twenty bucks I can do more pushups than you.” That sentence doesn’t just communicate an idea, it creates a truth: by performing that statement, I have now created a new reality in which I will definitely owe you twenty bucks, because my long gibbon arms HATE doing pushups. Or to continue the religious analogy, think of the sentence “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” That isn’t just communicating an internal thought; according to Christianity, uttering that phrase sincerely produces a very real change in reality; that utterance is what makes you Christian.
So, for me personally, at least at time of recording, when you ask me “What is a woman?” my most succinct answer echoes Susan Stryker: “A woman is someone who says they’re a woman.” A woman is a person who chooses to perform Woman in the world, simple as.
Okay, so back to the desert island, or even better… the Singularity.
Cis people following along, I now ask you: if you were all alone with no one to see or evaluate you, what would gender mean to you? If you uploaded your consciousness to the GameFAQs forums and had no body to look at, what gender would you be? And how would you know??
I started googling “Gender in the Singularity” to see what other people came up with and I found some interesting stuff.
First off, while it doesn’t answer my broader question, in a 2014 paper about robots and cyborgs called “Is the post-human a post-woman?”, Francesca Ferrando writes the following: “If gender has been historically constructed around the sexual difference, now that no biological nor sexual motives are connected to the genders of the robots, gender finally proceeds in its raw hermeneutical vestiges.
In other terms: even if sex will have no biological or physiological significance for robots, gender - its cultural apotheosis - will still be valuable for humans (at least in the near future), in order to relate more easily with our robotic significant others. In their series of experiments, Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon [54] have illustrated how people tend to relate to computers in the same way they would relate to other humans, including keeping the gender stereotypes and biases untouched when the robot is given a female or a male voice.
To make humans at ease with robots, roboticists apply features which do not have any function other than reception.” (https://eujournalfuturesresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s40309-014-0043-8)
If Ferrando is correct about cyborgs, it’s likely that phenomenon may also show itself in our bodiless uploaded future, perhaps as a transitional phase for a generation, perhaps longer.
In another paper, this one from 2017, authors Danaher and Bamford discuss the hypothetical scenario of uploading a human consciousness into a synthetic human. I found this passage pretty interesting in the context of this topic:
“The social construction of identity from a first-person perspective… results from a combination of how our brains work and how cognition gets distributed between our brains and the environments in which we live.
The perceptions that humans have, that relate to their own body, form a conceptual grouping which we label ‘self’. The human also interacts and communicates extensively with other humans and thereby forms concepts of those other humans. A ‘person’ is the conceptualization of a particular human, whether ‘self’ or ‘other’.
Thus we can think of a personal identity as a continually evolving set of information, which is stored disjointly across a set of different substrates, typically with the human body in question as the hub.
In an extreme case of retrograde amnesia, all of the memories stored in the brain of the victim become inaccessible, yet the personal identity often remains linked to that human through the support of peers… If, however, peers are not available, then the link between the human and their prior personal identity is broken and a new personal identity must be forged.” (Danaher, John & Bamford, Sim (2017). Transfer of Personality to Synthetic Human ("mind uploading") and the Social Construction of Identity. Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (11-12):6-30.)
The word “gender” only appears in that paper one time and while it seems like the authors weren’t prepared to go deep on that topic, I found that last little bit really interesting. Because essentially what the authors are saying is that your experience of yourself is an evolving dance between your interior perceptions and how others perceive and treat you, and that the absence of others may alter your identity in certain ways.
Along those lines, I want to read another citation here. If Twitter is at all representative, a lot of you are going to HATE this paper. I am not endorsing it, merely plucking a passage out to think about, please go easy on me!
Long story short, in Gender without Gender Identity, author Elizabeth Barnes offers a critique of the notion that gender is solely and 100% determined by self-identification or self-directed performance. For her, this would exclude people born with significant cognitive disabilities which preclude them from having the reasoning or linguistic capabilities to self-identify as anything.
She believes people in this edge case do not and cannot have an interior gender identity in the same way (and I recognize the thorniness of her comparison) that an infant lacks the reasoning capacity to have its own gender identity. Setting aside whether you agree with her train of thought, I did find this to be an interesting chunk of beef to toss into the stew we have cooking here. She writes:
“What I’m arguing is two-fold: (i) we have good reason to say that cognitively disabled females have gender; (ii) we have good reason to say, more specifically, that they are women. The case for (ii) is admittedly more complicated than the case for (i)... but the basic gist is this: in the absence of compelling reason otherwise, the broad pattern of social oppression that is evidence for (i) is also evidence for (ii)...
It is politically troubling to suggest that we don’t know what gender cognitively disabled people are. Cognitively disabled women are women. Their experience of the world is shaped by this fact and… we have often failed to understand those experiences because we so often fail to recognize them as women…
…campaigns to counter violence against women or the coercive control of women’s bodies often fail to include cognitively disabled women, even though they are amongst the people most at risk of such violence and coercion.” (Barnes, 2022)
For whatever it’s worth to you, I don’t think Barnes is doing a TERFy “sex-based rights” thing here. She approvingly quotes from Julia Serano and she even takes a little swipe at JK Rowling. I’ve linked the paper, you can decide for yourself.
But, I wanted to include this passage because it’s almost the inverse of the thought experiment we’ve been talking about, instead of “What is gender without a community around it to receive it?” it’s “What if community is the ONLY evidence of someone’s gender?” I’m unsure about the paper’s central assumption that someone could be so disabled they do not experience a gender identity at all, but I do think Barnes’ is correct to say that there is a material reality created when society foists gender onto people and treats them accordingly whether they consent or not.
And I find that interesting because, as the Destroy Your Binder blog said, “It is a fact of our human condition that we cannot escape our embeddedness in the social world…”. Meaning that whatever gender is and however you and I choose to live our bodies in the world, the society around us is always also creating a gender for us and it’s very difficult to know how that external creation process subtly warps our own ideas and behaviors.
But why do I find that interesting in this discussion of Gender on the Desert Island?
Well, I guess here is where I’ll stop quoting other people and just tell you what I think.
(And just for context, I’m someone who feels that “male” describes me perfectly fine but who is not otherwise attached to “masculinity” as some stat I need to min-max. I have a pink phone case, I feel comfortable lounging around in Uggs and leggings, none of that stuff makes me feel like less of a man even knowing that some people in society think that it does. That said, I do choose to adhere to western society’s basic conventions regarding men (I have facial hair, I don’t wear tennis skirts to work, etc))
So anyway, it seems to me uncontroversial that gender exists in (at least) two modes: the first is that it’s a private, internal sense we have of how our bodies ought to be styled within and navigated around the world, and the second is that it’s set of social norms and activities that influence how others treat us and what they think they can expect from us.
And I think it’s also uncontroversial to say that probably none of us have ever experienced gender in only one of those modes. We are always, all the time, both sensing our internal relationship to the world around us as well as reacting to society’s norms and expectations, either acquiescing or rebelling. Our private sense of our gender is influenced by the assumptions made about us socially and those assumptions are influenced by how we chose to express the private reality of our gender sense.
So on a deserted island with no one around to perform for, if your internal sense of yourself is that you are a man or a woman, then great, you are that man or woman. But I think you’d be a different kind of man or woman in the absence of social expectations to react to. Not lesser, just different. Because you would be constructing your gender reality completely on your own terms, no negotiations or compromises or even dismissals. In a sense, you would be a man or a woman in its purest, most unprocessed form.
(Nonbinary people following along, my intuition is that for you this sounds like paradise and what you’ve been asking for all along, the right to live your body in the world in your 100% unique way, free of assumptions and expectations. I’d be curious how you all feel about this discussion for sure!)
I think this is something interesting to contemplate because of what the Destroy Your Binder blog said, that “There is nothing untouched in us by other persons.” The desert island thought experiment, or the Singularity version as of right now, these are situations that are contrived and mostly impossible, but they do give us a little peek into a world with a different set of norms and arrangements. We don’t and we can’t live in that world, but we can use it to maybe know our real selves a little better anyway.
Because this whole discussion has me thinking back to the (unfortunately rare) times that I look in the mirror and truly like what I see, the times that I as a cis guy feel something trans people would call gender euphoria. And for me personally, it’s mostly appearance-based and if I’m honest, the times I’ve felt the most manly have been when I see something in the mirror that I think other people will enjoy seeing. And it’s this extremely bizarre paradox where I don’t care about being seen as unmanly, but I take a lot of pleasure from someone else seeing me as manly.
So as I get to the end of this script, I’m left with a weird question for myself: if I didn’t crave the attraction and approval of others, how WOULD I want to live this body in the world? What would *I* want to see in the mirror just for myself, purely as an expression of my unique internal reality?
And the answer is… I don’t know. I don’t know how to think of myself as a being that isn’t being perceived by others. And I don’t even know if it’s worth worrying about because I will always be subject to that perception. To quote one of the preeminent philosophers of the 21st century, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
My gender just *is* a collaborative project, a lattice of interactions and sensations distributed along a network of everyone I ever meet and the feelings those situations create in me, a hyperobject extending through space between me and my observers and extending through time as relationships and interactions shape my self-awareness. If I was alone on an island or uploaded to an empty server, that lattice simply trails off into a single thread I get to pull in whatever direction I want. I would be Me, but a much different kind of Me than I would be back in society.
And what does THAT mean??? Hell if I know! For me, I think this thought experiment gives me a weird sense of… peace I guess? Because it means I’m not failing to live up to some gender abolitionist ideal if I wear a tie and a moustasche to work and particularly if I like the way I look in that tie and moustasche. I’m stylizing my body in a way that makes me happy in a society that is reacting to that stylization. I’ve found a balance that works for me! (which isn’t to say that I’m not open to getting weird with my own gender, just that I can be happy when it ISNT weird)
And the reason that I am passionate about defending the rights and dignity of binary and nonbinary trans people (as well as agender people, gender fluid people, and people who have unlocked the secret New Game+ gender) is because I think they all deserve that same happiness and balance and ability to experiment to find ‘em. They deserve to love who they see in the mirror and they deserve to feel connected to their bodies in the same way I am connected to mine, whether that means a performance applauded by society or whether it’s a performance that baffles society. May a thousand flowers bloom!
ANYWAY this was supposed to be a 3 page script and a 9 minute video, not sure what happened here. What’s your reaction to all this? What would gender mean for you in pure isolation? Who would you be if you could be anything? Feel free to pontificate in the comments.
As for me, I just appreciate you being here and indulging me in a little philosophical reverie. I used to have AFK friends that I would drink and smoke cigars with and talk about this stuff, but now I’m an old dad and you are my friend group. Thanks for showing up, see ya on the next one. Have a good niiiight!
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