Along the lines of yesterday’s post… Perhaps the trickiest thing here is that gender is — or at least, can be — context-dependent. That is, while I don’t doubt there are immutable and biological aspects of gender, there are also enormous social and cultural aspects. Changes to the social and cultural boundaries can change an individual’s gender.
My whole gender journey started in earnest when I realized that, in a very rigid gender system in which the options were basically wife, husband, and outcast, I would choose husband in a heartbeat. And upon realizing this — that there was a way for me to survive in such a system, and that that way was as a man — I was overcome with incredible relief.
I explained this to a friend and she said, “Your sexual orientation is more important than your gender.” Well, no — dyke is my gender, and the larger culture determines whether that’s closer to woman or to man. Place enough constraints on the category of “woman” and I will happily choose “man,” even when it comes with its own painful and oppressive constraints.
And that, of course, presumes that choosing is even possible — it’s frequently not. But I’m living in a time and place where choosing is possible, to some degree. And that itself, the existence of the possibility of a choice, affects individuals’ genders. This is, I suspect, the source of the phenomenon some people call “butch flight.”
I don’t think this is a bad thing. The more choices the better, as far as I’m concerned. And I’m not trying to say that everyone is equally sensitive to these kinds of cultural changes — I think they are probably more powerful the more ambiguous, fluid, or unclear one’s sense of one’s gender is. People both trans and cis with a very defined sense of their sex and gender are probably less affected than people with a less defined, less static or less binary-conforming sense of self.
What I am saying is that our genders exist in a context. We are little lifeforms adapting to our habitat, interdependent, changing it as it changes us.
Tags: butch, gender identity, queer
