Sex/gender identity: Moving beyond fixed and ‘natural’ categories

Abstract

Despite feminist understandings of the socially constructed nature of sex and gender and anthropological studies of alternative constructions, western societies tend to understand sex and gender in terms of mutually-exclusive hierarchical categories. We analyze the process by which a heteronormative sex-gender-sexuality system is constructed and legitimized to the exclusion of those whose physiology and/or behaviors do not conform to it. We provide some insights into ways in which the extraordinary diversity of sex-gender can be recognized and valued on various social planes, through activism, the production and critique of popular culture, and education.

Keywords

Activism education gender identity heteronormativity transgender

Gender bias and the stereotypes and assumptions upon which sexism relies are fundamentally based on socially constructed associations and categories that have become widely accepted as normal and natural (Wilchins, 2004b). Just as race, a socially constructed category, has had enormous social significance (Law et al., 2004), so too has the social construction of gender into two mutually-exclusive, ‘natural’ and hierarchical categories contributed to marginalization in patriarchal, heteronormative societies (Guasch and Viñuales, 2003). People whose experience does not conform to the gender binary serve to highlight its inadequacy, although their existence tends to be ignored, and their experiences marginalized. Tam Sanger’s interviews with trans people and their intimate partners demonstrate how the experiences of people situated ‘beside’ the gender binary illustrate ‘some of the junctures at which norms may fail and therefore be open to reconstruction’ (2008: 49).

In this article we look at ways in which the sex-gender status quo is constructed as well as contested in three principle social arenas: political activism, popular culture, and schooling. First, we analyse some recent trends in social activism that promote such conceptual changes, as well as some specific examples of arts-based media and humour that have begun to blur the lines between popular culture and social movements. Finally, we look at ways in which traditional sex-gender-sexuality constructs are reinforced in schools, and how these might be challenged, including an example of a community–school collaboration in which one of the authors participated as a researcher.

While much of the research analyzing such gender concepts has been conducted in North American (Slesaransky-Poe and Garcia, 2009) and European (Gil, 2008) contexts, we argue that they are widespread either because they are fundamental as well to other cultures (see for example Najmabadi, 2008, for an analysis of Iranian culture) or because they are transmitted though globalizing forces such as colonization, capitalism, and popular media (Leung, 2006). It is important to keep in mind, however, that while certain understandings of gender and sexuality may be exported along with medicine, toys, cartoons, and academic scholarship, this does not imply passive, uncomplicated, or even unidirectional exchanges within or across cultures (Corboz, 2009). In our analysis of popular heteronormative understandings and their contestations, we draw largely upon the USA, UK, and Spanish contexts in which we have lived and worked.

Heteronormative sex-gender-sexuality categories: the social construction of ‘natural’

The original coining of the term ‘heteronormativity’ is often attributed to Berlant and Warner (1998), who use the term to define a set of practices and assumptions which serve to render heterosexuality not only coherent but also privileged. They argue that heteronormative assumptions are supported by popular cultural scripts (such as love plots) as well as material institutions (such as family and marriage law). This early analysis focused largely on sexuality, but it soon became clear that in patriarchal societies sexuality cannot easily be teased out from its entanglements with sex-gender, class, race and ethnicity:

I would understand heteronormativity to refer to those norms related to gender and sexuality which keep in place patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality as well as other systems and ideologies related to power such as religious fundamentalism, casteism, the class system and so on (recognizing that these axes of power intersect with each other). (Sharma, 2009: 53)

The implication of sex-gender in heteronormativity has been at the forefront of much trans activism. The term ‘trans’ encompasses the wide range of histories and experiences of individuals whose sense of self does not conform to the gender assigned to them at birth. Some of these individuals feel themselves to be unambiguously male or female, but are not socially recognized as belonging to the sex-gender category with which they identify, while others feel that their gendered identities are not adequately encompassed by either gender category (Girshick, 2008; Serano, 2007; Stryker and Whittle, 2006; Wilchins, 2004b). Intersex individuals, whose physical sex exceeds our binary sex categories, remind us that even medical science is socially constructed (Colapinto, 2000; Martínez-Patiño, 2005). Furthermore, sex-gender categories, as they interface with similarly rigid categories of sexuality, can blend and blur in ways that exceed human social systems. Gayle Rubin has described these sex-gender-sexuality categories as inevitably provisional and leaky, ‘Categories like “butch”, “lesbian”, or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, arbitrary, and temporary’ (2006: 479).

Susan Stryker has argued that transgender experiences challenge the very relationship of a particularly sexed body with a particular gendered subjectivity upon which heteronormative systems depend for coherence. She describes the emergence of Transgender Nation (1992–1994) as among the first social movements to focus on more informed understandings of sex-gender as an argument for social reform, ‘We argued that sexual orientation was not the only significant way to differ from heteronormativity — that homo, hetero, and bi in fact all depended on similar understandings of “man” and “woman”, which trans problematized’ (Stryker, 2008: 146–147). In 1993 Transgender Nation organized a protest at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association to bring media attention to the way in which the mental health and medical field continued to pathologize trans gender (Stryker, 2004). These liberatory visions of sex-gender have been circulating in the streets since Transgender Nation initiated a campaign of public education nearly 20 years ago (although perhaps without extending much beyond certain sectors of certain US cities where the movement took hold). Nevertheless, we argue, strong cultural traditions and political interests, which rely on the heteronormative status quo (Rofes, 2005), render this kind of education as difficult and necessary as it was in the early days of the trans activist movement.

As early as 1949 feminist philosopher Simone De Beauvoir began the call for a denaturalization of gender with the publication in France of her celebrated book Le Deuxième Sexe, although it was not until 1953 that these ideas reached the English-speaking world with its translation as The Second Sex (De Beauvoir, 1953). With her now-famous assertion that one is not born a woman but becomes one, the socially constructed nature of gender became a pillar of the second wave feminism that was born in North America in the 1970s (Burgos, 2008).

It was around this time that the theory and controversial practice of sexologist John Money began to have an influence on notions of sex and gender. Nevertheless, while, from a feminist perspective, the social construction of gender was a conceptual tool deployed in the struggle for women’s liberation, Money’s work ultimately reproduced binary notions of sex-gender. He proposed that the newborn was gender ‘neutral’, so that in cases of babies born with ‘ambiguous’ genitalia, ‘reparative’ surgery should be performed before the age of two and a half years, and the corresponding gender should be assigned to the child and socially reinforced (Money and Ehrhardt, 1972). The highly publicized failure of the John/Joan case (as documented in the autobiography of the subject, see Colapinto, 2000) might be seen to discredit early feminist understandings of gender. However, these understandings of gender as a social construction have little to do with the idea that gender should be forcibly constructed through the violent imposition of the physician’s will.

Nearly half a century went by before another feminist voice described the social construction not only of gender but of sex itself with the publication of Gender Trouble (Butler, 1990). Rather than assuming sex to be a natural and pre-discursive substrate from which one can ‘become’ female, Butler questioned the ‘natural’ sexual binary and proposed that sex and gender are not so easily differentiated, as they are both subject to cultural interpretations (but see Jay Prosser’s concerns that some more stable trans experiences of gender might be undermined in such understandings, 2006).

The failure of the binary construction of sex-gender at the level of complex organisms is exemplified by what have been referred to as ‘intersex conditions’ in newborn babies (Harper, 2007). According to The American Academy of Pediatrics, the more current terminology, Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD), comprises ‘congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomic sex is atypical’ (2006: e488). The Academy recommends that decisions to conduct genital surgery on children be based on ‘functional outcome rather than a strictly cosmetic appearance’ (2006: 491), although they recognize the social factors involved; ‘It is generally felt that surgery that is performed for cosmetic reasons in the first year of life relieves parental distress and improves attachment between the child and the parents; the systematic evidence for this belief is lacking’ (2006: 491, our emphasis). The human need to adapt biological diversity to the socially constructed sex-gender binary is illustrated by such surgical procedures to ‘relieve parental distress’. Canadian practitioners, for example, use criteria established decades ago by John Money at the Johns Hopkins School of Pediatric Endocrinology that include ‘an overall gender-appropriate appearance’; these interventions can result in feminizing genital surgery that is not medically necessary and may result in the inability to orgasm (Grosfield, 2010).

Intersex activists’ critiques of such surgical procedures comprise one form of social activism that implies a re-conceptualization of the sex-gender status quo. Yet the presence of sexual ‘ambiguity’ at the moment of birth is not the only way in which human diversity exceeds the binary and illustrates its limitations. Such diversity manifests itself in a variety of cases where physical characteristics fail to match up with gendered social expectations. It is not infrequent to find women with facial hair or unusually low voices and men with no facial hair and unusually high voices. Any attempt to find binary logic in sex-based traits begins to raise important questions: Are post-menopausal women less fully women? Do men who contract breast-cancer cease to be fully men? These observations suggest that, socio-political demands notwithstanding, gender is more accurately described as a continuum rather than as a binary, with manifestations grouped in terms of frequency and probability but not categorically excluded or included based on external and at times arbitrary legal, medical or social criteria (Roughgarden, 2004).

Society’s reaction to those who display ‘inappropriate’ gender traits, such as women with visible body hair or men with what have come to be disparagingly referred to as ‘man-boobs’ (Boucher, 2008), further demonstrate that the binary gender system is not only insufficient, but oppressive. The process of constructing apparent sexual dimorphism constitutes one of the fundamental projects of patriarchal cultures (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 2000). This inexorable process starts with the very beginning of life in the womb and extends throughout a person’s lifetime, so that an XX chromosomal combination is assumed to give rise to a ‘feminine’ phenotype and to ‘feminine’ personality traits. An XY chromosomal combination is expected to lead to a ‘masculine’ phenotype as well as those bodily aesthetics, traits and behaviors that are traditionally considered to be ‘masculine’ (Rumbelow, 2008).

The inadequacy of the binary sex-gender system and the fallacy of biological determinism is further highlighted by the diversity of socially legitimate sex-gender identities, such as the xanith of Oman (Wikam, 1998) and the muxe of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in México (Miano, 2002), both of which are defined as neither men nor women: they possess genitals that are culturally labeled as masculine and maintain a masculine appearance and yet may wear women’s makeup and behave as women are expected to; they carry out social roles expected of women but they have the legal status of men; and are generally sexually attracted to men. For western societies, these social positionings involve a great deal of contradiction among sex-gender-sexuality categories.

It is important, however, to refrain from over-idealizing these ‘non-western’ conceptualizations of gender, as they do not necessarily result in the emancipatory ideals that we tend to invest in them (Garber, 2006). At the same time, even in societies such as Spain or the USA where binary gender is widely taken for granted, other physical characteristics are conceptualized in non-binary terms. Height and hair color, for instance, tend to be seen as occurring on a natural continuum; while one may be tall or short, or have black or blonde hair, many people are perfectly comfortable with falling somewhere in the middle. This observation serves to highlight that in a given society certain characteristics are more salient than others in terms of organization and power distribution. As a regulatory factor in a patriarchal society, gender is more salient than height or eye color, and therefore is conceptualized as a binary separating the society’s more and less powerful members into clearly delineated and recognizable categories (Butler, 1990; Serano, 2007; Wilchins, 2004b).

Given the biological diversity available in nature, it is evident that sex and gender are not adequately encompassed by social constructions of sex and gender that rely on binary categories based on a rigid feminine-vaginal, masculine-penile dichotomy (Lameiras and Carrera, 2009). Furthermore, in a patriarchal society, it is no accident that this sexual dimorphism is constructed in terms of a penis–vagina binary, when the clitoris is actually the organ most closely related to the penis (Harper, 2007). In this sense, it is not just the construction of the binary itself that is significant, but the binary terms chosen. While sexual pleasure is arguably an important aspect of the penis, the clitoris, the analogous source of sexual pleasure, cedes its place in the binary to the vagina. This social organization emphasizes the sexual double standard that casts women as asexual beings. By rendering irrelevant and invisible the principal organ of female pleasure and designating the vagina as the only organ capable of ‘signifying’ that the subject is a woman, a woman’s right to enjoy her sexuality is further delegitimized. In this sense, not only are genitals used to reinforce the binary they supposedly signify, excluding those whose existence is not encompassed in this binary, but certain genital discourses reinforce sexist assumptions that remind us that this binary is not a balanced one.

Biology, medicine, and anthropology provide ample evidence that beyond the rigid model of social desirability, beyond the linearity assumed by the rigid congruence of genital (penis–vagina) and gender (masculine–feminine) duality and by a hegemonically heterosexual orientation, there exists a broad diversity of identities. These identities subvert and transgress binary sex-gender and highlight the possibility of situating oneself in the world with the other by means of a body that is sexed in a radically different way (Currah, 2008; DePalma, in press). We refer here to other legitimate identities, to other ways of being a person that exist outside the margins of penis–vagina, man–woman dichotomies and heteronormative constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality (Ansara, 2008).

Trans perspectives on sex-gender

Trans people may use a variety of terms to describe themselves, including un-gendered, gender queer, intersex or simply ‘human’ (Girshick, 2008). We use the stand-alone term ‘trans’ here, which was deliberately coined as an inclusive term in British parliamentary equalities negotiation in 1998 (Whittle, 2006), although we recognize that there is no term that can adequately capture the reality of gender diversity. Serano (2007) cautions, however, that the very inclusivity of the term may blur the distinctions among its diverse constituents.

It is the recognition of innumerable distinct yet potentially shifting possibilities, rather than the creation of ever more separate and mutually-exclusive categories, that we hope to take from trans perspectives on gender. For some, this diversity might imply fluidity and/or ungendered positionings, while others claim fixed gender identities that conflict with our perceptions and call into question our right, as spectators, to assign gender based on secondary (or primary) sex characteristics, dress, behaviors and preferences. Yet what these diverse trans experiences do have in common is their potential strategic deployment in a ‘politics of incoherence’ (Peetoom, 2009), where certain embodiments that are rendered incoherent or ambiguous can be strategically deployed as a political challenge to the very normative systems that define them as such. For men (FTMs) these radical embodiments may include a history of girlhood, experience living as a lesbian, bodies that are never anatomically the same as their normatively gendered male counterparts. For women (MTFs), the rejection of the male privilege afforded them at birth constitutes a challenge to male supremacy, and leaves them open to ridicule – first for being inadequate and weak men and subsequently for failing to meet the absurd expectations of femininity to which all women are subjected (Serano, 2007).

Such a politics of (gender) incoherence has contributed significantly to political struggles that have come to be largely associated with sexuality. Beginning with the Compton Café riots in San Francisco in 1966 and the Stonewall Inn Riots in New York in 1969, trans activists have participated in what was then usually considered to be the gay rights movement in the USA (Stryker, 2008). Drag queen and street worker Sylvia Rodriguez was a founding member of ‘gay’ activists’ groups Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance in New York (see Rivera, 2002, for her autobiographical account of these early activist days). As Corvino (2009) points out, the alliance between struggles for rights in terms of non-normative sexualities and sex-genders has been justified by parallels in the ways in which these groups have traditionally been oppressed:

[T]he alliance makes sense insofar as both (overlapping) groups suffer from rigid social expectations about sex and gender. Compare ‘If you’re born biologically male, you should grow up to be a man’ with ‘If you’re born biologically male, you should grow up to love a woman.’ The similarities between the two inferences seem to outweigh the differences. (Corvino, 2009: para 16)

Transphobia and homophobia are usually construed as individual responses of fear, hatred, and disgust, but they are supported by more subtle, underlying heteronormative social processes (Namaste, 2006; Wilchins, 2004b). It is important to recognize how socially constructed, categorical understandings of sex and gender operate in schools and to understand how these social understandings contribute to recognizable acts of violence, inequality, oppression, and exclusion. Indeed, while non-normative sexuality has been at the forefront of critical studies of heteronormativity, Wilchins (2004a) suggests that gender lies at the root of both homophobia and sexism and affects not just the minority of people who can be contained under the heading of ‘transgender’, but anyone who transgresses, consciously or not, gender roles.

The primacy of sex-gender in the policing of heteronormativity is illustrated again and again across the world, from the barring of a US student from her school yearbook for wearing a tuxedo instead of a dress (Geen, 2009), to the assertion of Bolivia’s president that female hormones in chicken cause men to become gay (Pink News, 2010a), to the arrest of cross-dressing men in Saudi Arabia (Grew, 2009), to the arrest of a Pakistani man for allegedly trying to marry a trans woman (Pink News, 2010b), to the UK’s refusal to grant residency to a Malaysian trans woman married to a UK citizen, despite evidence that her life would be in danger upon deportation (Brocklebank, 2010), to the murder of a gay cross-dressing Puerto-Rican teenager allegedly ‘when [the killer] discovered he was a man’ (Pink News, 2010c: para. 4).

Simply providing legal rights for trans people does not necessarily provide a way out of the heteronormative straitjacket. This is abundantly demonstrated by the extreme case of Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death, yet where the second highest number of sex-reassignment surgeries in the world are carried out. One recent news article featured an Iranian woman who planned to marry the girl she had dated since they were teenagers; of course, in order to secure her father’s (required) permission, her teenage sweetheart was forced to pass a medical exam proving the completion of a female-to-male sex reassignment (Pink News, 2009a); the documentary film Be Like Others (Eshaghian, 2008) details this Iranian phenomenon. In this context, trans rights not only fail to deter other heteronormative practices (such as the daughter’s submission to her father, the government-sponsored murder of sexual minorities) but they are twisted into an oppressive practice: sex-reassignment is converted from a right to an obligation.

Certainly Iran is not alone in creating legal policies based on impoverished understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality, and how they interrelate. While the Netherlands was a pioneer in 1972 by legally recognizing sex change, this law continues to require forced sterilization as a prerequisite (McCormick, 2012), and many countries’ gender-recognition legislation relies on diagnostic criteria that involve gendered expectations (Carrera et al., in press). Societies need to take up and circulate more realistic and liberating understandings of what constitute men, women, and desire if our legal systems are to go beyond such sex-gender reifications in the name of justice. In the following section, we will take a brief look at political activism and the kinds of human rights that have been fought for and secured, as well as some ways that alternative forms of activism have focused more broadly on social and cultural changes.

Human rights, the law, and the struggle for recognition

Any struggle for freedom, human rights, and legal protection involves a struggle to be recognized, a conceptual struggle that can translate into very real infringements of human rights for some people. While the law’s responsibility may be limited to ensuring the protection and safety of individuals, these protections may not always extend to those who fall outside the realm of what is acceptable, legitimate, and comprehensible:

For us to be recognized in our gender identities for the purposes of identity documents (passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses), marriage (which raises the issues of inheritance, child custody and visitation, immigration, and health benefits), placement in sex-segregated facilities (bathrooms, prisons, jails, homeless shelters, group homes, drug treatment facilities), and so much more, courts and administrative agencies demand detailed evidence about our bodies and our conformity to medical standards of binary gender. While any recognition of our gender identities at all is a welcome improvement, I am deeply concerned about any aspect of or struggle for liberation that involves adopting or affirming legal and medical definitions of binary gender that privilege people whose bodies ‘match’ their identities according to those standards and/or who desire or can afford treatments that would create such uniformity. (Spade and Wahng, 2004: 248)

As Spade and Wahng point out, legal recognitions that simply permit individuals to pass from one binary category to the other exclude those who, for whatever reason, do not fit this binary ideal. Effective legislation must take up a more sophisticated understanding of sex and gender. Thomas Hammarberg, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, has written an issue paper entitled ‘Human Rights and Gender Identity’, a document that clearly illustrates how important it is that those who advocate for human rights understand the complexities faced by those who demand these rights. He begins by recognizing that gender identity is not only salient for those who request medical procedures, but also for those who choose not to engage in surgical or hormonal modifications as well as those who ‘do not fit the narrow categories of “male” or “female”.’ He goes on to point out that ‘Many legal frameworks only seem to refer to transsexual persons, leaving out a decisive part of the community’ and to recommend that, since most legal protections extend only to people who undergo ‘gender reassignment’ surgery, gender identity should be explicitly included in legislation in order to protect cross dressers and people who simply live their gender differently without medical intervention (Hammarberg, 2009).

While some more recent legislation has moved beyond requiring medical interventions as a basic requirement for gender recognition, many continue to require medical documentation of a psychiatric disorder and its treatment. Even the most progressive and inclusive legal provisions for trans people, such as procedures for legal recognition of sex on identity documents and legal name changes in Spain, the UK, and Sweden, for example, are based on the diagnosis of a mental illness (for example, Gender Identity Disorder or gender dysphoria). Aside from the obvious stigma involved in being diagnosed with a mental disorder, the notion of gender dysphoria also serves to reinforce a binary and immutable understanding of gender. Recognition of acquired gender in the UK, for example, requires a certificate issued by a Gender Recognition Panel who must be satisfied that the applicant ‘has, or has had, gender dysphoria, has lived in the acquired gender throughout the preceding two years, and intends to continue to live in the acquired gender until death’ (Office of Public Sector Information, 2004).

In Spain, certification by a psychiatrist is required, and the subject is expected to choose a gender-unambiguous name, undergo a regime of hormone therapy so that the secondary sex characteristics conform to those expected for the new sex-gender, and ‘adapt to the new social role.’ (Carrera et al., in press). These kinds of requirements illustrate Butler’s (1990) ‘interpellation of gender’: the subject’s new gender is called into being through a series of socially constructed claims – this is a (legitimate) boy’s/girl’s name, this is a (legitimate) boy’s/girl’s body, these are (legitimate) boy’s/girl’s behaviors. The situation is similar in the Netherlands where, while sex reassignment is available, the gender binary remains strong and people tend to believe it is clearly rooted in biology (Hekma, 2004).

Legislation and policy tend to focus on short-term solutions that may indeed respond to an urgent need, such as separate prison facilities for transitioning trans inmates in Italy (Pink News, 2010d). However, debates need to continue and legal responses need to adjust themselves to some issues that here remain unresolved: Will (transitioning female to male) men and (transitioning male to female) women be housed separately? Will people choose to be placed in the alternative facility or will the state dictate what may be interpreted as forced segregation? What about those people who, as Spade and Wahng (2004) point out, don’t have access to or interest in surgery? These questions are not intended to undermine the tremendous value of this important step forward, nor to question the motives behind it, but to suggest that society’s legal response needs to continually evolve in consultation with the communities it intends to protect, and this will inevitably involve deepening understandings of the issues that need to be addressed.

Social activism for conceptual change

Social activist organizations, as potential community educators, are particularly crucial to these processes of legal and human rights reform. Since the pioneering work of Transgender Nation (1992–1994) mentioned earlier, we have seen a great deal of education and lobbying work aimed at promoting inclusive approaches to sex-gender.

The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC), which was active in the USA from 1995 to 2009, had the stated goal of ‘recognition of issues of gender in the workplace, on campus, and in the halls of Congress’ (Wilchins et al., 2009). The coalition’s broad agenda included a critique of the broad spectrum of gender norms, including restrictive notions of masculinity among young men of color. They have also campaigned against genital mutilation of intersex children and for the inclusion of gender protection in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This very breadth of vision was at times a source of internal strife; group members debated whether their mission was to provide a voice for the transgender community, often ignored or excluded from feminist and lesbian and gay activism, or whether this mission encompassed gender rights for all (Wilchins, 2004b).

In 2009, the group was disbanded, and placed a message on their website that they had come ‘to the happy conclusion that there is a vibrant and expanding core of organizations committed to this work’ (Wilchins et al., 2009). Among their accomplishments they list a campaign to support university student leaders in ensuring that their institutions’ anti-bullying policies include gender identity and expression. By the time they disbanded they counted 152 universities, including the entire Ivy League, among those whose policies met the standards of GenderPAC’s campaign (Wilchins et al., 2009).

Gendered Intelligence, an organization currently active in the UK, provides a range of activities that include arts programs and workshops for trans youth, professional development, and trans awareness training aimed at raising awareness of young trans people’s experiences and needs. On their website (Gendered Intelligence, 2008) the group defines ‘gendered intelligence’ as:

a sensitivity or attunement to moments when gender or gendered expressions appear in the world in ways that raise interest or cause for debate. This might be a political moment where power is brought into play. If you think about what happens when certain behaviors which are traditionally carried out by one gender, are lived by another, you can see quickly how roles, jobs, appearances and behaviors, even ways of thinking are all gendered activities.

According to a poll taken at the Gendered Intelligence 2008 Community Conference, nearly a third of the delegates present indicated that they had no desire to fit into the binary categories represented by male/female or man/woman. Some of their notable accomplishments include a youth group facilitated by a Trans Youth Support Worker and funded by the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission as well as professional development on trans awareness for UK metropolitan police. Director Jay Stewart has collaborated with the UK-based educational project No Outsiders (2004–2008) where he conducted workshops for primary school teachers and children on gender (this work is described in more detail later in this article).

La Insurreción Transfeminista (Transfeminist Insurrection) consists of a recently formed coalition of local and regional activist groups that came on the scene in Spain with the web-based publication of their ‘Transfeminist Manifesto’ in January 2010 (The WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network, 2010). Making specific reference to De Beauvoir’s assertion ‘one is not born a woman but becomes one’, the group identifies itself as ‘the rage of radical feminism’, and explicitly includes those marginalized members of society who are usually implicitly excluded from mainstream movements, including ‘dykes, whores, immigrants and hetero-dissidents’.

Although the transfeminist movement in Spain is very young, there has been an associated series of conferences and informal talks throughout the country that is beginning to disseminate trans-gender and transgressive understandings of sex and gender as a basis for social and political activism. For example, a recent university conference on ‘The Question of Gender in the 21st Century’ (Question of Gender, 2010) featured a roundtable discussion entitled ‘From the LGBTQ movement to trans-feminism’ that included a range of local activists who explained their role in the trans-feminist movement in northwestern Spain and Portugal.

These organizations exist alongside others which work for sex-gender rights under the broader umbrella of ‘LGBT’, such as The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association, which has a trans secretariat (ILGA, 2009), and the National LGBT Health Alliance in Australia (2010). Other organizations focus on a particular aspect of sex-gender in society, such as the Transgender Law and Policy Institute in the USA (2007) and Mermaids (2010), a support group for gender variant children and teenagers and their families in the UK.

The groups just highlighted however, share(d) a particular focus on working with youth and an emphasis on recognizing the need to broaden cultural understandings of sex and gender. It is a broad-based activism of education, rather than a more focused activism aimed at inclusion of a particular, clearly defined, marginalized group. The gender curriculum implicit in the work of Spain’s Transfeminist Insurrection or the UK’s Gendered Intelligence applies to anyone who has a gender, since what is called into question here is the very way in which gender is constructed. In many ways, this kind of activism begins to blur the lines between legal advocacy, public education, art/performance, and popular culture. For example, the trans-feminist collective Maribolheras Precárias (2010) based in the north of Spain explicitly defines itself in contrast to LGBT political pressure groups, the members identifying themselves instead as a ‘social and artistic performance group’.

Gendered Intelligence has produced a documentary film in collaboration with trans youth. As their website indicates, a multi-media exhibition at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama and a 35-minute documentary released in 2006 were produced as part of a project that explored how trans youth across the UK understood the relationships among sex, gender, and science. The now-defunct GenderPAC collaborated with a film company called Groundspark, which produced the documentary Straightlaced: How Gender’s got us all Tied Up (Chasnoff, 2009). The film is based on interviews with 50 teens in the exploration of ‘the toll that deeply held stereotypes and rigid gender policing have on all our lives’ (see Chasnoff’s video in Chasnoff, 2009).

These activist documentary film projects take their place in popular culture alongside fictionalized biographies such as Boys Don’t Cry (Peirce, 1999), based on the life of murdered trans teen Brendan Teena and pure fiction such as XXY (Puenzo, 2007), which chronicles the sexual awakening of 15-year-old Alex, who was born with an intersex condition. Indeed, the comments of the Director of XXY on the film’s official website do not seem all that different from those expressed by Gendered Intelligence and Groundspark:

Unknown to most, some babies are born with a condition known as genital ambiguity. XXY is the story of the brutal and transforming moment when a teenager comes to term[s] with her identity. Nothing is [worse] than being afraid of one’s own body, a boy who underwent a normalisation once told me. He grew up with the scars of surgery on his body. In that castration, the fear of genital ambiguity became the metaphor for all the amputations spawned by fear of Difference. (Puenzo, 2010)

And somewhere along that fine line that divides art and activism we find the The MANgina Monologues: A One Trans Show (Wilchins, 2010) starring Riki Wilchins, former director of GenderPAC. Wilchin’s live act humorously addresses themes such as the gender binary and identity politics. This use of humor and parody provide especially effective ways of exploring serious issues such as access to medical care (woman seeking rhinoplasty: ‘Oh doctor, I’ve always felt like a small-nosed woman trapped in a large-nosed woman’s body’) and the policing of gender in public places (e.g. airport security) and private spaces (e.g. toilets).

Along with popular culture production there has been some insightful critique of the ways in which sex-gender tends to be portrayed in the realm of popular culture. These include Serano’s (2007) analysis of society’s fascination with TV programs featuring sex reassignment, which only reinforce popular understandings that sex reassignment is artificial at best and that people who undergo these surgeries are simply mimicking the ‘opposite’ sex. Leung (2006) examines ways in which European and North American narratives of gender subversion may not adequately conceptualize the kinds of transgender subjectivities found in Asian cinema. Halberstam (2005) examines ways in which the transgender body tends to be represented exclusively by the transsexual body in cinema (for example, the FTM protagonist of the film Boys Don’t Cry). By contrast, she argues, the visual arts tend to theorize trans ambiguity through intentionally creating acts of misrecognition (for example, the mutational self-portraits of performance artist Del LaGrace Volcano).

While it may seem on the surface that Halberstam’s analysis of trans representations in visual arts and cinema has little to do with the struggle for human rights, Hammarberg’s observation that legal protections only exist for post-operative transsexual people and Spade and Wahng’s concern that current legal and medical definitions require that bodies ‘match’ recognizable binary gendered identities suggest that the long road to social justice needs to begin with re-imagining current understandings of sex and gender. These re-imaginings form a kind of educational project, whether in the informal sphere of media, popular culture and their critique, or in formal educational institutions.

Education: A trans curriculum

A recent issue of Teachers College Record called for a trans curriculum in schools; one which would serve to break down rigid gender stereotypes that characterize adolescence (McQueen, 2006). The publication of such an article in a well-established (100-year-old) academic teaching journal might suggest that the idea of a trans curriculum is becoming mainstream. However, gender identity, like sexuality, is still considered a taboo subject for young children (DePalma and Atkinson, 2006). Parents in one US school objected to a ‘Shared Community/Mixed Identities’ display that included a multiracial, trans person as one of the 25 local people featured (Williams, 2009). In another US (Catholic) school, an 8-year-old child was not permitted to present as a girl ‘as the girl had already attended the school for three years as a boy, her new appearance as a girl would not help foster a good learning environment for other pupils’ (Pink News, 2009b). These overt exclusions serve to sustain a profound and unspoken system of assumptions about binary, ‘natural’ sex-gender, emerging when the stability of this system is threatened.

Much work focusing on LGBT equality in schools has focused on the presentation of role models (LGBT History Month is celebrated in October in the USA and February in the UK). As one 6th grade teacher puts it, presenting oneself confidently and fully, trans history and all, to students can be an effective teaching technique (Krywanczyk, 2010). While we admire this teacher’s honest and thoughtful practice and support the work of History Month initiatives, we argue that a trans curriculum can and should extend to a broad and systematic interrogation of the construction of sex and gender, and that it can and should be implemented by everyone.

Actually, a trans curriculum is less a question of delivering new material than of unlearning together existing concepts that children pick up implicitly in schools. Even in the absence of an official (cis)gender curriculum, where students are explicitly taught how to be sex/gender normative and consistent, the hidden curriculum (Reay, 2001) of gender is very strong. Everyday gendered school practices can be so completely embedded in our routines that we don’t even see them, much less have the chance to question them. Practices such as lining up, playing games, desk placement and dress codes tend to be organized around (binary) gender, and teachers can often reinforce gender stereotypes in their response to children’s atypical behaviors and preferences in well-meaning attempts to save them from peer pressure (Slesaransky-Poe and García, 2009).

A recent survey (Stonewall, 2009) of UK primary teachers revealed that boys who ‘behave or act like girls’ and girls ‘who behave or act like boys’ are bullied. Green’s (2010) analysis of the experiences of two US high school students who did not conform to gendered school dress codes suggests that schools go beyond enforcing basic standards of decency to policing an arbitrary gender binary, which is not only unnecessary but can be oppressive to gender variant students. A recent study (Carrera, 2010) of Spanish secondary students between 12 and 18 years of age showed that those adolescents who transgress ‘appropriate’ gender roles and stereotypes are highly prone to bullying by peers.

An explicit (trans)gender curriculum designed to address and challenge this implicit one might invite open discussion of not only gender norms and stereotypes, but how we all read gender cues and impose our perceptions and assumptions on others. In three UK primary schools, for example, Jay Stewart, founding director of the organization Gendered Intelligence (described above) was invited to provide workshops for children in Years 2, 5 and 6 (from age 7 to 11). His work included discussions of how we construct notions of boy and girl, how/why gender is assigned at birth, and what it may mean to transgress sex and gender norms – as he explains in his published lesson plans, ‘What is being explored here is the way in which we “read” gender – as children and adults – from culturally determined signals’. (DePalma and Atkinson, 2010: 112).

As part of the same (UK-based) project, Stewart provided a workshop for teachers where they reflected on ways in which their schools unconsciously yet systematically sorted children into boys and girls: segregated sport, school uniforms, and of course, toilets. One teacher, inspired by Jay’s invitation to investigate their own school contexts, provoked parents into considering their own gendered expectations by suggesting at a parent meeting that not only could girls wear trousers as part of their school uniform, but boys would be permitted to wear skirts if they wished. When parents laughed in response, she reflected, ‘These are the parents of 4-year-olds … but already we have determined that it would be strange/odd/laughable if the boys dressed in skirts/tights’ (DePalma and Atkinson, 2007: 73).

Another teacher who works in a UK-based early years setting (birth to 8 years) reflected that the unisex toilets used in her facility are a small but important step toward gender equity. This approach contrasts with the approach taken by one Thai secondary school, which upon discovering that over 200 out of 2600 students identified as transgender, set up a separate trans toilet (Head, 2008). For some trans people toilet segregation can be a source of stress and harassment (see Girshick, 2008; Serano, 2007 for more discussion, and Wilchin’s, 2010 MANgina Monolgues for a humorous treatment), and this issue can be fraught with fears of sexual molestation. One advertising campaign protesting against a law protecting the rights of trans people to choose their own toilets in Gainsville, Florida, played upon such fears by ominously depicting a middle-aged man following a young blonde-haired girl into a toilet (Baker, 2009). Without wishing to undermine the potency of threats to women in secluded public spaces, we suggest that further subdivision of gender categories by devising special trans toilets may just lead to further segregation and marginalization.

Implications: New emancipations require new imaginaries

Taylor defines social imaginaries as ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others … the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (2004: 23). Political struggles for rights and inclusion are only made possible by opening new social imaginaries: Who might be considered a person, and therefore be able to vote, own property, or be protected from slavery? Who might be considered a legitimate romantic partner, parent, man, woman, intelligible human, and how might these people look, act, dress and be named? Society’s response to sex-gender oppression must include a process of creating new imaginaries, ones that go beyond the patriarchal (Ingraham, 1997; Pharr, 1988) and Cartesian (Wilton, 2003) cultural and historical social imaginaries that shape the UK, US, and Spanish contexts explored here, as well as others. This re-imagining will hopefully one day reach the justice system, but creativity, learning and impetus for change requires grassroots participation in popular and educational social spheres (Atkinson, 2002; Kissen, 2002; Kumashiro, 2004).

Some might argue that moving beyond identity politics in terms of the demand for specific lesbian, gay, women’s or transsexual rights to a discourse that disturbs the boundaries between these categories might remove the common ground for resistance (Feminist Activist Forum, 2008), but we do not argue for eliminating the possibility of identifying as woman, as a trans woman, as a woman of trans experience, as an intersex person, and so on. We argue, rather, for opening the spectrum of identity positions available for people to claim legitimately, or to choose not to. Jay Stewart from Gendered Intelligence, responding to adult concerns that he might be trying to create a genderless, ‘gray’ world, explained, ‘It’s about our identity, it’s not about getting rid of any of that. It’s about opening it up and saying you can have more if you want, and you can contradict yourself if you want and you can change your mind in ten years’ time if you want’ (DePalma and Atkinson, 2010: 64).

Yet aside from engaging with new imaginaries, we also need to establish and maintain ongoing dialog about concrete long-term and short-term strategies in terms of what might be lost and what might be gained along every step of the way. For example, in the short run, what would be the effects in particular contexts of removing categorical gender from the political landscape? In some contexts, for example, policies that aim to redress systematic inequalities in terms of hiring quotas or anti-gender violence campaigns might be short-circuited by removing gender as a legally salient category. It might be wise to consider this issue from multiple angles; for example, while the division of professional (and school-based) sports into men’s and women’s competitions may foster equal access for women, cases such as that of Spanish hurdler María José Martiñez Patiño (Martínez-Patiño, 2005) and more recently that of South African runner Caster Semenya (Rumbelow, 2009) call into question the ways in which we define sex and gender for particular purposes and the implications for individuals who ‘fail’ to meet our socially-constructed yet legally binding definitions (Fernhoff, 2010).

It is necessary and urgent that we broaden and reeducate our outlook, opening our eyes and particularly our minds to other realities. The extraordinary sex-gender diversity that we will find should give us pause to consider the extent to which the current heteronormative system serves to perpetuate phallocentric and patriarchal understandings and interests. Education will be, without a doubt, the primary tool for bringing about this change, both in informal settings through the creation and critique of popular culture and in formal school settings through implementation of a systematic (trans) gender curriculum. Projects like these blur the distinction between activism and education, by assuming that effective social change begins with social justice education (DePalma, 2011). And legal and policy interventions, while crucial for advancing human rights, must be critically examined and challenged, revised and reconceptualized until they come into line with a more realistic and more just understanding of sex, gender and the diversity of the human experience.

Footnotes

María Victoria Carrera received her PhD from the University of Vigo (Spain) with a thesis titled ‘Bullying in secondary education: Gendered practices and heteronormative control’ (2010). She is currently an assistant professor at the same university, teaching in the area of theory and history of education. Her research focuses on bullying as a gendered practice of heteronormative control and adopts a feminist postructuralist perspective.

Renée DePalma teaches at the University of A Coruña (Spain). From 2006 to 2009 she was Senior Researcher on the UK-based No Outsiders project, an action research project investigating approaches to address lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in primary schools. The project yielded two books: Undoing Homophobia in Primary Schools (2010) and Interrogating Heteronormativity in Primary Schools: The work of the No Outsiders Project (2009), both published by Trentham books.

Maria Lameiras is a lecturer in Psychology of Sexuality in the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Vigo (Spain). She served as expert consultant in the first national survey concerning sexual and reproductive health, conducted by the Women’s Observatory of the Ministry of Health and Consumption, and served on the committee of experts in the drafting of the National Sexual Health Strategy.

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