THE COST of GENDER

by Jaime Harker & tHeresa starkey

The cost of gender is largely invisible in the mainstream and rarely discussed in the media, but one’s gender frequently comes with a real cost–not only in terms of money. Gender causes stress, limits access, creates barriers to advancement, and prevents opportunities from materializing. Some of these losses and barriers you can see, but sometimes you don’t know about other possibilities because they are never shown to you.

We inherit, in Western cultures like the United States, a binary gender system at birth. It is presented as a ‘natural’ system, one that defines femininity and masculinity in specific, essentialist ways, and insists that all people are exclusively defined as one or the other. The gender binary, of course, isn’t natural; it is a gendered ideology, one that is raced, classed, and grounded in nationalism and cultural specificity. Though this gender system manifests differently in particular nations, regions, hemispheres, and languages, the language we use to describe gender suggests that it is fixed, unchanging, and an objective description of a natural, God-given order.

To talk about the gender system as an ideology is not to ignore the body; it is, rather, to see how our understanding of the body is mediated by this ideology. Biologists, for example, quantify gender variance: there is a huge disparity of size and appearance of what we term “sex characteristics,” variance that we obscure when we talk about “two genders.” There are also a statistically significant number of babies who are intersex, who are born with XXY or XYY chromosomes, or whose sex is not easily determined; this condition is often “corrected” surgically based on appearance, not chromosomes. Extensive plastic surgery, hormones, and other body modifications are often performed on those with XX chromosomes to be more “feminine” or those with XY chromosomes to be more “masculine.” We frequently discipline the body to match our ideological expectations, rather than acknowledging the huge range of gender variance in our “natural” state.

We are encouraged to understand ourselves through the binary system and internalize those ideologies. We know the social script of gender that we are expected to perform, and we know the consequences of not adhering to that script. We are interpellated as male or female; Louis Althuss- er defined interpellation as the moment the state, through its pervasive ideology, names you as a particular identity. When, for example, a policeman says “Hey you!” and you turn in response, you have been interpellated by the state.

We are interpellated by the gender binary system from our earliest moments. All of us can name some moments where we were interpellated by the gender system. Just in the office, we share these examples: Kevin’s mother bought him a Barbie to practice brushing hair, and when he enjoyed that present, his father tried to counteract it by buying him a shotgun that was taller than he was. When Theresa went to the playground with her short hair, pants, and Star Wars shirt, the other girls and boys said to her, “You aren’t a girl! You are a boy!” She had to claim she was a girl, when really she enjoyed that androgynous freedom before it was labeled. Jaime was forced to wear a skirt to her weekly church youth meeting on Wednesday, so she replaced her jeans with a wraparound skirt but kept her tube socks, tennis shoes, and t-shirt exactly the same, scandalizing the church ladies. There are countless moments like these, a repetition of gendered interpellation that forms a seemingly inescapable web. Whether we are punished for not conforming or starved by conforming all too well, all of us pay the price of being in such an inflexible ideological system, one which strives to define the terms and limit the conversation.

Can we imagine a world beyond this gender binary system? As Riki Williams argues in the ground-breaking anthology, Genderqueer, transgressing the conventions of the gender binary provides “a hint of another kind of person we might have been if only we didn’t inhabit a world where every one of eight billion human beings must fit themselves into one of only two genders” (13). The costs of masculine, feminine, trans, and genderqueer are multiple and various, but they all stem from the same system. How do we account for these costs? What are their long-term effects? How do we make them visible and how do we lessen them?

The articles below are by no means exhaustive, but they serve as case studies that reveal the hidden cost of gender. Before we can imagine a world outside the ideology of the gender binary, we need to see and account for the costs of the system we occupy. We hope to continue this exploration throughout the coming academic year.