Body, Sex And Gender

Your chromosomes determine your sex, which determines your genitalia and ultimately determines your gender- this is the stage on which the conservative rightist belief is based. It seems to be their prerogative based on what they call ‘natural’, but that begs the question- what is ‘natural’ anyways?

It is quite amusing how many people confuse the societal ‘normal,’ that is a direct result of our socialisation, with what is ‘natural’. We often confuse repetition with what is natural. If we experience the abnormal incessantly, it becomes regular and consequently normal. While ‘natural’ pertains to being produced by nature, normal refers to something that conforms to a standard– and this standard itself is nothing but a mere social construction.

Intersex

The whole argument regarding intersex people seems to be annihilated from the discourse on gender by the rightists. They are seen as ‘abnormal’ and ‘unnatural’ and wrongfully so, since they are a product of nature itself. Thus, it is almost eerie how strictly the gender binary, forced upon all these indigenous people due to colonisation, has now metamorphosed into what is considered normal. The gender binary seems far from unnatural or a construct and has come to be more and more inextricably inseparable from our concept of the body. Colonisation itself had a huge role in how we have come to perceive gender in recent times. The binary that seems to be so normal and the obvious now was not different from forced social constructs by the colonisers on the natives.

Argentine Philosopher Maria Lugones developed the concept of Coloniality of Gender, which explores how European colonialism influenced and imposed European gender structures on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and this does not stop there, but rather proliferates to India, Indonesia, Mexico, Madagascar, and so on.

The Indian society recognizes the Hijras (hermaphrodite and intersex people) as the third gender now, yet there are still anti-Hijra sentiments flaring throughout the country. This differs largely from how it was pre-colonisation. Gender non-conforming people were celebrated and even considered to have phantasmagorical powers. However, in recent centuries, a stigma arose against hijras, prompted by British colonialism; in fact, a 1871 British law (The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871) categorised all hijras as criminals, creating the consequent oppression of the community that continues to persist.

Sakalava tribe from Madagascar

In Madagascar, the Sakalava people, indigenous to Madagascar, recognise the gender Sekrata- people with male sexual characteristics who are raised as girls by their families after displaying behavior viewed as feminine during childhood. They adopt a feminine identity, and as adults, they do not occupy traditionally male roles, but rather undertake responsibilities such as performing in ceremonies. They, too, are widely held as sacred and protected by supernatural power.

And in Indonesia, the Bugis people recognize five genders, including the binary genders- makkunrai, oroané, bissu, calabai, and calalai.

Contrary to the above actual instances of gender crossing the binary it seems normal enough to many that someone with a penis is a man and someone with a vagina is a woman. However, by assigning genitalia with gender, one confuses sex (biological and associated with the body) with gender (social).

Biological sex refers to the sexual organs one is born with, and thus it relates to nature or biology. On the other hand, gender is what we become, as famously quoted by Simone de Beauvoir- “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilisation as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine.”- this quote, as Judith Butler says, appropriates and reinterprets the doctrine of constituting acts from the phenomenological tradition. She goes on to elucidate how gender is in no way a stable identity or a locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity instituted through a stylised repetition of acts. These acts are those of affirmation that we do every day to reaffirm the gender that aligns with our sex. This is how we ‘do’ gender, rather than ‘being’ it. She further connects the Body with the construct of gender – “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time.”

Thus, gender is far from being similar to sex, sex being biological and gender being an idea that is constructed around the sex or the body. “The sex is constructed into an idea, the fact of having a penis is granted pertinence- thus it is not biology which is destiny. Rather, what we make of biology, what we do to our anatomy, is what gives meaning to the fact of sex,” says V. Geetha, a popular Indian feminist writer.

Judith Butler

“When Beauvoir claims that 'woman' is a historical idea and not a natural fact, she clearly underscores the distinction between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity. To be female is, according to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to a historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project. The notion of a 'project', however, suggests the originating force of a radical will, and because gender is a project which has cultural survival as it send, the term 'strategy' better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs”- writes Butler in their essay, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” where they use phenomenology to question the Body and its association to gender.

Social media trends are the biggest rendition of the “trendy” political beliefs. Gender essentialism, too, has been a big part of it, with the Andrew Tate sigma male/alpha male content on one side and the trad wife, “how to be more feminine tips”, “I’m just a girl” trend, etc. Gender-essentialism is a sect of bio-essentialism, and is the belief that individuals, particularly women and men, possess inherent, unchanging qualities or traits determined by their biological sex. There has been an exorbitant rise in what V. Geetha calls the “War of the Sexes,” or in simpler terms, gender essentialism. These lead to the rise in polarisation among the genders, particularly the socially acceptable ones- men and women, which not only harms any effort or activism towards gender equality but also renders the non-binary genders (used as an umbrella term here), non-existent. This type of content reaffirms the hierarchical binary of the genders onto their audience, straying further and further away from the idea of gender as a spectrum.

Based on Beauvoir and Butler’s theory of gender constitution, gender comes to be seen as a cultural or social entity. One isn’t associated with their gender simply because, but rather since they conform to the set of actions assigned to the social ideal of that gender. Gender, one may argue, is thus a culmination of our actions or what we do.  If gender is a performance or something we “do”, it cannot be contained in a binary and surely isn’t a dichotomy but a spectrum.

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