Guest post: Sexuality, not “gender roles”
Originally a comment by Artymorty on They are pretending they have the right to be certain.
I’d like to offer at least a partial concession to Silent Bob’s argument about gender being “assigned at birth.”
If we take gender to broadly mean the sets of customs and behaviours that are expected of us based on how we’re perceived sexually, then in most other cultures, people really are assigned a gender at birth — they’re assigned a very specific cultural role in their community. Elsewhere in the world, your observed sex at birth will determine which gender role you are assigned, and this will determine which clothing and jewellery you can and cannot wear, which hairstyles you can and cannot adopt, what kinds of work you can and cannot do, which sexual partners you can and cannot have, and what rights you do and do not have.
The thing is, the more a culture loosens the rules about what men and women can and can’t do, the less the idea of “gender roles” makes sense. If it’s no longer illegal or taboo for a man to wear a dress and grow his hair long and have sex with men, there’s no need for such men to deny that they’re men.
In Samoa, for example, which maintains extremely strict and segregated masculine and feminine gender roles, it’s a man’s job to cut open a coconut. I saw a video of a butch lesbian in Samoa, defiantly cutting open coconuts, to show that she has a mascuine gender. She recognizes that she’s female, but because she’s butch (and gay) in a culture where these attributes break the rules that apply to women, she perceives herself as inhabiting a masculine gender — fa’afatana, in the way of a man, akin to a “trans man”, or perhaps more closely to a “nonbinary” female. She’s well aware that she’s female, but she doesn’t see herself as a woman, because to her, woman is a gender role.
But in the US and Canada we don’t prohibit women from cutting open coconuts. She’d have no need to identify as anything but a woman here. Because gender roles are gone, at least in law, and the only thing left that the words “man” and “woman” refer to is our sex.
So why has the idea that everybody needs a “gender role” come roaring back with a vengeance since social media came along? It’s probably partly to do with increased pressure to conform to stereotypes. It may be legal for a woman to open a coconut here, but if her social media feed has nothing but images of Kardashian clones she may develop a sense that she’s alienated from “woman” as a category of person and seek to find a label that doesn’t make her feel bad.
But there’s a far, far bigger factor at play. Man and woman may not denote “gender roles” in our culture anymore, but they still denote sex categories. Sexuality, not “gender roles”, is the primary reason men claim to be women in the Euro-American world today. To put it bluntly: when gay men pretend to be women, it’s because they want to look sexually attractive to straight men, and when straight men pretend to be women, it’s because they want to look sexually attractive to themselves. And when women pretend to be men, it’s often because they’re trying to get away from male sexual attention.
You can see this in the different ways men and women endorse gender identity ideology: many women mistakenly think it’s about liberating people from sex-based oppression: they think females who identify as male or nonbinary are freeing themselves from the threat of male sexual assault, and they think the same of men who identify as trans. But men like Silent Bob don’t see it as freedom from danger but an expansion of choice. To men, crossdressing guys in women’s bathrooms equals more freedom because more choice. To the women who believe in gender ideology, crossdressing guys in women’s bathrooms equals more freedom because less danger.
It’s the total conquest of straight men’s rights over feminism and gay rights, masquerading as liberation.
I hope Silent Bob reads this and has a think.
I’ve been thinking for this for a while and I don’t think I buy the AGP explanation or at least the way that it’s conventionally understood. I remember that a few years back reading here about a TIM who despite “making all the tight moves” (literally , I think dancing on a bar was involved) just couldn’t attract any male interest. So I suspect that what we are calling AGP is really about straight men’s envy of what they imagine is women’s ability to arouse sexual interest. Of course, it never occurs to them that there are many women who can’t simply get up on a bar and have men instantly salivating over them like Pavlov’s dogs because for them “woman” equals “sexually attractive woman” and for them sexually attractive woman is such a narrow category. (For example, no one over her mid-thirties – I’m looking at you Don Lemon.) Like MRAs and incels, they just never bother to think about any other kind of woman, much less inform themselves about the realities of women’s lives. So we get idiots like India Willoughby wittering on about shopping and all the other things he thinks will allow to perform the role of sexually attractive woman. (He should start a blog giving Photoshop tips because that’s the only thing that actually does the trick.)
Not perfect, but a good illustration that there is no single ‘trans community.’ Femme teenage boys, desperately self-hating adolescent girls, and hulking bathroom creeps are NOT a single group.
@Francis Boyle
I’ve read quite a lot about AGP and I’ve spoken with many people who have the condition. A key point that confuses people is that when they dress up they’re not interested in attracting other people at all. Autogynephilia is strictly about making themselves feel good. They are sexually and romantically attracted to their own bodies, so they have a compulsion to adorn their own bodies with things that would signal (to themselves) that they have female bodies. They often look dramatically different than homosexual transsexuals because the goal for many HSTS is to look “conventionally attractive” by straight men’s standards, while many AGPs are perfectly content looking far from “conventionally attractive” by other men’s standards, or have managed to delude themselves that they look absolutely gorgeous, because it doesn’t really matter to them whether straight men (or gay women) find them attractive.
I gotta say, that certainly must cut down on a lot of effort and expense, not to mention risk of rejection or abandonment.
They certainly don’t care about risking rejection from straight men or society at large, but sexual rejection from lesbians drives some AGP men to a state of narcissistic rage. But I don’t think they’re even trying to make themselves look attractive to lesbians; they just think they’re entitled to lesbian sex no matter what they look like.
*Not all AGPs of course. Many men with AGP just quietly keep it to themselves, or try to dress in conservative but feminine clothing and otherwise get on with life.
Artymorty
Well, I’ll certainly defer to your much greater knowledge and understanding of the matter. I’m probably just trying to understand this thing for myself. I’ve always been struck by that scene in the Naked Civil Servant where Quentin Crisp is flirting with the sailors and he says in VO something like it was wonderful fantasy because he was being accepted for what he was, when he knew that the men he was attracted to would never be attracted to someone like him. (It’s a long time since I watched it so I might have got it muddled.) The reason I gave up my brief adolescent (and private) flirtation with cross dressing was that I knew with complete certainty even at that young age that it wouldn’t in any way make me attractive to those who I was attracted to, that is women. But something like AGP was there alongside more conventional sexuality. And I know personally the desire to be desired the way I personally desire the woman I desire. (Too many desires there but I hope the point is clear.) So I don’t doubt that there are cases of pure AGP but I suspect that sometimes it’s a mixture, as sexuality tends to be. Or maybe that’s just me.