The issue of gender inequality is often positioned as a petty war between men and women, in which place and space is being unjustly encroached upon. It is often verbalised with rhetoric that reduces power relations to jealousy and bitterness on account of women who just can’t seem to accept their biologically sanctioned fate. That some of us were born with penises and others with vaginas is a fact, but what that fact means for our lives is but the tip of a very big iceberg – half of which is hardly even considered.
When we talk about gender, many foregone conclusions run ahead of us without a moment’s notice. The first conclusion is often that gender, categorised into man and woman, is a result of biological sex, categorised into male and female. The truth is firstly that neither of these things are linked by some force of nature, but that we have linked them as a way to organise and structure society. This organisation is made for the purposes of designating power.
The second conclusion is that biological sex, which supposedly informs gender, is a fact of nature and the meanings we attach to it is divinely ordained. When a baby is born with a penis or a vagina, the choice that was first made to call it a male or female was and still is a social construction. We named bodies according to the genitals they had. This naming is not in and of itself a problem, but the meanings we attach to those names are. The idea that a baby born with a vagina is a female and destined to become a girl and later a woman is something we made up, so that we can create a society that naturalises inequality. This is something we see an abundance of evidence for.
Attached to these ideas is the fantasy that gender and sex exist in a binary, where only two polar opposite expressions gender can be derived from. The existence of intersex people, who have multiple sexualities and gender expressions and are not some medical fault, disputes the binary fantasy of sex and its links to neatly preconceived gender identities and expressions.
The existence of trans people disputes the idea that the sex a baby is assigned at birth because of their genitals is an affirmation of the gender identity and expression they will one day embody. These realities are of course easily dismissed, because trans and gender-diverse lives are rarely admitted as lives in the first place. More importantly, our lives so effortlessly deconstruct the possibilities that the rules of binary gender seek to deny, but we do not exist to prove anything.
When I first came out as a gay man, and the anxiety around the consequences for my sexuality finally dissipated, I was subtly, but sternly warned by those around me that my deviance could not extend into my gender. That was to say that my sexuality was accepted on condition that my gender remained recognisable. Though I did not perceive it at the time, that was how I was reminded of my agreement with a gendered world – one which my maleness could be relied upon to maintain and endorse. Though I was a lesser man, I was still a man who could be used by patriarchy.
Today, just over 10 years later, my affinity for sometimes wearing what we have termed “women’s clothing” always finds a way to link back to my genitals and its safety. I realise every time this conversation resurfaces just how arbitrary the meanings are that we attach to gender, and how we attach gender to arbitrary things.
A question we must grapple with is: “What does gender mean and why have we attached it to bodies that need no qualification to exist?” We must grapple meaningfully with our obsession with power and the need to control human bodies.
• Khan is an author and PhD candidate in critical diversity studies
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