Including You!

Grasping Gender in America

To start off I want to talk about the United States. The issues covered in this pocket of literature reflect greatly about our current prognosis of gender in society.

Gender has been a topic of discussion for several hundred years now and I can point to several cases of gender bending just in our own American history.

One of the earliest known descriptions of non-binary genders in a Native American
society was recorded by Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote about seeing
"effeminate, impotent men" who are married to other men and "go about covered-up like women and they do the work of women. They draw the bow and they carry very heavy load" among a group of Coahuiltecan Indians in what is today Southern Texas in the 1530s.

Another one of the first recorded examples involved a servant in the Virginia colony in the 1620s who claimed to be both a man and a woman and, at different times, adopted the traditional roles and clothing of men and women and variously went by the names of Thomas and Thomasine Hall.

Unable to establish Hall's "true" gender,
despite repeated physical examinations, and unsure of whether to punish him/her/them for wearing men's or women's apparel, local citizens asked the court at Jamestown to resolve the issue.

Perhaps because the court too was unable to make a conclusive determination, or perhaps because it took Hall at his/her/their word that Hall was bi-gendered or what would be known today as intersexed, the court ordered Hall in 1629 to wear both a man's breeches and a woman's apron and cap.

The history of gender is blurry. Most people informed on the history of gender note that Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book The Second Sex has been interpreted as the beginning of the distinction between sex and gender in feminist theory.

Shortly after Beauvoir's book Sexologist John Money is credited as the first to introduce a terminological distinction between biological sex and "gender role" (which, as originally defined, includes the concepts of both gender role and what would later become known as gender identity) in 1955.

In some English literature, there is also a trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social gender role. This framework grew popular in the 1970 when World Health Organization adopted Money's theory. Shortly after, gender and sex defined individually first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978.

Gender is a huge topic that is misunderstood, complex, variable and confusing. It has developments, it seems annually, but I assure you that these topics have been discussed since before Ancient Greek's, as they had the word 'Pheno' meaning 'to appear' or 'to shine' as in to draw attention to.

Phenotype is what doctors use to assign gender at birth. The use of a visual examination to determine the sex of an individual based on gonads they have is severely detracting to other significant factors in determining sex.

Let us pause briefly to address gonads versus genitals. Gonads are the ovaries or testicles. Genitals are the external reproductive organ. Based on our current standards we greet males as males because they have what was assumed to be a penis and/or testicles and we greet women based on their stunted exterior growth meaning it is based on genitalia and not actual gender identity or social appearance.

Feminists of my generation understood gender as part of the apparatus of patriarchy: a social system, built on the biological foundation of human sexual dimorphism, which allocated different roles, rights and responsibilities to male and female humans.

To clarify, sex and gender were once an abridged subject. The terms were synonymous. Around the 1920's is when gender was highlighted. This gave way to movements around suffrage. As the conversation kept evolving, gender started to gain traction and become separate from sex.