Gender and Genitalia

What defines male and female?

The New York Times reports today that New York City is likely to adopt a proposal to allow transgender people to change the gender on their birth certificate even if they have not had reassignment surgery.

First, a primer on what is meant by “transgender.” Let us make a clear distinction – even as we acknowledge that these are blurry boundaries – between drag performers, or gender illusionists, who take on an alternate persona for the purpose of entertainment, transvestites or crossdressers, who enjoy dressing up as the opposite gender as a form of recreation, and people who suffer from gender identity disorder. One is an act, one is a hobby and the last is a psychological condition where a person’s self-perception of their gender does not match their genitalia.

This is a new and shocking social frontier for many of us, and let me be the first to admit I don’t fully understand it, myself – and to that end, I apologize in advance to any transfolks who might read this and infer insensitivity where really there is only ignorance.

Are men and women really only defined by their genitalia? Of course not. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus trying to explain what the differences are, we’d have books called Men Have Penises and Women Have Vaginas, and it would be a very short book. A pamphlet, even. We wouldn’t have academic studies about why boys and girls tend to perform differently in school and we wouldn’t have had a big to-do when Larry Summers tried to explain why there aren’t as many women scientists. He could have said, “Because they have vaginas,” and, if that were truly what determined gender, he might have been right and that would have been the end of it.

In this year’s New York Court of Appeals ruling on same-sex marriage, Judge R.S. Smith argued that marriage should be limited to opposite-sex couples because “a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like.” I don’t think he meant that children need to be shown a penis and a vagina every day to avoid confusion.

We can debate whether gender stereotyping is right or wrong, but however we feel about it we must admit it exists, and it starts at birth: babies with vaginas are dressed in pink, and babies with penises in blue. Some children get Barbies as presents, and some get fire trucks, and what they have between their legs determines how we talk to them, how we encourage them to behave, and what we expect of them. Yet when we say to children, “You need to behave like a big boy now” or “Act like a man,” that doesn’t really have anything to do with their penis. We usually perceive who is a man and who is a woman without needing to check below the belt. Quite simply put, one’s gender identity consists of a lot more than a reproductive organ.

[On a side note, we should really examine our ambivalence about our sexual organs, and why it is that we call people dicks, pussies and cunts.]

Gender is defined by more than genital status, and since hormone therapy and reassignment surgery are not covered by insurance (not to mention this country has 45 million uninsured people anyway), many transgender people cannot afford medical treatment. Also, given our larger social gender prejudices, it’s often difficult for transfolks to find meaningful work, because they are perceived to be mentally ill, or at a minimum, very weird, and somewhat threatening. Some transgender people do not feel a need for therapy or surgery. The new policy would allow birth certificates to be changed with recommendations from a doctor and a therapist and evidence that the applicant has lived with their current gender expression for two years.

Kudos to New York City for having the courage to confront this controversial issue and to come up with positive recommendations.