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Sex or Gender
Sex or Gender
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
In nature, male and female are distinct. She-elephants are
gregarious, he-elephants solitary. Male zebra finches are
loquacious - the females mute. Female green spoon worms are 200,000
times larger than their male mates. These striking differences are
biological - yet they lead to differentiation in social roles and
skill acquisition.
Alan Pease, author of a book titled "Why Men Don't Listen and Women
Can't Read Maps", believes that women are spatially-challenged
compared to men. The British firm, Admiral Insurance, conducted a
study of half a million claims. They found that "women were almost
twice as likely as guys to have a collision in a car park, 23 percent
more likely to hit a stationary car, and 15 percent more likely to
reverse into another vehicle" (Reuters).
Yet gender "differences" are often the outcomes of inferior scholarship.
Consider Admiral insurance's data. As Britain's Automobile
Association (AA) correctly pointed out - women drivers tend to make
more short journeys around towns and shopping centers and these
involve frequent parking. Hence their ubiquity in certain kinds of
claims. Regarding women's alleged spatial deficiency, in Britain,
girls have been outperforming boys in scholastic aptitude tests -
including geometry and maths - since 1988.
In an Op-Ed published by the New York Times on January 23, 2005,
Olivia Judson cited this example
"Beliefs that guys are intrinsically better at this or that have
repeatedly led to discrimination and prejudice, and then they've
been proved to be nonsense. Women were thought not to be world-class
musicians. But when American symphony orchestras introduced blind
auditions in the 1970's - the musician plays behind a screen so that
his or her gender is invisible to those listening - the number of
women offered jobs in professional orchestras increased. Similarly,
in science, studies of the ways that grant applications are
evaluated have shown that women are more likely to get financing
when those reading the applications do not know the sex of the
applicant."
On the other wing of the divide, Anthony Clare, a British
psychiatrist and author of "On Men" wrote:
"At the beginning of the 21st century it is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that guys are in serious trouble. Throughout the world,
developed and developing, antisocial behavior is essentially male.
Violence, sexual abuse of children, illicit drug use, alcohol
misuse, gambling, all are overwhelmingly male activities. The courts
and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, delinquent
behavior, risk taking and social mayhem, guys win gold."
Men also mature later, die earlier, are more susceptible to
infections and most types of cancer, are more likely to be dyslexic,
to suffer from a host of mental health disorders, such as Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and to commit suicide.
In her book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man", Susan
Faludi describes a crisis of masculinity following the breakdown of
manhood models and work and family structures in the last five
decades. In the film "Boys don't Cry", a teenage girl binds her
breasts and acts the male in a caricatural relish of stereotypes of
virility. Being a man is merely a state of mind, the movie implies.
But what does it really mean to be a "male" or a "female"? Are
gender identity and sexual preferences genetically determined? Can
they be reduced to one's sex? Or are they amalgams of biological,
social, and psychological factors in constant interaction? Are they
immutable lifelong features or dynamically evolving frames of self-
reference?
In the aforementioned New York Times Op-Ed, Olivia Judson opines:
"Many sex differences are not, therefore, the result of his having
one gene while she has another. Rather, they are attributable to the
way particular genes behave when they find themselves in him instead
of her. The magnificent difference between male and female green
spoon worms, for example, has nothing to do with their having
different genes: each green spoon worm larva could go either way.
Which sex it becomes depends on whether it meets a female during its
first three weeks of life. If it meets a female, it becomes male and
prepares to regurgitate; if it doesn't, it becomes female and
settles into a crack on the sea floor."
Yet, certain traits attributed to one's sex are surely better
accounted for by the demands of one's environment, by cultural
factors, the process of socialization, gender roles, and what George
Devereux called "ethnopsychiatry" in "Basic Problems of
Ethnopsychiatry" (University of Chicago Press, 1980). He suggested
to divide the unconscious into the id (the part that was always
instinctual and unconscious) and the "ethnic unconscious" (repressed
material that was once conscious). The latter is mostly molded by
prevailing cultural mores and includes all our defense mechanisms
and most of the superego.
So, how can we tell whether our sexual role is mostly in our blood
or in our brains?
The scrutiny of borderline cases of human sexuality - notably the
transgendered or intersexed - can yield clues as to the distribution
and relative weights of biological, social, and psychological
determinants of gender identity formation.
The results of a study conducted by Uwe Hartmann, Hinnerk Becker,
and Claudia Rueffer-Hesse in 1997 and titled "Self and Gender:
Narcissistic Pathology and Personality Factors in Gender Dysphoric
Patients", published in the "International Journal of
Transgenderism", "indicate significant psychopathological aspects
and narcissistic dysregulation in a substantial proportion of
patients." Are these "psychopathological aspects" merely reactions
to underlying physiological realities and changes? Could social
ostracism and labeling have induced them in the "patients"?
The authors conclude:
"The cumulative evidence of our study ... is consistent with the
view that gender dysphoria is a disorder of the sense of self as has
been proposed by Beitel (1985) or Pf'fflin (1993). The central
problem in our patients is about identity and the self in general
and the transsexual wish seems to be an attempt at reassuring and
stabilizing the self-coherence which in turn can lead to a further
destabilization if the self is already too fragile. In this view the
body is instrumentalized to create a sense of identity and the
splitting symbolized in the hiatus between the rejected body-self
and other parts of the self is more between worthy and inferior objects
than between masculine and feminine."
Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, and Fliess suggested that we are all bisexual
to a certain degree. As early as 1910, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld argued,
in Berlin, that absolute genders are "abstractions, invented
extremes". The consensus today is that one's sexuality is, mostly, a
psychological construct which reflects gender role orientation.
Joanne Meyerowitz, a professor of history at Indiana University and
the editor of The Journal of American History observes, in her
recently published tome, "How Sex Changed: A History of
Transsexuality in the United States", that the very meaning of
masculinity and femininity is in constant flux.
Transgender activists, says Meyerowitz, insist that gender and
sexuality represent "distinct analytical categories". The New York
Times wrote in its review of the book: "Some male-to-female
transsexuals have sex with guys and call themselves homosexuals. Some
female-to-male transsexuals have sex with women and call themselves
lesbians. Some transsexuals call themselves asexual."
So, it is all in the mind, you see.
This would be taking it too far. A large body of scientific evidence
points to the genetic and biological underpinnings of sexual
behavior and preferences.
The German science magazine, "Geo", reported recently that the males
of the fruit fly "drosophila melanogaster" switched from
heterosexuality to homosexuality as the temperature in the lab was
increased from 19 to 30 degrees Celsius. They reverted to chasing
females as it was lowered.
The brain structures of homosexual sheep are different to those of
straight sheep, a study conducted recently by the Oregon Health &
Science University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Sheep
Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho, revealed. Similar differences
were found between gay guys and straight ones in 1995 in Holland and
elsewhere. The preoptic area of the hypothalamus was larger in
heterosexual guys than in both homosexual guys and straight women.
According an article, titled "When Sexual Development Goes Awry", by
Suzanne Miller, published in the September 2000 issue of the "World
and I", various medical conditions give rise to sexual ambiguity.
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), involving excessive androgen
production by the adrenal cortex, results in mixed genitalia. A
person with the complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) has a
vagina, external female genitalia and functioning, androgen-
producing, testes - but no uterus or fallopian tubes.
People with the rare 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome are born
with ambiguous genitalia. They appear at first to be girls. At
puberty, such a person develops testicles and his clitoris swells
and becomes a penis. Hermaphrodites possess both ovaries and
testicles (both, in most cases, rather undeveloped). Sometimes the
ovaries and testicles are combined into a chimera called ovotestis.
Most of these individuals have the chromosomal composition of a
woman together with traces of the Y, male, chromosome. All
hermaphrodites have a sizable penis, though rarely generate sperm.
Some hermaphrodites develop breasts during puberty and menstruate.
Very few even get pregnant and give birth.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental geneticist, professor of
medical science at Brown University, and author of "Sexing the
Body", postulated, in 1993, a continuum of 5 sexes to supplant the
current dimorphism: males, merms (male pseudohermaphrodites), herms
(true hermaphrodites), ferms (female pseudohermaphrodites), and
females.
Intersexuality (hermpahroditism) is a natural human state. We are
all conceived with the potential to develop into either sex. The
embryonic developmental default is female. A series of triggers
during the first weeks of pregnancy places the fetus on the path to
maleness.
In rare cases, some women have a male's genetic makeup (XY
chromosomes) and vice versa. But, in the vast majority of cases, one
of the sexes is clearly selected. Relics of the stifled sex remain,
though. Women have the clitoris as a kind of symbolic penis. Men
have breasts (mammary glands) and nipples.
The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition describes the formation of
ovaries and testes thus:
"In the young embryo a pair of gonads develop that are indifferent
or neutral, showing no indication whether they are destined to
develop into testes or ovaries. There are also two different duct
systems, one of which can develop into the female system of oviducts
and related apparatus and the other into the male sperm duct system.
As development of the embryo proceeds, either the male or the female
reproductive tissue differentiates in the originally neutral gonad
of the mammal."
Yet, sexual preferences, genitalia and even secondary sex
characteristics, such as facial and pubic hair are first order
phenomena. Can genetics and biology account for male and female
behavior patterns and social interactions ("gender identity")? Can
the multi-tiered complexity and richness of human masculinity and
femininity arise from simpler, deterministic, building blocks?
Sociobiologists would have us think so.
For instance: the fact that we are mammals is astonishingly often
overlooked. Most mammalian families are composed of mother and
offspring. Males are peripatetic absentees. Arguably, high rates of
divorce and birth out of wedlock coupled with rising promiscuity
merely reinstate this natural "default mode", observes Lionel Tiger,
a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
That three quarters of all divorces are initiated by women tends to
support this view.
Furthermore, gender identity is determined during gestation, claim
some scholars.
Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii and Dr. Keith Sigmundson,
a practicing psychiatrist, studied the much-celebrated John/Joan
case. An accidentally castrated normal male was surgically modified
to look female, and raised as a girl but to no avail. He reverted to
being a male at puberty.
His gender identity seems to have been inborn (assuming he was not
subjected to conflicting cues from his human environment). The case
is extensively portrayed in John Colapinto's tome "As Nature Made
Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl".
HealthScoutNews cited a study published in the November 2002 issue
of "Child Development". The researchers, from City University of
London, found that the level of maternal testosterone during
pregnancy affects the behavior of neonatal girls and renders it more
masculine. "High testosterone" girls "enjoy activities typically
considered male behavior, like playing with trucks or guns". Boys'
behavior remains unaltered, according to the study.
Yet, other scholars, like John Money, insist that newborns are
a "blank slate" as far as their gender identity is concerned. This
is also the prevailing view. Gender and sex-role identities, we are
taught, are fully formed in a process of socialization which ends by
the third year of life. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition
sums it up thus:
"Like an individual's concept of his or her sex role, gender
identity develops by means of parental example, social
reinforcement, and language. Parents teach sex-appropriate behavior
to their children from an early age, and this behavior is reinforced
as the child grows older and enters a wider social world. As the
child acquires language, he also learns very early the distinction
between "he" and "she" and understands which pertains to him- or
herself."
So, which is it - nature or nurture? There is no disputing the fact
that our sexual physiology and, in all probability, our sexual
preferences are determined in the womb. Men and women are different -
physiologically and, as a result, also psychologically.
Society, through its agents - foremost amongst which are family,
peers, and teachers - represses or encourages these genetic
propensities. It does so by propagating "gender roles" - gender-
specific lists of alleged traits, permissible behavior patterns, and
prescriptive morals and norms. Our "gender identity" or "sex role"
is shorthand for the way we make use of our natural genotypic-
phenotypic endowments in conformity with social-cultural "gender
roles".
Inevitably as the composition and bias of these lists change, so
does the meaning of being "male" or "female". Gender roles are
constantly redefined by tectonic shifts in the definition and
functioning of basic social units, such as the nuclear family and
the workplace. The cross-fertilization of gender-related cultural
memes renders "masculinity" and "femininity" fluid concepts.
One's sex equals one's bodily equipment, an objective, finite, and,
usually, immutable inventory. But our endowments can be put to many
uses, in different cognitive and affective contexts, and subject to
varying exegetic frameworks. As opposed to "sex" - "gender" is,
therefore, a socio-cultural narrative. Both heterosexual and
homosexual guys ejaculate. Both straight and lesbian women climax.
What distinguishes them from each other are subjective introjects of
socio-cultural conventions, not objective, immutable "facts".
In "The New Gender Wars", published in the November/December 2000
issue of "Psychology Today", Sarah Blustain sums up the "bio-social"
model proposed by Mice Eagly, a professor of psychology at
Northwestern University and a former student of his, Wendy Wood, now
a professor at the Texas A&M University:
"Like (the evolutionary psychologists), Eagly and Wood reject social
constructionist notions that all gender differences are created by
culture. But to the question of where they come from, they reply
differently: not our genes but our roles in society. This narrative
focuses on how societies respond to the basic biological
differences - men's strength and women's reproductive capabilities -
and how they encourage guys and women to follow certain patterns.
'If you're spending a lot of time nursing your kid', explains
Wood, 'then you don't have the opportunity to devote large amounts
of time to developing specialized skills and engaging tasks outside
of the home'. And, adds Eagly, 'if women are charged with caring for
infants, what happens is that women are more nurturing. Societies
have to make the adult system work [so] socialization of girls is
arranged to give them experience in nurturing'.
According to this interpretation, as the environment changes, so
will the range and texture of gender differences. At a time in
Western countries when female reproduction is extremely low, nursing
is totally optional, childcare alternatives are many, and
mechanization lessens the importance of male size and strength,
women are no longer restricted as much by their smaller size and by
child-bearing. That means, argue Eagly and Wood, that role
structures for guys and women will change and, not surprisingly, the
way we socialize individuals in these new roles will change too. (Indeed,
says Wood, 'sex differences seem to be reduced in societies where
men and women have similar status,' she says. If you're looking to
live in more gender-neutral environment, try Scandinavia.)"
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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International
(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health
and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and
Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
