“Freeing” Gender

How prevalent, how ingrained, how sad – still – is our penchant to evaluate our own our worth through other people’s eyes, especially, although not exclusively, if we are female or other-gendered.

In these waning days of a month focusing on women, I offer a short piece that gives us one more tool to assess ourselves clearly without the intervening biases of others (Hello, Catholic hierarchy) about our genders and corresponding prescribed roles.

Here is author, Imani Perry, saying to us, “It’s More Than Sexism” in the March 10, 2022 newsletter, “Unsettled Territory” (linked on The Atlantic’s website). She begins with our persistent nemesis, ‘patriarchy’:

The contemporary era has made patriarchy more complicated. Power still tends to aggregate in white, cisgender heterosexual, affluent men, but elites are a much more diverse bunch than in the past. There are even women who occupy the traditional roles of patriarchs. And yet, gender still shapes how opportunity is distributed. Anyone who does not qualify as the ideal man is on a slippery slope to disadvantage, with those of us who are furthest from it due to gender, gender expression, wealth, race, sexuality, or ability most likely to be made vulnerable.

Some may even ask us (with a heavy dose of snark) to define “woman” as Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to do in the recent congressional hearings. For those of us who thought we were somehow in a post-patriarchal era, take a look at her questioner, a female who is one with, and fully supported by, her fellow male patriarchs.

Imani goes on to tell us more about how such gender focus can be distorted:

There is no objective meaning to traditional gender categories. They were simply used to sort people into higher and lower status and into particular sectors of the economy and home. To those who cry “But our bodies!” I respond: Our human bodies, endlessly varied, only very roughly fit into the couple of categories that we have devised.

She then emphasizes that ‘binary’ when applied to gender is not a truth. It is a choice:

To study gender and gendering means letting go of many social structures that have been made to seem “natural.” And it also means questioning the very idea that “natural” is superior. We are creative and distinctive beings, always changing.

Then she concludes:   

Gender isn’t going anywhere. We are deeply attached to it. We won’t be free of gender, but we can “free” gender. The gendered virtues—valor, leadership, softness, nurturing, being maternal, protection and physical strength – can belong to everyone. And should.

Freeing gender from its constraints, as we have seen over and over, does free us – all of us – in so many ways, including from letting others decide for us, or bestow upon us, our value. Freeing gender could, in fact, unite us at the same time at the same time it frees us but in a whole different way.

Now isn’t that a freedom to aspire to – and keep working toward – in an Easter season so famous for celebrating new birth?