Painting by Pamela Heater
Male and female. Woman and man. Are they really different? Or is it only a male-dominated society that thinks so?
This is not an essay about trans people or the rightness or wrongness of congressional committee members to grill supreme court nominees about their views on the subject. What I want to question is whether the distinction of male and female, whether among humans or fruit flies, represents something more than a convention, useful in certain situations but not absolute, more like Brit vs. Peruvian.
"He made them male and female," it says in Genesis. But even the Word of God gives the first woman a subsidiary, supporting role. She's made from one of Adam's ribs to serve as a companion ("It is not good for man to be alone"). The Greeks saw women as incomplete humans, born before they had a chance to develop proper organs like penises, strong muscles and minds capable of rationality. Useful as seedbeds and incubators for male sperm, but not much else.
Even so, in the post-feminist world we live in, sex, or as it now is called, "gender," is taken for granted. Lesbians and gays do not deny being male and female, except in a political sense when their identity as lesbian or gay can take precedence over their biological sex, much as someone can identify as Black or Jewish as their primary way of thinking about themselves without denying their humanity.
For most people "male" and "female" are givens. The argument is around secondary labels. There are female Blacks, female Jews. I pick these categories because they each come close to being taken for granted, at least in the US. Here we believe there are White people and Black people, different "races," immutable to the third or fourth generation. And most Jews believe you are born a Jew and always remain one even if you have never heard of Judaism, much less practiced it. Or, as the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand put it, "Being Jewish is the only club in the world you can't resign from."
Neither of these categories is as hidebound, though, as are the categories of male and female. But are "male" and "female" any less constructs, conventions, ways of seeing something that is as artificial as "Black" or "Jewish"?
It seems a ridiculous question. Even someone who goes to great trouble to change their sex by hormonal and surgical means is acknowledging there is a sex different from the one they seem to have been born. But why should trans people or anyone else be expected to think differently? "Black," "African American," "Negro" or any of the other words we use to describe whatever it is we mean by them, are inventions, and very recent ones at that. Only in the last 200 years have they become immutable, indelible, permanent marks of someone's identity. Even when they lived in Polish and other European ghettos, Jews could shed their Jewishness by converting to Christianity with all the rights and privileges entailed. It was only at the end of the 19th century that Jews became a racial group, not just a religious one, "Semites," as they were labeled by, who else? Anti-Semites.
Just as the Black or Negro "race" as an idea came after, not before, the establishment of chattel slavery, it seems reasonable to suggest the hard differentiation of the sexes came after the reduction of women to something less than fully human, i.e., males. Her legal status as a possession rather than as a person was the result, not the cause of her de facto status in a male world. There were plenty of cultures where women enjoyed the same rights as men, but those cultures weren't "discovered" or indeed imaginable until Europeans began exploring other parts of the world. Not coincidentally, that was also when the modern feminist movement began.
Even so, in Europe women still remained the possessions of their fathers and husbands. "A man's home is his castle" was meant literally. Not even the King of England could intervene in how a man treated his wife and children. Rome, in both a political and a spiritual (Christian) sense, was the model for the legalized social and religious status of women. A free male Roman had absolute control over his possessions, woman being one of them. If a man had sex with another man's wife, he owed restitution to the offended man just as if he had stolen one of his horses. And throughout Western history, women remain in a status below that of slave. This was partly because she had no monetary value, as a slave did, and could therefore be abused or eliminated without financial loss. You could replace a wife with another for free, but a healthy male slave cost real money.
In religion, a woman didn't amount to anything better than she did in the secular order. To the religious authorities (I'll stick to the Christian ones, though much of the same could be said about the Jewish), a woman represented the dregs of the material world, which was itself the bottom of the barrel in the cosmic scheme of things. Woman was at the heart of evil, the material world from which we hope to be liberated when our souls leave our bodies. (Plato, as much a de facto Father of the Church as any in the Christian tradition, saw things the same way.) A woman was responsible for the first sin and all the suffering it subsequently caused. Sex, in the sense of passions of the flesh, was at the core of the evil inherent in the material world. And sex (these concepts are all from a male point of view) means... woman.
What would a world without a hard distinction between the notions of male and female look like? At first blush it seems equivalent to a world without the distinction between cat and dog or night and day. But is getting past the idea of male-vs-female that much different from giving up the idea of race, even if "race" were used in a way that carries no prejudice or discrimination? But think how hard even that much of a shift in the way we think involves. And for many, if not most Jews, not being Jewish is unthinkable, not because of any sense of superiority or privilege (unless you're Israeli) but because it's, well, just how it is.
The struggle of women just to be included in the body politic has taken hundreds of years to attain. But the emphasis for that struggle has been on equality with men—rights, opportunity, etc.—not on doing away with the distinction between male versus female. Ironically, the way that has played out means women have achieved their goals not by changing the culture from male-dominated to unisex but by becoming honorary males, i.e., by being accepted into the male world and expected to behave as such. Wherever women have exerted influence as women, the difference is palpable, but for every Eleanor Roosevelt there are three Hillary Clintons.
In Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness, inhabitants of a distant planet change from what we would call male to female and back on a cyclical basis. There are no sexes in the sense we see things. Le Guin doesn't go into detail, but the inhabitants of that planet don't seem to be hermaphrodites, at least not as we understand the word: born with sex organs of both male and female. The transformation taking place on a regular basis appears to be something more likely hormonal. In other words, they are not two sexes in one body, they are unisex, or more realistically, sexless. The very concept of sex is inapplicable. It's as if everyone on earth were hermaphroditic, in which case no one would be.
Why can't we see men and women as simply different versions of the same being, like blonde and brunette? Are the concepts distinctions without a difference, like Black and White? Are the distinctions made after the fact as happened in the case of slavery? Even Aristotle believed some people were born for slavery. So did the authors of the Bible. Slavery was a necessity in the ancient world, as it was in the slave economy of the American South. So, the process goes: enslave other human beings, then declare them inferior human beings by birth; and turn women into subhumans, then declare that they are inherently defective or naturally subservient to males. It helps if you then make this distinction in Holy Writ or projected into Nature itself.
That's how it worked with slavery in 17th-century Virginia. At first Africans were indentured, the same as Europeans who performed the same roles. When freed after a stipulated number of years, they lived as free men and women, intermarried, held property of their own. But after the uprising of 1676-1677, the so-called Bacon's Rebellion, the slave holders realized they needed a class between themselves and slaves/indentured servants in order to police the latter. So they offered the European bond servants honorary whiteness with all that involved (or seemed to, though their lot mostly meant being reduced to abject poverty with only their Whiteness for consolation). Only at that point did African slaves became lifelong chattel ostensibly because of their color or "race."
Still not willing to see sex as a convention serving the master class, males? It's not easy. Women are, after all, biologically different from men, not just in obvious physical ways, but in other ways as well. But if we start with the way we see race, an empty category, we can make a start toward seeing sex the same way.
