Is Gender Fluid?

A primer for the 21st century

Sally Hines, Matthew Taylor

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780500774380
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When we are born, we are each assigned a gender based on our physical anatomy. But why is it that some people experience such dissonance between their biological sex and their inner identity? Is gender something we are or something we do? Is our expression of gender inborn or does it develop as we grow? Are the traditional binary male and female gender roles relevant in an increasingly fluid and flexible world? This intelligent, stimulating volume assesses the connections between gender, psychology, culture and sexuality, and reveals how individual and social attitudes have evolved over the centuries.

1. Gender as an Expression of Biological Sex

AThe ‘Miss America’ beauty pageant was established in 1921 and is still held today. Contestants were originally judged on their looks alone, although talent and interview sections were later added. Here, a group of young beauty contestants are pictured in their evening gowns after the winner has been crowned.

An essentialist viewpoint is based on the belief that each thing has a set of characteristics – its ‘essence’ – that defines it and that is fundamental to its identity and function.

Sexual dimorphism is the difference in characteristics – including size, colour, body structure, markings and secondary sex characteristics – between males and females of the same species, beyond those of their sexual organs.

Sociobiologists aim to explain social behaviours in animals and humans through a biological and evolutionary lens. They propose that, like physical traits, social behaviours have evolved in each species over time through natural selection.

It makes sense to begin by examining the presumed relationship between gender and biological sex, as the latter is so much a part of our understandings and assumptions about the former.

What is known in gender studies as an essentialist school of thought proposes that gender differences emerge from innate disparities in the biological make-up of women and men. As well as divergent physicalities, a biological essentialist perspective suggests that women and men possess distinct chromosomal and hormonal variations that impact on their specific social roles – the ‘essence’ of masculinity and femininity.

Women, it is argued, are instinctively caring and emotionally attuned, whereas men are inherently more competent providers and protectors.

Arguing from this perspective, theorists such as Leonard Sax work on the assumption that sexual dimorphism is absolute. For them, all differences in the behaviour of women and men are biologically driven and reflect the same traits found in the animal world. Sociobiologists such as Jeremy Cherfas (b. 1951) offer a number of hypotheses along these lines. For example, they posit that men are more naturally inclined towards promiscuity because they have limitless sperm, and women are more inclined towards monogamy because – with a limited supply of eggs – they have a narrower window of opportunity to pass on their genes and must therefore pick their partner carefully. In addition, the risks and burdens of procreation, including a nine-month gestation period, potentially fatal childbirth and (arguably) the brunt of child rearing, fall to the woman. As Cherfas wrote in 2008: ‘Males, with their cheap throwaway sperm, we would expect to be promiscuous; mating costs them so little they seek sexual opportunities wherever they can.’

BEstablished in 1933, Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, California, attracted a mixed response to the overt display of physical strength. Several ‘Mr Americas’ trained at this beach community of weightlifters in the 1950s and 1960s.

A/BThese MRI scans show slices of a healthy male brain (first) and female brain (second). In this male brain, the cerebrum is shown in red, the cerebellum in light blue, the brainstem in green, and the tissues of the neck in brown. In this female brain, the cerebrum is shown in yellow and red, the cerebellum in pink, and the tissues of the neck in blue. Differences between male and female brains may contribute to differing characteristics and behaviours. However, opinion as to the exact effect of these differences is varied.

Such theories often assume that biology impacts not only on differences in sexual behaviour, but also on how women and men psychologically approach relationships. Sociobiologist Donald Symons (b. 1942) reflected this approach in 2009: ‘Since human females, like those of most animal species, make a relatively large investment in the production and survival of each offspring, and males can get away with a relatively small one, they’ll approach sex and reproduction, as animals do, in rather different ways to males.’ Symons goes on to offer what might be termed a normative account of women’s and men’s approaches to sex and relationships: ‘Women should be more choosy and more hesitant, because they’re more at risk from the consequences of a bad choice. And men should be less discriminating, more aggressive and have a greater taste for variety of partners because they’re less at risk.’ Note that in this explanation, biology does not only account for what is, but also for what should be.

In essentialist theories, the link between gendered physicality and gender-specific behaviours is often thought to be based upon hormonal and neurological differences between men and women. But not all scientists agree.

In Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science and Society (2017), psychologist and neuroscience writer Cordelia Fine challenges biological approaches that use hormonal variation.

An insistence on ‘the basic and profound differences’ between women and men is represented, she suggests, through the dominant story of ‘Testosterone Rex’, the idea that testosterone is responsible for many key social structures: ‘that familiar, plausible, pervasive and powerful story of sex and society. Weaving together interlinked claims about evolution, brains, hormones and behaviour, it offers a neat and compelling account of our societies’ persistent and seemingly intractable sex inequalities.’ While ‘Testosterone Rex can appear undefeatable’, Fine argues, evolutionary theory has in fact uncovered the diversity and dynamism of the ‘sexual natural order’. She cites persuasively the scientific basis for the idea that, while sex differences in hormones and brain function certainly exist, they can actually be understood to balance out the behavioural differences that arise from the physicality of different reproductive roles, rather than reinforcing them.

So, while some physical differences between men and women serve to separate them, others work to make their behaviour more similar.

Some studies in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology support essentialist theories of gender dimorphism.

We can examine the links between human male and female behaviour and that of animals, which, like our own, has evolved over time. Studies on animals, it is argued, show that the male is naturally inclined to be the protector or provider and the female the one to nurture. However, there are examples of animals that fall outside of this model, the Emperor penguin being the most well known. Once she lays her single egg, the female penguin goes to feed in the ocean for two months, leaving the male father to keep the egg warm by balancing it between his feet and pouch until she returns with food for their chick. The male rhea (a large, flightless species of bird) incubates the female’s eggs for six weeks until they hatch. Dubbed the ‘single dad’ of the bird world, the male rhea is solely responsible for raising the chicks for their first six months. Some male primates also challenge preconceived ideas about sex roles in animals. The male marmoset, for example, cares for a newborn from its birth, as do the males of several rat species. Sea life offers numerous examples of ‘unconventional’ male reproductive behaviour. In sea horses, eggs are deposited by the female into the male’s pouch, where he carries them for up to 45 days before bearing the young.

Such examples of diversity in kin and reproductive practices in the animal world challenge the key tenets of evolutionary psychological studies that insist on natural sex and gender difference. In the human world, too, it is increasingly common for men to participate in some or all of the childcare, or for women to take on the role of provider.

AA male emu nests with its eggs. The male of this speci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author and Editor
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Milestones
• How to Read
• Introduction
• 1. Gender as an Expression of Biological Sex
• 2. Gender as a Social Construct
• 3. Gender Diversity
• 4. Gender Activism
• Conclusion
• Picture Credits
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright