Performing gender

When we talk about performing gender, it’s not like we’re talking about a theatrical performance, something that has nothing whatever to do with who we really are. But equally, gender is not “natural”. Gender, and sex, for that matter, have no objective existence outside the society in which they are created – they are both ways of understanding the world, not pre-existing objects. When a baby is born, it is inspected by a medic of some kind, and based on how well its genitals fit one of two stereotypes, is either assigned an F or an M on its birth certificate. ( or if its genitals fit neither stereotype, defined as intersex) . The obvious question that no-one usually asks is “why does it matter?”

Think of the problems the Olympic organisers have had defining gender – the easy assumption that all human beings can be divided into one lot with penises and XY DNA while the rest will have vaginas and XX so clearly did not work for them that they gave up.

A good analogy is with money. I think most people realise that money is something that’s created as a convenient means of exchange between people – it’s something that we all agree to, and agree to enforce on those who don’t agree to it as well. It may be socially constructed, but it has real power in our society. If you on your own decide that your local supermarket has a lot of food, and you’re just going to take it without paying, you will soon find that your incorrect performance of money will be quite severely punished. Depending on how severe your breach of the social norms is, you might end up in jail.

Now, when we get to transsexual and transgender performance of gender, we are immediately faced with attacks from at least 2 directions. Firstly, there’s the widespread transphobia of cis-sexual people who see us as either evil decievers if they can’t tell, or pathetic fakes if they can. These two positions, damned if you do or don’t, are based on the idea that sex/gender as assigned at birth is a fact, and cannot be changed. The transphobic radfems take a similar gender-essentialist view, and claim that transsexual women, in particular, are some kind of fifth columnist element of the patriarchy, invading “real” women’s spaces in order to – well I’m not quite sure what they’r e worried about, but I’m sure it would be really bad.

Now, both these transphobic, gender essentialist positions are based on the idea that there is some kind of “real” sex or gender, which you can never change, and therefore transsexual women are not women, but men pretending to be women. This transphobic idea of pretence, is not what I mean by gender performance. Transsexual women are women, and we are just as genuine as women as cis-sexual women. Indeed, many cis women have never really thought about the gender they were assigned at birth, and have just gone along with it.

If you think of the gender performance of someone like Grayson Perry or David Walliams performing femininity, what you see is masculine stereotype of extreme costume drama femininity, which might have once been appropriate for the idle rich. No 21^st century woman behaves or looks like that. It has as much to do with genuine feminine gender performance as a pantomime dame. I would argue that they are lampooning femininity by performing masculinity dressed in women’s clothing.

It’s not just trans people who play with gender boundaries. Look at a butch lesbian and her femme partner; the “top” in a gay partnership, or a dominant woman in a BDSM scene. These are performances, but they reflect and actualise the reality of the people performing them, they are not fake – although there may well be artifice involved.

Everyone performs gender. It becomes unconsidered and automatic – but if the audience, the people with whom you are interacting, considers your performance to be inadequate, there will be punishment; in just the same way as you may be punished for not agreeing about money. In the extreme, trans women have been left to die by paramedics or murdered. Those are fairly severe punishments.

In our society, examples of female gender performance might include wearing make up, having long hair, being able to walk well in high heels, using the toilets with the skirted figure on the door, filling “F” in on an application form, being interested in, and able to perform, dance aerobic exercise,... while male gender performance might include a limited palette of clothing, drinking beer in pints, an interest in football, wearing trousers, etc. Or a man offering to carry a suitcase for a woman, and the woman gracefully accepting. Yes, these are social constructs, and the pre-existing differences are small, and if I happen to be a woman who likes wearing jeans and trainers, and is interested in football and beer it doesn’t stop me being a woman, of course it doesn’t.

My idea about how this works is that as one grows up in our culture we absorb messages about how gender is from all directions. Parents, other schoolchildren, the media, people in the street. And somewhere inside ourselves, however clear or vague this might be, we have an idea about what gender we are – indeed, society spends a lot of time telling us what gender we are, and inculcating gendered behaviour. “Boys don’t cry (and you’re a boy, so stop crying)” or “That’s not ladylike (and you’re a girl, so stop doing it)” Reinforcement for gender appropriate behaviour, and sanctions for inappropriate. Why do so many little girls like pink?

For trans people this is a very odd experience. We know (if we are trans women) that we are girls, so we take, and try to act on, all the “girl” messages in the culture that seem to fit with who we are. But we are continually told that we are boys, and boys act like thus and so. So – for many of us, we learn to pretend to do all that, and make up a persona that can function in this world where who we are is rejected. So we pick up all the boy messages for the construct, too, and try to fit those in. How much of our reality are we going to be allowed? With practice, it becomes an act that requires little effort day to day. Maybe a “the show must go on” feeling as one gets up in the morning.

When we do eventually transition, some of us after decades of practice in the masculine role, working out how our true selves can be in society takes time. As a teenage woman, one gets something of a free pass for inappropriate behaviour. A mature woman, however, is expected to know how to behave. I can put my minimal make up on in the morning in 8 minutes, now. But when I started it took more like 28, partly because I used to use 4 shades of eye-shadow, and partly because I am practised, and don’t need to think about it. And that’s just one example. It is more natural, but it’s the interaction between oneself as an individual and the social context that has to be developed. It wasn’t just there, for me.

It’s not a simple argument. We are necessarily social beings and our behaviour in society is constrained by the society we’re in, and more than that, the kind of person we can be is constrained but equally we develop our way of being, and I am in no sense unreal. It’s a continual interaction.