Some Thoughts About Gender

In her article, “The Social Construction of Gender,” Judith Lorbeth describes a ranking system for gender in society. “[G]ender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. As part of a system that ranks these statuses unequally, gender is a major building block in the social structure built on these unequal statuses.” One question that I thought of immediately was, “Where do transgender and non-binary people fit in this ranking system society has created?" As far as I understand it, transgender people would fall lower in value than cisgender women (with men being on top), but there are so many different gender identities than just male, female, intersex, and transgender - how do they all relate to each other in this system? Is this ranking adequate for every gender identity out there? I’m inclined to disagree, simply due to how unique everyone’s experiences are, but since society is going to put value on people based on such arbitrary things as gender, it’s important to acknowledge this ranking system and address its problems.

The question about where transgender and non-binary people fall into the societal ranking stuck with me when I read through Abandon Your Tedious Search. In this article, the author brings up an incident involving a trans woman who was trying to talk to cis women in a support group. She was told, basically, that she was still a man and still had male privilege. The thing that contradicts that, to my understanding, is that transgender people are generally treated worse by men than even women are. A trans woman doesn’t have male privilege simply because she’s not a male, no matter how badly people want her to be male because of her penis. This part reminded me of the criticism Fausto-Sterling shared with us in her article, “The Five Sexes: Revisited.” “The limitation with Fausto-Sterling’s proposal [of a five-sex system] is that … [it] still gives genitals … primary signifying status and ignores the fact that … [w]hat has primacy in everyday life is the gender that is performed, regardless of the flesh’s configuration under the clothes."