Episode post here. Another bang-up transcription job from Caroline Wall! And now for the text version of this episode…
Matt Teichman:
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Robin Dembroff, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. And they are here to discuss going beyond the gender binary. Robin Dembroff, welcome.
Robin Dembroff:
Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Teichman:
So I think a natural first question here is what the phrase “gender binary” means. I guess one thing that might suggest is—is it the idea that there are two genders? Or what, exactly, is the gender binary?
Robin Dembroff:
I think the way people tend to answer that question is just saying it’s the idea that there are two genders. That’s accurate, but not precise. What I would say instead is that it’s the idea that there are two discrete, exhaustive gender categories—that is, there are two gender categories, they are defined neatly in opposition to each other, and every person falls into one of those two categories.
Matt Teichman:
Okay, good. So it’s an exhaustive partition.
Robin Dembroff:
Correct.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. And just to be clear, the two genders are men and women.
Robin Dembroff:
Yes.
Matt Teichman:
Interesting. So what do you think? Are there any other genders besides those two?
Robin Dembroff:
Given the way that I think about gender—given that I am understanding the term “gender” as it is used in trans-inclusive communities—yes, I do think there are more than two genders, despite the right’s mantra.
[LAUGHTER]
It’s become this rallying cry on the right—“there are only two genders.” If you Google that phrase, “there are only two genders,” you get a lot of far-right websites.
Matt Teichman:
Okay. So the menu of possible gender options, I guess, is a bit bigger than at least I was raised to believe it was. What are some of these other options?
Robin Dembroff:
So often, some common identities include things like genderfluid, pangender, agender, genderqueer, and so on.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe we could take some of those in turn. So what would “pangender” be?
Robin Dembroff:
So the first thing to say, I guess, is that all of these terms are somewhat in flux. There is no single agreed-upon definition of any of them. But I would say one of the most common understandings of pangender is someone who identifies with a variety of genders.
Matt Teichman:
And would that be identifying with a variety of genders all at once, or switching between them? Or would you feel that you’re simultaneously a man and a woman—or how does that work?
Robin Dembroff:
I think it’s more the simultaneous. If it was a switching between, people tend to lean more towards the term “genderfluid.”
Matt Teichman:
Okay. So that was the next term in your list, “genderfluid.” So that’s more like you experience your gender as something that switches over time between several different things.
Robin Dembroff:
Right, yeah—two or more. Sometimes, people who are genderfluid will articulate their experiences moving between being in something like “guy mode” and “feminine mode,” or different terms along those lines.
Matt Teichman:
And then “agender,” I guess, suggests that you don’t have a gender.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah—that there are no options that are recognized within the gender taxonomy that one identifies with.
Matt Teichman:
Oh, that’s interesting. So maybe you could be agender and think, well, there might be some gender out there that I am, but I just haven’t heard about it yet.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah. I mean, people don’t tend to articulate it that way, but I suppose one could identify as agender while recognizing that there could be a possible society somewhere, either in the future or the past, or one that that person had never heard of, that recognizes a gender that that person would identify with.
Matt Teichman:
Okay. And then, lastly, what would “genderqueer” be?
Robin Dembroff:
So “genderqueer” is also a term that’s in flux. As I use the term genderqueer, it’s more the umbrella for all of these different identities. And sometimes, people like myself just identify as genderqueer, meaning I don’t identify within the binary, but there’s nothing more specific that I have to say about what I do identify as.
Matt Teichman:
Okay. So in other words, any of the previous three, or maybe anything else?
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah.
Matt Teichman:
That’s interesting. So that’s the one, to me, then, that sounds the most like abstention. When people are raising their hands and saying what they are, I’m just going to abstain from that process.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah. For me, I use it as a synonym with non-binary. But the reason why I prefer genderqueer to non-binary is that non-binary is defined in terms of the binary, so it reinforces the very thing that it’s attempting to distance itself from, whereas genderqueer is both somewhat political in nature because of the addition of “queer” to it, but also isn’t defined in terms of the binary.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. Actually, let’s maybe talk about the relation to “queer.” I guess, historically, it’s meant something like gay or lesbian. What does that have to do with being genderqueer?
Robin Dembroff:
So yeah, the term “queer” originally was a slur aimed at gay and lesbian people. But as the term has been reclaimed within the LGBTQ community, it’s come to mean something more like a form of resistance to heteronormativity. So it has a political edge to it, moreso than words like gay and lesbian do. Part of that political edge comes from it not being defined in terms of the gender binary in the way that gay and lesbian are. So one can be queer without identifying as either a man or a woman, but one can also be queer while also identifying as a man or a woman. So it’s a unifying concept that brings a lot of people who don’t fall under the norms of heteronormativity, that aren’t cisgender and heterosexual, and puts them under one umbrella where they can find political solidarity with each other.
In terms of genderqueer, though, the term originally—actually Riki Wilchins originally coined the term. And originally, it was meant as a descriptor, according to Riki, not an identity. So the way Riki originally meant the term was as a term that anyone who was seen as, to use their term, “gendertrash” could use to describe how their gender was in the world—so people who didn’t conform to gender norms, either in terms of their bodies, or in terms of their pronouns, or in terms of their gender expression, and so on. But it evolved from that point into being something that people identified with as their gender, rather than just an adjective—so being genderqueer, rather than “a genderqueer woman,” or something like that.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. Actually, that gets me to another question I guess I have about two of these labels. So should we think of genderqueer as a new gender, or should we think of it as not having a gender? And the same question for agender.
Robin Dembroff:
I think in order to answer that question, we have to take a step back a little bit and think about what it means when you say, “Does it mean it’s a new gender, or not having a gender?” So the term “gender” itself gets understood in a lot of different ways, even within the literature on the metaphysics of gender. So two main camps of thought about what gender is, to borrow from Elizabeth Barnes, we can call the externalist and internalist camps.
So on externalistic camps, gender is about your social position. It’s about what your position is in the social world on the basis of your perceived sexual features. So this tracks back to Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that gender is the social interpretation of sex. On internalist accounts, gender should be understood more in terms of one’s gender identity. That’s certain psychological features, and in particular, a certain psychological relation between one’s self image, or how one conceives of oneself, and the social positions of certain people in the world, or the kinds of norms that go along with recognized genders in one’s society.
So when you say “is genderqueer another gender,” on either of those two accounts, no, I don’t think it is. But also, it’s not not having a gender, because someone who is genderqueer on either of those two accounts will be understood as having a certain gender.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. I can see why you’d say it’s neither of those things. Because it’s not like there’s a super established social status of being genderqueer right alongside men and women, where we know what that is, and we know what social role people who are genderqueer are expected to play the way we know, at least in our culture, what social role men versus women are expected to play. But then, it’s also not clear that there’s anything that it feels like to be genderqueer. Maybe there are many different things it can feel like.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And one common thing that genderqueer people do say—but not all, again—as far as what it feels like to be genderqueer is: it’s more of a form of resistance to a certain conceptualization or understanding of who one is. So for example, one might say something like, “I’m not a person wearing girl’s clothes. I’m a human wearing human clothes.” And it’s not so much a claim that I’m not wearing clothes that are conceptualized as girl clothes by those around me. It’s pushing back against the idea that those clothes should be thought of that way. So in my mind, “genderqueer” is taking a certain kind of theoretical, conceptual stance against a world that takes these two concepts of masculine, feminine, man, woman, and so on, and saturates them everywhere, such that everything is understood in light of those concepts.
Matt Teichman:
That’s really interesting. So it’s like, maybe some of the terms we learn to go around using for each other have all these assumptions built into them about the way people are, and the way people should be. So using a new set of terms, maybe whose exact definition is a little bit open-ended, is just a way of trying to raise awareness about those assumptions and get us to a place where we can start having different ones.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah. And I think even that will differ across different individuals who identify as genderqueer. For some people, it’s more about just themselves, and the fact that they don’t want those concepts to be applied for them. For others—particularly myself, because I’m a philosopher, right?—I mean it not just in terms of myself, but also this larger claim about how I think it would be better for the world to be.
Matt Teichman:
So maybe we could look at just a simple example of how some of this stuff gets projected onto a person via the traditional Western gender categories, as a way into thinking about how it might not get projected onto somebody in an everyday situation.
Robin Dembroff:
There’s a lot of empirical evidence from psychology about how people are treated differently even just on the basis of their differently gendered names. So you get things like CV tests, where identical CVs with differently gendered names are given to employers, and the competence of those people that the CVs are supposed to be referring to are ranked drastically differently. So clearly, there’s nothing else that would explain that difference other than what’s being dragged along by gendered concepts that are being applied to the CVs.
So that’s an example—I mean, maybe I’m not exactly understanding what your question was. But that’s an example of how the Western concepts of gender hugely affect how people are able to move through the world, and how they’re viewed by other people, even holding all other things fixed.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. Because the only reason somebody’s gender—information I only have access to through their name—the only reason that would influence my decision about who to hire has to be because of some prior belief I have about what genders are suitable for what types of careers.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah, as well as things like if a woman is in roles of leadership, she’s much more likely to be seen as power-grabbing, or bossy, or aggressive, whereas if a man has those same sorts of positions, he’s seen as being ambitious, and doing the things that he is supposed to be doing, career-wise.
Matt Teichman:
I taught a course once on the philosophy of gender, where we just tried to go through the basics of what genders exactly are, and what the relation is to biological sex, if anything, and all that stuff. And a question I put to my students was: would it be better to live in a society where there were no genders, in the sense of if there were no social statuses that people were ascribed on the basis of their presumed reproductive capacities? Would it be better if just everybody had exactly equal status in that regard?
And an interesting thing I found was that my students were, like, 50-50 split. So the split was between people who thought: yes, this sounds like a great idea, because what better way to eliminate prejudices and social expectations getting in the way of people’s life goals, et cetera, than to just not even think about men and women anymore? You can’t discriminate against somebody on the basis of whether they’re a man or a woman if you don’t even think about who’s a man and who’s a woman anymore. So that’s just one brute-force way to eliminate that. And then, the other 50% were firmly in the camp of: no, I think it’s totally fine to be a woman. I love being a woman. Let’s embrace the identity, but we’ll try to eliminate all of the offensive, nasty, noxious beliefs about how women have to be. Do you think there’s a tension between those two alternatives?
Robin Dembroff:
I think one thing I’d be curious to know from your students is how they were thinking of the term “woman” when they answered the question in the latter sort of way. If they want to strip the term “woman” of all of its social information—and my guess is they were thinking of it primarily in a biological way, or in terms of assigned sex. But if we want to strip the term “woman” both of any of its social information as well as any of its anatomical associations, it’s hard for me to understand what’s left. I think that there could be something that’s left—namely, identifying in terms of a historical category. That’s a possibility.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, I think that was the idea. I think it was like: no, I want to be proud of what we’ve all been through.
Robin Dembroff:
Sure, sure. But I think that’s also compatible with the first option. So you could have a world where people identify as women in terms of identifying with the historical category, or seeing themselves as standing in some interesting, robust relationship to a historical category, without having that category be the kind of category that’s being used or is salient in social interactions. In fact, it’s hard for me to understand how it could be used and be salient in social interactions if, in this context, it’s supposed to be stripped of its social and biological connotations.
One of the things I think about a lot is about the supposed tension between those who are fighting for women to be able to do whatever they want and not have any social connotations attached to this identity—between them, and between genderqueer people, and between trans women. So there’s this three-way tension that often arises between these groups, with feminists sometimes accusing genderqueer people who—so last I checked, about 70% of people who identify as genderqueer were assigned female at birth. So there’s sometimes this idea that genderqueer people jumped ship, and they’ve abandoned their solidarity with women—so abandoned some feminist obligation that they have to identify with women. Obviously, there’s this TERFy argument that trans women are reinforcing dangerous stereotypes about women by being feminine, if they are feminine, while being assigned male at birth. You get these problematic finger-pointings at other sorts of gender groups.
I think a lot of this, often, is just based on transphobia, right? Transphobia frames and helps us understand a lot of the infighting that occurs between different feminist groups. That said, I think a lot of it also can arise because of an incomplete understanding of the ideology that we’re up against, as trans people and as feminists, where I’m using those terms inclusively, obviously. So I think that when we’re talking about the Western concepts of gender, and we’re talking about the Western post-colonial understanding of gender, we need to understand that it’s multifaceted, and different kinds of groups need to attack different axes of that ideology.
So the way I like to think about this ideology is as a triangle that has three different axes. One of the axes is understanding gender as being the same as biology. Another is understanding gender as being split into binary, discrete, and exhaustive categories. And another is the idea that there are certain social stereotypes that one ought to conform to on the basis of one’s gender. And if we think about the work that trans binary people—like trans men and trans women—are doing, the work that genderqueer people are doing, and the work that cis women who are gender-nonconforming do, we’re all fighting the same enemy, but from different points of attack.
Matt Teichman:
Okay. So currently, there are maybe three different strands of feminism. What do they all have in common? Well, maybe they’re all attacking the patriarchy, but they’re attacking different aspects of it. So maybe one group of feminists is focused on the idea that there are only two genders, and that the space of possible genders is exhaustedly partitioned into them. Another group of feminists is pushing back against the limited social roles that have been traditionally ascribed to women, and trying to equalize the power structure. And then, maybe another group of feminists is combating the assumption that there is a strict and absolute connection between the gender you were assigned at birth on the basis of your biological features and what gender you actually have.
So it seems like on your view, the patriarchy is pretty large and multifaceted, and has a lot of different stuff going on. Maybe we could take a step back and think about what, exactly, is the patriarchy, and what does it do? Is it, like, a cabal of people? Is it like a set of beliefs that are widespread, that are wrong? Is it something we’re all subconsciously participating in? What, exactly, is the patriarchy?
Robin Dembroff:
I tend to think of the patriarchy as a social system that is set up so that cisgender men—and in particular, white, heterosexual, cisgender men—are afforded more power and resources than other people. It’s important to note, too, that the patriarchy does that. That is the result of patriarchy. But we can also think of patriarchy as a kind of ideology that reinforces that system. So we can also think of patriarchy as a set of expectations, norms, and beliefs that work together to keep those who are not cisgender, white, straight men from achieving, or sometimes even reaching for, those powers and resources.
Matt Teichman:
And just to be clear, we’re talking here not about some legally-enforced patriarchy, but rather a set of social conventions that’s enforced by social pressures and social policing.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah. I mean, I would not want to draw a distinction between the social and the legal. But the legal is only one part of the patriarchy. So if we think, for example, about—consider Ireland. Ireland moved past its constitutional ban on abortion. And one of the main things that people were saying about that was that that ban on abortion served the patriarchy. It was a way to legally control women’s bodies that aligned with social norms, but gave a particular kind of bite to those non-legal social norms. Or just consider the fact that your gender is on your driver’s license. That is a way in which—so think about what I said earlier. Part of the patriarchal idea of gender, or the Western post-colonial idea of gender, is that it’s split into binary, discrete, and exhaustive categories. That is very much reinforced under the legal system in America. Your passport, your driver’s license, except for in a few states, and so on, has to say either M or F on it.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. So that raises some interesting moral questions. So let’s assume that I don’t endorse either the label “man” or “woman” for myself. What exactly am I going to put on my driver’s license? And what public restroom am I going to use? And what social expectations, more generally, should people have about me, if any? Maybe none?
Robin Dembroff:
So there’s two kinds of ways of understanding your question. One is descriptive, and one is prescriptive. So descriptively, if you ask, what bathroom will I use, what language will I use, and so on, my answer is going to be different than the prescriptive, or the question about how it ought to be. As far as how it actually is to navigate the world as a genderqueer person, it’s incredibly difficult, largely because the world is saturated in a binary gender division, and because most people don’t have a concept of non-binary gender, or of genderqueerness. What that means is that even if one is androgynous, one is not read as non-binary. One is read as a man or a woman who is violating gender norms in some sort of way.
So as far as what bathroom would you use—you’d probably still end up using the men’s bathroom, because you probably wouldn’t have much of a choice about that, just as I often use either the men’s or the women’s bathroom because often, there isn’t a gender neutral bathroom option. Pronouns-wise—yes, I use they/them pronouns. Usually, though, people refer to me as “he” or “she.” And that’s just the way that I have to navigate the world, given that it’s set up in the way that it is. Prescriptively, though, part of what my identity is pushing for is for a world where there actually is space for people who do not see themselves as men or as women.
Matt Teichman:
Okay. So let’s talk about what that world would look like. Would there be gender-neutral bathrooms everywhere, and that’s it? Or would there be gender-neutral bathrooms in addition to the current bathrooms? And of course, it’s not all about bathrooms. That’s just one example. But then, would there be a third box you tick on your driver’s license besides just male and female? Or maybe there’d have to be four? Or maybe there’d have to be 20 of them. What kind of place should society be making for people with various gender identifications?
Robin Dembroff:
So different genderqueer people are going to give you different answers to that question. So I’ll just give you my own opinion. My own opinion is that it’s bad for gender to be institutionalized. So I would like to see a world where driver’s licenses and your passport don’t have any gender markers on them. I would like to see a world where all bathrooms are gender-neutral, and where we don’t need to have these sorts of gendered divisions built into the very structure of how we move through the world.
Matt Teichman:
And what would you say to people who put a lot of stock in their gender identity, and feel really empowered when they can publicly affirm it all the time? Would there be breathing room for people like that to be able to express their gender, if society were set up in that way?
Robin Dembroff:
Absolutely. I mean, you can think about the fact that we are able to communicate and affirm religious identities, racial identities, ethnic identities, different national identities, and so on, without needing there to be American bathrooms, and UK bathrooms, and so on. Those kinds of identities that are dear to us we can still communicate in other ways without needing the actual structure of the physical world to mark them.
Matt Teichman:
Oh my God, I need to use the New Jersey bathroom. Where is it?
Robin Dembroff:
Don’t go in the New Jersey bathroom.
Matt Teichman:
So you’ve argued, in very interesting joint work with Daniel Wodak, that it would be nice if even linguistically, we weren’t presuming to know each other’s genders all the time in the way that we inflect pronouns—so in other words, by saying “he” and “she.” Maybe it would be better if English was more like a lot of other languages in the world, like Turkish or Armenian, where you just don’t mark gender on pronouns. So the English version of that, I guess, would just be saying they/them/theirs for everybody. Would that be an accurate way to state your view?
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah. I mean, if anything, you’ve understated the view by saying it would be nice if English were that way. We’ve argued that there’s an actual philosophical, moral argument that English ought to become that way.
Matt Teichman:
I wonder whether you’ve talked to people who are native speakers of those languages, and asked them whether their experience of moving through the world with a gender is different.
Robin Dembroff:
I’ve talked to people who speak languages that don’t have gender encoded in them, such as Finnish. But I think it’s important to recognize here that the argument that we give can’t just be about the language in abstraction from the rest of the culture that it’s embedded in. So think about Turkish. Turkey is an incredibly gendered society that marks genders in a lot of ways besides language. So one thing to note about English is, I think, that the argument has more power towards, in fact, gender neutrality, as far as how people are able to move through the world, because we have other kinds of gendered freedom. Of course, we still don’t have a lot. But we have more than Turkey does, in terms of people’s ability to play between different modes of gender expressions.
Matt Teichman:
So one motivation for this idea that I find really interesting is the idea that maybe there should be some kind of confidentiality expectation with gender. In other words, a person should be able to not say what their gender is, if they don’t feel like saying what it is, and tell other people about it if they feel like it. But it should be up to the person. Why is that the case?
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah, so I want to back up a little bit on that question, actually, because just the idea that gender should be private is going to be understood differently by different people, depending on how they think about gender. And I think, in fact, the argument that gender should be private holds no matter how someone’s thinking about it. So suppose we’re talking to someone who thinks that gender is the same as biological sex, or assigned sex. In that case, I think the argument still holds, for reasons that have been argued by Talia Bettcher. So if when you say “he” and “she,” what you’re actually doing is providing a euphemism for what kind of genitals that person has, that seems hugely invasive. And Talia Bettcher has actually argued that it’s a kind of—I don’t know if she actually uses the term “sexual assault,” but certainly a kind of infringement on one’s sexual autonomy to be constantly communicating your ideas about what’s underneath that person’s clothes with what language you use for them.
But suppose you think that gender’s instead this—you have this internalist view where gender is about gender identity, and that when you use “he” or “she” for someone, you’re encoding information not about what their body is like, but instead about what their gender identity is. In that case, I think the argument still holds. Because then, you’re saying, I have a right to my mental states and how I think about myself. I don’t have any kind of obligation to communicate that information to people constantly, or have other people guess what that information is and communicate it to other people. I have a first-personal right to my mental states.
Matt Teichman:
So in other words, no matter what you think gender is, it seems like it’s going to have to be something that’s private.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah, or at least that you have a right to not have other people be constantly guessing and communicating what they think that information is. I mean, it’s really creepy. You go through TSA—and for those of you who actually pay attention to these things, you already know this, but I’m just going to say it, because I find that a lot of my cisgender friends have never realized this. When you go through airport security at TSA, and you go through those body scanners, the TSA literally has a pink button and a blue button that they push based on what they guess your genitalia is like. And then, the body scanner says that you have an anomaly or not based on whether they’ve guessed correctly. And I find that incredibly creepy—and not only creepy, but a kind of violation of my autonomy over my body when they do that.
But note that we do that to each other all the time when we use pronouns. The TSA example is just a very obvious example of the same sort of process that we do constantly with each other.
Matt Teichman:
Right. So even before airports all introduced millimeter-wave, full-body scans—that’s just a technological extension, maybe, of what we’re implicitly doing with each other anyway, all the time.
Robin Dembroff:
Right.
Matt Teichman:
So it seems like we’ve been circling around the view that we should strive to have a society in which this practice of constantly speculating about each other’s genders/biological sexes is no longer something we all do, and it becomes information that each person can make available if they want to, but it’s strictly on a voluntary basis. But it also seems, I think, pretty self-evident that we’re very far from that political ideal right now. So if we wanted to nudge our current system more in the direction of the ideal that you just described, what should we do?
Robin Dembroff:
I think there are different things that we can do on different levels of systematicity. So at an institutional level, there are certainly things that can be done. We can strive towards gender-neutral jurisprudence. We can strive towards removing gendered information from legal documents. We can push institutions to make their buildings, and their employee rules, and dress codes, and so on, gender-neutral. On an interpersonal level, I think one thing we can do is not presume to know someone’s pronouns until they tell us what they are. That’s a huge one, right? So if you meet someone new, default to they/them pronouns until you ask them what they are. And that might be awkward. Having that conversation, “what are your pronouns,” is very hard for people to get used to. But trust me—once you start doing it, it becomes much more natural. And in most cases, people appreciate it when you ask them.
Matt Teichman:
Robin Dembroff, thanks so much for joining us.
Robin Dembroff:
Yeah. Thanks, Matt.
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