Gender binary

If people were not coerced into gender...

Gender binary is the socially constructed dichotomy of human activities, behaviours, appearances, emotions, mannerisms, body parts, etc., into masculine and feminine. It is a central tenet of patriarchy.

The binary asserts that there are only two genders, male and female; and there are only two types of humans, men and women. Usually a corollary is added that gender can be diagnosed by external observation as opposed to self-concept.

This strict division of the human experience into two mutually exclusive gender-related domains is artificial and unsupported by scientific research. Despite this, people are assigned, by parents, doctors, and culture, a gender at birth. This is done, most often, based on the presence of a penis or a vagina. If a baby is intersex, this is almost always seen as pathological and surgery is performed to bring their reproductive organs closer to either end of the spectrum.

Historical details

The idea originates from the, historically recent, colonial/modern patriarchal invention of the idea of gender normality. Institutional power has been used by modern societies and organizations to try to enforce gender binary at the expense, trauma, injury, and lives of transgender, intersex, and non-binary people.

Dyadism

See the main article on this topic: Dyadism

Because intersex people are born with genitals that do not conform to society's preconceived notions of what a "girl" or a "boy" should look like, their genitals are often surgically changed into shapes and sizes that do. Intersex people are coercively assigned a gender, just like all people, however in their case coercive gender assignment (which usually is based on genitals) cannot be carried out without surgery. This is a demonstration of some of the circular logic involved in assigning gender at birth.

Coercive and abusive normalisation of intersex people's genitals is a particularly brutal manifestation of the gender binary. Applying the logic of the binary onto body parts, known as dyadism, results in many intersex people's live being irrevocably damaged by so-called "corrective" or "normalising" genital surgery. Such surgery and coercive hormone "treatment" often results in intersex people losing the ability to enjoy sex:

There were people there who had been intersex boys at birth (born with small penises and/or undescended testes), but had been given sex changes in infancy because it was believed that they couldn’t be happy as men with small penises, but that all they would need to be happy as women were “holes big enough to accommodate average-sized adult male penises.” (The quote comes from various medical articles I read for my undergraduate thesis at U.C. Berkeley.) Despite being castrated and left with huge breasts from the estrogen pills they’d been given, they had felt like boys all their lives. Sadly, doctors had told their parents to deny everything so that the sex changes would be a success, psychologically speaking. They weren’t. Instead, they were left psychologically confused and deeply betrayed by their parents’ lies. There were also women like myself who’d been born with large clitorises, but theirs had been either entirely removed, or reduced in size by clitoral reduction surgeries which doctors claimed did not damage sexual sensitivity. I’ll never forget one of the stories one of the victims of clitoral reduction surgery had told. She spoke about how she’d always had difficulty having sex with men because of her lack of sexual sensation, but that if she sat on the floor and hit her genital region with the heel of her foot, after about ten minutes she began to feel some kind of sensation, and she wondered if it was similar to what other women experienced during sexual arousal. It still makes me teary to think of the lifetime of joy and intimacy that was stolen from her, just because someone had decided her clitoris wasn’t “feminine-looking enough.”

See also

• Gender presentation
• Gender essentialism
• Gender variance
• Cisnormativity
• Neurosexism
• Cissexism

External links

• Gender binary, on Geek Feminism Wiki
• How do we decipher sex in daily life?, by Lisa Wade

References

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