Gender and genre share the same root. They both derive from the Latin genus “race, stock, family; kind, rank, order, species,” which in turn comes from the PIE root *gene “give birth, beget.”
In simple terms, the word gender has to do with grouping related things. It also has an underlying correlation to creation, or ‘begetting,’ which is most commonly associated with reproduction but is not limited to it as such.
For a long time, gender was used as a grouping separate from biological sex or gender identity as we understand it now. In the thirteenth century, one of its common usages was “kind of things or persons sharing certain traits.” In fact, it wasn’t until the fifteenth century that we see the sense of ‘male or female sex’ emerge in its usage.
What can we learn about our current relationship to gender by reflecting on the word’s transformation throughout time?
First, that a word which once grouped together people through common traits and had an association with birth or creation isn’t inherently tied to biological sex. I say this at the risk of pointing out the obvious, and also from the position of a trans person (who may be biased towards more nuanced and open-ended definitions of gender). But I don’t say this here with the goal of making an argument about the validity of trans or non binary identity--I say it because there’s something worth investigating about groupings and identity that is well-accessed through our use of ‘gender.’
There are three ways (or ‘groupings’) to conceptualize humans with. We can understand humans through universal traits, group traits, or individual traits. All three groupings coexist--we all have aspects to us that are shared universally, aspects that are shared by subsets of the population, and aspects that are completely unique to us. Different cultures at different times have prioritized one understanding at the expense of pushing one to the side, and completely ignoring the other. (For instance, I would argue that the USA today is caught in a tenuous position of raising group identity to the fore, against a fundamentally individual-centric backdrop. The result is a society of people who are trying to leverage their individual identity through a list of group identities. Meanwhile, universal human traits barely show up in our national discourse).
Let’s go back to gender. Gender belongs to this middle grouping. It is a function of understanding humans by means of looking both at what they share with some humans, and what makes them different from other humans. It is this method of understanding via alignment and pushing away that I am interested in.
In a recent conversation with a nonbinary person, they said that the binary was useful inasmuch as it was something to define themselves in opposition to. This is precisely what I mean about groupings: that we need to understand them and what is interesting about them as existing in the precarious and fluctuating line between shared and not-shared, in the subjective identity construction that occurs both in saying “you can understand me by understanding that I belong to x group,” and in saying “you can understand me by understanding that despite appearances, I don’t belong in x group.”
There are certainly some who claim that any kind of grouping around gender should be abolished. The binary is seen as a restrictive system that has created all sorts of off shoot problems in society. But while I (of course) agree with the negative by-products of a strictly binary understanding of gender, I’m dubious that we would feel liberated even if we could entirely destroy groupings around gender. My hesitation is grounded in my point above: that our identity is relational, and depends on how we see or position ourselves in relation to others. We know that all individuals are unique. That means that we can’t effectively define ourselves by pointing out the difference between ourselves and another individual.
To say “Finnegan is different than Mischa” is so self-evident that it fails to impart any meaning. The question--where we get our understanding from--is in asking “how is Finnegan different than Mischa?” As soon as we ask that question, we have stepped into the realm of groupings.
Maybe what I am trying to get round to say is this. When we conceptualize gender as static, and as a grouping determined by what we are, we’ve narrowed our definition considerably. If we open our understanding up to not only what we are, but what we are by means of what we’re not, the world gets a lot more interesting.
Words - Finnegan Shepard www.finneganshepard.com
Photography - Mischa de Stroumillo www.mischadestroumillo.com