Gender Benders

I didn’t like Raf Katigbak’s articles in The Mirror before reading his latest, Gender Bender, and I like them less now. 

Katigbak responds to a Canadian Medical Association article arguing for the sex of fetuses to be concealed, given the reality of global feticide and its preferential treatment for penises.  He uses this as a springboard to reflect on sex and gender, emphasizing that we ought to eradicate their association since gender (the social equivalent of sex) is faultily determined by biology.  And this creates vast gender inequality.

‘But the painful truth is this, knowing a baby’s sex is the first step towards a long life of gender bias and stereotyping.  As soon as parents find out if it’s a boy or girl, they’ll be putting them into a conceptual gender ghetto and getting all kinds of frilly stuff if they’re female and sporty stuff for the dudes…yes, gender inequality is rampant in our society, and perhaps not knowing the sex of your future child is the first step in fixing that.’

Let’s stop and simply ask: what possible case would result in no long life of gender/sex bias and stereotype, even if we didn’t know the sex of this person?  Does Raf really think that concealing sex would stop such a thing?  It doesn’t matter how someone is raised with respect to gender, society is going to do what it does, which is stereotype and judge. 

And why does he assume so many parents are maladroit at seeing a person develop and instead just good at inundating kids in cultural norms?  And why are parents blamed anyway for the consequences of gender norms so far down the line?  At a certain point, we have to say, if you’ve had the privilge of a relatively luxurious upbringing (food, shelter, education), growing up is a question of deceiphering your own values, choosing and rejecting them, some of which unquestionably relate to gender.  It pays to remember also that although not everyone is content with the gender norms fed to them by parents, many people are, and they would probably thank their parents too for those associations.

But the bigger mistakes in this article reside on the level of ideology.  On the one hand, a liberal position of openness under the auspices of human rights is conveyed as a repulsion to category (we don’t need the category of gender, let alone sex), and this is presented as a radical opposite to the tyranny of categorization.  But the idea of refusing to categorize is enforced with all the fascist tendencies of its opposite, but this time it preserves a disconcerting idealism that can’t hope to respond to real politic questions.  Without a credible alternative, the left-liberal gets too caught in an idealistic idea rather than a practical fact.

Second, Katigbak uses the real world evils of feticide and preferential sex treatment to mire into an aimless consideration of identity politics, and in doing so he emphasizes gender inequality as an index for inequality and contributes to the liberal trend of forgetting the real, economic inequality that still haunts us today and is of first importance.  This is succinct with contemporary liberal politics and the mechanics of late capitalism.  Walter Benn Michaels hit the hammer on the head in The Trouble With Diversity, where he argued that cultural diversity today (ethnicity, sexual identity, etc.) has mistakenly been designated the space of inequality by liberals, since identity difference is easier to talk about than class difference.  But a discourse about identity politics is one lost on real politics— the essence of which is always economic—and one that perpetuates the larger capitalist machine of concealing economic difference.  And the longer liberals cling to identity politics as a measure for difference the longer they will be fighting the wrong battle.