by Robyn Ryle
In matriarchal cultures, power is more equally distributed in general. Because of an emphasis on sharing and decision-making by consensus, no one in a matriarchy has considerably more or considerably less power than anyone else. Because power differentials along gender lines are smaller in a matriarchy, this means that as a girl, you’d have more power than you would in a patriarchal society. You’d be more powerful not only within your own family, but also when it comes to participating in larger decisions about your tribe or group. Property and titles would be passed down from mother to daughter instead of from father to son. Unlike in a patriarchal society where children often take their father’s names, your children would be more likely to be identified by your family name. When you are old enough to get married, your husband would move into your family’s house, instead of you going to live with him in his parents’ house. These and other practices give girls and women more power in a matriarchal society.
Gender socialization would probably still happen in a matriarchy, even if it might be different. Gender socialization is how you learn to become a girl and eventually a woman. The person who teaches you those things—your primary caregiver—is important in determining exactly what you learn. So you need to know who your primary caregiver is going to be.
Your primary caregiver is a woman. GO TO 34.
Your primary caregiver is a man. GO TO 35.
Your primary caregiver is a group of people. GO TO 26.
10
Congratulations! You’ve been born into a world where gender exists! Your gender adventure is under way!
If your parents had access to ultrasound technology, they may be ahead of the game. Perhaps they discovered your gender even before you were born, and your room is already decorated in pink or blue.
Whether it happens before you’re born, when you’re born, or some time much later, the starting point of your gender adventure is gender assignment. Gender assignment is what happens when someone puts you into a gender category appropriate to your particular culture. To put it simply, gender assignment is what happens when someone announces, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” or “It’s something else entirely!”
GENDER ASSIGNMENT
n. /ˈjen-dər ə-ˈsīn-mənt/
Determination by an outside party of a person’s gender.
On the surface, gender assignment seems like a straightforward, easy process. But it’s actually pretty complicated. Exactly how gender assignment works, and when it happens, depends on the time and place that you’re born into.
You’re born into a culture where gender assignment happens at birth. GO TO 2.
You’re born into a culture where gender assignment happens later. GO TO 15.
11
Congratulations! You’ve been born into a world where there is no such thing as gender!
Wait! Does such a thing exist? Are you still on Earth, or have you somehow been born in a galaxy far, far away? Is it possible to live in a world with no gender at all?
You’re not the first person to ask that question, and not everyone agrees on the answer. But if we assume that there are (or have been) places where gender doesn’t exist, here are a few possibilities for what that might look like.
One possibility is that gender didn’t exist at the very beginning of human prehistory. One anthropologist suggests that in order to understand what a culture without gender looks like, you have to go back in time and imagine that you’re an early human being, living as a hunter-gatherer in a small, tribal group.
In your group, you can certainly see that there are differences among people. Some of those differences have to do with genitalia, but you can see many other physical differences too.
There’s no particular reason that you would assign more meaning to genitalia than you would to, say, foot size. Or earlobes. People look physically different in lots of ways; culture tells us which of those differences are important, and your hunter-gatherer group doesn’t tell you that the physical markers of gender are (or are not) important. Some—but not all—members of your group who have a certain type of genitalia can get pregnant. But, as we know in modern times, not all biological women are fertile, and even fertile biological women are not capable of getting pregnant all of the time.
If, as a group, you don’t really attach importance or meaning to genitals, then you wouldn’t see a reason to organize your sexual or romantic behavior around them. Babies would still be born in such a group because biologically fertile women would sometimes have sex with biologically fertile men. But this wouldn’t be the only type of sex going on. Wanting to have sex exclusively with people who have certain kinds of genitals would make as much sense as only wanting to have sex with people who have round earlobes would. Neither physical difference means more than the other. If gender is the meaning we attach to genitals and other physical markers, then in your early human group, there is no such thing as gender. There’s also no such thing as sexual identity (gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, straight) in the way we think of it now.
Another possibility is that gender didn’t exist in some cultures around the world before their exposure to Anglo-European ideas. In places like Europe, beliefs about gender developed in very specific ways. When Europeans came into contact with other cultures, they imposed their rigid beliefs about gender onto them, regardless of whatever ideas these cultures may have already had. For example, among the Yoruba in Africa, seniority (or age) was much more important than any status based on bodily sex or gender. The categories of identity based on seniority were not gender-specific, and knowing a person’s seniority status wouldn’t reveal anything about their gender. Given this very different way of understanding social categories, did such a thing as gender really exist in Yorubaland before European colonizers introduced the concept? Is gender really a universal category, or have we just assumed that other cultures have gender when what’s actually going on is something completely different?
Maybe, rather than gender having been imposed by another culture where it didn’t exist before, gender has just mattered a lot less in certain places and times than it does now. Why might that be the case? Some researchers suggest that gender becomes more important when societies shift from simple hunting and gathering to living as settled farmers. Hunter-gatherers move from place to place in small groups, surviving off the animals they kill and the food they find. Everyone is pretty much doing the same thing, so gender doesn’t have much meaning. In agricultural societies, however, many different kinds of tasks must be accomplished, so work becomes specialized and assigned on the basis of whether you’re a woman or a man. In this context, gender begins to pack a punch. It is true that gender as we understand it now does exist among hunter-gatherer groups that are still around today, but it’s much less important, as an identity, than it is in many other cultures.
Others argue that gender becomes more important when societies begin to believe in private property—the idea that individuals can own and have control over land, stuff, or people. From this point of view, gender matters because women themselves can become private property; that is, women become something that can be bought and sold, usually through marriage.
Can you imagine a world in which there is no gender? Or a world in which gender isn’t very important? Does it seem strange? Was this the way it was for early humans? We can’t know for sure.
For now, every culture and society that we’re aware of seems to have some concept of gender, even though there’s a lot of variation in what gender looks like.
Sorry, but it looks like there’s no escaping gender just yet. GO TO 10.
12
You’ve been born into a society with one gender, which might seem pretty weird. Where, exactly, are you?
If you’re in a one-gender system, you’re somewhere in the Western world, but you’ve moved back in time. Some historians of gender suggest that if you were born before the eighteenth century in Europe, you were probably born into a one-gender system.
&nb
sp; The one-gender system dates back to ancient Greek culture. The ancient Greeks didn’t think of men and women as completely different types of people based on their biology. There was no sense of the “opposite sex.” Women were considered lesser versions of men, in the same way that men were lesser versions of the gods. Gender was viewed as a continuum, with gods at the top and women, slaves, and other undesirables at the bottom.
For all that wide swath of history from ancient Greek civilization up until the eighteenth century, it’s not as if people were ignorant about human anatomy, both internal and external. They had performed dissections to study the inside of women’s and men’s bodies in great detail. But in a one-gender system, penises and vaginas are seen as the same organ, as are testes and ovaries. In men, penises are external and in women, they’re internal—that is, a vagina is an internal penis and not an entirely different organ. In other words, penises and vaginas are different versions of the same thing. An ovary is just a lesser version of a testis. In some sense, a man is a woman turned inside out.
How, you might be wondering, could people have gotten gender so wrong for so long? Were they that stupid? No, they weren’t. Greek physicians knew a great deal about human anatomy. The difference lies in how they understood gender culturally. If you live in a culture that believes there is only one gender, then that is the lens through which you’ll understand anatomy. Because ancient Greek physicians believed there was only one gender, they saw only different types of the same organ. Today, because we believe in two genders, we see two completely different organs. To say that we’re right and the Greeks were wrong is an example of ethnocentrism, or assuming that the perspective of your own culture is correct while everyone else is wrong.
ETHNOCENTRISM
n. /ˌeth-nō-ˈsen-ˌtri-zəm/
The belief or attitude that one’s own culture is normal and therefore superior to all others.
Inequality still exists in a one-gender system, it just takes a different form. As a woman, you’re inferior not because you’re completely different, biologically speaking, from men. You’re inferior because you’re a less perfect version of men.
To start a new gender journey, TURN BACK TO 2.
13
You’ve been born into a society with two genders, which might seem pretty weird. Where, exactly, are you?
You were probably born somewhere in the Western world after the eighteenth century. From about the eighteenth century on, people in Europe and parts of the world under European influence came to believe in sexual dimorphism. Sexual dimorphism is the belief that there are two discrete and objectively real biological categories called male and female. Discrete means that you can only be in one category or the other; you can’t be both male and female at the same time. Objectively real means that anyone could look at the criteria you’ve developed to sort people into two categories and would come to the exact same conclusion about which category you belong to. Your mom and your sister, but also someone from the other side of the world—all of them would be able to use the criteria laid out to sort people into either women or men, and they’d all come to the exact same conclusion every time.
SEXUAL DIMORPHISM
n. /ˈsek-sh(ə-)wəl (ˌ)dī-ˈmȯr-ˌfi-zəm/
The belief that there are two discrete and objectively real biological categories called male and female.
What are these criteria that your mom and your sister are going to be using to assign someone to one gender or another? How does the person doing the gender assignment know whether you’re a boy or a girl or something else?
If you’re born in the contemporary United States, genitalia are the criteria used to assign you to a gender. You’re born, and the first thing your doctor looks for is a penis. If your mother had an ultrasound before you were born, a penis is what the doctor was looking for in those blurry images.
As far as criteria for deciding your gender, the presence or absence of a penis seems fairly straightforward. If you have a penis, then you’re a man. If you don’t, then you’re a woman. The tension in the delivery room is thick. Everyone’s waiting with baited breath for the big reveal.
But what if it isn’t quite as easy as it sounds? Imagine that you’re born and instead of saying, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” the doctor says, “I’m not sure.” What happens then?
Doctors are unlikely to tell new parents that they’re unsure of what the gender of their child is; they understand how upsetting that answer would be for a lot of parents to hear. But uncertainties do sometimes arise during these first moments in the delivery room.
The answer centers around one question—what’s the difference between a penis and clitoris?
Surely, you think as you’re handed off to the nurse to get cleaned, poked, and prodded, my doctor can tell the difference between a penis and a clitoris. She’s a trained healthcare professional, after all, and they’re completely different body parts, right? Penises are what boys and men have; clitorises are what girls and women have. It’s not that complicated, is it? It might seem that way, but they’re not quite as different as you think. The penis and the clitoris are homologous organs, which means that they’re different versions of the same basic, biological structure.
Just a few short months before you were born, you didn’t have a penis or a clitoris. For the first eight or nine weeks inside your mother’s womb, there were no anatomical differences between you and a fetus of a different gender. You had what’s called a genital tubercle, a body of tissue present in mammalian species (like humans) that, depending on the release of various hormones, becomes either a penis or a clitoris.
GENITAL TUBERCLE
n. /ˈje-nə-tᵊl ˈtü-bər-kəl/
A body of tissue present in the development of the reproductive system. It eventually develops into either a penis or a clitoris.
Because penises and clitorises emerge from the same body of tissue, telling the difference between the two of them is harder than you think. How will the doctor decide what to call your particular collection of tissue? Strange as it may sound, she’ll probably do some measuring.
Your body of genital tissue is longer than two and a half centimeters. GO TO 21.
Your body of genital tissue is shorter than one centimeter. GO TO 22.
Your body of genital tissue is somewhere between one and two and a half centimeters in length. GO TO 3.
14
You’ve been born into a society with more than two genders, which might seem pretty weird. Where, exactly, are you?
If you’re in a culture with more than two genders, there are quite a few places you could be. In fact, gender-variant categories, the term used to describe systems that don’t follow a strict division of the world into women and men, are fairly common across many cultures. You don’t have to travel that far to find a place with more than two gender categories, although the particular characteristics of third-gender categories vary a great deal.
Gender-variant categories exist in some form or another in places like the Balkans, Brazil, Hawaii, India, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, and Thailand, to name a few. They also exist among some Native American groups in North America.
GENDER-VARIANT CATEGORY
n. / ˈjen-dər ˈver-ē-ənt ˈka-tə-ˌgȯr-ēs/
A gender identity or gender status that departs from a dimorphic view of male and female.
But let’s narrow down the list for the sake of time. You’ve got your whole gendered life ahead of you, and you’re impatient to get started.
You were born a hijra in India. GO TO 4.
You were born an alyha among the Mohave. GO TO 5.
You were born a sworn virgin in the Balkans. GO TO 6.
15
In the particular time and place you’ve been born into, gender assignment doesn’t happen when you’re born, but at some later point.
What? No one decides for you whether you’re a girl or a boy when you’re born? How is that possible?
In some culture
s, children aren’t thought of as being fully gendered until later in life, often after some kind of initiation ritual. For example, among the Awa people of New Guinea, boys must undergo a series of rituals to “dry out” their bodies, as they believe excess moisture will make it impossible for the boys to mature physically into men. Part of these rituals involve induced bleeding, without which the Awa believe the boys will fail to physically become men. Elsewhere, the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea believe that boys aren’t born with jerungdu, the essential substance that makes them men. They don’t become men until later in life when they ingest jerungdu in a ritual setting.
In cultures like these, gender is seen much more as something that you achieve or accomplish, rather than as something that you’re assigned. Gender isn’t based solely on biological characteristics like genitalia, hormones, or chromosomes.
If you didn’t grow up in one of these cultures, you might be tempted to dismiss their notions of gender as wrong or weird. In fact, they’re just different. As you continue on your gender path, you’ll see that there are things about every culture’s way of understanding gender that don’t make perfect sense when you look at them up close. If you were born into a culture where gender assignment happens later in life, it would seem perfectly natural to you.
Your gender assignment is male or masculine. GO TO 23.
Your gender assignment is female or feminine. GO TO 24.
Your gender assignment is something else. GO TO 14.
