by Robyn Ryle
You’re socialized as a girl among the Mundugumor in Papua New Guinea. GO TO 17.
You’re socialized as a girl in the contemporary United States. GO TO 59.
You’re socialized as something different. GO TO 54.
36
As a girl in a patriarchal society, you’re automatically seen as inferior to boys and men just by virtue of having been born a girl. People will mostly expect you to act in feminine ways and will also see your femininity as something that makes you less-than. You’ll be more likely to feel bad about your body as a girl, and therefore also more likely to suffer from eating disorders. Wherever you are in the world, the media will probably depict you as more passive compared to active, authoritative, and in-control boys.
Because of androcentrism, it might be considered more acceptable for you to step outside of your gender and do masculine things than it would be for a boy to do feminine things. In fact, girls are often rewarded for acting masculine. It’s seen as much more okay for a girl to be a tomboy than it is for a boy to be a “sissy.” That is, up until a certain age. If you’re still acting too much like a boy when you hit puberty, you’ll probably be told to start being more “ladylike.”
So being in a patriarchal society as a girl isn’t so great. But exactly how patriarchal is the place you’ve been born into? Exactly how much inequality is there between women and men? How would you even go about measuring something like the amount of gender inequality in the first place?
GO TO 46.
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Aside from who’s doing the socializing (man, woman, or group), how exactly does gender socialization happen? There are different explanations, but many focus on the ways in which you’re rewarded and punished for behaviors that are considered correct or incorrect for the gender you’ve been assigned. What your gender socialization looks like depends on the particular gender norms of your culture. Learning to be a girl among the Mundugumor in Papua New Guinea will be different from learning gender socialization in the contemporary United States.
You’re socialized as a girl among the Mundugumor in Papua New Guinea. GO TO 17.
You’re socialized as a girl in the contemporary United States. GO TO 59.
You’re socialized as something different. GO TO 54.
38
The identity of your primary caregiver (man, woman, or group) influences how you learn your gender identity. But aside from who’s doing the gender socialization, how exactly does it happen? There are different explanations, but many focus on the ways in which you’re rewarded and punished for behaviors that are considered correct or incorrect for the gender you’ve been assigned. Not surprisingly, what your gender socialization looks like depends on the particular gender norms of the culture you find yourself in. A boy in colonial America, a boy in the contemporary United States, and a boy living with the Arapesh in Papua New Guinea are all going to have very different experiences of gender socialization.
You’re socialized as a boy in colonial America. GO TO 51.
You’re socialized as a boy in the contemporary United States. GO TO 52.
You’re socialized among the Arapesh in Papua New Guinea. GO TO 53.
You’re socialized as something different. GO TO 54.
39
Up until puberty, most of the differences between girls and boys are social rather than biological. In fact, even after puberty, humans as a species have very little gender-based differentiation compared to other species. Think about bird species among whom males and females are completely different colors. A male cardinal is bright red while a female cardinal is brown. Or consider the female hairy anglerfish, who is almost fourteen times as large as the male and looks nothing like him. Or male lions, with their stately manes, and female lions, without them. Comparatively, human women and men look pretty much alike, and this is especially true before secondary sex characteristics develop. That’s why, as a girl, you might have been allowed to run around with your shirt off before puberty.
Secondary sex characteristics are bodily changes that are brought about with the introduction of certain hormones after puberty. Before puberty, neither boys nor girls have breasts. Their voices sound the same. No one has facial hair or armpit hair or leg hair that needs to be shaved. Puberty is the moment when both the social and biological aspects of gender become even more intense.
You develop earlier than other girls at puberty. GO TO 68.
You develop later than other girls at puberty. GO TO 69.
You develop differently from other girls at puberty. GO TO 70.
40
Puberty is an important crossroads of sorts in your gender path. Up until puberty, a lot of the differences between boys and girls are social rather than physiological. In fact, in most human societies, it’s the social aspects of gender, rather than biological sex, that people use to make assumptions about what gender you fit into.
Think about it. In most places, humans don’t walk around completely naked all the time. We hide our genitalia—what we assume are the biggest markers of biological sex—under our clothes. You may think that you can see other bodily differences—the shape of breasts or the curve of a big butt—but they don’t always tell the full story. Breasts are easy enough to fake and they’re not always perfect indicators of underlying biological gender. Sometimes men have breasts and often women don’t. You might think of a big butt as a feminine trait, but there are plenty of men with junk in their trunk. Before puberty, your body as a boy doesn’t look much different from the bodies of the girls around you. After puberty, some more visible bodily differences might emerge. But even then, they won’t always be a perfect guide.
You develop earlier than other boys at puberty. GO TO 91.
You develop later than other boys at puberty. GO TO 92.
You develop differently from other boys at puberty. GO TO 70.
41
You’re born with some type of intersex condition, and your doctor decides to handle it with a concealment-centered model.
The concealment-centered model is the method for dealing with intersex infants that dominates in many places around the world. Under this model, your intersex condition is seen as an anatomical abnormality which is highly likely to cause great distress for you and your family. Being intersex is considered pathological, which means that you’re viewed as having a disease. If being intersex is defined as a disease, the logical course of action is immediate medical attention.
What does this medical attention look like? Doctors argue that if being intersex is pathological, then the correct course of action is to “normalize” the “abnormal” genitals using surgical, hormonal, and other treatments In addition, they recommend that this “normalization” happen as quickly as possible. The reason that doctors feel compelled to act with such speed is the belief that society can’t handle gender ambiguity or intersex conditions, so delaying treatment has the potential to increase your trauma. By intervening, doctors believe they are saving you from being ridiculed, isolated, and rejected—even, perhaps, by your own parents.
As its name suggests, the guiding motive of the concealment-centered model is to, well, conceal. The idea is to hide and correct the intersex condition from you and, to some extent, from your parents. The language doctors use to explain intersex conditions to your parents and other family members may be cloaked in so much medical jargon as to make it virtually impossible to understand.
If the goal of this approach is to hide the intersex condition, then, of course, you as the intersex person don’t have any say in what happens to your body. In this model, “fixing” the problem must happen as soon as possible, when you’re still an infant and therefore incapable of participating in decisions about your body. The concealment-centered model also advises doctors and family members to continue to hide the truth from you when you get older; telling you about your intersex condition would just lead to more gender confusion. Certain medical information and records are likely to be withheld from you as you
age. Doctors will continue to use ambiguous language in their interactions with you. If you’ve been gender assigned as a woman but still have masculine internal organs, they might say something like, “We removed your twisted ovaries,” instead of, “We removed your testes.”
So if you’re an intersex person and your doctors use the concealment-centered approach, decisions about your body and your gender are made for you when you’re too young to have any input. What’s troubling to many intersex activists is that many of these decisions are difficult or impossible to reverse. If someday you do find out about your intersex condition and feel that the gender your doctors and parents chose for you is wrong, some of the damage done by surgeries may be irreversible.
For example, if you have a Y chromosome and an “inadequate” or unreconstructible penis, you’ll be assigned female and surgically reconstructed as such. This means that your “inadequate” penis is removed. You can see how this would become a problem if you discover later on as an adult that you identify as male.
Intersex activists argue that the concealment-centered model surgically “normalizes” you not because it’s in your best medical interest, but in order to force you into society’s existing gender categories. Most intersex conditions are not physiologically harmful; being intersex won’t kill you and usually doesn’t cause any medical problems. The “problem” with being intersex is a social one rather than a medical one, but doctors still use medical solutions.
If you’re born intersex under the concealment-centered model, a gender will be assigned to you and your body will be made to fit that assignment as closely as possible. It may be many years before you find out about your condition, if you find out at all.
You’re assigned to be a boy. GO TO 23.
You’re assigned to be a girl. GO TO 24.
42
You’re born with some type of intersex condition, and your doctor decides to handle it with a patient-centered model.
The patient-centered model is advocated by many intersex activists but still isn’t the norm in most countries. There are currently only two countries that have outlawed “corrective” surgery on intersex infants—Chile and Malta. As an intersex infant anywhere else in the world, you’re less likely to encounter the patient-centered model.
Under the patient-centered model, intersex conditions are seen as a relatively common variation from the standard versions of “female” and “male.” Sexual and reproductive anatomy are treated no differently from hair color or skin color, in that all of these physical characteristics vary along a wide spectrum. Some people have red hair, some people are blond, and some people have black hair, just like some people have XY chromosomes, others have XX or XO chromosomes, and other combinations are possible too. Drawing the line between where red hair ends and brown hair begins is hard, just as it is for the characteristics of biological gender. Variation is natural, so proponents of the patient-centered model believe that being intersex is neither a medical nor a social pathology. That is to say, being intersex is not a disease and therefore should not be treated as such.
In a patient-centered model, your family gets some support in the form of counseling from experts, as well as from intersex adults. The doctors provide your parents with as much information about your intersex condition as they can handle.
Under this model, nothing permanent or irreversible happens to you until you’re old enough to make a decision for yourself. Parents, doctors, and extended family decide together what gender to assign you until you are certain for yourself about your gender identity. This only happens after they’ve had extensive conversations with doctors, experts, and other intersex people. They choose from the categories of female and male, but they also acknowledge that your gender assignment is preliminary. That is, they understand that later on, you could change your gender identity and alter your initial gender assignment. Maybe your parents decide to raise you as a girl, but as you mature, you realize that you’re a boy. At that point, you can pursue whatever surgical or medical interventions you’d like.
There’s no attempt in this model to hide the details of your intersex condition from you or your family. There’s no sense that a condition that is a societal problem (because of the lack of categories for people whose biology doesn’t fit into our existing categories) needs to be addressed through medical intervention. The model acknowledges that intersex people are more likely than the rest of the population to change their gender assignment and gender identity as adults, and it avoids the problem of performing surgeries on you as an infant that are impossible or difficult to reverse later in life.
In the patient-centered model, you’re assigned a gender as an infant, but it’s not seen as permanent. Those who advocate for the patient-centered model point out that, in reality, all gender assignments at birth should be treated as potentially temporary. No one, intersex or not, gets to decide what their gender is when they’re born. Doesn’t it make sense to assume that some people might feel later on that the assignment they were given isn’t the right one after all?
You’re assigned to be a boy…for now. GO TO 23.
You’re assigned to be a girl…for now. GO TO 24.
43
You feel like a girl on the inside (your gender identity), you’re labeled a girl (your gender assignment), and you act like a girl (your gender expression). You like the color pink and wearing dresses and playing with dolls. As a result of your gender socialization, you walk like a girl (keeping your feet closer together, as if you were walking a tightrope) and sit like a girl (crossing your legs and taking up less space). You smile like a girl (more often than boys) and you talk like a girl (saying “sorry” more often and using a higher voice). The list of things you’re supposed to do in order to act like a girl is a long one. It’s hard to keep track of them all. But maybe you do. Maybe you successfully keep your gender identity, your gender assignment, and your gender expression perfectly lined up. What do you win for this amazing feat?
Because of the way femininity is constructed, you don’t have to worry as much as boys do about proving your femininity. It’s also okay for you to show emotions—like sadness, joy, and caring—which are natural to all of us, but which boys many times have to pretend not to experience.
On the other hand, you get called a girly-girl. Or fru-fru. Or a sissy. Or frilly. Or maybe even weird, all for doing what you were supposed to do. Maybe people think you’re weak or a pushover or not very smart, just because you like pink. If this is what winning the gender game looks like, you think it might be better to lose.
The truth is that there is no winning at the gender game. In a society characterized by androcentrism, or the belief that men and being masculine are better than women and being feminine, being feminine isn’t really winning. You get bonus points for following the rules, but you’re still a girl in a culture where a girl isn’t really the best thing to be.
GO TO 39.
44
You feel like a girl inside and you were assigned a feminine gender. But you don’t particularly like the color pink. You’d rather play with trucks or cars than dolls. You really hate dresses, because they get in the way of doing important things like climbing trees or running or playing sports. Maybe you don’t walk like a girl (you don’t keep your feet close together, as if you were walking a tightrope) or sit like a girl (you don’t cross your legs and take up less space). You don’t like smiling (even though everyone’s always telling you to) or you have a very deep voice or you don’t like to say you’re sorry all the time. You can feel like a girl and be called a girl and still not want to do all the things that girls are supposed to do.
Maybe you’re like Betsy Lucal, a sociologist who writes about what it’s like to be an adult woman whose gender expression doesn’t conform to society’s expectations. Lucal was assigned a feminine gender when she was born and she identifies as a woman. But she’s tall and keeps her hair short. She doesn’t wear makeup or particularly feminine clothing. Her gen
der expression doesn’t match her gender assignment and her gender identity, so she’s often mistaken for a man in interactions. She gets called “sir.” When she uses the women’s restroom or the women’s dressing room in public, she gets strange looks or is told that she’s in the wrong place. Lucal doesn’t identify as transgender—she thinks of herself as a woman. She just wants to be a different type of woman through her gender expression, but that’s a difficult thing in the strict gender system in which she lives.
If your gender expression doesn’t match the other aspects of your gender, you might get punished for not acting like a girl. Like Lucal, you might be mistaken for a boy or man. But those consequences might not kick in fully until you hit puberty, when your parents and friends might begin to encourage you to act more feminine.
Until then, you might be called a tomboy and that’s not so bad, especially if you live in a society where androcentrism is the norm. Androcentrism is the belief that men and masculinity are better than women and femininity. In fact, as an adult, Lucal was able to reap some benefits from being seen as masculine. For example, she felt safer in public spaces because people assumed that she was a man instead of a woman. So if you’re a girl in an androcentric society, it’ll probably be more acceptable for you to act like a boy than it would be for a boy, acting like a girl.
GO TO 39.
