[Note: This post began life as an editorial for Interzone (#288), but I thought there was room for a bit of expansion. It’s a bit less punchy as a result – brevity is a virtue! – but maybe it’s a bit more nuanced.]
Long ago, when such things were still allowed, I went to an exhibition. Someone walked by, distracting me from the plunder out of Pharaoh’s tomb; and I couldn’t tell whether that person was a man or a woman. My head snapped around, instantly, instinctively. Some part of my brain had decided it was urgent to resolve that question.
Then I stopped, and asked myself a different question. Why should I care about identifying anyone’s gender, let alone that of a stranger I would never see again? Their gender wouldn’t be anything to me, practically, other than a word, a name, a category.
I want to say something, here, about imaginative fiction (to borrow Ursula Le Guin’s delicately barbed term) and gender (and transgender) definitions. There will be nipples too, never fear.
If you write imaginative fiction, you are a ship’s lookout, standing at the bow or perched in the crow’s nest, scanning the horizon: for hazards, or for sight of land. That seems easy enough; but to do it well, you have to see with a clear eye. That shadow on the water – is it a shoal, or a reef? Should we cast nets, or change course?
Imaginative fiction looks ahead, then, but it also tries to define. It isn’t prediction, really; or rather, even in the most rigorous SF, prediction is only part of the art. It’s more like an act of naming: naming things that only exist in other realities, some of which (like robots, like cyberspace) are potential futures. And it is also, inevitably, an act of judgement.
If we describe a future, we describe things as positive, things we would like to happen (switching from body to cloned body could make us near-immortal!) – shoals; or things we must warn against (an artificial virus wipes most of us out, and the remainder of civilisation collapses!) – reefs.
A thoughtful writer might find room for a subtlety and ambiguity in their futures (what would be the perils, or the regrets, associated with body transference? Would a subsistence farmer in humanity’s final fall have a sense that it was fitting, and be content?). The shoal is the reef.
And then there are the visionaries whose future events are so awe-inspiring as to be impossible for us to judge (inscrutable aliens ignite Jupiter into a second sun!) – here, our own limitations are precisely the point.
When we encounter something unknown, or undefined, something in us seeks – instantly, instinctively – to define it. The urge is troublingly deep-rooted. Like most of us, I can’t be sure that I treat people equally, but I try; no one’s gender should matter to me. Male, female, neither, both, some stage in transition – being as objective as I can, I don’t think I have a negative view of anyone.
And yet, from the stranger among the tombs, I learned that some primitive part of me wanted to know.
(Similar effects exist with the other ways we define each other, and ourselves. We may genuinely not draw any conclusions from another person’s race, or age, or sexual orientation, or social status. But we notice. The phrase ‘I don’t see race’ is often criticised, sometimes mocked; literally, it must be untrue, though rhetorically it is really only a way of declaring that one is not a racist.)
So be it. Let me not pretend that gender means nothing to me at all. Then, am I making a judgement, without consciously being aware of it? If so, what judgement do I make?
There are two lookouts on the ship, two broad strands of thought on the nature of gender, and both exist in imaginative fiction. One says that gender is absolute: trans women, for example, are still men somewhere inside. Doris Lessing’s The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four and Five takes this view. So does Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (albeit crudely, and only in passing).
The other lookout says – to simplify – that we are all just people; that biological gender is only one aspect of identity; and that, in an ideal world, it shouldn’t matter at all whether we are male, female, neither, both, or some stage in transition.
Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, of course, examines these ideas with her customary wisdom. A similar approach is taken by Mary Gentle (in Golden Witchbreed), Ian McDonald (in River of Gods, albeit subtly, and only in passing), Greg Egan, and others.
Put simply, that seems right to me, both morally and scientifically – see, for example, Cordelia Fine’s books examining the science on the lack of gender difference, particularly Delusions of Gender. The closer one looks at the science – often, the ‘science’ – of gender difference, the more aspects of it fall away, or are revealed to be cultural, not genetic, artefacts.
To state the obvious: males were traditionally thought to have an advantage in maths and ‘hard’ sciences; strip away expectations, and that difference evaporates. Of course it does. Conversely, females were thought to have an advantage in communication skills; that too is either largely or entirely a myth when studied objectively, with correction for bias. Of course it is.
Apart from revealing what should have been obvious from the start, the more recent studies on gender difference reveal the flaws, biases and lazy thinking of previous studies; and they also confirm that traditional wisdom is sometimes traditional foolishness.
Even biological differences are not quite as obvious as they might appear. Why do men have nipples? Because the foetal ‘template’ is female – it is the default human setting – and the male form is a set of adjustments to that default. (I was going to say ‘deviations’ but I don’t want to make it sound as if there is anything wrong with the male form. I am living in one, after all.)
… But the male nipple need not be just for piercing. The glands that allow milk production exist and can function in human males. All that is needed is a hormone – prolactin – which men don’t usually produce. Production can happen naturally in some circumstances, or can be stimulated by a drug.
And yes, yes, there are other differences. I won’t pretend that there aren’t. But do I want to be defined by the way in which my body contributes to the reproductive process? Does anyone? For women in particular, this kind of gender essentialism has rightly been the focus of much opposition.
In any case, more broadly: do our bodies define us, or our minds? Imaginative fiction often contemplates leaving our bodies behind – disincarnation. The fact that we are far, far away from any real prospect of being able to download ourselves (whether into machines, alternate bodyforms, information in the Matrix or pure structures in spacetime) does not mean that the possibility is unimportant.
I think it is vital. I think it goes to that central question of imaginative fiction, one of the bones we keep coming back to gnaw at: what are we, really? And whatever the answer is, the body is the least of it.
Even the term ‘android’ is, at root, gendered – but we don’t use the term ‘gynoid’ for a ‘female’ humanoid robot, because it reinforces gender essentialism, and because it’s ridiculous. But it’s really quite a small step from acknowledging that gendering is ridiculous for a machine to acknowledging that it’s near-ridiculous for the meat machines in which we currently have to live, and into which we have been thrown by accident of birth.
Another recurrent question is: how should we live? What should society be like? Here, one person’s utopia may well be another’s fevered nightmare. In my ideal world, it genuinely doesn’t matter what someone’s gender is, and therefore I shouldn’t even need to ask the question.
If my brain is still asking the question, then my brain is not quite ready for that ideal world; but it’s up to me whether I want to make myself ready for it. I can’t be sure that I’ll succeed in doing that, but I can try.
We’re not living in that ideal world, though. We’re probably far from that shore. But I think we can steer towards it.