Locked into the binary

Stereotyping is the mental categorization of individuals in order to affect greater social control. In Gender Stereotypes: Reproduction and Challenge, Mary Talbot suggests, “Like caricatures, they focus on certain characteristics, real or imagined, and exaggerate them” (468).  Although simplicity is the goal of stereotyping, the nature of stereotyping is anything but simple—a complex relationship between language and social construction. The stereotype of binary gender assumption is an inherently flawed system. This research addresses the questions: What are the problems with the binary gender assumption and subsequent sex-typed gender roles? What possibilities and benefits are gained through gender fluidity?

This paper will address the nature of stereotyping as it is used to reduce and simplify otherwise complex groupings of people—introducing linguistic judgment, the development of an Us/Them climate, and the legitimization of discrimination and bias. Next, it will consider the social, psychological, and physical effects of the binary gender system. This research will focus on the idea that gender is neither fixed nor unchanging. From this perspective, it will address pre-existing notions of gender appropriateness. It will then look at how gender is being redefined through gender independence and will consider the benefits associated with gender fluidity. Lastly, it will discuss the creation of new stories that include self-defined gender appropriateness.

The Nature of Stereotyping

Humans are social beings. We seek to create social comfort by developing ways of identifying others within our social interactions. Stereotyping is a method by which one reduces and simplifies otherwise complex groupings of people, creating an assumption of knowledge. Further, stereotyping constructs a set of behavior expectations. The comfort that stereotyping affords, however, is not without cost.

Attempting to pare down a group of individuals into a simplistic set of expected behaviors establishes a judgment system as to what is normal and what is abnormal behavior for each stereotype. So simplified are these behavior expectations that, as Talbot suggests, those who are affected are often reduced to little more than caricatures. Stereotypes whittle away the characteristics of individuals, salvaging only those traits of commonality. In The Psychology of Stereotyping, David J. Schneider provides the following analogy, “stereotypes are the common cold of social interaction—ubiquitous, infectious, irritating, and hard to get rid of” (1).

Although it is often true that in stereotyped groups you will find commonalities, when a norm is established it often creates false, even harmful, expectations on the members of the stereotyped group, as well as those in other groups. Schneider proposes that “The very concept of ‘stereotype’ was invented to label a common element of our experience—namely, that our expectations, attitudes, prejudices, stereotypes, and theories bias us even in the presence of valid disconfirming behavioral data” (147).

Once a stereotype has established normative behaviors, it then proceeds in the creation of an ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ climate. Talbot suggests those most closely ascribing to normal behaviors are invited into the Us category, while those who are abnormal are thrust into the Them category. It is in this climate that power is allocated to those fitting in the Us category, while it is denied from those in the Them category. In Art & Physics, Leonard Shlain illustrates the power attributed with such classifications:

To affix a name to something is the beginning of control over it. After God created Adam, the very first task He instructed Adam to perform was the naming of all the animals. God informed Adam that by accomplishing this feat he would gain dominion over all the beast and fowl. Note that God didn’t teach Adam anything practical as how to make a fire or fashion a spear. Instead, He taught him to name. Words, more than strength or speed, became the weapons that humans have used to subdue nature. (18)

The dynamic of power based on stereotypic fit effectively legitimizes discrimination and bias. Due to the prescriptive nature of stereotyping, those who are most normative are welcomed to a wealth of opportunity, while those who stray outside expected behaviors are shunned as deviants worthy of discrimination and exclusion. Stuart Hall maintains stereotyping “reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes ‘difference’…facilitates the ‘binding’ or bonding together of all of Us who are ‘normal’ into one ‘imagined community’; and it sends into symbolic exile all of Them” (qtd. in Talbot 471).

Stereotypes are very powerful and often damning social tools. Those who ascribe to its rules and enjoy its benefits may have difficultly seeing it through Schneider’s lens of illness. However, those who seek to be more than simply a caricature often find the consequences of movement outside of the stereotype, isolating at the least, and, at worst, deadly.

The Effect of a Binary Gender System

Gendered stereotypes evolve from a basic assumption that gender is both binary and fixed. Binary language further supports this with its narrow and often rigid nature—normal vs. abnormal, acceptable vs. unacceptable. Narrowing gender still further, the binary gender system divides gender into two homogenous groupings centering on a hegemonic norm. Although a human norm is the center from which ideal sex-typed gender roles are birthed, according to Schneider, males are historically considered to possess traits more associated with being a normal human (443). Talbot, too, discusses the hegemonic norm in reference to an ideal male norm vs. a female deficiency (474). Such a frame of reference justifies a dominant patriarchal social order.

From this social order a set of expectations for appropriate sex-typed gender roles are constructed. For centuries societies have learned their gender roles from conduct literature. These literary gems act as how-to guides, primarily for women, on the expected appropriate behaviors for their time. Today, many of the self-help books continue the conduct literature tradition, such as the widely popular book by John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

Sex-typed gender roles create a dynamic where society’s perception of a trait or role will be dependent upon the perceived gender of the person with said trait or role. Schneider provides the example of kindergarten teachers and attorneys (440). When the kindergarten teacher is male, they are seen as more loving and kind than their female counterpart due to the fact that this would be considered an atypical job for a male. Likewise, female attorneys are seen as more competent than their male counterparts.

As social beings, we seek to find acceptance within our social structure. The ability to label one an outcast, ironically, often creates self-fulfilling prophecies. People will modify their behavior in order to fit into the norm. In some cases, people will use a hyper-modified version of gender in order to work it to their advantage. Kira Hall’s study, Lip Service on the Fantasy Lines, offers an example in which phone-sex workers profit from the use of women’s language in order to be successful in their industry. “This high-tech mode of linguistic exchange complicates traditional notions of power in language, because the women working within the industry consciously produce a language stereotypically associated with women’s powerlessness in order to gain economic power and social flexibility” (Hall 183).

Those who do not fit within the sex-typed gender roles face venomous linguistic attacks, and are often treated as outcasts or as having psychosis requiring treatment. In Psychopathology and the Social and Historical Construction of Gay Male Identities, clinical psychologist Gary Taylor provides a disheartening look at the effects of living outside accepted sex-typed gender roles:

Medically, religiously, legally and culturally-reified negative representation of homosexuality have had a toxically corrosive impact upon our psychological health. Negative ideas – such that homosexuals are sick, degenerate, immoral, deviant, potentially dangerous and so on – also appear to have been instrumental in driving many gay men towards self-damaging and abusive behaviors, thus confirming the prophetic myth that the homosexual is self-destructive and unavoidably doomed. (162)

Ironically, the same year the GLBT community celebrated homosexuality being removed from the DSM-III, Gender Identity Disorder (GID) was added in order to treat children who did not conform to sex-typed gender roles. GID solidified the social stereotype of an acceptable binary gender system. In Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male & Female, Phyllis Burke points out, “when boys are diagnosed with GID because they pretend to be ‘mother’ and only play house, is it because they think they must choose one arena over the other? Why would they think otherwise?” (125). Butler argues that, “the displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological ‘core’ precluded an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable inferiority of its sex or of its true identity” (174).

Burke studied the social ramifications of sex-typed gender roles on the behavior of parents (124). Regardless of their liberalness, parents fear gender ambiguity in their children, in particular when a boy is mistaken as a girl. This will be reflected in the toys and clothing they deem as appropriate. Girls are allowed more gender flexibility where boys are still subjected to strict gender roles and expected behaviors. Says Burke, “If the boy picks up the doll, as we have seen from the most recent, wide-ranging study across all family types, he is at best ‘permitted’ to play with it, and at worst, the dolls are grabbed away from him…” If he is encouraged it is out of amusement, which provides a clear message to the child that “he is a freak, as clown enacting a role that can never be his” (128). Children have sex-typed gender roles demonstrated to them, and thus believe, their choices are limited to two sex-typed ways of being—boy or girl—and believe that they must be one or the other.

The prohibitive nature of the binary gender system not only limits the choices presented to children; when moving into the larger social arena, it becomes a powerful weapon of discrimination and division. In Constructing Meaning, Constructing Selves: Snapshots of Language, Gender, and Class from Belten High, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet explain that “Social labeling discriminates among people and is used like a weapon to divide and to deride. Attempts to define and delimit what labels mean are really attempts to delimit what people and the social structures they build can or should be like” (505). Butler submits, “gender is a divisive principle, a tool of subjection, one that resists the very notion of unity” (151). By narrowly defining gender into a binary system, a hierarchal structure is created complete with expectations of gender appropriate behaviors and language. Because this defining clearly creates self-fulfilling prophecies, problems such as under-achievement, low confidence, and hyper-gendered behaviors become cyclical in nature.

The binary gender system has created a very rigid lens in which gender is seen as having only three possibilities: appropriate male, appropriate female, or outsider. As gender is a socially constructed assumption, it is inherently flawed. Burke explains, “…adherence to the bipolar, sex-typed gender system has hidden within it the most debilitating of emotional illnesses, many of which literally affect the body” (235). She points out that women in traditional roles of femininity are particularly vulnerable to depression due to the lack of control that is often associated with this role. Likewise, men who are traditionally masculine sex-typed have been identified as being at risk for coronary artery and heart disease. In addition, the shorter life span of men is significantly contributed to by the fact that “men often experience the inability to ask for help, or to even acknowledge the onset of physical illness because it does not seem manly” (Burke 236).

The binary gender assumption also has a significant impact on relationships. Feelings of isolation, shame, fear, and powerlessness, as has been clearly demonstrated, are associated with socially assigned non-gender appropriate traits. This commonly leads one to hide these traits out of fear of rejection. Individuals will deny themselves something that is natural to their individuality. When one pretends not to have a particular opposite sex-typed trait in order to feel more accepted, ultimately they will never be truly known or accepted within their relationships.