The new gender fundamentalism

Pronouns and language in the gender wars

Photo by Juan Martin Lopez on Unsplash

In a world where men can declare themselves women, and women can have their breasts removed by stating that they are men, where some claim transwomen are literal women, and others insist on using sex-based pronouns regardless of the gender presentation of the person they are speaking to, gender itself has become a modern-day Tower of Babel phenomenon.

For those not in the know, the Bible contains a compelling cautionary tale against human pride and self-glorification that is often referred to as The Tower of Babel. In Genesis, the biblical story describes how the people of the earth once spoke a single language and decided to build a city and a tower high enough that they would be able to reach God Himself.

When God saw the humans striving to attain His heights, not out of love for Him, but out of their own selfish obsessions, He decided to thwart their plans. As punishment, he confused the languages of the people of the earth so that they could no longer understand each other.

Eventually so many languages emerged that humans no longer had a common understanding of how to proceed with building the Tower of Babel. The tower was never completed. Its builders never again achieved a single common language.

Regardless of your faith tradition (or lack of one) it is a story that has resonated through the centuries.

Navigating our modern gender wars can feel like living in the era of the Tower of Babel. We live in a world where some believe gender and sex are synonymous while others see them as separate and distinct. Some believe sex is materially real while others believe that it, like gender, is socially constructed. Some hold sex to be binary while others argue that it is a spectrum. Each person speaks their own sex and gender language and in doing so no single common understanding exists.

And in this cacophony of sex and gender-related definitions and terms, pronouns are one casualty.

Some believe calling a transwoman by she/her pronouns or a transman by he/him is a sign of politeness and respect, while others believe that doing so is to lie about material reality. The consequence of that lie, some argue, is that it has put women at risk in some of their most vulnerable moments — in the locker room, bathroom, at domestic violence shelters, hospitals or prisons. With no common definition of woman to protect women from violent men, what’s to stop those violent men from utilizing the existing confusion to push their boundary-violating behaviour to the next level?

Meanwhile, ordinary trans people, most of whom are non-violent, are attempting as best we can, to live a life that isn’t entirely centered on our genders. We, too, are striving for safety.

Pretty soon after I transitioned, people started calling me by male pronouns. I credit my relatively quick ability to pass as male as the result of my height and my relatively slender build (I am over six feet). At first, hearing male pronouns to refer to me felt odd, like I was being exposed when all my life I’d tried to simply blend in. But it also felt powerful. People were acknowledging something important about me for the first time. No longer were they comparing me to other women - even if that is what I literally was. Transitioning offered me freedom from my failures in the femininity department. Society at large no longer expected me to wear makeup, wear dresses or date men. They treated me as if I was a human being worthy of respect, even if I made no effort to beautify myself. Imagine that. I could wear men’s shirts and pants instead of the uniform I’d worn in school, i.e. a tight blouse and pleated school skirt. I could walk down the street without having creepy, untrustworthy men make pointed comments about my breasts, breasts which remained largely hidden behind sports bras and T-shirts, until I had them surgically removed.

When I legally changed my name to match my transmasculine identity, pronouns became the symbol of the effort I’d put in to reinvent myself. People who knew me as a woman sometimes slipped over their words, and caught themselves in time to correct themselves. When this happened, I felt a deep gratitude for the effort they were putting in to recognize me for the man I was putting a lot of effort into becoming. Not literally - I didn’t believe I was becoming an actual, literal man. But metaphorically. Or analogically. I believed I was enough like a man - whatever that means - that I might as well live my life as a man. And the acceptance of those around me, made me feel that they valued me enough to call me a metaphorical male. They didn’t have to believe I was male; only to treat me as if I were male — an honorary member of the brotherhood.

I assumed that no one who truly knew me actually believed I was a male - especially my health care providers. After all, actual males don’t need hysterectomies. Actual males don’t need pap smears. Actual males don’t have to worry about getting pregnant. Those were sex-based interventions that can only ever occur to females. At best, I saw myself as a female who existed in a kind of gender grey zone. A liminal space between the genders. I recall asking my endocrinologist whether she thought perhaps I might be intersex. She wrote down on her note pad the word ‘Intersex’ followed by a question mark. She had no definitive answer for me. She seemed remarkably incurious about it. It wouldn’t change anything if I was, she said. Since it appeared to be a hassle to determine, I dropped my inquiry. I didn’t want my gender struggles to be a burden, not even to my healthcare providers. I transitioned to escape the awkwardness of my gender. I knew that as a man I could focus on other things more easily, whereas as a woman, I would be constantly policed by other women, or harassed by men. I wanted neither.

How odd that we live in a time where both extremes of the gender wars insist fanatically that their all-or-nothing position is the one true position. The more ardent trans activists argue that they are literally, biologically the other sex regardless of their gametes, chromosomes or genitalia. They do not merely want to be treated like the other sex but instead insist that they are the other sex. At a certain level, I admire their clarity of vision even if I do not share it. I’m not constitutionally built for it.

On the other side, some very vocal gender critical voices insist that trans people should be called by the pronouns that match their sex because not to do so is to engage in a deception that harms women. But the truth is, we lie all the time to each other. We do not insist, at every turn, on calling a friend fat even if they technically are. We do not tell every person we talk to our deepest darkest secrets when they politely ask us: “How are you?”

We are capable of embracing analogies in a legal sense in cases where adults adopt babies from other parents. We call it adoption and for a fee, we allow all kinds of people who otherwise couldn’t have children to access the experience of parenting. We call these adults who do the adopting, parents, even as they are not literally the biological parents of the child they adopted. We do not consider that deception. We are capable of holding space for these adults as adoptive parents given that for all intents and purposes they are living the role and the responsibilities of what a parent is.

Similarly, we are able to offer an avenue for legal immigrants to become citizens of a nation-state they were not born to. If they follow the rules of the immigration process, they too can call their adopted country home. And if anyone were to tell them to ‘go back to where you came from’ we would rightly claim that they’d experienced discrimination. To call these immigrants citizens is not considered a lie.

I used to think of myself as a gender immigrant: I underwent a legal process that allowed me to give up my citizenship as a woman and claim my citizenship as a man. Metaphorically speaking. And it is important to state that because so much of the gender wars revolves around metaphors becoming confused with reality. The map has become mistaken for the territory.

The gender immigrant metaphor is an elegant metaphor, but it is not literally true. Womanhood is not so easily left behind. Manhood is not so easily embraced. And while citizens who were born in a particular country and citizens who immigrated there have had different pathways to becoming citizens, they share one thing in common — the land they live in. It is the common denominator.

The problem with gender is that there is no easily identifiable common denominator that connects the experiences of women with the experiences of transwomen, or men with transmen. Remove the body as the common denominator, and you are left merely with generalities and stereotypes. Remove the body, and the different voices are not speaking the same language. Our tower of Babel, our tower of common understanding, lies in rubble, unfinished.

While I understand why so many women have stood up and spoken up, I also am cognizant of those of us who are trans, who must still exist in this world. Some of us were medicalized as children, some as adults. Some of us have embraced our trans identities, others feel medically harmed but unable to return to a pre-transition state. We exist. And we must live our lives. Surely there must be a way for us to live together, without trans people needing to hide themselves away, without women having to fear for their safety. I don’t know what that future looks like but I hope that enough people can move away from extremism to find a space of common ground to build a shared future. I don’t see any other way.