A Brief History On Gender Fluidity

Gender impacts all of our lives in profound ways. I know from personal experience that it’s a particularly sensitive topic for men. For example, I can count the number of times my dad has told me he loves me. Because in mid-20th century America, when he was growing up, boys were taught that men don’t express emotion. Nowadays, things are different. I have my own kids and I can’t wait for them to lose count of the number of times they hear “I love you” from me. Or the number of times I give them a kiss. Because for me, what it means to be a man differs from what it meant for my dad.

That’s because our society’s ideas around gender (and sexuality) are always changing.

One way that’s affected many of us recently is the discourse around pronouns and how we use them in colloquial language or official settings. Just last week, I saw an Instagram meme with a clip from the makeover show Queer Eye in which Jonathan Van Ness (one of the show’s hosts) tells someone his pronouns are “he/she/they”. The meme was clearly making fun of Van Ness, essentially asking how and why an individual would identify as all three. The “humor” struck me as lazy and boring, but it also got me thinking about the popular misunderstanding of “gender fluidity,” and how it goes well beyond the more prevalent discussion around pronouns.

At the heart of the confusion is a very common misunderstanding that “sex” and “gender” mean the same thing.

On the surface, it’s a somewhat reasonable assumption. From a young age, we’re all taught to distinguish between boys and girls: each is associated with different behaviors, likes, dislikes, attitudes, and, of course, private parts.

It isn’t surprising that most of us grow up to believe that “gender” – a word which goes beyond anatomy to describe how we live, not just what we look like – is one of the “facts of life”.

We also learn – in classrooms, at home, online, in movies, and so on – that certain essential differences between “manhood” and “womanhood” come down to biology. Women produce estrogen, menstruate monthly, and can have babies. Definitions of femininity and womanhood are tied to those experiences, which is why women are assumed (and encouraged) to be more emotional, more caring, and in need of protection. Men, on the other hand, produce testosterone, develop body hair and deep voices, and are typically physically stronger. So we associate masculinity and manhood with strength, assertiveness, and a certain inclination to more animal instincts like sex and fighting.

Whether you agree with these descriptions of masculinity and femininity is beside the point. Obviously they are massively faulty generalizations. What really matters here is that they sound sufficiently familiar. They are cultural constructs ingrained in our collective mind.

We are all, therefore, conditioned to believe that anatomical sex (the hormones, genitalia, and other secondary characteristics that allow doctors to define sex at birth) determines gender identity (the gender you perform and identify most with in your daily life).

But in actual fact, it doesn’t. In most societies today, and in many cultures throughout history, people have come to understand the difference between sex and gender identity.

Another relevant fact – though it’s rarely talked about – is that 1.7% of the human population are born with intersex traits. “Intersex” is an umbrella term that refers to natural variations in genetics affecting genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, or other sex characteristics. Intersex people exhibit traits of both male and female sexes. It turns out not everyone is born with an XX or XY chromosome pair. (And by the way, 1.7% of the population is roughly the same as the number of people in the world with red hair, i.e. over 130 million people.)

Even if anatomical sex was an absolute binary, with only 2 possible categories, male and female, it doesn’t follow that gender would have to be as well.

Judith Butler, a philosophy scholar and gender theorist, made this clear in the ‘90s when she published her now-famous theory of gender performativity. This theory attempted to show that gender is never a pre-existing identity for individuals of a given sex. Gender is learned and performed – particularly through words and actions – every day and over time. This means that an anatomically male infant is not intrinsically “male-gendered” from birth because of his anatomy, but learns to perform male-gendered words and actions.

That’s why it’s equally possible to see an infant born with female sex characteristics, who later grows up “performing” or employing male-gendered actions, expressions, and lifestyles.

Butler’s theory is an evolution of earlier scholars’ work on the history of gender and sexuality. It depends on the premise, first put forward by philosophers and historians like Michel Foucault, that gender and sexuality have not remained essentially the same throughout history. This is because concepts of gender and sexuality are “socially constructed” by the cultures in which they exist. Different cultures have different codes for what is acceptable, normal, or desirable gendered behavior for “males,” “females,” and even “third genders” who exist somewhere in between (more on that last term in a bit).

It’s just like the old saying goes: “The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there.” 

One famous example is male sexuality in Ancient Greece. For well over a thousand years in Ancient Greece (and Rome), it was perfectly normal for men to be sexually attracted to both women and young men. In fact, it was practically a default expectation.

This is very different from how our society views men who experience same-sex desire. For us, same-sex attraction signals that a man should define himself as “bisexual” or “gay,” which our society generally views as deviations from the “heterosexual” norm. But for the Greeks, their form of bisexuality was more common than exclusive heterosexuality. Things change.

The same pattern is true of gender. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, in early modern China, it was desirable and socially acceptable to bind women’s feet. Binding feet was an incredibly painful process that took years and required breaking women’s feet to make them smaller. Many generations of Chinese people viewed it as a symbol of beauty and status for women. Today, pretty much everyone in China would vehemently disagree. Things change.

Both of these examples (and there are thousands more) show how societies can shift what they deem normal or good when it comes to gender and sexuality. They help us understand how these concepts are always changing in any culture – that is, how they are constructed. But history doesn’t just help us understand variations in gender and sexuality norms. There is also a long history of societies who believed that gender identity is fluid.

A well-known example is the hijra community in India, who have been around for 2,000 years and still exist today. Hijra are officially referred to as a “third gender” because they do not identify as male or female (similar to non-binary people). Roughly 3 million hijra live in India alone. Many are born anatomically male and choose to dress and act in traditionally feminine ways. Some are born intersex. Traditionally, the hijra were celebrated members of the community with important religious functions at Hindu births and weddings. Their power to bless (and curse!) was revered for much of Indian history. Today, the hijra face discrimination, poverty, and abuse, thanks in large part to homophobic, patriarchal law codes established by the British in the 19th century.

Examples of gender-fluid or non-binary people can be found in many more civilizations, from the ancient temples of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) to the Navajo territories of the southwestern United States. Indigenous people in the Americas in particular still use the term “Two-Spirit” to describe transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid individuals. Like the hijra, their fluidity is often believed to be the source of critical spiritual and healing powers in their communities.

For all of history, then, gender has not been a binary. It has been a socially constructed concept in flux. And in most modern countries, we now acknowledge that gender is a spectrum, where individuals have the right to determine or shift their place at will.

Many people who are confused by this concept find it difficult or annoying to grapple with some of the philosophical and historical ideas underpinning it. “Why can’t we just keep it simple?” “You’re either a girl or a boy, end of story.” These are things I hear all the time.

First, it’s worth saying: just because something is difficult to understand, and doesn’t immediately map up with your lived experience, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Quantum physics is pretty complex, but it’s the best description we have of how the universe really works (for now).

Second, the concept of gender fluidity is not intended to threaten or deny our scientific understanding of evolution and biology. There are physical things that happen to people with uteruses and ovaries that can’t happen to people who don’t have them (and vice versa). We all know that. What we don’t know quite as well is why we feel that people with certain biological traits must act, speak, or dress a certain way to prove what and who they are. (Or why we would limit definitions of “manhood” or “womanhood” to biological processes. Most cis-gendered women would agree that giving birth is not the only thing that defines their experience of being a woman.)

If anything, gender fluidity actually invites us all to think more critically about how we perform gender in our own lives. Masculinity and femininity, as human beings have understood them across time and space, are indeed different. But there’s a lot of gray area in between and a lot of overlap.

There’s also a lot to be challenged. When we talk about toxic masculinity, for example, we refer to traits traditionally associated with cis-gendered men that we can all agree are damaging to society at large. Believing that boys shouldn’t cry or express emotion is damaging to men’s mental health. Men encouraging or allowing other men to sexually harrass or degrade people – of any gender or sexuality – is harmful to their victims and their own lives.

Gender is fluid because it is not a fixed concept, and human beings in the 21st century have agreed (as many before them did) that every individual has a right to choose their own gender identity or expression.

People who get hung up on insisting that gender is a fact, or who make jokes about people like Jonathan Van Ness, are missing the scientific and cultural point that gender is whatever a human being makes of it.

Porter Braswell