Indeed. If we've learned anything over the last year, from vocal transgender spokespeople like Caitlin Jenner and Laverne Cox; from on-screen depictions like "Transparent," the Emmy-winning Amazon series about a family patriarch who comes out as transgender; or even from Miley Cyrus -- who has said she identifies as "pansexual," or sexually fluid -- it's that both sexuality (whom you go to bed with) and gender (who you go to bed as) are much more ... flexible.
No. No. No.
Clearly, Ms. Bennett, while it appears that you've really, really tried, the reality is you've learned little over the last year on this topic. I'm not assigning any blame here, but you've not only missed the boat, but fallen overboard and floated out to sea.
Sexuality is an umbrella term for everything you mention, and has no specific meaning. Gender does not mean "who you go to bed as." Let's start at the beginning:
•Gender is "the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity."It includes gender role, gender expression, gender perception, all of which are the psychological and behavioral manifestations of one's biological sex.
•Sex is a biological state, including chromosomes, genes, epigenetic factors, hormones, hormone receptors, genitals, gonads, and the brain, and the intricate spatial and temporal choreography of all these factors during development and adulthood.
•Gender identity is your sense of your biological sex, what you define as "who you go to bed as."
•Sexual orientation is "whom you go to bed with."
So, no, it appears much has not been learned this past year. Trans men and women know full well who they are, and there is no flexibility involved. We are of one brain sex and the opposite genital sex. We identify as our brain sex, because our minds are functions of our brains, and our brains determine our gender identity. It's not something we make up, or choose on a whim -- it's who we are. The only flexibility resides in the courage to accept and own our identities and come out into a generally hostile world and change the body and expression to whatever degree makes us comfortable.
"I think we, and particularly young people, increasingly view gender not as a given, but as a choice, not as a distinction between male and female, but as a spectrum, regardless of what's 'down there,'" said Julie Mencher, a psychotherapist in Northampton, Mass., who conducts school workshops on how to support transgender students. "Many claim that gender doesn't even exist."
Now this is going into uncharted territory. Most human beings do not view "gender" as a choice. Gender expression is a choice, and both men and women have been manifesting different gender expressions throughout human history. We have been, in recent decades, loosening up standards for female gender expression, and recently for men as well. The law, since the Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins Supreme Court case of 1989, protects that gender expression.
The controversial notion is that "gender" (not specifically gender expression) is a spectrum, whatever that means, or that "gender" doesn't even exist, which is nonsense. There is no human history that is not completely grounded in gender. Sometimes that involves very inflexible and constraining standards of gender, but the "many" who claim that gender doesn't exist are just asserting that case, sometimes rather belligerently.
I will say it clearly: claiming that there is no gender, (or no sex, which is also a biological impossibility which would run counter to the history of evolution), is an insult to most trans persons. Social transition is the most difficult of all social experiences in most societies; many struggle with the consequences of that brave act, from loss of family and friends, employment, housing, educational opportunities, and a susceptibility to physical and emotional violence unknown in other minority groups. To simply "claim" that it doesn't exist, and have people ask you which pronoun you prefer when it would be obvious to just about anyone, is quite annoying.
I agree with Mr. Fitzerman-Blue that language has a way of working itself out. The Swedish settled on a single gender-neutral pronoun, which will ease life for those who insist they don't belong in the binary. But in this country, where pronouns vary from campus to campus and failure to appropriately use them leads to macroaggressions against the unfortunate identity assailants, the situation is leading to chaos.
He correctly points out that this is the result of the hyper-individuation of identity, manifested in Facebook's use of 53 gender identities from which its members can choose. While there may be subgroups which develop within communities, to believe there are 53 distinct gender identities grounded in materiality is simply part of the sense of anarchy sweeping many campuses.
The article goes on to mention that the usage of the unpronounceable "trans*" is respectful, while it's actually dying out because it's useless. "Trans" is the single syllable umbrella word that does just as well as "trans*" with the asterisk.
"Cisgender" is the simple word to describe someone who is not transgender, because it's easier and more polite to not define someone with a negative. It derives from organic chemistry and the use of cis and trans carbon-carbon double bonds, and was first use by a German psychologist over a century ago. Unfortunately some trans persons use it as an epithet, burdening it with a pejorative connotation.
"Chromosomal"? Really? Anyone with a basic high school biology education would know how inadequate that is. There are many different variations of chromosomes, associated with an assortment of gender identities, so such a term is useless.
Ms. Bennett mentions the Eve Ensler play, The Vagina Monologues, and the crisis it provoked at Mt. Holyoke from students last year, about which I've written extensively. It's not for me to say whether or not it carries too narrow a sense of gender - each generation must decide that for itself - but to claim, as the students did, that Ms. Ensler is transphobic was dead wrong. She went so far as to create a new monologue just for trans women which we performed in West Hollywood for V-Day in 2004.
Failures by some millennials to do their homework, as manifested in the Mt. Holyoke affair, lead me to believe that this will all eventually sort itself out. After all, the gay community still uses many different names for its various sub-communities, but most eventually agreed to be satisfied with the general terms gay and lesbian and bisexual, and we've gone on to a state of marriage equality bliss. I expect the trans community, with the use of the term, "trans," will discover it's already done the same.
As for the search for the acceptable "gender neutral third person definite pronoun," I have a suggestion which has been floating around in another context -- "y'all." Maybe it's because I lived in Mississippi, but it functions as both singular and plural in the second person. So why not just extend it to third person? It's still very weird, but less so than messing with the fundamental infrastructure of the language. Or we can just imagine we're all in Stockholm and do as the Swedes will do.