Gender Identity in Newsweek

Newsweek has a really good article this week, looking at gender identity and people whose gender does not match their physical bodies: transgender people. This situation is not very common, but it's not so rare that you will never encounter it.

The new MCPS curriculum has some small amount of discussion of the topic, and the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum go positively rabid about it -- it is inconceivable to them that anyone would ever have any real reason to want to change their public identity from male to female or vice versa. They like to talk about sex reassignment surgery as "mutilation," and treat the dilemma of transgender people as if it were some kind of fashion decision, like getting a tattoo or something.

Anyway, Newsweek starts with an anecdote that I'll skip over.

To most of us, gender comes as naturally as breathing. We have no quarrel with the "M" or the "F" on our birth certificates. And, crash diets aside, we've made peace with how we want the world to see us—pants or skirt, boa or blazer, spiky heels or sneakers. But to those who consider themselves transgender, there's a disconnect between the sex they were assigned at birth and the way they see or express themselves. Though their numbers are relatively few—the most generous estimate from the National Center for Transgender Equality is between 750,000 and 3 million Americans (fewer than 1 percent)—many of them are taking their intimate struggles public for the first time. In April, L.A. Times sportswriter Mike Penner announced in his column that when he returned from vacation, he would do so as a woman, Christine Daniels. Nine states plus Washington, D.C., have enacted antidiscrimination laws that protect transgender people—and an additional three states have legislation pending, according to the Human Rights Campaign. And this month the U.S. House of Representatives passed a hate-crimes prevention bill that included "gender identity." Today's transgender Americans go far beyond the old stereotypes (think "Rocky Horror Picture Show"). They are soccer moms, ministers, teachers, politicians, even young children. Their push for tolerance and acceptance is reshaping businesses, sports, schools and families. It's also raising new questions about just what makes us male or female. (Rethinking) Gender

OK, I like the philosophical and scientific questions -- what makes us male or female kinds of questions. Obviously there is some plumbing involved, but man, there's a lot more than that. I remember in grade school learning that boys carry their books under their arms, and girls hold them against their chest with both arms. If you were a boy and you held your books like a girl there'd be hell to pay. You know what I'm talking about. Growing up is largely an education in how your sex is supposed to behave. The entire world of pronouns is dichotomized, so you have to refer to someone as "he" or "she," there's no finagle-factor in the language for the ambiguous or confusing cases.

But the scientific stuff, the philosophical stuff, when you get down to it, that's not what this is about. When you get down to it, there's a person, and they feel a certain way. Why do they feel that way? I don't know, ask a scientist, ask a philosopher, all you can say is that they do feel that they are not what they appear to be. Most of us, not a problem. But some people have the persistent, lifetime feeling that a terrible mistake is being made.

What is gender anyway? It is certainly more than the physical details of what's between our legs. History and science suggest that gender is more subtle and more complicated than anatomy. (It's separate from sexual orientation, too, which determines which sex we're attracted to.) Gender helps us organize the world into two boxes, his and hers, and gives us a way of quickly sizing up every person we see on the street. "Gender is a way of making the world secure," says feminist scholar Judith Butler, a rhetoric professor at University of California, Berkeley. Though some scholars like Butler consider gender largely a social construct, others increasingly see it as a complex interplay of biology, genes, hormones and culture.

Luckily, we are concerned here with a couple of classes that will be taught in 8th and 10th grades. We won't have to sort all of this out, though these are terrific questions.

What we want to do in middle school and high school is to show that there are transgender people, and though they may be statistically rare they are just people. The Portia vignette -- the one thing the CRC hates more than anything in the new curriculum -- successfully brings to life a transgender character so students can empathize with her for a minute. That's really all the school needs to do, let students imagine what this is like. For most students this will be a kind of curiosity or novelty, but some will recognize themselves in the vignette; just think what that would be like, to discover that you were not entirely alone with your secret. I don't see the downside of that.

Well, this article is quite long and very readable. There are a number of complicated issues -- qualifications for Olympic athletes, for instance, reconciliation with religion, hiring-and-firing decisions, other things. I won't quote any more -- I recommend you click on the link and read this whole article.