gender and sexuality

Possible Inauthenticities in the Transgendered Phenomenon

In the cases I have come across through professional ethics consulting with families and youth, there are present three kinds of discrepancies from institutionally and commercially normative family forms; that is, those possessing two different but dominant gendered parents who have mutually come to terms with the birth gender of their children. They are:

1. Single parent families: here, the child has adopted the gender of the absent or missing parent and if their sex at birth contradicts that of the one who has been so adopted, a transgendered child results.

2. Conflict between parents who desire a different sexed child: here, the child internalizes this conflict and reproduces it in himself or herself, generating a transgendered selfhood in the effort to please both parents.

3. Conflict within one or another parent whose own desires regarding their sexual identity do not match worldly outcomes regarding the child’s sex at birth: in such cases, the child becomes accustomed to performing as if they were the gender counter to their physiological sex, also constructing a transgendered identity for themselves.

Often subconsciously, parents interact with their children as if the latter were simply smaller projections of themselves. If conflict is present beyond that inevitably associated with basic socialization processes – there is no culture that does not possess this more demographically based conflict; some cultures negotiate it with more compassion and gentleness than do others – also, in my sense, a pathological presence, the phenomenon of transgenderedness is understood by the child, once again, subconsciously, as the only possible response to the context around them. I must please both parents, I must take on the role of the absent parent, I must assuage my parent’s self-doubts.

In each permutation, ethical interaction is scarce. In general, speaking as a philosopher, I would suggest that any time one’s actions are bereft of ethical reflection, inauthenticity, perhaps at best, is the result. My case observations have, in turn, suggested to me that parents overly and overtly concerned with normative gender boundaries can also produce transgenderism in their children, thereby generating a fourth category, slightly different from the three listed above. Here, by contrast, the conflict within the adult is transferred to the child who reacts not to assuage or please their parent but to instead defy them and thus also to deny the projection itself. These cases were also more challenging to resolve, as the adults involved were in patent denial that they were defending gender norms against their own self-doubts regarding them.

The inauthenticity of transgenderism is a function of it being not only epiphenomenal to sources of conflict which orbit round self-conscious agrarian-based societal norms regarding gender roles and performances – that is, these conflicts are not personal but rather historical in scope – but as well, they represent avoidance of conflict in general; decoys constructed by the child who is either too young to understand the authentic conflict in the family, or later on, too anemic in character to confront such conflict which has by then become their own.

As such, it is easier to understand why the gay subculture has been tepid in its support for transgenderism. They are utterly different phenomena in both source and result. For gay people, transgenderism might well seem to be reactionary, as it, in every case, seeks to shore up dominant gender models and roleplaying, and thus is nothing radical at all, let alone revolutionary. Thus, transgenderism has been misunderstood both by its critics as well as by its adherents. In sum, it is essentially a coping mechanism that is both inauthentic to modern selfhood – it seeks to cover over the conflict that is both necessary to distinguish the self from others as well as provide a bandage for the pathological conceptions of parents who have unethically allowed their desires to overtake their ideals – and an entanglement of one’s very being in the face of its essential mortality and condition of its happenstance birth.

Though gender as a performance, however indirectly related to biological sex and to human sexuality in general, may be a ludic form which should not be evaluated as pathological in itself, that which is sourced in conflicts which are pathological should not be encouraged, but rather resolved at the point of departure. I suggest here that transgenderism is, in general, just such a negative form, and as such, must be gently retouched to the point that the victim in these cases, the child, is not further alienated by other social forces which are thence to be encountered at an interpersonal level.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 57 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades and has consulted for families and youth for three years.

Tricks of the Transgendered Trade (On the liminal figure in the cultural imagination)

Could it be that the often-vicious popular invective directed against transgendered persons and others who identify with alternate sexual orientations and gendered persona emanates from a deeper source in our still shared culture? I am going to suggest that the liminal figure has traditionally been regarded with some suspicion, even fear. Such a persona can never truly be a person, this suspicion cautions. Liminality was meant to be performed as a social role alone, and not as a selfhood. Consider the shaman, the eunuch, the court jester. Consider the representation of liminality in symbolic form, the daemon, the angel, even the joker in a deck of cards. A figure with uncertain registry, such a role-player could not be identified through gender or sexuality, though it was possessed of both. In service of society as a whole, in representing the expression of all that culture could not perform in mundane task, the liminal figure was itself unable to express anything mundane. Its ‘trans’ character is at once transient, transitive, and in translation. And what is lost in this language of the threshold, or ‘limen’, is not so much our moral compass, but rather the sense that our own identities can be vouchsafed with any ultimate certainty.

This is a deeper source of why the contemporary liminal figure is seen as such a threat. It almost seems as if the liminal figure must shed its very humanity in order to take on the shadow of society’s self-lit lumen. From lumen to limen then, is the ongoing and repetitive passage the shamanesque character must make. But they, as a performer, and it, as a social role performed, makes that passage on our behalf. In doing so, there had always been a space, perhaps begrudging but also admired, for the liminalist. The shaman was at once a seer, medicine person, sorcerer, and spiritual leader in times of crisis. The mistake the men’s movement made with this figure was in masculinizing it. Correspondingly, the error the women’s movement made was in associating the sorceress cum midwife with the feminine.

But by definition the liminal figure cannot be co-opted by either dominant gender. In social contract societies, the shaman was truly the only specialized role player. In such small-scale affairs, one might well expect at least one member to be outside the normative performances associated with male and female, though neither of these were especially dominant early on, when the only division of labor was based not on sex, but rather upon age. In horticultural societies, we see the beginnings of a stricter separation of men and women, but only in periods of specific passage, such as the communal menstrual hut that no male would dare invade. ‘Secret societies’ of all kinds appear only in ‘chiefdom’ organizations, and are most often gender exclusive. But the shaman could, and did, make passage amongst any and all. Its role was that of the card-playing joker, and indeed, their personality might well be said to be that of a ‘card’, to use an archaism. ‘Oscar’s Wild’, we might smirk, thinking ourselves to be clever.

This aside, it is clear that the liminal figure’s central role was to facilitate the rites of passage. On the Northwest Coast, the shaman guided the spirit of the dying to the puma, who would then carry it to the world of spirits, or, by contrast, if it was not one’s time to pass on, scare it back down the shadowy tunnel where the shaman could then tend to its cure. Birth, puberty/adulthood, marriage, death. These four forms appear to have been universal for our ancestors, and even today they mark us, remarking upon our personal nomenclature that we are no longer inexistent, no longer a child, no longer singular, and finally, no longer amongst the living once again. The more fundamental lesson presented by such major life changes is that each of us must participate, even if only for a time, in the liminality of human finitude.

This is then the yet deeper reason for our suspicion of the transitive person today. We feel that such transitions occur only within short periods, perhaps at most a few years, such as adolescence and engagement, sickening and dying. These periods mark themselves out from the rest of our existence, which is stable, mundane, and more certain of its identity. It cannot possibly come as a surprise then, that it is overwhelmingly youth, who are already fully imbricated in the liminal space of adolescence, for which society has not yet found an enduring place – mainly because the identity and role is itself transient – who are turning to transgenderedness as a possible way of representing this liminality. No longer a child, not yet fully an adult, why not no longer a girl, not fully a boy, or vice-versa? Even so, no society has ever existed where entire blocs of a demographic group have remained liminal in their identities or in their social role performances. In traditional cultures, a week at most for the rite of passage from child to adult, wherein one’s sexuality is discovered and perhaps performed, but only in view of reproduction, both in the physiological and social sense. In a global society where warfare is intermittent and where out-and-out conquest is mitigated by the possession of nuclear weapons, there is no need for large scale populations. In spite of labor shortages and economic stressors associated with population pyramids turning on their heads, the very fact that our contemporary world generally does not consider masses of persons to be expendable in direct conflict allows for the wider exploration of alternate genders and sexualities. In a word, biopower is on the wane, and where it is not, such as in Russia, it is a precise factor in the calculation that suggests, even if tacitly, that weapons of mass destruction, while handy to possess, cannot ever truly be used.

The question then remains: do we accept the liminal figure as a kind of categorical third wheel in our mundane social relations, given that ’breeding’ is no longer of the utmost, neither in its sense of cultural pedigree nor in the sponsorship of additional births, or do we ourselves take on a performance which is not, and was never our own? That is, do we don the trickster’s garb and level our collective sorcery against the very source of cultural chiaroscuro? Do we state flatly that trans people are to be prescribed for the theater and the secret society alone? Or do we more gently shrug our shoulders and tell ourselves that what really matters is how one performs one’s job, one’s Samaritanism, one’s person and not one’s persona? But if we do practice an authentic acceptance, would this also entail a sense, not so much novel but perhaps suppressed, that we too, as vehicles of living change and transition, must come to terms with the human condition of not being any one thing for overlong? For in doing this, we are placed upon an existential limen far more profound than any gendered identity, a threshold which pronounces a leveling upon all of us and thence takes all across its mysterious barrier.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, education, health, aesthetics and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.