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The Genesis of Gender

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-3140164

2164-0041

Joy Ladin,

Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

In the beginning, there was gender. We all were born into a world in which to be human is to be divided by gender, assigned roles based on gender, and taught to understand ourselves and our relationships with others in terms of gender. We inherited this world from our parents, who inherited it from their parents, and on and on, back to the dawn of humanness, when hominids began extrapolating the physical difference between male and female bodies into systems of meaning that go far beyond genitals, secondary sex characteristics, or reproductive functions.Though the specifics of gender roles and expression vary widely, there is no culture that does not divide and define individuals, family relationships, and social roles in terms of gender. And though some cultures provide for what are often called “third genders,” even there, the vast majority of people are defined in terms of the local version of the gender binary of male or female.Feminist activists and scholars, joined in recent decades by gender studies scholars and gay and lesbian studies scholars, have long documented the oppressiveness of the system of binary gender, the limitations and sometimes cruelty of conventional definitions of male and female, and the staggering social inequities and misogyny that grow out of distinguishing men from women. But as Judith Butler demonstrated in Gender Trouble, the pervasiveness of binary gender makes it hard to critique gender without relying on the very categories of maleness and femaleness whose oppressiveness we are exposing. How, for example, can one fight for women’s rights without distinguishing between women and men?Indeed, the vast majority of gender’s critics, including those who, like Butler, argue that gender is something we do rather than something we are, identify and live as women or men, an irony reminiscent of a joke Woody Allen tells at the end of the movie Annie Hall:A guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, “Hey doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken.” Then the doc says, “Why don’t you turn him in?” Then the guy says, “I would but I need the eggs.”Perhaps, as Butler and other gender theorists have suggested, our sense that we are male or female is as imaginary as the brother’s sense that he is a chicken. Certainly, when we contemplate the systems of oppression based on our divisions of humanity into male and female, our insistence on identifying ourselves as men and women seems at least as crazy as the brother’s insistence on identifying himself as poultry. But like the guy who walks into the psychiatrist’s office, most of us seem to need the eggs — the social and psychological benefits that binary gender offers.When I say “most of us,” I include myself, even though the gender binary model that insists that everyone is either male or female has no place for someone like me. I was born, raised, and lived as a male for forty-five years. But as long as I can remember, my gender identity — my sense of my own gender — has been female. (The technical term for my relationship to gender is “transsexual,” but “transsexual” is a diagnosis, not a gender.) The conflict between the male gender I was assigned at birth and my internal sense of being female was excruciating, and after decades of struggle, I stopped living as a man and began living as a woman. But according to gender binary definitions, which see gender as a consequence of physical sex, I was, am, and always will be male.You would think that someone who has suffered as much as I have from living in a society that defines everyone as either male or female, and who knows as intimately as I do that those terms cannot account for the diversity of humanity, would abandon binary gender. But despite the decades of suicidal depression that resulted from my efforts to understand myself in terms of the gender binary, and despite the difficulty of living as a woman who doesn’t fit the usual definition of woman, my gender identity remains female, and I express that identity by presenting myself as a woman — because I need the eggs.In recent years, many transgender people — people who are not simply male or female — have argued that the gender binary should either be replaced by a vastly expanded understanding of gender diversity, or “smashed” (an idea popularized by t-shirts that say “smash the gender binary”) so that no one will be forced to define themselves in terms of gender. Certainly, transgender people need and deserve far more recognition, respect, opportunity, and legal protection than we currently have. But is this a matter of redressing discrimination against a misunderstood and oppressed minority, or does respect for gender diversity require non-transgender people (more than six billion people) to radically change the way they define themselves and relate to others?Thus far, such questions have been explored largely in theoretical discussions that, for those who don’t have degrees in feminist, gender, transgender, or queer studies, are difficult to follow. But if we are truly on the verge of a radical transformation of binary gender, we need ways of thinking about the nature and functions of gender that are accessible to those who are not familiar with gender, queer, or transgender theory.One way to do so is to examine the two very different stories of the creation of humanity we find in the opening chapters of the biblical book of Genesis. These familiar stories offer a surprisingly nuanced account of the ways in which the gender binary is bound up with our ideas of what it means to be human.When we examine the first chapter of Genesis, we don’t find gender at all, apart from the gendering of verbs and pronouns required by biblical Hebrew. God creates light and dark, day and night, sky and earth, seas, plants, stars, sun and moon, and animals “of every kind” without referring to maleness or femaleness. Those terms don’t appear until the end of the chapter, when God creates human beings:And God said, Let us make [humanity] in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created humanity in God’s own image... male and female God created them (1:26–27).God creates humanity “male and female,” suggesting that these categories are built into the nature of humanity. (The Hebrew word I am translating as “humanity” is adam, which means “earth,” “man,” and humanity in general, and becomes the first man’s name.) But at this point, “male and female” refers to physical sex (differences between male and female bodies) rather than gender identities (individuals’ identification of themselves as male or female, men or women). The gender binary doesn’t merely note the difference between male and female bodies; it also gives this difference meaning, assigning different roles and characteristics to males and females. At this point in Genesis, such differences have not yet emerged. Both male and female are “created in the image of God,” and in the verse that immediately follows, God blesses and instructs humanity without distinguishing one from another:And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed … and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat (1:28–29).Here, unlike in the later creation narrative that tells the story of Eve being created from Adam’s rib, all human beings share the same characteristics: they are created “in God’s image,” have dominion over other creatures, and are ordered to be vegetarians. Of course, by specifically creating humanity “male and female” — by singling out that difference among all the variations characteristic of human bodies — God has laid the foundation of the gender binary, which ascribes different roles, characteristics, feelings, desires, and so on to men and to women. But in the first chapter of Genesis, differences in genitalia and secondary sex characteristics have not yet been translated into differences in roles and identities.But though little at this point rides on being male or female, these verses establish that humanity can be understood in terms of that binary.To understand what God’s introduction of the gender binary later comes to mean, we first have to understand binary thinking — the habit of simplifying complex phenomena by dividing them into mutually exclusive and mutually defining categories. We think in binary terms so often that these categories often seem like built-in aspects of existence. For example, take the binary of light and darkness. These categories don’t seem like ways of thinking; they seem like facts. Darkness is the opposite of light, and light is the opposite of darkness; each defines the other. But the second verse of Genesis presents darkness as existing before the creation of light, and when, in verse 3, God says, “Let there be light,” light is created as an independent entity, without regard to the darkness we are told preceded creation. As rabbinic commentators have noted, at this point in the Genesis narrative, light and darkness don’t exist in relation to one another. They coexist, intertwine, and interpenetrate. In the next verse, though, this potentially dizzying complexity is simplified: “God separated the light from the darkness,” dividing light and darkness into binary categories. From here on, light and darkness are mutually exclusive: where there is light, there is no darkness, and vice versa.Like the male/female binary into which God divides humanity in verse 27, the light/darkness binary is a purely physical distinction, without symbolic or social significance. But as we see in verse 5, once we organize physical reality into binary categories, we tend to give those categories additional meanings, by associating them with other binaries: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night.” By associating “light” and “darkness” with “Day” and “Night,” God turns a way of distinguishing degrees of illumination into a way of describing the human experience of time.The association of day with light and night with darkness seems natural, but this association is a way of thinking rather than a built-in feature of reality. For example, those who live near the poles experience days when it is always dark and nights when it is always light, but we still call those days “days” and those nights “nights,” because these terms refer not to physical phenomena but to a way that human beings think about time.Genesis moves on after associating light and darkness with day and night, but most cultures pile on many more binary associations. For example, since light enables us to see, and seeing is associating with knowing, light is often associated with understanding and darkness with ignorance. Similarly, since being able to see makes us feel safe and being unable to see makes us scared, light is often associated with goodness and darkness with evil. Such associations expand the light/darkness binary into a complex web of symbols and metaphors, ways of thinking that have little to do with physical conditions. People can be ignorant and evil when it is light, and understanding and good when it is dark.But even the relatively reality-based binary of light/darkness drastically simplifies much more complicated phenomena. In scientific terms, “light” is a vague catchall term for the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to human eyes; “darkness” has no scientific meaning at all. If Genesis were written in the language of science, the statement “And God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night” would read something like this:And God called the period of time when the yet-uncreated human residents of the yet-uncreated planet not yet called “Earth” would generally perceive the greatest amount of visible electromagnetic radiation (Day), and the period of time when they would generally perceive the least amount of visible electromagnetic radiation (Night).I’m not sure what theological consequences this sort of language would have, but if Genesis had avoided binary simplifications in favor of precise physical descriptions, the Bible would never have become a bestseller.In other words, binaries are sexy. They offer attractively simple terms for overwhelmingly complex phenomena; they promiscuously associate with other binaries that extend their resonance and meaning; and they even sound good, lending themselves to rhythmic rhetorical devices such as parallelism.No binary is sexier — literally as well as figuratively — than the gender binary, which has been used to interpret everything from individual behavior to the structure of the universe. Like the light/darkness binary, the gender binary of male/female is based on a physical distinction. And like the light/darkness binary, the gender binary extends vastly the meaning of that physical distinction through webs of association that are so fundamental to our ways of interpreting reality that they are hard to disentangle from our experience of the world.But unlike the distinction between light and darkness, as we see in the first chapter of Genesis, the distinction between male and female is a cornerstone of our concept of what it means to be human. The association of light and darkness with good and evil, understanding and ignorance, and so on fosters racist habits of thought that have justified centuries of oppression. But as we see in precolonialist and some postcolonialist societies, human beings do not universally define ourselves in terms of relative skin color. By contrast, there is no society in which human beings are not defined as male or female. And though the associations that extend the meaning of the male/female distinction vary considerably, there is no society in which the structure of relationships, families, and institutions is not based on distinctions between men and women.That is presumably why Genesis describes God as creating humanity “male and female,” when this distinction is not mentioned in the creation of fish, birds, or other mammals. But just as the light/darkness binary drastically simplifies the nature of electromagnetic radiation, the division of humanity into male and female drastically simplifies the nature of human bodies. While most human bodies fit scientific definitions of maleness or femaleness, a significant percentage do not: talmudic discussions of two additional sexes, the tumtum and androgynos, acknowledge this fact. And though the Talmud recognizes only two sexes in addition to male and female, there are many kinds of “intersex” bodies, a fact that has been obscured by doctors’ penchants for surgically “correcting” the genitals of intersex newborns. This persistent Western form of genital mutilation attests to our profound, sometimes violent insistence that everyone must be either male or female.When we turn from physical sex to the web of associations we call “gender,” the chasm between the complexity of human beings and the simplicity of the categories “male” and “female” yawns even wider. However cultures define those categories, few if any of us completely fit them. Human beings are ever-changing bundles of contradictory emotions and desires buffeted by unpredictable circumstances and relationships. Why, if the terms fit us so badly, do most of us define ourselves as male or female?For me, as for many transgender people who try to “pass” as men or women, the answer is simple: however badly binary gender categories represent us, being gendered seems better than being alone. That’s why, for forty-five years, I did everything I could to fit the male identity I had been assigned at birth. Though living as someone I knew I wasn’t drove me to, and sometimes over, the edge of suicidal despair, I clung to my male persona, terrified that if I didn’t present myself as male I would be rejected by everyone who knew me — because, as Genesis tells us, to be human is to be male or female. Whatever suffering it cost to live as a male, it was better than being alone.According to the second chapter of Genesis, which offers a very different account of the creation of humanity than chapter 1, that is why gender was created: so human beings would not feel alone. In chapter 1, humanity is created collectively, but in chapter 2, humanity begins with the creation of a single person:And the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul (2:6–7).As in the first chapter, humanity here is created with sex (Adam, “the man,” is physically male), but not with gender. Gender is a system for defining and interpreting differences, and at this point, there are no differences to define: the man is the only person there is.God gives Adam a home, a place to live (the Garden of Eden) and a purpose for living: “to work [the Garden] and guard it” (2:15). God even gives him a law to keep — the famous prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But though the man has a body, a soul, a home, work, plants to eat, a relationship with God, and the beginning of morality, he is not yet human, because though some of us enjoy living in solitude, as a species, human beings are social animals. To fully become ourselves, we need others, a fact God belatedly realizes: “It is not good that the man be alone” (2:18).And the man is very, very alone. In the first chapter, humanity is created after all the other creatures on earth, but in chapter 2, Adam is created first — he’s the only living thing on Earth other than vegetation. In an effort to give him companionship, God “form[s] … all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky” and brings them to Adam (2:19). Adam names the creatures, but, though they, like Adam, were “formed out of the earth,” he doesn’t recognize in any of them the “fitting helper” — literally, “the helper who is his opposite” — he longs for. Finally, God gets it: Adam needs a creature whose body is akin to his own:And the LORD God cast a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept: and while he slept, God took one of his ribs. … And the LORD God fashioned the rib taken from the man into a woman; and God brought her to the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh (2:21–24).Though here, as in Genesis 1:27, humanity is created “male and female,” in this story, the difference between male and female bodies is far less important than the kinship between human beings. That is why, instead of forming the woman from the earth, God forms her from Adam’s body: so the man will see the woman as fundamentally like him and no longer feel alone. Adam isn’t struck by her physical differences, but by her humanness: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” For Adam, the primary function of gender is not sexual desire, reproduction, or male privilege, but to enable men and women to recognize their common humanity.That recognition of common humanity inspires Adam to elaborate into a system of mutually defining identities: “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” In Adam’s (and Genesis’) male-centered account, it is “woman” who is defined in relationship to “man,” but though the text doesn’t make it explicit, “man” is radically redefined now that the term stands in relation to “woman.” Before the woman was created, “man” was a unique term for a unique being. The creation of the woman turns “man,” and maleness, into one of two possible forms of humanity, demoting Adam from the supreme, species-defining individual to a member of a gender-based social system that defines him just as much as it defines the woman.Adam doesn’t mind the demotion; in fact, he is delighted, because being defined by the gender binary feels better than being alone. Indeed, being part of the gender binary inspires him, till now the only human being on earth, to imagine a future filled with gender-based relationships: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” In Adam’s vision, the gender binary is the basis of human society, the root from which not just family but human history (imagined here as family dramas caused by the conflict between loyalty to parents and heterosexual attachments) grows. To express gender’s widening significance, Adam invents two more associated binaries, “father/mother” and “husband/wife,” terms that expand gender from a means of interpreting the difference between individual bodies into a way of defining human relationships.Adam’s enthusiastic response to the woman suggests many of the benefits we receive from binary gender. When we define ourselves as men and women rather than as unique individuals, we, like Adam, know we are not alone: however unusual our bodies, feelings, or experiences, the gender binary defines us as “like,” fundamentally similar to, half the human race, and offers us a variety of roles (mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter, boyfriend, girlfriend, and so on) through which we can relate to those in the other half.But despite Adam’s enthusiasm about the relationship-forming potential of the gender binary, there are already signs of trouble in paradise. As numerous feminist readers have pointed out, though humanity is created equally “male and female” in chapter 1, chapter 2 is all about “the man”: God forms Adam first, designs the garden for him, creates the animals for his benefit, and invites him to name them. Only then, to relieve the man’s isolation, does God create the woman. Though he and the woman presumably saw each other simultaneously, the story tells us only about Adam’s response to seeing her, not her response to seeing him. (The woman, as they say, is seen and not heard.) In short, the creation of humanity is presented as a story about a man, his needs, and a woman who is literally created to fulfill them — a bias that Adam foresees continuing into the gendered future he describes in terms of “a man” leaving “his” family for “his wife.”Despite this story’s male-centered and heteronormative bias, taken together, Genesis’ accounts of the creation of humanity offer a surprisingly radical perspective on gender. Chapter 1 invites us to imagine a time when the distinction between male and female had no significance beyond the physical. Even more radically, chapter 2 invites us to imagine humanity before the existence of gender, describing the time when Adam was the only human. In these stories, then, gender is presented not as an inherent or essential aspect of human beings (humanity is created, twice, with sex but without gender), but as a historical (if one can use that term in relation to mythic narrative) consequence of the human desire for relationship. That desire is presented as greater than the desire for individuality: Adam readily and joyfully gives up his solitude and embraces the vision of a future in which everyone, men and women, will be assigned roles defined by gender. Chapter 2 presents gender not as a single binary but as a bundle of associated binaries (male/female, man/woman, father/mother, husband/wife), each of which is introduced at different moments in the narrative, and gives different meanings to maleness and femaleness. Gender, here, is portrayed as composite, as historical, and as a system of reciprocal relationships rather than of hierarchical oppression — even though it is already bound up with heteronormativity in this narrative.But whatever its virtues and limitations, this Edenic vision of gender is lost, along with Eden itself, in chapter 3, when God, in response to the woman and man eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, curses them in terms that transform the gender binary into an engine of inequality:God said to the woman, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you. And to Adam God said, Because you hearkened to the voice of your wife, and ate of the tree … cursed is the ground for your sake. … By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread (3:16–17).God’s decrees that the woman is to be “ruled over” by the man and burdened by childbirth, while the man is to toil for “bread,” magnify the consequences of being male and being female, and transform the gender binary into patriarchy, a system in which social roles, privilege, and power are unequally divided on the basis of gender.But even here, Genesis hints that there could and should be a better form of gender. God presents patriarchy as a curse on both men and women. And though patriarchy is the final step in the biblical genesis of gender, patriarchy is portrayed as a result of human error, not as the result of inborn differences between males and females. In chapter 2, neither God nor Adam says anything that identifies the gender binary with male dominance or female submission; even Adam’s male-centered vision of a gendered future, in which men leave their parents for their wives, ends on an egalitarian note, with husband and wife becoming “one flesh.” In chapter 3, patriarchy is presented not as an inherent aspect of the gender binary, but as the tragic consequence of bad decisions — in Christian terms, of original sin. Had those decisions gone differently, the story implies, gender would never have become patriarchal.But these are hints of a paradise that certainly was lost. Though the gender binary has taken innumerable forms, most fulfill all too aptly the biblical curse of patriarchy. And while it is generally better to rule than to be ruled over, as the biblical curse suggests, men as well as women suffer from patriarchal forms of the gender binary that translate biology, the physical difference between male and female, into social destiny. According to the curse, and to many definitions of male social roles, Adam has to work for bread whether he wants to or not — and Adam, like many men, clearly doesn’t want to do that work; he is literally cursed with it.But as I noted at the beginning of this essay, no matter how much we suffer from the roles the gender binary assigns us, most of us continue to identify ourselves as men or women, and structure much of our lives in terms of our gender. Even in societies in which men and women are free to mingle, most of us are homosocial — that is, most of us socialize and form friendships with people of “our” gender. The gender binary encourages homosociality by promoting a sense of kinship based on shared interests, socialization, and experience among those born into a given gender, and by magnifying the sense of difference between genders: the more homosocial our lives and cultures are, the more we will tend to see men and women as speaking different languages, embracing different values, engaging in different modes of thinking and feeling — and even, as the hoary bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus claims, coming from different planets.We are also bound to the gender binary in far more intimate ways, because gender is more than just a means of relating to others; for most of us, our sense of being either male or female is a fundamental aspect of our identities. The idea that binary gender identification is foundational to individual identity is a staple of psychoanalytic and feminist theory and practice. This idea is so foundational that many feminist, queer, and transgender theorists argue that binary gender must be radically transformed or completely done away with for the sake of individual liberation and social transformation.Whether or not we want to smash the gender binary, there is wide agreement that the gender binary encourages us to embrace and express aspects of ourselves that fit the gender with which we identify, and to repress, conceal, or minimize aspects of ourselves that don’t. As Kate Bornstein’s Gender Workbook questionnaires show, in order to maintain stable gender identities, we have to prune the complex flux of our psyches to fit definitions of male or female. Indeed, simplifying and stabilizing our shifting streams of thought, feeling, and desire into relatively consistent, intelligible identities is one of the primary functions of the binary gender. Whatever sacrifices binary gender demands, we define ourselves as male or female because we need the psychological and social benefits we get from our gender identities — because we need the eggs.One of the advantages of being transgender — of having an identity that doesn’t fit binary gender categories — is that we are constantly reminded that the gender binary cannot adequately express our humanity, and so we are forced to imagine selves, lives, and relationships that are not defined by maleness or femaleness.Socially, though, being transgender is not generally an advantage. Those who don’t identify as either male or female, or whose bodies or histories don’t fit those categories, must constantly choose between misrepresenting ourselves in order to get along in a binary gender world, or expressing our identities in ways that mark us as outsiders. Some of us enjoy being what Kate Bornstein calls “gender outlaws”; some of us find friends and family, partners and communities, who love us as we are. But for too many, our inability to fit the gender binary leads to exile from family and community, loss of home and emp