The politics of gender have always implicated the politics of sex. This is because one of two “gendered” social roles are assigned according to the genital “sex” of each individual’s body at birth. The politics of sex and gender are therefore inseparable by social design. This seems an obvious truth, but many people are still seduced by the idea that gender is somehow “programmed from within.” I will explain how the increasingly popular theory of “cisgender” and “cis privilege” takes advantage of our pluralistic ignorance to reinscribe a fundamentally conservative ideology of gender role essentialism. SOCIAL DETERMINISM
I am fond of using the graphic above to illustrate the mechanics of social role determinism and its relationship to the presence (or absence) of a phallus at birth. The image itself is featured in Anne Fausto-Sterling’s book, Sexing the Body. [i] She provides the following context:
As a teaching tool in their struggle to change the medical practice of infant genital surgery, members of the Intersexual Rights Movement have designed a ‘‘phall-o-meter’’ (shown in ﬁgure 3.4), a small ruler that depicts the permissible ranges of phallus size for males and females at birth. It provides a graphic summary of the reasoning behind the decision-making process for assigning gender.
Again, in Fausto-Sterling’s words:
Deciding whether to call a child a boy or a girl, then, employs social deﬁnitions of the essential components of gender. Such deﬁnitions, as the social psychologist Suzanne Kessler observes in her book Lessons from the Intersexed, are primarily cultural, not biological.
Medical diagnosis of “male” or “female” determines the individual’s social role as “boy” or “girl.” Culture imposes a complex set of values on our bodies, behaviors, moods, and relationships through the process of sex-based (aka “gender”) role socialization. This sex-based division of social labor is externally—not internally— enforced and dictates a very particular set of things about the form of our relationships to others. The picture of the bib below provides an example of the social script for how adult males are expected to relate to their female children, even before the child can feed herself without making a mess.