Is androgyny the ideal gender identity?

In this episode, Molly and Cristen talk about gender identity as it relates to social and psychological factors -- and whether androgyny is the ideal.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From House top works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. Let's discuss gender

(00:21):
neutral pronouns things you're English teacher, never told you? Yes,
because usually we refer to people as she, he, him, her, yeah,
and then sometimes when we get plural, we go they
them gender neutral right there. But if you're just talking
about one person, what should you say when they do

(00:43):
not clearly identify with one gender or another. Well, Molly,
we have a set of gender neutral pronouns. Instead of
saying she or he, you would say z. And instead
of saying her or him you would say here, so
you'd say z went to hear bedroom. Yes. Now, are
we just being goofy with the English language for the

(01:05):
fun of it? No, this is relevant to the story
we're about to discuss and our topic at hand, because
we were inspired to do this podcast by a news
story that came out on March twelve, two ten Sydney
Morning Harold, which to describe the story of a person
named Nori who became the first person to receive a

(01:26):
legal document that said sex not specified. Instead of having
the female or the male box ticked off, instead it
said not specified. Yes. Nori basically provided adequate medical documentation
to the New South Wales government so she could request
a new certificate from the Registry of Births, Deaths and

(01:49):
Marriages that in the box for gender said sex not
specified because Nori identifies here's self as neither male nor female.
Nori was born as a boy and later was castrated
and then went on hormone treatments, but then stopped taking

(02:11):
hormone treatments because Z wanted to just live life naturally,
I guess. In an article for written for The Scavenger,
Z says that quote, I haven't taken hormones for about
twenty years, preferring my body and my brain to be
as they are naturally, without being dependent on externally supplied
hormones or plastic implants. Happy to be androgynous and to

(02:35):
be seen as such. And Nori also goes on to
say that getting the gender not specified label is actually
just logistically easier because if Z identifies as female but
someone mistakes Nori as male, then their problems and then
vice versa, because if you look at a picture of Nori,

(02:57):
it kind of is a toss up into terms of
you know, if you would immediately, you know, just from
gender ques say think oh male or female? Right, And
like let's say they're Z's traveling and you know you've
got the passport and it says one thing, but it
looks like another. That's sort of the problems you were saying,
Z was saying, And um, I mean, it's gonna be

(03:18):
an adjustment to fix the pronouns. But what And Z
thinks that more people will want this designation, particularly if
they're trans sexual, perhaps transitioning from one gender to the other,
but also just because of the way women are discriminated
against in culture. Now, this is an argument that I
have personally a little bit harder time swallowing, because I

(03:41):
just I don't know if we could ever get to
a society where we wouldn't want where some people wouldn't
want that specification. But it is interesting to think about
going to a bar and Christ and I know you've
experienced this. You've got your your female driver's license, and
then you order the very masculine scotch and soda and
as I'm smoking a cigar. I mean, there are ways

(04:03):
in which we are unconsciously and consciously embodying gender norms
that make people hold certain perceptions of us. Yeah, I
will say, like going to the bar. Example, if I,
let's say I'm out with a fella and he wants
to buy me a drink, and when I tell him
I would like a Jamison on the rocks, he's you know,

(04:25):
sometimes it's a little he doesn't expect that, you know.
And if he he's already bought me a zema, I
always want to say. In contrast, if he likes zema,
or if he likes an Apple teena or something like that,
we would say, oh, what a good man exactly. Um,
which is going to bring us to our discussion, Not
that we're comparing Nori's plight with cocktail ordering on a date,

(04:45):
but it's going to bring us to this discussion of
androgyny our topic for the day, right, because it's all
has to do with the social construct that is gender.
We're not talking about biological gender. Whether you have a
penis or a vagina, is all about the idea of what,
in society's eyes it means to be a male or

(05:06):
a female. Right now, the definition of androgyny is a
blending of what is considered to be a female or
a male within a single individual, so that they display
both stereotypically male traits and the stereotypically female traits in
earlier world. In other words, a girly man who you know,
may be able to hunt a bear that seems stereotypically masculine,

(05:28):
but also enjoy a nice, nice appletine at the end
of the day. Yeah, and this should be distinguished from
inter sexuality, which Molly not have talked about before, which
has to do with your biological sex. When the your
your physical makeup doesn't distinguish you as male or female,
that's a separate issue right now. I think that a
lot of people when they think about androgyny, they think

(05:50):
about a physical appearance of androgyny, which is why it's
so important to separate it from sexuality, because think of
some of our pop stars today. We've got Adam Lambert,
we've got Lady Gaga. In earlier times we had people
like David Bowie. In fact, I even read one argument
that Michael Jackson was one of the first androgynous superstars
because he really didn't know where he where he stood.

(06:12):
So all of those performers really have physical markers that
you can tell that they're playing with gender. But we're
going to talk about the actual like blending of female
male and personality, we'll need to talk about psychological androgyny
right now. When we talk about psychologically androgyny, we would
be remiss to not mention a pre famous researcher named

(06:35):
Sandra Bem, and in nineteen seventy one she developed something
called the Bem Sexual Inventory because she basically wanted to
create some kind of scale for measuring androgyny. And it's
basically the set of traits that are considered stereotypically masculine, feminine,
and then gender neutral. And depending on how a person

(06:58):
identifies with each of these trades, UH determines where they
fall on this sexual inventory scale. Right, And it was
really interesting to me to read a little bit about
why she developed this. It came out of sort of
the feminist movement, and she had feminist convictions, and she
writes about how women were afraid to express anger, assert
themselves essintially without adopting some of these stereotypically masculine traits,

(07:23):
feminism would go nowhere. So let me read off a
few of these traits on the scale. Masculine items include
self reliant uh defends own beliefs, independent, athletic, assertive, strong personality, forceful, analytical,
willing to take risks, mixed decisions, easily, self sufficient, dominant, aggressive,

(07:44):
acts as a leader, competitive, ambitious. I mean, I described
myself as a few of those things. I would like
to be a few of those things. Exactly. That's what
she was saying is as a feminist, you would never
able to move forward and be truly equal until did
some of those things. Now, if you're feminine, the feminine
i'ms on the scale are yielding, cheerful, shy, affectionate, flatterable, loyal, sympathetic,

(08:10):
sensitive to needs of others, understanding, compassionate, eager to soothe,
who hurt feelings, self spoken, warm, gullible, childlike, does not
use harsh language, loves children and gentle Well, I think
I might want to identify with them first less anyway,
that's that's sort of gonna be. The trick of the
day is to figure out what this scale really means,

(08:32):
because essentially, people who identified with things from both lists
as well as this list of neutral things Um, if
they if they identified strongly enough most of the time
with things from both lists, can them consider that person androgynous,
meaning they encapsulated both male and female traits. And all
sorts of statements were made about how androgynous people were

(08:53):
probably set up to live the best life possible because
they could take on any job because they had both
that nurturing side and uh, you know, the determination to
get things done, and they probably have better relationships. Um,
there's been uh studies about weather androwsy and as people
are more creative because they can be expressive but also imaginative. Well,

(09:14):
and Bem was trying to make a point I think
when she developed this sexual inventory, because she said, and
this is a quote from her, I took for myself
the feminist goal of trying to gather the relevant data
of trying to demonstrate empirically the traditional sex roles did
not restrict behavior in important human ways. And so it
seems like it was almost, uh, you know a way too,

(09:37):
I guess, kind of prove that, you know, you don't
need to identify as solely masculine or feminine. And especially
because this ties in so much with second wave feminism,
like you mentioned, there was a lot of related research
that came out of this as well well. I think
it's one of the most cited methodologies for determining where
someone falls on a gender spectrum, maybe of all time. Yeah,

(09:59):
I mean, I don't know much about the gender spectrums,
and I'm gonna go ahead and make a statement as
bold as that. It definitely seemed like from my research
it has been used to the point that it surprises
bem how much has been used. Um And because it
has probably been so widely used, it's also come under
a lot of criticism as well, questioning whether or not

(10:19):
it's really testing androgyny and whether or not we it's
really just reinforcing normative stereotypes of what it means to
be male, female androgynous. And I think that you could
probably tell from some of my my intonations, Kristen, that
I wasn't I wasn't thrilled with some of the feminine
ideal traits. I mean, I would like to be sensitive

(10:42):
to things of others, but I don't really want to
be described as gullible necessarily. I don't think that females
have some sort of um domain on not using harsh
language because Kristen's got a mouth like a sailor. Hey, now, well,
that's also one reason why some researchers have tried to

(11:03):
refer to these masculine feminine traits instead of going back
to masculinity femininity, aligning masculine terms with instrumentality and more
feminine terms with expressiveness, and some of even wanted to
use a genic and communal to distinguish between them. But
I still have a problem with dividing these terms up anyway,

(11:25):
because you're never going to be able to fully divorce
instrumentality and expressiveness for masculinity and femininity, which is always
going to lead you back to gender stereotypes two sides
in the same coin, and keeping us Yeah, we're still
checking off a certain set of characteristics that supposedly defines
who we are and the type of person we are

(11:46):
and how we relate to other people. So with all
of this research about androgyny, it kind of makes me
wonder whether or not it's even that progressive. So despite
the fact that Ben wants to make this sort of
a feminist rallying point, you know, as soon as she
puts it out, a scholar named Daniel Harris comes out

(12:07):
and says that she is, you know, undermining feminists in
this way because it's still allowing men to co opt
good traits, whereas you know, the women will still be
out of sink essentially if they adopt the masculine traits
right there, still having to disown parts of themselves. And
he even goes far as to describe androgyny as a
sexist myth because kind of like what I mentioned before,

(12:29):
like in his eyes, it's still all came back to
this sexual polarization that didn't benefit women in the long run.
But the interesting thing is if you look at studies
since then that evaluate people who have these collections of
what we would consider to be psychologically androgynous traits, the

(12:52):
benefit does seem to fall more to the women than
the men. It seems more socially advantageous for a woman
to exhibit more androgy illustrates, i e. Adopt more masculine
traits than for the men out there. For instance, there
was a pretty extensive article in Psychology Today about the
concept of androgyny, and it points out that um psychological

(13:15):
masculinity has always been correlated positively with creativity in both
men and women, but psychological femininity had negative associations and
creativity for both men and women. So then it kind
of brings up the point to if we keep coming
back to these masculine and feminine terms, you know, it
seems like the masculine ones by and large are going

(13:37):
to be favored no matter what um over feminine ones,
because if you just think about women in the workplace,
kind of the most successful ones kind of have to
adopt a little bit more of a masculine persona, whereas
of the typical man was to adopt a typical female characteristics,
you know, he he might not benefit from it. So essentially,

(13:57):
despite the fact that it all comes down to psycho
logical traits, it's really it's not helpful, you know, is
that what we're saying with us? I think that that
might be an argument that we are putting out there.
You know, I don't know that we can necessarily, you know,
we aren't the we aren't the experts. But from reading it,
it doesn't seem like it's said helpful. So I think

(14:18):
what's difficult to swear with is that when you read
about the spectrum and how it's used, androgyne is ideal.
You know, it's just it's the best way you could
make your way through, especially a male dominated world, just
by becoming more masculine. Well especially well if you look
at if you take up the positive masculine traits, because

(14:39):
they we did come across one article where you could
definitely be negatively androgynous if you take what's that, what's
an awful male traite, aggression, aggression, if you take aggression,
and then likely yeah, you could definitely be negatively androgynous.
And um, but it seems if you take the best
of both worlds and that's just the way to be,

(15:01):
which does support Norri's case that you know, you would
you would have advantages in the world that you wouldn't
have if you were just male or female. But I
think the word androgyny has become so associated with physical
markers that it's very difficult to tell someone that androgyny
is an ideal if you can accept that, if you

(15:22):
can get away from you know, as we talked about
this sexist myth that you should be even thinking about
what a feminine or a masculine trade is in the
first place. But because physical gender is such a marker
to us, um, then androgny I think can start to
become very troublesome to society, to some people in society

(15:42):
who can't handle the fact there might not be a
gender marker for every person. And I also question kind
of the importance, I guess, of all these androgynous you know, characteristics,
psychological characteristics, because it seems like the thing that people
are more curious about is sexuality more than whether or

(16:03):
not someone is childlike or you know, gullible or aggressive
or whatever. You know, when you see um like okay,
for instance, when Adam Lambert was on American Idol, everyone's
question wasn't whether what Adam Lambert was like, what his
personality was like off stage, It was who he went
home with at night? Right, you know, does he like

(16:24):
boys or girls? Are both? Or how he dressed? Yeah,
So that because it's become so blurred, I think androgyny
is a really loaded term that's not very useful anymore,
despite the fact that in the world of psychology it
did have sort of this ideal status. But physically, UM,
I found this one study from new scientists that I
thought was pretty fascinating, where um, some researchers from the

(16:46):
University of Connecticut made all these computer avatars UM and
some were very gendered, some were just like catch up
bottles with faces on it, and then some were sexually
androgynous in the physical appearance. And the people who used
who interact with the avatars were asked to rate how
trustworthy the people using the avatars were, and by and large,

(17:07):
the catchup bottle was not very not very trustworthy, by
the way to never trust the bottle of ketchup um.
But androgynous avatars were far less trusted in the Internet
world than the gendered avatars. So I think that that space,
the fact that when a lot of people can't have
that physical marker that gives them the reassurance that this

(17:28):
is a manner, this is a woman, And I think
that's what makes you know, a lot of people uncomfortable
with someone like Lady Gaga. But I think it also
is part of what makes them alluring sexually exciting, because
you're not sure there is a little bit of that,
you know, forbidden territory. I don't know what, you don't
know what's going on necessarily exactly. But for some people,
more conservative people, I would think it would be a

(17:50):
lot more troublesome. And you know, the researchers basically said,
if you want to be trust on the internet and
you're not Lady Gaga who's got a platform and you
know sort of you know, acceptance just because she's famous,
if you're just someone in the world, that it's almost
like you do have to identify with the gender, and
that's what people like Nori are trying to combat. So

(18:11):
we've told you guys what we think. Now we want
to hear from you. Do you think that Nori's androgyny
is going to possibly become the new model? Do you
think that we need to reinforce you know, our physical
markers for gender, social markers for gender. Do you think

(18:31):
that it matters at all? Is andrown? The ideal isn'trojny
the ideal? Let us know mom stuff and how stuff works.
Dot com is our email address. Send us an email
and you'll probably get a response, all right. First email
today is from Caroline, who wrote about our Ballet and
Racism podcasts, and she writes, I wonder if I'll be

(18:53):
the only one to write in to say that she
grew up ignorant of the racism issue in ballet. Do
the Babysitters Club books. I was a big fan of
Jet see the eleven year old ballet obsessed Babysitters Club
member who was often pointed out as one of the
only people of color at Sunnybrook Middle School. But I
can't recall any stories that dealt with race with regards
to her dance performances. Maybe that's because she was eleven
and non adult ballerina. But now I'm left feeling like

(19:15):
Anna Martin, or rather her army of ghostwriters, missed an
opportunity for yet another very special episode book. All right, well,
I've got another email here about the exact same podcasts
on ballet, and this comes from Aaron. She said, I
wanted to let you know it's not just ballet that
has racial discrimination issues. Recently, I did a performance with

(19:36):
an Indian dance school here in America. I was shocked
to see the makeup situation backstage. Many of the darker
skinned Indian girls were being given a lighter skinned look
using bass. Honestly, many of these girls were given skin
tones that were almost white. I was dismayed at the behavior,
and many of the girls were beautiful as they were naturally,
and felt like we were giving the wrong idea to

(19:57):
these very impressionable teenagers. I just wanted to let you
know with it whiteness isn't only sought after for ballet
or from Americans. And one more quick one from Laura,
who points out that it's not just ballet either. She writes,
I figure skate, and there seems to be the same
problem with diversity on the ice. I only know one
or two black figure skaters at my rink, and the
rest are mostly wider Asian. Even if you look at

(20:19):
famous skaters, if you are black or Latina. I don't
know if this is because of discrimination, lack of interest, cost,
or what, but I started thinking about it as I
listened to your podcast. It would be great if there
are a bit more diversity in these sports. Girls would
have positive role models encouraging them to get active and
have fun. So there you have it, And again, if
you wanted to send us an email, it's mom stuff
at how stuff works dot com. During the week, you

(20:41):
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(21:01):
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