Gender as performance or as innate essence

The sixth form girls who chose to wear ties identify as trans and are signalling their masculine gender identity by adopting the masculine dress code.
And doubtless the boys who didn't want to wear ties would have happily identified as non-binary if pressed.

Yes, this is kind of how fashion trickle down works.

10 years ago my 20-something friend in London came to meet me wearing a black dress and white trainers – looked cool and fresh.

10 years later, my friend’s 75-year old mum wore the same kind of look to a family meal in a suburban newtown in the north east.

The look no longer means what it originally meant.

A woman who wears a tie as part of a costume intended to code her as masculine doesn't break the coding but strengthens it.

In theory yes, but in practice no, because the construction of "reality" through performative repetition depends not on the intention of the performer but on the meaning experienced by the audience, and the sex will be read over the gender. The tie works to confer an intention of masculinity on the trans man but the trans man's performance does not in turn strengthen the construction, so over time if all trans men wear ties they will cease to functional as a masculine construct.

If gender performance were entirely disconnected with sex, then people performing masculinity would reinforce masculinity regardless of their sex.

Thing is, I pretty much agree with all of this stuff. I simply don't see how it leads to the conclusion that we need to replace all existing sex based rights, protections and language with exactly the same but aligned to performative gender instead, nor why people who don't enact the repetition/construction of gender are nevertheless swept into the gender buckets because of their sex when sex itself is considered subordinate to gender.

I went to an all-girls school, and then a mixed-sex school, my school tie wasn’t intended to code me as masculine it was simply part of the uniform. Just like the school blazer, it was intended to show the public what school I was attending because it was made in the school colours. Our teachers frequently told us that we were expected to behave well in public while wearing our school uniform because we were representing the school and its values. I also suspect that, on a practical level, schools here insist on ties for all students because it looks tidier than open-necked shirts.

I’m afraid that I don’t understand your point that girls wearing a tie as part of school uniform is strengthening masculine coding for clothes. I think they’re adhering to formality and to communality because uniforms create a social bond among children - everyone wearing the same clothes means a school spirit can develop and there are no opportunities for social distinction to develop caused by some students wearing expensive clothing that other students can’t afford. Uniforms also prevent students from signalling teenage tribes via dress or hairstyles while at school which can serve to create distractions from learning and differences among students. To my mind, ties, like school blazers and school scarves, are a way of identifying a student as being from a particular school (they’re practical in that they serve as walking advertisements for schools and they make uniforms look more coordinated and tidier).

Re your daughter’s school, I think the school created a problem for itself in letting children wear their own clothes. The school could make all students in every year wear a school uniform and that issue re signalling ideology/identity wouldn’t arise - every student either wears a school tie or doesn’t as part of the uniform code.

I think you got away with it

'those of tie-wearing persuasion'

It's funny, but what it boils down to is that the school made a rule and then had to amend it so it only applies to the people who choose to respect it. Not much of a 'rule', then, is it?

'All in all you're just another brick 'etc etc., I'm not defending rules, uniforms, ties, per se*, I'm just making the point that you can 'identify' out of anything, including school rules.

*[OMG this is FWR, is somebody going to point out that 'per se' is singular and I've used it for more than one thing..]

Mega eye-roll at the tie wearing persuasion. What a tangled web we weave!

That is so well put, thanks.

And I kind of agree with Butler when it comes to /gender/. Gender is whatever people say it is. It is those societal norms. It is whatever you say you are. It is the stereotypes. We should queer /gender/ because gender is by and large oppressive of women.

But whoever said /gender/ is something we should organise society round? Sex exists, sex matters, sex is the thing that's objectively verifiable and sometimes matters. When sex doesn't matter, gender certainly doesn't.

If you say "I'm a woman", you're doing woman-gender?

This is literally what self-id is. The word "woman" no longer has any meaning beyond "a person who refers to themselves as a woman". The word may as well be "vhdkl". I can't see any difference between any of the genders under this ideology because there is no substance to differentiate them.

And yet the difference between genders is simultaneously so vast that people cannot face life living as the label they feel is wrong.

And not just 'what is a gender identity' but what is an 'identity'. This idea that we all have an inner essence that needs to be discovered and expressed is a relatively recent idea (I'm talking in the last 100 years). You don't see such an emphasis historically or in other cultures

Do you believe that "we all have a gender identity" or not?
What is a “gender identity”? It’s clearly not hair or makeup or clothes, because I’m a woman with short hair and I don’t use makeup, and I wear trousers and baggy shirts and boots all the time. I’m struggling to understand exactly what makes someone a woman if it’s not biological sex or hair or makeup or clothes?

As a young girl, I wore a tie every day during primary and secondary school as part of my school uniform so I don’t view ties as masculine, and ties are still part of certain uniforms for jobs and professions that both men and women work in, so I see them as formal clothing worn in certain settings.

There’s an old adage 'clothing maketh the man' but I don’t see people wearing clothing made for the opposite sex as changing their sex (or gender) in any way - fabric cannot perform miracles of bodily transubstantiation.

I googled 'performative acts' and it said they were still speech.

'Performative acts are types of authoritative speech. This can only happen and be enforced through the law or norms of the society. These statements, just by speaking them, carry out a certain action and exhibit a certain level of power."

I think you're probably right, in the case of Butler and gender she does actually mean acts, i.e. stereotypes.

"Philosophically, gender is created through a series of “performative acts”—a type of ritualized action that serves to create many elements of society."

So performative in that sense is sort of that saying something is an action in itself? When people say gender is performative, they don't mean it's what you do, it's what you say. If you say "I'm a woman", you're doing woman-gender?

Why would you divide the human race up into two or more abstract categories based on having nothing in common whatsoever except their choice of category? What's the actual point? What's it for?

And this doesn't avoid it coming back to stereotypes. How is a person supposed to know which category they feel an affinity to? Which of those two collections of syllables 'man' and 'woman' are theirs? Not bodies apparently. So... stereotypes are all they've got.

Most of the unreasonable demands seem to come from middle aged straight white guys who have a sexual fetish for seeing themselves as a sexist misogynist charicature of womanhood.

"He covets"

Butler's main beef wasn't with gender per se, but with the 'idea' that biological sex is innate and binary. She linked that 'idea' to compulsary heterosexuality which was where her true issue lay. She simply used her discussion of gender and gender acts acts as a way to demonstrate how binary sex was an illusion. I think that's the part trans people have taken and ran with.

It is contradictory to say a person is born with an inner feeling of gender ( as in when I person says, ‘I may have been born male, but I know I am really a woman’), and also say there is no inborn gender, only performance of cultural expectations around gender.

Well, quite. Butler contradicts herself all the time. Her later work certainly seems to contradict the earlier stuff. Performance is acting, and reenacting. If, through language, we reenact a formerly contingent identity that's come into being through the process of iteration and reiteration, then surely that's the very definition of something other than innate. This is social constructivism. Gender is a social construct which is not tied to biological essentialism.

These are Butler's own conclusions, and those of Foucault before her, with a good dose of structural linguistics and speech act theory built in. (And confused genderists claim that a gender critical stance [isn't all feminism intrisictly critical of gender - that's what feminism has done since time immemorial?) - is somehow 'essentialist'. How? Please help me, because I can't for the life of me figure that one out. But I suspect they can't either, or have any idea of the actual breadth, scope or content of actual queer theory.

The question is, does Butler use such obfuscating language in the first place so as to disguise those contradictions, leading her back to the claim (cop out) that a lack of truth at the centre (of something) is the stuff of poststructuralism and get off the hook that way? 😀

Here's wondering why 'theory' has for some inexplicable reason gone out of vogue. Oh, unless it's intersectionality of course (which doesn't offer any insights as to methodology or practice and arguably isn't a 'theory' at all). At the same time English, and English literature, are suffering as academic disciplines.

What could possibly have gone wrong?

Yes, OP, you make a good point imo. It is contradictory to say a person is born with an inner feeling of gender ( as in when I person says, ‘I may have been born male, but I know I am really a woman’), and also say there is no inborn gender, only performance of cultural expectations around gender.

Maybe Judith Butler suggested the performance idea, this made people say there was no mandated gender linked to the sex you are born, and this idea came full circle to be interpreted to mean your sex does not matter, only your inborn floating sense of gender, which is the real you.
And, most nonsensically to think that, though sex means nothing, your chosen/inborn gender must express itself as looking like a stereotype associated with a sex, including, hormonal and surgical body modifications. So mimicking , what is supposedly meaningless - a sex.

Or (worse, much worse) girlhood