Gender as performance or as innate essence

[SaltPorridge]

Why is it that kids talk about "coming out" as trans when they change their names and ask to be treated as the opposite sex/gender? Yet I also see references to gender as a performance, which seems to come from Judith Butler.
Where did the idea of an innate gender that is unrelated to sex come from?

Drawing on JL Austin’s speech-act theory. That some forms of speech are actions eg wedding ceremony.

Not really. Butler would say that you wear feminine coded clothes because of societal gender norms. However in wearing such clothes you also reiterate and reinforce gender norms.

Edit to clarify: it's not your own internal gender identity you realise by wearing female clothes, it's the cultural idea of 'woman/female' you reinforce. E.g. for every woman who wears a dress, dress-wearing becomes more and more associated with, and seen as a normal and natural part of, 'being a woman' .

I used to teach this stuff to undergrads so am well practiced in trying to make it clear....but it's still a struggle!

I think the idea is straightforward but the terms used don’t intuitively point you towards the intended meaning

If she’s drawn on the language of speech act theory the connection is pretty opaque.

… I should probably read some and then see what I think 😁😉

Edit to clarify: it's not your own internal gender identity you realise by wearing female clothes, it's the cultural idea of 'woman/female' you reinforce. E.g. for every woman who wears a dress, dress-wearing becomes more and more associated with, and seen as a normal and natural part of, 'being a woman' .

That really resonates with me. Like the idea at work that when high-status individuals dressed up or dressed down they made it more acceptable for lower-status (typically junior) individuals to do the same.
How does that work with trans identities - if short hair on a female signals transman, then that reinforces the idea that short hair signals "not feminine"?

I’ve also concluded that I no longer believe that there is some internal “trans” state. Transitioning is something you do - a choice you make - a way of dealing with your internet feelings, whatever those may be.

And I think the internal feelings of different people who transition are wildly differing and go from variations on the traditional AGP and HSTS types in men, to the young women who just hate the expectations that come with womanhood, alongside other people with problems of different types, including mental health problems after being abused.

In my opinion then, there isn’t one coherent “trans personality”. I think that’s an invention, created in order to persuade people like your OH that there is a group of “trans people” who have some innate inner feelings which must therefore be prioritized. It allows them to assert that one can “be trans” without having to do anything.

You can even see the progress of that idea being invented if you look at the EA2010 and compare its “gender reassignment” (albeit with an inbuilt understanding you only had to be thinking about treatment) with the later Hate Crimes legislation, which uses “transgender identity”.

The vaguer it is, the more easily it can be abused by predatory men. Who benefits most from this idea of an innate, unchangeable inner life and the sense they can’t help it? Answer: men who want to make the minimum effort possible, but still gain access to women’s spaces.

Gay men never wanted to invade anyone else’s space. If this was really just about inner feelings, someone would have suggested third spaces and the campaign would have moved directly onto trying to obtain them.

Butler is very pro trans/cross dressing as a way of disrupting the gender binary. If a woman has short hair (or a man wears a dress etc) Butler would say she was 'doing gender wrong' or 'queering' gender.

For her, that is a good thing as, the more people do that, the more that gender (and by extention the so-called illusion of binary sex) is revealed to be false. In other words, when we see a man in a dress we become aware that dress=woman is a false construction.

Edit to add that I'm not sure what Butler would make of trans people today though. I know she is pro trans however she has always insisted that there is no such thing as a stable gender identity (as illustrated in her work) ...which ironically is the very opposite of what trans people today insist. I stopped reading her about 5 years ago when she started calling everyone who disagreed with her fascists

@Ws2210
Butler is very pro trans/cross dressing as a way of disrupting the gender binary. If a woman has short hair (or a man wears a dress etc) Butler would say she was 'doing gender wrong' or 'queering' gender.

For her, that is a good thing as, the more people do that, the more that gender (and by extention the so-called illusion of binary sex) is revealed to be false. In other words, when we see a man in a dress we become aware that dress=woman is a false construction.

It has occurred to me that this whole trans thing could have gone differently. If trans people were clear about their biological sex - in fact that would be central to it - whilst breaking social convention by presenting as the opposite gender (or neither). If we celebrated the individuals who did this as men and women flying in the face of gender norms, and fought for their right to do this without being harassed/losing jobs/etc.

I can imagine there'd be some eyerolling on here at celebrating men in dresses (we've been wearing them for years without applause!), and some discussions about what was meant by living as a different gender... but broadly it would be something we could get behind, even if just a step on the way to dismantling gender stereotypes.

It it the conflation of sex and gender that is the problem. And the weird backwards idea that "gender" is somehow the more important, concrete thing.

Having said that, if there really is a tiny core group of people with serious sex dysphoria (which I could well believe) this is precisely the opposite of what they'd want. Ironically it is this group who more of us were ok to be polite about, or even make allowances about shared spaces. It's the overwhelming majority who have pushed things too far, who don't primarily have sex dysphoria, who would have been better funnelled into making a song and dance about being trans without that being seen as overriding biological sex.

I think all of that is fair comment. 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.

Or (worse, much worse) girlhood

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.

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?

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.

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"

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.

I don't think so. I think as explained upthread its about performative acts, rather than performative speech. So iiuc, every time any woman wears for example a tie that makes a tie a feminine accessory.

The trans aspect may be incidental, i dont know enough about this, but i think if a woman wears a tie and says she is a transman, that makes a tie a masculine accessory.

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."

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.

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?

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

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 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.

That is so well put, thanks.

You wore a tie as part of a uniform. If an influential woman wears a tie outside of that context, then it makes tie wearing more possible and if lots of women wear ties in that way tie-wearing could lose its masculine gender coding.
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.
At my daughter's sixth form, the dress code specifies that boys wear shirts and ties, and girls wear "smart office wear". In the first week the Headteacher gathered them and reminded them of the dress code. My daughter's frriendship group is mostly trans, so the girls were dutifully wearing ties. The rest of the kids had on a loose interpretation of the rules, and most of the boys had no ties on. (It's deeply last century for men to wear ties here.) The Head tried to reiterate the rules and was reduced to saying "those of the tie- wearing persuasion" had to wear ties or else they will get an Extended Study Day.

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

'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..]