In this post, I want to explore a few ideas about a system of oppression that targets gender non-binary and non-conforming persons. I begin with considerations that are relatable for binary cis persons. Such persons, after all, likely compose the majority of the philosophical community and broader readership, and I want to make a case that’s compelling to the blog’s audience.
“i am here—hairy, feminine, powerful!”
In late August 2021, Alok Vaid-Menon, the gender non-conforming writer, performer, and public speaker, posted on Instagram that “BODY HAIR IS BEAUTIFUL.” It needed saying for a number of reasons that Alok notes:
“because when my sister’s arm hair grew she was called a man,”
“because the indian aunties used to chide each other for not plucking,”
“because when i came out [as transfeminine] my community told me i should ‘at least shave’ to be taken seriously,”
“because every day online i have people tell me that i am disgusting + deserve to die.”
In the accompanying photo, we see Alok in briefs and bra. Their body hair is indeed beautiful—lush and dark, styled in fanciful swirls.
The abuse suffered by Alok, their sisters, and their aunties is not uncommon. Most gender non-conforming people can tell you about similar online comments, street harassment, and micro-aggressions. Friends, role models, and loved ones give us less abusive but related ‘nudges’ or ‘advice’ about how to better conform to the binary: make up tips; exhortations to “man up”; ‘advice’ to shave merely to be taken seriously. In my experience, the abuse and the advice communicate similar messages about non-binariness and gender non-conformity. The typical abuser seems to see that I am non-binary or gender non-conforming and to take it that I am thereby a failed man or a person for whom abuse is appropriate. Those who give advice think similar things, and they want to help me change so I won’t be a failure, so I won’t be deserving of abuse. They know and perhaps accept that our world is often designed to exclude gender non-binary persons, and they know that if we don’t conform, we’re targeted for exclusion, abuse, and violence.
Whether you’re cis or trans, binary or non-binary, you’re probably already aware that our world is often hostile to gender non-binary and non-conforming folks. But if you’re binary and cis, you might not have noticed whether this hostility is also directed at you. In this first section, I propose that it is, and I suggest that if you haven’t noticed it, that’s plausibly thanks in part to how our binary gender system treats trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons.
More specifically, after briefly motivating the idea that cis folks often feel uncomfortable with their gender assignments too, I’ll develop these ideas: If you’ve never reflected on your cis gender discomfort or if you’ve reflected on it but never even entertained the possibility of giving up your assigned birth gender, that’s plausibly thanks to how our dominant gender system works. It normalizes cis gender discomfort in at least these two ways:
- It makes it seem like one can appropriately reject one’s assigned birth gender only if one identifies with ‘the other’ binary gender.
- It obscures non-binary lives and the possibility of having any non-binary gender.
I am not saying that if you have felt any discomfort at all with your assigned gender, then you are or should be trans or non-binary. Nor am I saying that all discomfort with one’s assigned gender is or ought to be understood as gender dysphoria. And I don’t mean to disparage all uses of the term “gender dysphoria” or those who find some of the term’s uses helpful. I mean for points i and ii to help cis binary folks see the dominant system of binary gender norms, how those norms are enforced, and how the system often makes itself difficult to notice. The next two sections focus on that system of binary gender enforcement.
Unless you are among the very rare exceptions, binary gender norms affect how you relate to your own body and the way you live your life. You might experience a flash of disgust or embarrassment at the hair on your lip or chest, your strong thick ankles, your effeminate hands. Maybe you feel compelled to shape your body into binary gender conformity: waxing and shaving, dieting and exercising. Maybe you do the same with your behaviors, enacting dominance or deference to meet binary gender expectations. Maybe you’ve chosen romantic partners, your job, or your hobbies partly in light of binary gender expectations. To the extent that you are gender-conforming today or have been in the past, you have taken perhaps thousands of measures to ‘achieve’ it. Clothes, hair, make up, friends and relationships, sports and hobbies, ways of speaking, emoting, eating, making eye contact, etc., etc. If you are gender conforming—whether you are cis or trans—chances are that it is something you have worked to achieve.
If you’re cis and gender conforming and you’ve put hours and hours into gender conformity, take a moment to ask yourself why you do that. What motivates you to dedicate so much time to living within binary gender expectations? Are you afraid that otherwise you will be a failure, deserving of abuse? Are you giving yourself the sorts of nudges that people give me? Do those activities make you feel good, or are you trying to avoid the humiliations of gender non-conformity?
If you’re like most gender-conforming cis people I know, you don’t think of the time you put into living within binary gender expectations as working to satisfy gender binary norms. You think of it as ‘keeping fit,’ trying to ‘look good,’ or ‘maintaining a professional appearance.’ As you might anticipate, I’d like you to consider that dominant ideas about what’s fit, what looks good, and what looks professional divide according to binary gender norms too. Indeed, these conceptions reinforce binary gender norms; and, by ‘centering’ white, wealthy, young, non-disabled bodies as the most fit, attractive, and professional, they reinforce white supremacy, classism, and ableism.
In addition, I’d like to ask you to search within your experiences for discomfort with these norms. I’m still talking primarily to binary cis folks here. Have you ever felt uncomfortable being held to the standards of the gender you were assigned at birth? Maybe think back to adolescence, when gender roles are often most stringently enforced. I was assigned male at birth (AMAB), and I recall in high school feeling horror at gendered pressure to be aggressive, fascinated with violence, and unmoved by others’ pain. Masculine anger and violence still unsettle me like few others things. If you’re AFAB (assigned female at birth) and reading this, you’re probably well aware of the many double binds in expectations of women. Would you say you feel discomfort with those gendered expectations?
If you have felt such discomfort, what do you make of it? Is it something you’ve reflected on much? If not, take a moment to notice that that might be somewhat strange. If you’ve felt uncomfortable with gendered expectations and you’ve put thousands of hours into satisfying them, why wouldn’t that be something on which you reflect?
If you have reflected on it quite a bit, have you entertained the possibility of giving up your assigned birth gender? Again, I’m not saying that you should give up your assigned birth gender. I’m just asking whether you’ve entertained it. As Robin Dembroff points out, it would offer one way to escape your discomfort with the gender system, so it would seem to be a natural possibility to consider when reflecting on your gender discomfort. So if you haven’t considered it, why do you suppose that is?
As you already know, I think that if you’ve never reflected on your cis gender discomfort or if you’ve reflected on it but never even entertained the possibility of giving up your assigned birth gender, that’s plausibly thanks to how our dominant gender system works. It makes cis binary people think and feel like their discomfort with gender expectations is just normal. So normal, in fact, as to be unworthy of notice. Certainly normal enough that it’s no reason even to consider escaping one’s gender assigned at birth.
Moreover, I think our gender system normalizes cis gender discomfort in part by how it treats trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folks. I’ll focus on two ways it does this in the context of medical-institutional conceptions of “gender dysphoria.” Such conceptions reinforce binary genders in at least these two related ways:
- They make it seem like one can appropriately reject one’s assigned birth gender only if one identifies with ‘the other’ binary gender.
- They obscure non-binary lives and the possibility of having any non-binary gender.
Again, I am not trying to say that cis gender discomfort is no different from the gender dysphoria experienced by many trans folks. I am not denying that many people benefit from official diagnoses of gender dysphoria, and I am not dismissing anyone’s experience with gender dysphoria. I’m not denying that there are real differences in exposure to violence between visibly trans folks and cis folks. I’m pointing out that a and b reinforce binary gender norms and thereby normalize cis gender discomfort and enforce the binary gender system. These points have already been made in the works of many trans studies scholars; I draw specifically on Dean Spade’s case, but see also, for example, Sandy Stone.
Psychiatry.org defines “gender dysphoria” as “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.” Many insurance and medical institutions require at least one letter from a mental health professional documenting gender dysphoria before they will cover or offer gender affirming medical interventions. Relatedly, gender dysphoria is presumed in the popular imagination (so far as it exists in the popular imagination) to be necessary for being ‘really’ trans or otherwise warranted in rejecting one’s binary birth assignment.
Here are the criteria for diagnosing gender dysphoria in the DSM-V:
- A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
- A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
- A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender
- A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
- A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
- A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
Note that four of the six criteria above don’t actually concern discomfort with one’s assigned (typically binary) gender. Instead, they focus on identification with ‘the other’ gender (although they parenthetically acknowledge that there are other possibilities too). Moreover, as Dean Spade and many others who have sought gender affirming surgeries attest, what mental health professionals typically want to hear is that one has identified with the other binary gender since childhood. On the dominant, medical conception, gender dysphoria seems to be less about gender discomfort and more about conformity to a binary gender. This is reason to believe that on the dominant conception, one can appropriately reject one’s assigned birth gender only if one identifies with ‘the other’ binary gender. For me, this would mean I can reject my birth assignment only if I accept and conform to another assignment I’m uncomfortable with. I don’t identify with my assigned birth gender, but in many non-queer (and some queer) spaces, there are only two viable gender options (i.e. no one will read me as non-binary in these spaces, and instead I’ll be read as either a failed man or a failed woman), and I don’t identify with either of them.
Moreover, institutional restrictions on gender affirming medical interventions help to stabilize and reinforce the gender binary. Spade points out that “The ‘successful’ daily performance of normative [binary] gender is a requirement for receiving authorization for body alteration.” In some cases, one is expected to “live in the new gender role…for 1 to 2 years in order to experience life in the new role and develop appropriate role behaviors.” Contrast this with what it takes to receive medical interventions—like breast augmentation, for example—that affirm binary cis genders. There’s considerably less ‘gatekeeping.’ Spade proposes that this serves to police and reinforce binary gender norms, so that gender transition will not be allowed unless there’s good reason to believe the person transitioning will not challenge binary gender ideals. This gives us reason to think the dominant conception of gender dysphoria obscures non-binary lives and the possibility of having a non-binary gender.
Both of these influence how cis binary people relate to their gender assignments. They make it seem as though any discomfort you might feel with your gender assignment is irrelevant to your gender identity unless you identify strongly with the other binary gender. If you feel or have felt discomfort with your assigned gender role, the dominant conception of gender dysphoria tells you to ask yourself whether you have identified with ‘the other gender’ from a young age or not. If so, then you are binary trans, and you should aim for the successful daily performance of the other normative binary gender. If not, then you should accept your discomfort and continue to strive to meet your assigned binary gender ideal. Non-binary genders are no option at all, so if you feel gender discomfort that isn’t accompanied by a strong lifelong identification with the other binary gender, then your discomfort is just normal. You should ignore it and learn to live with it. You shouldn’t even notice it. You should definitely not see yourself as oppressed by the binary gender system.
Misandrogyny as a system
If you’re starting to think that you are oppressed by the binary gender system or if you’re not convinced but you’re keen to be an ally, what can you do? It may be tempting to think in terms of individuals: the online abusers, the nudging friends. How do we stop them? How do we change their minds?
In responding to their abusers, Alok often makes the case that the abuser is suffering from gender oppression—the very oppression Alok is resisting—and this suffering motivates the abuse. The abuser will find respite not by changing Alok but by joining them in resistance.
Comment to Alok: I don’t know who needs to tell you this so I’ll just do it. You are not a woman, bro. Man up.
Alokvmenon: My friend! I don’t know who needs to tell you this, so I’ll just do it. You are hurting. You mistake your armor as an identity & your pain as a personality. You are climbing a tree that bears no fruit. Ascending a ladder that goes nowhere. What you seek isn’t here with me, it’s within you. This isn’t about my freedom, it’s about your repression. You resent me because I live what you fear. I love you because I have no fear. I’m sorry you’ve been told you can’t express yourself. You can. I promise. Have a great day!
Alok directs our attention to the system of oppression and our common experiences of it. In this way, Alok’s approach is reminiscent of some lessons from recent philosophical work on misogyny. It teaches that instead of focusing on individuals and their motivations, it’s better to focus on the targets of abuse and the systems that target them.
Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is well-known among philosophers (but not only philosophers) for developing an account of misogyny that revises and improves upon our typical understanding of it. Contemporary popular discussions of misogyny tend to devolve into endless, fruitless discussions of the perpetrator’s psychology. Was the young man who killed eight people—six women of Asian descent, one white woman, and one white man—at massage parlors around Atlanta, Ga. a misogynist? Racist? Popular discussion purporting to address these questions presupposed that the answers turn on what he was thinking and feeling—on his motivations. Manne’s proposed revision focuses instead on misogyny’s targets, and it characterizes misogyny as systemic rather than psychological. Rather than suppose that misogyny requires its perpetrator(s) to loathe women, Manne proposes that misogyny is the “‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its overall ideology.” When women don’t “play the role of a man’s attentive, loving subordinate,” the mechanisms of misogyny put them back in their patriarchal place with hostility, threats, and violence (Ibid 57, 47). Misogyny targets women because they are women in a man’s world (not in a man’s mind), and it maintains the patriarchal gender hierarchy by keeping women in their subordinate place in a man’s world.
It would be helpful to articulate the system that targets non-binary people and gender non-conformity in a similar way: focusing on targets and the mechanisms that keep us in our place. But what is our place in the gender binary?
Lori Watson has an answer: we have no place.
…the hostile enforcer of gender conformity relies on the ideology of gender binarism to insist that the gender non-conforming person is entitled to no space, no place, no existential entitlement. There is no place for the gender non-conforming person to retreat and exist as such. Retreat—conformity to the gender binary—entails annihilation, non-existence.
Prima facie, then, what this system enforces on non-binary and non-conforming folks isn’t a subordinate position in the gender hierarchy but no position at all. Nonexistence. Watson calls this “misandrogyny.” (As Watson acknowledges, the term is suboptimal insofar as it suggests that all non-binary and non-conforming persons are androgynous; but of course that’s false.)
In a forthcoming paper, I develop an account of misandrogyny that’s inspired by Manne’s view of misogyny and Watson’s insights.
Where misogyny enforces the patriarchal gender hierarchy, misandrogyny is a system of mechanisms that together police and enforce the gender binary of a patriarchal order. The gender binary is constituted by norms that preclude the existence of persons who aren’t consistently ‘read’ either as a man (and only a man) or as a woman (and only a woman). Misandrogyny thus polices and enforces exactly the nonexistence of people who are neither women (only) nor men (only). […] While misogyny pushes women down into their subordinate place, misandrogyny pushes [gender non-binary and non-conforming] folks out of existence—either by pushing its targets out of literal or social existence or by pushing them into binary gender positions.
How is non-existence enforced? The mechanisms are multiform: from hormonal and surgical interventions on intersex infants to binary gender segregated bathrooms, dorms, shelters, sports teams, professional dress, etc.; from the definition of “gender dysphoria” to enhanced surveillance, interrogation, and detention for anyone with ‘discrepancies’ in their gender records. Gender non-binary and non-conforming folks are pressured by social norms, institutions, laws, and violence to conform to the binary; if we don’t, there’s no place for us.
Misandrogyny as intersectional
It may be tempting to think of misandrogyny entirely in terms of gender. It’s a system that targets gender non-binary and non-conforming folks, so considerations of race, class, disability, and citizenship are beside the point, right?
No. If we’re going to stand in solidarity against misandrogyny—whether you become non-binary or not—it’s important to understand that misandrogyny is interdependent with many other forms of oppression, and it typically makes people of color, indigenous people, poor people, and persons with disabilities most vulnerable. When people of color or undocumented immigrants have ‘discrepancies’ in their gender records, for instance, they are much more likely to be interrogated and detained than their wealthy, white, US citizen counterparts.
And, as we noted above, binary gender ideals tend to center White, wealthy, straight, non-disabled cis people. That’s partly why Black and Indigenous women were often incarcerated in men’s prisons in the 19th century. It is plausibly why dark body hair like Alok’s, their sister’s, and their aunties’ is a mark of failed femininity. On the other hand, dominant Western conceptions of reclaimed, acceptable queerness and queer spaces also tend to center White folks. Consequently, Black non-binary folks are often treated as “not trans enough” by their queer White peers.
These connections aren’t accidental. There’s good reason to think that our binary gender system was designed to advance White supremacy and settler colonialism. Plausibly, the mechanisms that make no place for non-binary people and that mark us for annihilation were honed and refined by their application to Black and Indigenous peoples. Understanding misandrogyny requires understanding how these mechanisms were developed and how they operate today.
Siobhan B. Somerville has made the case that 19th c. racial classifications were motivated by anxieties over apparent threats to the European gender system, and racial classifications were used in turn to obscure the injustices of the binary gender system. Comparative anatomists of the time perceived African women’s bodies as ‘sexually ambiguous,’ and as thereby undermining the binary gender system. In response, they proposed that African bodies (1) are different from European bodies by virtue of their sexual and reproductive anatomy and that (2) these differences constitute a difference in racial kind. The gender binary was then taken to prioritize White European bodies, so if Black and Brown bodies don’t seem to fit in the binary, that’s not evidence of the binary’s inadequacy as a model of gender; rather, it’s evidence of Black and Brown ‘otherness’ and inferiority. White supremacist ideology helped to obscure and justify misandrogyny.
Around the same time, biologists and sexologists took the imagined sexual differentiation among Whites to be evidence of an evolutionary hierarchy. They took it that binary gender differentiation is an indicator of “evolutionary progress toward civilization.” With enforced gender conformity among Whites and the attribution of gender non-conformity to people of color, such attitudes ‘justified’ White supremacy and obscured the injustices of White domination, colonization, and imperialism.
A similar story has played out countless times as European powers have colonized, exploited, displaced, and erased indigenous peoples around the world. On the one hand, indigenous peoples who acknowledge non-binary genders are thereby taken to be inferior, and this is offered as justification for exploitation, expropriation, genocide, and forced assimilation. Binary gender norms were developed and deployed as justification for colonizers’ atrocities. On the other hand, settler colonial ideology encourages the thoughts that all Indigenous Americans are now gone and that the Americas were sparsely populated before colonization anyway. This helps to cover up the historical and ongoing genocide and expropriation of indigenous peoples in the Americas while again pushing gender non-binary and non-conforming people out of view.
And yet, we also sometimes conceptualize imperialism, racism, and xenophobia as in support of queerness. Jasbir K. Puar has pointed out that state powers have recently started characterizing non-Whites, especially migrants and Muslims, as intolerant toward queers. These characterizations are deployed to justify anti-immigration policies, violence, and detention; military interventions; and the xenophobia and racism embedded in dominant conceptions of terrorism.
Help us understand and resist misandrogyny
This is all tricky, complicated stuff. Moreover, one of the operations of the system of misandrogyny is to conceal itself, to make cisgender dysphoria and colonization seem like normal parts of life, hardly worthy of notice. One important kind of work we can do, then, is to reveal it in all its tricky complexity.
If you’re reading the APA blog, you’re probably a seriously bright person who has understood tricky, complicated things before. It would be helpful if you would work on misandrogyny and/or talk to others about it. If you’re not already working to reveal and understand intersections between misandrogyny and imperialist foreign policy, white supremacy, immigrant detention, ableism, environmental destruction, etc., etc., you can start. You’re smart and diligent. This isn’t a place to finish, of course; we won’t be finished until we’ve overturned those systems, so you should also figure out what kinds of coalitions to build and actions to join. But you can start. And I hope you’ve seen that it’s required if you’re going to escape the sorts of self-hatred that misandrogyny encourages.
Jeff Engelhardt
Jeff Engelhardt is associate professor of philosophy at Dickinson College. Their research is primarily in metaphysics and feminist philosophy of mind and language.
