The question about sexual difference seems always to come as an absolutist either/or: are there more than two sexes, the inquisitors ask, and assume that the poor object of the query will mumble some nonsense, or what the inquisitor will smirk into nonsense. I'm thinking Piers Morgan here, but there are others.
Let me agree that on the whole, generally, usually, there are just two sexes. Some beings have organs that produce eggs. They are female. Some beings have organs that produce sperm. They are male. Sometimes a particular being has ambiguous genetics and so the organs are less than obviously sperm or egg producers. There are also true hermaphroditic beings, snails and earthworms for example, with organs that produce both eggs and sperm. And there are creatures that change their sex, like Nemo—I mean, clownfish—and parrotfish. True hermaphrodites as well as protandrous or protogynous critters are pretty rare, however; the sex changers are male when their organs produce sperm and female when they produce eggs.
In short, on the whole, generally, usually, as Milton says, male and female are "the two great sexes that animate the world." Animate there is quite literal in Milton’s use, I think—the two great sexes bring anima, spirit, life to the world.
Of course Milton did not know about the millions of species of asexual bacteria and viruses, lichen and some fungi and ferns, which bring life into the world without egg or sperm, so without the two great sexes. But that’s a different story.
For the grand inquisitor who wants to assert the either/or of sexual difference, however, the problem is that in humans, at any rate—and no doubt in other creatures as well, although I’m not ethologist enough to assert as much—in humans, sexual difference is only one aspect, one register, of sexuality, and so of sexual identity. The biology of sexual difference intersects immediately with a whole range of other issues—social, psychological, familial, legal, religious . . . . An infinite number of registers in which sexuality is elaborated.
Those complexities of sexuality are not a matter of sex, or rather only very partially a matter of sex. The whole complex of issues that invest sexuality all together produces what we call gender. Gender is to sex as a symphony is to an octave.
I suspect we’re all aware of that difference in gender as opposed to sex. Even the most dualistic of inquisitors will refer to a “feminine” man or to a “masculine” woman. In those phrases the adjective in quotation marks refers to gender, and the substantive modified by the adjective refers to sex.
A quick stroll through Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, which I invoke quite deliberately with a sort of malice aforethought, yields the following gender characteristics. Feminine is passive; masculine is active. Feminine focuses on family; masculine seeks out friendships. Feminine is therefore of the household; masculine is of the society. Feminine comforts and supports; masculine commands. In the fruity phrase of Satan’s erroneous vision when he first sees Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “He for God; she for God in him.”
Such gender stereotypes may well attract the perhaps satanic and certainly Freudian imagination of MAGATs, since clearly they limn out a social universe of difference that defines for them when America was great.
But what Freud does is as absolutist an either/or dualism as is the either/or of sexual difference. Freud in effect maps sex onto gender in a one-to-one relationship. That dualism is absurdly reductive. It does not allow, for instance, for a woman who is ferociously dominant in the workplace but gently comforting with her children, or for a man who gladly serves as boss in the workplace but is submissive in the bedroom. Gender gets expressed in so complicated and nuanced a series of behaviors, attitudes, and mind sets that Freudian reduction of gender is as false as Satan's dichotomy of sex in Paradise Lost.
Via Freud's absurdity I mean to suggest the absurdity of most current considerations of gender. Or should I say the disappearance of gender from current discourse. Recently it seems, gender gets absorbed into the dualism of sexual difference. When the grand inquisitor asks about how many sexes there are, bullying the poor object of the inquisition, he does not want to hear about the myriad possibilities of gender identities. He does not want to hear anything remotely like the complex reality of human existence. He wants to hear only about the duality of male and female. He certainly doesn't want to hear that just as the modern world has made it possible for humans to fly, so to the modern world has made it possible for a fully mature male to become like Nemo and turn into a female, or for a fully mature female to become like a parrotfish and turn into a male. Yes, to be sure, Mr. Inquisitor, we're not at the point where the new male or the new female has the organs to produce eggs or sperm. Maybe we'll never get to that point. But then, though we humans now fly, we do not flap our wings to do so.
And definitely the grand inquisitor does not want to complicate matters even further with questions of sexual preference. A transgendered woman loving a cisgendered woman? A cisgendered man loving a transgendered man? No thanks, says the inquisitor. Gimme man or woman, either/or, and gimme man loving woman. Gimme a world where Freud's dualism is the name of the game, and any variation is nothing other than perversion.
Such limited imaginations, such falsification of reality, such assertion of socializations as absolute truth would be laughable were it not so dangerous.
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