Have you ever had to sit through some “training” where everyone knows the “correct” answers before it starts? I experienced one such training from the Pride organization at the local university. It was full of dubious claims and its pretense to open-mindedness was paper thin. Honest questions were met, not with serious answers, but with invitations to “do more research.” The research materials offered begged more questions than they answered.
Studies show that courses like this — even those with laudable goals — often backfire, reinforcing the very attitudes they aimed to change. It turns out that people don’t like being condescended to.
Still, such courses can be instructive, even in spite of themselves. One particular instance from the course stood out in this regard. In a long list of gender identities, we came to “two-spirited.” At this point, we were warned very sternly that not just anybody can be “two-spirited,” but that it is a culturally specific gender identity only available to people of North American Indigenous heritage.
This is exactly right — more so than the presenter imagined. It is right because every single gender identity is a cultural construct. To identify Joan of Arc as, say, trans is something like an act of colonialism, as even some on the radical left acknowledge.
In Amoris Laetitia (“On Love in the Family”), Pope Francis teaches that we can distinguish between sex and gender but we can never separate them. That is to say, there are times when it makes sense to differentiate between biological categories and things like cultural expressions or one’s relationship to one’s embodied, sexed nature. A Catholic does not need to deny legitimate variation here just because, despite disingenuous arguments to the contrary, there are only two sexes.
Of course, there is variation and there is variation. We are often informed, for instance, that some cultures recognize three or four or several genders. But what does this actually mean?
The case of the ‘tomboy’
An anthropologist visiting my middle school would have encountered a young woman with short hair and at least androgynous attire playing football with the boys and doing very well for herself. They would have noticed a common term for girls like this, used without any hint of disapproval. This “tomboy” was in fact celebrated for her relationship to her sex.
No one in small-town Saskatchewan in 1992 imagined that this made her some third gender, either outside the male-female binary or somewhere in between it. But, if the anthropologist came from a culture with that kind of framework, he might well.
Notice also that, while we are told that believing there are two genders is close-minded and restrictive because some cultures have recognized three, you will never hear that cultures with only three genders are close-minded because some cultures recognize four.
Indeed, something like the inverse of a tomboy (i.e., a non-stigmatized descriptor) would have come in very handy to some young men in small-town Saskatchewan in 1992. Our anthropologist would also have found, for instance, a boy of effete deportment who liked playing with dolls and doing hair and makeup. (He is now an award-winning hair stylist.) There were also, God forgive us, widely agreed-upon terms to describe this young man’s relationship to his sex. Did those constitute a fourth gender?
We should be careful before we celebrate a given culture’s broad-mindedness in the way it understands those who fall outside the norm in their experience of their sexed bodies. If a culture has a term, and even a kind of reverence (sometimes quite superstitious), for effeminate men, but condemns most of them to a life of sex work, is that really something we want to emulate?
Accounting for human experience
The question, then, is not really how many genders there are. The question is whether a given cultural category accurately captures human experience (including biology) while also upholding the dignity of every individual. In many contexts, “tomboy” passed that test with flying colors.
I am no expert, but it seems to me that a traditional Indigenous understanding of “two-spirited” fares pretty well by this metric, though I worry that the category is easily co-opted by a very (neo)colonialist project. There is nothing inherently wrong with a cultural category that recognizes some men have more feminine qualities than is typical and some women have more masculine qualities than is typical. If such individuals are often marginalized and a culture finds a way of affirming their dignity without denying reality, a Catholic can give a hearty three cheers.
But if such a category implies that a person was “born in the wrong body” (which can then be “corrected”) or that biological sex is not determinative for a range of questions from the formation of a family to the ordering of athletics competitions, something is amiss.
Our current categories fail — not because they recognize diversity — but because they don’t. Tomboys are disappearing because these new categories insist that women outside of the norm are not really women at all. And if Joan of Arc is a tomboy, or the medieval French equivalent, then women really can lead armies. But if she’s trans, they really can’t.
