Sunday 17 May 2015

What kind of construct is gender?

I have told you this story once before, but it was buried deep in my screed on evo psych and I wouldn’t blame you if you missed it. At the age of three, one of my nephews announced to my mother (his grandmother) that girls have blue eyes and boys have brown eyes. About nine out of ten for observation, there; only one member of our local family group breaks this rule, and he must not have looked in a mirror that day.

When his mother and I were that age – we’re twins – we had a magnetic letter tray, with plastic letters in four colours. We spontaneously came up with a treaty to avoid precedence disputes over letters: green and blue were boys’ colours, whereas red and yellow were girls’ colours. The convention was readily extended to the crayons and felt pens. Girls’ colours also included pink, purple, and white, while boys’ colours extended to orange, brown, black and grey. Why orange was a boys’ colour when red and yellow were girls’ colours, I could not for the life of me tell you now. But we both agreed that it was. Sadly, when we graduated to a larger set of felts, that overlooked inconsistency proved the downfall of the system. I think the disputatious item may have had the word “vermilion” printed on the side.

I repeat these charming vignettes, I think the word is, to draw your attention to three common features. First, as you’ve surely picked already, both involve gender binaries. Second, both binaries are false to the point of silliness, such that you only excuse their proponents because we were all preschoolers. And third, just so’s you know, both were spontaneous. Neither was endorsed by the authorities in our lives. In our case, admittedly, we may very well have heard from on high that pink was a girls’ colour, and probably also our toothbrushes and hairbrushes and what not would have been colour-coded just so our parents could remember which to use on whom. But, whenever they overheard us negotiating settlements, those same adults also told us in so many words that the notion of girls’ colours and boys’ colours in general was daft. We ignored them. We weren’t about to give up any cultural convention that had proved such a powerful force for peace.